The Player of Games
The Culture's greatest games player is sent to challenge the Azad Empire, whose complex board game doubles as its social and governmental system. Banks's Culture novels define post-scarcity SF; *The Player of Games* (1988) is the most perfectly structured of them.
“Two thirds of this book is really slow,” one reader reports, with almost nothing happening across most of it. Gurgeh draws complaints as “arrogant, selfish, almost wilfully ignorant” of the world he is dropped into, hard to root for. “The central game is never described,” leaving an abstraction rather than rules to follow. The handling of gender and sexuality in the empire strikes readers as clinical rather than illuminating. And more than one reader senses “an 80’s vibe which I couldn’t shake off.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
