Player of Games by Iain M. Banks (4 stars)

My second culture book, and much much better than Consider Phlebas. In this novel we get a deeper insight into the Culture itself: a galaxy-spanning highly evolved human civilisation where no-one wants for anything. Our protagonist Gurgeh has gotten sick of being a super-leet game player and winning at basically every game he takes an interest in, so reaches out, in response to gentle prodding, to Contact (the part of the culture that interacts with aliens) for something new. Incidentally, there was something about Banks' use of slight mis-pronounciations of Gurgeh's name by aliens that added a special bit of polish to his interactions with aliens of the Empire.

The Empire is held together, and a governing class chosen, via an extremely complex series of games called Azad. I loved the dig at chess, one of the more complex games humanity has come up with to-date:

Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense 'perfectly', such as grid, Prallian scope 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a relativistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies...As a work of intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time.

Spoiler time.

Most disappointing in the early part of the novel was the blackmail scheme from Mawhrin-Skel. It was completely implausible that Gurgeh wouldn't see obvious blackmail underneath an offer to help with cheating from Mawhrin-Skel, a drone that Gurgeh knows loves digging up trouble. I like the implication that Mawhrin-Skel/Flere-Imsaho/our-narrator was working for Special Circumstances all along, and that blackmail was just part of the plan to get Gurgeh on board, but Banks could have come up with a much more sneaky entrapment than just "hey, wanna cheat?". Banks uses the Empire as a foil for commentary on our own society:

Gurgeh pointed at the shantytown. "What's that?" he asked Pequil. "That is where people who have left the countryside for the bright lights of the big city often end up. Unfortunately, many of them are just loafers." "Driven off the land," Flere-Imsaho added in Marain, "by an ingeniously unfair property-tax system and the opportunistic top-down reorganization of the agricultural production apparatus."

Although it was unclear to me what point he was making with the game of Azad that is the focus of the Empire. One theory I had was that Azad was supposed to be an allegory for the complex game-like system of politics/elections/government on Earth. I think Banks very cleverly didn't try to describe Azad in great detail, since it would be very difficult to portray something as complex as he built it up to be without being boring.

I was a big fan of the planet Echronedal: an entire planet with flora and fauna evolved to survive, and even depend on, a constant raging inferno working its way around the globe.

I'm still not sure if I liked the ending. It's better than Gurgeh winning outright, exposing the faked propaganda about him losing, and becoming Emperor himself, which I thought was where it might be heading. It was a little reminiscent of Ender's Game or The Last Starfighter: finding out he was playing for the world after the fact. Winning at Azad seemed to be the low-force first option for the Culture, a little nudge to destroy the Empire, something that seems to gel very nicely with what I know of the Culture so far.

Onto the next one!

4 stars.