Our verdict on The Player of Games: Iain M. Banks is still a master

The New Scientist Book Club has moved away from the dystopian near future imagined by Grace Chan in Every version of you in November to the distant utopian future imagined by Iain M. Banks in The games player for our December reading – and it was a real hit with members.

Set in the intergalactic civilization of Culture, The games player follows the adventures and travails of Gurgeh, a master of the game who is inspired to take on the barbarian empire of Azad at his own game. Also known as Azad, this complex and ubiquitous game is so important to the people of Azad that the winner becomes emperor. Can Gurgeh compete, even though he is just a beginner? What are the secrets that Azad and Culture hide? This is a summary of members’ thoughts on the book, so answers to these questions, as well as multiple spoilers, will follow. Only continue reading if you are finished!

The first thing to say is that this wasn’t a first read for many of us: 36 percent of members, myself included, said they had already read this particular Banks novel. And many of us are big fans of Banks and are still mourning the fact that there are no new novels – science fiction or literary – coming from this wonderful writer. “Oh, I still miss Iain. I never read his latest book, The careerbecause after that there will be no new ones to read. I guess it’s time now, I’m getting to the age where I might never read it! writes Paul Oldroyd on our Facebook group. “Same here – I never finished The Hydrogen Sonata! » adds Emma Weisblatt.

I think I’ve read most of Banks’ books, but not in years. The games player It was one of my first, so, given my terrible memory, I came to it quite fresh. I found this an absolute delight – I’m sure there’s a lot going on behind the scenes, but Banks makes the reader look effortlessly genius. His touch is so light, so naturally funny. (I loved, for example, the little detail of the “proto-sentient Styglian census taker,” an animal that counts everything it sees. It starts by counting people, there are 23 of them. “Then it started counting furniture, after which it concentrated on legs.”)

But there’s also so much to think about, from the nature of life in a utopia where there are no more challenges, to what it means to be a human in a universe where vast minds take over everything. And that’s to say nothing of the joys of the plot – I was almost screaming on the page when Gurgeh was tempted to cheat at the game of Stricken by Mawhrin-Skel, and I was completely swept away by the Azad games. This was a real win for me, and I’m going to go back and reread many more Iain M. Banks books as a post-Christmas gift.

One aspect of the book that Banks handled particularly well in my opinion was the games that Gurgeh plays. It’s not easy to invent a futuristic game and make it seem real, and I felt he succeeded, giving us enough details about Azad (and other games) to make them feel real, but without getting bogged down in the nitty-gritty. This was certainly something that members were also interested in. “The game [Azad] was a representation, an encapsulation if you will, of empire,” explains Elaine Li. “More generally, it was probably a critique of Cold War politics. »

Judith Lazell wasn’t so sure: “I just took them literally, I’m afraid,” she said. Niall Leighton highlights how deep this idea of ​​play is in the book. “And then, not least, there is the game in which Gurgeh is a pawn played by the narrator, in a game without rules, in which the end justifies the means, whose turns last for decades, whose moves we must guess just as much as in other games, and in which there may indeed be no end.” Indeed!

A quick aside: When I spoke to Banks’ friend and fellow science fiction writer Ken MacLeod, Ken proudly told me that he was actually the one who came up with the book’s final title. The banks wanted to call him The game player. I think The games player it’s much better!

Now let’s move on to what we thought of Gurgeh as a character. “Gurgeh wouldn’t be a very nice person if he hadn’t been integrated into this culture – he’s a bit of a creep, a bit of a self-obsessed person. I hope he learned something from his adventures,” Matthew Campbell says by email. I’m not sure we’re supposed to particularly like him – he’s a disgruntled and arrogant cheater, after all – but I definitely found myself rooting for him as the story progressed.

Steve Swan, however, was not as captivated by the narrative. He put the book aside “at the moment [Gurgeh] was roughed up” – I guess that’s when Mawhrin-Skel meets him on the way home. “Smart people, especially those who think they are, can make the biggest mistakes,” says Steve. “Gurgeh should have seen beyond the limits. [drone’s] cunning, but his arrogance and personal desires got in the way. What is this old saying? – he made his bed and had to lie down in it. No sympathy from me, I’m afraid! Steve felt that Gurgeh had fallen too easily into the trap of Mawhrin-Skel’s manipulation, and this “brought down the disbelief I had put aside.”

Niall has a different take on why Gurgeh makes the fateful decision to cheat. “The way I read it was that his mind was being altered by Mawhrin-Skel using his effectors. It wasn’t his free will. It was the drone influencing him to the point where he might think he made the decision himself,” Niall explains. “He is manipulated by Special Circumstances from start to finish. For me, Gurgeh is not the starting player. He is played.” While I think this is entirely true overall, I saw Gurgeh’s cheating as a very human response to temptation, rather than another manipulation…but I’m going to have to look at that section again, because it’s an interesting guess.

Although Paul Jonas did not find Gurgeh to be a player “as engaging as the mercenary role in Consider Phlebas Or Use of weapons“, he thought the setup with the drone was “quite believable and tempting for a high-level ‘sportsman’.” “It’s all part of the hero avoiding the call to adventure for a while. After all, why would Gurgeh give up all his security and comfort without a little help?

Our science fiction columnist Emily H. Wilson warned The games player as a good way to get into the work of Iain M. Banks, and after this re-read, I completely agree. We are gradually introduced into the world of Culture, not with a huge amount of exposition, but with small details about drones, ships, orbitals, etc.

We gradually understand that this is a post-scarcity civilization where (almost) everything is permitted. I loved Gurgeh’s conversation with Hamin, an Azadian elder, on this topic. Hamin doesn’t understand why there is almost no crime, and almost nothing is forbidden, in the Culture – and he was told about slapping drones, which are used in cases of murder. What does it do? “He follows you everywhere and makes sure you never do it again,” says Gurgeh. Is that all, asks Hamin? “What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don’t get invited to too many parties.”

Paul Jonas already had an idea of ​​the utopian worlds of Culture when he resumed The games player. “[It] reconstructs this world very subtly by following Gurgeh, his boredom and his lack of challenge. Anyone who wants a house like his on a rainy mountain can have one. Drones are presented as personalities and Ai in their own right. We find “Contact”, the Culture service which manages contacts with other civilizations and which is also its military and intelligence service,” says Paul. “It’s so great to call it “Contact” rather than Ministry of Defense or War! So humanitarian. So utopian. But as Adam Roberts says, utopias are difficult to write because they become boring, just like Gurgeh becomes bored with his life. The challenge of Culture is to spread its utopianism to other cultures by intervening essentially in a subtle way in their societies.

Some of our members have considered what it might mean to live in a utopia. “Gurgeh is an individualist living in a utopia of individualists where collective work is primarily done by minds, drones, and sentient spaceships,” Paul muses. “Gurgeh never seems to work on a team of other humans.”

Niall points out that Gurgeh may be “obnoxious”, but he is a product of his anarchist society, and Banks seeks to examine “the line between individualist anarchism and collectivist anarchism”.

“Gurgeh is clearly an individualist, and I reject individualist anarchist philosophies in part because they are an excuse to behave like Gurgeh,” says Niall. “One of the problems with the Culture is that there is nothing to engage its humans. It is also static, which doesn’t help, and the consequence is predictable boredom. It is perhaps worth pointing out that this book was written before Octavia Butler put the importance of change in a utopia at the forefront of her thinking, but it has been thought about at least since HG Wells.”

For Matthew Campbell, only Azad’s cultural ambassador, Shohobohaum Za, seems to be “really alive and enjoying life.” “By contrast, Gurgeh and the Azadians are each stuck in their own little world, each in their own way,” he says. “The clash between [Azadian emperor] Nicosar and Gurgeh sum it up near the end (and echo today’s political debates – sorry, not sorry if you’re a MAGA conservative) – a enthusiast angry at his empire but only seeing it from a very narrow selfish perspective and knowing it’s all doomed to failure; the other having no firmly articulated convictions, incapable of defending his utopia, he never had to think about it.

We could all say a lot more about the culture and The games playerand if you want to continue the discussion, join the members on Facebook.

In the meantime, it’s time for our first read of 2026: January’s book club pick and 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Science Fiction Prize winner, Sierra Greer. Annie Bot. This is told from the point of view of Annie, who is a sex robot. It belongs to a not-so-nice man, and this novel goes to some dark places. But as Clarke Prize jury chairman Andrew Butler said when announcing his win, it is “a highly focused first-person account of a robot designed to be the ideal companion struggling to become free.” You can try a taste with a clip from the opening here and an article by Sierra Greer about what it was like writing from the perspective of a sex robot here. And here’s Emily H. Wilson’s review – she really liked it.