The Player of Games

‘Consider Phlebas’ was great. A real old-timey action science fiction book with a good number of twists. Like being hugged by an alien with eight arms. There are similarities between my experience with ‘Phlebas’ and ‘Dune’, though the two books stand apart from one another. I would argue that ‘Dune’ is, in many places, more finely woven – the politics certainly – but then ‘Player of Games’ happens, and, well, Banks does some magical things to weave in politics, plot and action.

Gurgeh plays board games. He makes them too. He lives on an orbital within the Culture. I thought his life quite ordinary a way – kinda like a space academic, with an edge of play. And yet he appears disaffected, a little absent, almost bored. So he does something out of the ordinary, something which could get him into a bit of trouble. Enough to threaten his reputation as one of the best game players out there. Then everything changes for him. He moves from academia to subterfuge and espionage – but he’s still the same old Gurgeh.

That’s what I enjoy the most about ‘Player of Games’. I saw Gurgeh in my mind as a pot-bellied everyman. He’s not a combat-ready, rifle-packing marine. He’s a yawny, indoorsy game player living a safe live who gets launched into a shitstorm. That, and the slower pace of the opening gives the reader plenty of time to breathe in the world that Banks paints for us. Here, in this narrative, we feel the world of the Culture. We see people living in it. We get a greater sense of its structure for the everyman and everywoman.

I found this gloriously satisfying, and could easily have read a whole book about Gurgeh’s rambling around this one station. I feed off of the small socio-political comments the characters around him make, or the way in which Banks describes the drones and their interactions with human beings. ‘Phlebas’ moved at lightspeed, the pleasure of that text was that you were always riding the wave, but you were moving too fast to get a real sense of the universe and the cultures within it. ‘Player of Games’ is gentler, more ponderous, like a drawn out game of chess.

Particular credit should be given to Banks’ ability to describe games that do not exist, and to do it in a way that makes it seem both like a real game but also make me, as a reader, feel like I know what the character is doing. What I thought these games were like is probably a great deal different to what others imagined. I imagined a blocky, turn based Starcraft. Civlization, perhaps.

So where does ‘Player of Games’ rate? Above ‘Phlebas’. Perhaps not quite as high as ‘Dune’. For all the pleasure I had reading ‘Player of Games’ I still found myself wanting more political intrigue. More of a dance of wits. But I am more than satisfied.