The Player of Games

Iain M. Banks

Average Rating 8/10 (1 Review)

The Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. ThePlayer of Games. Master of every board, computer and strategy.

Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game… a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life and very possibly his death.

'Few of us have been exposed to a talent so manifest and of such extraordinary breadth'

The New York Review of Science Fiction

'Poetic, humorous, baffling, terrifying, sexy - the books of Iain M. Banks are all these things and more'

NME

Review by Vex (010202) Rating (8/10)

Review by Vex
Rating 8/10
Well this is an author that I've been meaning to read for ages, ever since reading a couple of reviews here on booklore in fact.. :)

The story centres around Gurgeh, The Player of Games, who is sent as a representative of The Culture to play the most complex game yet seen, a game that's played as much off the board as it is on...

This was quite a strange book to get into to begin with, getting to understand The Culture and how it works, but it soon becomes a very immersive and believable world, and it quickly becomes background to the main story of The Game and the Empire of Azad.

This is a very good book, there's lots of humour, intrigue, politics, twists and turns, and plenty of new ideas and thoughts on sentient life.

I'll definitely be reading more of Mr. Banks's novels, in fact I think I'll pop over to Amazon now.. :)
Vex (1st February 2002)