BOOK CLUB
BOOK CLUB MUST-READ CLASSICS OF SF LITERATURE
#15
Tom Holt plays a session or two of Azad in the second Culture novel
S
tep forward to the far-future
socialist utopia of the Culture,
where an expert games-player is
blackmailed into doing a job for
the government. He must travel to
a distant, barbaric empire whose entire
society is formed around prowess at
Azad (a sort of cross between Monopoly
and Mornington Crescent) and – literally
– beat them at their own game. In
theory, if he gets all the way to the fi nals
and wins, he becomes emperor; but of
course it won’t come to that...
The Player of Games was Iain Banks’s
second science fiction novel (following
the fi rst Culture novel, 1987’s Consider
Phlebas), and although it’s a Culture
story and the Culture ethos is at the core
of the book throughout, it’s unlike the
rest of the Banks oeuvre in many ways.
The plot is straightforward, the narrative
starts at the beginning, carries on
through the middle and stops at the end,
and there’s one main viewpoint character.
Banks tells the story in a spare,
functional style; it doesn’t have the
linguistic fi reworks, the soaring fl ights
of imagination, the massive and intricate
structures that characterise his later
work, and the comedy and wordplay are
kept low-key. Even so, it contrives to be
arguably the essential Banks SF novel;
not because of what’s put in, but because
of what’s left out, and why.
In all his writing, Banks is an
incorrigible player of games. He plays
with language and structure, form,
vocabulary, syntax; the second-person
narrative of Complicity, the murderous
three-card trick of Use of Weapons, or
the capstan-lathe structure and verbal
mayhem of Feersum Endjinn.
As befits a master games-player, he
doesn’t break the rules; he bends them,
subverts them, uses them as chips,
pawns and gambits. In Player of Games,
he plays the hand straight and tight,
cards close to his chest. The game – the
Azad tournament itself; the deeper game
the Culture is playing with Gurgeh, the
hero – dictates the book’s structure:
qualifying rounds, semis and quarters,
the fi nal. We know, as soon as Gurgeh
agrees to take part, that he’ll reach the
last round, at which point something
nasty will happen. Rules is rules, and
114 SFX MAGAZINE November 2007
SFX162.bookclub 112
Iain M Banks, 1988
As befits a master games-
player, Banks doesn’t
break the rules; he bends
them, subverts them,
uses them as chips…
Banks never cheats. To that extent, it’s
as predictable as Wimbledon. It has to
be, or it wouldn’t work. It’s the
limitations that create the pressure.
People play games to win; they watch
games to see the skill and enjoy the
human drama, and to root for their
team. In the novel, knowing which side
to support is easy; the bad guys are
cruel, decadent and arrogant, and the
game becomes a battle of ideologies.
Gurgeh is beating them at their own
game, but since the Culture, for whose
ideals he’s playing, cheated in order to
get him there, can they be trusted to
stick to the rules? And if you win the
Like This? Try These!
Use of Weapons by Iain M Banks
(1990)
Banks at his wildest, wittiest and most
disturbing in a firestorm account of the life
and times of a practically immortal soldier
of misfortune.
YOUR
OPINIONS
Join the debate at
http://forum.sfx.co.uk
>> “Banks’s Culture novels
are always a joy. That
said, it’s my least
favourite Culture book.
The others are ‘harder’ to
read, but satisfy my want
for the Culture more.”
Grrrrrrr!
>> “Damn good. Quite
game of good and evil by cheating, don’t how Banks manages to
you necessarily lose? get you so engrossed in a
So, yes, it is a classic Iain M Banks game you never learn the
novel after all. The form and the theme rules to is beyond me.
merge together, as the story twists the The way the two
hero like a spring. civilisations are explored
For once, the passionate intensity lies in the process is very
in what isn’t said; the commentator clever indeed.”
Org
doesn’t intrude, and we’re left to judge
the plays for ourselves. Since this is a >> “This is his most
game of skill rather than chance, what accessible? God help us!
matters isn’t the outcome so much as I’m really enjoying it now,
the stakes being played for, escalating but for the first 30 pages
from self-esteem to integrity to survival. or so I found it confusing
Only at the end, of course, do we fi nd and impenetrable.”
out who the real game-player Shoesworth
is, as the last card is turned over in
>> “The idea of games
the very last line of the book, and we within games, clashing
realise that, although we made it civilisations and how far
through to the fi nal round, Banks has will you go to defend your
won the last trick...
The Player of Games may not be
ideology make for a
fascinating and
compelling read.”
Banks’s best science fiction novel. It
doesn’t deliver the devastating knock- Tgirl
out punch of 1992’s Use of Weapons,
and although the scene-setting and
>> “Banks’s names make
great non-rude
world-building are magnificently done,
there isn’t quite the same immensity of
swearwords. ‘Oh, chamlis.
What a load of chiark.’”
scale and imagination that we fi nd in
his later work.
On the other hand, Player of Games
Johntoon
>> “It’s not the best of his
displays a level of control and direction books but it’s still a damn
that Banks’s later, more picaresque SF sight better than an awful
lot of books out there.”
novels often lack. There’s none of the
Midget_Yoda
self-indulgence or joyous delight in the
sound of his own voice that occasionally >> “All my old Banks
make Against a Dark Background, for favourites are there. The
example, rather hard going. By Banks’s impressive names. The
standards it’s a conventional book Minds. The drones that
(because what’s a game except a set of display emotions via
conventions?) but within its self-imposed colours. Brilliant. My big
limits it’s perfect, a flawless exhibition loves are games, books
and sci-fi so it’s as if he
by a master at the top of his game. SFX wrote this just for me. ”
DocSavage
Tom Holt’s latest novel, Barking, is
currently available from Orbit in
hardback (RRP £12.99). Get Reading!
>> In SFX164, Scarlett
Thomas (author of The
End of Mr Y ) will be
The Final Reflection by John M Ford discussing cyberpunk
(1984) classic Neuromancer.
Beautifully written, superbly credible world- NEXT ISSUE: Christopher
building; a different take on the same basic Priest ventures into the
idea by an under-rated master. Nominally a alternate-history
Trek tie-in. Deal with it. England of Keith
Roberts’s Pavane.
www.sfx.co.uk
10/9/07 4:17:55 pm