The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

[james_davis_nicoll]

A gaming adept is used as a weapon against a malevolent empire.

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

Comments

[jayblanc]

The Culture approves of and encourages diversity, and there is no proscribed list of things to which one must conform. And speaking in Marin is not on the top of that list which does not exist. There certainly is no particular reason why any state that sought to embrace and extend to other people, would then ask them to speak but one language.

[viktor_haag]

I always thought it was like Mandarin or Latin -- it's the language that the Minds speak, so it's "the court language" or "the language you want to speak if you want to be taken seriously", but I have no basis for that feeling particularly: I'm not sure Banks ever really brought it up in the books... in fact, comments on the review go into this much more accurately than my poor memory...

[andrewducker]

I love this one. It's my general recommendation for a starting point with the Culture novels.

V

[(Anonymous)]

It's the first Culture novel I read.

[philrm]

It's not only my favorite Culture novel, it's quite possibly my favorite Banks novel (with or without the M), full stop.

[viktor_haag]

Generally speaking, I find books about games unsatisfactory

Interesting; what books in particular feature like this that you bring to mind? And where do those books lie on the satisfaction scale? (I can think of two where The Game described figures as prominently as in this Banks one and both grapple with the problem you identify (in fact, we can't ask him, but I'm pretty sure that Banks had one of these works firmly in mind when he wrote Player Of Gams; heck, he may have publicly commented on this while he was alive, and I just don't know about that...))

[philrm]

The one that occurs to me is Jack Vance's Trullion: Alastor 2262, where he describes the game of hussade in enough detail that you can almost envision how it's played.

[philrm]

I have that same Orbit trade paperback edition, which rather inexplicably was for sale in the bookstore of the University of Colorado at Boulder. I'd only discovered Banks a couple of years earlier, thanks to those Bantam MMPB editions of Consider Phlebas, Use of Weapons, and Against a Dark Background, with their gorgeous Paul Youll covers.