✍️ Written by: Ian M Banks
🏷️ Genre: Sci-fi / fantasy
🗓️ Published: 10 August 1989
📄 Pages: 320
🧐 My rating: ★★★☆☆ (3 stars)

The Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player 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.

I enjoyed this book; I think that's evident by the fact that I managed to get through it in a couple of days. Having said that, I came away with a feeling that the ending was predictable. That's not necessarily a bad thing, as the rest of the story was great, and there was a slight twist at the end, but as I say...predictable.

Banks' ability to paint worlds is spectacularly good. He's particularly adept, I think, at articulating the mind-boggling scales at which space travel would work, and relatedly, the futility of the various stories he covers. I don't know if that's a theme that will follow on in the other books, I suppose I'll have to wait and see.

When I started this book, I expected it to follow on from the first book, Consider Phlebas, but it turns out that each book is a separate story, which means I can scatter these between other books I'm reading.

Anyway, while the ending was somewhat predictable, the rest of the story was great, so well worth a read. Looking forward to the next Culture book.

• Books
• Ian M Banks
• Culture Series

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