The Player of Games by Ian M. Banks

*only read if you've read the book! here's a summary. 

I've already had the wondrous pleasure of reading Transition whilst I was away on my second fieldtrip in Mexico. Having binged on Terry Pratchett, my better half slyly put this book in my hands and just left it to that. 

As someone still new to SF, not quite a virgin, I always start SF books with slight rigidity and frustration, waiting for my brain to embrace the internal logic the writer has created for his/her new world. It took about 30 pages for my mind to go: ok, I think I know where we are!

I enjoyed the book, mainly for the main quality I find in SF literature: it allows writers to create a world that contrasts ours so sharply by rendering the familiar uncanny yet recognisable. Banks writes with ease and surgical precision about the Empire of Azad, a world that is primitive and barbaric and whose humanoid species is ruled by a the winner of a game. The sheer naked violence of Azad put in stark contrast our own assumptions about private property, corporeal punishment, and sexual relations. Basically, Gurgeh, the hero of our novel, is from the Culture, a utopian type of world governed by machine and whose Marin language -again invented by machines- is the closes to reflecting subtle nuances and devoid of all the aggressive traits of domination and violence that Azadians demonstrate with their own crude and primitive lingo: 

It is especially important to remember that the ownership of humans is possible too; not in terms of actual slavery, which they are proud to have abolished, but in the sense that, according to which sex and class one belongs to, one may be partially owned by another or others by having to sell one's labour or talents to somebody with the means to buy them. In the case of males, they give themselves most totally when they become soldiers; the personnel in their armed forces are like slaves, with little personal freedom, and under threat of death if they disobey. Females sell their bodies, usually, entering into the legal contract of "marriage" to Intermediates, who then pay them for their sexual favours... 
... despite the Empire’s obvious, if limited, technological sophistication, its formal side remained so entrenched in the past” ... “a people so concerned with rank and protocol and clothed dignity might well want to restrict such things [pornography], harmless though they might be” ... “I have chosen to represent the intermediates—or apices—with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation is male or female dominated.

There is a great take on Gurgeh’s story perceived as a bildungsroman (check out Gareth Rees here) and the take on the sexual appetite and maturity of Gurgeh from a predator to a more morally rounded character here. I disagree with both bloggers though. Banks' novel is for me really a critique of the utopia represented by Culture and I don't believe Culture was in any shape or form trying to reform our dearest hero into a more civilised Culturnik at all. I think he lost a little of himself, that gave him his edge and that Culture used him for its own ends. 

A couple comments on what tickled my literary buds. 

The reference of language as a medium that shapes our behaviour and world view. Though Banks directly refers to Gurgeh's change as he increasingly speaks Azad's language. He experiences a psychological paradigm shift as Azadhian language has inbuilt assumptions of hierarchicalisation and dominance… Something I think was necessary for Gurgeh to adapt in order to win the games. In the end, he wins over Nicosar, the emperor of the Empire, by becoming Azadhian and understand Nicosar's strategy then breaking it with a logic entirely foreign - by playing distinctly 'Culture'. In the end, Culture absorbs Empire because, that is what it does. The books is a metaphor for the very notions embodied in the terms 'culture' and 'empire': it doesn't matter if you get dominated by an Other, your culture will permeate theirs and in the end, they will fold into your culture and become You. An interesting idea of consuming, absorbing the other with a 'superior' culture... Reminiscent of some neocolonial tropes I am deeply interested and unsettled by. Personally, for me, the genius of Banks is to make this very point: it is unsettling. Culture is a worrisome entity that sends of Gurgeh, to the detriment of his own wellbeing, to penetrate Azad's culture and implode it from the inside. You have another interesting theme of the fire burning all to ashes when the Games come to a close. 

The book is framed by an unknown omniscient narrator who turns out to be the little drone that first blackmailed him into leaving his life behind for 5 years and go to the Empire to play for Culture and that endlessly manipulated him throughout his stay to whip him into the correct state to face each phases of the games. So: Culture, not all that it appears and the ultimate frame of a story that seems to be hiccuping forward unexpectedly. And a little nod at my better half when I am reminded by your favourite little drone that it's all about chance, just like a game: 

Does identity matter anyway? I have my doubts. We are what we do, not what we think. Only the interactions count (there is no problem with free will here; that’s not incompatible with believing your actions define you). And what is free will anyway? Chance. The random factor. If one is not ultimately predictable, then of course that’s all it can be.