I have to say it never occurred to me to read The Player of Games as a commentary on games, as opposed to using games to comment on society (and to set up the fundamental conflict between the Culture’s ostensible non-interference policy and its incessant meddling).
Enumerator isn’t actually invented, it’s a real word.
I bet it’s something one of those buttons on a fancy calculator does, right? In other words, not really a word, but a math thing. So it doesn’t count*.
-Tom
* Get it?
Heh. :)
I’ve only used it in a programming context, so, a really, really fancy calculator?
Add me to the list of people who didn’t think of seeing the games as anything but a way to comment on society, nice to see your POV.
I love the Culture stuff I’ve read (2 plus several short stories). By far the most attractive Communist utopia anyone’s ever put to paper, and I say that as a raving libertarian.
But it is telling that it requires a literal deus ex machina to work. I’ve never been able to quite tell whether Banks himself appreciated the irony.
This is exactly how I felt about Consider Phlebas, which was recommended to me as one of Banks’ BEST. After that, I simply had no interest in exploring him further.
Read Use of Weapons. Oddly I don’t think anyone I know puts Phlebas as his best.
Characters are definitely not the strong point of the Culture series.
By the way, Tom, have you read the Glass Bead Game? It does a similar thing in terms of mapping society on to a “board game”, though it takes a very different approach.
I love them all but Excession is the best Culture novel and I think that it’s the best introduction on top of that.
Yeah, Excession is best followed closely by Surface Detail and Hydrogen Sonata.
I’m not sure Excession is the best intro though. Excession is a lot more accessible if you’ve read earlier stuff in the series first and know what a drone and a Mind are (in culture terms). That open with the Elencher ship is pretty dense and involves that stuff. if you have to stop to puzzle it all out I can imagine it would be difficult reading.
I reckon Use of Weapons is the best intro. Player of Games isn’t a bad one, though.
Didn’t they? Now I’m beginning to doubt my memory. I was thinking there was a bit in Consider Phlebas about all the super intelligent shipboard AIs having a quirky sense of humor and adopting these bad pun names that all their crew kind of rolled their eyes at. Am I confusing this with another book?
You may be. There was actually very little direct from ship AI’s, particularly ones relating to humans. Most of it was told from the perspective of a few human actors. Have you read Ancillary Justice? That is more in line with that series.
No, that’s right, more or less. Minds pick their own ships’ names. Whereas, if I remember correctly, orbital hub minds don’t. They don’t even get to name themselves, really, they just get called Hub.
Hmm, well it must come up more in later books, since it is barely touched on in Phlebas, at least not that I recall. But, then again, very few AIs are active participants in that story, being mostly about the search for one rather than involving one.
No, haven’t heard of that one. Mainly I second guessed myself because after reading my post I thought that sounded like something Douglas Adams would do - create ships with a super intelligent AI, then have them use that intelligence to dream up bad puns.
I love the Culture series, one of my favorite scifi series of all time. And yes, the benevolent AIs are the best part-- they are often more interesting characters than the humans. That makes sense as they’re supposed to be much smarter than we are-- so why would they be staid automatons?
I think Look To Windward has the most explicit discussion of it, but there’s quite a bit indirectly in Excession too given that it’s mostly ships talking to each other about other Minds.
Hey Tom, and thanks for the insightful review! A couple of personal thoughts, in no particular order:
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Consider Phlebas and Use of Weapons are good. I vote for both of them. =) Excession has some really neat elements, but did not grab me quite so much as a novel.
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As Juan_Raigada mentions, Consider Phlebas does have a fair bit of humanoid exceptionalism in it, and Banks moves away from that as he writes more Culture books and thinks more about the universe. That being said, I did still really like the strategy-lady and her drone companion. And as with the rest of Banks’ books the thing is just littered with neat ideas and world building, e.g. the radiation blasted tomb world preserved by an Elder Race as a sort of emo art project? How could you not like that? =)
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gurugeorge, at the end of State of the Art there’s an interesting discussion from Bank’s about the pre-history of the Culture and how in many ways it has libertarian roots. The Culture only came about once people had self-sustaining starships, since at that point people were no longer fully-bound to planet based governments. If the government or society became too objectionable to a crew, the crew had the option to just take their ship and jet off into the yonder and form their own society with hookers and black jack. And the Culture collated out of these outcasts, as they started to cooperate together out of free association and shared ideals rather than out of coercion and the threat of force. And even in the later Culture, people always had the option to go “Nope!”, and take a ship and go off and do their own thing.
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Ok, and finally here’s my bit for the literary theory of Player of Games. I’d like to defend all the pages spent describing the lava-planet palace of Azad. I don’t think Banks put that in just as a bit of world building, I think it’s also a metaphor for Azad and for empire’s in general. Theorizing begins: one way to read Banks’ work is in terms of life-seeking/upward seeking behavior vs death-seeking/downward seeking behavior. On the one side you have the Culture’s orbitals and GSVs which are filled with dense networks of lifeforms, all guided and nudged to their particular forms of flourishing, and with unnecessary pain and waste mostly eliminated. On the other side you have the societies of Azad/Afffronters/Iridans/the Island cultists from Consider Phlebas, all of which involve large amounts of intentional waste, inefficiency, blighted lives, and cruelty. In the case of the island cultists, there is a very large proportion of these down ward seeking elements, and its clear that they will never be a successful society (or last more than a few weeks). In the case of Azad though, the downward seeking elements and intentional wastage are balanced and contained within sufficient upward seeking elements to keep the system going. So rather than just quickly burning out like the island cultists, Azad can keep on burning more or less forever, like it’s symbolic planet.
tl dr: shit’s on fire yo.
I’m sure most Culture fans have read this, but good background info for those who haven’t…
A few Notes On The Culture