axialgentleman 's review for:

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
3.0
This book is frequently recommended as a good way to get into the Culture books, and I think it succeeded at that -- I have a sense of how lovely, and scary, the Culture is. The first third dragged on a bit and I came close to quitting, but it picks up once the protagonist is on his way to to Azad (spoiler-free: it's the place where they Play the Game). I was a bit disappointed by how abstracted the games were. Banks skillfully intertwines _descriptions_ of gameplay with character development and important choices, but the games themselves are minimally described. Right at the end it begins going into more detail about how
Spoilerthe competitors' playstyle is expressive of their culture of origin and how they need to express, or even change, that culture in order to adapt their game
and I'd have loved more of that throughout.

The ending to the novel was
Spoilercertainly dramatic, but perhaps overly gruesome and black-and-white.
. And the novel itself feels like Culture propaganda -- Azad is depicted as so barbarous and awful that it removes any sense of moral tension; it's as if Banks is trying as hard as possible to convince us that
Spoilerwe shouldn't feel bad about what SC did to them
.