"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elegant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By bei...
Gurgeh is possibly the Culture's best game player. He has studied and played games his whole life (somewhere between 60 or 100 years, I wasn't quite sure). The problem is that he's bored. There are few truly new games for him to discover and learn, and few players who are a proper match for him. He ...
Yes, you heard me. Nothing less would be enough. I first learned about "Culture series" of which this book is part of from the friend with whom I was sharing my impressions about the first book of Ann Leckie's trilogy. She told me that Ian Banks did these themes much better and boy do I agree with h...
This is the second in the Culture series by Banks. One thing that it is really great about the Culture series is that they take place in a setting, but the characters and stories are not necessarily related. That means that we don't get endless repetitive sequels with characters that have led absurd...
"The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game." The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks In the post-scarcity society of the Culture, men and machines live with the opportunity to do anything or nothing, to travel the universe in the great Culture ships...
I loved this book. I surely didn't think I would like it, which is why I have been sitting on it for over a year. I read Consider Phlebas a while ago and like it enough to consider doing more...but when the main character ... I lost interest. I suppose I took his point of view about The Culture, a...
3 / 5The Player of Games , by Iain M. Banks, is a book about a very well-known and successful Culture player called Gurgeh and his effort to participate in a complex and all-encompassing game that defines and controls a whole cilivization. This is in a few words what the book is about. As always, I ...
This is my first time reading Iain Banks, and my preconceptions were totally off-base. I'm not historically a huge fan of hard sci-fi, as it is often more focused on ideas and setting than character. (Hey, I said often, not always.) When I heard that Banks was a great world builder, and that his boo...
I dunno, maybe? From a Guardian article about sci-fi for people who don't like sci-fi:The Culture is a galaxy-spanning civilisation that lives in perfect utopia. Nothing amuses the humans and computer Minds who run the Culture more than messing around with less evolved, more barbaric civilisations. ...
When someone who rarely reads science-fiction says that a particular book is light on the SF aspect which could be read by anybody (even those who don’t like SF) I always groan inwardly (Only if some of my dependable Goodreads friends who read SF regularly tell me that even though a particular SF bo...
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