The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Dudebro member of a post scarcity, post human space society travels to a distant, less advanced culture to participate in a tournament of games that determines sociopolitical hierarchy.

This was certainly better than the first Culture book I read (Matter) but I'm still not really sold. This book is playing with cultural relativism/absolutism, and what happens when a citizen of a supposed technological utopia encounters a violent, hierarchical, inherently unjust society. But the thing is, writing about utopias is really freaking difficult, particularly the social sort Banks attempts here. He makes a point, for example, of having dudebro express great confusion over the concept of a gender hierarchy, which he has never encountered before. This sort of thing gets tricky to create because hierarchy – and accompanying isms -- are so embedded in our context that it's impossible for an author to imagination it away even when that's the specific project he sets out to do, if you know what I mean.

So I read this through two lenses simultaneously: one was all, ah, Banks is using the blatantly unjust society to reflect upon the flaws in the Culture's utopia, and to comment upon the violence inherent in its system that its citizens don't see, that's interesting. The other was like, so this dudebro is a sexist homophobic dick – I wonder if Banks was really in control of all of this as a tool for creating the message. Probably not. And I honestly couldn't tell, until the last 15% or so of the book, which was the correct reading.

It's mostly the first one, for the record. This book is about the violence inherent in the system, including the Culture's utopia. But also for the record? The second reading is valid too, because I really don't think Banks had a handle on all the implicit and explicit homophobia he was putting down here, even as he mouthed some background color about the normative nature of queerness in the Culture.

So basically, this was interesting, but also one of those books that fails specifically on one of the axes it's trying to comment on. Soooo….awkward.




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