A very rewarding book to read. Not only are the characters richly detailed and easy to identify with, but the plot is exciting throughout and builds to a thrilling climax. (Everything that SF films tend to miss.)
I really can't wait to move on to book three of the Culture, this is first rate! ( )

This is definitely the most satisfying of Banks' novels I have read so far. While I have enjoyed all of them, the others' endings seemed.... well, just not as good as the rest of the book. [b:The Player of Games|18630|The Player of Games|Iain M. Banks|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166984450s/18630.jpg|1494157], however, is evenly good from start to finish. I particularly like how Banks' AI characters are portrayed. They are not "robotic" in any recognizable sense, but they are certainly not "human" either. If you are just coming to Banks' "Culture" novels, I would recommend starting with this one (at least of the handful that I've read). ( )

Below expectations; some cartoonish moments à la Rick & Morty. I prefer dead serious SF. ( )

I love this book. This is one of those books that I re-read every few years. It's science fiction by one of my favorite science fiction authors, but it's not really about science fiction. ( )

3.5. I have never read any of Graham Greene's spy novels, but I imagine they read exactly like The Player of Games, if you swap out the colonialism and espionage for science fiction tropes. The book follows professional gamer Gurgeh as he leaves the post-Singularity utopia of the Culture for the barbaric Empire, where an immensely complex board game mediates access to political power. What ensues is an enjoyable fish-out-of-water story full of ambiguity and political subterfuge.

Banks is a talented writer, and the Player of Games is technically excellent. The worldbuilding is inventive, marked by a pervasive strangeness (I loved the ships that appear to be named by algorithm), and held together by the brilliant central concept of games serving as a symbolic language for power and ideology.

I admired this novel, but I never really fell in love with it. The characters and story felt slightly flat and remote, perhaps by design. The comparisons I kept drawing to British colonial literature (Joseph Conrad also comes to mind) meant that the Azadian Empire felt othered / Orientalized, much more so than, say, the Gethenians in The Left Hand of Darkness.

Definitely a must-read if you're a gamer, but didn't hit the sweet spot for me. ( )