The Player of Games

By: Iain M. Banks

Narrated by: Peter Kenny

Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins

Publisher's summary

The Culture - a human/machine symbiotic society - has thrown up many great Game Players, and one of the greatest is Gurgeh. Jernau Morat Gurgeh. The Player of Games. Master of every board, computer, and strategy. Bored with success, Gurgeh travels to the Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, to try their fabulous game... a game so complex, so like life itself, that the winner becomes emperor. Mocked, blackmailed, almost murdered, Gurgeh accepts the game, and with it the challenge of his life - and very possibly his death.

©2008 Iain M. Banks (P)2011 Hachette Audio

Critic reviews

"Poetic, humorous, baffling, terrifying, sexy - the books of Iain M. Banks are all these things and more." ( NME)

"An exquisitely riotous tour de force of the imagination which writes its own rules simply for the pleasure of breaking them." ( Time Out)

Another winner for the Culture

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this story. It moves surprisingly quickly for a book that is basically about people sitting around playing a board game. Of course, that is just what is on the surface. If you allow your mind to wander, the board stretches out and you see yourself within the story, a player ofngames yourself, living within the mass of other pieces at play. A wonderful read. Highly recommended.

fast talker good book

Overall the story was great. narration was good but too fast for my taste. played at 0.9x to be comfortable.

Excellent Read

Overall just a fantastic read. A little slow to start, but the payoff is worth it. Well written and great narration. Easy to recommend.

Vivid Depiction of a Galactic Utopia’s Edge

Much more interesting in its premise than the first Culture book (Consider Phlebas), Player of Games has a more noble, though no less complicated, protagonist, and an antagonist-empire equally fascinating to the Culture itself. Azad is a brutal, deeply hierarchical society who award status based on success in a board game. In any other aspects, their flaws and contradictions resemble our own highly competitive society as it might appear to a more enlightened, post-scarcity Utopia. Like Swift or Voltaire, Banks uses fantastic societies to critique our own, showing us how we might appear to an outsider. A good starting point for the Culture-curious. Recommended.

Highly recommend!!

This is my fav from The Culture series. The audible narration is also terrific as well.

Philosophical clash of paradigms and epistomology

This book was intense. The plot is thick and the characters are deep. The intellectual flexibility of the authors concepts are intriguing in both subtle and direct ways. If you like analyzing the underpinnings of cultures and how the worldviews of those cultures shape the reality they observe, this book takes a look at that in the concept of a game. The main character has to play a game that is more complicated than any game anyone has ever played on a remote planet and civilization. The game is so large scaled and complicated that the philosophies and subconscious motivations of the players manifest accurately onto the positions on the board. If a capitalist plays the game, the board takes on the garb of a capitalist structure and so on with other modalities. The philosophical intrigue of the book combined with the liveliness of the characters makes it a strong science fiction title. There are some adult themes in it, though none are direct. I'm looking forward to reading more novels in the same universe.

Great story, superbly narrated

The second book of the Culture series tells the story of a serious game player (think board games, card games, etc.) who is manipulated into traveling across the Galaxy to participate in a tournament where the winner becomes Emperor of an alien civilization.

The Culture is a vast, technically advanced civilization where great machine minds keep most of the human populace living in liberty and high luxury. With all their needs provided for, the people of the Culture spend a great deal of their time in research, art, and recreation. However, a small number join "Contact," the Culture organization responsible for engaging with other civilizations and trying to peacefully share the Culture's values with them. Occasionally, Contact encounters a civilization which is either dangerously hostile or so backwards that direct engagement with the Culture could be calamitous for their less advanced neighbors. These are "Special Circumstances," and the SC group handles them.

The Azadians are indeed a backward civilization by the Culture's standards; aggressive, repressive, brutal imperialists subjugating every world they encounter. But their Empire is ordered according to the intricately complicated game of Azad. Hence SC decides the best approach might be to send in one of their top gamers... Only in the Culture, no one can be forced to do anything, and their best candidate doesn't seem to be interested.

Peter Kenny does a fantastic job voicing the characters and smoothly moving the story along.

Great intro to Iain Banks' Culture novels

This was recommended to me as a good starting point into Banks' Culture novels (although technically its book #2) and I enjoyed it immensely.

The narration was fantastic, read at a fairly fast pace but not hard to follow. Kenny adjusts his voice in subtle ways to suggest different people, but does not treat it like an audio play. It felt like a book being expertly read to me. While I have recently grown to appreciate other narration styles, this is just the kind of experience I originally joined Audible for.

I'm disappointed to see that not all of the Culture books are available on Audible, but I'll listen to the ones I can, particularly if they are narrated by Peter Kenny.

Fantastic story read by wonderful actor

Iain Banks is a hugely creative author, Peter Kenney nailed the reading. One of my top 3 books ever read next to the Hitchhiker's Guide series and Iain Banks' Use of Weapons.

Excellent story, highly recommended

Just fantastic, the world of The Culture is hypnotic and alluring on so many levels. The narrator did a top notch job and I'm looking forward to more tales from The Culture!