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Fans of Iain Banks, please explain – a.k.a. "player of games" book review

4 points by shwouchk ↗ HN
Recently ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41481821 ) there has been a post about Banks and, coinciding with time and desire for a new book, i decided to take up “player of games”.

Having finished it, it fells really… hollow? There is no plot. I think the one page summary on wikipedia gives a very thorough summary of the entire plot, and i can summarize it further. Please take this in humor;

Some “special” (aka successful) guy is “volunteered” off to an unknown world to participate in some tournament for some reason. What? Where? Why? Who cares.

On the way, he trains. By virtue of being smart and special and with assistance from sophisticated AI he quickly learns as he goes and outplays the entire empire, despite, being told “schemes against him”. What schemes? What challenges does he overcome? What’s special about his strategy? Who cares.

Wait! It turns out this is whole thing is an elaborate duel for the fate of both civilizations! Drama! Well guess what, the emperor would rather swallow a poison pill than surrender in defeat, and tries to “cheat”. Who could have guessed?

But don’t worry a bit, deus machine is here to save the day, our protagonist, whom we still know literally nothing about by this end of the book, and tell us this rather shallow story.

The only thing that kinda sorta makes sense to tie this into, very slightly more than a template that no one has bothered to even fill in, is to surmise that the whole point of this book was to deliver the punchline that this player got played for the purposes of the amusement of our storyteller, to enable it to bestow this very engineered story to us.

I got burned so bad, it ruined (together with the movie) enders game forever for me, which i enjoyed in my childhood, due to similarities in the plot and how it is displayed in the movie.

So, this author has a following. I must be missing something. All the nuance and inside references and inside jokes. Or whatever. What is it that i'm missing? Please motivate me to read another one of his books.

7 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 26.6 ms ] thread
timonoko
When you start skipping endless and pointless dialog between multitude of characters you cant't remember, you know this is not for you.

There is only one brilliant story from Iain Banks. Quote Grok:

The Iain M. Banks novel that features a space suit carrying a dead human is "The State of the Art". Specifically, the short story within this collection is titled "Descendant." In this story, a Culture soldier and his sentient space suit struggle to survive after being shot down and crash-landing on a barren planet.

kristianp
Player of Games was never my favourite Banks book and he's my favourite author. I'd recommend Consider Phlebas or Use of Weapons as a starter. But as the sibling comment says, if you find yourself skimming, then it's probably not for you.
shwouchk
Ill take a look, thanks. However, I think your superficially similar statement to sibling is actually saying the opposite?

In player of games, i don’t recall skipping/skimming dialogue? Is that your claim? there’s something hidden in the dialogue that i missed? I must agree i didn’t find much meaning in it nor remember any at this point - it was so vague! As if people knew they were being eavesdropped…

kristianp
Pardon, I was agreeing with the other comment saying "When you start skipping endless and pointless dialog", I didn't mean anything with a hidden meaning.
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drweevil
I would not recommend Player of Games to someone new to novels set in The Culture. Use of Weapons (or later novels) would be a better choice. (It's not essential to read them in publication order.) Possibly my favorite Iain M. Banks sci-fi novel is The Algebraist, which is not set in The Culture. If either of those don't get you going, then maybe Banks is not your cup of tea.