The Player of Games

The Player of Games is a science fiction novel by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, published in 1988. It was the second-published novel of his Culture series, and it can be read without the others. The Culture is a post-scarcity civilisation run largely by artificial intelligences, and the novel concerns one of its citizens being used as an instrument of foreign policy.

Jernau Morat Gurgeh is the best game player in the Culture and has grown bored of being the best. He lives on Chiark Orbital, and he is famous enough that his reputation is a burden. When a Culture contact drone offers him the chance to travel to the Empire of Azad and compete in the tournament that decides who rules it, he takes it, because the game is genuinely difficult and nothing else in his life is.

What nobody tells him is the framing: the Culture's Special Circumstances division is interested in what the Azad do to their own people, and in whether an outsider playing their game well can change anything. Gurgeh learns the rules of a game designed by a society that shows you exactly what it values, and he has to live inside it for years while the politics of his own mission become clearer.

It is a standalone story within the Culture sequence, which continues across further novels with different characters.