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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.
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Into this milieu the Culture plays its "piece", a professional game-player called Gurgeh who has spent his entire life playing every sort of game of strategy but would probably hurt himself if he tried to use any kind of weapon. Gurgeh's attempts to compete in the Azad tournament reflect the many contrasts between the two civilisations - and also show up unexpected similarities.
This fine novel can be read in different ways. On one level, it's simply a blast - pacy, exciting, suspenseful widescreen space opera. Read it on a beach and get badly sunburnt. However, there's a lot more depth there if you want it. Banks raises a lot of interesting questions about how we set the rules of our society and how all kinds of play interact with those rules. Are cruelty and ruthlessness taught by game-play - whether in the children's playground or in multiplayer internet shoot-'em-ups - or do people's choice of games tell you about their society? Banks is a known addict of the "Civilization" series of strategy computer games, which many otherwise mild-mannered people play as brutal conquerors and commit acts which in Real Life(TM) would be war crimes. The Culture itself, of course, has gained power and stability at the expense of what one might call "soul". Most people who read this as their first Iain M novel tend to think the Culture sounds great, but on a re-read, or combined with the other novels, there are plenty of problems. The name itself is a sly joke - after all, a "culture" can mean both a human society and bacteria growing on a plate.
Finally, some reviewers have commented that the book's ending seems a little flat after the immersive, sweaty-palms roller-coaster of what comes before; I feel that Banks has perfectly captured the slight feeling of anticlimax when one finishes a particularly intense game of Civilization!
Among Banks' output, this is the easiest of the "Iain M" books to get into and one of the most enjoyable of all his novels. Intelligent, gripping science fiction with a literary edge - warmly recommended.
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