The theory and practice of gaming inform Banks’ fiction from beginning to end.1 We have seen how many of his stories thus far feature games in which the characters are involved with varying degrees of interest, understanding, and success: Frank’s live-action wargames in The Wasp Factory; Quiss and Ajay’s one-dimensional chess, open-plan go, and spotless dominoes in Walking on Glass; and Kraiklyn’s Damage in Consider Phlebas. Games figure prominently in Banks’ later works as well—most evidently but by no means exclusively in The Steep Approach to Garbadale (2007) among his non-genre work, and in Inversions (1998) and Surface Detail (2010) among his genre work. His second Culture novel, The Player of Games, belongs to this group as well, and arguably represents it.2
But playing acquires multiple valences in Banks’ fiction, and the actual games that appear in his novels are only the physically visible portion of a set of play-related processes that pervade the vast majority of the stories he wrote. This is not an exaggeration: as Will Slocombe argues, “Banks endeavors to show that reality (or at least our understanding of it) works through games; they do not just reflect reality but inherently color our perceptions of it. The choice is not whether we play the game or not, but how we play. Moreover, the way in which we play the game reveals more than just our understanding of its rules: it reveals who we are…. If games embody the idea of competition, of agonistics, then how we compete reveals our ethical stance towards others, the extent to which our strived-for victory is due to, or at the expense of, others” (2013, 136). The reason why Slocombe’s assessment applies to the entirety of Banks’ body of work is that Banks himself saw the process by which games at once reflect, express, and shape human life as integral to the writing of fiction. Besides arguing, as Slocombe does, that games are symbolic signifiers of our struggle to understand ourselves and our lives, Banks also connected the act of gaming to the tripartite relationship among the writer, the work of fiction, and the reader. If games are a structured system of rules designed to replicate certain conditions prevailing in real life, so are novels—each is “a self-contained universe, something that is set in front of you. A game is like a novel—it’s a set of rules and symbols and patterns, and in certain novels you have to work it out…. To simply tell a story, tell everything, all shown, every card on the table, not left to chance in a sense, then it’s a bit boring actually. You could do so much more, why not make it live beyond the last page? Make the characters live, the plot live, the ideas live. And games imply that as well, games imply a continuation of the play” (Cobley 1990, 27).
So we’re all players, characters and writers and readers, and the games we play intertwine with each other to form systems of meaning that do indeed live beyond the book that physically contains them. The characters don’t just play games with each other in the sense that, like Quiss and Ajay or Kraiklyn, they often sit at a table with a board in front of them. They also play with each other’s lives (Sara and Slater with Graham, for example, or Horza with the Free Company, or Fal N’geestra with everyone else in Consider Phlebas—hence the three State of play titles),3 or they play with the lives of creatures that they consider beneath them because those creatures are powerless to fight back (Frank with the wasps in the Factory, or the Idirans with every less advanced civilization they meet); they also play games with themselves (Steven Grout and his stacks of novels), or devise complex systems of signifiers that represent an aspect of life as they see it (Frank again).
And watching it all from our own vantage point, we readers play our own game of detection, which gamemaster Banks put in front of us the moment we bought the novel. The novel is the board, the words the map, and the intertwining paths of the characters’ lives the traces we have to follow to make sense of the game, which is the game of story that is the game of life. Above it all stands Iain (M.) Banks, who has his own game to play because writing a novel is a game unto itself and, like every game, it reveals the player. There are several levels of agency in this heterocosm of play, and Banks’ is clearly the highest, but that doesn’t mean that influence only flows in one direction. The empathy of story creates a permeable membrane of emotional attachment that shapes the writing, the reading, and the thinking about the story once the reading is over, which is another way of saying that nothing is without consequence. Banks constantly fielded questions about his own morality because of the things he made many of his characters do (or made happen to them), and his responses repeatedly connected to a higher ethical point that justified playing with these characters’ lives and with the feelings of the readers who’d become attached to them. His thinking on games and gaming was the same:
Morality is involved in the games we play with one another. The morality of games is the rules. Games have a very definite and set morality, you play according to the rules or you don’t play at all…. It’s trying to make the connection between the games that societies play on each other and on the individuals within those societies and the games played on the basic interpersonal level … in the books I try to use games as symbols of the way we react to one another and to society. There’s a conscious effort to make sense of all that, but there’s no conscious answer because it’s too difficult for any one individual … in fiction the trick is to give people a choice of potential answers so they can disagree with what you’re saying, or what you think you’re saying [Cobley 1990, 27].
Banks seems to be arguing here that the ultimate objective of a game is not to win and dominate, but to understand and grow, to map out the play-related dynamics that regulate our behavior toward each other and toward the world around us. In this respect, he is echoing a point that Peter Hutchinson had made a few years earlier. In his book Games Authors Play (1983), Hutchinson had argued that notions of a rule set “suggest competitive play, but Suits (as well as Huizinga and Caillois) refrains from using the concept of ‘winning.’ He sees the aim instead as ‘an attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs.’ In literature, too, the emphasis is rarely on triumphing at the expense of another: it is on the pleasure which is derived from analysis and recognition, on the pleasure of mastery over a text which has been presented as a specific form of challenge” (7). Thus, engaging with The Player of Games means accepting an offer to play and therefore to feel the pleasure implicit in the act of playing, a pleasure that is independent of material rewards. Decoding the novel and mastering the meaning of the text will not result in someone’s loss of property, honor, or goodwill from others. It will result in a moment of epiphany and joy, in an instant of recognition. It will be good.
Banks’ point about the individual’s inability to fully encompass the meaning of a social context is also crucial here. In his non-genre work, where the reality of the setting was either a mimetic given or an otherworld teetering over the brink of dreamlike fantastika, the morals of the games the characters played were subject to an assessment on the part of the reader that was, by necessity, aimed at the individual agent before it was aimed at the system itself. We can say, for example, that Frank/Frances Cauldhame, Steven Grout, and Alex Lennox/John Orr lead lives controlled and bent out of shape by the systems within which they exist: Frank/Frances is the victim of a biological experiment and of a social construction of masculinity that turns him/her into an outcast; Steven is suffering from paranoid-schizophrenic delusions in a public context that rejects and avoids him without helping his condition; and Alex/John are prisoners of social machineries within whose workings their desires are either frustrated or dashed without warning. All this is true, and Banks’ attention, like that of his inspiration Alasdair Gray, was always focused on society’s play on the individual—of particular interest, in this sense, is a piece Banks wrote for The Guardian in 2008, in which he recounted the process that led him from out-and-out SF to the exploded mimesis of The Wasp Factory. The novel, Banks wrote, “was supposed [italics mine] to be a pro-feminist, antimilitarist work, satirising religion and commenting on the way we’re shaped by our surroundings and upbringing and the usually skewed information we’re presented with by those in power. Frank is supposed to stand for all of us, in some ways; deceived, misled, harking back to something that never existed, vengeful for no good reason and trying too hard to live up to some oversold ideal that is of no real relevance, anyway” (2008, n.p.).
The majority of readers, however, didn’t receive Factory—or either of the other two novels—that way, mainly because, fairly or unfairly, they focused more on the characters’ personal choices than on the social setup that shaped, influenced, and often constrained those choices. Frank/Frances, Steven, Quiss, Ajay, and Alex/John are people within (problematically) mimetic worlds, and their lives are of interest because of the things they do or fail to do, and of the consequences those things have on others.4 Expressing the same thought in terms more germane to this chapter’s subject matter, their lives are of interest because of the games they play with and on themselves and each other, and of the outcomes those games have on other people. There is an element of utopian/dystopian speculation in all three stories, but its agency is limited because the genre within whose operating principles those stories were published didn’t allow for more than a certain amount of ‘official’ divergence from the norm. Within a mimetic paradigm, the world is the world and it can’t be changed. In the long run, readers of fiction labeled mimetic (irrespective of whether the narrative itself actually deserves the label) focus on these characters’ weight of personal responsibility for the same reason they focus on the same thing in their lives: wishing for a different world, while understandable and to an extent necessary, makes us all helpless against the moment. We live here, now, and things are what they are—that is to say, the rules of the game are known to us, so whatever strategy of play we decide to employ, that strategy will have at least as much to say about us as it will about the constraints the system places upon us. We readers are individuals; as Banks himself pointed out, making sense of it all is beyond our capabilities, so we work with what we have: ourselves and other individuals.
But say that mimetic literature, however problematized and estranged, is not all you have. Say that now, in 1988, you’re also a published SF writer with an open brief to return to and revisit the works you wrote ten years before, those that contained the concept of a social order designed precisely to make wishing for another world a fait accompli. Say also that one of those works foregrounds the concept of gaming not just as a reflection of or symbol for life, but rather as life itself, literally and directly. You couldn’t have done that in mimetic literature; there’s no place on Earth where a game is a society and vice-versa, and while you can get your hallucinatory dream-realities to do part of the job, as in Walking on Glass, the environment of mainstream fiction—i.e., one of the rule sets you have to work with in the game of publishing—constrains you to an epistemic position that is incapable of unambiguously announcing them as legitimate otherworlds in their own right. No, that’s the job of the other rule set you have chosen to play with: SF.
So it’s 1988, “you” is Iain M. Banks (Iain Banks’ player character for SF, a gamemaster might decide to call him), the game-novel you have redrafted and happily published is The Player of Games, the game that is also the world is called Azad, and the player is, on the surface, the Culture and its agents. But the beginning of the novel immediately warns us of the actual number of layers of play involved:
This is the story of a man who went far away for a long time, just to play a game. The man is a game-player called “Gurgeh.” The story starts with a battle that is not a battle, and ends with a game that is not a game. Me? I’ll tell you about me later [3].
There’s a riddle for us readers here, and an equally enigmatic announcement on the part of the narrator that he5 is present in the story. Also, he plays coy with us, withholding his identity, which inevitably triggers the question of how many other things will remain hidden from us and for how long, or whether we’ll ever know them. We’re in the hands of the gamemaster, in other words, and the fact that his direct-to-reader address immediately withdraws into third person after the opening above changes nothing. He’ll be back.
Thus, the game is known, at least in its broadest outlines, and so are the players. There’s Iain Banks, who plays as Iain M. Banks who, in turn, plays as the narrator—his/their objective is to say something, or make a point, or just have some fun; could be all three. Then there are the readers, who play without the necessity of adopting another persona (but who, given the chance, probably will); our objective is to decode the novel’s meaning, or message, or moral lesson, and if we could also have fun in the process that’d be nice. Then there’s the “official” player of games: Jernau Morat Gurgeh, the most renowned gaming generalist in the Culture—“Morat” means game-player in Marain, the Culture’s language (21). He shows up as soon as our gamemaster’s voice fades into the pretend third-person narration through which most of the novel unspools, and he is indeed participating in a battle that is not a battle—it’s a live-action game, which the high levels of technology available to Culture citizens makes perfectly realistic without the deadly side-effects (3–7).
In the chummy, happily hedonistic social intercourse of the Culture, Gurgeh is something of a spiky character: he’s mostly a loner, surrounding himself only with a select few friends, and at public gatherings he tends to be a little brusque with others (10–13). His accomplishments as a game-player have made him a bit egotistic, so that he is not above patronizing fans who approach him with ideas or questions (41–42). From Gurgeh’s own point of view, his problem, as he himself tells his two best friends, is that “this is not a heroic age…. The individual is obsolete. That’s why life is so comfortable for us all. We don’t matter, so we’re safe. No one person can have any real effect any more” (22). This is one of the reasons why he has always nurtured a fascination with barbarian societies, even before becoming involved in the study of their games (30).
The blight in Gurgeh’s existence, he feels, is that existence: as a Culture citizen, he lives in a society without want, disease, danger, or exploitation, readily granted everything he may conceivably want upon asking, just like everybody else. And because everyone can have everything and anything, nobody wants much anyway. The concept of ownership retains its value only in a scarcity-based economy; once a society hits the post-scarcity track, both the desire for and the concept of possession become unnecessary. And in Gurgeh’s view, the safety and happiness of this state of things have removed interest from his life because they have removed interest from his games. As he explains to his friends, what would be the point of wagering anything on the outcome of a game? This is the Culture; if one wanted something, it’d just be manufactured for them, and without money as an indicator of status there is no exchangeable currency to lend gravitas to the proceedings (20–21). Because the Culture has made life safe and pleasurable on every possible level, the point of both gaming and living is lost; without tangible risk, one loses its flavor because the other does. Little wonder that one of his two friends, the drone Chamlis, tells Gurgeh that instead of Morat, he should have chosen the name “Shequi”—Marain for “Gambler” (21). That’s what Gurgeh is, at a fundamental level. The gambler is a player who won’t find pleasure in playing unless the outcome of the game carries consequences beyond the game’s immediate context. But because living in the Culture means living in a context beyond the game where the possibility of taking such risks is nonexistent, Gurgeh feels that his life has now become consequence-less.
This view of the relationship between life and gaming, valid in a world like Earth between the 20th and 21st century, would appear obsolete to the point of immorality in a place like the Culture—as indeed it does. Gurgeh’s other friend, a young woman called Yay Meristinoux6 in whom Gurgeh displays a good deal of interest, repeatedly fends off his advances because “I feel you want to […] take me … like a piece, like an area. To be had. To be […] possessed…. There’s something very […] I don’t know; primitive, perhaps, about you, Gurgeh. You’ve never changed sex, have you?” (24). And Gurgeh hasn’t, in fact. In the Culture, changing one’s gender is as easy as thinking about it and waiting for the changes to take effect, but Gurgeh has remained willfully wedded to the gender that, in most primitive collectives, is traditionally dominant. In his world, Jernau Morat Gurgeh is a throwback, a barbarian of sorts.
The embedded absurdity of Gurgeh’s position, which gives The Player of Games an aspect of rite of passage, of a bildungsroman tracing the growth of a human being from arrested development to full adulthood, is that he is perfectly free to feel that way and safe in expressing those feelings. He lives in the Culture and is as much a product of it as everyone else—even more so, in fact, if we consider that it is the free use of the Culture’s educational and logistical infrastructure that allowed him a level of access to information, knowledge, and training beyond anything anyone living anywhere else could imagine. Talent and personal qualities matter, to be sure, which is why Gurgeh is the Player of Games and not some other Culture citizen, but in bemoaning the Culture’s ethos he is willfully ignoring the other key ingredient in his success. He is also unaware of how much he is romanticizing his yearning for primitivism: it’s easy to wish being Conan the Barbarian from the safety of one’s couch, and convenient to pine after the passing of a more heroic time when one doesn’t have to suffer the consequences of actually living in it.
This is where the actual gameplayer in Gurgeh’s near-future life comes in: Contact first and, immediately thereafter, Special Circumstances, which want to make Gurgeh’s existence a lot more heroic than it has been thus far. The coy narrator of the novel’s beginning, it turns out at the end (308–309), has two identities in the story: the first is that of Mawhrin-Skel, a decommissioned SC drone who failed the screening process and was offered either reprogramming or de-fanged exile, deprived of its vastly destructive array of offensive sensory and weapons systems (14–15). Mawhrin-Skel chose the latter and settled on Chiark Orbital, where Gurgeh and everyone else on the Culture’s side live in The Player of Games. The drone’s attitude, already callous, is helped in no way whatever by this form of gelding, so that its presence at public functions and parties is always punctuated by some form of horrible behavior in which it engages for the sake of shocking people (like dissecting a dead bird in front of a crowd of appalled onlookers; 13–14). Everybody accordingly dislikes Mawhrin-Skel, except for Gurgeh, who fancies the drone a sort of kindred spirit, refreshingly cynical and brutally direct in a social context where everyone is polite and happy with their circumstances.
But Mawhrin-Skel isn’t decommissioned, and it’s not in exile either. It’s working for Special Circumstances, and it has come to Chiark to recruit Gurgeh, which it accomplishes by exploiting his game-player vanity.7 Now unable to decline SC’s offer, Gurgeh listens in astonishment as the ambassador drone sent to brief him tells the story of the Empire of Azad. Seventy-three years before the beginning of the novel, Contact stumbled upon a society in the Lesser Cloud8 whose structure and reason for being stumped even the vast intelligence of the Minds. Azad is a unique case in the Culture’s records, and therefore impossible to game out according to preexisting models (78–79). The reason for the Empire of Azad’s uniqueness, which is also the reason why, in the drone’s explanation, such an archaic social system was able to survive the move from a single-planet to a spacefaring-commonwealth existence in the first place (74), is a game so fundamental to its society’s existence that the society took its name from it. The game is thus called Azad, and it literally holds the empire together:
The idea … is that Azad is so complex, so subtle, so flexible and so demanding that it is as precise and comprehensive a model of life as it is possible to construct. Whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance … the set-up assumes that the game and life are the same thing, and such is the pervasive nature of the idea of the game within the society that just by believing that, they make it so. It becomes true; it is willed into actuality [74–75].
So, as far as the Azadians are concerned the game is life, life is game, and the game truly is fantastically complex and absorbing, which is the whole point as far as the Empire’s ruling classes are concerned and the whole problem from Contact and Special Circumstances’ perspective: life in the empire has reached such thresholds of social inequality, exploitation, injustice, and cruelty toward both its own people and the aliens it subjugates that, without the seduction of Azad, those ruling classes would already have collapsed.
Instead they remain standing, and so do the crimes they perpetrate. Banks hated the institutionalized brutality of imperialistic power structures, and we have seen the fate he assigned to one such structure in Consider Phlebas, but this is something else. Even by Idiran standards, the Empire of Azad is a show of horrors: eugenic intervention against the male and female sexes has lowered their intelligence in favor of the dominant third sex, appropriately called apex. Millions have died in the wake of a program of deportation, race-based taxation, birth-control fixing, and purposefully engineered starvation aimed at making everyone on the Empire’s home planet the same basic color and body-type (80). The treatment of conquered races, as well as that of Azadian veterans returning victorious from those same wars of conquest, is appalling (207), and the punishments meted out by the courts for such crimes as murder are wildly skewed in favor of the dominant sex—an apex convicted of killing a female gets a year’s worth of hard labor, but a female convicted of killing an apex dies over a period of days, tortured with a variety of chemicals (204). The mentally ill, especially if they are male or female and can’t pay for a place in a hospital, are “de-citisenised” and sold to apexes as property (206).
And on and on it goes, this list of the horrors of empire, which Banks distilled from our (at times immediate) past but didn’t invent. And next to the more appalling examples of exploitation and unholy suffering are the comparatively little things, the beatings and the rapes and the displacements of the poor and the life of prostitutes on the streets and the fights and the racism, the sum total of which joins the grand crimes to paint a composite image of nearly unbearable ferocity. The Culture, well-intentioned meddler that it is, won’t stand by and allow such things to keep happening, so its specialized sections, Contact and Special Circumstances, have finally resolved upon a course of action: send Gurgeh to the Empire of Azad to play the game without telling him precisely why that should make any difference at all. For his part Gurgeh, who is utterly engrossed with the game of which he has received a brief glimpse, doesn’t ask questions. And so he goes, the reluctant curmudgeon who doesn’t even like leaving his mountain retreat of Ikroh, on a journey that’ll take five years to complete and will end with the death of empire, as we’ve known all along it would.
With Gurgeh goes Mawhrin-Skel’s (and the narrator’s) other identity, a supposedly meek and pointedly unarmed library/diplomacy drone by the name of Flere-Imsaho. In keeping with its job description, the Flere-Imsaho personality behaves very much like its conceptual parent, C-3PO from Star Wars: fussy, overly worried about minutiae, excessively mindful of social niceties, and nearly useless in a pinch—or so it leads Gurgeh to believe. In reality, Flere-Imsaho is no more an unarmed protocol drone than Mawhrin-Skel was a de-fanged exile, and like its now-discarded alter ego (which faked its own destruction), it is a fully-fledged SC agent that saves Gurgeh’s life in two separate occasions (290, 297). Behind the curtains, it also speaks to the Emperor himself as the true ambassador of the Culture, managing Gurgeh’s increasingly worrying successes on the boards of Azad in a meta-game of aggressive diplomacy whose ultimate goal is the capitulation of the empire—“Gamespersonship,” Flere-Imsaho calls it when, at the end of the novel, it finally reveals nearly the whole truth to Gurgeh (295).
And the Player of Games truly does win it all, beating opponent after opponent until he faces Nicosar, the Emperor of Azad, and defeats him as well. At that point, in the aftershock of defeat on the board, the empire simply falls apart in real life as well, so completely and irrevocably that the Culture’s direct large-scale intervention becomes unnecessary (305). According to our first-person narrator, Gurgeh never gets to find out that Mawhrin-Skel and Flere-Imsaho were the same person (309), nor does he ever discover what larger forces were at work in the game played within and without Azad, although Flere-Imsaho does hint at their presence above the board:
SC’s been looking for someone like you for quite a while. The Empire’s been ripe to fall for decades; it needed a big push, but it could always go … Azad—the game itself—had to be discredited. It was what had held the Empire together all these years…. My respect for those great Minds which use the likes of you and me like game-pieces increases all the time. Those are very smart machines [296].
This is the second time Gurgeh receives an acknowledgement that he has indeed been a piece—albeit a fundamental one—on a playing board whose boundaries he couldn’t see,9 and it’s not the first time for us readers either. The voice of the narrator comes to talk directly to us in four different occasions (3; 99–100; 231–232; 308–309), reiterating every time (1) that a game is being played, (2) that Gurgeh is a playing-piece in it, and (3) that we are playing-pieces as well. “I haven’t told you who I am so far,” it says at one point, “and I’m not going to tell you now, either. Maybe later. Maybe” (231). And even when the time comes to tell us that it is both Mawhrin-Skel and Flere-Imsaho and someone else entirely all at once, the narrator still has a game to play with us:
Let me recapitulate. This is a true story. I was there. When I wasn’t, and when I didn’t know exactly what was going on—inside Gurgeh’s mind, for example—I admit that I have not hesitated to make it up. But it’s still a true story. Would I lie to you? [309].
The answer is yes, absolutely, since the narrator belongs to Special Circumstances and we’re playing the game. We’re reading the novel.
Does utopia get away with calling itself so if some or all of its agents are fine with strong-arm tactics, deception, and withholding information? Before officially blackmailing Gurgeh into speaking on its behalf, and in order to make one hundred percent sure that he takes its warning seriously, Mawhrin-Skel physically restrains him—something previously unheard of on Chiark Orbital and, by implication, in the Culture at large (56–57). Also, the drone shows him video/audio footage of his bedroom at Ikroh while he is involved in intercourse with a young admirer (60). Is Special Circumstances the worm in the apple, the cancer eating away at the heart of the perfect society until the perfect society ends up resembling it? How many people is it all right to manipulate and coerce for the greater good? And whose “greater good” is it anyway? Who gets to issue the definition?
As before, we can express those questions in gaming terms. “Games have a very definite and set morality,” Banks had told Michael Cobley; “you play according to the rules or you don’t play at all.” Thus, the morality of the rule set is the first of two crucial requirements for the existence of a good game, which also means a good society; in Player, the Culture represents the quintessential example of one such game, whose rules are fair because the philosophical, ethical, and moral variables that went into designing them were fair. By contrast, the Empire of Azad is the quintessential example of a rigged rule set: Azadian society is designed for the advantage of one third of its population, with the other two suffering appalling deprivations and punishments. Strangely, however, Azad the game does not initially appear to reflect this form of privilege—the Azadian constitution grants all three sexes the right to play, thus seemingly allowing males and females the chance to improve their lot in life (137).
But in fact the game does reflect privilege. It’s in the second crucial requirement for the existence of a good game/society, the unanimous acceptance of—and equal participation in—the rule set, that Azad starts echoing the culture within which it was born. First, the Azadian educational system stacks the odds heavily against males and females by having the best colleges accept only apices. Second, the draw is arranged so that males and females will be eliminated immediately.10 Third, a recent “improvement” in the rules, introduced at the behest of the privileged classes, allows poor people to stay in the bidding with rich people by wagering what they call “physical licence”—i.e., the performance of tortures or mutilations on the game’s loser. But because the rich apices already have a considerable advantage over everyone else, the physical license option does nothing to actually redress the balance—it’s always the lower-class player that pays that awful price (79–80).
Azad is easy to gauge on any relevant moral scale. Player provides us with so many horrifying scenes of injustice, exploitation, and abuse of the helpless11 that, within the novel’s dramatic economy, to let either the empire or the game continue to exist is unthinkable. The philosophy of Azad, compressed into a single sentence by one of the government’s highest-ranking members, amounts to a violation of what Banks had said about the morality of games: “one can be on either side in the Empire. One can be the player, or one can be […] played upon” (222).12 In Azadian society, there is no choice not to play, and because the odds have been rigged from the start, there is also no hope of an outcome different from the one already assigned. Winners and losers have already been decided, and the true game, the true fun as far as the Azadian elites are concerned, lies in the pleasure of watching others be subject to their every whim (220–221).
The Culture, on the other had, is more difficult to assess. From the perspective of every character except possibly Gurgeh and Mawhrin-Skel/Flere-Imsaho, the Culture truly is the utopia Banks created it to be, and here we come to one of the more remarkable aspects of this novel: the plausible, credible, sustained description of day-to-day life in paradise. Usually, to describe utopia is to destroy it: from Thomas More’s 1516 original to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) to Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), the vast majority of attempts to describe the actual daily life in what the story construes as a utopia results in the reader wishing for something else. One’s utopia is invariably someone else’s dystopia, and our history is full of figures that tried to enforce their utopias on others. Martin Luther King had a dream, but so did, for example, Pol Pot; the difference between their respective dreams is that, while Pol Pot’s began and ended at the muzzle of a gun or at the gate of a camp, King found a way to express his in terms that most others could agree with and wish for. He folded us all in his dream and promised we’d be safe in it, happier than we’d been thus far. And we did believe.
But even then, there were many who listened to King’s voice and heard the Devil’s, and one of them acted upon his fear. Conversely, many others listened to Pol Pot and saw the dream, which was easy to embrace because it had been custom-made for them. And in The Player of Games, we can certainly say that the apices in control of Azadian society, those in the country villa who listen to music played on the body parts of their victims, would unhesitatingly describe their circumstances as utopian. Once again, who gets to announce their dream and enforce its advent?
So Banks had one hell of a job to do, convincingly describing utopia and setting it against dystopia. He pulled it off, though, chiefly through the use of a variation on a classic trope in utopian fiction. In his seminal book on the utopian imagination, Demand the Impossible (1986), Tom Moylan observes that all literary utopias, from the earliest examples of the form to the latest, share two common traits: the alternative society and the visitor to that society (43). The visitor to the alternative, utopian society—Julian West in Looking Backward, for example, or Bron Helstrom in Samuel Delany’s Triton (1976)—is someone who, because they come from a more dystopian reality (sometimes Earth at the time of the story’s writing, sometimes a future society gone wrong), must be introduced to the kind of life they will lead in their new world. The dialectic of differentiation between the visitor’s native values and the ones their guide to utopia espouses serves (1) as background information on the creation and nature of the utopian society under scrutiny, (2) as a critique of our society in the here and now, and (3) as the trigger for a discourse on the process of utopian creation itself, this last task accomplished through “[drawing] on both the traditional eutopian evocation of a new spatial reality … and the temporal, dystopian, account of personal suffering, systemic discovery, and radical action” (Moylan 2014b, xviii). Banks’ Culture stories are, in this respect, no different from other utopian writings, although he often varies the dynamics. In Consider Phlebas, for example, Horza acts as the visitor whose unsupported prejudice against the primacy of Minds (he’s never actually visited the Culture) further accentuates his role of willfully ignorant, doomed viewpoint character at the same time as it helps us readers see utopia in its true light. Horza’s would-be guides, Balveda and Fal N’geestra, speak on behalf of the Culture without hope of reaching him—Balveda because she is from the Culture but not in the Culture, and Fal because she is; that is, she’s never in the room with anyone involved in the search for the Mind. Ultimately, everyone is talking to us readers, who are the only beneficiaries of the lessons imparted at the end.
The Player of Games presents another variation on the visitation template, this time through the viewpoint of Jernau Gurgeh as a socio-chemical reagent of sorts—a discontented citizen of utopia who perversely managed to cast his own experience of Culture life as a nearly dystopian encounter. The first hundred or so pages of the novel are exclusively set on Chiark Orbital (3–95), among beautiful vistas of mountain ranges, fjords, lakes, green meadows, clear torrents, and clusters of human habitation carefully arranged for maximum aesthetic effect and perfect symbiosis with the natural world that interpenetrates them—Gurgeh’s home of Ikroh is a particularly beautiful example of such architectonic care (72). The Culture people in the novel go to parties, attend public functions, study at the local university, visit each other, and generally engage in every kind of pastime or endeavor that catches their fancy without qualms or guilt. Resources are, for all intents and purposes, infinite, and the technology that makes use of them is so advanced that even the most extravagant whims are within range of the individual’s grasp without damage or offense to others. People can still experience suffering—love still goes unrequited at times, for example, or like Fal N’geestra in Phlebas, one may occasionally fall and get hurt—but those instances of suffering are accidents of chance, not of design, and as such they fall into the realm of personal rather than systemic responsibility.
And in the midst of all this guiltless, blameless fun, nestling like a grub inside the heart of a nearly perfect social contract, its one discontent continues bemoaning the loss of dystopia. It’s easy to become irritated at Gurgeh’s attitude toward the Culture, especially because—and Banks knew this very well—we don’t live in it. We have to make do with Earth between the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, and unfortunately that’s closer to Azad than it is to the Culture. To watch a person express his desire to be rid of something we’d give anything to achieve, even if it’s “just” a story, feels galling. The description of life on Chiark Orbital, which is shorthand for life in the Culture at large, receives an added air of plausibility and desirability precisely by virtue of the presence of this one famous contrarian who keeps insisting on making himself miserable when everything around him invites happiness.
Then the novel switches scenery from the Culture to Azad, and Gurgeh retains his role of socio-chemical reagent—now reversed—when he is confronted by the reality of life in the Empire. In the terms Moylan established in his study, Gurgeh can be described as a visitor to both dystopia and utopia, in the sense that he is finally learning what life in the Culture truly is like through the experience of life in “a more heroic society.” For all his spikiness and pretend-savagery, Gurgeh is a Culture citizen and a decent human being. The very language he uses to craft meaning out of his surroundings betrays his belonging to the Culture: the words relating to concepts like “prison,” “dominant sex,” “ownership,” and “illegal” continue to escape him, so that either the ambassador drone from Contact or Flere-Imsaho have to explain them to him (see page 118, for example). Also, when he is compelled to register his philosophical and ethical beliefs with the Imperial Game Bureau, the Limiting Factor—the demilitarized warship13 that has taken him from Chiark to Azad—contrasts his opinion that he doesn’t really have any structured beliefs with an argument that is also a warning:
A guilty system recognizes no innocents. As with any power apparatus which thinks everybody’s either for it or against it, we’re against it. You would be too, if you thought about it. The very way you think places you amongst its enemies. This might not be your fault, because every society imposes some if its values on those raised within it, but the point is that some societies try to maximise that effect, and some try to minimise it. You come from one of the latter and you’re being asked to explain yourself to one of the former [170–171].
For a while, however, barbarian-loving throwback that he is, Gurgeh feels the attraction of the Empire through the attraction of the game. Upon arriving in orbit around Azad’s home planet and witnessing the martial discipline of the soldiers who come onboard to greet him and inspect the Limiting Factor, he unfavorably compares the Culture to Azad according to authoritarian thought patterns that a Culture citizen would find ludicrous (116), and at one point he falls prey precisely to the feelings of greed for conquest and victory that keep the Azadian élites in power—“He hadn’t realized how seductive Azad was when played in its home environment,” the narrator tells us; “now he knew why the Empire had survived because of the game. Azad itself simply produced an insatiable desire for more victories, more power, more territory, more dominance” (200). At the same time, Gurgeh starts expressing himself in the language of the Empire rather than in Marain, and because the words we use to define everything in our lives also shape those things, he begins employing more primitive thought patterns, which in turn results in a more savage behavior on the Azad board than he’d previously displayed. Also, when he receives a video communiqué from his friend Chamlis, he becomes angry at the realization that some of his friends have been staying at Ikroh for a few days (246–247).
Gurgeh is, in other words, in some danger of embracing the morality of Azad’s rule set, right at the same time as his Culture upbringing, in reaction to the horrors perpetrated by the Empire, is pulling him away from that and back toward the morality of the rule set Gurgeh was born with. There’s a struggle going on inside the man, but there shouldn’t be: the respective moralities of the two societies are known quantities by now, so it shouldn’t be difficult for Gurgeh to make a choice. The problem is that he is suffering from a degree of distrust toward Flere-Imsaho and SC in general: aside from remembering exactly how he was fished into this entire business to begin with, and apart from SC’s well-known reputation for deviousness, Gurgeh has just found out that, contrary to what he’d been told before, a handful of people in the Empire have known the Culture’s true size, technological capabilities, and extension across the galaxy for about two hundred years (thus making the original quote of seventy-three years since discovery another lie). Flere-Imsaho is informing him of the fact now that, in the wake of his successes, he’s about to play one of those people; otherwise, the drone tells Gurgeh, he wouldn’t have been informed. Need-to-know basis (243).
This deep level of manipulation of a few choice individuals, the narrative indicates, is the price utopia pays for satisfying its urge to be useful. Banks declared more than once that, precisely because the Culture is a utopia, he didn’t feel like writing a story exclusively set within its social context—he might as well write a “Hampstead novel,” as he’d called non-genre fiction (Hughes 1999, n.p.). Every Culture story, first to last, is accordingly set in the moral and ethical gray area where, when utopia meets dystopia, one of the two has to establish a sort of dialogue with the other. But dystopias don’t do honest, direct dialogue; they do obfuscation, bottlenecking of information, and outright lying. The burden of opening communications therefore falls on the shoulders of the utopian society’s representatives. Banks, who’d been paying a lot of attention to Chomsky’s theories of freedom of information, tells us several times in Player that the Empire’s information network constantly misinforms on, lies about, and when it deems it necessary forges news and events. In that, it is the diametric opposite of the Culture, where every scrap of information is free for everyone at every moment.
Well, almost. SC, it turns out, can obfuscate with the best of them. Part of the reasons why it hasn’t informed the Culture at large of the existence and nature of the Empire is that, should news of life in that place become common knowledge, a wave of popular outrage would force Contact and SC to act militarily. Thirteen years after the end of the Vietnam War, one year before the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, three years before Desert Storm, and fifteen years before the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom, the ambassador drone SC sends to brief Gurgeh lays out the dilemma of intervention in uncomfortably accurate detail:
We might be forced into a high-profile intervention against the empire; it would hardly be war as such because we’re way ahead of them technologically, but we’d have to become an occupying force to control them, and that would mean a huge drain on our resources as well as morale; in the end such an adventure would almost certainly be seen as a mistake, no matter the popular enthusiasm for it at the time. The people of the empire would lose by uniting against us instead of the corrupt regime which controls them, so putting the clock back a century or two, and the Culture would lose by emulating those we despise; invaders, occupiers, hegemonists [79].
Thus, Special Circumstances is sitting on the Azad matter while the great Minds that manage such situations game out all the variables involved. In the end, it’s the Morat option that proves to be the one least likely to result in widespread bloodshed and total war between the Empire and the Culture. Gurgeh has to go to Azad (game and empire), play Azad (game and empire), and win, thus discrediting the value of the game as an accurate reality model. The unholy link between simulation and actuality broken, the veil lifts, and the Empire collapses under the monstrous weight of its crimes.
So, not every bit of news is available to anyone at any time. If Contact and SC deem it necessary or desirable, they can bottleneck the flow of certain venues of information. But surely this is easy to embrace? If Contact and SC are keeping mum so as to avoid the same kind of imperialistic adventure that has been staining the conscience of the industrialized West for the past twenty years or so, wouldn’t that be entirely justifiable? But what about Gurgeh? What about his undoubtedly forced enlistment in the Azad intervention? To whom does he get to complain about the considerable infringement upon his personal freedoms, an infringement that also goes unpunished? He is blackmailed, lied to, transported to a faraway place where nearly everyone wishes him harm, and shown sights that horrify him to such an extent that, in the wake of the Limiting Factor’s departure from the Lesser Cloud at the end of the novel, he asks to be put into the deep sleep of storage for the duration of the two-year trip back to Chiark (301–302). Where’s his utopia?
In his 1988 review of The Player of Games, John Clute offered these considerations on the matter of Gurgeh’s participation in SC’s venture:
Although Gurgeh has transparently been fitted up for his Empire-demolishing role, Azad does deserve (in space opera terms) its comeuppance, and Gurgeh accomplishes his mission with panache and some cunning. Indeed, most readers will assume he tumbled to the true location and role of Mawhrin-Skel as soon as they do, about halfway through the story; and will consequently assume that his subsequent playing of Skel’s game is elated and volunteer [1995c, 99].
If this is true, then the top-down flow of gameplaying and manipulation in the novel contains some counter-currents, and the all-knowing narrator who tells us Gurgeh never knew better is, in fact, being played himself. And why not? Jernau Gurgeh is the Morat, the player of games, and he is fully aware of the intense relationship between gaming and life—witness for example his theory of gaming in the Player’s early stages (41), which contains in microcosm the thematic concerns of the novel entire. In fact, Gurgeh is no more an average Culture person than Consider Phlebas’ Fal N’geestra and Perosteck Balveda were, and not just because of his gameplaying skills. He’s also the contrarian, the lover of barbarian societies and, most importantly, the gambler. He’s a citizen of the fringe, a dweller in the gray moral and ethical areas that Contact and Special Circumstances staked a claim to when they began their ecumenical good works for the benefit of less fortunate people. While he has indeed been fitted out for his role as the agent of Azad’s destruction, those who prepared him didn’t have to change that much.
In the end, it’s the game that brings Gurgeh wholly back into the Culture’s fold, just as it was the game that had originally presented him with the lure of—to use his own terminology—a more heroic age. The very last game of Azad that Gurgeh has to play pits him against Nicosar, the Emperor, and Nicosar is a consummate gameplayer in his own right. To him belong the early stages of the game, when his forces seem to run rampant across the areas of the board Gurgeh controls while the Culture man tries to figure out what the Emperor’s strategy is. When he finally does realize what’s happening on the Azad board, he also finally understands himself:
The Emperor had set out to beat not just Gurgeh, but the whole Culture … he had set up his whole side of the game as an Empire, the very image of Azad. Another revelation struck Gurgeh … one reading—perhaps the best—of the way he’d always played was that he played as the Culture. He’d habitually set up something like the society itself when he constructed his positions and deployed his pieces; a net, a grid of forces and relationships, without any obvious hierarchy or entrenched leadership, and initially quite profoundly peaceful [269].
Something of an oddity he may be, by his society’s standards, but in spite of that Jernau Gurgeh has always been and still remains a Culture citizen, with Culture values and Culture ethics, and in Azad’s terms he plays as the Culture because he is from the Culture. He doesn’t really have a choice because the morality of Azad’s rule set, as the Limiting Factor had intimated to him, construes as inimical anyone who isn’t on its side, both within and without the game itself. Nicosar, who knows that the Empire couldn’t beat the Culture in actuality, attempts to reverse the game-to-life flow of Azad’s reality model through a statement of principle issued in the language of game that, as far as the average Azadian is concerned, is also the language of life. By deciding to play as the whole of Azad, he automatically casts Gurgeh in the role of champion of the Culture, a function the other man has trouble accepting because, typically for someone from the Culture, he sees himself as speaking exclusively for his own conduct (281).
Another thing that Gurgeh doesn’t find out until the game’s aftermath is that the night before he’d begun playing Nicosar, Flere-Imsaho had told the Emperor that Gurgeh really was the Culture’s champion, and that, should he beat Nicosar, the Culture would come in and impose its own brand of peace upon the Empire (295). And because Nicosar is the quintessential Azadian, and because, as the ambassador drone had told Gurgeh back on Chiark, the identification of game and life in the Empire is willed into actuality through sheer belief, the Emperor absolutely knows that what Flere-Imsaho told him is the truth (even though the drone himself has—or claims to have—no idea whether that was actually what the Minds had planned; 295). Nicosar believes, and shapes the game accordingly; in turn, the game shapes Gurgeh, who finds himself losing because he doesn’t believe in his role within the game; when he does come to believe, he becomes exactly what Flere-Imsaho told Nicosar he is—the Culture’s champion.14 There’s nothing else he can do because the option of not playing isn’t open to him, and even if it were he wouldn’t take it; he is the Player of Games. Gurgeh comes back from the brink and ultimately defeats Nicosar by resetting his society’s structure within the game as that of the Culture militant, a virtual analog of the organism that had defeated the Idiran Empire more than seven hundred years before (270–272).15
And just like the Idiran War, which the Culture had started on the losing side but had ended up winning, the game-board duel between the Culture and the Empire of Azad plays out to its inevitable conclusion. When he realizes he’s beaten, Nicosar tries to burn down himself, Gurgeh, and everyone else in the room—in losing the game he’s lost the Empire; he believes it. At that point, Flere-Imsaho drops the library-drone guise and shields Gurgeh, who survives the flames and, after receiving a belated explanation of his true role in the events, boards the Limiting Factor and heads on home. Chamlis and Yay are waiting for him, and Gurgeh tells them the whole story of Azad, and finally makes peace with himself. He sleeps with Yay, who now accepts him because he has changed, and the story ends in dystopia lost and utopia regained, thankfully. For us on the other side of the page, for the readers of utopia who speculate on it from inside social machineries more resembling of its dark twin, it’s an indispensable blessing. We need our dreams. Also, despite the narrator’s open admission that we are, like Gurgeh himself, at once players and pawns in a game, there are rewards for our willingness to play, as Hutchinson intimated, because the rule set Banks handed to us in this novel is a fundamentally fair one. Everyone has a function to perform in it, and because we’ve always known this of literature, if only at a subconscious level, our participation in the game that is a world that is a novel is gleeful. The joy of engaging with The Player of Games is also the joy of realizing that everyone will play their roles to the best of their abilities and without attempting to second-guess the rule set. And first and foremost among us players is Iain M. Banks himself, who tried, in Consider Phlebas, to second-guess the rule set of space opera to the near-suffocation of the main story. He doesn’t do that here. Here, he keeps the faith; he tells the tale without arguing or sidetracking, obedient to the melody although singing it with different lyrics. And the story ends, and Gurgeh has learned better, and we get to keep utopia at the same time as we rejoice for the demise of the dark twin, even if for all of us it only happens in the pages of a novel. Maybe one day.