The Player of Games
Iain M. Banks · 1988
The Culture's greatest games player is sent to challenge the Azad Empire, whose complex board game doubles as its social and governmental system. Banks's Culture novels define post-scarcity SF; *The Player of Games* (1988) is the most perfectly structured of them.
The case against
Banks never shows you how Azad is actually played; the game that structures the whole novel stays an abstraction, all stakes and no rules. The Empire is so lavishly cruel (the torture broadcasts, the rigged hierarchy) that the moral contest has a foregone winner. And Gurgeh is less protagonist than instrument, moved square by square by Special Circumstances drones.
Science Fiction & Fantasy · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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