James Nicoll Reviews

Iain M. Banks’ 1988 The Player of Games is a stand-alone space opera, set in Banks’ Culture. And also adjacent to it.

The Culture allows its citizens to pursue whatever occupation they like. In the case of Jernau Gurgeh, that would be obsessive gameplaying. Gurgeh is extremely adept at learning and playing new games, but lately, he has become bored.

The Culture’s Special Circumstances agency has use for a person with Gurgeh’s talents.

There is the slight problem that Special Circumstances won’t explain what that use is until Gurgeh agrees to work with them. Gurgeh won’t agree until he knows what he is getting into. Nothing a little blackmail cannot solve.

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Iain M. Banks’ 1990 Use of Weapons is a space opera set in Banks’ Culture universe.

The Culture, one of the Milky Way’s great powers, is a post-scarcity, egalitarian¹ society that prides itself on its highly developed ethics. The Culture is, at least in theory, constrained in the degree to which it can intervene in other civilizations, even the very naughty ones.

Certain special circumstances fall under the domain of the Culture’s Special Circumstances bureau and its agents.

Cheradenine Zakalwe is one such agent. Or was.

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What better novel to inaugurate Space Opera That Doesn’t Suck than Consider Phlebas? This 1987 novel by the (sadly) late Iain M. Banks wasn’t Banks’ debut novel, but it was the first novel to feature his star-spanning, anarchistic utopia, the Culture. 

Banks chooses to introduce the Culture not from the perspective of a sympathetic observer, but rather from the point of view of an enemy. The Changer Horza sees Minds, the artificial intelligences that dominate the Culture, as anti-life and the culture of the Culture as an anti-evolutionary dead end. Accordingly, when the Idiran-Culture War breaks out, Horza casts his lot with the Idirans. The Idirans might be violent, repressive, bigoted religious fanatics but at least they are on the side of life. Or so Horza sees it. And a shapeshifter like Horza is a valuable asset.…

His cover blown, shackled to a cell wall, waiting for a rising tide of waste to drown him …

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