Literature

The Player of Games

Iain M. Banks · 1988

Lindy Score

3,160·Classic

38 yrs

Age

1

Endorsers

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Why it endured

The Culture's greatest game player is sent to a brutal empire whose entire civilization is decided by a single game. Banks's most accessible Culture novel — a perfect entry point.

What they're saying

1 people recommend this book

Andrej KarpathyAI researcher & former Tesla AI Director

This is another example of a popular sci-fi that I simply cannot stand. I forced myself to make it through hundreds of pages thinking that it might get better later but gave up halfway through, at a point where some alien females were described as wearing jewels. I'm sorry, but I cannot accept human-like qualities naively attributed to alien beings, it's one of my greatest pet peeves. This is another one of those sci-fi that are really a vanilla story that _happens_ to take place in the future. It is a story first and a sci-fi second, and I like my books the other way around. I debated between 2/5 and 1/5, but I hated the sheer naivety and childish "little green men on mars"-like ideas in the book so much that I'm going to go with 1/5. 1/5

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