THE PLAYER OF GAMES was published in 1988
It is a Culture novel, first drafted in 1980
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 cruel and incredibly wealthy Empire of Azad, 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.
Iain on his fascination with games “It’s originally the starship, Limiting Factor, who says Azad is a game that recognises no innocence, then the drone says ‘Yes, it does recognise innocence, but you see what it does with it.’ The problem with the (Azad) society is that it can’t stand innocence, it sees innocence and it feels guilty. It can’t bear the idea that something exists outside its morality so it has to despoil it, it has to make it suffer. So Azad does recognise innocence, and in that sense the drone is almost setting Gurgeh up in terms of what he’s going to think about; the society, the system. And the drone is saying that the entire society is about power, and that’s why you’ve got this overbearing sense of sexuality in the Azadian Empire, they’re obsessed with sex, as we are. It’s there, it informs the whole society, it’s about power, domination, sexuality. The Culture had got beyond this stage, of course.”
Japanese cover
Iain was asked about the repeat appearances of castles in his novels, specifically Castle Klaff in The Player of Games: “The castle, in a way, represents the individual writ large. There’s the central keep which is your inner core, if you like, and the curtain walls, external defences, as the areas of defence of the human being, used to let the world in at certain areas and in certain restricted ways, and to keep the rest out. While the central core is always there, fortress-like behind defences. Irving Goffman’s book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is about the way we use more or less assumed identities, taken from films, TV, books, people around us, to construct defences to keep the world back, so any time a castle appears in any book, certainly in mine, in a way it stands for the individual. Joined with the landscape yet apart from it.”
SPOILER ALERT! (hover or tap to reveal)
“The idea is that Azad is actually their life, it genuinely is a reflection of the life of the Empire. Because life in the Empire is beastly, and it is a beastly game. You’re expected to win, and to win you defeat somebody else, not try and co-operate with them. In a way Gurgeh’s trying to do that, in certain bits. Towards the very last few games he has the game taped in such a way that he can actually set the game up not as a conflict but as a means of co-operation, a beautiful song. And he actually lets the Empire take over the Culture in the game; he lets the Emperor take him over, but again he knows that his values will take over the Empire. It’s like the invading army and Rome – it might invade and apparently win but it becomes the thing it originally invaded. In terms of the game of Azad, the Culture’s ethos is better than the Empire’s, therefore the Empire appears to win but will get taken over. That’s why the Emperor just goes crazy.
“Superficially the published version is very similar to the first draft, except that, in the first version, Gurgeh leaves the Culture just because he gets bored, no other motive, he’s not blackmailed or anything, and this means you miss out on the surprise ending. It’s much more complex and darker in the rewritten form. The original draft still exists within the finished book in a sense.”