The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

“It looks perverse and wasteful to us, but then one thing that empires are not about is the efficient use of resources and the spread of happiness; both are typically accomplished despite the economic short-circuiting—corruption and favoritism, mostly—endemic to the system.”

Stories set in the Culture in which Things Went Wrong tended to start with humans losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal. It was a conventional opening, the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another.

“But if someone kills somebody else?” Gurgeh shrugged. “They’re slap-droned.” “Ah! This sounds more like it. What does this drone do?” “Follows you around and makes sure you never do it again.” “Is that all?” “What more do you want? Social death, Hamin; you don’t get invited to too many parties.” “Ah; but in your Culture, can’t you gatecrash?” “I suppose so,” Gurgeh conceded. “But nobody’d talk to you.”

What, anyway, was he to say? That intelligence could surpass and excel the blind force of evolution, with its emphasis on mutation, struggle and death? That conscious cooperation was more efficient than feral competition?

The blade dangled uselessly in midair, suspended from the little white disk that was Flere-Imsaho. “Ha ha ha,” it boomed above the noise of the screaming wind.