The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

Tronze, for all the fact that Chiark was a fairly recent Orbital, only a thousand or so years old, was already almost as big as any Orbital community ever grew; the Culture’s real cities were its great ships, the General Systems Vehicles.

Some people used such machines just for fun or revenge, making up stories where appalling or just funny things happened to their enemies or their friends. Where nothing could be authenticated, blackmail became both pointless and impossible;

AI

“It is unusual for us to discover an imperial power-system in space. As a rule, such archaic forms of authority wither long before the relevant species drags itself off the home planet, let alone cracks the lightspeed problem, which of course one has to do, to rule effectively over any worthwhile volume.

“Every now and again, however, Contact disturbs some particular ball of rock and discovers something nasty underneath. On every occasion, there is a specific and singular reason, some special circumstance which allows the general rule to go by the board. In the case of the conglomerate you see before you—apart from the obvious factors, such as the fact that we didn’t get out there until fairly recently, and the lack of any other powerful influence in the Lesser Cloud—that special circumstance is a game.”

SC = special circumstances

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.”

and Gurgeh started to see what the drone Worthil had meant when it said Contact suspected it was the game that held the Empire together. Nothing else seemed to.

Like the stock market in our society?

Their juvenile representative didn’t even bother to hang around and do its job properly; it preferred to hide, nursing its pathetic self-esteem. Gurgeh knew enough about the way the Empire worked to realize that it wouldn’t let such things happen; its people knew what duties and orders meant, and they took their responsibilities seriously, or, if they didn’t, they suffered for it. They did as they were told; they had discipline.

“That is where people who have left the countryside for the bright lights of the big city often end up. Unfortunately, many of them are just loafers.” “Driven off the land,” Flere-Imsaho added in Marain, “by an ingeniously unfair property-tax system and the opportunistic top-down reorganization of the agricultural production apparatus.”

What struck Gurgeh most strongly, though, was that the whole place and everybody in it seemed to be stuck in another age. He could see nothing in the palace or worn by the people that could not have been produced at least a thousand years earlier;

Gland Crystal Fugue State instead. Brilliant combination; blows your neurons out your ass.

He hardly thought it mattered what their social system was; it simply looked so crassly, rigidly over-organized.

All over the city that morning, people were going to their first game of the new series; from the most optimistic young player lucky enough to win a place in the games in a state lottery, right up to Nicosar himself, those twelve thousand people faced that day knowing that their lives might change utterly and forever, for better or worse, starting from right now.

was not so difficult to understand the warped view the Azadians had of what they called “human nature”—the phrase they used whenever they had to justify something inhuman and unnatural—when

the Culture’s been a spacefaring species for eleven thousand years; just because you’ve mostly settled down in idealized, tailor-made conditions doesn’t mean you’ve lost the capacity for rapid adaptation. Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design. You know the Culture’s philosophy.”

but it had been briefed that when Culture people didn’t speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language,

Gurgeh found himself angered at the fact that people came and stayed there every now and again. Who did they think they were?

A little while later, the small band of dazed survivors—released by the two ship’s drones, and mostly servants, soldiers, concubines and clerks—stumbled into the daytime night and the soot-like snow, to take stock of their temporary exile in the once great fortress, and claim their vanished land.

Any phone cleaning technicians?