The Player of Games (Culture, #2)

by Iain M. Banks

“The game’s the thing. That’s the conventional wisdom, isn’t it? The fun is what matters, not the victory. To glory in the defeat of another, to need that purchased pride, is to show you are incomplete and inadequate to start with.”

We might be forced into a high-profile intervention against the empire; it would hardly be war as such because we’re way ahead of them technologically, but we’d have to become an occupying force to control them, and that would mean a huge drain on our resources as well as morale; in the end such an adventure would almost certainly be seen as a mistake, no matter the popular enthusiasm for it at the time.

It was a small victory against them, a little-game, a gesture on a lesser board; a blow against the elements and the gods.

Strength in depth; redundancy; over-design. You know the Culture’s philosophy.”