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The Player of Games - Week 4
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(And by "bit" I also mean "penis.")
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Just finished it. The ending was a great crescendo but I didn't really like that Contact came off as an omniscient puppet master. It would have been more satisfying if the book ended the exact same way but with Azad crumbling under it's own weight without Nicosar being prodded into insanity by Imsaho.
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Agreed. The whole "ha ha, everything in this whole book has been set up by Contact" seemed a bit much. I thought it was fine, for example, that the drone had clearly set Gurgeh up so that he couldn't refuse the trip to the Empire. I didn't think it was so great that virtually every plot point was manufactured.
I will say, though, that it was a quick and enjoyable read. It was just genre novel trash, but it was well crafted genre novel trash, and I can appreciate that. I don't get to do a lot of light reading, so this was a welcome relief. -
As I understand it, "it was a secret plan by Contact all along" is pretty much the ending of every Culture book. It's like Banks fell in love with those heist movies where the whole thing was a con that's explained in detail by the last scene, and so he's just doing that in a sci-fi context.
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I hope your understanding is wrong, RB. It was a crappy ex machina (sorry!) wrap-up for one book, let alone a string of them.
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Maybe it's just the few I've read, but it seriously seems to be a major part of all of them. Even when it wasn't a secret plan by Contact all along, they usually find out about halfway through the book and just let it play out until the very end when they magically fix everything.
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What's crazy is that Contact didn't even have to play the role of shadowy government conspiracy engine. The game of Azad between Nicosar and Gurgeh had already been contextualized as a clash of civilizations capable of destroying the empire. With a few tweaks, Banks could have told a much more complicated and nuanced story about the nature of power. In the end, an interesting idea is undercut in name of exposition. It wasn't even expedient to include Contacts contemporary role in the events of the game. The result, as I understood it before the last couple pages, would have been the same.
The ending sort of spoils an otherwise enjoyable ride. It opts for something simplistic when there was something more complicated and fulfilling right there. -
The book stressed that Azad was the foundation of it's civilization and it led up to Gurgeh, an alien soiling it. These people spend their life playing and studying this game and some outsider comes along decimates their best players. After Gurgeh's visit it seemed that they were going to burn themselves out. But in the end Contact just added "fuel to the fire".
The Joel said:
The ending sort of spoils an otherwise enjoyable ride. It opts for something simplistic when there was something more complicated and fulfilling right there.
My thoughts exactly, it made me feel I had the wrong story going on in my head.
