June 21st Fatjer's Day! All the best gift ideas.  Shop NowJune 21st Fatjer's Day! All the best gift ideas.  Shop Now

The Player of Games (Culture Series #2)

Paperback
$19.99
3|
Promotion message icon
Premium Members save an extra 10% and all Members collect stamps to save with Rewards. 10 stamps = $5.Learn More
In stock
This item is currently out of stock online.
Free standard shipping on orders over $60
Select a store to view item availability.
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 Empire of Azad, cruel and incredibly wealthy, 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...

From the B&N Reads Blog

5 Reasons Iain M. Banks’ Culture Should Be the Next Big Sci-Fi Adaptation

5 Reasons Iain M. Banks’ Culture Should Be the Next Big Sci-Fi Adaptation

It’s a wonderful time to be a science fiction fan. The television adaptation of James S.A. Corey’s Expanse space opera series is poised to drag SyFy back from the brink. Ann Leckie’s excellent Ancillary Justice has been optioned, as has basically everything with John Scalzi’s name on the cover, from Lock In, to Redshirts , to The Ghost Brigades. But there’s one series […]
Read More
The 5 Deadliest Games in SF/F

The 5 Deadliest Games in SF/F

To say that existence itself is reminiscent of a game is almost a cliché; games turn up in our everyday lives in vocabulary, theory, and metaphor. Competition, after all, is what drives everything—competition for resources, for food, for success. In the modern age, our games are (relatively) sedate and calm, with the worst consequences usually hurt […]
Read More
6 of the Strangest Political Systems in SFF

6 of the Strangest Political Systems in SFF

If this election cycle has taught us anything, it’s that politics is strange enough, even before you mix in magic and futuristic technology. Granted, this hasn’t stopped anyone in science fiction or fantasy from adding their own unique flourishes to the political process, but with the baseline set so high, it’s pretty much given things will only get […]
Read More
We’d Rather Be Living in These 6 Sci-Fi Utopias

We’d Rather Be Living in These 6 Sci-Fi Utopias

No matter the outcome of last week’s presidential election, one thing was certain: half the country was poised to wake up Wednesday morning feeling like they’d slipped into a dystopian world. Between a flawed campaign system and the relentless grind of the endless election season, politics in general is pretty horrifying for the average person, and the 2016 race was one […]
Read More