Rating: 
Summary: A superb story
Review: A genius living in paradise is manipulated through a flaw in his personality into playing a game. In this sense a potential tragedy is in the making. Not so, as this is Iain M Banks writing and he's more advanced than that!
He travels to a rotten alien Empire, inspired by the worst in humans. He is naive politically and does not understand the true cruelty of the Empire and plays the game to decide who rules it. I can't give away the ending but it's well worth reading.
This is a clever, complex book with vivid scenes of paradise, advanced technology, barbarians, emotions and various scenes. The fire planet image is amazing. It's fun in places, exciting, an adventure story, it's nasty and horrible. It's sad and shocking. The 'hero' of the book is not your action hero of many sci fi stories. He's a vain coward at times single minded on playing games.
Short on violence, weapons and no space combat yet it doesn't matter. For violent thrills read Consider Phelbas or 'Against a Dark Background'. This is a carefully constructed story which I can and have read again and again without being bored.
There aren't many authors whose story endings are better. This one makes me smile, think 'Yes!' and then feel sad all at the same time...
Rating: 
Summary: Thanks for loaning me this one, Noah!
Review: I like the part where some of the chess pieces are plant matter that ripens and changes moving ability over the course of the game according to color change! Don't shortchange this book on the title. There are games played in the book but they are metaphors to illustrate deeper concepts. Lengthwise this is fairly short. It's no Dune or anything. The book became a compelling page-turner by about the third chapter. Banks has created a world with intelligent robots that have jealousy, ambition, and hobbies. Three or four of the main characters are little floating spherical robots and Banks really makes good use of the robot as character to extend the possibilities of the social milieu here. It's analogous to game playing: chess is to checkers as Banks' robot society is to our human society. He plays around a lot with the possibilities of robots as active, socializable entities. And the super-robots called ship-minds are both space vessels and hyper-intelligent transcendent beings floating through the plot like blue whales on earth: big, intelligent, and seemingly benign. The main star of this book (and I guess Banks' other works) is his future society called The Culture. The culture was so cool of an idea socially that it left me spoiled for lesser science fiction books. When this book got me jonesing for more science fiction I tried to follow it up with Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye. Isn't that supposed to be a classic? Well, I couldn't read it. The whole society portrayed seemed so obsolete and boring, like a Buck Rogers movie. So read Iaian Banks and get spoiled for lesser science fiction!
Rating:
Summary: A Near Perfect Book
Review: I say "near perfect" because as those who've read a lot of Ian Banks know, Banks is somewhat obsessed with cruelty and torture and this book has its fair share. At least here, however, it forms a logical and integral part of the book unlike Banks' Consider Phlebas, where it's so gratuitous and specific that it's really disturbing, and it doesn't form a huge part of the book like it does in The Wasp Factory, which I couldn't finish because of it. The above aside, the story is compelling, the writing superb, and the author's premise intelligent without being condescending or dense. Banks has created a version of Utopia, called the Culture, and thought it through quite well. Ownership and status have been eliminated, there's plenty of space, there's equality (even sentient machines share the same status as humans), people can internally create whatever drugs/state of mind they need/want and even select their gender, and people are happy and engaged. So when Jernau Gergeh, a professional game player, is recruited to play the game of Azad in the far-distant empire of Azad, he is reluctant to leave his home for the five years the game will take. But Gurgeh does leave, and Azad turns out to be a civilization much more like our own than that of the Culture. Azad is hierarchical, crowded and violent, and status is everything. One of the interesting things that Banks has done is to make us recognize ourselves in the empire of Azad, while still finding ways to make the Azadians different than the alien races one so often finds in mediocre science fiction writing. For one thing, the Azadians have three genders. Banks also focuses on the difference between the languages of the Culture and the empire, and how language may shape thought. Banks makes us understand why Gurgeh becomes attracted to the empire even with all its flaws, inequalities and cruelty, and to the game of Azad, a brilliantly created giant of a game which is central to the civilization of Azad and all its institutions, and which represents the entire philosophy of the empire. You might not think that a book about a game and game-playing would be consistently compelling, but in Bank's capable hands it is. A study of competition, cultural differences, politics and human nature, it stays captivating throughout, managing to combine a good story and excellent story telling with thought- provoking premises. This was the first book by Banks I ever read and easily my favorite still. I've read it at least half a dozen times and it holds up on every re-reading.
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