By rights, I should be a huge fan of Iain M Banks’ Culture books as everything I have read about the setting makes it sound very appealing to me. Unfortunately I read the first book of the series Consider Phlebas a few years back, found it to be a not very impressive space opera and stopped right there. Recently I came across discussion of the Culture setting again and decided to give it another shot. This is of course the second book in the series and to my surprise, I absolutely loved it. This should be the first proper book to the series and introduction to the civilization of the Culture. It’s just downright wrong for the first book to be written from the perspective of characters who are the Culture’s enemies.

In the Culture, citizens live free of want or trouble of any kind and fill their days doing whatever it is that interests them. One such citizen is Jernau Morat Gurgeh who lives on Chiark Orbital, one of vast orbital structures on which the majority of the Culture’s people live. Gurgeh’s personal obsession is in the playing of games of all types and he is reckoned to be among the best in the Culture and even writes academic papers on the subject. However over time he has grown bored due to the lack of challenge and perhaps the sense that the games ultimately have no meaning. His friends are aware of his malaise and one of them suggests asking Contact, effectively the foreign affairs section of the Culture for help. A Contact agent arrives and after swearing Gurgeh to secrecy explains that they know of the existence of a board game called Azad that is more complex and more massive than anything else known. It is played by foreign polity itself called the Azad Empire which uses it as the basis of their civilization as success at the game is used to determine political rank and ultimately even who rules the empire. At first Gurgeh is reluctant to commit himself as the empire is located in the Small Magellanic Cloud and travelling there would take at least two years. But he is manipulated by another of his friends to participate and so resigns himself to at least a five-year absence from his home.

There is quite a lot of setup before Gurgeh sets off on his inevitable journey and once he arrives the story takes on the familiar shape of what we now call a tournament arc. But that’s all good however as it gives us the chance to take a deep look at what everyday life on the inside of the Culture is like. Almost all of them spend most of their time having fun, which for many means plenty of socializing and altering their mental states from drugs synthesized from the glands built into their bodies. All of the material needs are trivially taken care of by non-sentient drones. A friend of Gurgeh is frustrated as she wants to design a new orbital plate but has to prove that her outlandish ideas work first and that is pretty much the worst worry one of them could have. Citizens do still die due to rare accidents or more likely extremely risky feats that they are not prevented from attempting, but there is no doubt whatsoever that this is as perfect an utopia as one could imagine. More details are given when Gurgeh travels to the Azad Empire and they challenge him about how the Culture handles the worst elements in a society. Even murderers are not truly punished. A drone is simply assigned to watch over the offender to prevent a reoccurrence of the heinous act.

The Azad Empire is of course a barbarian society that is explicitly meant to be the Culture’s polar opposite. An expansionistic empire that conquers every less advanced civilization it encounters, it is hierarchical, militaristic and pointlessly cruel. I think Banks overdoes it here with how cartoonishly evil he makes them as their elites admit to enjoying their entertainments more when they know that it causes pain and suffering to create. But he needs this in order to justify Contact intervening to alleviate the suffering in this society. Star Trek this is not as the Culture is not bound by the equivalent of a Prime Directive. Furthermore, the reader can see that Gurgeh is manipulated by the Minds who rules the Culture to act as their agent against the empire without his knowledge, so they are indeed crafty when needed and at least part of their seeming naivety is an affected subterfuge. Granted that this is against a potentially hostile civilization so much less advanced that the Minds fear revealing just how far ahead the Culture is would be destabilizing to them, but it does comprehensively answer the question of what the Culture would do in such a situation.

By pure coincidence, this is precisely the question that I just lamented about Greg Egan’s Glory not addressing and that is one reason why I loved this book so much. The book is sparse about the rules of the Azad game itself but barring some weirdness about how some game pieces can transform due to contact with the player holding them, it mostly seems like ordinary wargame, albeit on a vast scale and the details don’t pertain to the plot. There is also a lot of information on the technology employed by the Culture and while I know that the faster-than-light travel stuff is technobabble, it works well enough. I do like that the Culture is vast and almost incomprehensibly powerful, their effectors being able to manipulate physical materials at will from incredible distances. The Culture can accomplish almost anything so the conflict lies only in their ethical qualms over what to use it for. One oddity is that while the citizens of the Culture manipulate their own biology with almost no restrictions, they don’t seem to routinely use cybernetics even when it seems it would be very useful. From what I know of the setting from elsewhere I understand that this is addressed in other books.

As I said, the Azad Empire is so over the top evil that it’s somewhat hard to believe that a society like that could really exist. They even have what are basically television channels that show torture as entertainment! Some of the aesthetic details of their empire are amazing though including the world they use to coronate their emperor. I also dislike how the drone Flere-Imsaho that is sent to accompany Gurgeh keeps so much information back from him. It seems unnecessary for the success of the operation and compromises the ethics of the Culture to keep Gurgeh in the dark and to put pressure on him. The only reason would be to retain some dramatic tension in the story as the Culture’s victory seems preordained. Still these are pretty small problems in a very strong science-fiction book and I absolutely appreciated how much it reveals of the Culture’s perspective and way of life. I now truly regret that I didn’t try reading this series earlier so rest assured that I will be catching up as soon as possible.