Fans of Iain Banks, please explain – a.k.a. "player of games" book review
Having finished it, it fells really… hollow? There is no plot. I think the one page summary on wikipedia gives a very thorough summary of the entire plot, and i can summarize it further. Please take this in humor;
Some “special” (aka successful) guy is “volunteered” off to an unknown world to participate in some tournament for some reason. What? Where? Why? Who cares.
On the way, he trains. By virtue of being smart and special and with assistance from sophisticated AI he quickly learns as he goes and outplays the entire empire, despite, being told “schemes against him”. What schemes? What challenges does he overcome? What’s special about his strategy? Who cares.
Wait! It turns out this is whole thing is an elaborate duel for the fate of both civilizations! Drama! Well guess what, the emperor would rather swallow a poison pill than surrender in defeat, and tries to “cheat”. Who could have guessed?
But don’t worry a bit, deus machine is here to save the day, our protagonist, whom we still know literally nothing about by this end of the book, and tell us this rather shallow story.
The only thing that kinda sorta makes sense to tie this into, very slightly more than a template that no one has bothered to even fill in, is to surmise that the whole point of this book was to deliver the punchline that this player got played for the purposes of the amusement of our storyteller, to enable it to bestow this very engineered story to us.
I got burned so bad, it ruined (together with the movie) enders game forever for me, which i enjoyed in my childhood, due to similarities in the plot and how it is displayed in the movie.
So, this author has a following. I must be missing something. All the nuance and inside references and inside jokes. Or whatever. What is it that i'm missing? Please motivate me to read another one of his books.