Jernau Morat Gurgeh is one of the Culture’s finest game players: brilliant, celebrated and increasingly bored inside a civilisation that has largely abolished scarcity, coercion and meaningful danger.

When he is invited to the Empire of Azad, where an impossibly complex game determines social rank and political power, play stops being recreation and becomes the organising logic of an entire society.

The second of Banks’s Culture novels is one of the cleanest entrances into the series, using the contest between Gurgeh and Azad to test the Culture’s apparent benevolence against hierarchy, cruelty and imperial ambition. Banks is interested not merely in who wins, but in what games reveal: every system hides an image of the human being it expects to produce. Sharp, funny and politically serious space opera for readers who like science fiction as both spectacle and philosophical machinery.

Orbit paperback, 1997 reprint of the 1989 edition. Moderate rubbing and edgewear; pages age-toned, binding sound.