SEMIOPUNK (22)

By: Joshua Glenn
June 26, 2024

An irregular, ongoing series of posts dedicated to surfacing examples (and predecessors) of the sf subgenre that HILOBROW was the first to name “semiopunk.”

THE PLAYER OF GAMES

Iain M. Banks’s Culture is a post-scarcity, galaxy-spanning, left-libertarian society composed of humanoids, and aliens, plus godlike “Minds” (artificial intelligences) who animate spaceships and off-planet habitats. The Culture derives its sense of purpose from improving the lives of those in developing societies, which is not unproblematic. This is an ambiguous utopia; in each installment, Banks explores that ambiguity.

The Player of Games (1988) is the second published installment in the series.

Two quick notes. (1) Contact is an organization that coordinates the Culture’s interactions with less-developed civilizations, while Special Circumstances is a secret service-type organization carrying out Contact’s dirty work. (2) Culture drones are sentient, though not as intelligent as Minds; however, a Special Circumstances drone is typically more intelligent (and lethal) than a non-SC drone. Some of Banks’s best characters are SC Minds and drones.

In The Player of Games we learn that boardgames (and similar contests) are considered one of humankind’s highest achievements and most worthwhile pursuits. One of the Culture’s best boardgame players is Jernau Gurgeh. Bored with his successful life, he is blackmailed by Mawhrin-Skel, a drone supposedly ejected from the Culture’s Special Circumstances due to its unstable personality, into participating in a SC special op. In the course of which he spends two years traveling to the Empire of Azad — a less-developed version of the Culture — to participate in a fabulously complex game (also called Azad) that is used to determine one’s social rank and political status. In fact, the winner of the tournament will becomes Azad’s emperor.

Having studied the Azad game en route, Gurgeh lands on the Azad Empire’s home planet of Eä; he is accompanied by the SC drone Flere-Imsaho. As he advances through the tournament, Gurgeh is matched against increasingly powerful Azad politicians… and ultimately the Emperor himself. Who will triumph?

My fellow commercial and applied semioticians may enjoy Banks’s exploration of what Gurgeh experiences as he comes to know an alien culture… perhaps all too well.

Eä’s culture is exploitative, cruel, and obsessed with sex and violence. Its citizens tend to be pasty and bloated. It is, in short, America. (As Carlo Rotella has written of The Player of Games for HILOBROW: “Gurgeh, puzzled and appalled in the way Europeans are puzzled and appalled by American culture, gains a new appreciation of what’s at stake in the Azad tournament.”) Azad is also sexist, albeit in an odd way: There are three Azadian sexes; male, female, and apex. Apex is the biologically and socially superior sex and exercises sexist discrimination against the other sexes.

As Gurgeh discovers, the game Azad embodies the incumbent preferences of this social order’s social elite, reinforcing and reiterating their pre-existing inclinations. His own tactics prove successful, he figures out, because his thought and behavior have been formed by the Culture. The Azad game, in fact, is a vehicle for transmitting the Azad Empire’s values to its population… and as he becomes more and more skilled at playing the game, he finds himself becoming more sympathetic with those values.

Which of us semios hasn’t experienced something like this — albeit on a much lesser scale? We research and analyze brand communications from the Hair Care category, we map the fault lines and think about which signs and symbols are dominant or emergent… and then we offer a POV to the client around positioning, communicating, packaging… We even use the first-person plural when talking about this stuff. If only for a few days or weeks, we become one of the shuffling figures in Baudelaire’s “Every Man His Chimera” — seeing the world through the eyes of the alien “culture” temporarily possessing us. Does our immersion in various semiospheres take a toll?

The other thing semios may enjoy about this book is the Azad game itself.

The Azad game is described in detail; however, the actual rules are never given to the reader. Which is fun. What we know is that it’s primarily tactical and played on three-dimensional boards of various shapes and sizes, though earlier rounds may be played exclusively in cards. The number of players differs from game to game and also influences the tactics, as players can choose to cooperate or compete with one another. As well as skill and tactics, random events may influence gameplay.

Semios enjoy puzzling out the “rules” of each semiosphere — which can be profitably compared to games. As we create our charts of codes, we’re almost designing a boardgame layout, and moving pieces around it. In an earlier installment in this series, I described Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game as a semiopunk novel. Is this one The Glass Bead Game… in space?

PS: A film version of this novel was planned by Pathé in the 1990s, but was abandoned. In 2015, Elon Musk named two SpaceX autonomous spaceport drone ships — Just Read the Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You — after AI ships in this book.

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SEMIOPUNK (22)

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