Freedom in Banks' Utopia

Published: 2024-08-25

Tagged: essay readings review

There came a time in my life when non-fiction replaced science fiction. Reading about macroeconomics or TCP/IP gave me the same insight high as Phillip K. Dick or William Gibson did before--except it felt more material and immediately useful.

But in that trade, something was lost.

There's a lot of whimsical sci-fi out there. It's entertaining enough to make a long train ride more brief. But then there's also stuff like what Stanisław Lem or Ursula K. Le Guin put out, stuff where science and technology act as vehicles for discussing deep human questions. You know, the kind of stuff where you get up a subtly different person than the one that sat down to read before.

Iain M. Banks' whole ten-book Culture series is just that kind of stuff. It isn't linear. Each novel can stand more or less on its own. What holds the whole thing together is the Culture itself, an AI/human civilization located in a cosmos filled with other, very different civilizations. In Banks' hands, the Culture is a tool for investigating ourselves.

Many of his fans recommend reading the series in the order of publication, but starting off with the second book, The Player of Games. I hope to show why this is a good choice.

The Shape of the Story

The story follows Gurgeh, the best human game player in the Culture. The games he plays sound rather ordinary relative to the incredible technology he is surrounded by, relying on cards, dice, boards, and pawns. They are, however, very sophisticated, requiring hours or days for a single game--even for humans that have dedicated a significant chunk of their immensely extended lifespans towards mastering them.

As one might expect, Gurgeh, lacking serious challengers, finds himself rather bored. But luckily the Culture has a special use for individuals experiencing such feelings: Contact. Contact is an organization that deals with newly encountered sentient beings, which happens surprisingly often in Banks' universe.

Let's pause for a moment and discuss an important aspect of the Culture. The Culture is a space-faring civilization made up of humans and AIs. The AIs--the Minds--are curious explorers often inhabiting the bodies of immense ships traveling at some considerable fraction of the speed of light. These ships are often home to humans, billions of them because the Minds are also benevolent. Some Minds are installed in smaller devices, drones, which are less intelligent and powerful, but still way more capable than a standard human. Culture humans themselves have been enhanced by their benevolent hosts in many ways, from enjoying a lifespan of roughly five hundred years to being able to change sexes at will or produce a host of interesting drugs inside their brains.

What makes the Culture an exciting character in itself, one worthy of ten novels, is that it is a utopia. Money and commerce are unknown--everything anyone could ever desire can be synthesized by the Minds. As a consequence, violence, theft, greed, and other human vices are all but unknown. People who do bad are told to stop. If they don't listen, they are shunned, or the AIs find some simple technical way to keep them from causing harm. Murderers, for example, are assigned a "slap drone" that follows them around and physically prevents them from doing more bad.

A story without conflict would be impossibly bland, which is why Banks has Gurgeh recruited into Contact. Contact has fairly recently encountered a new civilization, one very different from the Culture:

'These stars,' Worthil said (...) 'are under the control of what one can only describe as an empire. Now…' (...) 'It is unusual for us to discover an imperial power-system in space. As a rule, such archaic forms of authority wither long before the relevant species drags itself off the home planet, let alone cracks the lightspeed problem, which of course one has to do, to rule effectively over any worthwhile volume. (...) In the case of the conglomerate you see before you - apart from the obvious factors, such as the fact that we didn't get out there until fairly recently, and the lack of any other powerful influence in the Lesser Cloud - that special circumstance is a game.'

Now, why would a game seem special to an AI-led civilization that has spent the last 11,000 years zipping around space, meeting countless other civilizations, and whose internal Wikipedia probably has more entries on games than ours has unique entries?

First, it's complex:

'That,' Gurgeh asked, 'is a board?' He swallowed. He had never seen, never heard about, never had the least hint of a game as complicated as this one must surely be, if those were individual pieces and areas. 'One of them.'

But more importantly, it has real stakes:

'The idea, you see, is that Azad is so complex, so subtle, so flexible and so demanding that it is as precise and comprehensive a model of life as it is possible to construct. Whoever succeeds at the game succeeds in life; the same qualities are required in each to ensure dominance.'

As a consequence, anyone who wins in Azad becomes Emperor.

Another consequence is that the empire--called Azad, after the game--is completely hierarchical and everything and everyone is reduced to property. There is slavery and indentured servitude; radical economic inequality; and poverty of the kind that would be familiar to you and me today:

Gurgeh saw many cripples. They sat on street corners, selling trinkets, playing music on scratchy, squeaky instruments, or just begging. Some were blind, some had no arms, some had no legs. Gurgeh looked at the damaged people and felt dizzy; the gritty surface of the street beneath him seemed to tip and heave. For a moment it was as though the city, the planet, the whole Empire swirled around him in a frantic spinning tangle of nightmare shapes; a constellation of suffering and anguish, an infernal dance of agony and mutilation.

It becomes clear quickly that Banks set up Azad as a caricature of modern capitalist society. It's almost as if The Player of Games is an indictment of our society, like the author saying, "Look, we could be the Culture, but instead we choose to have property and profits so we instead we get to be Azad. That sucks, doesn't it?"

Utopia and Freedom

But I think Banks is only playing with his readers. Because on a deeper level, The Player of Games discusses the meaning of freedom.

The society of Azad is fundamentally controlled by violence or the threat of it. Criminals are punished with torture and debtors are forced into slavery. Because everyone fears for their position, they constantly play at small political games to ensure loyalty, where survival is simply the ability to betray and avoid betrayal.

Banks presents this state most beautifully in a scene when Gurgeh is almost assassinated by Star Marshal Yonomul. Yonomul once lost to the Emperor and was supposed to be imprisoned as punishment. However, the Emperor did not wish to lose the services of the brilliant commander so he ordered that Yonomul be encased in a semi-intelligent exoskeleton, which forces the Star Marshal to live like convict some of the time, but allows him to fulfill his military duties otherwise.

Yonomul and Gurgeh play against each other in Azad and a mutual respect grows between the two. However, an Azadian faction that strongly objects to Gurgeh's participation in their most holy game hacks into Yonomul's exoskeleton and attempts to use it to murder Gurgeh when the two are taking part in a hunt. The scheme fails in part because the Star Marshal tries to fight against the physical force being used against him, a mirror of the force being applied to all of Azadian society.

However, the farther we get into the story, the more we realize that Gurgeh is being used like a game piece. Flere-Imsaho, the small ambassador-drone that accompanies him to Azad seems at first to be there for comical relief. But over time it becomes apparent that the drone's teasing about losing the game and going home only serves to make Gurgeh more motivated to win.

Later on, when Gurgeh's resolve weakens and threatens the mission, Flere-Imsaho takes him on an undercover trip into the Azad capitol's slums. There Gurgeh witnesses what life looks like for the empire's poor: people dying of hunger; a man beaten to death for entertainment; and finally a freak show composed of mentally unstable patients sold into slavery. All of that fills Gurgeh with a cold rage which propels him into the game's finals.

After surviving the game, Gurgeh realizes he has been used. He asks Flere-Imsaho outright if his whole life was scripted for this mission, but the drone replies in the negative, instead implying it was just a wise bet on the part of the Culture's Minds:

'Everything worked out a little more dramatically than we'd expected, I must admit, but it looks like all the analyses of your abilities and Nicosar's [the Azadian Emperor] weaknesses were just about right. My respect for those great Minds which use the likes of you and me like game-pieces increases all the time. Those are very smart machines.'

But can we trust this answer?

At the very end, it is revealed that Flere-Imsaho was the same drone that "recruited" Gurgeh into the mission. I put double quotes there because the drone was operating under a different identity, that of Mawhrin-Skel, complete with wearing a different machine body, and, what's more important, used some cunning tricks to persuade Gurgeh to cheat in a game, then used a recording of that event to blackmail Gurgeh into accepting the mission.

The Culture's AIs are as gods to ordinary humans. They're older, live longer, can think faster, they never forget, and have instant access to all the knowledge accumulated over millennia. Given such a cosmic disparity in power, I can't see that it would be difficult for them to steer mere humans into doing what they wanted them to do. I wouldn't put it out of their reach to have orchestrated decades of Gurgeh's life to make him into the potent weapon that he is.

But why not simply force Gurgeh into service? Or even approach the Azad Empire guns blazing and pound them into submission?

The second question is actually answered in the book: it would not work because:

(...) we'd have to become an occupying force to control them, and that would mean a huge drain on our resources as well as morale; in the end such an adventure would almost certainly be seen as a mistake, no matter the popular enthusiasm for it at the time. The people of the empire would lose by uniting against us instead of the corrupt regime which controls them, so putting the clock back a century or two, and the Culture would lose by emulating those we despise; invaders, occupiers, hegemonists.'

The first question, though, is implied throughout the book: it boils down to elegant game play. It would be bad form to abuse or destroy one's game pieces. The soft touch required for the feat of manipulation depicted in the book would require significant planning and taking chances, but would be the most elegant way to achieve the Culture's ends--legally, Gurgeh was acting under his own volition, and Azad would disintegrate after being beaten in its own game with minimal fighting.

Sun Tzu wrote that, "The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting," and the Culture very much follows that precept.

Unfortunately, this reading cast a rather dark shadow on the Culture humans. There is nothing they can do that would mean anything in the grand scheme of the events happening around them. They have no skin in the game, something that Gurgeh notes at the very beginning of the book:

'Maybe I'm just disillusioned with games,' Gurgeh said, turning a carved game-piece over in his hands. 'I used to think that context didn't matter; a good game was a good game and there was a purity about manipulating rules that translated perfectly from society to society… but now I wonder. Take this; Deploy.' He nodded at the board in front of him. 'This is foreign. Some backwater planet discovered just a few decades ago. They play this there and they bet on it; they make it important. But what do we have to bet with? What would be the point of my wagering Ikroh [Gurgeh's home], say?'

In the end, I think Gurgeh comes to realize how similar his existence is to that of a resident of Azad. Though it may seem like paradise—with its freedom from want, disease, and violence—his freedom to act is just as restricted as that of an Azadian.