The second of Iain M. Banks's Culture novels uses a single, impossibly complex board game to ask what a post-scarcity utopia owes to the rest of the galaxy, and what it is willing to do to it. The Culture is a vast civilization of humans and superintelligent machines, the Minds, that has abolished want, money, and most forms of coercion. Jernau Morat Gurgeh is one of its greatest game players, a brilliant but jaded man for whom nothing is really at stake. After he is drawn into a moment of cheating and blackmailed by a manipulative drone, he agrees to a mission from Special Circumstances, the Culture's shadowy interventionist arm: travel to the Empire of Azad and compete in its eponymous game. Azad is no mere pastime. The empire's entire social order, including who rules, is determined by the tournament, and its board is a mirror of its politics, wealth, and cruelty. Accompanied by a deceptively chatty drone, Gurgeh advances through the rounds, and the more he wins, the more clearly the game becomes a contest between two ways of organizing a society. His style of play, shaped by Culture values, turns out to be an argument in itself. Banks, a Scottish writer who also published literary fiction as Iain Banks, wrote space opera with real political intelligence, and this book is often recommended as the best entry point to the series. It is a thriller, a satire of hierarchy and empire, and a sly meditation on manipulation, since the question of who is really playing whom runs all the way to its final page.