The Player of Games
The second Culture novel, in which a master game-player is sent to challenge the ruling elite of a brutal empire at their own defining game.
Jernau Morat Gurgeh, one of the Culture's most accomplished game players, is bored with his life of post-scarcity ease and is drawn into playing Azad, the fantastically complex game that determines political power within the Empire of Azad. Sent by Contact/Special Circumstances under murky pretenses, Gurgeh finds himself entangled in a high-stakes contest that mirrors — and eventually threatens to overturn — the empire's entire social order.
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