Book 42: The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks — The Culture Novel Behind SpaceX’s Drone Ships and Musk’s Vision of AI (100 Great Books)

How Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels shaped the imagination behind SpaceX and a protopian AI future

The podcast below offers a useful overview of the commercial space industry and the AI revolution. The book that follows is The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks’s most accessible Culture novel, and one of the books Musk has pointed to when describing a positive future for AI.

The Player of Games

There is a quote that follows Iain M. Banks around now, more than a decade after his death. Asked at an AI summit what a good future with artificial intelligence might look like, Elon Musk said the Culture novels were the best version anyone had written, and that everything else fell some way behind. SpaceX names its drone ships after Banks’s starships. So the books have acquired a second life as a sort of founding text for a certain kind of technological optimism, and The Player of Games, the second Culture novel and the easiest to recommend to a newcomer, is usually where people are told to begin.

It earns the recommendation, though the Musk association points slightly away from the real reason. The book follows a man who is very good at games and bored by the fact, and Banks does something stranger and sharper with that premise than its reputation as comfortable utopian science fiction suggests.