> An alien species should be different. Vastly different.
That is one thing you could do with an alien species. Banks has done that elsewhere quite a bit. It could be that his imagination failed him here. Or he could have made a conscious choice, seeking a specific effect.
I think it was the latter. For me, part of the point of literature is to explore what it means to be human. One of the things that comes up over and over in Banks's work is encounters between developed and primitive cultures. He uses the contrasts to examine where we've come from, who we are, and where we might go.
Player of Games in particular to me spends a lot of time looking at the desire to win, and also the desire to play for high stakes. The Culture's post-scarcity society makes bets meaningless. How does somebody with a gambler's nature fare in that context? And how does somebody raised in that context change when they become immersed in a society built around gamesmanship and gambling? The Azadians are an exaggeration of particular aspects of humanity because he's trying to explore those aspects. If they were more alien, you would identify with them less, which I think would weaken the impact.
If you're reading Banks for things like detailed descriptions of fictional games, you should probably look elsewhere. He's definitely the kind of guy who likes building elaborate sets and then showing them to you. But they are there to support the drama that is performed in front of them.
That is one thing you could do with an alien species. Banks has done that elsewhere quite a bit. It could be that his imagination failed him here. Or he could have made a conscious choice, seeking a specific effect.
I think it was the latter. For me, part of the point of literature is to explore what it means to be human. One of the things that comes up over and over in Banks's work is encounters between developed and primitive cultures. He uses the contrasts to examine where we've come from, who we are, and where we might go.
Player of Games in particular to me spends a lot of time looking at the desire to win, and also the desire to play for high stakes. The Culture's post-scarcity society makes bets meaningless. How does somebody with a gambler's nature fare in that context? And how does somebody raised in that context change when they become immersed in a society built around gamesmanship and gambling? The Azadians are an exaggeration of particular aspects of humanity because he's trying to explore those aspects. If they were more alien, you would identify with them less, which I think would weaken the impact.
If you're reading Banks for things like detailed descriptions of fictional games, you should probably look elsewhere. He's definitely the kind of guy who likes building elaborate sets and then showing them to you. But they are there to support the drama that is performed in front of them.