The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks

Second book in the Culture series. Two things particularly interested me in this story. The first was an interesting ecosystem of one of the worlds. Jupiter has the storms that never end, the great red eye; this plant has a single band of land around the equator and there is a fire that moves around the plant on a yearly basis. I enjoyed that Banks wrote out some of the ecosystem instead of leaving all the background just in his head. The second interesting part was the plot itself. Banks told the old story of  "outsider comes in, beats everyone at some game, and wins the kingdom/empire" from the perspective of the gamer. He made the empire a horrible place, but didn't try to lecture me about it. The story was a story, with only enough didactic overtones to build a better understanding of the culture the outsider came from for the rest of the books in the series.

Pages: 416