The State at Play

Anotace: This article sets out to explore the dynamics of play in three selected science-fiction novels by the contemporary Scottish author Iain M. Banks. Drawing on the typology of literary play designed by the German theoretician Wolfgang Iser, the article focuses particularly on Banks’s second novel from the Culture series, The Player of Games (1988), concentrating on the ludic dynamics that inform and form these texts in narrative, discursive and thematic terms. Highlighting the author’s complex conceptual critique of empire and civilisation and their contested relationship with the individual, the article is especially interested in uncovering the intricacies of power paradigms in the context of Banks’s bespoke, ever-ambivalent vision of a cosmic utopia and its counterparts, where the interconnectedness of being and playing is performed on key levels.