The Player of Games

In the Culture, a post-scarcity civilisation where nothing is needed and nothing is at stake, Gurgeh is a master of games who is bored to the point of self-sabotage. He is sent to the Empire of Azad, where an impossibly complex game determines who governs. Banks uses the contrast to interrogate his own utopia, and the novel is a good entry point to the Culture sequence: political, cruel in places, and very readable.