Abstrakt
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.