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Notes -
I was kinda put off by the villainy in Player of Games. It would be nicer if their "extreme meritocracy through McGuffin" concept have been addressed on merits, instead Banks just goes for "but akshually they are all liars and don't do what they profess at all, and instead just do evil things and hypocritically hide it". This is easy - of course people that use plausible sounding concepts to hide being bad are actually bad, especially if the author demonstrates to us that they are bad and then asks "aren't the people I just showed you being bad actually bad?!" Of course they are, you wrote them this way, what do you expect! This just feels lazy to me. I like my villains to be a bit more chewy, to require at least some work to figure out why their position - in which they see themselves as righteous - is untenable, or at least unacceptable to me. Even Ferengi have been given more fair treatment than that (remember, they reached pretty high level of developed society without any wars or atrocities like slavery. For an obvious caricature, it's pretty decent achievement).
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