Not sure, I'm not really a literary critic. I guess Banks does a good job of setting up the bad guys to be real arseholes, then knocks them down. The pacing had me reading this book in just two days, which is unusual for me.

This sprinkled with cool ideas like the giant brush fire, the whole empire being based on a game, the ship names. I also like board games which probably doesn't hurt the book.

I like most of the Culture books. My other favorite is Use of Weapons which is very different from Player of Games, much slower.