Book Excerpt for the Day

    Damage was just a fancy card game; partly skill, partly luck and partly bluff.  What made it interesting was not just the high sums involved, or even the fact that whenever a player lost a life he lost a Life – a living, breathing human being – but the use of complicated consciousness-altering two-way electronic fields around the game table. 

    With the cards in his or her hand, a player could alter the emotions of another player, or sometimes of several others.  Fear, hate, despair, hope, love, camaraderie, doubt, elation, paranoia; virtually every emotional state the human brain was capable of experiencing could be beamed at another player or used for oneself.  From far enough away, or in a field shield close in, the game could look like a pastime for the deranged or the simple-minded.

    (from Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks)

  8½*/10.  The complete review is here.

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