The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks
🟊🟊🟊🟊🟊
Number two in Banks's Culture series, although this one was actually written, at least in part, before the first one (he finished and published it later though).
This one's even better than the first, holy shit. A simply stunning meditation on human motivation, gender, and identity, intercut with nuanced and biting social commentary, and embedded in a plot arc ostensibly about a peculiar game on a backward planet, but that manages to feel like a spy thriller.
Memorable settings, characters, and dialogue, with a plot that keeps kindling into an inferno, leaving a scorched residue of tastefully unanswered questions (enough to make a reader thoughtful, but not cranky).
Really a masterpiece of science fiction that can go toe to toe with anything else in the genre (or out of it, in my opinion).