From The Player of Games to the Game of Life

I just finished Iain Banks’ Player of Games and wondered if it was influenced by Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science — with “simple rules” leading to emergent complexity. But Player of Games (1988) pre-dates Wolfram by 14 years!

P.S. The book is also the source of SpaceX’s autonomous drone ship names: Of Course, I Still Love You and Just Read the Instructions, the names of General Contact Unit ships in the Culture. It was my son’s top pick of the Culture series. I also liked Surface Detail, the inspiration for Neuralink.