Imagine someone sapped you, popped open your skull like a Pez dispenser and shoved a radio into your head which enabled someone to transmit instructions into your head with the same plausibility as your own thoughts. If that sounds familiar, you've read some of the same books I have.
So I read another book on the same theme and it was The Squares of the City. It's from 1965 and it's One of the Ten Best Science Fiction Novels of the Year. I know that because the publisher helpfully printed that on the cover. What is this book?
It's a novelization of a chess game. Specifically, this chess game. In this aspect, it's a little like The Man in the High Castle, where the narrative is shaped by an external pattern. Chess is less random than the I Ching, or so I seem to believe.
That's not a spoiler, about the chess game. I say this because
- the back cover tells you this
- the foreword tells you this
- the introduction tells you this
- the afterword tells you this
You're supposed to read this story, knowing that it is an anthropomorphic rendition of the chess game. Name characters are pieces and they move, interact, threaten and capture, according to the schedule set by the chess games.
Does it work? Yes and no. It's easy, reading the story, to forget the structure imposed upon it by the chess game. The story is reasonably interesting as a man vs. society struggle. But in the end, it felt overly constrained by that framework. Sometimes the protagonist seems struck inert and unmotivated by the dictates of the game.
Things I liked about it
- prescient awareness of the threat that subliminal messaging presents
- prescient warning that someday the government would manage populace using gimmicks dreamed up by advertisers
- Maria Posador, a strong female character
- romanticizing civil engineering
- an experimental framework which added a layer to understanding the work
- an exploration of prejudice
Things I didn't
- the presentation of the story which laid out over and over the chess game underlying
- the endgame compromise where Brunner abandons the game as played
Who might like this story
- chess fans
- fans of John Brunner, the godfather of cyberpunk
- fans of experimental fiction
