The Squares of the City by John Brunner

INTRODUCTION

The story told by John Brunner in The Squares of the City held me spellbound from beginning to end. It had a special attraction for me because all the people in the book are chess-mad, and chess is my favorite pastime. But even the reader who knows nothing about the game will be thoroughly fascinated by this story in which the two chief political antagonists in a South American country attempt to direct the actions of their followers by using the unconscious but powerful influence of “subliminal perception,” a technique which may well threaten all our futures.

Under its baleful persuasion, members of the two hostile parties commit all sorts of crimes as they unknowingly carry out the actions suggested to them by a confidant of their leaders who is an expert in subliminal perception and who is the Director of the television network that controls The City. Only gradually does one realize that The City is a chessboard — its chief inhabitants taking actions that are the counterparts of moves in a vicious game of chess being played out by their leaders.

The author has added an ingenious twist to his story which will be particularly intriguing to chess fans. The game in which his characters move as living pieces has not been artificially designed by him to suit the progress of his plot. It had actually been played, move for move, some seventy years ago in a match for the world championship between the title holder, the American master William Steinitz, and the Russian master Mikhail Ivanovich Tchigorin.

—Edward Lasker, M.E., E.E.