Literature and chess – A Brief History
Around 1400, Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) wrote The Canterbury Tales, a collection of over 20 stories written in Middle English. In “The Franklin’s Tale,” Chaucer wrote, “Her friends saw that it was no alleviation, but grief for her, to roam by the sea, and planned to disport themselves somewhere else. They led her by rivers and springs and eke in other delectable places; they danced and they played at tables [backgammon] and chess.”
In 1531, Thomas Elyot (1490-1546) wrote The Book of the Governor, also called The Boke Named the Gouernour. It was a treatise on how to train
statesmen. It states that chess is to be
commended to sharpen a player’s intellectual faculties.
In 1610-1611, William
Shakespeare (1564-1616) wrote a play called The
Tempest. It may be the last play
that Shakespeare wrote. In Act 5, Scene
1, Prospero gathers everyone around and dramatically draws back a curtain to
reveal his daughter, Miranda, and Prince Ferdinand playing chess in the final
scene. Miranda accuses Ferdinand of
cheating, but he says that he wouldn’t cheat her for the whole world.
Around 1620,
Thomas Middleton (1580-1627) wrote a play called Women Beware Women. It was
first published din 1657. Chess is used
as a metaphor in Act II, scene ii this play.
In 1624, Thomas
Middleton wrote a play called A Game at
Chess. Chess was used to represent
the intrigue of the Anglo-Spanish conflict.
This comic satirical play was first stage in August 1624 by the King’s
Men at the Globe Theatre. It was notable
for its political content. It was an
allegory of the conflict between Great Britain (the White pieces) and Spain
(the Black pieces). The play was stopped
after 9 performances after becoming the greatest box-hit of early modern
London. Middleton and the actors were
arrested, reprimanded, and fined.
Middleton never wrote another play after that. The crime was that it was illegal to portray
any modern Christian king on the stage.
In 1836, Edgar
Allen Poe (1809-1849) wrote an essay called “Maelzel’s
Chess Player.” It was originally
published in he April 1836
issue of the Southern Literary Magazine. He was trying to expose a fraudulent
automaton chess player called The Turk.
Although it is the most famous essay on the Turk, many of Poe’s
hypotheses were incorrect. Poe did not
suggest a human was operating the machine, but that a mind was.
In
1841, Edgar Allen Poe wrote the short story, “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue.” It was first published in
Graham’s Magazine in 1841. It is
considered the first detective story, making Poe the only American to ever
invent a form of literature. Chess is
mentioned several times in the story.
Poe writes: “A chess-player, for example, does the
one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of
chess,
in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now
writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by
observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert
that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more
usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the
elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and
bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is
mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here
called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is
committed, resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only
manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights
are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative
rather than the more acute player who conquers.”
In 1848, Anne
Bronte (1820-1849) wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
It was her second and final novel.
She wrote it under the pen name Acton Bell. Walter Hargrave and
Helen Huntingdon play chess. Helen has
no real interest in playing chess against Hargrave,
but he persists by making her seem petty if she refuses. One of the quotes in the book is, “But
chess-players are so unsociable. They
are no company for any but themselves.” Hargrave says to Helen, “You are a good player, --but I am
better. …in the end, I shall certainly
win.”
In
1866, George Eliot (1819-1880), then pen name of Mary Ann Evans, wrote a social
novel called Felix Holt, the Radical. She wrote: “Fancy what a game at chess would
be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and
cunning: if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a
little uncertain about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a
new square by the sly; if your bishop, in disgust at your castling, could
wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because
they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get
checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deductive reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns.
You would be especially likely to be beat, if you depended arrogantly on your
mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with
contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is
easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other
fellow-men for his instruments. He thinks himself sagacious, perhaps, because
he trusts no bond except that of self-interest: but the only self-interest he
can safely rely on is what seems to be such to the mind he would use or govern.
Can he ever be sure of knowing this?”
Charles Dodgson
(1832-1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, wrote Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice
Found There in 1871 with a many chess references. Alice observes that the chess pieces on the
other side of the mirror have come to life, though they remain small enough for
her to pick up. She meets the Red Queen who tells Alice that the entire
countryside is laid out in squares, like a gigantic chessboard. The queen offers to make Alice a queen if she
can move all the way to the 8th rank. Most of the main characters in the story are
represented by chess pieces, with Alice starting out as a pawn. The novel was a sequel to Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland, written in 1865.
In 1872, Thomas
Hardy (1840-1928) wrote A Pair of Blue
Eyes, which was serialized, then made into a novel in 1873. It was his first novel to bear his name on
publication. The book describes the love
triangle of Miss Elfride Swancourt,
who plays chess, and her two suitors, Stephen Smith (who is just learning
chess) and Henry Knight (who also plays chess and beats her).
In 1885, British
explorer and Arabist Richard Francis Burton
(1821-1890) translated into English The Book of the
Thousand Nights and a Night, subtitled A Plain and Literal Translation of the
Arabian Nights Entertainsments, better known as
the “Arabian Nights.” Chess is frequently mentioned in the Arabian
Nights. In The Second Qalandar’s Tale, the price transformed into a monkey makes
his partners suspect his human nature by his proficiency in playing chess. In the Tale of the King, Umar
ibn al-Nu’man has to play
chess as part of the test to which Abriza subjects
him. The love story of Masrur and Zayn al-Mawasif begins with a series of chess games. In the story of Tawaddud,
the heroine beats the most proficient chess player of Baghdad. The story of Al-Ma’mun
and Zubayda holds a game of chess for the procreation
of the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun. The book is a collection of Middle Eastern
and South Asian stories and fold tales compiled in
Arabic from the8th through the 13th centuries.
In 1886, Paul Celiere wrote The Startling Exploits of Dr. J. B. Quies. It was
translated into English in 1997. Doctor Quies is a great lover of the game of chess who competed
with the best players in Europe. One
humorous line was, “The world might fall into ruins around the Café de la Refeance, where the chess-players congregate, and not one
of them would seem to be aware of the occurance.
In 1893, Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?) wrote a short story called Moxon’s Master. It
was first published in his 1893 short story collection Can Such Things Be? (and reprinted in
1909). It appeared in the San Francisco
Examiner newspaper on April 16, 1899. It
is one of the first descriptions of a robot in English literature. The story describes a chess-playing automaton
or robot that murders its creator, Mr. Moxon. The unnamed narrator converses with Moxon at his house, who is playing chess with his
robot. The narrator leaves, but later
returns to the house and finds that Moxon wins the
chess game with a checkmate and the automaton strangles him in an apparent fit
of rage.
In 1897, Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916),
the Nobel Prize winner in Literature in 1905, wrote the historical novel The Knights of the Cross or The Teutonic Knights. The book was first serialized by the magazine
Tygodnik Illustrowany, then printed in book form in 1900. It was the first book to be printed in Poland
at the end of World War II in 1945. The
knights play chess.
Leonid Andreyev (1871-1919) was a Russian playwright, novelist and
short-story writer. In 1908, he wrote a
novel called The Seven Who Were Hanged,
depicting the fates of seven people who received death sentences. One of the characters was a chess player who
started playing chess on the first day of his imprisonment and continued it
uninterruptedly. Even the sentence
condemning him to death by hanging did not remove a single figure from his
imaginary chessboard.
Lord Dunsany
(1878-1957) wrote ‘The Three Sailors’
Gambit,’ which was published in The
Smart Set in 1916 and The Last Book
of Wonder (Boston, 1916). It is
about three sailors who enter a tavern with a chess set and they complain that
they could find no one who knew how to play chess. They finally meet an opponent who agrees to
play chess for a pound, but it must be a consolation game on the part of the
sailors, as they all three must play.
They never lost a game. The short
story was later published in CHESS, March 1942.
In 1922, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) wrote a science fantasy
novel called The Chessmen of Mars. The first sentence is about chess (“Shea had
just beaten me at chess”). A game on
Mars is similar to chess called jetan. The board is 10x10 (black and orange) and has
20 pieces (black and orange) on each side.
Burroughs began writing it in January, 1921. Captives are forced to fight to the death in
an arena on a board game resembling chess; the living version uses people as
the game pieces on a life-sized board, with each taking of a piece being a duel
to the death. It was first published in
Argosy All-Story Weekly as a 6-part serial from February 18 to Match 25,
1922. It was later published as a complete
novel in November 1922.
T.S. Eliot
(1888-1965), the 1948 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, wrote the Waste Land in 1922. One of the chapters (chapter 2) is called “A
Game of Chess.” The title comes from the
plays of the early 17th-century playwright Thomas Middleton, in
which the moves in a game of chess denote stages in seduction. Eliot portrays a wealthy, high-class woman
planning for an excursion and a game of chess.
Hermann Hesse (1877-1972), the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature
winner, wrote Steppenwolf in 1926 and
had it published in 1927. One of the
chapters is called “The Chess Player.”
The novel mentions a gifted chess player who offers to show Harry Haller
how to assemble his life. The novel was
translated into English in 1929.
In 1927, Agatha
Christie (1890-1976) wrote a detective fiction novel The Big Four which included a chess problem and mentions Lasker, Capablanca, and
Rubinstein. Inspector Japp informs detective Hercule Poirot of a mysterious death – the chess grandmasters
Gilmour Wilson and Doctor Savaronoff were playing
chess when Gilmour Wilson collapsed and died from heart failure. Japp suspects he was poisoned. The story has been anthologized in Chess in Literature by Marcelo Trutti in 1974 and Sinister
Gambits by Richard Peyton in 1991.
Ilya Ilf (1897-1937) and
Evgeny Petrov (1903-1942)
wrote The Twelve Chairs in 1928. The story partially takes place in a chess
club. It mentions Capablanca. Chapter 34 it titled “The Interplanetary
Chess Tournament.” A grandmaster gives a
simultaneous chess exhibiton on 160 boards.
In 1928, S.S. Van
Dine (1888-1939), the pen name of Willard Wright, wrote the Bishop Murder Case. It was his fourth in a series of mystery
novels about fictional detective Philo Vance.
The detective solves a mystery built around a nursery rhyme. This is the first nursery-rhyme mystery
book. One of the characters is John Pardee, a mathematician and chess expert. His one passion was solving chess
problems. Emanuel Lasker,
Edward Lasker, Capablanca,
Marshall, and Tartakower are mentioned in the
story. A funny line in the story is “And
I know a couple of chess masters who need nurses to dress and feed ‘em.”
In 1928, H.
Russell Wakefield (1888-1964) wrote Professor
Pownall’s Oversight, a chess ghost story. A man who doesn’t like to lose, challenges
his old school rival to a game of chess.
Soon, the man realizes that he is going to lose to his opponent when the
game is continued the next day. To avoid
defeat, he murders his rival that night, wins the match by default, and is sent
on to an international chess competition.
Every game in the new tournament is spoiled, however, when the
ghost of his old "friend" stands behind his flesh-and-blood opponent
and guides his hand to the one perfect move.
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)
wrote The Defense (Zashchita Luzhina or The Luzhin Defense) in 1929, his third novel, but under the pen name V. Sirin. It was first
published in 1930 in the Russian émigré quarterly “Sovremennye
Zapiski.” It
was translated into English in 1964. The main
character, Aleksandr Ivanovich
Luzhin, suffers from mental problems because of his
obsession with chess. As his obsession with chess grows, he becomes
socially detached and physically unhealthy.
He later has a nervous breakdown during his world championship chess
match and committed suicide at the end of the novel by jumping out a bathroom
window. The character of Luzhin is based on Curt von Bardeleben,
a chess master Nabokov knew personally. Bardeleben committed suicide by jumping out a window. The book was also influenced by the Soviet
film “Chess Fever” made in 1925. In
2000, the book was made into a movie, starring John Turturro.
In 1935, Nobel prize winner in Literature
(1981) Elias Canetti (1905-1994) write Auto-da-Fe,
his only work of fiction. The original
title was Die Blendung, “The Blinding.” The title refers to the burning of heretics
by the Inquisition. Canetti finished the
manuscript in 1931 and had it published in his home town at that time, Vienna,
1935. It is Canetti’s first
publication. It was published in English
in 1946. The main character, Klein,
meets a humbacked dwarf called Fischerle
who fancies himself as a world chess champion.
Fischerle spends his time fantasizing about
becoming wealthy and winning the world chess championship in America, then
building himself a palace. He then
fantasizes that he will become an American citizen, drop the –le from his name,
and become Fischer. How ironic that
Canetti predicted the first official American world chess champion would be
named Fischer before Fischer was born in 1943.
In 1935, Dorthy L. Sayers (1893-1957)
wrote the mystery novel Gaudy Night. It is a classic British murder mystery with
amateur detectives Harriet Vane and Lord Peter Wimsey. A chess board plays a significant part in the
book. A ghost invades Harriet’s room and
crushes the ivory chess set, a beautiful collector’s set and recent gift from
Peter. In the novel, Sayers writes that
chess was the world’s most wearisome amusement.
In 1938, Nobel prize winner in literature
(1969) Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) wrote Murphy, his first published novel. In the novel, the protagonist Murphy takes a
job as a male nurse in a mental hospital (the Magdalen
Mental Mercyseat) where he plays chess with Mr Endon, a schizophrenic patient
there. All the moves are in the novel,
which lasts 43 moves. Murphy was written
at a time when Beckett was undergoing psychoanalysis in London and playing a
lot of chess.
In 1939, Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) wrote a crime novel, The Big Sleep. It is the first novel to feature detective
Philip Marlowe. The entire novel
represents a game of chess. Each
character is a piece, and the name of the game is survival. Chandler wrote, ““I looked down at the
chessboard. The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved
it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn't a game for knights.”
In 1941, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) published Nightfall. The story includes
a piece about a chess game played on a multi-chess board with six
players. In 1968, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted Nightfall
as the best science fiction short story ever written. When the short
story was expanded into a novel, multi-chess had been changed to stochastic
chess.
In 1941, Robert Heinlein wrote Methuselah’s
Children, which was serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in the
July, August, and September 1941 issues. Andrew Jackson Libby and Captain
Rufus King play a game of chess, which starts out 1.e4 Nf6 (the novel uses
descriptive notation).
Stefan Zweig (1881-1942)
wrote The Royal Game (or Chess Story; Schachnovelle
in the original German) in 1941. One of
the passengers on a ship traveling from New York to Buenos Aires is the world
chess champion Mirko Czentovic,
who had just finished a coast-to-coast exhibition in the USA and was now going
to Argentina for an exhibition. The other
chess player is Dr. B. Earlier, Dr. B
stole a chess book of past masters’ chess games while in prison and put in
isolation. He plays over all the games
constantly, learning each one until they overwhelm his imagination to such an
extent that he becomes consumed by chess.
While in the cruise, Dr. B. challenges the world champion in an off-hand
game and beats him. The world champion
immediately demands a return game to restore his honor. In the return match, the world champion plays
as slowly as possible to irritate his opponent, driving Dr. B. mad as he gets
more and more impatient. This culminates
in an incorrect move and Dr. B quits the game and walks away, saying “…it is
the last time that I yield to the temptation of chess.” Czentovic then
says, “Too bad. The attack wasn’t at all
badly conceived. The man certainly has
lots of talent for an amateur.” The
novella was published in 1942, after the author’s death by suicide. After Zweig edited the final draft in Brazil,
his wife typed up the manuscript and sent it to New York with a letter to his
publisher. Shortly afterwards, they were
found dead, a double suicide. In 1960,
the novella was made into a movie called Brainwashed.
In 1945, Julien Gracq (1910-2007) wrote Un
Beau Tenebreux (A Beautiful Dark). Chess is a major theme in the novel. Alekhine, Botvinnik, Morphy, Rubinstein,
and Breyer are all mentioned.
In 1946, Henry Kuttner (1915-1958), whose pen name was Lewis Padgett
(along with his wife, C.L. Moore), wrote the novella The Fairy Chessmen, which was published in the January and February
issues of “Astounding Science Fiction.”
It was later published as Chessboard
Planet and The Far Reality. In 1951, a collection of two of his science
fiction novels was published, called Tomorrow
and Tomorrow & The Fairy Chessmen. A mathematician, Eli Wood, whose research
involves a type of chess played with variable rules (fairy chess)
is the only one able to solve an equation from the future, based on fairy
chess.
George Orwell (1903-1950),
whose real name was Eric Blair, has several references of chess, chess
problems, and a Chess Committee in his novel
1984, written in 1948 and published in 1949. The chess pieces symbolize the players in the
great political game. Chess is used to
sum up and illuminate many of the themes of the book. While regarding a position on a
chessboard, the main character, Winston Smith, reflects on the powerlessness of
the individual within a totalitarian regime.
Orwell wrote, “He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It
was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. ‘White to play and mate in two moves.’ Winston looked up at
the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of
cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess
problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not
symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed
back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.”
In 1949, Lord Dunsany wrote “Jorkens’s
Problem,” which was first published in CHESS
magazine in January 1949. It was later
published in The Ghosts of the Heaviside Layer, and Other Fantasms, a
collection of stories by Lord Dunsany published in 1980.
In 1949, Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) published Hide and Seek. A man on Phobos
was being sought for by guided missiles and the TV screen was compared to a
chessboard, more men were on the chessboar now, and
the game was a little deadlier.
In 1950, The Sack
was published by William Morrison. The Sack was a creature that could
answer any questions. The Sack found itself giving advice to bitter
rivals, so that it seemed to be playing a game of Interplanetary Chess.
In 1950, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) wrote a science fiction novel
called Pebble in the Sky. It was his first novel. He included a chess game based on a game by
Boris Verlinsky and Grigory
Levenfish, played in the 1924 USSR championship. In the novel, the protagonist Joseph Schwartz,
who is hurled into the future from 1947 to 8,000 years later, plays a chess
game with an elderly man named Grew.
Asimov originally wrote the story in 1947 under the title “Grow Old With Me” for the magazine Startling Stories, but it was rejected. In Chapter 11, Asimov wrote: “Chess,
somehow, hadn't changed, except for the names of the pieces. It was as he
remembered it, and therefore it was always a comfort to him. At least, in this
one respect, his poor memory did not play him false. Grew told him of variations
of chess. There was four-handed chess, in which each player had a board,
touching each other at the corners, with a fifth board filling the hollow in
the center as a common No Man's Land. There were three- dimensional chess games
in which eight transparent boards were placed one over the other and in which
each piece moved in three dimensions as they formerly moved in two, and in
which the number of pieces and pawns were doubled, the win coming only when
simultaneous check of both enemy kings occurred. There were even the popular
varieties, in which the original position of the chessmen were decided by
throws of the dice, or where certain squares conferred advantages or
disadvantages to the pieces upon them, or where new pieces with strange
properties were introduced.”
In 1951, Kurt
Vonnegut (1922-2007) wrote the short story, All
the King’s Horses. A prisoner,
Colonel Bryan Kelly, is forced to play his Chinese captor a game of chess after
his plane crashes in China. The
prisoner’s family and companions (16 prisoners all together) are the actual
pieces. Every piece that is captured
will be immediately executed. If Kelly
wins, he and his surviving pieces will be freed. The title comes from a line in the Humpty
Dumpty nursery rhyme. The story can also
be found in his collection of short stories, Welcome to the Monkey House, first published in 1968.
Robert Heinlein
(1907-1988) wrote a science fiction novel called The Rolling Stones in 1952. It
was also published under the name Space Family Stone in England. A condensed version of the novel was
published in Boys’ Life in 1952 under the title “Tramp Space Ship.” One of the characters, Lowell Stone (Buster),
is only 4 years old but beats his grandmother at chess. He is also telepathic, which may explain his
chess victories. He mentions that it is
no fun playing chess by telephone since he can’t tell what the opponent is
thinking. In the novel, there was an
announcement of the Mars chess championship.
In 1953, Charles
Harness (1915-2005) wrote The Chessplayers, which was published in Fantasy &
Science Fiction in the October 1953 issue.
It is a short story of a chess club (the K Street Chess Club) that runs
across a professor, Dr. Schmidt, who claims he has a chess-playing rat named
Zeno. Schmidt wants to have his pet rat
play the whole chess club in a simultaneous exhibition. At the end of the story, the immigration
officer who has to take away the professor says to the Club Treasurer, “There
wasn’t really a rat playing chess in there [the chess club], was there?” The club treasurer responded, “No. There wasn’t any rat in there. And no human beings, either. Just chessplayers.”
In 1953, Jonathan Burke (John Frederick Burke) (1922- ) published Chessboard, which was his first
science fiction story, published in New
Worlds magazine.
In 1954, Poul Anderson (1926-2001) wrote
a short story called The Immortal Game, published in the February 1954 issue of
Fantasy & Science Fiction. The
computerized chess pieces don’t know they are merely acting out old moves and
they later develop delusions of free will, loyalty, melodrama, and prose. The basis of this short story is based on the
real immortal game between Adolf Anderssen and Lionel
Kieseritsky in 1851.
It was later included in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Fourth
Series, published in 1955 and Pawn to Infinity by Fred Saberhagen.
In 1954, Arthur C. Clarke published Armanents Race. The communist in the
story peaceably studies a chess-board in the corner of a room.
William Golding
(1911-1993), the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, wrote Lord of the Flies in 1954. One of the quotes from the novel is “The only
trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player.”
In 1955, Roger
Lee Vernon (1924-1980) wrote the short story “The Chess Civilization,”
published in The Space Frontiers.
In 1955, Vladimir
Nabokov wrote the novel Lolita where
the main character Humbert Humbert
plays three games of chess. In the
novel, Humbert and Gaston play chess “two or three
times weekly” and he links Lolita with the Queen in their game. The novel
was made into a film in 1962, directed by Stanley Kubrick (a chess player) and
starring James Mason, Shelley Winters, Peter Sellers, and Sue Lyon.
In 1956, Asimov published The Dead
Past, first published in the April 1956 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.
Scientists were not expected to write or be grand masters of chess.
That’s what specialists were for. Scholars were forbidden from working
outside their narrow field of specialization.
In
1956, Ian Fleming (1908-1964) wrote From
Russia, With Love, which was published in 1957. One of the villains, Tov
Kronsteen, is a chess grandmaster. In the
novel, Fleming wrote,
"What did these people amount to? Bond remembered cold, dedicated,
chess-playing Russians; brilliant, neurotic Germans; silent, deadly, anonymous
men from Central Europe." In
another chapter, he wrote, "These Russians are great chess players.
When they wish to execute a plot, they execute it brilliantly. The game
is planned minutely, the gambits of the enemy are provided for. They are
foreseen and countered...I have a feeling that you and I and this girl are
pawns on a very big board - that we are being allowed our moves because they do
not interfere with the Russian game."
In the novel, Ian Fleming opens chapter 7 by writing, "The two
faces of the double clock in the shiny, domed case looked out across the
chess-board like the eyes of some huge sea monster that had peered over the
edge of the table to watch the game. The two faces of the chess clock
showed different times." In the novel,
Colonel Tov Kronsteen, a
chess grandmaster, is the Head of the Planning Department of SMERSH, the Soviet
counterintelligence agency, as head of the
planning department. He helps devise a plan to trap James Bond by
providing a SMERSH encryption machine, then killing him. In the novel, Kronsteen is champion of Moscow for two years in a row and
is playing in the championship tournament for his third year. His opponent is Tov Makharov, chess champion of
Soviet Georgia. In the novel, the chess
game was described as a Queen's Gambit Declined, Meran
Variation. The novel says that Kronsteen waited
for three minutes before accepting his opponent's resignation. He later
had to explain to his superior why he did not obey his order of returning to
SMERSH at once and waited 3 minutes before accepting his opponent's
resignation. Kronsteen explained, "To the
public, Comrade General, I am a professional chess player. If, with only
three minutes to go, I had received a message that my wife was being murdered
outside the door of the tournament hall, I would have not raised a finger to
save her. My public knows that. They are dedicated to the game as myself. Tonight, if I had resigned the game and had
come immediately upon receipt of that message (YOU ARE REQUIRED THIS INSTANT),
5,000 people would have known that it could only be on the orders of such a
department as this. There would have been a storm of gossip. My
future comings and goings would have been watched for clues. It would
have been the end of my cover. In the interests of State Security, I
waited three minutes before obeying the order. Even so, my hurried departure
will be the subject of much comment."
In the novel, Kronsteen does not die as in the
movie, and never encounters James Bond.
In 1957, Arthur C. Clarke published The
Other Side of the Sky. On a space ship there was
a microfilm library, a magnetic billiard table, lightweight chess sets, and
other novelties for bored spacemen.
In
1957, Max Frisch (1911-1991) wrote a novel called Homo faber. Ein Bericht. The
first English edition appeared in 1959.
Walter Faber always has a pocket chess set and plays chess when he can. The novel was made into a 1991 film called
Voyager, starring Sam Shepard and Julie Delpy.
In
1957, Gerald Vance wrote the short story Equation
of Doom, published in Amazing Stories in February 1957. Margot
Dennison had to play chess with proto-man.
In 1958, Charles De Vet (1911-1997) wrote the novelette Second
Game, published in Astounding in March
1958. The novel was reissued in 1962 with Katherine Maclean as Cosmic
Checkmate, and reissued again in 1981 as Second
Game. An Earthman is sent to investigate a hostile planet (Velda) whose inhabitants
all play a chess-like game, played on a 13x13 chessboard. Their social
advancement depends on their proficiency in the game. The earthling
narrator, a chess champion, is equipped with an “annotator” which is an
artificial intelligence addition to his brain. He comes to Velda and challenges all comers saying that he can beat
anyone in the second game. He probe’s the weakness of his opponents in
the first game, then is able to always win the second
game.
In
1959, Brian Aldiss (1925- ) wrote The Canopy of Time, previously known as Galaxies Like
Grains of Sand. War was fought between planets as stylized as
chess. War was being waged that was very complicated, like 3-D chess with
obscure motivations and strict rules of chivalry.
In 1960, Peter Beagle (1939- ) wrote A Fine and Private
Place. It has dozens of chess references. When Michael,
a dead person (poisoned by his wife), wants to play a game of chess with
Jonathan Rebeck in a mausoleum, Rebeck
was surprised and thought Michael did not like to play chess. Michael
responded sarcastically, “I like chess. I am very fond of chess.
I’m crazy about chess. Let’s play chess.” A talking raven had
stolen some of the chess pieces from department stores to make up the chess
set.
Frances Parkinson
Keyes (1885-1970) wrote The Chess Players
– A Novel of New Orleans and Paris in 1960,
centered around the life of Paul Morphy. In the 1950s, she purchased the historic
Beauregard House in the New Orleans French Quarter. The house was the childhood home of Paul Morphy. The original
manuscript was in 13 notebooks. The
bibliography for the novel lists 78 sources.
The novel is regarded as one of the most exhaustively researched books
ever written about a chess player.
In 1961, Frederic Brown (1906-1972) published Recessional, where the protagonists
are chessmen. The story portrays a battle that turns out to be a chess
game.
In 1961, Cordwainer Smith published Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons, which
appeared in Galaxy Magazine. The Elders of the Guild of Thieves welcomed Benjacomin Bozart back to his
planet comparing his work like the opening move in a brand new game of chess
and that there had been a gambit like this before.
In 1962, Fritz Leiber (1910-1992) wrote The 64-Square Madhouse. It
appeared in the May 1962 issue of If magazine.
It is about a chess-playing computer that wins the World Chess Championship.
In 1963, Roger Zelazny (1937-1995) published
A Rose for Eccleslasteswhich appeared in the November
1963 issue of The Magazine
of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was nominated for the 1964
Hugo Award for Short Fiction. The protagonist, a poet named Gallinger, settled in
Greenwich Village and learned to play chess before becoming the first human to
learn the language of Martians.
In 1965, John Brunner (1934-1995) wrote a science fiction novel
called The Squares of the City. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best
Novel in 1966. It is a story of urban
class warfare taking place in the fictional South American capital city of Vados. The people
move in a structure based on a world championship chess game between William
Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin in 1892. It is a scene of a flesh and blood game of
chess where the unwitting pawns are real people. The action goes move for move with the
Steinitz-Chigorin game, every piece on the board
having a human counterpart. All the
people in the book are chess-mad. Most of the characters are
environmentally being manipulated as chess pieces. When they are
exchanged, they are killed or jailed. The Forward was written by Edward Lasker.
In 1966, Woody Allen published a humorous chess story called The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers in the January 22, 1966 issue of
New Yorker magazine. It was a short
story written as a series of letters between Gossage
and Vardebedian playing a game of correspondence
chess. After the game, they decided to
play correspondence Scrabble. In 1971,
it was published in Getting Even, his
first collection of humorous stores.
In 1966, Robert Heinlein wrote The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He
mentions the Luna City Chess Club.
In 1968, James Whitfield Ellison wrote Master Prim. The game in the
novel was based on the game between Alekhine and Sterk, Budapest 1921.
The character, Grandmaster Julian Prim, was based on Bobby Fischer. Ellison used Fischer quotes from intervies, almost without changing a word.
Anthony Glyn
(1922-1998) wrote The Dragon Variation
in 1969, which has a chess theme. A lady, Mrs. Joann Oppenheimer, the #2 ranked
U.S. ladies player, trains a boy, Jeff Falkner, to
become a chess champion after he beat a Soviet grandmaster in a simul, followed by beating the world champion the next day. Some of the action takes place at the Manhattan
Chess Club.
In 1969, Frank Herbert (1920-1986) wrote Whipping Star. Miss Abnethe,a psychotic human female with immense power and
wealth, is described as a person who castles in chess when she doesn’t have to.
In 1969, Dahlov Ipcar (1917- ) wrote a
young adult novel called The Warlock of
Night. It is based on a real chess
game between two grandmasters.
Poul Anderson’s Circus of Hells, published in 1970, mentions
chess. Dominic Flandy plays chess with a
computer. The protagonists find themselves stranded on a planet where a
bored computer has constructed machines in the shape of chess pieces, and
spends its time playing out a gigantic game of chess on the surface of the
planet.
In 1970, Asimov wrote Waterclap,
which appeard in the May 1970 issue of If
magazine. Demerest asks Bergen why he met so
few people at Ocean-Deep. Bergen replies that they are either asleep , watching films, or playing chess.
In 1972, Gene Wolfe published The
Fifth Head of Cerberus. He mentions holographic chessmen and
the movement of a lady like an onyx chessman on a polished board that reminded
the character of a Black Queen.
Alexander
Cockburn wrote Idle Passion: Chess and
the Dance of Death in 1974.
In 1974, Schwartz
Between the Galaxies was published by
Robert Silverberg. Dr. Schwartz, an anthropologist, travels to Papua in a
rocket. He compares his chosen profession as empty, foolish, and useless
as playing a game of chess.
Isaac Asimov wrote The Winnowing,
which was published in the February 1976 edition of Analog magazine. Peter Affare,
chairman of the World Food Organization, came frequently to Dr. Aaron Rodman’s
laboratories for chess. He wanted Rodman to add selective poisons to
certain food shipments to over-populated areas to control the world population,
which was suffering from acute famine.
In 1976, Patrick Alexander (1926-1997) wrote his first novel, Death of a Thin-Skinned Animal. It features a chess tournament that British
organizer Stewart Patrick had organized.
This novel won the Crime Writers’ Association “John Creasey
Memorial Award.” In 1991 it was made
into a move called Le Professionnel.
Arthur C.
Clarke (1917-2008) mentioned chess in his very short story Quarantine, first published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction
Magazine, first issue, Vol 1, No. 1, Spring 1977. Clarke
was challenged to write a story so short that it could fit on the back of a
postcard. Earth’s flaming debris still
filled half the sky when the question filtered up to Central from the Curiosity
Generator. Here it is. “Why
was it necessary? Even though they were organic, they had reached Third Order
Intelligence.” “We had no choice: 5 earlier units became hopelessly infected
when they made contact.” “Infected? How? The microseconds dragged slowly by,
while Central tracked down the few fading memories that had leaked past the
Censor Gate, when the heavily-buffered Reconnaissance Circuits had been ordered
to self-destruct. “They encountered a – problem – that could not be fully
analyzed within the lifetime of the Universe. Though it involved only 6
operators, they became totally obsessed by it.” “How is that possible?” “We do
not know: we must never know. But if those 6 operators are ever re-discovered,
all rational computing will end.” “How can they be recognized?” “That also we
do not know; only the names leaked through before the Censor Gate closed. Of
course, they mean nothing.” “Nevertheless, I must have them.” The Censor
voltage started to rise; but it did not trigger the Gate. “Here they are: King,
Queen, Bishop, Knight, Rook, Pawn.”
In 1978,
William Shepherd wrote The Chessmen, which was
published in the November 1978 issue of Omni magazine. Dosiev, Andreievich, and Stalin play chess. Playing with particular chessmen makes you
drowsy. Stalin then burns the pieces
when he feels affected as his henchmen hurry out to tell the people of the city
that Stalin won again.
In 1978,
Ellen Raskin wrote the young adult books, The Westing Game. Chess is an overlaying theme throughout the
story showing up in clues and character developments. The Judge, Theo, and Turtle play chess
against Westing.
The Judge calls herself a pawn.
Otis calls himself a king. The
Crow is called the queen.
Waldemar Lysiak wrote The
Chess Player in 1980. It is centered on
a game of chess between Napoleon Bonaparte and The Turk.
In 1981, Isaac Asimov wrote a science fiction short story called The Perfect Fit. He referred to a
3-dimensional chess game which was a game with 8 chessboards stacked upon each
other, making the playing area cubic rather than square.
In 1981, Kent Smith wrote a novel, Incident
at the Sicilian Dragon. It concerns
a mythical chess club in San Francisco called The Sicilian Dragon where a
grisly crime has been committed.
In 1982, John Caris wrote Reality
Inspector. This may be the first
computer-hacking novel. A world chess
championship match played at the Cow Palace in San Francisco is the backdrop of
this science fiction detective story.
Actual chess games are being used while the main computer of the Federal
Reserve is being hacked into. Bobby
Fischer, Anatoly Karpov, and Viktor Korchnoi are mentioned.
The challenger for the world championship match is a woman, Mary
Rainbow, playing Sam Runner.
In 1982, Daniel Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard, wrote
the short story Kokomu. It is mostly about the game of Go. It was published in Pawn to Infinity.
In 1982, Fred Saberhagen (1930-2007)
published Pawn to Infinity with Joan Saberhagen. It is
one of the greatest collection of fantasy and science
fiction stories to involve chess or a chess-like game.
Walter Tevis wrote The
Queen’s Gambit in 1983. The main
protagonist, Beth Harmon, is a chess player.
Heath Ledger was trying to get if filmed before he died.
Fernando Arrabal (1932- ) is a Spanish
playwright, screenwriter, film director, novelist, and poet. He is also a chess player and has written
about chess. In 1983, he wrote The Tower
Struck by Lightning. It is a novel that
takes place during the course of a final world championship match in Paris.
In 1983, Tom Clancy (1947-2013), who was president of his
university chess club at Loyola University, wrote his first novel, The Hunt for Red October, which was
published in 1984. The only reference to
chess was this line: “Ryan followed the two admirals out of the room. He spent two hours watching Painter move
ships around the ocean like a chess master with his pieces.”
In 1984, Warren Murphy (1933- ) and Molly Cochrane wrote the novel
Grandmaster. It is a story about a child chess prodigy who
is raised by Tibetan monks and later works for the CIA. The book was the winner of the Edgar Award. After the completion of the novel, Warren
Murphy and Molly Cochrane got married.
In 1986, Ian Watson wrote Queenmagic, Kingmagic. Two kingdoms have been locked in a war
waged according to the strict rules of chess. Two opposing pawns fall in
love and seek a way out of their world before its inevitable end.
In 1986, John Wheatcroft (1925- ) wrote a
short story called, “The Forfeit,” published in his collection Slow Exposures. Military veterans in Honolulu play chess as
they recuperate from war injuries. One
man has to use a steel claw in place of a missing hand to move the pieces.
In 1987, David Gerrold (1944- ) wrote Chess With a Dragon.
The title does not refer to an actual game. Humans have to negotiate with
an alien creature from a race called the Dragons.
Katherine Neville
(1945- ) wrote her first novel The Eight
in 1988 with a chess theme. It is about
a computer expert and accountant, Catherine Velis,
searching for the chess pieces of the Montglane
Service, a legendary chess set that belonged to Charlemagne. She is hired to recover the chess
pieces. Anyone possessing all the chess
pieces will have unlimited power. A
sequel, The Fire, appeared in 2008.
In 1988, Asimov published Man as the Ultimate Gadget. It was
later published as The
Smile of the Chipper in the anthology Gold. Chippers were people whose natural mental
abilities were augmented by computer chips. He compared chippers to chess
grandmasters. Put them in the same room and they would automatically
challenge each other.
Gabriel Garcia
Marquez (1982 Nobel Prize in Literature winner) mentions chess in several of
his works. In Love in the Time of Cholera, written in 1989, the doctor and his
friend plays chess until his friend commits suicide.
Bryce Courtenay
wrote The Power of One in 1989, with
references to chess. The doctor in the
book is a chess player.
In 1989, Brad Leithauser (1953- ) wrote
Hence, in which a chess genius named Timothy and plays against an MIT computer
(ANNDY) for the world chess championship.
In 1989, John Bellairs (1938-1991) wrote The Chessmen of Doom. Johnny
Dixon and his friends must unravel the riddle in Peregrine Childermass’s
will. It was the 7th book in
the Johnny Dixon series.
In 1990, Arturo
Perez-Reverte (1951- ) wrote the novel La Table de Flandes
(The Flanders Panel). It was translated into English in 1994. Julia, an art restorer tries to solve the
riddle of a 15th-century painting, the “Game of Chess,” showing the
Duke of Flanders and his knight playing a game of chess. She discovers a painted-over message on the
1471 painting which reads, “Who killed the knight?” Julia works with a local chess master to
uncover a mystery of a 500-year-old murder.
In 1990, Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) published A Graveyard for Lunatics. Roy
asks himself what kind of game is this and the only way to find out is by countermoving the chesspieces. He also published The Martian
Chronicles in which humans left Earth to inhabit Mars. Starlight
glitter on the spires of a little Martian town, no bigger than a game of chess,
in the blue hills.
In 1991, Fernando
Arrabel (1932- ) wrote his first novel, The Tower Struck by Lightning. Ex-Jesuit seminarian Elias Tarsis, an Andorran Spaniard, plays a world championship
match with Marc Amary, a swiss
physicist and Marxist
terrorist. The title
refers to a Tarot card depicting a column struck by lightning which denotes the
danger to the human mind struck by excessive pride.
Chess is mentioned in Griffin’s
Egg by Michael Swanwick (1950- ),
published in 1992. Gunther Weil works as a
laborer on the moon and wants to play chess. But nobody plays chess
anymore. It’s a game for computers.
In 1992, Greg Bear wrote Anvil of Stars. The Brothers or
cords, worm-like creatures, discovered chess, and it became a release for
them. They would play chess all day on a space ship without eating or
sleeping. One of the cords died while playing chess.
Paolo Maurensig (1943 - ) wrote his first novel, La variante di Luneburg (The Luneberg Variation), in 1993, which has a chess theme. A murdered man, Dieter Frisch, was obsessed
with chess.
In 1994, Salman Rushdie (1947- ) wrote “The Courter” which was published
in his collection of his short stories, East,
West. Rushdie uses the chess game in
the story as a metaphor to depict the constant battle of balance that a
character of two sides, or two cultures, must maintain. The narrator, the courter, Dodo, and Mary all
play chess.
Isaac Singer
(1978 Nobel Prize in Literature) had a chess prodigy character in his book Shadows of the Hudson, written in
1997.
Chess is mentioned in The
Fleet of Stars, written by Poul Anderson
in 1997. Kinna Ronay
beat he father in two games out of three while on
Mars.
In 1997, J.K.
Rowling (1965- ) wrote Harry Potter and
the Sorcerer’s Stone. Ron teaches
Harry wizard chess. Harry and Ron engage
in a game of Wizard’s Chess. The wizards
are later involved in a living chess match.
Kurt Vonnegut has
a short story with a chess theme in the short story “All the
King’s Horses,” from Welcome to the
Monkey House, written in 1998.
Charles Yaffe wrote Alekhine’s Anguish: A Novel of the Chess World in 1999.
Poul Anderson’s Operation Luna, published in 1999, mentions chess a few
times. Balawahdiwa watches animated chess
pieces fighting the game out on a chessboard. One of the characters had a
couple of bone chessmen from the middle ages.
In 2002, Tom Clancy wrote Red
Rabbit. It has several references to
chess. Zaitsev, the KGB man played and
lost to Boris Spassky. Oleg plays chess. Ryan says he as an ex-marine, not a chess
master.
In 2003, Stephen Baxter (1957- ) wrote Coalescent. In old Britain, the children of
Regina played a fast-moving game like chess played only with rooks that were
made of colored glass counters.
In 2003, Walter Tevis (1928-1984) wrote The Queen’s Gambit: A Novel. An 8-year-old orphan girl, Beth Harmon, turns
out to be a chess genius. By the age of
16, she is competing for the U.S. Open championship.
Arturo Perez-Reverte wrote The
Flanders Panel, written in 2004, with a chess theme.
In 2005, Darren
Shan (1972- ) wrote Lord Loss, the
first novel in the Demonata series. The novel is set in Ireland and is told in
present tense first person through Grubbs Grady, a child whose family are all
chess players.
In 2005, Jack McDevitt wrote Seeker. At the Museum of
Alien Life there is a Hall of Humans. One of the displays was a chess
game in progress.
In 2005, Paolo Bacigalupi published The Calorie Man in the October 2005
issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
Lalji of India plays chess in New Orleans.
Ronan Bennett (1956- ) is an Irish novelist and screenwriter. In 2006, he wrote a novel called Zugzwang. It takes
place in St. Petersburg in 1914 during an international chess tournament. It was published week-by-week in the British
Sunday newspaper The Observer. The book
opens with the murder of a newspaper editor names Gulko.
In 2006, Catherine Asaro wrote Alpha. Alpha was a gorgeous, superintelligent android. The novel mentions modern
forms of the Turing test and references the Gary Kasparov vs. Deep Blue
computer match that had occurred decades ago.
In 2007, Michael Chabon (1963- ) wrote The
Yiddish Poliecemen’s Union, which features a plot
settled around chess, murder of a chess prodigy named Emanuel Lasker, and the position on the chess board at the murder
scene. The novel won a number of science fiction awards: the Nebula Award
for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, the Hugo Award
for Best Novel, and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History for Best Novel.
In 2008, David Benioff (1970- ) wrote a
historical fiction novel called City of
Thieves. The story takes place
during the siege of Leningrad. Chess
plays an important part of the story near the end. The character Lev is a chess master and plays
a game of chess with a hated Nazi soldier.
In 2010, Benjamin Crowell published Petopia
in the June 2010 issue of Asimovs.
Raphael ignores his chores and spends the day at a chessboard with a chess book
full of diagrams. He later plays chess with an artificial intelligence
toy named Jelly, then with some others using a chess clock to play blitz
chess. He starts hustling other people for money. Jelly was used as
a paper-weight for the money on the chess table, but was Jelly helping Raphael
cheat and win at chess?
In 2013, grandmaster Jesse Kraai (1972-
) published Lisa: A chess Novel. A teenage girl named Lisa, who has Asperger Syndrome, is taught chess by Russian émigré GM Igor
Ivanov. Lisa
goes from being self-absorbed with her personal journal to being obsessed with
chess. She struggles in school and has
attention deficits and behavioir problems. The only people Lisa repsects
are her chess coaches, Ruth and Igor Ivanov. Kraii, who has a PhD in philosophy, took three years off of
chess to write the novel.
Authors of literature with chess theme
Aldiss, Brian – The Canopy of Time, 1959
Alexander,
Patrick – Death of a Thin-Skinned Animal, 1976
Allen,
Woody – The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers, 1966
Altman,
Linda – Checkmate Julie, 1974
Anderson, Poul – The Immortal Game, 1954
Anderson, Poul – Circus of Hells, 1970
Anderson, Poul – The Fleet of Stars, 1997
Anderson, Poul – Operation Luna, 1999
Andreyev, Leonid - The Seven That Were
Hanged (1908)
Arrabal, Fernando - The Tower Struck by Lightning
(Prix Nadal 1983)
Asaro, Catherine – Alpha, 2006
Asimov, Isaac – Nightfall, 1941
Asimov, Isaac - Pebble in the Sky (Doubleday, 1950)
Asimov, Isaac – The Dead Past, 1956
Asimov, Isaac – Waterclap,
1970
Asimov, Isaac – The Willowing, 1976
Asimov, Isaac – The Perfect Fit, 1981
Asimov, Isaac – Man as the Ultimate
Gadget, 1988
Bailey, Len – Clabbernappers,
2005
Bacigalupi, Paoli – The Calorie Man, 2005
Bard, Benedict - The Black Queen, 1999
Barns, Charles Edward – Digby, Chess Professor (1889), 2009
Baxter, Stephen – Coalescent, 2003
Beagle, Peter – A Fine and Private
Place, 1960
Bear, Greg – Anvil of Stars, 1992
Becket, Samuel - Murphy (1938)
Becket, Samuel - Endgame (1957)
Bellairs, John – The Chessmen of Doom, 1989
Benioff, David – City of Thieves, 2008
Bennett, Ronan, Zugzwang
(2006)
Berman, Ruth - A Board in the Other
Direction (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1974)
Bierce, Ambrose - Moxon's
Master (1893)
Birch, David - The King's Chessboard,
1993
Blackman, Malorie
– Checkmate (Noughts & Crosses, #3), 2001
Bland, Mark - The Four Chessmen
(Morris, 2001)
Bochak, John - The Gamemaster
(1995)
Bontley, Thomas – Celestial Chess, 1979
Borges, Jorge Luis - The Gardens of
Forking Paths (1941)
Borges, Jorge Luis - The Game of Chess
(Dreamtigers, 1974)
Boucher, Rita - Miss Gabriel's Gambit
(Avon, 1993)
Ray Bradbury – A Graveyard of
Lunatics, 1990
Braine, Sheila – The Turkish
Automaton, 1896
Bronte, Anne – The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,
Brown, Dan - Da
Vinci Code (Doubleday, 2003)
Brown, Frederic – Recessional, 1961
Brunner, John - The Squares of the
City (Ballentine, 1965)
Burke, Jonaathan
– Chessboard, 1953
Burroughs, Edgar Rice - The Chessmen
of Mars (Argosy, 1922)
Burton, Jeffrey – Der
Schach Spieler, 2013
Burton, Richard – Arabian Knights, 1885
Calvino, Italo
– Invisible Cities, 1972
Campbell, Nenia
– Fearscape, 2012
Canetti, Elias - Auto-da-Fe (1935)
Caris, John - Reality Inspector (Westgate House,
1982)
Carrol, Lewis - Through The
Looking Glass (1872)
Carter, Stephen - The Emperor of Ocean
Park (2002)
Carter, Stephen – Samantha’s Gambit
Celiere, Paul – The Startling Exploits of Dr. J. B. Quies, 1886
Chabon, Michael – The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,
2007
Chandler, Raymond – The Big Sleep,
1939
Chang, Shi-kuo
– Chess King, 1986
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury
Tales, 1400
Chernev, Irving – The Chess Companion (New York,
1968)
Cherryh, C. J. – Rimrunners,
1989
Chesbro, George - King's Gambit (New English Library
1976)
Christie, Agatha - The Big Four
(Collins, 1927)
Clarke, Arthur C. – Hide and Seek,
1949
Clarke, Arthur C. - Armaments Race, 1954
Clarke, Arthur C. – The Other Side of
the Sky, 1957
Clarke, Arthur C. - Quarantine
(Asimov's SFM Spring 1977)
Clancy, Tom – The Hunt for Red
October, 1984
Clancy, Tom – The Cardinal of the
Kremlin, 1988
Clancy, Tom – Clear and Present
Danger, 1989
Clancy, Tom – The Sum of All Fears,
1991
Clancy, Tom – Without Remorse, 1993
Clancy, Tom & Steve Pieczenik – OP Center Series, Volume 1, OP CENTER, 1995
Clancy, Tom & Steve Pieczenik – OP Center Series, Volume 2, Mirror Image, 1995
Clancy, Tom & Steve Pieczenik – OP Center Series, Volume 3, Games of State,
1995
Clancy, Tom – Executive Orders, 1996
Clancy, Tom – The Bear and the Dragon,
2000
Clancy, Tom – Net Force: Point of
Impact, 2001
Clancy, Tom – Red Rabbit, 2002
Clancy, Tom – The Teeth of the Tiger,
2003
Clancy, Tom – Dead or Alive, 2010
Clancy, Tom – Command Authority, 2013
Clancy, Tom – Net Force Series
Clancy, Tom – Op Center series
Clancy, tom – Power Play Series
Cochran, Molly and Warren Murphy –
Grandmaster, 1984
Cochran, Molly and Warren Murphy (Dev
Stryker) – Grandmaster, 1994
Cockburn, Alexander - Idle Passion:
Chess and the Dance of Death (Simon & Shuster, 1974)
Codrescu, Andrei – The Posthuman Dada Guide, 2009
Coggins, Mark - The Immortal Game (1999)
Colonna, Francesco – Strife of Love in
a Dream, 1890
Contoski, Victor - Von Goom's
Gambit (Chess Review, 1966)
Couperus, Louis - Het zwevende schaakbord (1922)
Courtenay, Bryce - The Power of One
(Random House, 1989)
Crowell, Benjamin – Petopia, 2010
De Vet, Charles – Second Game, 1958
Delman, David - The Last Gambit (St. Martins 1991)
Devroe, Hans (1939- ) - Het schaakspel
van Leuvren, 1987
Downey, GlenRobert – The Truth about Pawn Promotion: The
Development of the Chess Motif in Victorian Fiction, 1998
Duerrenmatt, Friedrich (1921-1990) - Der
Schachspieler, 2007
Dumas pere,
Alexander - Twenty Years After (1845)
Dunnett, Dorothy - Pawn in Frankincense (1969)
Dunsany, Lord - Three Sailor's Gambit
(1916)
Dunsany, Lord - The Man Who Sidetracked His Brains,
1940
Dunsany, Lord – The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories (London, 1952)
Dunsany, Lord - "Jorkens's Problem" in The
Ghosts of the Heavside Layer and Other Fantasms, 1949
Eliot, George – Felix Holt, the
Radical, 1866
Eliot, T.S. - Waste Land (1922)
Ellison, James – Master Prim, 1968
Elyot, Thomas – The Gouernour, 1531
Falco, Edward – Smothered Mate
Fanthorpe, Lionel – Forbidden Planet, 1961
Farber, Erica - Kiss of the Mermaid
(Random House, 1996)
Faulkner, William - Knight's Gambit
(1949)
Fleming, Ian - Moonraker
(Jonathan Cape, 1955)
Fleming, Ian - From Russia With Love (1957)
Frazier, Robert - Rendezvous 2062
(Fantasy Book, 1982)
Freymann-Weyr, Garret - The King's Are Already Here, 2003
Frisch, Max – Homo Faber, 1957
Garrow, Simon - The Amazing Adventure of Dan, the
Pawn, 1983
Gavin, Thomas - King Kill (Vintage/Ebury, 1978)
Gerrold, David - Chess With
A Dragon, 1987
Gilbert, Daniel – Kokomu,
1982
Glavinic, Thomas – Partie
Remise (Adourned Game), 1999
Glavinic, Thomas - Carl Haffner's
Love of the Draw (2000)
Glyn, Anthony - The Dragon Variation
(Hutchinson, 1969)
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
(1954)
Goldowsky, Howard – Masters of Technique, 2010
Gormley, Beatrice - The Magic Mean Machine
, 2010
Gracq, Julien – Un Beau Tenebreux, 1945
Green, Thomas – The chessboard of
Life, 1876
Griffith, Michael - Zugzwang
Griffiths, John – The Memory Man,1982
Guy, Will and Normal Knight – King,
Queen, and Knight: A Chess Anthology in Prose and Verse, 1975
Hale, Lucretia
- The Queen of the Red Chessmen, 2010
Hall, Adam – Knight Sinister, 1990
Hall, Adam – Queen in Danger, 2012
Hall, Adam – Bishop in Check
Hall, Adam – Pawn in Jeopardy
Hall, Adam – Rook’s Gambit
Hall, Katy - My Secret Life, 1999
Hansen, Brooks - The Chess Garden
(London, 1996)
Hardy, Thomas – A Pair of Blue Eyes,
1873
Harness, Charles - The Chessplayers, 1953
Harper, Piers - Checkmate at Chess
City, 2000
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