Szachowisko

by Henry Kuttner

Trwa wojna, od tak dawna, że właściwie nikt się nie zastanawia od kiedy. O przewadze decydują raczej sztaby inżynierów projektujących broń, a nie żołnierze. I pojawia się problem - najwyraźniej jedna ze stron zdobyła decydującą przewagę.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Henry Kuttner was, alone and in collaboration with his wife, the great science fiction and fantasy writer C.L. Moore, one of the four or five most important writers of the 1940s, the writer whose work went furthest in its sociological and psychological insight to making science fiction a human as well as technological literature. He was an important influence upon every contemporary and every science fiction writer who succeeded him. In the early 1940s and under many pseudonyms, Kuttner and Moore published very widely through the range of the science fiction and fantasy pulp markets.

Their fantasy novels, all of them for the lower grade markets like Future, Thrilling Wonder, and Planet Stories, are forgotten now; their science fiction novels, Fury and Mutant, are however well regarded. There is no question but that Kuttner's talent lay primarily in the shorter form; Mutant is an amalgamation of five novelettes and Fury, his only true science fiction novel, is considered as secondary material. There are, however, 40 or 50 shorter works which are among the most significant achievements in the field and they remain consistently in print. The critic James Blish, quoting a passage from Mutant about the telepathic perception of the little blank, silvery minds of goldfish, noted that writing of this quality was not only rare in science fiction but rare throughout literature: "The Kuttners learned a few thing writing for the pulp magazines, however, that one doesn't learn reading Henry James."

In the early 1950s, Kuttner and Moore, both citing weariness with writing, even creative exhaustion, turned away from science fiction; both obtained undergraduate degrees in psychology from the University of Southern California and Henry Kuttner, enrolled in an MA program, planned to be a clinical psychologist. A few science fiction short stories and novelettes appeared (Humpty Dumpty finished the Baldy series in 1953). Those stories -- Home There Is No Returning, Home Is the Hunter, Two-Handed Engine, and Rite of Passage -- were at the highest level of Kuttner's work. He also published three mystery novels with Harper & Row (of which only the first is certainly his; the other two, apparently, were farmed out by Kuttner to other writers when he found himself incapable of finishing them).

Henry Kuttner died suddenly in his sleep, probably from a stroke, in February 1958; Catherine Moore remarried a physician and survived him by almost three decades but she never published again. She remained in touch with the science fiction community, however, and was Guest of Honor at the World Convention in Denver in 198l. She died of complications of Alzheimer's Disease in 1987.

His pseudonyms include:

Edward J. Bellin
Paul Edmonds
Noel Gardner
Will Garth
James Hall
Keith Hammond
Hudson Hastings
Peter Horn
Kelvin Kent
Robert O. Kenyon
C. H. Liddell
Hugh Maepenn
Scott Morgan
Lawrence O'Donnell
Lewis Padgett
Woodrow Wilson Smith
Charles Stoddard

Reviews

[Sandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection, by sci-fi's foremost husband-and-wife writing team, is comprised of a novella, two longish short stories, and a short piece. The novella, "Chessboard Planet," originally appeared under the title "The Fairy Chessmen" in the January and February 1946 issues of John W. Campbell's "Astounding Science-Fiction" and, in my opinion, is an unjustly forgotten masterpiece. In it, the United States and the European union known as the Falangists have been at war for decades, and as the story opens, the U.S. is in big trouble. It seems that the enemy has come up with a scientific equation that can completely preempt reality; a formula made up of variable constants, the solving of which is driving our best scientific minds insane. A team of men at U.S. Psychometrics is given the task of unraveling this scientific riddle whilst resisting the reality-bending effects that the enemy is bombarding them with. They must also contend with a battle-hardened supersoldier from the future, a band of mutants possessing ETP (extra-temporal perception), a physicist whose merest thought can erase reality, AND the appearance of 74 mysterious alien domes. The book becomes fairly way out and hallucinatory at times, as equations and counterequations for abrogating reality are bounced back and forth by the two sides. (I almost wish I'd read this novella 30 years ago in college, while under the influence of some psychotropic substance!) The book is quite a departure from Kuttner and Moore's previous novella, "Earth's Last Citadel" (1943), both in terms of style and content. That previous work is a pulpy, well-written sci-fi/fantasy of the far future, whereas this is almost a hybrid of hard sci-fi and 1960s New Wave. Indeed, the book almost anticipates the works of P.K. Dick, and that author's recurring theme of the tenuousness of reality. "Chessboard Planet" is the type of book that just brims over with imaginative ideas, mind-blowing speculation, unique settings and unexpected plot twists on just about every page. It is an extremely sophisticated piece of work that must have been all the more impressive to readers back in 1946. As I said, a neglected masterpiece.

To round out the collection, the (British) Hamlyn edition that I just completed contains three other pieces. In "Camouflage," which first appeared in "Astounding Science-Fiction" in September '45, a group of criminals hijacks a spaceship that is under the control of a Transplant: a human brain in a box that operates all mechanical functions aboard. The resulting game of cat and mouse between the human/machine and the bad guys is both tense and exciting, although the story's underlying theme--can a human remain human in a mechanical body?--is one that Catherine Moore had visited to even greater effect in her classic 1944 short story "No Woman Born." In "Android," which first saw the light of day in the June '51 issue of "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction," a man comes to the conclusion that the majority of "people" on Earth are androids. Too bad he has more trouble convincing others of this theory than Kevin McCarthy had with his "pod people" story in the 1956 film "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"! Like that seminal film, "Android" is a wonderful piece of sci-fi paranoia, with an ending that is at once downbeat and curiously uplifting. To complete this collection, there is the oft-anthologized short piece "Or Else!," which was first published in the September '53 issue of "Amazing Stories." In this one, a Klaatu-like alien attempts to bring peace to a pair of feuding Mexican farmers. But, as it turns out, the simple Earth peasants seem to possess more in the way of practical wisdom than the technologically superior but simplistically naive star dweller, in this pithy little tale. Anyway, to sum up, this is a wonderful collection from Kuttner and Moore, worth owning for that "Fairy Chessman" story alone. I mo(o)re than highly recommend it to all readers.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

The review by Sandy is excellent! I enjoyed this book a lot and am making a copy of the list of seventeen pseudonyms found on Wikipedia to improve my chances of finding more of the author's work when trawling through opportunity shops. The title story is preceded by a note on 'Fairy Chess' which prompts me to draw attention to an excellent website with a great deal more information on this topic. Google Mayhematics maintained by George Jelliss for a resource that will easily occupy your next lifetime!