Град върху шахматна дъска

by John Brunner, Юлиян Стойно (translator)

В латиноамериканската държава Агуасул се издига най-модерната столица на света. Архитектурата и е великолепна, но хората са стиснати от кадифената ръкавица на диктаторски режим. Тук сякаш е позволено всичко — от контрола върху подсъзнанието до… тайнственото местене на гражданите като шахматни фигури.
Авторът е първият европеец, удостоен с „Хюго“, а романът му предлага рядко срещаната сплав между антиутопия и детектив, обединени по новаторски начин.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Chess, Science Fiction Fantasy, Dystopia, Politics, Speculative Fiction

352 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

John Brunner was born in Preston Crowmarsh, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire, and went to school at St Andrew's Prep School, Pangbourne, then to Cheltenham College. He wrote his first novel, Galactic Storm, at 17, and published it under the pen-name Gill Hunt, but he did not start writing full-time until 1958. He served as an officer in the Royal Air Force from 1953 to 1955, and married Marjorie Rosamond Sauer on 12 July 1958

At the beginning of his writing career Brunner wrote conventional space opera pulp science fiction. Brunner later began to experiment with the novel form. His 1968 novel "Stand on Zanzibar" exploits the fragmented organizational style John Dos Passos invented for his USA trilogy, but updates it in terms of the theory of media popularised by Marshall McLuhan.

"The Jagged Orbit" (1969) is set in a United States dominated by weapons proliferation and interracial violence, and has 100 numbered chapters varying in length from a single syllable to several pages in length. "The Sheep Look Up" (1972) depicts ecological catastrophe in America. Brunner is credited with coining the term "worm" and predicting the emergence of computer viruses in his 1975 novel "The Shockwave Rider", in which he used the term to describe software which reproduces itself across a computer network. Together with "Stand on Zanzibar", these novels have been called the "Club of Rome Quartet", named after the Club of Rome whose 1972 report The Limits to Growth warned of the dire effects of overpopulation.

Brunner's pen names include K. H. Brunner, Gill Hunt, John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Ellis Quick, Henry Crosstrees Jr., and Keith Woodcott.
In addition to his fiction, Brunner wrote poetry and many unpaid articles in a variety of publications, particularly fanzines, but also 13 letters to the New Scientist and an article about the educational relevance of science fiction in Physics Education. Brunner was an active member of the organisation Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and wrote the words to "The H-Bomb's Thunder", which was sung on the Aldermaston Marches.

Brunner had an uneasy relationship with British new wave writers, who often considered him too American in his settings and themes. He attempted to shift to a more mainstream readership in the early 1980s, without success. Before his death, most of his books had fallen out of print. Brunner accused publishers of a conspiracy against him, although he was difficult to deal with (his wife had handled his publishing relations before she died).[2]

Brunner's health began to decline in the 1980s and worsened with the death of his wife in 1986. He remarried, to Li Yi Tan, on 27 September 1991. He died of a heart attack in Glasgow on 25 August 1995, while attending the World Science Fiction Convention there


aka
K H Brunner, Henry Crosstrees Jr, Gill Hunt (with Dennis Hughes and E C Tubb), John Loxmith, Trevor Staines, Keith Woodcott

Winner of the ESFS Awards in 1980 as "Best Author" and 1n 1984 as "Novelist"..

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 to 4.0 stars. John Brunner has yet to disappoint me with one of his novels. His classic Stand on Zanzibar is one of my all time favorites and The Sheep Look Up and The Jagged Orbit were both excellent. This is not one of his more famous books which is a bit of a shame because of its originality in style and execution.

Let me say at the outset that there is not really a "science fiction" element to the story and it belongs more in the category of mystery/thriller. It basically involves a traffic pattern analyst/consultant brought to a fictional South American city in order to solve some infrastructure issues and finding himself in the middle of a political struggle between the wealthy, predominately white, ruling class and the poor native population.

I don't want to give away any spoilers, however if you do any research on the book before you read it the "hook" is mentioned a lot. I happened to know the basic idea behind the book before I read it and I think it helped my enjoyment of it because I was "looking for clues" while I was reading and I think it made the read more compelling.

Brunner's writing is excellent and the plotting is superb. However, if it was not for the unusual "hook" of the book, I probably would have given this 3 stars based on pure enjoyment. However, the brilliance, in my opinion, of the ending and the big reveal and looking back over the rest of the book after finishing it, I had to give the guy another star. A one of kind read and one that I recommend highly.

Nominee: Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

[Kate Sherrod · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Sheep Look Up utterly devastated me when I read it for the first (and definitely not the last) time earlier this year, and I realized that John Brunner was a guy whose books I would definitely need to track down one by one until I had read them all.

Then a relatively new Twitter friend, Fred Kiesche, applauding my resolution, told me that if The Sheep Look Up was "death by pollution", The Squares of the City was "death by chess". As in the structure is modeled after a World Championship game in 1982 between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin. I thus knew that this one would have to be my next Brunner, because if there is one thing I love, utterly hopelessly*, it's chess. And people who are obsessed with chess.

And I also like a good jaw about urban planning and cities. So, um, as they say nowadays, hell yes.

The city in question here, Vados, is a relatively newly founded capital city in a ficticious South American Republic, Aguazul, to which our hero, the delightfully named Boyd Hakluyt,** has been summoned to help improve its traffic flows. Vados might be the most modern and well-planned city in the world, but the problem of moving people and goods around is never really solved, is it?

But of course, it's not really a traffic problem our hero has been brought in to solve. See, the circumstances behind the founding, just 20 years ago, of the city of Vados, are troublesome. Aguazul's president, Vados (yes), did not trust his people and their meager resources to create the perfect city he dreamed of, so he threw it open to the global elite as what amounted to an investment opportunity with big returns -- the biggest return being a place to live with a guaranteed high standard of living, elegance, order, and freedom from riff-raff. Yeah, he sort of built Galt's Gulch.

But wait! In order to assure the city had adequate water, most of the nation's water supply was diverted. Water that peasants and villagers and small farmers depended on. Water that said peasants etc. wound up having to follow to Vados, even though Vados had no place for the likes of them, resulting in unsightly slums and shanty towns and the general presence of riff-raff in this perfect city. Oh noes!

So what Hakluyt is really there to do is come up with a "traffic improvement plan" that requires the city to eliminate said slums and shanty towns, thus forcing the riff-raff back "onto to the land" where they belong. Any plan he might come up with that does not require this will be rejected; he is there to provide an excuse and act as a scapegoat.

It takes him a while to discover this, of course. And once he does...


Here is the source of the novel's real interest and tension (the chess plot is really just window dressing, though it's kind of fun to track plot developments -- deaths, arrests, kidnappings -- and see how they map onto the moves of the famous 1892 game): Hakluyt spends a lot of this novel trying to rationalize his presence in Vados, to justify to himself and a few key others his dogged determination to do some appoximation, at least, of what he's being paid for. Among those key others is one Maria Posador, leader of a small faction of native-born privilege who have taken up the cause of the slum-dwellers. If there is an opposite term for "femme fatale" that term would apply to Maria, who is constantly trying to get our hero to do the right thing and tell his employers to pound sand.

Lots of others would like him to do so as well, and many of them are less subtle than Maria, which means there are some decent action scenes, conspiracy elements, even a bit of a mystery plot woven in with this meditation on haves and have nots and what the former might be seen to owe to the latter. Which is to say that once again, Brunner showed a great deal of prescience -- but this time his work has not achieved anything like the status of self-denying prophecy that The Sheep Look Up has.

And of course it's a bit of a dig at the history of the New World in general, isn't it?

Well worth a read.


*As in I adore the game and never miss a chance to play but pretty much suck at it to a hilarious degree.

**I suspect his name is a nod to Richard Hakluyt, an Elizabethan era writer who promoted the settlement of North America in his work.

[prcardi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Storyline: 2/5
Characters: 3/5
Writing Style: 3/5
Resonance: 1/5

The first few chapters held some real surprises for me. I'd approached this because of Brunner's science fiction credentials and the book's nomination for the 1966 Hugo Awards. I wouldn't, however, classify this as science fiction. There's a little technological invention of the Cold War variety - supposed developments the other side had and was employing, but nothing that wasn't rumored to already be true then in the 1960s. Hardly enough to count as science fiction. What it was, instead, was a third world political drama. I can't find evidence for it on a quick search, but Brunner must have based his Vados on real world Brasilia. I thought that was great; I'd read an excellent history of the city before, and it would be fascinating point from which to build up a speculative fiction story. Also the main character's profession is in civil engineering, and I was enthusiastic to see the character complete the tasks Brunner puts him up to. Finally, the writing in the early chapters set this apart from general science fiction writing. It was contemplative and playful, informed by a writer who obviously had experienced the lifestyle of a traveler. There was a common language and familiar observations that synced with the reader who had similar experiences. For the first few chapters, then, I was wowed with the possibilities. I thought I had stumbled onto a mostly overlooked classic, and I was keen to settle in and enjoy the experience.

Unfortunately the book does not live up to many of the initial expectations. The science fiction was superficial to the point of nonexistence. Aside from this being located in an imaginary city in the near future this was pretty standard literature. The profession of our character and his task in the book were not the product of research or experience; the depth and information I was looking for never materialized. The writing turned functional, and the unique observations of the expat were all used up early on. There's some attempts to make this a serious book, 1960s message fiction with real villains and real world problems. There were some really provocative questions raised, namely: 1) to what extent do natives "own" or have "rights" to their native land beyond or in opposition to immigrants who give up everything to make it their home? 2) how do you share very limited and non-divisible national treasures with a large population? These are the kind of themes that serious literature would take on, and at times this posed as serious literature. It was posturing, however, and the questions are used instead to direct us to the political drama. This turned as internecine and sensational as one would expect with a novel with little else going for it. At the end of the book it turned out that the author did have a point. I scoffed at the message as I read the final chapter, thinking that the Brunner lost control of the tale. The author's note at the end advised me that what I was considering ridiculous, was, in fact, quite purposeful, and had required a great deal of plotting to achieve. So my final impressions changed from ridicule to befuddlement. I don't know why Brunner wanted to do what he did, but I was neither entertained nor impressed.

[Troy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I stumbled across this book on Amazon during one of my many browsing sessions.

As a chess player, I sometimes gravitate toward novels that use chess in one way or another. This novel was to take the usual conventions a step further by using an actual game of chess to guide the plot. Intriguing, I thought.

The beginning of the book is an introduction by Edward Lasker, a chess master and author. His endorsement of the novel gave me hope that the idea would be well executed. It prepares the reader for a real chess novel, where chess is absolutely central to the book as a whole, which is why I became increasingly frustrated the farther into the book I read. Page after page only an occasional reference to the game would pop up. Only at the end of the book did the big chess section arrive--a huge letdown. To make matters worse, the chess plot, as explained at the end, does not make sense.

There are two characters who have decided to solve a conflict by playing a "real chess game" using the citizens of the city as their armies. This is not a metaphor--they have a chess set where they move pieces while simultaneously manipulating actual persons in corresponding manners. When a capture is needed, that person is killed or rendered useless. Brunner uses a game from the Steinitz-Chigorin 1892 World Championship Rematch to structure his novel; it is supposed to be the game played out by the characters. And in one sense it is. A piece for every character, plot points of rough equivalence to the effects of each move in the historical game, etc.

But the idea of playing out a chess game with real people does not work in such a literal sense. Brunner uses the city as the board, but the construction falls apart because he allows just the board to remain metaphorical. There are no coordinates to match a real chessboard and therefore there are no boundaries to the influence of the pieces nor of the game itself. Chess pieces get their value from the board upon which they are placed. Outside of that board, their "power" (or mobility) has no definition. So even if we assume that this advanced form of governmental manipulation is able to influence indefinitely those who live within the city limits, the novel fails to explain how such influence is mirrored on the chessboard used by the two acting kings.

The white king even admits that he and the black king did not decide who would be the pawns until later in game. Come on. Those are some of the first pieces you have to move in a chess game, and are in fact the first two pieces moved in the historical game. They literally shape a chess game.

Brunner informs us at the end that he has left out the final three moves of the historical game. Even so, you might expect at least the result to be the same as that game. Nope. In spite of the characters reminding us that the kings of a game are never captured (or killed, for their purposes), the white king is most likely killed at the end of the novel. Which also reverses the result of the historical game, in which (as Brunner reminds us) black resigned on move thirty-eight.

Now that is really just the chess gripe, which was the main reason I read the book. I did have other issues with it: boring, repetitive, etc. I will just say it was not my idea of a good final draft of a novel.

Redeeming factors included the sociological and political discussions, the gentle prods regarding ethical and philosophical implications of media manipulation, and the novel's relevance to my own literary research.

Overall, this novel had some provocative successes but required too much work from the reader that should have been done by the author and editor.

[Xabi1990 · Rating 2 out of 5]

4/10. Media de las 3 obras leídas del autor: 5/10

Famoso sobre todo por su novela “El jinete de la onda de shock”, precursora del cyberpunk (escrita en 1975 y donde ya se ve una especia de internet) y por su “Todos sobre Zanzibar” (distopía sobre futuro en el que mandan los mass media y las grandes corporaciones) que a mí no me gustó apenas a pesar de su Hugo.

Esta novela, especie de CF/policiaca, ni me gustó ni me entretuvo.

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

"Nominated for the 1966 Hugo Award for Best Novel

John Brunner’s The Squares of the City (1965) transposes the moves of a 1892 chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz (1836-1900) and Mikhail Chigorin (1850-1905) onto a near future landscape of political intrigue. Inspired by Brazil’s planned capital Brasília (founded in 1960), the action takes place in [...]"

[Rom Mojica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dang man this one really plateaued all my great reading I'd been doing this year. Which isn't necessarily its fault - as the star rating suggests, I didn't hate it by any means, and it's more that I did the "too big for my britches" thing and started reading multiple things at once, including several that I haven't listed here on goodreads. This really slows me down a lot because it introduces an extra level of choice paralysis - not only am I choosing between multiple activities at a time (reading, writing, playing games, etc), I am also then having to choose between multiple books, and wind up just being on my phone instead or watching something on YouTube. Hopefully I will eventually learn this lesson instead of just falling back into this pattern over and over. But I won't.

My spouse totally judged this book by its cover, which is why we have a copy - I think they saw it in a used store for like $1 and thought that it looked incredible, so purchased it, took a bunch of photos, and then probably didn't expect to ever read it or really ever think about it, but I was too enticed and picked it up and started reading it. And for the first 100 or so pages I was extremely taken by this book and what was going on with it - a traffic engineer (or whatever) comes to this fictional South American country to try and improve the traffic situation in the capital, by the president's request, and his arrival in the country gives him a good chance to be an outside observer, meeting the various power players in the area, and offering his thoughts up. For the time that this came out (1965) it felt like a pretty deft commentary in the way that outside interests started coming into South America, to influence its development and set themselves up in positions to take advantage of the natural resources there. The oil reserves here, for example, are owned by Aguazul (the country), but are leased for a pittance to outside companies that own the equipment.

On top of that, there was this idea that they had created a special class of citizen just for people who aren't originally from Aguazul but had helped fund its creation. The whole thing felt very Banana Republic/CIA meddling and with a country and instilling its people there, with someone in charge who's very happy to acquiesce to these people who made this country possible. All this sets up a level of political turmoil in the place: namely, the needs of the poor indigenous people who were displaced in the creation of Vados (the capital) who tend to live in squalor and slums because the agricultural opportunities they might have had before are gone, and the desired of the wealthier Eurocentric special citizens who want this city to look pristine and planned and keep its issues out of view. So like there's a lot set up, and the idea of seeing it through the eyes of someone with such a specific focus, traffic, is really pretty cool. They approach him and say, hey here's a problem area we would like to fix, can you take a look at it? And he does and he realizes that the actually problem here isn't the traffic. It's that it's a slum full of brown people. And they want him to just come up with an excuse to get rid of it.

And I did appreciate that Huyklut (main character) did find a way to clear the slums out that would be beneficial to everyone, and I think it's interesting then that the people in the government just go, no. They are not looking for a solution that will pay off over time, they are just looking to get rid of the people who are living there. Huyklut isn't here to to actually improve things. He's here to be used, to give them the answer they want so they can go "see? A neutral third party who's outstanding in his field says to do this so it must be the best solution!"

Huyklut's neutrality does become pretty annoying, though, because a lot of times it feels like his point of view is mostly based on the most recent person he's talked to. He ratchets between "this is a thing I'm mad about!" to "this is a thing I now understand," or "this is a bad thing" to "this is a good thing" to "well I see now how it can be used in either way." But his blankness does give us a good lens for people here to talk about their thoughts on like, being in charge, controlling society, fighting injustice, trying to do something in the face of a government that works against you. It really doesn't feel like until the end that Huyklut manages to come into his own and really draw conclusions that aren't just something someone else told him.

And so like yeah there is something here that I think is really fascinating and I could have enjoyed a book that mostly focused on these questions through the eyes of this character, but I think the book eventually got too complicated. For example: there are 32 characters in this, all with names, histories, allegiances, and official titles. And much of the book is given over to quick updates about what each of them are up to and what consequences come from their actions. It is INCREDIBLY easy to lose track of who's what, what's going on, who's on which side, and what their actions actually mean. My eyes started to skim over much of this, and it felt like, in the grand scheme of things, a lot of it doesn't really matter. X got bankrupted and killed himself, Y died in jail, Z was shot, and like, for the way the book makes it very clear all of these people are pieces on a chessboard, what it means to the overall power struggle in the city was extremely difficult for me to parse.

Which I'll take as my segue into chess. Ah, chess. Look, I'm not here to pretend I'm too good for chess or something, or that I'm some kind of genius who thinks that the 8x8 grid and lack of fog of war makes it too simple or something. What I am here to say is that there are few things more hackneyed in their metaphorical use in fiction than chess (Tarot probably comes higher) and this book not only engages with it on those terms, but also designed its entire narrative around a specific, well-regarded chess game. This can explain why so much of the book feels like pieces being moved around a board aimlessly rather than characters doing something we care about - the back of the book even has a guide to who's on which side, and which piece they represent, and where they were taken and who by and how. Others have said this but I do think the devotion to this does hurt the narrative overall because it feels like we have to keep up with: 32 pieces.

And more than that, and here there be spoilers that I don't feel like marking the whole review for, it kinda feels a little insulting when the book makes the twist be that the whole story was based on chess? Not even that it was based on a specific match which honestly I do think is kinda neat even if I think it doesn't work out at all. But just that like. Back to that first point, it's a pretty hackneyed metaphor, and so "you are treating society like a chess game!" feels kind of clear given how much the book THROWS chess in our face the whole time. And it feels kind of silly when Huyklut barges into the president's dinner party and goes "YOU ARE TREATING SOCIETY LIKE A CHESS GAME BUT PEOPLE AREN'T PAWNS" and they gape at him like, oh my god. Oh fuck how did he figure it out. How did he look out a city based on squares that's obsessed with chess and, at several points, loudly showcases how things are split into white people and non-white people, and figure out that we're trying to control people's actions like they're pieces in a board game. They're completely shooketh by a common metaphor so much so that they just tell him what's going on and give up the whole plot. It's silly and it invites a lot of questions it doesn't really feel like it's equipped to answer. The best I'll say about this part is that it does acknowledge how stupid it all is, how naive the plan is, and how it doesn't really make sense to consider these "moves on a chessboard" when they're the actions of people. Huyklut, for example, was brought in as an important piece on the board because they assumed he'd be racist, and were thrown when it turned out he wasn't. And I also appreciate that Vados (the man the capital is named for) has a moment where he goes "we came up with this idea to prevent a civil war, but it seems like all we actually did was postpone it" and like a minute later rockets start pelting the presidential mansion.

This also ties into the annoyance I had with the introduction of the subliminal messages in the broadcasts and the ideas of that influencing the populace. The afterword talks about how this is just an extrapolation of what ads already do but its use in the book made me a little worried. I think it kind of pulls it out in this extended discussion about how it's impossible to really predict people, but that it's possible to influence their lives, both in small ways and in big ways. I think it goes too little too late on this and the overall conversation about the subliminal, liminal, and superliminal way we're influenced by living in a society. It's brought up and discussed and seems to land on like "a man is not a pawn, except he kind of is, except you can't know how things will influence him, until you do" which, I dunno. A bit wishy washy. The book feels like its attention is turned in too many ways to really land something and left me a bit cool at the end.

I don't think it's bad but I do think it's hard to recommend to anyone. It's so bogged down in so many things, and so much of it feels like shuffling pieces around, that I think a large chunk could be cut without really feeling like it lost anything. Brunner's writing is generally good, though, and though the ins and outs of the whos and whats could be a little hard to parse, it flowed nicely, even if sometimes it was a little difficult to really want to come back to it. When your other option is video games or phone or sleep, "reading 2 pages about minor characters doing things while the main character kind of reacts" doesn't really light your engine, you know?

I am glad that Huyklut didn't have sex with Maria Posador, which seems like the kind of thing that would be guaranteed to happen in books from this time, but he certainly does go "dang wish things would be different with me and her so maybe something could happen." Guess what bitch she's her own woman!!!

[jzthompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Apologies for the rambling gonzo review that is to follow - wanted to get my thoughts on this down in short order before the book faded from my immediate memory. I fully intend to edit this into something more sensical in due course. I wasn't actually going to write a review on this until I started to see the "Recommendations" Goodreads were supplying me off the back of my four star rating and started to get a little irked... It's telling I think about how difficult John Brunner is to classify as a writer - and how thoroughly he has slipped from the view of all but the SF faithful - that the recommendations are high Sci-Fantasy stories from the 50s and 60s about Robot Popes and Resurrected Thomas Moores on Mars. All perfectly enjoyable stuff no doubt but about as distant from what Brunner is about as... oh I dunno... "Wuthering Heights" is from "Bridget Jones's Diary."

I have a huge deal of admiration for Brunner's abilities despite having really only skimmed the surface of his phenomenally vast output. In fact this is only the fourth John Brunner I have read since I first read Stand on Zanzibar about 12 years or more ago... in part this due to the difficulty of laying hands on copies of even his most noted works. I found this as a well preserved paperback on a summer visit to Hay on Wye in amidst a box of moldering Star Trek novelizations.

Now I'm the first to sing the merits of decent SF but this seems unfair - whilst he seems to have published a lot of space opera tripe to pay the bills the three earlier books of his I'd read (Stand on Zanzibar, This Jagged Orbit and The Sheep Look up) sit far more comfortably in the dystopian tradition of Ninteen Eighty-Four or The Handmaid's Tale and in my view are far more accurate eerie reflections of our current world of turbo-charged capitalism than... well to be honest anything else I've ever read.

When an English bloke writing in the 60s and 70s managed to see the collapse of the Soviet Union, the rise of China, the IT revolution, medicalisation of every aspect of the human condition, and even the organic vegetable racket it seems somewhat mysterious why he sits in the box with Jim Kirk teaching green skinned space babes about this human thing you call love rather than being respected as a prophetic genius. Heck, forget mainstream literary credibility aside if the CIA had given the bloke an office and a carton of cigarettes a day they could have saved themselves a fortune.

The Squares of the City is barely SF at all... it's set in a fictional Latin American republic and there are a couple of references to subliminal advertising and briefcased size personal computers that take it out of "the real world" but that aside the story here - conflict between the haves and the have-nots in an ultra-modern prestige city - could have come from a political science text book.

This isn't the best Brunner I've read and it's clear there are flaws. A couple of nice descriptive passages aside the prose is functional rather than stylish. The decision to structure the book after a chess game is a nice conceit but proves a straightjacket by the two thirds mark - the plot becomes a bit predictable when you realise that every "move" by one side will be met by a countermove by the other in short order. The biggest problem is that the volume of characters required to give each chess piece (black and white) an equivalent in the story leads to all but a handful of the cast being archetypes rather than well developed. But at least Brunner bothered with characters and a plot - most "classics" of the dystopian genre didn't even bother with that... Can anyone give me a summary of the plot of Brave New World that takes more than two sentences? Can anyone tell me anything about Julia from Ninteen Eighty-Four's character aside from "is really young and totally hot and is well into older dudes that - by a complete coincidence - are a bit like George Orwell?"

John Brunner deserves more than the 60p paperback box in Hay on Wye. If you are interested in dystopian fiction or political science please give him a chance.

[Electra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a head trip and a half. One of my former friends gave it to me, telling me only that "it was a sci-fi book about a chess game". Needless to say, I was ill prepared for what I was about to encounter.
First of all, it's barely science fiction. It's mainly a story of urban planning, and the tribulations that can result.
Secondly, The entire book is the chess game, and the difficulty is recognizing which characters correspond to which pieces, and when they're meant to have moved (obviously, when one is killed, it makes things easier, but other than that...). The edition I read had a handy guide in the back, which I didn’t discover until I finished reading the book. It was interesting to compare the authors intentions to my own interpretation.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, but I felt that I would've liked it much more had I been prepared for what I was truly about to encounter.

[Deidre · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first read this many years ago. An enjoyable example of politics buried in sci fi.

And the poor consultant who discovered he was a pawn...

[Devero · Rating 2 out of 5]

Un romanzo scritto come una partita di scacchi, basato su una partita vera di cui riproduce lo schema e le mosse. Non proprio riuscito, come esperimento.

[Tex-49 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Riletto in versione integrale, 11 anni dopo, e, a dir la verità, lo giudico più severamente di allora: trovo la trama troppo ingarbugliata ed il finale a sorpresa poco credibile.

[Bus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aburridete

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

review of
John Brunner's The Squares of the City
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 9, 2014

"Review is too long. You entered 21001 characters, and the max is 20000" - In other words, see the full review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...

Do you ever think about the urban planning that goes into things like the way traffic lights work? I do - & I'm impressed when such things work so efficiently that traffic keeps flowing w/o my getting too annoyed by delays, w/o accidents.

"I came quickly to the central traffic intersection that lay at the focal point of the flow generated and governed by the four great squares. I stopped there for some time on the sidewalk, watching the vehicles move—and they did move, with no breaks. Ingenious use of precedence lanes and total avoidance of same-level crossing had eliminated the need for stoppages altogether, and there wasn't a traffic signal in sight" - p 25

On the other hand, I think about the way highways can be built that isolate certain communities & cause urban blight. This, of course, can be a type of racism/classism: the people to suffer the blight are considered disposable, unimportant. I remember when I-70 was planned to go thru Baltimore City & the communities to be effected by this protested & actually WON, thank goodness, & prevented the highway from cutting thru, & dividing their neighborhoods. That was probably in the early 1970s.

WELL, once again, Brunner had the foresight to present just such an issue in a highly developed & entertaining way - & he did it in 1965. &, as w/ pretty much everything I like, there's more to it than that, much more. Subliminal Suggestion features prominently. Remember the book by Wilson Bryan Key called Subliminal Seduction (1974) about the way advertisers used subliminal means to convince you to buy things? You can read reviews about that here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6... . I think Key wrote a follow-up bk too. I don't have any problem believing Key's premise but I never bothered to read his bk b/c it struck me too much as sensationalism. Yes, unscrupulous people will use whatever techniques they can get away w/ to make themselves richer & the rest of us poorer - that doesn't necessarily mean that they'll succeed enuf for it to be worth it for any of us to become obsessed w/ it. The more insidious propaganda methods used by TV News, eg, are far more successful in framing the worldviews of the people who waste their time 'tuning in' (but never really tuning out). That sd, protecting yr free-thinking is certainly a worthy goal from my POV.

""It is too dangerous to watch television in Aguazul."" - p 87

""Who first saw the possibilities? I cannot say. It was all kept very secret. In most countries use of subliminal perception is banned by law, because its effectiveness—oh, it has been made reliable by testing!—it is inhuman. But in Aguazul there was no law. The single obstacle was that most of our people are, illiterate. Yet that in its way was an advantage; it was soon found that even for persons who could read, pictures worked better than words. A message in words can be argued with, but pictures have the impact of something con los ojos de si."" - p 93

"Western society, biased toward the objective mental mode of experience, tends to be blind not only to the power of images but also to the fact that we are nearly defenseless against their effect. Since we are educated and thoughtful, as we like to think, we believe we can choose among the things that will influence us. We accept fact, we reject lies. We go to movies, we watch television, we see photographs, and as the images pour into us, we believe we can choose among those we wish to absorb and those we don't. We assume that our rational processes protect us from implantation, or brainwashing. What we fail to realize is the difference between fact and image. Our objective processes can help us resist only one kind of implantation. There is no rejection of images." - pages 257-258, Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television - Jerry Mander

[See my review of Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2... ]

""There are few places in Vados where it is safe to watch television, señor. This is one of them. I have a device which I think in English is called a 'blinker.' Our name for it means 'sieve.' I have just played you that recording without the blinker."

""A blinker, so far as I'm concerned," I said, "is one of those gadgets that you can set to shit off commercials. You haven't any advertising on that program."

""No?" she said, and gave her wan little smile again. "Did you ever hear of a technique called subliminal perception?"" - p 90

In the Introduction to The Squares of the City, Edward Lasker tells us: "this story in which the two chief protagonists 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 out futures." (p 5) In other words, this novel is about CONTROL, a subject dear to my heart, a subject explored deeply by another favorite writer: William S. Burroughs.

"I saw myself—or at any rate a recognizable likeness of myself—dipping my fingers for holy water into the font at the entrance to the cathedral. Another few yards of tape: I was shaking hands with el Presidente, and then in a few more moments I was kneeling before the bishop I had seen coming out of the elevator at the TV studios. Finally, before the sequence began to repeat, I was shown—this was so crude it nearly made me laugh—as an angel in a long white gown, holding a flaming sword over the monorail central, from beneath which figures ran like frightened ants." - p 92

"I frowned. "Well, I know the principle—you project a message on a TV screen or a movie screen for a fraction of a second, and it's alleged to impress the subconscious mind. They tried it out in movie houses with simple words like 'ice cream,'["]" [Strange, my neighbor & I just now made plans to go get ice cream..] "["]and some people said it worked and others said it didn't. I thought it had gone out of fashion, because it proved unreliable or something."" - p 92

"I chose my words carefully. "I have," I said. "In fact, I spoke to Señora Cortés of the television service, and her husband, the professor, admitted at once without my asking that they use this technique. I don't like it msyelf, but according to what Cortés says, they seem to have some justification, at any rate—"

"She seemed to wilt like a flower in an oven. "Yes, Señor Hakluyt. I have no doubt there was also some justification at any rate for Belson. Good day to you."" - p 130

Lasker continues by telling us that "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." (p 5) I'm reminded of George Perec's great novel Life: A User's Manual (1978).

In 1997, I was invited to coordinate a small Latin American festival at a local university. I wasn't a Latin American expert by any means so I might not've been the best person for the job - it just sortof fell in my lap. In the long run, I think I did it passably well. A side-effect of this was that I went on a spree of reading Latin American novels (in English translation). I became particularly fond of the authors published by Avon Bard. I ended up reading work by (if I hadn't read them already), but not limited to:

Allende, Isabel (Chilé)
Argueta, Manlio (El Salvador)
Arlt, Roberto (Argentina)
de Assis, Machado (Brazil)
Asturias, Machado (Brazil)
Azuela, Mariano (Mexico)
Bastos, Augusto Roa (Pataguay)
Bioy-Casares, Adolfo (Argentina?)
Borges, Jorge Luis (Argentina)
Brandão, Iganácio de Loyola (Brazil)
Carpentier, Alejo (Cuba)
Cortázar, Julio (Argentina; France)
Donoso, José (Chile)
Fuentes, Carlos (Mexico)
Ibargüengoitia, Jorge (Mexico)
Infante, G. Cabrera (Cuba)
Koster, R. M. (United States of America; Panama)
Llosa, Mario Vargas (Peru)
Márquez, Gabriel Garcia (Columbia; Mexico)
Queiroz, Rachel de (Brazil)
Sánchez, Luis Rafael (Puerto Rico)
Souza, Márcio (Brazil)
Traven, B. (Germany; Mexico)

The Squares of the City is set in a fictitious South American country &, as such, is vaguely open to a reading as Latin American fiction. I think it passed nicely. Sometimes it seems that Latin American countries have horrible reputations as dictatorships in North America (Argentina certainly earned it in the 1960s & 1970s - as did Chile under Pinochet after the US helped put him in power, etc, etc) but, then, there's so much great political fiction from Latin America that there seems to be a substantial liberation going on too (obviously).

"I looked around, and the buildings said proudly, "Progress!" The laughter on the faces of youths and girls said, "Success!" The satisfied look of businessmen said, "Prosperity!"

"But even in that moment, in my first hours in Vados, I found myself wondering what the peasant family would have answered, trudging up the hill toward their shantytown." - p 17

Yep, one person's 'prosperity' might well be codependent on another person's destruction. More about that later.

""But this is a thing you find everywhere in Vados, indeed throughout the country. It is perhaps our national game so much as it is of the Russians, let us say." As though mention of the name had reminded her, she took another draw on her Russian cigarette and tapped the first ash into a tray on the table. It is, of course, a dream of our president that one day such another as the Cuban Capablanca should be found here in Cuidad de Vados. For that reason we play from childhood."" - pp 21-22

Since I'm usually pretty busy w/ a variety of things, when I'm reading a bk I'm also witnessing movies & reading other bks & these multiplicities sometimes coincide in stimulating ways. In this case, I witnessed Andrew van den Houten 2005 Headspace at about this point in reading The Squares of the City & was struck by the chess connection in relation to the last-quoted. In it, a mediocre chess player encounters some much better chess players in the park & gradually becomes enabled to beat the best of them due to an increase of intelligence under mysterious circumstances.

I become more engaged w/ what I read when the author references things that interest me - maybe just a casual passing mention of music that I like.

"I caught on. "Ah, Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park. Yes, I know what you mean. Is that the sort of thing you have in the Plaza del Sur?"

""Exactly. Only—our national temperament being what it is—our discussions sometimes grow more heated than among the phlegmatic English."" - p 22

What 1st struck me about this passage was the way the 2nd speaker seems to trivialize a heretofore only hinted at disturbance that seems potentially of more importance. Having now read the whole novel, I'm more just interested in Speakers' Corners anywhere. Yet another bk I've yet to read (even tho it's in my personal library) is The Speakers (1964) by Heathcote Williams. Will I live long enuf to read everything that interests me? People willing to elongate my life shd feel free to apply. My own excursions into Speakers' Corner type public speaking might be best represented by my "Soap Box Opera episode 4": http://youtu.be/FUY9DwiE1Dk .

Vados seems so 'perfect' BUT "["]The people of the villages and half-pint towns up-country from here saw this prosperous new city on their doorstep, so to speak, and decided they wanted to move in. Why, they argued, shouldn't they get a slice of this cake? Of course, to people like you and me it's obvious why not, but imagine trying to explain the facts to an illiterate Indian peasant.["]" (p 31) The reader won't have much trouble figuring out that the speaker here is from the privileged end of the spectrum. Later, a more compelling reason for this immigration is revealed. It all hints of classism & other imposed inequalities:

"["]The man of mixed blood who was addressing the crowd on his behalf is a certain Sam Francis. He had just assured the crowd—and I, for one, believe him—that he we will not spend a cento on himself until the fine is paid. And yet there are holes in his shoes."

"She swung around and pointed at the speaker under the Citizens of Vados banner. "There you see Andres Lucas, secretary of the Citizens Party. The shoes he is wearing probably cost him fifty dolaros, and he probably has more than twenty pairs. I do not know where Guerrero is, their chairman."

""I do," I said after a pause. "Lunching in the Plaza del Norte."

"She nodded without surprise. "The check there will be as much as a pair of Lucas's shoes.["]. - p 38

Finally, the real reason for the exodus of the peasants is revealed:

""They must have had homes where they came from," said Angers sharply.

""Had, Señor Angers! When they were starving because their water was taken for the city, when their land was dry, where else should they go but to the city?["] - p 50

Think this is unrealistic? Look at the recent history of India: dams are built, farmland is flooded, farmers are displaced, they go to the city as workers. In 2000, I had an Australian friend who was going to India to document rural Indian women who were going to chain themselves to their homes that were about to be flooded for just such a dam. Their purpose? To show that this displacement is MURDER, their plan was to die, if necessary, if the flooding went ahead. As usual, the beneficiaries of 'modern' society are often woefully ignorant of or cynically indifferent to the price that's pd for their luxury. What suffering went into making the computer I'm typing this on? What suffering went into the electrical power that keeps it running? Into the internet infrastructure that'll enable the posting of this review?

""At home"; yes, that was the trouble in Vados. Or a good part of it anyway. Twenty thousand people who couldn't regard the city as their home, although they lived in it—simply because it wasn't their home. They were in a foreign country in their own homeland." - p 54

One of the things that the Black Panthers always sd that impressed me deeply was that the police in their neighborhoods were an occupying army. Indeed.

The narrator, a traffic flow designer whose skills have earned him international acclaim & jobs among the informed, parades his impressive experience before us: "I'd had to allow for the snarls in traffic flow caused by the muezzins in Moslem cities calling the devout to prayer, and the consequent five-times-daily interruption of everything, much to the annoyance of the nonreligious citizens. I'd had to work out a design for an embankment along the Ganges where it was certain that at least a million people would suddenly turn up once a year, but which had to cope with them and with its ordinary traffic without wasting unduly much space on the million-strong crowd which would remain idle the rest of the year. I'd helped develop the signal system in Galveston, Texas, designed to give every fire appliance within twenty miles nonstop to any outbreak without interfering with traffic on any route not used by the engines." (p 61)

"and the total impression left on students like myself—who went through college faced with what seemed like equally appalling alternative futures: nuclear war or a population explosion that would pass the six billion mark by the end of the century" (p 82)

The above prediction of the worldwide human population by 2000 was written about 1965 or thereabouts. Estimates from multiple groups have the human population as less than 3.5 billion at the time - &, yes, those same groups have us at over 6 billion as of 2000. Now we're supposedly at over 7 billion. Scary, eh? NOW, where I live it's not crowded - one cd even say it's 'underpopulated' - so where is this population increase showing up the most? Wherever it is, expect some spill-over.

When I read a bk, I make pencilled jottings on its inner jacket about things that seem noteworthy as I go along. Since I don't know the bk in advance (I rarely reread bks), the notes are made based on whatever I know of the bk so far. THEN, when it's time to write the review, I go thru the notes in order & pick out the ones I want to use (usually almost all of them) & put them in the order they originally appeared unless a different order seems more compelling. I generally avoid following the plotline - both to avoid spoilers & in the interest of exploring subtexts. As I'm writing this, I've rejected a few possibilities as too plot-centered. The next quote is an exception. The structure of the novel is such that, predictably, what seems initially placid, becomes more & more violent as the secrets are revealed to the protagonist:

"Someone had thrown red paint all over Vados's statue.

"Police in the Calle del Sol were bundling young me into trucks; there was blood on the ground, and one of the police held two wet-bladed knives.

"During the lunch-hour meeting in the Plaza del Sur, Arrio had been hanged in effigy from a tree by enraged supporters of Juan Tezol, in protest against his being jailed. Police had had to clear that up, too; the evening edition of Libertad spoke of many arrests.

"My car had had the air let out of its tires.

"And Sam Francis had committed suicide in jail. . . ." - pp 175-176

Now that I've given away entirely too much of the plot, I'll distract you w/ trivia:

""All right, that wasn't an invitation. Go ahead and sing. How about La Cucaracha?"

""That is a bad song, señor. It is all about marijuana.["]" - p 214

[Lucian Bogdan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mi-a plăcut.
Traducerea a fost rezonabilă (din nou întâlnesc „noi plecasem” în loc de „noi plecaserăm”, chestie care mă omoară).

Boyd Hakluyt este angajat de guvernul din Aguazul pentru a găsi un mod de a redesena orașul Vados, astfel încât să elimine cartierele mizere unde s-au refugiat cei mai săraci locuitori ai țării. Treptat, specialistul se vede prins în țesătura intrigilor locale, în luptele dintre cei care doresc o țară cu un standard ridicat și cei ce trăiesc cu greu de pe o zi pe alta, victime ale bolilor, lipsei de educație și agresiunii autorităților.

Nu e o carte rea. Doar că partea SF e atât de subțire, încât, pentru mine, nu trece peste o sumedenie de alte texte care tratează societăți (reale sau fictive) din zona Americii Centrale și de Sud. Iar cu acestea, din păcate, n-am prea rezonat niciodată - nu mi-au stârnit / captat interesul, modul de a se comporta, de a gândi și acționa al oamenilor din acele zone nu face parte din lucrurile de care să fiu atras cine-știe-ce. Da, au specificul lor, farmecul lor, fantasticul lor - doar că e ceva la care eu sunt destul de insensibil (iar uneori chiar mă irită).

Așa se face că, atâta vreme cât nu exista ceva care să „acopere” cadrul, cartea nu avea cum să mă prindă în mod deosebit. Ideea ei e revelată la final - dar eu am intuit-o de pe la început (probabil că de vină a fost și opțiunea de traducere a titlului în limba română, care e un „spoiler” cât toate zilele). În fine, datorită faptului că m-am prins de la început care e ideea am reușit să apreciez cartea - care, din nou, nu e rea, ci doar tratează un subiect care, pentru mine, intră în categoria „plicticos”. Revolte locale, cetățenii avuți și cei cu un statut inferior, unii vor să scape de cei care murdăresc imaginea orașului, ceilalți vor și ei să aibă de unde mânca o pâine, latinii se înfierbântă ușor (în ambele direcții), străinul vine și vede din afară, apoi începe să treacă dincolo de aparențe și să înțeleagă dramele interne ale societății - totul scris frumos, dar nu în sfera mea de interes.

Am preferat să rețin ideea și să depistez elementele care vor fi exploatate ulterior în descrierea societăților din romane precum „Zanzibar” sau „Oile privesc în sus”.

[Dave Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

If J.G. Ballard had written this it would be regarded as a classic of modern literature. It's an interesting experiment, with quite a modern feel to it. The factions are not good and evil, the characters on both sides having sound and honest reasons for what they do and qualms when their beliefs drive them out of the lane of their moral code.

Some takeaways: the narrator talks of the "appalling future" (p 76) that would see an population explosion taking the Earth's population over six billion by the end of the century. Well, that's the H. sap pandemic we're living through. He points out that pictures make better propaganda than words, even among people who read (p 87) and that's exactly what we see on social media: people will share an image without stopping to consider whether there's any evidence or argument to support it. And throughout the book both factions use disinformation to make reasoned debate impossible.

The idea of fixing a society's problems through urban planning is interesting, hiding the deeper level of social engineering going on below that. That last bit is the conceit of the novel, and Brunner doesn't quite pull it off. For example, at one point a character is drugged and left for someone else to find in the expectation that the second person will, of all the ways they might react, kill the first -- which is ridiculously contrived, and unfortunate as it just highlights the unworkability of the book's entire premise. Still, it's an interesting formal experiment, which he explains in the notes at the end so I won't spoil it here, except to say that I'd been bewildered by the sheer number of characters we're expected to keep track of and the ending explains why.

[Padmin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Scheda e copertina di MondoUrania
Urania è lieta di presentare ai suoi lettori quello che si può a buon diritto definire uno dei più insoliti, intelligenti e perfetti "congegni" che la narrativa fantascientifica abbia mai prodotto. All'aereoporto di Vados, una capitale sudamericana, arriva dagli Stati Uniti un famoso "esperto" di urbanistica, che ha avuto dal governo locale l'incarico di rimettere ordine nella modernissima, ma già caotica, città. Ma già al controllo doganale Boyd Haklyut s'accorge che il suo lavoro sarà più difficile del previsto. E comincia per lui un'attesa snervante, incomprensibile. Perchè lo fanno aspettare? E chi lo fa aspettare? In una paurosa progressione di delitti, suicidi, incarcerazioni, duelli e sommosse, Boyd finisce per rendersi conto che nella metropoli è in corso un violento e occulto gioco di potere, in cui egli non è che una semplice pedina. Nel senso letterale della parola: infatti l'intreccio del romanzo corrisponde - mossa per mossa, personaggio per personaggio - a una celebre partita a scacchi giocatasi nel 1892 tra i campioni Steinitz e Cigorin, e il cui schema è riportato in appendice al volume. E' questo il "colpo di genio" del machiavellico Brunner, che riesce, da parte sua, a vincere su entrambi i fronti: quello degli appassionati di scacchi, che potranno divertirsi a riconoscere cavalli, alfieri, torri e regine mano a mano che entrano in azione; e quello degli amatori di una "storia" drammaticamente e magistralmente concatenata fino alla "rivelazione" finale.

[Marcus Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Squares of the City is hard to classify as being science fiction, it is more of a thriller with its sociological story of urban class warfare and political intrigue set in the fictional South American capital city of Vados. John Brunner is always at his most interesting for me when he is at his most speculative and dystopian, and in that sense he was ahead of his time by about thirty years. Here he explores the idea of subliminal messages as political tools, as people are moved around like human chessmen in a game, the novel even having the structure of a famous 1892 chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigorin. This structure plays an important part in the story, which is a very thought provoking read. Although if you are expecting little green men and alien invasions you will definitely be disappointed.

[Si · Rating 5 out of 5]

The characterisation suffers from a contrived ending, essential to fulfilling the authors chess metaphor however the underlying concept of the book, like all the best Sci-fi, is extremely prescient. As such it's well worth a read.

*Spoliers*




The central idea is that people can be controlled unwittingly and largely go along with it, as long as they don't perceive the puppeteers 'strings'. That concept and the similarities with nudge theory now employed in government departments is unmistakable to the modern reader. As such I found the parallels with current events striking, especially what happens when the populace begins to perceive the manipulation (and/or it fails) and the subsequent collapse in social order.

[Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is much more a political thriller than Brunner's usual sci-fi ideas, though many of his popular titles have quite a bit of politics involved. They still seem to market this book as sci-fi by really emphasizing the subliminal messages to control the population part of the story, though it is actually quite a small part of the overall plot.
Either way, this is a pretty solid story of Boyd Halkyut, who is a famous city planner, coming to the fictional city of Vados in South America to help them with their road system. But when he gets there is gets all meshed into their political turmoil and their "intricate" chess game. Classic Brunner.

[Scott Campbell · Rating 2 out of 5]

I vacillated between giving this 2 or 3 stars. So, 2.5? I like books with lots of vivid characters, and this book has that, and Brunner's prose is very good. But the government in Brunner's imaginary country was completely absurd, and the more I learned about it, the harder it became to believe in it. In addition, Brunner's main conceit, structuring the game after a famous chess game, seemed like a straitjacket as the book went on, with the result that I lost interest halfway through and struggled to finish it.

[Chris Sellers · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 stars everyday! I don’t know quite what it was about this book, perhaps the constant chess references, the political intrigue, the dystopia? I was unsure of it at first but this book gripped me and pulled me out of a reading slump that had lasted nigh on 7 years. I wouldn’t say it’s the best book ever, but it’s now very important to me. It reminded me why I loved to read so much all those years ago!

A book about road traffic management used as a political tool to displace the people of the favela. A game of chess on a grand scale.

[Chris Fox · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not science fiction. Brunner was the author of numerous SF classics; Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up. They were science fiction; this is about a man hired to solve traffic problems in a fictitious South American country and it is based on a 19th century game of chess, with detailed explanations of how each move of the game corresponds to an event in the book. Not my favorite Brunner.

[David Allen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 1965 novel, set in an ultramodern, exquisitely planned South American city and inspired by Brasilia, is of interest to fans of urban planning and chess. (Basically, the narrator, a traffic consultant, discovers he's a pawn -- literally.) It can be hard keeping the two political factions straight and the chess conceit doesn't quite work. The story still kept me engaged.

[K W · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty entertaining! Was not expecting chess fanfic that it was lowkey yet still enjoyed it. Our main character was simultaneously so aware and so unaware. And the world building was simple but engaging. Loved the take on subliminal messaging and it was a good cautionary reminder.

[Martin Doychinov · Rating 2 out of 5]

Не знам дали е (само) от превода, но много трудно се чете... Отдавна не съм оставял започната книга... Много добър сюжет, но просто на една трета от книгата не искам да я чета повече...

[Frank Ashe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember being impressed by this when I first read it as a teenager, but that may have been because of its structure as a chess game.

[Van Swearingen · Rating 2 out of 5]

The concept had such promise.

[Philip · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of this story is tedious and difficult to follow until the very end when you discover what is going on. Then you have to admit that the ideas are really clever.

[Saya · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lo añado porque lo tengo en físico y lo leí hace muchos años. Me dejó meh, es más bien una trama política que otra cosa.