Queenmagic

Perhaps twenty years ago, I picked up a copy of Isaac Asimov's Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine because it had a cover story named "Queenmagic, Pawnmagic" by Ian Watson. The story was fairly good, about a boy named Pedino who comes of age in the medieval setting of Bellogard, a city of light locked in war with an antithetical city of dark named Chorny. Ordinary citizens live their lives ignorant of the conflict which is fought magically between the lords and squires of the realm. During a practical joke gone horribly wrong, Pedino is found to have a soul and overnight goes from the son of a tradesman to Pawn/Squire.

Recently, I was delighted to find out that the story from that magazine was part of a larger book, "Queenmagic, Kingmagic". However, my enthusiasm was tempered when I read the story to the end. I think Act I and Act II are strong with insight into the human experience transplanted to a chess-themed one. I suppose the main constant throughout is that the main character has a preoccupation with a series of women in his life. But I'm disappointed as usual with Act III, which almost discards the groundwork of the previous two-thirds. The story goes through palace intrigue and star-crossed romance, but then there is a left turn into action-packed multiverse theory before returning home to a meandering wrap-up. The story goes through a succession of discarded quests - victory, survival, home, family, love - none of which seem resolved satisfactorily.

Perhaps Mr. Watson didn't want to write for a chessically educated audience, since there seemed to be strange liberties such as a pawn being lost during castling. There were perhaps three main battles but treatment of the strategy and tactics were disappointingly superficial. One problem the author seemed to have is that in his description of Pedino's life, the pawn had agency and soul, but when the larger kingdom came into focus, there was an element of Destiny that stole the agency from the Pieces acting as players within this life-sized game.

My twenty-something self was struck back then by this passage relevant to our current discussion of dead and wounded pieces:

Queen Alyitsa was dead – murdered by Prince Feryava of Chorny. Bishop Slon was dead, killed by Bishop Zorn. Squire Iris was dead, protecting Bishop Veck.

The survivors were: the king, Bishop Veck, Sir Brant, Prince Ruk, and five of us squires. Henchy was injured; his wrist had been broken. It would stay that way for the rest of his life. Magical injuries did not heal unless you killed the person who inflicted them.

Despite its shortcomings, it was fun to see perspective shift to life among the pieces. It reminded me of this poem which I posted back during the death of Bobby Fischer:

‘Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days
Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.
-- Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

A Song of Ice and Fire

I spent most of my leisure time during the holidays reading A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin. This is more or less a review with a bunch of quotes at the bottom. It's probable that I'll give away some ***SPOILERS BELOW***, so there's your warning.

Where to begin? It's difficult to summarize a work of such grand scope. Let's start on the positive. George R. R. Martin is a great writer. If you took the story-telling gifts of William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and J. R. R. Tolkein and rolled them all into one person, George R. R. Martin might be that person. He has a vivid style, flowery, but not excessively so. He has great instincts for pacing such that during climactic moments, the flowery words drop away and things happen in a rush. He has certain vocabulary mannerisms that seem very British ("arse") and some that seem a part of his invented fantasy universe ("Ser" instead of "Sir", "septs" instead of "churches", "sellswords" instead of "mercenaries"). There are also character mannerisms (every bearded character dribbles while drinking wine) and settings mannerisms (how many ways can you describe bone-numbing cold?) that mark his style. He also revisits about 10-15 themes such as "Winter is coming" (prudence) and "A Lannister always pays his debts" (monetary honor) that act as touchstones through the long tracts of pages.

The series is about a struggle to rule Westeros, a land of pre-gunpowder medieval chivalry, rival lordships, simmering feuds, legendary heroes, and ancient castles. Magic and mythical monsters seem extinct, although the very first chapter sets the tone for the return of an ancient inhuman evil. Martin's world includes a continent beyond the Narrow Sea that allows him to extend his tale beyond Western European culture into exotic Eastern cultures, such that if Scheherezade were an actual person, I would include her among Martin's inner muses. Most of the first book lays out the missteps and opening salvos of a war that engulfs a noble family of seven called the Starks. But the land is filled with carnivorous rivals: Lannisters, Targaryens, and Baratheons (oh my!). Against the backdrop of the rebirth of myth and magic, Martin weaves a Gordian knot of plots and murder mysteries among seven powerful families trying to grab the brass ring, or in this case an Iron Throne. Martin's characters run the gamut between stupid to genius, saintly to demonic, vivacious to listless and at least for the characters he concentrates on, they jump out from the page, warts and all. And just like in Shakespeare's tragedies, main characters die.

The deaths of main characters were jarring to me, especially since I hang on to childhood notions of "happily ever after". I hated the ending of Oscar-winning "Million Dollar Baby" and judging by the surplus DVD bin, so did much of America. But I was able to forgive Martin and keep turning the pages in hopes that enough of my favorite characters survive to justify my investment in their causes. But I now realize that perhaps Martin had little choice to create real danger and surprise. When I read the David Eddings' Belgariad (Pawn of Prophecy, Queen of Sorcery, Magician's Gambit, Castle of Wizardry, and Enchanter's End Game) or many of Asimov's works, I felt somewhat bored because their protagonists intelligently hatched plans, and executed them, perhaps improvising a little when things go wrong. Danger to main characters seems only a distant possibility. Martin actually gives his villains the elements of surprise, initiative, intelligence, and victory. Good guys haven't always won so far and perhaps I will grudgingly admit that the story experience has been richer for it.

This series is not for the faint of heart. George R. R. Martin originally started out in 1995 making a trilogy, but like the horizon, the final book keeps moving away, until now he estimates the final act to be book seven. He has only published the first five so far. The reading is voluminous. To finish book five, you have to read about 4,000 pages. Compare that to J. R. R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings at 1,200 pages. There is a cast of thousands and I am not exaggerating too much here. The books have appendices that show family trees out to four or five generations of semi-significant characters plus perhaps thirty minor families. There are so many names that it is almost a necessity to consult A Wiki of Ice and Fire to keep from being hopelessly lost in the crowd. The content of both the book and the first season on HBO I would definitely rate at NC-17. Martin does not shrink from describing the horrors of war including amputations and maimings, gang rapes, infanticide, and torture. He is also not one to gloss over consensual sexual situations; sex sells. But there is at least one child rape that I can think of and some tangential references to an underage sex trade from which I have some trouble withholding Victorian judgment. It does add realism and cultural richness to Martin's world in a time of war that such ugliness is not covered up.

Martin also tackles weighty issues within his fiction framework using a realistic and sometimes satirical viewpoint. In this endeavor, he follows Mark Twain whose Huckleberry Finn focuses on slavery and whose A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court take on chivalry. Knights follow codes of honor for each other, but treat the common folk as less than dirt. Slaves are not just servile robots, but human beings trying to survive through obsequiousness and insidious rebellion and the little resources that they can muster. One writer took Martin's work as a commentary on statecraft, concluding that Martin seems to advocate use of soft power.

In summary, the 4,000 plus pages of "A Song of Ice and Fire" are well worth the slog. For chess players, there are references to the "Game of Thrones" in the first three books. In book five, a game similar to chess named cyvasse makes its appearance. The plots to win the throne include of course the defeat of other kings with the death of the losing king the standard consequence. There's nothing like a tale of regicide to get a chess player's blood flowing. The characters in the first book roughly map out to a group of chess pieces:

King:	King Robert Baratheon
Queen:	Queen Cirsei Lannister
Queen's Bishop:	Lord Varys - "The Spider"
King's Bishop:	Lord Petyr Baelish - "Littlefinger"
King's Knight:	Ser Barristan Selmy - "Barristan The Bold"
Queen's Knight:	Ser Jaime Lannister - "The Lion of Lannister"
Queen's Rook:	Lord John Arryn
King's Rook:	Lord Eddard Stark
Pawns:	Robb Stark, Brandon Stark, Sansa Stark, Arya Stark, Jon Snow, Joffrey Baratheon, Tommen Baratheon, Theon Greyjoy

Here are some quotes from the book that are tangentially relevant to chess.

Volume 1: A Game of Thrones
Ser Jorah Mormont: The common people pray for rain, healthy children, and a summer that never ends. It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of thrones, so long as they are left in peace. They never are.

Queen Cersei Lannister: When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground.

Lord Eddard Stark: Lord Baelish, what you suggest is treason.
Lord Petyr Baelish: Only if we lose.

Volume 3: A Feast for Crows
Lord Petyr Baelish: Always keep your foes confused. If they are never certain who you are or what you want, they cannot know what you are like to do next. Sometimes the best way to baffle them is to make moves that have no purpose, or even seem to work against you. Remember that, Sansa, when you come to play the game.
Sansa Stark: What... what game?
Lord Petyr Baelish: The only game. The game of thrones.

Lord Petyr Baelish: I am tempted to say this is no game we play, daughter, but of course it is. The game of thrones.
Sansa Stark (thinking): I never asked to play. The game was too dangerous. One slip and I am dead.

Lord Petyr Baelish: I might have to remove her from the game sooner than I'd planned. Provided she does not remove herself first. In the game of thrones, even the humblest pieces can have wills of their own. Sometimes they refuse to make the moves you've planned for them. Mark that well, Alayne, It's a lesson that Cersei Lannister still has yet to learn.

Volume 5: A Dance with Dragons
Haldon Halfmaester: The day you beat me at cyvasse will be the day turtles crawl out of my arse.

"Prince Aegon," said Tyrion, "since we're both stuck aboard this boat, perhaps you will honor me with a game of cyvasse to while away the hours?"
The prince gave him a wary look. "I am sick of cyvasse."
"Sick of losing to a dwarf, you mean?"
That pricked the lad's pride, just as Tyrion had known it would. "Go fetch the board and pieces. This time I mean to smash you."

They played on deck, sitting cross-legged behind the cabin. Young Griff arrayed his army for attack, with dragon, elephants, and heavy horse up front. A young man's formation, as bold as it is foolish. He risks all for the quick kill. He let the prince have first move. Haldon stood behind them, watching the play.

When the prince reached for his dragon, Tyrion cleared his throat. "I would not do that if I were you. It is a mistake to bring your dragon out too soon." He smiled innocently. "Your father knew the dangers of being over-bold."
[..]
Smiling, he seized his dragon, flew it across the board. "I hope Your Grace will pardon me. Your king is trapped. Death in four."
The prince stared at the playing board. "My dragon..."
"...is too far away to save you. You should have moved her to the center of the battle."
"But you said..."
"I lied. Trust no one. And keep your dragon close."
Young Griff jerked to his feet and kicked over the board. Cyvasse pieces flew in all directions, bouncing and rolling across the deck of the Shy Maid. "Pick those up," the boy commanded. He may well be a Targaryen after all.
"If it please Your Grace." Tyrion got down on his hands and knees and began to crawl about the deck, gathering up pieces.

The thin man shifted an onyx elephant.
Across the cyvasse table, the man behind the alabaster army pursed his lips in disapproval. He moved his heavy horse.
"A blunder," said Tyrion. He had as well play his part. "Just so," the thin man said. He answered with his own heavy horse. A flurry of quick moves followed, until finally the thin man smiled and said, "Death, my friend."

Tyrion Lannister: I play better with a full belly and a cup of wine to hand.

Freak Show

Here are two book reviews. I hope people don't get offended by my broad-brushes with the word “freak”. Taking a cue from Mr. Fatsis, I consider these personalities freakishly accomplished.

King's Gambit by Paul Hoffman
In my review of The Chess Artist, I ended up panning the book mostly because I felt robbed at the end by the author's disillusionment and estrangement from his friend and chess itself. After reading King's Gambit, I would say that Paul Hoffman's book is the one I had been seeking.

King's Gambit explores the lofty aeries to the depths of abyss experienced by those chess artists that commit the best part of their lives to the game. The heights include interviews with Garry Kasparov and Nigel Short. The depths include analyses of the usual suspects: Morphy, Fischer, Bloodgood. Not only did Paul Hoffman interview FIDE President Kirsan Ilzhuminov, but he also played a tense King's Gambit against him which ended in an agreed draw. The author's friendship with Pascal Charbonneau allows us to vicariously live the triumphs and tragedies near the top, including the penultimate aspiration chessplayers can have aside from becoming world champion: becoming an International Grandmaster.

One of the most amusing parts was reading about Charbonneau's terrible study habits. The most dramatic part was the intimation of threats of bodily harm in Libya.

Paul Hoffman himself is quite a character with an amazing resume including: graduating summa cum laude from Harvard College, steering Encyclopaedia Britannica, steering Discover magazine, and being color commentator for ESPN on the man vs. machine match between Garry Kasparov and Deep Fritz. When I found out he was also the man behind the pseudonym Dr. Crypton, whose puzzles I had played with as a teenager reading Science Digest, I had a "No way!" moment. Ridiculously ubiquitous.

The inclusion of his complicated relationship with his father points up the subconsciously patricidal psychology of chess illuminated by Ernest Jones' analysis of Paul Morphy. I felt disappointment that the author's marriage fell apart, but perhaps feel privileged that he confided this with me as the reader of his memoir. I hope that his own experiences are a cautionary tale on how to maintain his relationship with his son. As with Chess Artist, I sensed an estrangement between the author and chess, backed up from what I see in the USCF databases, but Hoffman recently defended his legitimacy as a continuing chess player by pointing out his participation in an unrated 2007 city team league. Whereas there is still disillusionment at the end of the book, there are still relationships to fall back on in the larger scheme of the author's rich life. Since the book was autobiographical in scope, the larger context of accomplishment makes the disillusionment less jarring. This time, I didn’t feel robbed.


Word Freak by Andrew Fatsis
Word Freak is an entertaining and thorough treatment on the history of Scrabble and the colorful (read dysfunctional) personalities that inhabit its upper echelons. Again, the story follows the author's own efforts to find some level of accomplishment in the game while hanging out with amazingly skilled anagrammers. Many of the chapters are entitled simply with a four digit number which was his rating during that time. Ups and downs and self-loathing are all too familiar.

I was most amused when he described the craving for more legitimacy for Scrabble as a socially important pastime relative to chess which has its own inferiority complexes, usually craving the legitimacy of golf and tennis. The question "Why can't tournament Scrabble be as legitimate as tournament chess" makes me laugh when I think about chess' current sad state of governance. The doubters' refrain "It's just a game" hounds the Scrabble players who like chess players seem to be hopelessly behind the house in terms of life spent in questionable pursuit. Books like these help to document and legitimize the common effort of a chosen - or stigmatized - few.

Being a book about Scrabble, the words themselves became a star subject. Having spent some time memorizing a few 7-letter bingoes myself, I appreciated it when Fatsis worked words like ETESIAN (an annually occuring wind) and SENARII (Greek or Latin verses consisting of six metrical feet) into the everyday vignettes. One gets the impression that the English language is one massive fusty museum with entire wings of forgotten words that only get visited by the pedantic Scrabblers in search of their next bingo or clever word hook. The sheer mental exertion required to cram hundreds of thousands of obscure word patterns into a mind is reminiscent of the herculean task of cramming chess openings and tactical patterns into these fallible brains. The sieve and the sand. A visit to a lexicographer who seemed to possess the keys to the entire English language in his modest ascetic apartment came off as positively surreal.


In both of these books, the authors are fairly proficient practitioners of the games, nearly experts. They feel the inferiority complex of hanging with the masters without being able to really hang with the masters. I think this is the sweet spot of writing for an amateur audience. They are both skilled writers who can describe in beautiful detail the promised land from a lofty vantage point, but like Moses, they themselves are not allowed to enter. Author and reader commiserate in the bittersweet wistfulness of mediocrity. I highly recommend both King's Gambit and Word Freak as clear and luxurious picture windows on these freakish worlds within our world.

Potemkin Village

Since Dana Mackenzie just put up a review, I thought I'd chime in with a short review I wrote a while back and was saving for a slow news day.

A while back, I read J.C. Hallman’s The Chess Artist. Like Catherine Neville’s The Eight, I liked the descriptive elements of the writing such as the Kalmyk fly and the extravagant desolation (another oxymoron for you, Dana) of Kalmykia. I liked the in-depth character sketches of Glenn and Baagi, especially their common satisfaction at having played without fear.

However, as with The Eight, I was hoping for more of a payoff. The main plot device seemed to be a half-hearted detective story about the death of reporter Larisa Yudina who was found beaten to death in a pond in Elista. Perhaps the book was limited by the fact that it was autobiographical and couldn’t rightly blend with fiction invented out of whole cloth. Ultimately the Yudina plot was weakly executed with several pointless walks and no real fact-gathering.

There was a decided lack of plot twists and characters changing course, except for a kind of exhausted repulsion between the two main characters at the end. In a way, the awkward tension between the main character and his compatriot is the same weak feeling that I had toward the book at the end. The Chess Artist was a respectable effort at painting a colorful picture of people and places. But because of its limitations in reality, it felt like I was reading the embellished journal of someone who didn’t really have such a significant life-changing tale to tell. The title sold me on an artist's journey, but like Kalmykia's Potemkin village it was facade without substance.

A Tale Of Two Chess Novels

A while back I read Katherine Neville’s The Eight. One could describe it as a chessplayer’s The DaVinci Code. Indeed, several of the reviewers at Amazon.com compare the two and imply that Dan Brown’s 2006 smash hit was heavily influenced by Neville’s book published in 1990.

My opinion of The Eight could be summed up by saying: great opening, but it went downhill to the endgame. The Eight is a bit long for those with limited attention spans, 550 pages in hardcover. The underlying concept is great - a historic and present-day crusade to find and reunite the pieces of a magical chess set - but the characters and plot degenerate into what I would describe as “a bunch of people running around.” I think the strength of the treasure hunt genre is that the main characters bring expert skill and knowledge to the truly testing parts of the climax. In the homestretch of "The Last Crusade", Indiana Jones not only solves the riddles and traps, but he makes the process of struggling to solve these the center of the stage. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare a book to a movie, but the climax of The Eight just seemed like so much “and then they went there and did this.” Perhaps if she had made the protagonist an actual chess player and given her some chess problems to solve, it might have satisfied my desire for merit in the protagonist instead of apparently dumb luck all the time.

There also seems to be a problem of bumbling villains. They don’t seem particularly clever or distinguishable from each other, and the “good guys” don’t have much trouble dispatching them. It is here that Dan Brown did one better and characterized a many-tentacled Opus Dei with coolly efficient Captain Fache, rich and connected Bishop Aringarosa, and terminator-like Silas. What is Indiana Jones without Dr. Belloq?

I really liked the weaving of chess history and culture into the beginning of the story. It was fanciful to think that chess played integral parts in the French Revolution and the Oil Embargo. I like the flowery descriptive portions of Neville’s work such that I feel deprived not knowing what certain plants smell like while driving on coastal roads. I have to agree that she paints excellent pictures with her words, such that I was transported to the places she described and craved a glimpse at the marvelous chess pieces. But in the end, the weak plot resolution left me disappointed.


Today, I read Ronan Bennett’s 2007 Zugzwang. I walked into the public library to return some books and my eyes were drawn to two titles, Endgame Enigma which turned out to be a sci-fi novel with apparently only a tangential relationship to chess, and Zugzwang which seemed to be just what I was looking for.

I picked up the book at 3pm at the library and read all 269 pages in essentially one five-hour sitting. Whereas The Eight is written in the historical context of the French Revolution, Zugzwang is written in the prelude to the 1917 Russian Revolution against the tsar with the primary historical event being the 1914 St. Petersburg chess tournament, won by Emanuel Lasker.

The main character is a psychoanalyst who meets all manner of devious characters while mingling among the bourgeoisie, exorcising their psychological demons, and trying to evade wrongful prosecution from several different police entities. Of course one of his patients is the stereotypical near-autistic chess master, made into one of the least interesting characters by his incompetent and clichéd existence. Certainly, the female characters seem less important here than the ones in The Eight. On the one hand, they hold the plot together, easing the fantastic connections of the central characters (Adhesive and lubricant?) But sometimes, they seem little more than potboiler material. (Yes, there is sex in this book.) The villains and allies seem complex in their intersecting schemes, but in a way, they begin to seem like clones of each other, crossing and double-crossing everyone like the round robin tournament that is the backdrop. But at least they are competent, respectable villains, not the bumbling kind found in The Eight.

Compared with The Eight, Zugzwang certainly contains less flowery detail about places, colors, and the general smell of the place, but with the added perception of the psychoanalyst’s lens, the latter’s characters seem much deeper.

Best of all, there is an ongoing correspondence game throughout the book which I appreciated as a very finely conducted endgame involving zugzwang with both queens on the board. Unfortunately, the diagrams that followed the game had some awful errors, but the endgame is still decipherable to the seasoned chess amateur. While The Eight has voluminous chess references that seem almost shoehorned into the text, Zugzwang makes up for quantity with the quality of sparingly and appropriately used chess references.

In summary, both books interlace regicidal portions of history with chess-related murder mysteries. I think the problem with The Eight is that it became too ambitious with too many settings and the added dimension of treasure hunt genre, such that the ending became too unwieldy to tie up. Zugzwang was much more tautly written with more interesting psychological struggles and better plot execution. The Eight I would coolly recommend with reservations of not getting your hopes too high about the plot. I wholeheartedly recommend Zugzwang especially for (adult) chess players.