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.
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. (view spoiler)[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. (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about The Squares Of The City (1978)?
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.
—Stephen
I have always liked Brunner novels and this although different in style is no exception. The science fiction element is the notion of putting abstract notions like social control and town planning into practice. I particularly liked the notion of using traffic flows as lysosomes to cut off and eliminate undesirable elements from a city. Imagine how long a city would last with all its traffic connections cut? This is paired with a thrilling adventure with corruption and murder coming do a diabolical ending.
—Charles Harrison
An intriguing book, in many ways as much an academic exercise as a novel. Usually referred to as science fiction (though the sf elements are few until the denouement), it is perhaps better to consider it more generally as a tale of a Latin American country on the brink of revolution and accept it on those terms. For the most part, it works well in this way, though there are moments when the conceit of the story (basing the character moves upon a real historical chess match) threatens to intrude too far. For all that, a good readable yarn.
—James
