Chess in Sword & Planet Fiction: The Chessmen of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
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The Chessmen of Mars (Ace Books, December 1962). Cover by Roy Krenkel, Jr.
Chess in Sword & Planet fiction: I learned the basic rules of chess in grade school and liked that it was a game that didn’t require luck. I didn’t do well at “luck!” The first adult I played was my brother-in-law, who rather gleefully mopped the floor with me. Out of resentment, I began to study and in our next game, probably when I was about 16, I mopped the floor with him.
I played quite a bit in college and actually joined a chess club in graduate school and began to study the game seriously. I got close to “expert” level, still well below Master level, before realizing I had to quit serious chess if I were going to be able to do my graduate work. Both were very time consuming and chess wasn’t going to pay the bills so it had to go bye bye.
I bring the game up here because I remember with distinct pleasure discovering Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Chessmen of Mars. Wow! A whole book in which a chess-like game plays a major role, and where living chess pieces must fight for the control of squares during the game. I know this isn’t the first time someone used the concept of living chess pieces but it was my first exposure to it. It sent my imagination soaring.
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Interior frontispiece for The Chessmen of Mars by Roy Krenkel, Jr., and the
Science Fiction Book Club omnibus edition (January 1973), with a cover by Frank Frazetta
ERB even included the rules of Martian chess, called Jetan, in an appendix to that book. The game is played on a board of 100 squares of orange and black, with 20 pieces to a side. With the help of my brother-in-law, I actually made and painted my own Jetan board and pieces (using marked chess pieces and empty shells of various types).
I managed to talk my younger nephews into playing a few games but they didn’t care for it. I’m afraid Jetan never caught on in my little part of Arkansas, and I’ve long since lost that board.
Turns out, variations of chess, often but not always with a 100 square board, are common in Sword & Planet fiction, and my next couple of posts will discuss a few more. (You can find the rules for Jetan, by the way, online, at Wikipedia and other sites.)
The cover of my copy, pictured above, is by the awesome Roy Krenkel.
Read Part II of Chess in Sword & Planet Fiction, covering Dray Prescot and Gor, here.
Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for Black Gate was Part II of his look at the fantasy novels of Philip Jose Farmer.
One of my all-time favorite Burroughs books. I read my Ballantine paperback (with the wonderful Gino D’Achille cover) – 300 plus pages – in a single sitting. (Long, long ago!) The Kahaldanes are among Burroughs’s wildest creations.
One of mine too. Great story and imagination
Ooh! This sounds like a WONDERFUL topic! Looking through genres and finding unexpected themes and tropes tying disparate examples together has a distinctly treasure hunt-type feeling. Thanks in advance for writing this series.
Chess also seems to come up as a theme a lot in gamelit and litRPG. Does that make the two subgenres a child of sword-and-planet? Or perhaps it’s just that the types of authors who wrote sword-and-planet at its biggest would write litRPG now, and vice versa. So much of gamelit and litRPG involve being in a whole different world, whether through portals, gamedecks, or resurrections….
(Never quite liked chess as a game, though. I blame this on videogames; by the time I was old enough to learn chess, I’d already long been playing text adventures on the TI 99-4A, so things that didn’t have a story to them held less appeal. “You want me to play the same two armies in battle over and over again? Nuts to that!”)
I learned chess a long time before there were video games so I’m sure there’s some meaning there. Glad you enjoyed the post. I bet many of these writers would have dabbled in RPGs if they were around today.
I read this waaaay back in middle school. If I remember right, it doesn’t involve John Carter or any of his family directly– just like a palace guard from Helium trying to do a thing? Or maybe he was a minor noble. Whatever he was, that was one of the things I liked about it (if I’m even close to remembering it right).
Yeah, the protagonist (Gahan of Gathol) is a prince of another country, not one of the Carters, although the Fair Maiden(tm) he pursues is Tara of Helium, daughter of John Carter and Dejah Thoris. And she actually gets a fair amount of time on stage herself in the book.
You’re remembering it right. As Joe H, said, John Carter’s Daughter, Tara is the major player from the family here. I liked how ERB did this and brought in other characters from Barsoom rather than just focusing on Carter every time. Alan Burt Akers did something similar with his Dray Prescot series. I set this up for my own Talera series but have not written any of those later books as of yet.
One of my favorite of the later Barsoom books (Fighting Man of Mars is also a strong contender).
Yes, it was cool to see ERB expanding the world of Barsoom with other characters.
That was one of my favorite John Carter and Burroughs books!
And the adventure, it’s like a whole different writer versus the accepting phantasmagoric Nihilism of a hallucinatory version of Tangiers… Whoops! Wrong Burroughs!
Too bad there’s no good movie of it – just that ultra budget flop that guarunteed there’d be no serious attempt. Way back Harryhausen was possibly going to work out the creatures and there’d be a Roger Rabbit style mix of active actor and live action models…
yes, it would have made a great movie on it’s own
I read it in high school and built a set. For the pieces I used 3/4-inch dowel rods with add-ons. I recall something about some pieces having differing numbers of feathers? I definitely had 1/8-inch dowel rods sticking out the top of various pieces, but I don’t remember the other differentiators. Maybe in the patterns painted on them?
I also remember being annoyed by the large board and the pieces having limited range, and being really annoyed by the princess’s escape move. “I have to win twice?” But the 10×10 board did come in handy in grad school when I was working on n-by-n chess-board-coverage problems.
With the help of my brother in law, I built a board too, and used it for both Jetan and Jikaida (from the Dray Prescott books). I enjoyed setting it up but couldn’t get anyone to play with me. Where I grew up, few enough people even played chess
I like chess enough to always look into books that take it as a metaphor for their plot or for the author’s image of the plotting. I am currently subscribing to Anna Cramling’s Youtube channel, enjoying her games and her analysis of the game. She also got into the game of Tak, from Patrick Rothfuss’s books (The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man’s Fear) and developed by James Ernest (Cheapass Games).
that’s interesting. I didn’t know about Cramling. I’ll have to check it out
Her mother, Pia Cramling, was the #1 women’s chess player in the 1980s, and she often comments/annotates Anna’s games. They are a lively, interesting pair.
Very cool
It’s not sword-and-planet, but John Brunner’s “The Squares of the City” is structured based on an 1892 chess game between Wilhelm Steinitz and Mikhail Chigotin.
I have that Brunner book but haven’t read it. There’s a collection called Pawns to infinity that has several fictionlized chess games in. One of my favorite anthologies of all time.
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