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.

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.

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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.