James Nicoll Reviews

John Brunner’s 1965 The Squares of the City is a stand-alone Ruritanian thriller.

Under Vados’ benign dictatorship, the once-backwater South American nation of Aguazul thrives. Ciudad de Vados is an exemplar of Vados’ vision, a useless wasteland transformed into a peerless modern city.

Ciudad de Vados has one unsolved challenge. Traffic analyst Boyd Hakluyt is hired to help resolve it.

From afar, Aguazul might seem free of the woes common to South American nations¹. Vados is a dictator, yes, but he prefers persuasion over brute force. Vados uses cutting edge media theory to sway the masses. Vados also has a knack for hiring experts and for listening to them. If one had to live in a dictatorship, Aguazul seems like an excellent choice.

Ciudad de Vados is a victim of Vados’ success. The city represents wealth and comfort unmatched elsewhere in Aguazul. No surprise that many of the peasants took note and moved to the city. Or rather, to the slums that sprang up adjacent to (and in one notable case, within) Ciudad de Vados. The slums and those who live within them are a sore point for the European residents. One of the rewards with which Vados tempted experts to spend years building a city in South America was citizenship. The very sight of the natives and their squalid homes is an affront. Even worse, the natives are demanding a place in the city. Tensions are high.

The ​“traffic” issue Boyd is tasked to resolve is how to remove the natives without triggering violence. The obvious solution — having the police and the army apply however much violence is needed to convince the slum dwellers to move on — is contrary to Vados’ preferred methods. Boyd must provide some more subtle means of persuasion.

The longer Boyd is in Ciudad de Vados, the more aware that he should have exercised some due diligence before he signed his contract. The means by which Vados encourages compliance are technically non-violent but are nevertheless alarming. The divisions between factions of the elites are more profound than Boyd realized. Violence is rife.

In another nation, coup, counter-coup, and civil war might be inevitable. However, here too Vados innovates. Aguazul is famed for its love of chess. Why not apply chess to the question of whose vision for the nation will win out?

~oOo~

The answer to the final question is ​“because it is a bad idea that won’t work.” Points for at least attempting the least violent option, though. Jerry Pournelle would have had the mercenaries hired by Vados machine-gun the natives somewhere around page 60.

My copy of The Squares of the City is the 1973 Ballantine edition, which is a fine example of the gratuitous nudity school of SF cover art. Therefore, I found myself explaining to teachers that the novel is not, as it appeared, soft-core porn, but rather a traffic control thriller. Teacher reaction was skeptical.

Brunner is one of a number of SF authors who tried to up their game in the mid-1960s. Brunner is also one of a number of SF authors who discovered over the next ten or fifteen years that readers won’t necessarily reward increased effort with a proportionate increase in sales. Thus, Brunner’s ill-fated venture into historical novels.

The Squares of the City is — this is something of a spoiler but pretty much every edition gives it away on the cover²—a novel whose plot is a chess game. The game is based on ​“Steinitz-Tchigorin (Havana) 1892, precisely as recorded in the Penguin handbook The Game of Chess by H. Golombek.” Various unlucky residents have been assigned the role of specific chess pieces.

Ideally this would be where I reveal that I am a lifelong chess fan before incisively analyzing Brunner’s transformation of the game in his plot. In actual fact, I only belonged to the high school chess club because the chess club let me read in peace, while the library would only let me spend half of each lunch period in the library³. I am not a skilled chess player, so that whole angle of the novel is lost on me. Points for ambition, though.

I thought the book was a bit dull when I read it back in 1973. Rereading it today, I see Brunner is advancing a scathing view of colonialism. The (almost entirely European) citizenry views the city as theirs and theirs alone. The belief on the natives’ part that they’re somehow entitled to a place in the city simply because the city is on land appropriated from them is seen as unforgivable cheek. As far as the Europeans are concerned, the natives are barely human and should be happy to live somewhere out of sight⁴.

The immediate result is a fair amount of tension and self-segregation between pale- and dark-skinned people, which Boyd notes without immediately understanding.

I noticed a strange coincidence-even with my Florida tan, I was the palest among the people who had stayed to hear the music, whereas on the other side of the square, where I had been at first, it was a swarthy skin that was a rarity.

A division of sophistication, perhaps. 

The SFnal element comes not from the chess game but the means by which the Vados regime shapes public opinion. Aguazul has embraced subliminal persuasion and developed it to a high degree. It’s challenging to consume visual entertainment without being subjected to it⁵. It is part and parcel with Vados’ love of non-violent control… but there’s a drawback Boyd points out once the novel reaches the inevitable-in-a-Brunner-novel stage of angry lecturing.

The conceit of a novel based on a chess game is interesting but the result isn’t especially gripping… at least for non-chess fans. If you are a chess fan, your mileage may vary.

The Squares of the City is available here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), and here (Kobo).

It does not seem to be possible to buy this book directly from publisher Open Road Media. British publisher Orion does list the novel, but it’s not clear to me if the non-Kindle versions can be purchased.

I did not find The Squares of the City at Bookshop UK, Chapters Indigo, or at Words Worth Books, presumably because the only edition is an ebook.

1: The role the US plays in regional instability is not mentioned, although Brunner was the sort of author who would be aware of and complain about it.

Nevertheless, USA delenda est.

2: Except for the editions from publishers who prefer zero-effort covers.

3: I don’t think the non-reading rule was a general rule; I suspect it was a James-specific guideline whose purpose was to get my nose out of books. Presumably so that I would spend more time socializing more with other students. Students with whom I had little in common. Nothing makes me dig in my heels like a hand in the small of my back, pushing, so I found a way to comply with the exact words of the rule while sidestepping the spirit.

4: Vados for his part wants his nation to be rich, which necessarily involves modernizing the hinterlands… but he also doesn’t want slums in his jewel of a city. What is a hard-working dictator to do?

5: The natives being too poor to afford TV or movie tickets must mean that they are less exposed to subliminal nudges, which fact may have exacerbated the social divisions.