Source: here.
We often noted in this blog the relationship between chess and science fiction. We note here another blog post of many such books, from the "science fiction" side - that is, a science fiction web site that has a post about science fiction books and chess (one is reminded of Nabokov's Pnin, where there is a fight between a historian of philosophy and a philosopher of history...).
Above, I add another book that is not in the list given by the science fiction web site: Gerard Klein's Starmasters' Gambit. Klein, I add, is a well-known French writer many of whose work, says the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, features "an imagery and even a structure influenced by chess."
It should be noted that sometimes - although by no means always - the alleged "chess" in the science fiction book is a mere plot device, where (for example) a "genius" who learned the game a week ago somehow manages to checkmate (in five moves or so) an unbeatable computer in a game on which hangs the fate of humanity. One such example is Barry Malzberg's Tactics of Conquest, witheringly reviewed by Edward Winter in Chess Notes 5355.
