An interesting science fiction novel about chess, by John Brunner, is The Squares of the City. This particular book is interesting for three reasons. First, it was nominated for the Hugo award in 1966. Second, it is based on an actual game, to wit, a game between Steinitz and Chigorin in 1892, as Wikipedia (see link above) notes.
A third point of interest is that the idea of using a particular chess game for a science fiction novel is not quite new. One example that predates Brunner is
Beyond the Void by "John E. Muller" (
R. Lionel Fanthorpe), a notorious hack write who turned out most of the novels for the notorious "Badger Books" series, as detailed in
Down the Badger Hole by
Debbie Cross. It is a retelling of
The Tempest on an alien planet. Cross notes:
But lazy old Shakespeare couldn’t provide enough plot for the terrifying needs of a Badger novel, even after eleven pages of small print detailing every single move of the chess game between Darmina and Ferdin[and].
In a 1961 novel, The Forbidden Planet (no relation to the famous movie), the chess metaphor is even more obvious, notes Cross:
The “sixty-four habitable planets federated to the Intergalactic Convention and explain the spacegoing capabilities of certain alien races, with Garaks able to teleport only along diagonals and Pralos along grid lines”, while “Anything a Pralos or Garak could do a Gishgilk could do”, and Zurgs not only leap askew through hyperspace but have horse-like faces, and... One can only admire, and even more so when in Chapter Ten the human pawns realize that the situation strangely resembles a forgotten Earth game – enabling the author to have them explain the moves to each other all over again...
It should be added that Edward Winter's "Chess in Fiction" article also gives other examples of awful science fiction use of chess, in particular Barry Malzberg's Tactics of Conquest, in which the chess content might have been, a reader points out, deliberately bad, as a literary experiment.
The same, to a degree, can be said of Fanthorpe: he never took his Badger novels seriously and used them as a joke, for example having in one novel "Suessydo" and his wife "Epolenep," with the novel ending with "Suessydo" using a heavy blaster, instead of a bow, to get rid of Epolenep's unwanted suitors.
