Chess in Outer Space
By Sergio Ernesto Negri
As above, so below
That is one of the teachings of Hermeticism.
Its followers refer to Hermes Trismegistus who, in addition to alchemy, may have invented chess according to mythological accounts.
As in Heaven, so on Earth
It is well-known that chess can be played at all times and in all places.
This has happened at least since a version of the game arrived in Ctesiphon under Khosrow I in the 6th century, originating from an Indian kingdom east of the Persian Empire.
It has been present from medieval courts or in refined cafés (such as the Régence in Paris) to ominous places (prisons, ghettos, concentration camps or gulags),
It has been and is practiced in clubs, schools, in public spaces, and homes, the latter having been facilitated for some time by the development of virtual media.
And, because of its modern connection to technology and AI, it could be said that the ancient game is always in a position to capture the future.
If all this, and so much more, can happen on Earth, one must imagine that humanity, in its insatiable thirst to expand its limits, could take its favorite board game to the heavens.
That milestone occurred on June 9, 1970, when from the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz-9, which was on its ninth day in orbit around the planet, cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolayev (1929-2004) and Vitaly Sevastyanov (1935-2010) played a game (ended in a draw) against a pair of scientists from the Control Center on Earth.
For this, a board was used that was more art than technology, with incisions on its surface to prevent the pieces from moving outside the grid, even if a piece was captured, thus preventing them from flying around due to microgravity and potentially damaging the onboard instruments.
This effective and ingenious device is exhibited at the Moscow Chess Museum.
That being the first, it will not be the last time chess appears in extraterrestrial spaces.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Soyuz 9, in 2020, Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin (born in 1969) and Ivan Vagner (born in 1985), from the International Space Station, faced off in a simultaneous exhibition chess match against Russian Grandmaster Sergey Karjakin (born in 1990).
Previously, in 2008, Canadian astronaut Gregory Chamitoff (born in 1962), a keen chess enthusiast, from the International Space Station located in low Earth orbit, which he accessed via the Space Shuttle Discovery, faced opponents located on our home planet in a long meeting that lasted from September 2008 to December 2009.
The Americans astronauts of the ISS: Frank Rubio (born in 1975), Woody Hoburg (born in 1985), Steve Bowen (born in 1964), and Emiratis Sultan Alneyadi (born in 1981), played in 2023, versus the team of NASA flight directors from the Mission Control Center in Houston in 2023.
Does fiction precede reality?
The French writer Julio Verne (1828-1905) seems to indicate that this is the correct temporal sequence: indeed, he who imagined journeys to the Moon or in long-range submarines, as a clairvoyant, presented chess outside the Earth’s surface in his novel Hector Servadac.
In it, travelers of the vast spaces are seen entertaining themselves with chess in an experience that is quite disturbing when we discover that Servadac, cadavers seen in a mirror in French, is a word meaning «corpses,» from which it could be inferred that the space crew members were actually involved in their eschatological journey.
As on Mars, so on Earth
It is well known that one of the first to portray the existence of life on Mars in fantasy literature was the British H. G. Wells (1866-1946) who, proposing an alien invasion, caused panic in New York City when his influential story The War of the Worlds was read on the radio by a very convincing norteamerican actor Orson Welles (1915-1985). The writer was not precisely complimentary about a game that in his view could be «…the most absorbing of occupations, the least satisfying of desires, a purposeless excrescence of life.»
However, he would not refrain from including it in the story The Crystal Egg where the board appears in a shop window where the aforementioned crystal egg is also displayed. This contained a dynamic universe, which was none other than the planet Mars, which was considered inhabited; from that moment on, a specular watchful-watched relationship with disturbing consequences was established.
It will be the American writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) who, in The Chessmen of Mars, in addition to conceiving Martian life like Wells, will begin a path by proposing that its inhabitants could have a strategy game: we are in the presence of jetan (Martian chess), which is played on a board with living pieces in the style of Alice Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) or Harry Potter and his friends in the J. K. Rowling (born in 1965) saga.
For now, it is proverbial that in each move, the personal exploits and the life and history of the participants who as pieces form part of the game-battle are made evident, so we could conclude that Martian chess, rather than reflecting life, integrates into it, with the distinct possibility of losing it depending on the course of the crucial game.
The atanj presented by the American Stephen Stirling in In the Courts of the Crimson Kings is another Martian game that is played on a board of strange sixty-two squares (thus, initially losing the grid effect) with the addition of dice, just as happened in the original chaturanga, that proto-chess originated in the Indian subcontinent. It is considered a «game of life»: the outcome depends as much on one’s own strategy as on the force of chance (that of destiny), and existence itself is governed by the course of the game.
The American Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) imagines in Strange Eden a virgin and Edenic world inhabited by an eleven-thousand-year-old woman who, with her brother, had chess as their main sport, which they had introduced from Earth through ancestral Brahmins. Again, a link between extra-planetary games and the ancient and very terrestrial chaturanga.
For his part, Eando Binder, name assumed by the American brothers of that surname called Earl (1904–1966) and Otto (1911–1974), in The Chessboard of Mars suggests that on the red planet, a remote communication system was created that allowed Martians to control the movements of people, groups, and entire nations on Earth, manipulating events here almost as if its inhabitants were pieces of an interstellar game foreign to them.
Before leaving the red planet, let’s remember that the Argentinian Julio Cortázar, in a posthumously published short story, recorded the existence of Martian chess with very exotic pieces (tractors, balloons, underground houses) and with the ingenious paradox that each player had to move their piece as indicated by their opponent.
Thus in other parts of the cosmos, as on Mars
Caissa is the goddess of chess that Earth offers as a deity of the universe.
The American John Norman (born in 1931) surely thought so when he imagined that on the planet Gor, which, though in our solar system, could not be detected (as it is just on the other side of the Sun), there exists a game called kaissa that is practiced on a hundred-square board with pieces as strange as those representing assassins and slaves. A curious note: in an inconvenient taxonomy, it cannot be played by women and slaves.
On Callisto, one of Jupiter’s satellites, the American Lin Carter (1930-1988) assures, in Renegade of Callisto, that its inhabitants entertain themselves with darza (Thanatorian chess or deadly chess) in which, following the jetan model, players can lose their lives.
The British Kenneth Bulmer (1921-2005), by Alan Burt Akers series, in A Life for Kregen and A sword for Kregen, imagines that in a distant planet located near the star Antares, the brightest in the constellation of Scorpio, there exists an asymmetric chess game he calls jikaida where, again, real people assume the role of pieces to achieve personal goals (not to be killed) or social goals (to blockade a city, an island, or even the nation itself).
In The Paradox Men by the American Charles Harness (1915-2005), it is noted that in an orbital station, isolation and its consequent state of melancholy could be partially remedied with the game.
For its part, skill and concentration are key to being successful in the chess of Velda, a planet where the processes of life development and death itself depend on a game played on a 13×13 board as indicated by the Americans Charles de Vet (1911-1997) and Katherine MacLean (1925-2019) in Cosmic Checkmate.
The American Poul Anderson (1926-2001) was one of the genre writers who most used chess, placing it outside Earth’s orbit: for example, in A Circus of Hells. from the outset, he announces that we will be in the presence of «A hellish game of chess on an abandoned moon where every move was a checkmate.»
If we talk about science fiction writers, there is no way to omit the Soviet-American Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), who claimed to be «the most terrible chess player in history.» Despite this character, or perhaps precisely because of the fascination it caused him an activity he felt exceeded a mind as brilliant as his own, he included it with relish in his prolific work.
It is discovered in Pebble in the Sky, when there is talk of a fifty-game match played by Schwartz and Grew, not in outer space but on Earth itself (though seven thousand years in the future): there, several types of multi-dimensional chess are presented, and another two-dimensional one in which the placement of pieces at the start is randomized (a clear anticipation of the randomized chess once proposed by Bobby Fischer).
Outside the bounds of Earth, in Nightfall, Asimov presents a game for six contenders in perfect harmony with the fact that the inhabitants of Lagash only presumed the existence of that number of stars in the entire galaxy (we return to the idea of «as above, so below»). Also there is a stochastic chess in which, as its name indicates, statistics play a central role.
The American Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), in his famous The Martian Chronicles, mentions the game, no longer as a pastime in the form of games, but with physiognomic allusions, for example, when comparing the towers of a Martian village with the pieces of chess.
If in literature, mentions of chess types outside Earth’s orbit are numerous and diverse, it must be asserted that the same applies in audiovisual language. Who does not remember the images from 2001: A Space Odyssey, film directed by the American-British Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999), where a rebellious computer plays with the crew (and not just chess)? A story inspired by the novel by the British Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008), a notable reference in the science fiction genre who also, in his Rama saga, presented chess in Martian territory.
In the 1972 film Solaris, the masterpiece by Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986), based on the novel of the same name by Polish author Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006), set in the scientific space station orbiting the mysterious planet covered by a thinking ocean, where the everyday elements and isolation of the scientists reflect their emotional and intellectual stagnation, chess is seen integrated within that claustrophobic and melancholic environment as a pastime for the crew to deal with the tedium and the heavy psychological burden caused by the very consciousness of the planet.
In the very popular Star Trek series and movies, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock are seen playing a game using a beautiful three-dimensional chess set, and the latter also settled chess supremacies in a match against an alien.
As it is always possible to extend the limits, especially since chess invites us to embrace the idea of infinity and eternity, let’s remember that in Yoshiki Tanaka’s Legend of the Galactic Heroes stories, which were even brought into the world of video games, it is established that somewhere in interstellar space there exists an extremely complex and unimaginable nine-dimensional chess game in the context of a saga set in the 35th century. It will be a matter of waiting a bit and traveling far to be able to verify it.
Thus on the metaphysical plane, as in reality and literature
If chess could be here or there, yesterday, today, and always, one wonders what its precise origin might be.
Is it from our planet, as is quite intuitive and at first glance verifiable, or can one go a step further and commune with the Mexican writer Eduardo Lizalde (1929-2022) who even posits «…if the very origin of man is not, scientifically speaking, terrestrial, why should the origin of chess be terrestrial?»
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), the most universal Argentinian, as always, will approach the best answer by attempting to delve into the question in the realm of metaphysics. In conceiving Tlön, he imagined a planet where wonder matters more than truth and where ideas prevail over materialism, so he will say:
«Contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world. Spellbound by Tlön’s rigor, humanity has forgotten, and continues to forget, that it is the rigor of chess masters, not of angels».
An unfathomable chess that deeply moves science fiction writers, poets, filmmakers, and all who approach its magic.
An unfathomable chess due to the intrinsic depth of a game that offers the possibility of infinite possible games and of being appropriated by culture in its multifaceted metaphorical value.
An unfathomable chess that can reach any corner of Earth and space.
A chess for which one only needs to surrender to its ontological and ancient fascination.
In any case, it will never be merely about «moving little pieces,» whether it happens on Earth, in interstellar space, or in other worlds.
Chess, in proof of its power, has already begun to accompany us in the first explorations outside our home.
In time, we will very likely be surprised by extra-planetary life and its own strategy games (indigenous to them, exotic to us) that may refer to terrestrial chess.
In the exploration of the cosmos, we are only beginning the journey. In this incipient stellar journey of humanity thirsty to extend its frontiers and the search for knowledge, chess, as always, will continue to accompany us.
