Fritz Leiber 1 hr read

Reporter Sandra Lea Grayling curses the day she talked her paper into covering the first grandmaster tournament to admit an electronic computer among the yakking, shabby chess masters.

Fritz Leiber's 1962 story is a superb, prophetic AI-and-social-SF tale of the first chess-playing machine. Sharp, funny, remarkably foresighted. Read it for a landmark story that imagined the man-versus-computer chess drama decades early, rich in the color and obsession of the tournament hall, from a master of the field.

In its time

Published in 1962, during the 1960s, new wave revolutionizes the genre.

Reading it

1 hr read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

Burns