Storyline: 2/5Characters: 3/5Writing Style: 3/5Resonance: 1/5The first few chapters held some real surprises for me. I'd approached this because of Brunner's science fiction credentials and the book's nomination for the 1966 Hugo Awards. I wouldn't, however, classify this as science fiction. There's a little technological invention of the Cold War variety - supposed developments the other side had and was employing, but nothing that wasn't rumored to already be true then in the 1960s. Hardly eno...

review of John Brunner's The Squares of the City by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 9, 2014 "Review is too long. You entered 21001 characters, and the max is 20000" - In other words, see the full review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...Do you ever think about the urban planning that goes into things like the way traffic lights work? I do - & I'm impressed when such things work so efficiently that traffic keeps flowing w/o my getting too annoyed by delays, w/o accidents. "I came qui...

I remember being impressed by this when I first read it as a teenager, but that may have been because of its structure as a chess game.

Most of this story is tedious and difficult to follow until the very end when you discover what is going on. Then you have to admit that the ideas are really clever.

I first read this many years ago. An enjoyable example of politics buried in sci fi.And the poor consultant who discovered he was a pawn...

The Squares of the City is hard to classify as being science fiction, it is more of a thriller with its sociological story of urban class warfare and political intrigue set in the fictional South American capital city of Vados. John Brunner is always at his most interesting for me when he is at his most speculative and dystopian, and in that sense he was ahead of his time by about thirty years. Here he explores the idea of subliminal messages as political tools, as people are moved around like h...

This 1965 novel, set in an ultramodern, exquisitely planned South American city and inspired by Brasilia, is of interest to fans of urban planning and chess. (Basically, the narrator, a traffic consultant, discovers he's a pawn -- literally.) It can be hard keeping the two political factions straight and the chess conceit doesn't quite work. The story still kept me engaged.

Apologies for the rambling gonzo review that is to follow - wanted to get my thoughts on this down in short order before the book faded from my immediate memory. I fully intend to edit this into something more sensical in due course. I wasn't actually going to write a review on this until I started to see the "Recommendations" Goodreads were supplying me off the back of my four star rating and started to get a little irked... It's telling I think about how difficult John Brunner is to classify a...

First published in 1965, “ The Squares of the City” marks John Brunner’s movement away from the space opera/time-travel form he had hitherto been working in and his first foray into the “social science fiction” that ultimately would be what his reputation would rest on. Set in a very near future ( 1970?) in the artificially developed capital city of a fictional South American country ( the city is based on Brasilia). It focuses on a European analyst who has been hired to improve the traffic flow...

I stumbled across this book on Amazon during one of my many browsing sessions. As a chess player, I sometimes gravitate toward novels that use chess in one way or another. This novel was to take the usual conventions a step further by using an actual game of chess to guide the plot. Intriguing, I thought. The beginning of the book is an introduction by Edward Lasker, a chess master and author. His endorsement of the novel gave me hope that the idea would be well executed. It prepares the reader

This is not science fiction. Brunner was the author of numerous SF classics; Stand on Zanzibar, The Sheep Look Up. They were science fiction; this is about a man hired to solve traffic problems in a fictitious South American country and it is based on a 19th century game of chess, with detailed explanations of how each move of the game corresponds to an event in the book. Not my favorite Brunner.

Boyd Hakluyt has been hired to update the traffic system in Vados the shining jewel, capitol city, of Aguazul. A country in Latin America. Once he gets there he finds that he isn't there to fix a traffic problem, but rather a social one. Twenty years ago presidente Vados conceived of creating a new city for the capitol, one that is modern, and engineered to perfection. Many of the foreigners that helped build the city were granted citizenship. There is a disparity between Vados and the rest of t...

3.5 to 4.0 stars. John Brunner has yet to disappoint me with one of his novels. His classic Stand on Zanzibar is one of my all time favorites and The Sheep Look Up and The Jagged Orbit were both excellent. This is not one of his more famous books which is a bit of a shame because of its originality in style and execution. Let me say at the outset that there is not really a "science fiction" element to the story and it belongs more in the category of mystery/thriller. It basically involves a traf...

The characterisation suffers from a contrived ending, essential to fulfilling the authors chess metaphor however the underlying concept of the book, like all the best Sci-fi, is extremely prescient. As such it's well worth a read.*Spoliers*The central idea is that people can be controlled unwittingly and largely go along with it, as long as they don't perceive the puppeteers 'strings'. That concept and the similarities with nudge theory now employed in government departments is unmistakable to t...

The concept had such promise.

The Sheep Look Up utterly devastated me when I read it for the first (and definitely not the last) time earlier this year, and I realized that John Brunner was a guy whose books I would definitely need to track down one by one until I had read them all.Then a relatively new Twitter friend, Fred Kiesche, applauding my resolution, told me that if The Sheep Look Up was "death by pollution", The Squares of the City was "death by chess". As in the structure is modeled after a World Championship game

2.5 StarsNot in any way a science fiction novel, but an enjoyable read until the end anyway. The end has a very silly reveal followed by a sillier closing scene. An interesting discussion of sociology/colonialism but doesn't really come to any conclusions. The characters' actions don't always make sense, but a decently enjoyable narrative nonetheless.

I moved to East Rogers Park on Chicago's north side after graduating from seminary in New York in 1978. I'd been away, except for some vacations, since college and the fabric of my social relationships had unravelled over the years. Thus, my first apartment was a miserable studio on Morse and Ashland, one of the worst areas in the neighborhood. I had no television, no phonograph, no job and very few friends. I did, however, have books, lots of them, stored during the years of my schooling at the...

This book is a head trip and a half. One of my former friends gave it to me, telling me only that "it was a sci-fi book about a chess game". Needless to say, I was ill prepared for what I was about to encounter.First of all, it's barely science fiction. It's mainly a story of urban planning, and the tribulations that can result.Secondly, The entire book is the chess game, and the difficulty is recognizing which characters correspond to which pieces, and when they're meant to have moved (obviousl...

While I was trying to describe this to someone who'd never heard of Brunner, I came up with "Phillip K. Dick with a heaping spoonful of Heinlein." The mixture, especially in this book, is a good one - it's very Dick, but the main characters are better drawn, the story is more accessible, and there is a hell of a lot less angst. Still plenty of tension. This particular book would make a brilliant movie.The only thing that keeps me from giving it five stars is the way the secondary characters ran