Birth of the Chess Queen
first read May 2015
This is the type of writing that I assumed poisoned the m-dash. The free-for-all of the 2015 internet had to be dripping with more amateur writings than just mine, and I assume we all relied heavily on under-edited, over-wrought sentences that required questionable m-dashes to stay erect. And so when the predictive-text AI machines devoured the collected musings of a bunch of hacks, what has become everyone’s favorite generative editors are based on shit we all typed out in ten minute chunks during office jobs. The collective works of humanity is vastly outnumbered by the collective musings of a bunch of bloggers.
If you know anything at all about chatbots, you’ll know that asking them for a random number between one and ten will nearly always get you seven. Seven is the most common human choice, so it’s the best bet for a predictive mad lib machine. Now extend that to language; instead of absorbing the tendency to pick 7 “randomly”, super-intelligences eat up and spit out the symbols that are most commonly placed near other symbols. Hence the hacky m-dashes.
Anyway, this book was cool.
book by Marilyn Yalom
There is a question unasked everywhere except within Birth of the Chess Queen; given the historical level of vitriol directed toward women in authority and the vast—almost non-existent—minority of women in traditional armed fighting, how did the queen become the most potent tactical piece of an ancient wargame? The kerfuffle over FIFA2016’s inclusion of female players is an example par excellence for the unique position of the chess queen; where else but Mad Max: Fury Road are women portrayed as a match for—let alone superior to—their male counterparts?
Historically, not everyone was keen on the chess queen:
A woman who raced about destroying knights, bishops, and even the king struck terror in the hearts of men, some of whom reacted not only by calling the queen “mad,” but also by impugning the whole female sex….John of Wales accus[ed] queens of being greedy, like all women, and known to take through rapine and injustice. He made much of the fact that both the bishop and the queen moved on the diagonal, representing unjust qualities, whereas the king and rook moved in just, straight lines.
Birth of the Chess Queen cares not a fig for your stereotypes, be they medieval or modern; the book is first and foremost a didactic experience. It presents information divested from any sort of modern inflammatory clickbait language—no "You'll-never-believes" nor "What-she-did-next-will-astonish-yous" to be found. Enough authorial personality peeks through to keep it from being dry, but the book was published in 2004; a time before the somewhat ambiguously dated narrative non-fiction revolution that brought dense characterization, snappy dialogue, and rising story arcs into the thick of factual inquiries.
If one knows nothing of chess history, there are cool cocktail-party facts to pick up: that what is now the current queen was once the vizier—the king’s adviser, if you’ve forgotten your Aladdin—and he used to be quite weak, moving only one diagonal step. Not quite mocked-for-being-lame weak; at least, not until he became a she:
….Before she acquired her unparalleled powers, the critique of the chess queen was gentle: she was simply advised to stay close to the king. Conflating the chess queen with living queens, the authors of those earlier chess treatises would also occasionally remind her to remain chaste and behave in a “feminine” manner—attributes that obviously had nothing to do with her moves on the board.
That the queen was once a vizier is a neat fact. That the queen used to only be able to move one square diagonally is a neat fact. That the queen was mocked for weakness when her piece was frail, but then scorned for madness when it was potent, is a sad one.
Pages move quickly in Birth of the Chess Queen, driven by the singular focus of the narrative. It is an honest surprise that an entire book can be filled with the theories surrounding “Wherefore Queen?” and the facts supporting those theories. The answers it gives are satisfactory and—given the relative esoteric nature of the material—probably as close as anyone will ever get to the truth.
Plus, it spurred me to actually enter—not just walk past—the Chess Forum in the West Village and legit geek out over their replica Lewis Chess sets. Which are fantastic!