The Far Reality (AKA The Fairy Chessmen AKA Chessboard Planet) by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore

Recently at Second Story Books I acquired some paperbacks that caught my eye with their unusual covers or origins.  Today let's read one of those finds, a British paperback edition of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's 1946 novella "The Fairy Chessmen," which was first published as a two-part serial in Astounding under the penname Lewis Padgett.  My paperback edition from Consul Books was published under the title The Far Reality in 1963 and bears a price of 2 shillings and 6 pence; my copy has an old typewritten 50¢ price sticker over the British price and a recent handwritten 3 dollar price sticker put there by the Second Story Books staff--everything at Second Story Books's Rockville store is half off, so I paid $1.50 (actually less, because there was a buy five get one free or something sale.)  The most remarkable thing about this edition is perhaps the ad for life insurance on the last page.

The Far Reality is set in a bizarre post-war America.  The chaos of World War II resulted in the establishment of a new country in the middle of Europe, a multiethnic empire of emigres who call themselves The Falangists.  Kuttner and Moore describe this new nation as "a hybrid race, as Americans had once been...a new melting pot of races...black, yellow and white stirred up together in a cauldron under which a fire had been kindled."

As the story begins, this new nation and the United States have been at war for decades.  The U. S. civilian population has been spread out thinly across the country, so there are no concentrations that would make tempting bomb targets--the great cities are in ruins.  Meanwhile, the "warmen" live and work in industrial underground cities, workers building and supplying the robots that fight the war, the bureaucrats and military officers making the plans and directing the robots (Kuttner and Moore liken the mechanical war to chess.)

Subterranean life, with no pets and no children, is hard on the warmen, and to keep them sane, new drugs have been developed that reproduce the euphoric effects of alcohol without causing a hangover; warmen are also provided with films that directly stimulate the brain and addictive virtual reality games like the Fairyland machines that allow a player to "be Jehovah to a fantastically convincing illusion of a little world of his own, peopled with critters he could design and create himself."

The plot follows the staff of the office of the director of the Department of Psychometrics, Robert Cameron.  Cameron is getting stressed out, suffering hallucinations--Kuttner and Moore describe many of these hallucinations.  Cameron's two assistants, Ben DuBrose and Seth Pell, manipulate him with drugs and hypnosis and act as a buffer between their boss and Cameron's own boss, the Secretary of War, striving to keep Cameron from going totally off the deep end.  

This novella is all about psychology and mental illness, and one of the theories Kuttner and Moore put forward is the idea that mental illness is often caused by a sense of responsibility.  The example they offer is how a husband whose wife is injured will be crazed with worry and fear until the doctor arrives, and then he can relax because the responsibility for his wife's health is offloaded to the doctor.  Anyway, DuBrose and Pell think one reason Cameron is going nutso is the titanic responsibility of his job, and one way they try to stabilize his psyche is to take over some of his responsibilities by, for example, screening all of Cameron's calls on the video phone and all his visitors.

The Secretary of War has a big new job for Cameron and his department: US intelligence has acquired an inexplicable secret equation that the Falangists are using to develop super weapons, and America's top scientists and technicians are trying to figure the equation out, but trying to solve the equation is driving them insane!  The Sec of War needs Cameron and his staff to do something about this problem so we too can take advantage of the equation or the enemy will win the decades-old war.  DuBrose and Pell try to limit how much their boss knows about this new crisis; they don't let on how important this new task is, for example.  But the Secret Service agent who acts as the Secretary of War's courier,  Ridgley, always insists on delivering top secret packages from the Secretary directly into Cameron's hands, threatening to clue Cameron in to how much responsibility has been added to his shoulders.

A third of the way through the story DuBrose and Pell make a series of startling discoveries.  Those big silver spheres--impenetrable force fields--which suddenly appeared all over the USA 22 years ago are not dud Falangist weapons, as everyone has supposed--they are the artifacts of time travelling refugees--aliens!--from a horrible future who came to the 20th century but promptly died!  In the hour or so before they died these aliens emitted a radiation which caused nearby human babies still in the womb to mutate.  This mutation has just recently manifested itself--the mutants, seemingly normal for over twenty years, have gone catatonic, but if they are close to one of the spheres, they become semi-coherent, and exhibit the ability to see through time!  The mutant, for example, will evince awareness not only of the furniture in the room, but the furniture that was in the room in the past and has since been removed, and the furniture that has not yet been installed in the room, but will be.  This knowledge extends so far into the past and future that the excess of information overloads the human mind and drives the mutants catatonic.

As if this wasn't amazing enough, one mutant that Pell is treating comes out if his stupor when Ridgley comes by on one of his insistent deliveries, proving that Ridgley is an agent from another time!  The Secretary of War assures Cameron's staff that Ridgely has been a loyal American doing his part in the war on the Falangists for as long as he has known him, but could Ridgley be playing his own game?  It later becomes apparent that Ridgley is a genetically engineered warrior, a perfect fighting machine, another refugee from the future; his future is one of constant war which he fled because he was guilty of war crimes and vulnerable to prosecution.    

The first half of the novella ends with a surprise--American scientist Emil Pastor solves much of the strange equation, which drives him insane but does give him the power to make matter disappear.  He calls up DuBrose and Pell on the video phone, and to demonstrate his new ability to DuBrose this brain-addled boffin annihilates Seth Pell!  One of our main characters just died in the middle of the story!

In the second half of the novella Cameron and DuBrose find a scientist who can tackle the equation, Eli Wood.  You see, the equation presupposes, and in fact proves, that what we consider bedrock constants--e. g., the speed of light or the rate of acceleration imparted by Earth gravity--are not in fact constant, but variable, and can be changed.  Early in The Far Reality, one American scientist figures out part of the equation, and is able to tinker with gravity; he gains the ability to hover, but he is so psychologically shaken that he goes into a comatose state, a defense mechanism his subconscious resorts to because this scientist can't face the reality that the constants he has based his career on are not constants at all.  Cameron and DuBrose think Eli Wood can safely tackle the formula because he is a fairy chess player, and fairy chess is all about experimenting with changing the basic rules of chess, sometimes in radical and fluid ways.  (Pastor made progress on the equation because he was a Fairyland player who would make custom modifications to his Fairyland machine, altering many of its basic parameters.)

(Fairy chess is a real thing I never heard of until today.  When educated kids were playing chess and listening to Beethoven and Mozart I was throwing rocks at squirrels and watching Tom and Jerry and Gilligan and the Skipper on the idiot box.  No regrets, though!)  

At the same time this Wood subplot is playing out, insane Emil Pastor is wandering around America, taking public transport from one subterranean city to another, thinking he is God because he has the power to destroy the world or any individual part of it with a mere thought.  Government agents hunt him, their orders to kill him on sight, but a man who can annihilate you with a thought is hard to kill!  Meanwhile Cameron is trying to overcome his hallucinations, which he believes are caused by a Falangist attack, while he and DuBrose deal with Ridgely, the secret agent from the future who may be in the hire of the Falangists and is perhaps the source of the crazy equation which exposes the terrible reality that there are no unchanging facts, no invariable truths, and holds the key to winning the war.

In the end, Pastor and Ridgely are neutralized, and the US government gets a hold of the full equation and the counter equation that makes us immune to Falangist use of the equation, and the US wins the war.  But the novella ends ambiguously, we might even say ironically and tragically.  On the cheery side, DuBrose believes that the future which produced Ridgely, a world of endless war, can be averted; he thinks that now that the Falangists have been overthrown the human race can unite to invent space rockets and conquer the stars.  Humanity needs a goal, a mission, an obstacle to overcome--war provides that goal, but exploration of space can provide a healthier substitute to war.

Cameron disagrees.  He is certain that, even though the Falangists have been defeated, America cannot relax, but must remain on a war footing because other enemies might arise.  Even worse, Cameron realizes that his own policies of propaganda and indoctrination are at least partly responsible for the creation of men like Ridgely and a world of endless war--even though the Falangist attack on his brain that apparently caused all those hallucinations is over, this new weighty responsibility threatens to drive Cameron insane, and the last line of the novella is the same as a the first, a description of one of Cameron's hallucinations!

The January cover (left) depicts Ridgley trying to get to his chopper to escape to 
the Falangists, while Cameron's team uses the equation to conjure such
apparitions as monster chessmen to obstruct him

This downer ending--and this 1946 novella as a whole--is perhaps a reflection of, or an allegory of, the world and the United States after World War II--the Axis powers had been vanquished, but the existence of nuclear weapons and the threat posed by the Soviet Union, which had conquered and was brutalizing Poland (which Great Britain and France had gone to war to protect in the first place) and the rest of Eastern Europe, meant that the West could not relax and war still threatened the world.   

This novella is not bad, but it is not great, either.  We're giving it the coveted "Acceptable" ranking here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Kuttner and Moore put forward lots of interesting ideas, but many of them go nowhere--we learn about the ethnic makeup of the new country in Europe, but then we almost never learn anything else about the Falangists and their racial character has zero effect on the story.  We don't learn much of anything about the time travelling aliens, either; they are just there to cause the mutations that allow Cameron and his team to probe the future from whence Ridgley came.  We are told the people in the military and defense industries have to live underground, but we don't get much of a picture of this subterranean life, and it turns out lots of people live aboveground anyway--Pastor's lab is above ground, and isn't his lab important enough to hide from enemy bombs?

The way that the equation works is confusing and just seems to give the authors license to present whatever effects they want and move the plot in whatever direction they would like.  The Falangists use the equation to make bombs that can penetrate force fields and to project hallucinations into Cameron's mind (though it is ambiguous how much these hallucinations are native to Cameron's brain, the result of too much responsibility.)  One guy uses the equation to levitate, another to destroy anything.  When Cameron and crew finally get control of the equation they use it to attack Ridgley, in an effort to keep him from escaping and force him to use the counter equation so they can film him using the counter equation and thus learn how it works, but I couldn't tell if they were just making him hallucinate or actually causing chaotic shifts in the terrain around him and making items, like giant chessmen, appear.  And how would see him using the counter equation help them learn it?  Seeing the levitator and Pastor in action didn't help them solve the original equation.  And if Ridgely can use the counter equation, why is it he never uses the original equation? 

SF is full of stuff that makes no sense but which act as an allegory or facilitate thrills and excitement; we forgive nonsense like hyperspace and telepathy if they are used by the author to say something interesting about the human condition or tell a fun or moving story about people.  One of the problems with The Fairy Chessmen/The Far Reality is that Kuttner and Moore want us to accept the incredible idea of this equation, but the thrills and excitement their story offers are limited.  We are told the war is important and everybody is stressed out and on the brink of insanity but we don't feel any tension.  Partly this is because the majority of the text is men sitting around talking, in person or on the videophone--there are very few direct confrontations in the story.  Kuttner and Moore do try to show the relationship between Cameron and his wife, and how Cameron and DuBrose miss their friend Pell after he gets annihilated, but these efforts at eliciting human emotion from the reader didn't work for me.

Not a waste of time, but, as I have suggested, not spectacular.  Perhaps The Far Reality is interesting as a characteristic Kuttner/Moore work, with its references to Lewis Carroll, virtual reality machines that serve as an opiate for the masses, and all that psychology, elements we have seen in other K & M stories, or as a window onto views of the world--and America's role in it--just after the Second World War. 

Here's one for all you students of the history of life insurance