Culture Clash with a Chess theme

 kw: story reviews, science fiction, collections, anthologies, novellas

One item in The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8, edited by Neil Clarke is a novella, "Bishop's Opening" by R.S.A. Garcia. It took a couple of days to read.

The action takes place in a space habitat, where the crew of a spaceship have berthed for repairs and some R&R. A people called the Valencians, a human offshoot, are the arrogant Uber-rich. One of the crew interrupts an attempted assassination by snatching a small weapon from the assassin. He receives a dose of poison as a consequence, and the Valencian target of the assassin reciprocates the favor by quickly getting him to a medical facility that has the antidote. This opens an unlikely dialogue, and while nobody undergoes any significant cultural transformation, one could say that it makes a dent in the attitudes of at least some of the people involved.

Some interesting ideas appear. The milieu is that many or most humans live off-planet in habitats that function as mini-planets. Another is that Valencia itself seems to be in another dimension, and humans need some kind of implant to go there, which is nearly instantaneous. The culture of the Valencians is of relentless competition; the assassination attempt is no anomaly.

I mused upon the extremes. I have noted often that the X in X Generation seems to mean "eXtreme". It was they who created the X games, for example. And that the Y Generation has taken many of the extremes a step further. So it makes sense for an X or Y Generation writer to explore a culture of extremes, as profoundly unstable as such a culture would be. I don't know why the author chose chess pieces as the prototypes of the ranks and castes of the Valencians. In a chess game, a Bishop's opening requires a pawn to move first to allow a bishop (which must move on a diagonal) to exit the back row. In the story the failed assassin is a Pawn, and the target is a Bishop. Other than the terms, there is little resemblance to a chess game.

I thought of titling this post "Culture in change, one mind at a time", but that would be going too far.