Chess Fiction

“Chessfiction” is a niche genre of Games Fiction which deploys various concepts of Chess in literary tales in different variants, styles, and garbs. Thousands of stories which fall under this rubric are already known in the English language alone. More are being found and catalogued from old archives. And a new generation of writers is writing many more of these at a very rapid and intricate clip…

A Library of Chess Fiction

The present site aims to be a single repository of all such chess-based fiction. Its vision is to be a complete, freely accessible Library of Chessfiction…

While many examples of chessfiction are known and reviewed across hundreds of websites, the availability of the source material itself has always been a challenge. Some of the older works can be found on sites like gutenberg.org and archive.org. However, many of these stories remain hidden in old magazines, library scans, or even stay unidentified as chessfiction. The geographic availability of the stories is also uneven. Readers in USA with access to  interlibrary resources may be able to get hold of a few gems with some diligent and patient work, but for most of the world, there is no easy recourse. And then there is the real risk of losing these precious works to the babel of global information glut. A single library housing as many as these works as can be found (and allowed by copyright considerations) will sustain them in their entirety, out of obscurity. 

Since the contents of the library are freely available to read and download, aficionados of this narrow but intellectually rich sub-genre can get the immediate gratification of diving into a fascinating literary world. They can make a first-hand judgment about the literary quality and ‘chessiness’ of a cited work rather than relying on independent reviews. 

Finally, one hopes that the availability of complete stories will spur more writers to develop chessfiction in newer, deeper directions…

Selection Criteria

We categorize a piece of literary fiction as “Chessfiction” if some elements of the game of chess play a crucial – or extended – role in the story. The stories might be fictional accounts of real-life chess players or situations. They might be mysteries revolving around talismanic chess pieces. They could be detective yarns where some strategic details of a chess game, say, lead to the revelation of the crime and the criminal. Or take fantastic shape of alien gambits played out on the cosmic scale with civilizations as pawns. Or be a simple excerpt dedicated to the scholarship and study of the game in a larger setting which does not have chess as a central part. All of these and more would become part of the chessfiction oeuvre.

We do not consider a story to be chessfiction simply because there are references to chess in it, unless such references are so extensive that they leave the reader with a distinct feeling of “chessiness” after having read the story. This is subjective, but the reader generally knows whether such a judgment for or against a particular piece is warranted.

There are some longer literary works where specific chapters or extended portions focus on the game of chess. In those cases, we showcase the specific part as Chessfiction as an “Excerpt” rather than showing the entire work. We are also biased in such instances to be more charitable toward works of older vintage, typically pre-1900s.

By design, we do not consider literary forms like poetry, cartoons, humor, etc. to be part of Chessfiction. This is not due to any significant force of logic in favor of our position. It is simply to keep the task ahead manageable as well as interesting. Certainly, an epic poem recounting some chess legend would count as Chessfiction in our dictionary, but simple verses waxing lyrical about the beauty of chess would not, even though such literary works most definitely are deserving of our attention. Over time, one can envision a separate section of the library housing these as well, but in the immediate future, we shall focus on the story-form of Chessfiction.

Other Art Forms

Chessfiction appears in many visual art-forms with a story-line, like cinema, stage dramas, and musicals. At this stage of the library, we are not compiling a list of such works but it is certainly a long-term vision to bring together a fuller bibliography of these productions. For now, the reader can easily find listings of such works by the dozens on online resources like IMDB.

We Need Your Help!

The effort to load ALL available chessfiction is substantial and will take time. There will also be many cases where we are simply unable to load the content or reference it elsewhere due to copyright issues or because the works have not been found. But we aim to reach the mark of 1,000 stories by the end of 2026… 

Clearly, we can use all the help we can get. If you would like to contribute a review of an existing entry, or propose a new entry with a copy of the original work, please contact us!

Website Credits

Content: Vijay Fafat

Construction: Mythili Vutukuru

Maintenance: Kalpana Bangad