2 thoughts on “73: The Squares of the City by John Brunner”

1. 

   Great stuff! I’ve read much Brunner, although I don’t necessarily remember it. I enjoyed his straight fantasy but this kind of pre-Ballardian look at systems in flux is great. Stand on Zanzibar goes to similar places. I’m also reminded of the Viable System Model (VSM) from my own discipline, operational research. It was an early attempt to determine the key elements to any system and how they need to interact for the system to thrive. It’s very much founded on biology but is another model which can be used in gaming to create structures to investigate in games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viable_system_model. That said, these days, people are much more likely to look at smaller elements, or individual issues using something like systems dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics. I’m not aware of any games or fiction based directly on this.

2. 

   Looking at the original chess game, https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1036356, the game ends with a white pawn, supported by a bishop and rooks, about to be promoted to queen, then black resigns. That’s essentially what happens at the end of the novel too.

    This will be displayed in a monospaced font. The first four 
    spaces will be stripped off, but all other whitespace
    will be preserved.
    
    Markdown is turned off in code blocks:
     [This is not a link](http://example.com)

Here is some inline `code`.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.