08-05-2025
To Avenge A Dead Gacier by Shane Tivenan
We present an exxtract from To Avenge A Dead Gacier, the debut short story collection by Shane Tivenan, winner of the RTÉ Francis McManus Short Story Prize and the John McGahern Award - read an extract from Mother Vs Big Blue below.
Throughout the stories in To Avenge a Dead Glacier, Tivenan explores the lives of rural Irish outsiders. His characters are artists, sean-nós singers, members of the queer community, the gifted, the neurodivergent, the environmentally concerned, people with memory problems, the spiritual people, the non-human... These are stories rich in the essential detail of life, in the fraught exchanges that make up our every relationship, and very often of life lived beyond the confines of safety or simplicity.
From Mother Vs Big Blue
In the run up to Kasparov's rematch with Deep Blue in New York, the idea touted at the time was 'The Brain's Last Stand' (Newsweek, 3 May 1997). Mother and myself, however, were not worried about the outcome. Kasparov had played computers before. He'd played Deep Blue's forefather, Deep Thought, in 1989 (Deep Thought 0: Kasparov 2). In 1996 he took Deep Blue out in their initial match behind closed doors, and so the rematch in New York had an exhibition feel to it, where the quirky celebrity challenger would eventually go down before the bout was over. The Beast from Baku wouldn't even have to go through all the gears to get the win – he was playing a mindless computer made of silicon and cables, not a fellow 2800 super-grandmaster.
Mother and myself booked into a fancy hotel for the rematch in New York. It was our first holiday alone together. We queued early outside the hall each day and wore matching the brain will not be bested T-shirts. A giant board with notated moves was projected onto a screen over the stage, and after each game, Kasparov and the IBM team would come out and face the crowd and take media questions. Kasparov dominated Game 1, but in Game 2, Deep Blue forced his resignation.
Up until that point in our chess lives, Mother would always explain to me that the chess-playing style of a computer was brute force. It was a slow-moving wall that closes in on its opponents and takes takes takes, capturing all available material regardless of outcome. A computer does not understand sacrifice, she would say, and it is blind to the dangers of accepting one. A computer lacks hunch and instinct, and it can never play a psychological move. And Kasparov, he had prepared to play a computer. He was battle hardened for the brute force, but in Game 2 towards the latter half of the middle game, he offered up some material, convinced the computer would take it, which would allow holes to be punctured in Deep Blue's defence. But Deep Blue did not do what a computer is supposed to do. It thought hard. It crashed. It rebooted. Kasparov sweated and paced and held his head in the corner of the stage as after the third reboot, with fresh buffers and logs to think through, Deep Blue refused the sacrificial pawn, a sacrifice in itself, and it played instead a beautiful move. It played a human move.
By Game 4 the bookies' odds began to swing. Spectators were quiet, sitting up straighter in their seats, small chess boards were out and lines were being analyzed and calculated. A Latino guy with micro-dreads and an FC Barça T-shirt in front of us left his seat every hour and came back with glazed eyes. I followed him out once and nodded at his hand and he smiled.
I don't know about you, he said to me, but that Deep Blue dude, that thing is playing some grandmaster s**t.
Kasparov will hold, I told him. There's no way a computer beats the Beast.
He shook his head and laughed and left me to finish off the blunt.
And Kasparov did hold. We met him with a standing ovation as he walked across the stage after the penultimate game, having earned a third successive draw in a row, but the penny was starting to drop for all in attendance. We were no longer just cheering Kasparov on, we were cheering on ourselves. We were cheering on our biological brains and beating hearts and creative thinking minds.
Mother squeezed my hand through all the remaining tense periods of play, looking at me each time Kasparov found a way to protect himself, whispering in my ear, We have it, son, we have it. He is going to find a brilliancy and win the match. Just watch. And I did. I watched the match. I watched Kasparov. I watched the guy in the Barça jersey and I watched Mother. But her face was different to everybody else's. It was like she was watching an actual war as opposed to a gamified one.
At the end of Game 6, after Kasparov put out his hand in resignation, Mother's hand went limp in mine. She stared hard at the back of the seat in front of her. Kasparov himself went into a twelve-month period of grief after the match. He would eventually emerge and publicly state that he was not just defeated by Deep Blue in New York that day, he was killed.
When answering questions about Deep Blue's preparations, the IBM engineers played down speculation that it was prepared specifically to play Kasparov. Deep Blue did not know it was playing Kasparov, they stated. Deep Blue did not even know it was playing chess. But Mother would argue, Kasparov would argue, by Game 2, Move 36, Deep Blue knew exactly what it was doing.
On our flight home from New York, I tried coaxing Mother into playing a game of blitz on my travel board, but she turned away, staring out the porthole. Our game is dead, she said. She stopped painting in the latter half of that year. She returned to her job and her unused canvases were stored in the attic.
