"Chess With A Dragon" is a 1987 science-fiction novel by David Gerrold, detailing, in a surprisingly comedic fashion, humanity's interaction with more advanced, and predatory aliens. While Gerrold has written a number of other science-fiction novels that take place in series, or shared universes, this work seems to be a stand alone story.
Sometime in not-too-distant future, humanity has gained interstellar travel and encountered other alien races, and gained access to "The InterChange", a galactic database of limitless information put together by hundreds of alien races. Humanity has been recklessly downloading as much information as possible, before being informed that the information is not free, but that humanity has incurred quite a debt. (Although the comparison wouldn't exist in 1987, ever used tons of data on your cellphone, thinking you were attached to wifi but you weren't? Kind of like that, on a galactic scale.) And it seems that humanity's bill will have to be paid by being indentured to other alien races, and that the indenture might include being food, hosts for larva, or experimental subjects for sentient bacterial colonies. It is up to the protagonist of the story, Yake Singh Browne, to find a way to outwit the various aliens races, resembling things like slugs and praying mantises, that have tricked humanity. And to do that, he might have to seek advice from one of the most dangerous alien races of all-- the titular dragon.
This book was short, 167 pages including the many chapter breaks, and it was a breeze to read through. Despite its seemingly grim subject matter, it is told in a light and chatty fashion. Despite its short length and somewhat shallow character development, I considered it a good read, for several reasons.
First is that the possibility of differences in alien biology, something that most science-fiction writers often gloss over. Most science-fiction stories, in any media, assume that intelligent life will be mammalian and humanoid, but this book proposes that mammals are rare, and that most intelligent life would be reptilian or insect-like. David Gerrold made his first mark on science-fiction by writing the classic Star Trek story "The Trouble With Tribbles", dealing with weird alien biology (and would also write, much later, the classic Babylon 5 episode "Believers", also based on different alien biology.) So this book, despite its comedic pretenses, manages to do something many science-fiction books do not manage to do.
Secondly, it would be interesting to see just when in the history of science-fiction aliens were seen as being insidious. Contrary to stereotypes, in the 1960s, much science-fiction was more worried about what humans could do to aliens than vice-versa. Here though, aliens are seen as quite sinister, manipulative and predatory. (And, ironically, some of the book's portrayal of alien races could be seen as homophobic or anti-semitic, something we can assume David Gerrold didn't intend). I don't think that xenophobia, literal or figurative, was what the author intended with this book, since it is a short, comedic standalone book, but I do think that exterior trends could have colored it into something more cynical than it could have been.