Ryk E. Spoor's Blog, page 29

Lying About the Future, OR Reality is Unrealistic

I've written, to this point, five hard-SF novels, with two more on the way – the Boundary Series (Boundary, Threshold, Portal), the Castaway Planet novels (Castaway Planet, Castaway Odyssey, and forthcoming Castaway Peril), and one tentatively titled Fenrir. As hard-SF novels, I worked hard to make these stories as accurate-to-known-science as I could, within the limits of dramatic necessity and the need to not bore my readers with calculations and details that they didn't really want.

But even within hard-SF, the author has to make a lot of choices about what they depict. And contrary to many people's surface impressions, a hard-SF author is (generally) not trying to predict the future; they're trying to tell a cool story set in *A* future – not, in virtually certain likelihood, our future or one terribly like it.

"But why? I thought hard-SF was supposed to extrapolate into our future!"

Well… yes. Sort of. Sometimes. We're telling stories, and the core of most hard-SF stories is "what if" – we ask a question of something that we think is possible, and then build a story around it. Sometimes, yes, that is an extrapolation of technology or social change or whatever that we're looking at… but almost always we're then going to be following it to a focused conclusion. That is, for the sake of a good story, we're not going to look at the slow progression of a set of consequences from one new technology and examine how the whole civilization that we know progresses in the meantime; we're going to drive the extrapolation strongly, to its ultimate conclusion, and preferably in a way that allows a small number of characters to be involved in that conclusion.

So in Boundary the question is "what if aliens DID visit us back in the age of the Dinosaurs… and had a real nasty argument about who owned the local real estate?" This question and its answer lead to the action of the Boundary series that spans a large chunk of the solar system, with most of the same characters staying involved in the key actions.

Is this likely? Of course not! To tell a fun story, I have to make things that are very unlikely to happen… seem inevitable within the context of the story. To an extent, choosing the way in which I answered that question helped. I allowed there to be some extensive, significant, and pretty-well-preserved remains of the alien presence which made it important for people to get to them and examine them, in a detail and with flexibility that no automated probes would be likely to accomplish in anything like the timeframe needed.

For space-setting hard-SF, that bit – "automated probes" – is a real problem. I provided a sequence using automated probe exploration in Boundary, when A. J. Baker's "Faeries" explore Ceres and make a key discovery, and it was pretty interesting as a one-off. But in general, people like stories about people in space – even if, being honest, it's getting less and less necessary to send people out. Aside from making those automated probes into functional AIs (i.e., "people" like WALL-E or R2-D2 or C-3PO who just happen to be metal), the reader's not going to have the same connection with an automated rover as they would over a person.

Thus, a hard-SF author may have to ignore the basic fact that most outer-space exploration work isn't going to be done by human beings; machines can survive in worse environments, tolerate more acceleration, withstand all kinds of abuse, don't require food and water… and don't have friends and family at home who will be devastated if they die. And, as time goes on, those probes will be more and more capable, rather than the current devices that can't move faster than a slow walk and need constant instruction modifications to do their jobs well. It takes very special circumstances (like those I invented in Boundary) to justify sending "naked apes in a can" into deep space.

Automation and intelligent systems have an even greater impact in other areas; in Grand Central Arena I follow some of the current research to logical conclusions that result in what amounts to a post-scarcity society where few people have anything resembling a "job" and people are mostly independent entities from almost everything (very little significant government, etc.); what "work" people do is something that they WANT to do, that's FUN for them.

This unfortunately makes for a difficult-to-grasp environment; many people either have a hard time understanding it, or simply don't believe it could work. And in the latter case they may be completely right, for various reasons.

Such advances, however, also can be very bad for maintaining drama. The modern reader understands the idea of needing a job, of working at some particular task or in some specific category, and keeping at least some of that element present provides a good anchor for the reader as they encounter more outré elements of the story.

In the Castaway series, for example, I not only disable all sorts of automated technology to keep our castaways in a position to be "castaway", I also deliberately ignore the likely level of advancement of even the most casual devices these people have with them.

Castaway Planet takes place about 150-200 years after Portal, and Boundary itself takes place about 30 years in the future, with Portal ending 13 years later. So even taking the lower estimate, that's almost two hundred years in the future. Yet all the devices they use are ones not only based on known science, they're ones whose functions are extrapolations of things that we're already working on. Two hundred years ago, it was 1817; the United States had barely started on its path to becoming a significant country, guns were still one-shot powder-patch-and-ball affairs, long-range signaling used flags or fire, and electricity was a curiosity.

Realistically, the capabilities of the "omnis" that the Kimeis use will probably be available within my life time. The simplest devices the Kimeis and their friends use should be things almost indescribable to us; the people might be unrecognizable, considering current trends in advances of genetics, cybernetics, and so on. Yet would that let me connect with my readers as well? Probably not.

There are some authors who follow such trends and try to describe the societies resulting from them, but the resulting books can be very challenging for many readers, and in all likelihood those books are also ignoring some other predictions or consequences. Authors aren't omniscient or even close to it. We're telling stories – and choosing the setting that best fits the story we want to tell.

So sure, I could have – and more realistically, should have – assumed that all relevant information about the lifeboat/shuttles in Castaway Planet would be available even in the small "omnis" that our castaways carried, and that such devices would be themselves so very capable (even if not intelligent as such) that they could provide the answers to almost all of the problems confronted by their situation.

But that wouldn't make it a better story. Perhaps a more realistic one, but not a more interesting and enjoyable one. We don't want the humans just following the almost-infallible directions of their handheld smart machines; especially in a "Robinsonade" of this type, we want human beings in dangerous situations thinking themselves out of those situations with individual cleverness and initiative, improvising with what's at hand.

Thus, rather than let boring reality take over, I choose to pretend that things only advance a little bit… and the readers, in general, nod and play along, because that allows me to tell the story they'd like to read.

So come, read our books. Let us lie to you.

 

On My Shelves: Holst’s _The Planets_

There are a few classical pieces known to almost everyone; Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance (from graduations everywhere), Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D-Minor. Many more are known, but not always immediately recognized by name, as they get played in part or in whole in many different settings.

But in the world of SF geeks, there are some with special significance, and of these, few could compete with Gustav Holst's The Planets, a suite of seven pieces each representing one of the major planets (other than Earth). These are usually presented in the order:

Mars, Bringer of War
Venus, the Bringer of Peace
Mercury, the Winged Messenger
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
Uranus, the Magician
Neptune, the Mystic

Besides the obvious "space" theme, this suite of music has been heavily inspirational to makers of many works of science fiction and fantasy.

I first encountered The Planets when I was, I think, fourteen, in a version by the Los Angeles Philharmonic conducted by Leopold Stokowski; someone, I think my brother, had borrowed the record from a neighbor, and I listened to it – and instantly fell in love with the music. The local record stores didn't have this version any more, and so I bought the record from our neighbor with my own money.

I played that record so many times over the years that I wore it out; by the end the sound was badly degraded. But by then I'd practically memorized it. Each of the movements was well-suited to its title and the symbolism of its planet – the hammering beat of Mars, the slow, dark-to-acceptance of Saturn, the dramatic pomposity of the Magician Uranus, the powerful joy of Jupiter – and were endlessly inspirational to me as I began the work on my own universe (that eventually became the one seen in the Balanced Sword trilogy and Paradigms Lost).

While all of the movements have been inspirational to many, two of them utterly overshadow the rest: Mars and Jupiter.

Mars' relentless, driving, brassy theme has been used directly in movies, television, and video games, but more than that has in its tone and beat inspired multiple other pieces of music – the Imperial March from Star Wars, and to an extent another of Williams' masterpieces, Jaws. The main alien theme from Gunbuster is a clear derivative of Mars, Bringer of War. In fact, it's a fairly good bet that any time you hear a villain or destructive force theme with a hammering beat and a classical vibe, it was inspired in at least part by Mars.

Jupiter's theme has inspired a number of other pieces of music; Holst himself adapted part of the theme to the hymn "I Vow to Thee, My Country", and it has been heard in pure or adapted form in Bill Conti's music for The Right Stuff, the 2003 World Cup music, and even an advertisement for Reeses' Peanut Butter Cups!

In my case, both pieces helped inspire much of my writing. Mars became the theme song for a planned trilogy of stories: Juggernaut, Juggernaut Awakened, and The Forgotten Weapon, all centered around a nigh-indestructible cybernetic war machine called, naturally, the Juggernaut. While I doubt now that I'll ever complete the trilogy – part of its background no longer works, for one, and for another, other people have done cybernetic war machines to death – much of the imagery and thought put into those, while listening to Mars, informed later work I have done. And Mars, Bringer of War still inspires me when I'm writing something dark and grim and powerful.

But if anything is the musical heart and soul of my writing, it is Jupiter; this powerful, endlessly uplifting piece of music was the first theme for Terian and the Wanderer, and for the launch of the first starship from Earth in one of the first stories I ever wrote. It sings in the background of Grand Central Arena, and in the foreground – for the final bars of that powerful piece of music are the music for the trailer made for GCA back in 2010. That triumphant theme also thunders and echoes in the very foundations of Zarathan, forming the spirit of the Greatest Dragons and the thousand thousand heroes who walk its paths. There are a few – a very few – pieces of music that may equal it, but none surpass it in its ability to send chills of wonder down my spine.

To my surprise, Stokowski's version of The Planets is available on iTunes – for a mere four dollars. If by any chance you've never listened to this wonderful suite of classical pieces, try it. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

 

On My Shelves: Watchmen

Alan Moore and David Gibbon's Watchmen is, justifiably, a landmark in the comic-book universe, a carefully-planned attempt to analyze and deconstruct the standard superhero universe while, at the same time, staying true to some of its most powerful tropes. Watchmen was also made into a movie, which in my view managed to stick fairly close to the original miniseries/graphic novel, but of necessity had to cut out some rather important elements (discussed below). If you don't want spoilers galore, don't read any farther!

The setting of Watchmen is a version of our world, with a change that began in the late 1930s with the emergence of costumed adventurers, and is exemplified in the present of the comic by the fact that Richard Nixon is still President, apparently having managed to un-do the amendment that limits Presidents to serving two terms.

The main story begins with the murder of a man named Edward Blake, which sets costumed vigilante Rorschach on a path of investigation when he realizes that Blake was once known as The Comedian, one of the two government-sanctioned heroes who were allowed to continue to operate after the enactment of the "Keene Act" which forbade any costumed vigilantism. Rorschach quickly comes to a belief that there is someone or something out there trying to dispose of the remaining heroes – even the retired ones – and that something truly monstrous is afoot.

In his investigations, Rorschach contacts former members of his super-team, the Watchmen: Nite Owl (Daniel Drieberg), Ozymandias (Adrian Veidt), Silk Spectre (Laurie Juspeczyk), and Doctor Manhattan (Jon Osterman). At first none of them believe Rorschach's tenuous deductions – Rorschach is the most mentally unbalanced of the group and, indeed, is in some ways very little different from the criminals he hunts – but gradually the pattern becomes more clear, and the others, especially Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, begin to believe there is something to Rorschach's obsessive rants.

But though they are veterans of the dark world of villains and vigilantism, even they cannot imagine what the truth behind this shadowy threat truly is.

Watchmen is a complex story, with two (apparently) independent threads: the main story and its associated flashbacks, dealing with the mysterious plot that led to Blake's murder, and a parallel horror story, Tales of the Black Freighter, which seems to be nothing more than a rather typical horror comic of the "Eerie Comics" type; the story read by one of the minor characters within the Watchmen series deals with a man shipwrecked but desperate to make his way home to warn his hometown of the approach of the dread pirate vessel, the Black Freighter; the man – a sea captain himself – undertakes progressively more desperate and horrific methods to make his way home, including sailing away from the island on a raft made of his former shipmates corpses, eventually descending to murder and almost killing his own wife thinking she is a pirate from the Freighter; finally he comes to the realization that the Freighter has come, not for his town, but for him, as he has now become the exact sort of red-handed monster the Black Freighter seeks for crew.

Unfortunately for the movie adaptation, this secondary plotline had to be removed (although a version of it was created for DVD release).

I'm not usually one to pick up on symbolism, so I was rather startled when I did in reading Watchmen. Perhaps this was partially due to my rational author's evaluation that there was no way that Moore and Gibbon spent all that space on this grotesque Twilight-Zone-eque comic-within-a-comic if it didn't have something to do with the plot. At first I thought it was just referring to the degeneration of the world situation; as Watchmen progresses, we see snippets of news broadcasts and political events that indicate the world is coming closer and closer to a third World War.

But it's much more than that.

Watchmen bounces between past and present regularly, and this is to a great extent because one of the characters – the only true superhuman being, Doctor Manhattan – exists in a realm of quantum time, where he perceives timelike curves as easily as spacelike curves. He thus can envision – in fact, is forced to envision – objects and people as existing simultaneously along their entire history. Past and future and present have ceased to have their traditional meanings for Jon Osterman; he has conversations in which he already knows the answers, but finds himself also bound by time in that he has no choice but to follow the conversation, or action, to the end he has already seen.

In some ways, Doctor Manhattan is one of the most tragic figures of all. He knows what mistakes people will make, he sees the consequences of short-sighted actions, he can recognize when and how crimes will be committed… but once he has done so, he is powerless to change them. An atrocity perceived, even in the future, is an atrocity made certain. At the same time, he is nigh-omnipotent, able to rearrange matter and energy at the slightest whim to the most complex structure he might desire. He is a god bound within time, locked by his own perception and the physics he otherwise flouts to an unwavering and immutable course of destiny.

It is little wonder, then, that Jan Osterman drifts ever farther from humanity – now almost his polar opposite, unable to perceive more than the slightest aspect of the truth that surrounds them yet able to act on whim and will without the crushing foreknowledge of their success or failure. Yet his choosing to re-acquire contact with humanity, even in the smallest degree, is essential for the plot to move forward, and he knows this – and risks the life of Silk Spectre, once his lover, to discover if that contact can ever be reacquired.

The climactic revelation that it is not some shadowy enemy, but one of their own – the handsome, dashing, wealthy, courageous, superlative Ozymandias – behind the murderous machinations terrifies the other once-heroes, intimidates even the usually-stolid Rorschach with the scale and depth of Ozymandias' manipulations. Ozymandias has conceived a grand plan to, literally, save the world from itself: convince the world that it is under immediate threat of invasion from an alien source (in the movie, Dr. Manhattan himself is made into the threat).

Ultimately, the remaining Watchmen – Nite Owl and Rorschach – attempt to confront Ozymandias at his Antarctic base; Ozymandias demonstrates that he remains superior to both of them in combat, and then after revealing the extent of his plan, gives one of the most chilling and trope-breaking lines of all time, when Nite Owl declares they'll find some way to stop him: "Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago."

It seems that even Doctor Manhattan is powerless against Ozymandias' plan – he appears to be dispersed in a final trap based on the experiment that originally created him, while Silk Spectre almost manages to shoot him down – but Veidt, somewhat to his own surprise, manages to literally catch the bullet.

Manhattan is not so easily destroyed, and remanifests, almost killing Ozymandias… before the others come to the grudging realization that it appears that Adrian Veidt's plan has worked – the false alien attack has defused the increasing tensions and the USA and USSR are now seriously discussing a unified course of action.

It was Ozymandias' name that finally made me realize how Tales of the Black Freighter linked to the main plot. As Veidt mentions, Ozymandias is just a different name for the Egyptian Pharaoh known more familiarly as Ramses II, but more importantly for the short poem by Shelley, speaking of a great and broken statue in a desert; the poem ends thusly:

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains.

Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

Ozymandias, then, is the Sea-Captain, on a desperate quest to save that which he values, driven by such desperation that he betrays every principle that he held dear on a quest that is, ultimately, doomed to failure. Yes, it seems that Ozymandias' plan has worked, but there is ultimately no way that it will survive; his fake-alien creature cannot be hidden away, and analysis by both sides will eventually show it is, itself, an earthly genetic construct. His secrecy was broken by a few independent vigilantes; it is laughable to think that once the suspicions of the major governments are awakened he will be able to escape their scrutiny, and both sides will likely accuse the other of planning this murderous charade.

Doctor Manhattan himself points this out, very laconically, to Ozymandias, when the latter asks if he did the right thing in the end: "Nothing ever ends".

Watchmen isn't the sort of story I'd usually read, or read very often, but it was a brilliant work of its time. It did, unfortunately, have rather the opposite effect intended by its creators; they had hoped to rekindle a new and diverse, brighter future in the comics universe, but instead the gritty, antiheroic imagery in Watchmen – along with the other contemporary graphic-novel sensation, Frank Miller's The Dark Knight (re-imagining Batman), ushered in what became the "Iron Age" of comics, where grim-and-gritty ruled supreme.

I don't really appreciate – in the sense of approving – that aspect of its influence. But as a work on its own, Watchmen remains a powerful and fascinating read, well worth the hour or three it takes to read. Highly recommended.

On My Shelves: Girl Genius

Soldier: Herr Baron! We need you! All the experiments have either been let loose or turned on!

And everything's on FIRE!

Baron Wulfenbach(facepalming): Unbelievable.

 

Agatha Clay is having a bad day. In the steampunk city of Beetleburg, where she's a not-very-good student at Transylvania Polygnostic Institute, she encounters a strange electrical anomaly, runs from that, is robbed by two out-of-work soldiers who steal the locket that's her only memento of her parents, and arrives – late – to discover that Baron Wulfenbach, ruler of all Europe, is making a surprise inspection.

To cap it off, her own project, a little watch-sized automaton or "clank", once more fails to work and self-destructs… and now she's getting these sudden, terrible headaches…

Girl Genius, a webcomic (originally print!) by Phil and Kaja Foglio, is one of the archetypal works of the subgenre called "steampunk", with its own unique twist. The world of Girl Genius is dominated by the existence of "Sparks" – people blessed or cursed with a strange ability to understand the workings of the universe at a level most people will never even approach, and create devices that appear to violate the known laws of physics. A strong Spark is capable of inventing weapons of mass destruction – and unfortunately the "Spark" within them carries with it a tendency to megalomania, a strange ability to draw ordinary non-Sparks to obey or serve them, and a greater or lesser set of superhuman capabilities both mental and physical.

Because of this, for many years Europe (and presumably the rest of the world) suffered as Sparks of various levels of capability battled each other for recognition and supremacy; even those with ostensibly benign motives originally seemed to go not-so-slowly mad. Their battles laid waste to miles of landscape, unleashed monsters, bizarre radiation-like phenomena, rifts in reality, and seemed likely to eventually leave all Europe uninhabited.

And then came the Heterodyne Boys, and their friend Klaus Wulfenbach.

The Heterodynes – Bill and Barry – were tremendously powerful Sparks, brothers, who – along with their nearly equally talented friend Klaus – proved the exception to the rule. Though the Spark burned strongly within them, and their ancestry as Heterodynes carried a very dark and terrifying weight, the two brothers proved to be heroes, and won over a large proportion of the population. It seemed that they alone might bring peace to the lands by uniting everyone under a common banner, based on nothing more than their optimism, powerful personalities, and charisma.

And then they disappeared, due (it was said) to the action of the powerful Spark (or maybe something worse) called "The Other". Few knew exactly who or what the Other might have been – indeed, many people did not even hear of the Other – but the end result was that the Heterodyne Boys vanished and so did their friend.

When Klaus found his way back to civilization, only a relatively short time later, all the work the Boys had done had fallen apart. So he decided he would save Europe… his way.

It is against this background that Agatha Clay – who is, in truth, Agatha Heterodyne – begins to awaken to her true powers as a Spark, and finds herself the most hunted woman on the continent.

Girl Genius walks the line between serious adventure and comedy, the Foglios demonstrating a fine sense of the absurd while maintaining dramatic tension and a complexly interwoven set of plots that are only slowly revealed to the reader through Agatha's adventures.

While there's a lot of adventure – both comedic and deadly serious – in Girl Genius, the characters are what make it all work. Agatha herself starts out as a somewhat clueless innocent, for whom the Spark is a not-entirely-welcome change and who knows nothing of her background or the problems it brings to her, and evolves into a woman whose core innocence remains but who is fiercely devoted to her friends and more than willing to take up the mantle of the Heterodynes – but do it in the tradition of the Heterodyne Brothers, no matter what others – or The Other – may think.

Baron Klaus Wulfenbach is the dominant figure in the early story; he has imposed his own Pax Transylvania upon all of Europe through the Spark-mechanized might of his own empire. Despite often being demonized by his opponents, Klaus is actually a pragmatic ruler with a preference for peace and reasonable negotiation, who – when possible – allows the various divisions of his empire to run themselves, rather than just crushing everything beneath his iron heel. One often feels sorry for Klaus, because he really is trying his best, but the insanity of the world around him just doesn't allow him any peace.

The Other – named as "Lucrezia Mongfish" by Klaus, but in honestly with her true origin unknown for sure – is a hellishly strong Spark (or possibly something else) which has mastered the ability to transfer her consciousness to different bodies (and apparently despite the Other's goal of conquest and control, the Other's duplicates don't work against each other). She, in the form of Lucrezia, also apparently is Agatha's mother. Agatha's voice is close enough to the Other's that Agatha is capable of controlling the Other's creations if she tries.

Two powerful Sparks – Gilgamesh Wulfenbach and Tarvek Sturmvoros – are the romantic leads making a triangle with Agatha. Gil, the son of Klaus, falls for Agatha almost on sight and she seems to reciprocate. Despite some bad coincidences messing up his initial relationship with her, Gil is clearly a hero in the mold of his father on his father's best days, and is the heir apparent to the Wulfenbach empire; a marriage between Gil and Agatha could be a powerful political tool, if the Other wasn't interfering.

Tarvek comes from a family of scheming, plotting bastards that make the legendary Borgias look like amateurs. While our initial encounters with Tarvek make him seem a treacherous soul indeed, as we learn more about him it becomes clear that somehow he's managed to maintain a core of idealism even within that nest of snakes, and Agatha is a shining symbol to him of what could be.

A host of other characters accompany these through the story – the Jaegermonsters, Spark-created warrior guardians of the Heterodynes, a sort of overly-cheerful warrior race that combines barbarism with a sense of strange style ("Eny plen dot makes you lose het iz…?" "… a bad plen."); Zeetha of Skifander, a green-haired swordmaster supreme who adopts Agatha as her apprentice in combat; Krosp, King of the Cats, fastidious, arrogant, grouchy, yet ultimately loyal to a fault; Higgs, "Airman Third Class" who is vastly more than he seems; and dozens of others.

The insane inventions of the Sparks, of course, dominate the action, and span the gamut from the "Wow, that's neat" (a coffee maker that makes coffee that taste like it smells, to the point of sending the drinker into a Nirvana-like state) to the horrific (a living castle that enjoys making itself into a series of deathtraps). You can't throw a baseball anywhere in Europa without hitting SOMETHING a Spark built. Better hope it doesn't turn on and puree you!

The lush, colorful artwork of the Foglios – colored currently by Cheyenne Wright – draws you into the world of Girl Genius. An immense amount of work and thought is evident in every panel; details in the background can range from plot-relevant to silly in-jokes, but in major splash pages can be found in the dozens in either case. The different locations – Sturmhalten, Mechanicsburg, Paris, Beetleburg – all have widely varied and distinctive appearances, allowing the reader to identify where they are just from the appearance of the local houses, streets, and people.

I highly recommend Girl Genius for anyone looking for magic-steampunk action-adventure-romance!

 

Just For Fun: Tabletop RPGs 2: Effects Versus Causes, OR Why I Hate _Champions_

In my prior RPG discussion I talked about my basic approach to running a game – that the world is the important thing that I'm presenting, and the rules are the tools – often imperfect and clumsy tools – used to help the players (who are stuck in our world) interact with the game world through the characters, who live in the game world.

But what makes a game world a functioning world rather than, say, a bunch of settings, people, and things? My simple answer for this is that it is a place with an underlying logic to it. Our world has the complex underlying logical foundations that we know of as physics, chemistry, biology, and so on; if you understood all of these to their ultimate extent, you could examine any events in the world and understand how they came to happen.

It is, of course, impossible for a human being to create a fictional world nearly as complex as the real world, and in fact any writer of fiction or runner of games will of necessity focus only on those parts of the world that are important to the stories they want to tell; Tolkien, for example, was a language geek extraordinare and an expert on myth and legend, and at their core The Lord of the Rings and its associated works are meant as a showcase for the languages he created and the mythology he developed in association with those languages.

I have my own fictional languages, with Ancient Sauran/Draconic being the most significant, but I am not even vaguely comparable – even in terms of effort, let alone results – with Tolkien in this area. Where I have focused my efforts were on building the foundation of the world – explaining, for my own satisfaction, the ways in which the powers of the fictional worlds I ran worked – why you could do this with magic but not that, or how magic and psionics were different, what made the gods willing or unwilling to act, and so on.

Another core assumption I have when gaming is that the worlds make sense from the point of view of having humans, or beings pretty close to human, living in them (since all the games I've ever played in involve either human characters, or characters so very much like humans in their basic behavior that they might as well be considered human). This means that you really can't change everything about the way the world works, because human beings only survive in the world because their instinctual assumptions are "good enough", and because the world does, at its core, make sense. A primitive human (or other intelligent being) may not understand what the laws of physics are, but they are pretty good at learning the reliability of the behavior of the world around them, and – this is a crucial part – predicting the behavior of the world based on their knowledge.

This is a vital part of a real-feeling world. Events don't happen in isolation; they are produced by causes, which themselves have causes, and people know this instinctively. When they hear an unfamiliar sound, they look for what caused the sound; they know that sounds don't just happen for no reason. When they learn to make, say, chipped-flint spearpoints, they know that there's a logical progression from raw flint through striking the flint in just the right way to a finished spearpoint, and that this process is teachable so that it can be passed on.

Similarly, in an RPG world, if you have magic that's taught to people and used reasonably reliably by various characters, it, too, must be subject to rules, must be reliably teachable, producing pretty much the same results for anyone if they do the same general actions. The real rules may not be known to the characters, of course, just as the real laws of physics weren't known by our stone-age ancestors. For instance, the rituals of magic may turn out to simply be ways of calling the attention of magical beings who in turn actually perform the magical feats that the wizards think they're performing, but that doesn't change the fact that there are rules to the way magic works; just that the true details of the rules (which the magical beings know) are hidden behind the rules that the wizards know… but those rules still work, at least as long as the magical beings abide by them.

Similarly, if you have the power to perform some kind of action – say, to control the weather – this implies the potential to do any of the many things that weather can do. That is, making rain fall on a field or having winds blow or making temperatures drop to freezing are natural consequences of being able to control the weather. You don't have a set of isolated different powers (strong winds, rain summoning, freezing blast, etc.) but a single power that implies many different capabilities.

For this reason, I prefer games that focus on the causes – what method you use to accomplish something – rather than purely on effects (the thing you accomplish). This has been the trigger of a number of sometimes epic discussions/arguments over the years, because I will take into account not just the game mechanical effect description, but the description of what is supposed to be happening.

In D&D terms, I consider the Spell Description to be just as important – perhaps sometimes more important – than the spell effect summary which may be "Medium Range, d6/lvl Fire damage, Will negates". This is because the description tells me what the spell is supposed to be doing, rather than the specific, and usually sole, effect that the game designer came up with. One could think of the spell's effect summary as being what a CRPG (computer/console RPG) programmer would be encoding as the results of using the spell. It only encapsulates the effects/uses of the spell that the game designer contemplated as being relevant.

But often a player may want to use a spell to do something that makes sense, yet isn't in the spell effect list. This is what the spell description itself is useful for. For example, the effects of the Cone of Cold spell are pretty much exclusively limited to the physical damage the spell creates, but as the description says that it creates an area of extreme cold, draining heat from the area, one can envision a number of other possible uses; for example, if you wanted to cross a small body of water, you might freeze the surface and walk across. You might temporarily stop a leak through a dam or wall by freezing the water. You might use it to put out or reduce the size of a fire.

None of these are listed in the effects of the spell, yet they are all obvious applications of the cause – of the ability to generate a field of cold so intense that it causes extreme injury to any and all living creatures caught in it. A GM or player might argue the details of these applications, but all of them are perfectly reasonable effects that might be expected to be possible results of this spell.

D&D itself, of course, isn't really terribly method/cause based; it's more mechanic based with a broad tradition of interpretation to allow the players latitude on what they can "get away with". This was good enough for much of my early gaming years, partly because there weren't too many other popular choices to work with.

I was often encouraged to start using other systems, most notably either GURPS (Generic Universal Roleplaying System, from Steve Jackson Games) or Champions/HERO System (Hero Games). I tried both of these, and I developed a strong dislike for them. It was at first very hard for me to articulate why. I could give examples of specific things that had, for me, failed in these games, but I couldn't quite figure out what was the essential flaw in them, especially Champions.

On the face of it, games like this had a number of features that ought to appeal; you could take a set of points and just build the character you wanted (rather than, as in the original D&D, randomly rolling your stats and hoping you got something good), and as you went through the game, you gained more points you could use as you wished to extend and improve your character; Champions, with an expansive set of special effect modifications and advantages/disadvantages that allowed you to basically engineer any power, ability, or skill to reflect your precise vision, would on first glance have seemed tailor-made for me, especially when I was younger and had many hours of time to devote to working out characters and other elements of my world in painstaking detail.

Yet they left me quite cold, and I finally realized that it had something to do with the way in which various abilities were described. To an extent, it was simply the language that was used – in one of the earlier versions of Champions, for example, if you wanted to make a surface slippery you described it as Telekinesis over an area with specific modifications as to how it affected objects and people in the area.

Now, it's true that while using a description for "slippery surface" that comes out as "telekinesis limited to a surface, makes any attempt to walk, turn, or stand on it harder, flying avoids the effect" sounds ridiculously complicated, at the same time it would seem needlessly petty to complain about the language as such (though I did, strenuously, in earlier years). Yes, no one would normally consider using the word "telekinesis" to describe a slippery surface, but if it produces the right effect, does the description matter?

Years later, once more thinking on one of those never-ending debates and my own experiences, I found myself thinking that line above, and my brain suddenly stopped on one word: effect.

Suddenly it was clear what my real problem with Champions – and to a somewhat lesser extent GURPS and similar games – was. They were primarily effects-based, and when combined with the mechanism of "points" – which was intended as a game-balance mechanism – this meant that consideration of how the world worked was not only not directly supported, but was directly hindered, by the game approach. Any capability you didn't explicitly design into your power was a capability it didn't have, and that you would need to spend points to get if you wanted it. It was a game entirely focused on the effect descriptions, and in which the "flavor text" was almost entirely ignored.

The same principle also directly conflicted with my earlier-described position, that game balance was derived from the players and GM, not the game design as such. To me, and my players, the important measure of proper game "balance" was "spotlight time". While spotlight time – the amount of time a given player is the center of attention – is often associated with raw power, it is far from always the truth, and I have run multiple parties wherein the different player characters covered a huge gamut of power, from barely-better-than-ordinary human to mountain-wrecking, and still had spotlight time for all of them.

The existence of the character points in Champions as both a power-defining mechanic and a tool to represent advancement of the character made it extremely difficult to make use of cause-based logic within the game. With this realization I finally understood why my prior experiences had been unsatisfactory, and why it had been so hard to articulate the problem. It wasn't a problem with the game. It was a problem with the game's assumptions that clashed with mine on a fundamental level.

As time has gone on, I've become less and less wedded to mechanics; my favorite game system these days is really something more like the AMBER diceless RPG, which is more a descriptive framework than anything else. This allows the game to flow with less interruption from mechanical demands, although it does have the requirement that the GM and players know/trust each other a lot more than in a game where there are specific rules for major aspects of the game.

But really, for me, that's necessary anyway. When I'm playing, I don't want to be wondering if I can trust the other players, or the GM, as players – I don't want my attention to be split between the in-game and out-of-game concerns. I don't want my players thinking of me as an adversary they have to out-think, or each other as competitors. I want them to live on Zarathan, or in the Reborn Empire, or wandering through the streets of Morgantown, if only for a while, and their worries and hopes and dreams to be those appropriate for that world, not this one.

 

What about you, readers? If you game, what do you look for, and why?

Just For Fun: Tabletop RPGs – Game Balance OR World Trumps Rules

I've been a roleplaying gamer since 1977, when I first encountered Dungeons and Dragons – unless you count the venerable game of "let's pretend", which I was playing from the time I was 4 or 5, and even had some rules for to minimize the arguments. I discussed my initial encounter with commercial RPGs, and the influence it had on my life, in this prior entry: http://grandcentralarena.com/under-the-influence-roleplaying-games-rpgs/

In this entry, though, I want to talk about running RPGs and how I view this extremely challenging hobbyist task. I'll start by just clarifying a few basic concepts and terms (although I suspect most people reading this won't need the help) before moving on to the main discussion.

In an RPG context, "running" the game means being the person who directs the game in one sense or another. In classic D&D, this person was called the DM (Dungeon Master); a more generic term that I tend to use is GM (Game Master) as that applies to running any RPG campaign, be it a D&D fantasy game or a space opera campaign. Other games have their own particular name for the position, such as "Storyteller" for World of Darkness games (Vampire: The Masquerade, etc.).

A GM is in a position that ranges from "Improv Movie Director" to "Playing God Almighty" depending on the precise game and the expectations of the players. It is the GM's job to create the world in which the action of the game will take place, design the characters and other beings that the players' characters will interact with, determine the circumstances that surround what the characters are doing, and in short be prepared to bring the world around the characters to life with their descriptions and dialogue.

In many games, some of this work may be done for them by the game companies, as most if not all RPG companies have their own vision of the world or worlds their games are meant to be played in, and will market worldbooks and adventure outlines/modules to the players. Even with such resources, however, a GM is still going to be doing a lot of work running the game, as they have to mediate the events in the game – combats, discussions with characters who may be allies or adversaries of the players' characters, success or failure of their attempts to achieve goals ranging from picking a lock to casting a powerful magical spell, piloting an unfamiliar ship, negotiating a treaty with a suspicious foreign power, or trying to paint a masterpiece on canvas for presentation to a local lord.

(I'll note that there are a few gaming groups I know of that do not have a true "GM" – they run what amounts to an ensemble game. I'm unfamiliar with how they resolve the issues that I have generally seen require a GM, however, so I won't be discussing them here)

The players, in general, control the creation (with the GM's approval/input) of their characters, the portrayal of these characters, and their decisions and actions. In writing terms, usually the Player Characters (PCs) are the main characters of the story told by the game, while the Nonplayer Characters (NPCs) are the secondary characters or antagonists or, often, background characters of the story.

Whether I am playing or running a game, I like to achieve as much "immersion" as possible in the world of the game – to try to be the character, to envision the world I am playing in as real, to act and react as the character, or as a GM to facilitate this in my players, so that for a few moments they feel they are on Zarathan, looking up at the Ice Peaks looming before them, glittering diamond-clear mountains throwing rainbow-shattered light across their faces. To momentarily LIVE in the world created is one of the highest goals of many roleplayers.

Like the GM position itself, of course, this is not true for all. There are at least a fair number of RPG gamers who are "beer and pretzels" gamers, treating it more as a casual amusement in the center of a social gathering. For such gamers, the following discussion would be of relatively little value, because immersion isn't going to be a major goal.

If you do like immersive play, you need to try to avoid things that break that immersion – that draw your attention to the game (or the world outside the game) rather than the story, the events within the game. There are naturally many things that can do that, ranging from unexpected phone calls to clashing musical choices (for those who use music in their games) or mistakes/unexpected and apparently out-of-character behavior by other players.

By far the largest source for me and many other players, however, is world clash – when either the rules themselves, or something about the world, forces the play to stop and the players to have to ask questions not about what they see or hear, but about how the world is working, why the rules are doing particular things. That is, it's not terribly immersion breaking to interject a question like "How far across does Ragnar think the chasm is?", but it is immersion-breaking to have to ask "Why can't I just jump across this canyon when I just jumped twice that far in the previous adventure?"

As with writing fiction, consistency is one of the most important aspects of a functioning RPG world. The players need to know that the world behaves like a world – that the rules the characters live by (which may be modeled by, but are not identical to, the rules the players work with)are going to stay the same, that logical consequences or extrapolations of their behavior will tend to work out, and so on.

This, however, hasn't always been a focus of RPG designers and worldbuilders. The classic example, going back to the original D&D, is the "mages in armor" rule. Under the original D&D rules (and continuing until Third Edition), magic-users simply could not wear armor. If they did, they couldn't cast spells. As a rule in isolation, there wasn't anything specifically wrong with it.

However, it didn't actually make much sense. There was no explanation for why mages couldn't wear armor, or rather, there were several, none of which held up under any examination. For example, some argued that it had to do with armor affecting the gestures and movement of the mage, that they couldn't perform their magic while hampered in the slightest bit by the armor. Leaving aside the fact that relatively light armors can be shown to interfere very little in these areas, that argument would imply that anything which interfered with a mage's accurate movement or balance should prevent them from doing magic – yet there was no penalty for wearing heavy winter clothing (which restricts movement at least as much as a chain shirt) or a backpack so heavy the mage was practically staggering under its weight.

Another explanation was that it was the metal in the armor that interfered with magical casting; however, that implied that mages couldn't carry much money around with them, and that non-metallic armors (dragon scales, tough leather, etc.) should be just fine, yet the game didn't have these consequences either.

Now, the reason for the rule – and quite a few more rules in D&D and other RPGs – was fairly straightforward: "game balance". The basic thinking was that since the mages got the advantage of being able to sling magic around, they needed something to weaken them with respect to the fighter types, so the mages were restricted in the weapons and armor they could use to give the fighters an advantage. It was also a "role enforcer" – it kept the mages to the stereotype of robed/lightly dressed guys waving their arms and using staves and the fighters to the ideal of the Knight, dressed in strong armor and with massive weapons to deal out death.

For me, the problem was that I really didn't – and to this day don't – accept the basic postulate that "game balance" came from having the right set of rules. It was many years before I could articulate why this was so, however, and it turns out there are two major reasons:

All sets of rules are built with inherent assumptions about how people will play the game. This is true in pretty much all games. In games with a small enough set of rules, and sufficiently constrained universe of play – Monopoly, for instance – the assumptions in the rules will effectively cover any quirks of play, or simply reveal that some choices are better than others and players of the game will live with it; even Tic-Tac-Toe has inherently better choices (the center square) than others, even though it is possible to win against an inexperienced opponent without immediately taking that square.

In more complex games, however, this tends to lead to problems due to conflicts between the designers' assumptions/blind spots and those of the universe of players who knew nothing of the designers and didn't share their assumptions. The release of Magic: The Gathering drove this home rather emphatically when a number of cards that had seemed perfectly reasonable and balanced to the entire in-house set of playtesters turned out to offer hideously effective combinations in play which had simply never occurred to the in-house playtesters because of the assumptions about the cards' purposes and use that they had all shared, but that which were not part of the assumptions of the hundreds of thousands of players who had just picked up the game at a store.

For RPGs the problem is even worse; Magic, at least, is still a game with a clear set of arbitrary rules governing its use and an absolutely clear-cut set of win/loss conditions. This doesn't apply to any RPG; the universe of possible choices is effectively as huge as the number of different player/character combinations, and even win/loss conditions vary wildly – even "death" isn't necessarily a loss for a character who dies in a way that their player finds satisfying. Similarly, groups of players may have very different purposes in playing even if they are immersive – ranging from pure escapist heroism to psychological catharsis – and as such will choose to play very different characters with very different goals and approaches.

Ultimately, this means that the rules of an RPG, designed with the assumptions of a particular group of gamer/designers, can only truly be balanced in that group, or those that share all of the key assumptions of the designing group, especially because many of the assumptions in the rules are unconscious. A set of rules built with the unspoken assumption that all your players will play shining heroes will break down when you have players that want to play gritty anti-heroes who make uses of various powers and abilities that were assumed to never be used by PCs, (or at least never used THAT way) and so on.
A world is too big for any set of rules. In theory, an RPG takes place in a world that is as real as the one we live in; the players are able to choose to be pretty much anyone in that world, with any set of motivations, interests, and world-appropriate abilities.

By necessity, the rules can only abstract elements of the world, and generally only a tiny, tiny portion of the world, for two reasons: first, if you had rules for everything – how your character breathes, chews food, turns their head – you'd never be able to get anything actually accomplished in the game. Second, because people – the players – prefer to control, themselves, a large portion of their interactions with the world, and not simply follow some set of codified rules. The basic purpose of RPG rules is – at its heart – to eliminate the basic flaw of the original children's "RPG" we call "pretending", where Jane says "I hit you" and Jenna says "No you din't!". Thus, rules are really only meant to be used to clarify interactions with the world and characters, and provide decisionmaking tools for the players and GM to use. Because of this, they are, of necessity, relatively sparse even in the most vast and picky of game systems.

Moreover, the effectively analog nature of a real world, or the envisioned fantasy world, will always utterly defeat the limited powers of a descriptive or prescriptive ruleset, unless part of the ruleset explicitly cuts off the complexity available to the players – the general solution used by CRPGs (Computer or Console RPGs – video games like Fallout, Final Fantasy, Skyrim, etc.). In computer games there are explicit limits in what you CAN do which allows the rules to cover the entirety of world behavior. For instance, if you have to open a safe, you can only do so by means envisioned by, and then programmed in – i.e., explicitly contained within the rules of the game. If the designers only allow you to open it with the proper key (from some particular NPC) or by "safecracking" skill, then even if your character has demonstrated superhuman strength and power you can't even attempt to force the safe open.

In a tabletop RPG, by contrast, the GM is expected to permit the players to try any approach to solve the problems or address the goals presented in game. Sure, they may expect the players to attack the goblins and kill them, then discovering a scroll on one of them that gives a clue as to where the bad guy's stronghold is, but there is absolutely nothing stopping the players from trying to take the goblins alive, or even negotiate with them for the information, or even deciding they're going to change sides and work for Mr. Evil!

Rules cannot encompass such an unbounded universe of choices. Thus, they cannot enforce game balance because there will always be a nigh-infinite number of choices, or combinations of choices, made by the players that are either not addressed by the rules, or, as previously, go against the rule's unspoken assumptions.

Because of this, my position has always been that game balance can only come from play – from the Game Master and the Players making choices that produce balance appropriate for their world. As is probably clear from the above, it thus follows that it will not be uncommon for the GM and/or players to encounter situations where the rules conflict with the game style or play choices that they want to make – with, in short, the world they envision for their characters.

To maintain immersion, the most important thing is that the game not conflict with the players' vision of the world. This is most often manifested in a situation where a player thinks of a perfectly reasonable action of their character, perhaps using some set of powers they have in a way not envisioned by the game creators but perfectly sensible in a world context, and is told that either they cannot do that, or that the logical consequence of their action doesn't happen.

Using the prior classic example of the mage-armor rule, someone might have been told that their GM thought the reason mages couldn't use armor was because of the way metal interfered with the flow of magical energies. The character ends up fighting a giant centipede with a very tough shell, and is suddenly inspired to make a suit of armor from the non-metallic shell. The rules, however, make no allowance for this, so despite this making perfect sense to the player and character, it fails to work.

To me, this is an unacceptable situation. If I provide a player with in-world facts A and B, and A and B imply C should be true, then a player whose character acts upon C being true should succeed, unless I can give a DAMN good reason why C is not true in this case – and will always have that explanation be true in any similar situation.

Fortunately, nearly all RPGs include a version of what is called "Rule Zero": the GM has the right and authority to change the rules. This doesn't (or shouldn't) mean they do so arbitrarily for their own amusement or to annoy or punish the players, but that they can adjust the rules to fit their needs.

In my case, I hold that the PRIMARY use of Rule Zero is to change rules that conflict with the world. No set of RPG rules yet written really properly reflects the way I envision magic or combat working on my world of Zarathan, even though it was originally built on the foundation of D&D and I've worked on it (and run games in it) for almost 40 years now. So when a player comes up with a new idea, and it fits my conception of how the world's magic works, but conflicts with the way the rules work… I toss out the rule.

In short, "World Trumps Rules". What makes sense in the world is paramount. The standard Call of Cthulhu rules will lead PCs to an almost inevitable spiral of madness and death; but a GM who wants to use the Lovecraftian background without the utter HOPELESSNESS of the universe may have to change many of those rules to allow success where there would have been failure; a GM in the old days of D&D running a Lord of the Rings game would have had to severely change the rules to allow for a Wizard who wielded a sword (and did so better than many warriors).

This basic philosophical approach affects pretty much everything I do in both running games and writing stories, and has a tremendously powerful effect on my choice of gaming systems and mechanics – as we will see in the second entry in this set of rambling RPG posts, Effects Versus Causes!

 

 

On My Shelves: Calvin and Hobbes

     "Spiff coolly draws his deathray blaster…"

 

For ten years – starting in late 1985 and going through the end of 1995 – readers of the comic pages were treated to the (mis)adventures of grade-schooler Calvin, his (usually) walking and talking stuffed tiger Hobbes, his long-suffering mother and sometimes clueless father, next-door girl Susie, schoolyard bully Moe, and a host of other chracters in Calvin and Hobbes.

Someone growing up after that era – especially today – probably has a hard time understanding the way things worked back then. While there were a few online comics around, passed about the dark and mysterious electronic halls of Compuserve and such, modern webcomics really didn't even start emerging until after the Web – in 1993 – and didn't really get rolling until years later.

So in those days if you wanted a daily dose of comic entertainment, there was really only one place to get it: the back pages of a newspaper. Newspaper comics were (and still are) controlled by a syndicate that determined which comics would be published and distributed, and this tended to keep the "funnies page" a relatively conservative, slow-changing landscape of often outdated amusement – Blondie recycling many of the same jokes it had been using since sometime in the 1930s, Dennis the Menace still playing in the backyard in a sort of timeless 1950s setting with the immortal Peanuts gang somewhere above him on the page.

Every once in a while, though, something new would appear; in 1980, Bloom County made its first showing, a comic that partook of some of the spirit of the early Doonesbury while modernizing it and giving it an even more quirky cast of characters. Five years later, Bill Watterson gave us the first look at what became one of the most beloved and thought-provoking comic strips of all time: Calvin and Hobbes.

In some ways, Calvin and Hobbes was a throwback strip – quite deliberately so, as Watterson made clear that his influences sometimes went back to the very dawn of the drawn comic age. Calvin, like the Peanuts gang and Dennis and many other comic characters, is eternally fixed in childhood, his behavior and interactions with the towering adults around him allowing him to comment on the world from a perspective that is very different from that of the adult reader and more sympathetic for the younger readers.

Calvin also partakes of another comic tradition, the "flight of fancy", possibly exemplified by none other than that voiceless yet articulate beagle, Snoopy. As Snoopy had his many aliases – the famous World War I Flying Ace, a snake crawling through the grass, "Joe Cool" the unflappable hang-about, and others – so too does Calvin, but his are more defined – less gags and more characters that Calvin invents to populate his universe with things more dynamic and less mundane than the world around him. Spaceman Spiff, a daring explorer of dangerous alien worlds, is a distillation of old pulp tales; Tracer Bullet, the living incarnation of the hard-bitten gumshoe; Stupendous Man, the essence of the superhero.

Many of Calvin's fantasy sequences blend with reality, going back and forth, showing us Calvin's interpretation of the world and then what's really going on – Spaceman Spiff holding off a horde of aliens before making a daring escape, versus Calvin threatening everyone with a rubber band before dashing out the door.

What makes the strip itself stand out more than any other may well be the frequent interaction between Calvin and his imaginary (?) friend Hobbes. The two of them interact not as a boy talking to a stuffed toy, but as two friends, who have shared interests but not complete agreement. Calvin and Hobbes may wander through the woods simply enjoying a day away from school and responsibilities, or have a philosophical debate about choice and inevitability while careening down a steep hill on a wagon, or get into a fight over the "minutes" of their two-person club. Hobbes himself often stands by as the "I told you so" onlooker when one of Calvin's schemes backfires on him (such as duplicating himself and discovering that his duplicates are just as lazy as he is).

As can be seen from the above, Calvin's life – at least as we, the readers, see it – is often filled with a surreal quality, a sort of Wonderland of Suburbia. This is not entirely incorrect even from outside Calvin's head; Calvin himself creates surreality for those around him on occasion, building literal armies of mutant snowmen or launching an attack as Stupendous Man on Babysitter Girl (his take-no-crap babysitter Rosalyn), or sprinting out of the school as Spaceman Spiff shouting "I'm FREE".

There are even questions of basic reality touched on in the strip; for the most part it seems obvious that Hobbes is merely Calvin's imaginary friend, yet there are moments where one has to wonder whether there is a reality to Hobbes, where Calvin performs feats that seem impossible for a child yet easy for a child accompanied by an intelligent semi-anthropomorphic tiger...

It's no wonder that this strip caught the imaginations of many children – and adults who remembered what it was like to be a child. For geeks like me, Calvin was especially appealing; clearly smarter than almost everyone around him, yet "wasting" his life with flights of imagination that sometimes interfere with even things like taking tests (Susie: "Psst! Calvin! What was the capital of Poland until 1569?" Calvin: "Krakow." Susie:"Thanks, Calvin!" Calvin: "Krakow! Krakow! Two more aliens bite the dust!"). He also shared the common experience of being bullied, his quick wit only rarely being able to outmatch the brutish power of Moe.

Above, and behind, the strip's surface humor and surreality, Watterson often addressed real-life issues through Calvin and his family and friends; these ranged from death (a raccoon found near-death, that Calvin is unable to save) to self-referential musings on the nature of comics themselves, and of course the worries and frustrations faced by parents dealing with a child of such a… unique temperament, as well as the fact that parents are neither identical nor always right. And sometimes, in the case of Calvin's father, just downright twisted, like the time he explained to Calvin that the reason old photographs are all black-and-white is that the WORLD was in black-and-white until sometime in the 1950s. "… and for a while there it was still pretty grainy color."

Calvin and Hobbes ended its run while it was still tremendously popular, something rarely seen in commercial properties. This was, according to various accounts, partly because Watterson felt he'd done all he could with the strip, but also because – contrary to Watterson's express negotiations and conditions when he had signed with the syndicate – there had been tremendous pressure placed on him to permit various licensing deals that he did not want, and this had sapped him of much of his time and energy.

In addition, the comic pages had continued to become more constrained as time went on; the number of panels allowed even in a Sunday strip, and their size, had become smaller, meaning that Watterson could not present the comic as he truly envisioned it (in some of the collections, the bonus material allows you get a sense of what Calvin and Hobbes could have been if Watterson had had completely free rein, and it's both wondrous and heartbreaking).

Whatever the reasons, however, this meant that we were left with a body of work that was all worth keeping. Looking at other series – comics, movies, television, books – one has to wonder, very seriously, if that doesn't make Calvin and Hobbes that much better, as it does not have to live under the shadow of the "should have ended sooner" that so many other entertainments do.

Today, some of Calvin and Hobbes is outdated; the modern computer age had barely started by the time it ended, as the Web was only two years old, the ubiquity of cell phones was years in the future, and of course much of what Calvin referenced was even older; his household echoes, in a twisted fashion, that of the classic American White Family – mother, father, child, living in a suburban house backing on semi-tamed wilderness. Yet much of it remains as fun and thought-provoking as it was the day it was printed. If you've never read Calvin and Hobbes, give it a try. And if you have… it's worth reading again!

 

 

 

On My Shelves: Grand Theft Auto 5 (a partial review)

I was given this game for Christmas (2016) and I suspect that was partially intended as a joke. Nonetheless, I did install and play the game to an extent.

This will be a "partial" review because it's extremely unlikely I'll ever play the whole game through, mainly because its basic premise doesn't appeal. Of the two characters I've unlocked and played a bit of so far, one is a basically decent, but apparently kinda weak-willed, young man named Franklin – he seems to know that a lot of the things his friends/acquaintances get up to are Just Plain Bad Ideas, but the game gives you no options to decide "you know, no, I'm not doing this next thing that's gonna get us shot at".

The second main character is an older man – probably around my own age – named Michael. He's an ex-criminal (to the point I've played it isn't QUITE clear what his "line" was, but it was both lucrative and one that involved considerable violence and skill, because when we meet him he's retired with a very expensive house, a yacht, and a family he's got a rather shaky relationship with, and he's demonstrated considerable physical capability and willingness to do violence. (He is, it turns out, one of the bank robbers you play as for the initial start of the game, but I don't know how much of his money came from that kind of thing).

Despite being in a fairly good position in life, Michael's an arrogant prick and hotheaded, used to getting his own way… and this gets him in one hell of a lot of trouble early on. He ends up owing a lot of money to a powerful local mobster, which he'd better pay up fast or else… and, well, there's only one thing he really knows how to do that makes millions fast.

I'm a Paladin type at heart, so playing the RPG-section of this game simply doesn't work for me. As Franklin, I want to "go straight". As Michael, I honestly want to see him KICKED straight. But that's not really an option.

That said, the game does what it sets out to do brilliantly. The characters are individuals, clearly delineated with personalities, well-acted voices, differing goals, and forced into connections that make reasonable sense in context.

The visuals are pretty much perfect. Walking through "Los Santos" visually looks and feels like walking through a large Southern California city area; even rain and puddles look fairly realistic, and there's a wide variety of visual jokes and references that can amuse you while you're appreciating the scenery. The only really weak imagery I came across is storefronts that you're not expected to enter; they reveal their "I'm a flat 2-D picture" nature if you get too close.

This is of course primarily an action game, focused around driving various vehicles while performing an assortment of actions – most of them, obviously, illegal. The action sequences are well thought out, well choreographed, and have a wide range of difficulty involved ranging from trivial to "are you kidding me???"

In this context, the most brilliant aspect of GTA5 is a mechanic that I've wanted in, well, dozens of games through the years: if you fail at a given challenge three times, the game gives you the option to SKIP THE CHALLENGE and move on with the story. This means that even with my old-man reflexes I'm not barred from completing the game. Sure, I'm not going to get the best ratings or manage 100% completion or get all the trophies, but the overall game isn't barred from me because I can't manage to pull off (to take one actual example) driving at high speed and avoiding traffic while trying to shoot someone who's beating up on my friend.

If that mechanic had existed in the Tomb Raider franchise, I'd probably have finished some of those games.

As a mindless amusement game – especially in a party/group of friends context – there is a lot to be said for GTA5 for some amusing video-game sociopathy. Barring moments when you're actually in the middle of some plot-determined sequence of events, you can always just decide to trot out and start being a Bad Person, stealing cars, trucks, boats, ski-doos, and even planes, exceeding speed limits, running over pedestrians, and evading the cops (who seem to be more than happy to not only gun you down, but take out any bystanders that happen to be nearby). Despite their hardcase approach to most crime, they're amazingly tolerant of anything that doesn't involve pretty much up-and-up manslaughter or worse; go ahead, run all the red lights you want, steal a truck and kick the driver out and start ramming everyone off the road, the cops don't care. Start running over people, now, then they care.

Oh, and don't steal a cop's car or bike. They'll end you.

It is amusing to try to drive around the city at high speed in a variety of vehicles – dumping one and stealing another as the first becomes too damaged to move – and even more fun with other people watching and playing.

Overall, this game looks to me like it is an excellent game for those who like this kind of game, and it's not entirely a waste of time for me, either. Good work, Rockstar Games!

 

On My Shelves (the Net): The Arithmancer/Lady Archimedes

As those who know me can attest, I rarely read fanfiction. I've written an awful lot of it (a million words or so with Kathleen in our Saint Seiya/Samurai Troopers/DBZ universe, and more elsewhere), but it's really very infrequent that I find a fanfiction story that is worth my time to read, and most of it is deep in the past, such as Ryan Matthew's Dirty Pair fics or Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Ranma (multiple authors).

Harry Potter fandom, by its sheer volume, could be expected to produce a few real gems. Naked Quidditch (https://www.fanfiction.net/s/3689325/1/The-Original-Naked-Quidditch-Match) is something of a classic, and certainly very funny. The fandom has also produced what may well be the most popularly read fanfic ever, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (http://hpmor.com/).

But none of the fics I've ever read have struck me so powerfully as The Arithmancer and its sequel Lady Archimedes (start here: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10070079/1/The-Arithmancer ) by "White Squirrel", and, indeed, few books of any sort, fan or published fiction, have worked so well for me. I was directed to it by a side comment in a discussion on (IIRC) James Nicoll's journal, and ended up badly hooked once I started.

There are a few parallels between The Arithmancer and Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (henceforth abbreviated as HP&tMOR). In both cases a major character of the original books uses rational, scientific approaches to evaluate magic and this causes changes large and small in the events of the various books. In HP&tMOR, of course, it's Harry Potter, whose Aunt Petunia married an intelligent and rational man rather than the abominable Vernon Dursley, and who is thus raised with a scientific point of view (and much better treated than in the original, of course!).

In The Arithmancer, it is Hermione Granger we follow; The core conceit of The Arithmancer is that while Hermione is undoubtedly generally brilliant, she has a particular facility for mathematics which turns out to apply to magic, and its speciality of Arithmancy in particular. Hermione, child of Muggle parents, receives her letter from Hogwarts and – once she and her parents are convinced this is no trick – is extremely enthusiastic to start her studies at an honest-to-god school of magic.

The first thing that stands out about this fic is that all of the characters we meet are recognizable. One of the hardest challenges of writing in someone else's universe is that you don't write the way they do, and that makes it almost trivially easy to screw up the characters. White Squirrel nails the characters, and even expands on them in ways that make many of them more interesting (and often likeable) people.

Part of this, of course, is that she's writing from another point of view, giving us how Hermione sees the people, how she feels about them, and so on, and since pretty much anyone who's going to read The Arithmancer will have read the original Harry Potter series, her observations build upon and supplement what we know in the series. But a lot of it is that she pays more attention to the characters – and as time goes on, she pays a lot of attention to characters we only saw sketched out, like Cedric Diggory, Professor Vector, and others, in the original.

This is a massive fanfic. The Arithmancer covers the first four years, and Lady Archimedes follows on to complete the set – though it is not yet complete, somewhere in the Sixth Year at this point. The length may be daunting, but it grabbed my attention so much that it took only a relatively few days before I'd raced through the entire thing.

One of the key challenges of writing a fic of this nature – where you bring in knowledge to the universe that the original author either did not know, or didn't consider important to the story (and Rowling would be correct – she was able to tell her story without worrying about these things) – is that you may break the story in any of a number of ways. True, that "break" may actually be part of your plan, but if it's not handled well, it will make the story painful to read; for instance, if your introduced new knowledge suddenly allows 11 year olds to defeat Voldemort and all his foes trivially, you make the older people look like idiots. Or, alternatively, you make your one bright protagonist into the worst sort of Mary Sue, solving all problems with her awesomeness and leaving all the other characters in the dust, or at best following her as a cheerleading squad.

White Squirrel deftly avoids these pitfalls. Yes, Hermione slowly develops unique, and sometimes terrifying, applications of magic, but the way in which magic works keeps her progress to a reasonable pace, throws interesting obstacles in her way, and involves many other people. She develops relationships with multiple characters that throw light both on their character, and hers, and the relationships she establishes are important to the plot.

One of the most brilliantly artful features of The Arithmancer and its sequel is this: Hermione is made the main character (and a strong and interesting one she is), and she has major and important effects on the story and characters… and yet the general outline of events in the plot remains largely untouched, and some of the most important personal events and contacts are not wiped out. She still ends up befriending both Harry and Ron, in a similar fashion to the original, but with a far more believable sequence of events leading to it. Voldemort's major plots still are carried off, without either sidelining Hermione or taking away some of Harry's important aspects.

The latter's really well done: Hermione gets victories, and changes events significantly, but The Boy Who Lived isn't reduced to a secondary character. Instead, the solution to various events – such as the confrontation with the Basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets – gives both of them important things to do.

The plot starts to change, inexorably, in later books, but not enough to keep us from instantly knowing which book we're in, or the overall shape of the challenges to be confronted by our heroes. And despite Hermione's sometimes quite mindboggling inventions in magic, the two great figures of the series – Dumbledore and Voldemort – are not lessened by her presence; indeed, when we finally see the conflict between them in the Ministry of Magic, Hermione personally registers the vast difference between her new skill and tricks and the sheer power and virtuosity of the most powerful wizards in the world.

It is impossible to read this without some comparison to HP&tMOR, and – putting it bluntly – the comparison does not go well for HP&tMOR. Both The Arithmancer and HP&tMOR are fics that concentrate on something that the author knows and is interested in (mathematics for the one, and rational thought for the other), but their approaches, especially to characters, are quite divergent. HP&tMOR's version of Harry is something of a jerk, and despite his vaunted intellect often misses things that a reader (or at least this reader) finds obvious. He's more private and less trusting, meaning much less interaction with the other characters in ways that will garner sympathy. He may have improved after, say, Chapter 25 or so (I think that's as far as I read) but it would take a lot of redemption to change my opinion. In addition, HP&tMOR is a more... didactic fic; Eliezer Yudkowsky has been up-front about part of the purpose of the fic being to convey the methods of rational thought to readers, and this affects it somewhat negatively when considered solely as a story.

By contrast, the Hermione and Harry of The Arithmancer are recognizably the same people, and grow up in ways that even Rowling didn't carry off well. We also see them examining their world critically and addressing issues that always bothered me as an adult (for instance, Snape's utterly intolerable behavior in classes, Harry's mistreatment at the hands of his relatives, and the reactions of Hermione's parents to the terrifying threats she keeps encountering). This is a version of the Potterverse that makes more sense in both a logical and an emotional way. It couldn't exist without the originals, but in many ways it is better than the original.

This includes character relationships. Some of the relationships of the original book remain the same – most notably the three-man-band of Harry, Hermione, and Ron, at least for a large part of the series – but others change, and not just relationships between the kids but between adults and the children as well.

We get to see a real mentoring relationship between an adult wizard and a student of promise – something that Rowling occasionally touched on but never really went into. Professor Vector was barely mentioned in the books, but here the Arithmancy professor (a former Slytherin!) plays a huge part and is lovingly detailed and characterized.

We see Hermione in a real daughter–parent relationship with her parents, and how the constant cycle of peril affects their view of the magical world and of Hogwarts in particular (both Hermione and her parents try to get her OUT of Hogwarts to avoid the apparently inevitable deadly danger that shows up every year).

Hermione, as she gets older, actually confronts Dumbledore about certain poor decisions… and he recognizes her right to do so, as Dumbledore is nothing if not honest with himself (due to his own poor choices earlier in life). Despite this and other occasional opposition to authority, White Squirrel's depiction of Hermione and the teachers remains true to their nature; this was one area that HM&tMOR bothered me with, having Harry essentially pressure/bully McGonagall within the first day or two of meeting her, with some rather sophomoric manipulation that the McGonagall of the original books would have shut down cold. The Arithmancer keeps the characters we know, with their good and bad points, and all relationships are based on those characters.

J.K. Rowling admitted, after the series was done, that the Hermione-Ron pairing really didn't work so well, and that Harry-Hermione was an obviously better choice from a more disinterested point of view. In The Arithmancer, Hermione and Harry are very close friends – a friendship more clearly drawn and interesting than in the original – but White Squirrel chooses not to go down that path as a romance. Instead, she takes a surprising turn which, in context of the universe of the fic, makes perfect sense, and pairs her with George Weasley – one of the few people who's bright enough to at least try to keep up with her in the magical realm, and not at all bothered by her sometimes dangerous experimentation.

Speaking of characters… it takes no little skill to make one of the most repulsive characters in fantasy literature more repulsive, but White Squirrel achieves it through her more detailed and unflinching depiction of Dolores Jane Umbridge. Vile though she was in the original Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Umbridge is at least twice as bad in The Arithmancer/Lady Archimedes. Rarely have I wanted to see a character humiliated so badly.

Now, while I have indeed been pretty much unreservedly gushing, this doesn't mean the story is without flaws. There are occasional misuses of words that make me twitch, and other common flaws in posted fics (though, thankfully, vastly less present in this than in most).

Despite these, leaving aside the copyright/trademark issues, The Arithmancer would be perfectly publishable material, with only one real sin: there's a fair amount of rather jarring viewpoint-switching in the story, and it's not properly signaled by scene or chapter changes. While most of the story is from Hermione's point of view, there are many points where White Rabbit clearly wants to let the reader know the thoughts of another character and just jumps blithely into their head, even if it's just a paragraph or two, and then back to Hermione, without warning in either direction.

Even this, however, is only a relatively minor blemish; obviously it didn't stop me from gobbling down the entire series as fast as I could make time for it. Its TRUE flaw is that IT ISN'T FINISHED AND GOD I WANT TO SEE HOW IT ENDS…

 

Naturally, highly recommended!

 

On My Shelves: Rogue One

I was at first unsure as to whether I would see this movie, as I am – in general – unenthusiastic about prequels, and I knew this one would be dark (at least for a Star Wars movie). But for the last day of winter vacation I took the whole family to the movies, and this is the one we chose.

Capsule Summary: Rogue One tells the story of the events that lead up to the original Star Wars – the people and actions that eventually put the Death Star plans in the hands of Princess Leia Organa. This is a classic war story set in the Star Wars universe, and is well-told, well-paced, and ultimately a satisfying – if not terribly cheerful – entry in the Star Wars mythology.

 

More Spoilery Review:

 

The movie introduces us to Jyn Orso, at first a very young child, as her father Galen is forcibly recruited – at gunpoint – to work on some secret project for the Empire. Galen expected this, and has arranged a secret hideaway for Jyn, where she will hopefully be safe until his friend Saw Gerrera can find her. This at least deprives the Empire of any hostages to use against Galen, but he is still taken away and Jyn is left afraid and alone.

Many years later, Jyn is a young woman imprisoned by Imperials; they apparently don't know who she is, exactly, but she's become a jaded and cynical person (unsurprisingly) and isn't even terribly enthusiastic about being rescued from prison!

However, the Rebellion has a very strong reason to rescue her: they believe that her father Galen is still a key engineer in the creation of an incredible weapon and hope they can use her to get in contact with Galen, perhaps extract him while getting information about this weapon.

Or rather, that's the line they give her. In reality, her chosen companion and, at least at first, guard, Cassian Andor, has clear instructions: there's to be no extraction, just an assassination. And we've seen, in his first appearance, that Cassian is quite capable of killing someone if they seem to be a threat to a mission…

 

Just from this beginning, you know that Rogue One is going to be a darker story than the usual Star Wars film, and it doesn't shrink from this approach. No one – and I mean NO ONE – is safe in this film, except for those that we know must survive, because we've seen them in the films that take place later (e.g., Mon Mothma, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, etc.).

The earlier movies were, mostly, event/plot driven. There's certainly a straightforward plot driving this movie, but the dynamics and events of the plot are to a large extent dependent on the characters. Jyn and Cassian find that they are increasingly in over their heads as what seemed a relatively simple, if very dangerous, mission – find her father and rescue (or kill) him – spirals out of control into what is ultimately a desperate infiltration of one of the most secure Imperial installations in the Galaxy in search of vital information that will make the difference between the life and death of countless planets.

The side characters are what help bring the world to life. Oh, we know and recognize the setting well enough, but without the familiar characters we need new ones to care about, or to hate. Perhaps the most important and often overlooked of these – even by the other characters – is Bodhi Rook, the Imperial cargo pilot whose defection triggers the entire plot. Untrusted by either side, subjected to a mind-ripping interrogation, Rook is nonetheless able to regain his sanity and focus, and is in some ways the real hero of the movie, despite being at first nothing more than a MacGuffin to get things moving.

Monk-like Chirrut Imwe, one of the guardians of the Whills and the closest thing we see to a true Jedi in this film, brings both humor and wisdom to counterpoint the deadpan, cynical practicality of his lifetime companion Baze Malbus, and both of them have something to teach the main characters Jyn and Cassian. Repurposed Imperial Droid, now pilot and Rebel soldier K-2S0, is at turns creepily cold and startlingly insightful, with an acid wit that never deserts him.

The heroes of course need villains to oppose them. The main opposition comes from Orson Krennic, Director of Weapons Research, for whom the Death Star is the crowning achievement of a lifetime – an achievement dependent to a great extent on the work of Galen Orso, which is why Krennic had to have him retrieved. Krennic, however, is not himself secure from higher-placed members of the Empire, and has to walk a tightrope between the rapacious Grand Moff Tarkin – who at first doubts the effectiveness of the Death Star and then, upon seeing it in action, uses relatively minor failures in Krennic's command to co-opt control of the planetoid-sized battle station – and the terrifying Darth Vader, who allows Krennic to attempt to regain control of his project while demonstrating just how little Krennic's ambitions mean to Vader or the Emperor.

Technically, Rogue One is brilliant. The battles are filmed with precise and well-thought-out timing, the sets are convincingly solid, the special effects top-notch. This was a great film for watching, just for the visuals alone, although – no doubt partly to maintain the stark atmosphere of the film – we rarely got to see pleasant areas of the Empire (and the one really nice place we get to see gets destroyed shortly thereafter).

The re-animation of Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin is startlingly effective; only in the longer scenes can one see hints that this isn't actually a living actor. The real tip-off comes from the voice itself; whoever is editing or imitating Tarkin's voice is just a hair off, missing a bit of the gravitas that Cushing put into every word he spoke. Princess Leia's appearance is also very good, although she is only on-screen for a short time and thus doesn't face the challenges that Tarkin did.

Darth Vader gets one sequence to himself and in a matter of minutes manages to emphasize WHY his name was feared throughout the Galaxy; he is an unstoppable, pitiless force of destruction and only sheer numbers, luck, and determination allow ANY of the Rebels to escape with their lives.

Overall, this was an excellent entry into the Star Wars canon, and is probably the best prequel I've ever seen. Highly recommended!