Max Gladstone's Blog, page 8

It’s Christmas Eve

Happy holidays, everybody.  This week I have a busy agenda of re-reading Hogfather and The Dark is Rising, and hanging out with my family and my nephew.  Who is also family, I suppose, but deserves special mention.

I hope you’re all well.  Enjoy midwinter, read good books, and love your neighbors as yourselves.

I’ll be back next week.

In Which I Sing Dwarven Carols

I cannot tell you how excited I am to share this video with you all.

That’s my friend Daniel Jordan on the right; he’s a biophysicist and excellent musician who’s writing a way cool rock opera adaptation Wagner’s Ring Cycle, because that’s how we roll in Somerville Mass.

Other news, if you are insufficiently Holiday’d: Tor.com, the more fools they, invited me to write about whether The Nightmare Before Christmas is properly a Christmas movie, or a Halloween movie, or what.  This in turn occasioned me to engage in my favorite pasttime: obsessive rumination on religion and story structure, plus Die Hard references!

This is a frivolous question, sure, like some of the best. But even frivolous questions have a serious edge: holidays are ritual times, and stories are our oldest rituals. The stories we tell around a holiday name that holiday: I’ve failed at every Christmas on which I don’t watch the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. When December rolls around, even unchurched folk can get their teeth out for a Lessons & Carols service.

So let’s abandon trappings and turn to deep structures of story. Does The Nightmare Before Christmas work as Christmas movies do? Does it work as Halloween movies do? It can achieve both ends, clearly—much as a comedy can be romantic, or a thriller funny. But to resolve our dilemma we must first identify these deep structures.

Happy holidays, y’all!

 

Readers, Earning Out, and Thanks

My first book came out two years ago. Many books come out each year, but this one was mine, dammit, and I was excited! I wanted to tell cool stories, do crazy things, and make magic happen.  I didn’t know if anyone would read my work—I mean, I had high hopes, but those and two bits won’t buy you a coke these days unless you go to Sam’s Club and that’s too much tangent for even me to sustain.

A few weeks ago, this came in the mail.

Nothing on this check matters except for that little “Roy” in the memo line.  These are royalties for Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise, which means those books have earned out of their advance.  This is amazing news.  Let me write that on its own line.

This is amazing news.

The general accepted wisdom on advances (as I’ve heard it anyway) is that if you earn out, great!  But you shouldn’t expect to earn out—the advance is the only money you should ever count on receiving.

So, earning out is a Big Thing, folks.  It means my publisher was justified in the risk they took on the first books, and will be more likely to want to publish more, which is great, because I have more stories to tell, in the Sequence and out of it.  But this isn’t really a thing I’ve done, so much as a thing you all have done.  Everyone who read the books, who reviewed them, who bought copies for their friends, who checked them out of the library, who came to a signing or said hi at a convention—thank you so much.  I love this job, and I can only do it because you care, because you read, and because you spread the word.

Also in this cool vein: my story A Kiss with Teeth landed in Some of the Best from Tor.com, a Tor.com reader poll listed Full Fathom Five as one of the best books of 2014, and then their critical roundup included it as well!

Here is an animated .gif to express my feelings about my readers:

 

Happy holidays, y’all.

A Bit of a Love Letter to Kip Thorne Honestly

Hi everyone!  I’m back at Tor.com this week, with a post about Interstellar and Kip Thorne.  Behold: an essay in which I get excitable and incoherent about science writing!  Read the rest here!

Or, if you’re interested, I’m trying a strange experiment: video!  What experiment is this, you say.  Here, says I:

What do you think?  Worth doing more?  Oh my god Gladstone stay off our video internet?

Other news: I’ve published a rare Craft Sequence short story, as part of the Shared Nightmares anthology.  It’s available right now wherever fine books and ebooks are sold, stars Tara and Abelard, and is a piece of good clean fun about nightmares and office technology.  Enjoy!

Oh, and though it should go without saying: it’s Christmastime!  Have you considered possibly acquiring a nice new book for you and / or your friends?

A Moment of Silence

I had a Thanksgiving post ready for this year.  I have a great deal to be thankful for.

In light of recent events, I’m taking a moment to be silent.

You can donate to the Ferguson Public Library at this link.

You can donate to the Ferguson Defense Fund at this link.

You can donate to Saint Stephen’s Food Bank at this link.

Comments are off for this post.

Indiana Jones, Tor.com Column, Website Updates!

First things first: for your regular weekly dose of crazy Max thoughts about weird geek stuff, go check out this article I wrote for Tor.com on why Indiana Jones isn’t that bad of an archaeologist really:

Indiana Jones isn’t that bad of an archaeologist.

I mean, okay, the low relative quality of his archaeological expeditions is so notorious it’s become a bit of a truism. There’s a great McSweeney’s list of the reasons Herr Doktor Jones was denied tenure. Even as I make this argument, I can hear friends of mine who spent their summers on digs cringe inside, across the continent. (Hi, Celia!) But hear me out. This won’t take long.

(Looks at rest of essay)

Um. Maybe it will. Keep reading anyway.

This brings us to an important housekeeping issue: starting with this post, I’ll be over at Tor.com once every other week, posting weird off-the-wall essays on geek madness.  Since blog post writing (especially at this length) cuts into fiction-writing time, I’ll be restricting myself to brief posts on this site on the weeks a Tor.com piece goes live—mostly pointing your way to the Tor.com column.  I have Grand Schemes about multimedia elements to complement the Tor.com pieces, but that will take shape when I have more time than I do at the moment.

Speaking of which: second important housekeeping issue!  Due to Deadline Confluence, I’ll be less available on social media and the like than usual for the rest of the year.  Basically I’ll be keeping old-fashioned Visiting Hours—I’m At Home to Friends or Reasonable Facsimiles Thereof on Twitter and Facebook Monday and Wednesday afternoons.  All other times, my currently live Schemes require above-average levels of Brutal Focus.  Plus side: if I come through this alive, you’ll have a book, and a game, and I might be able to play Dragon Age: Inquisition!

Third important housekeeping issue!  I’ve done most of the website redesign I’ve planned.  The site doesn’t look much different, but I’ve created individual book pages, added a description for the Craft Sequence, and given you a menu of delectable and free short fiction upon which to browse.  Also, my Events page is up to date with confirmed Con appearances through August!  Coming soon: fan art gallery.

Fourth—ah, no, this really isn’t a housekeeping issue, it’s just that Breaking Bad / Frozen video you’ve seen elsewhere.  Still great though!

Craft Sequence Gaming at AnonyCon!

Hello, dear friends, and please take care not to fall into the enormous pit in the center of my website!  Also, be careful when sampling the cream-filled pastries, some of which may have been filled with Grimwald Variegated Industries Nanite Superweapon Lifelike Cream Substitute [tm, pat. pend.] due to a catering mishap.  All of which is to say: I’ll be updating the site over the course of the next week or so, and as Wordpress hackery goes, I’m one hell of a hack.  I’ll do my best to offer a seamless transition, but I’m not exactly the Lord King of UX Testing, so if something breaks for your edge-case browser, please do let me know.

I had a wonderful time at the World Fantasy Convention this year, though I think I’ll be the next week or two recovering from the sleep debt incurred those four days.  Cons, as I may have observed on this site before, are ritual spaces—for three days a dedicated corps of acolytes creates a space which is by definition tangent to all other ritual spaces of the same tradition.  (Though it occurs to me that this view of ritual space may be particularly Abrahamic, or maybe even post-Christian—the opposition of ritual space and holy place… Fruit for further research & / or blog entries.)  Cons transform otherwise unassuming Marriotts to lands of adventure—or at least to places where staying up until 4 AM talking about social dynamics in live action roleplaying makes sense.  I had a wonderful time with too many people to list—though I tried on Facebook as soon as I came back from the con, and of course left out a bunch of people and as a result now feel kinda like a heel.  Anyway!

My next con follows hot on the heels of World Fantasy: AnonyCon in Stamford, CT, from Dec. 5 – 7.  AnonyCon is a gaming convention I’ve attended with friends off and on since college.  For the last couple years we’ve been working on games in the Craft Sequence universe—an announcement I’m happy to make today!

Michael Seidman has been working on a Craft Sequence d20 system which we’ll be road-testing this con—and I’ll run a God Wars game using, naturally, Mythender, the only con-weight system I know with a power level high enough.  If you’ve ever wanted to game in the Craft world, this is your chance.  Here are the games!  The Mythender game’s on the schedule already, and the d20 games should be there soon:

God Wars – Mythender

2-6 PM Saturday, Dec 6

Max Gladstone

Welcome to the God Wars. You and your teammates are Craftsmen, once-human magic-users fighting for human freedom from the dark gods that rule the world. Create a lich king, a demon accountant, a bankruptcy necromancer—and go punch a God of Thunder in the face. But will the destruction you wreak loose your already-fragile hold on humanity? Characters created at session. Come with concepts. Some familiarity with the Craft Sequence preferred; general desire to murder gods a plus.

God Wars is a game using the Mythender system. If you prefer to use your own dice, bring d6s. Bring lots of d6s. You may not own enough d6s for this game. The rulebook suggests a four-player group can get by with 170 dice. The GM will bring dice cubes.

So Sue Me

(Not yet scheduled)

Mike Seidman

Your team has been hired to represent a local colony of intelligent worms in a lawsuit against one of the most powerful firms in the Iskari Empire. What could possibly go wrong?

The next two games may or may not be run, depending on schedule—

Are You Feelin’ Hot, Hot, Hot

An office building in the city of Kol ‘ir, built by the Iskari architectural firm Koralli Consolidated, has suffered significant fire damage despite being warded against such events. Koralli has sent the team to investigate what happened, why the wards failed, and what needs to be done to repair the place and ensure it stays safe. Pre-generated characters provided.

The Iskari Treasure Fleet

The great nation of Iskar is bringing the riches home from its diverse colonial holdings. Despite the powerful magics, curses, and blessings designed to ensure a safe voyage, the trip is not without risk, especially for those newly drafted into service with the Iskari Merchant Marine.

There’s a chance Mike will run revised versions of two other Craft Sequence games, depending on demand and his own availability.  So, yeah—if you’re in the Connecticut area and want to game in the Craft world, hie thee hence!  Also I’ll be hanging around signing books and stuff, so there’s that.

I’ll be updating the con appearance section soon with confirmed dates for 2015.  Stay tuned!  And take a pastry on your way out

Wait, no, not that—

-static follows-

 

Surviving a National Novel Writing Apocalypse

To start, news! I have a new short story out this week!  Don’t expect this kind of treatment regularly, but I wrote a thing about supervillains at a bar, and it’s in the first issue of Uncanny Magazine, the rest of which is also worth reading!  Now, on to your regularly scheduled bloviating.

National Novel Writing Month is here!  If you’re not a dual-class writer / internet person this may not mean much to you, so here’s the skinny: every November, people around the world sign up to write 50,000 words over the course of the calendar month.  This is a large number of words to write.  For participant, especially those who haven’t done it before, NaNoWriMo may feel like a constant sprint against a voracious and ever-advancing wordcount target.  1,667 words every single day.  Weekends.  Holidays.

The Target does not stop.  The Target does not sleep.  The Target doesn’t care about your nervous breakdown.  Tired?  Wrists hurt?  Out of coffee?  Tough.  The Target still shambles forward, rotten teeth jutting jagged from rotten gums.  Run as fast as you can, look back, and you’ll find the Target behind you—always just behind you somehow, over your shoulder, down that alley.  Rest and it will find you.  The Target has no sympathy.  The Target feels no pain.  The Target doesn’t feel anything, really, not even hunger.  Feelings are a distraction.  The Target eats.  The Target follows.  The Target’s behind you right now.  You could feel its breath on your neck, if it breathed.  The air stinks of rot and typewriter ribbon.

I live the fight against the Target.  I lived it long before I stumbled into this neat, terrifying place where I fight the Target full-time.  If this is your first time through, or, hell, if this is your fifth time through but you still feel that fear, if you wake some nights drowning in the stink of rot and typewriter ribbon—I’m here to offer you some pieces of advice I hope will be worth the time you’re even now thinking you could have, should have, spent running, fighting, building barricades.  I hope—this will help you.  Because it’s a vicious world out there.

Don’t Panic (Though it will get bad.)  The Target knows your fear.  It’s not smart, understand—but it uses your own smarts against you, instinctively.  Our great-great-a-billion-times-great grandmas were little rats quivering under leaves as monstrous feathered lizards prowled for a snack—we’re built to freeze under pressure, or to run.  The Target’s dumb, but thorough.  If you remain in place, it will devour you.  And the closer it gets (or the further ahead it gets!) the more a little voice will whisper in your ear: freeze.  Don’t trust that voice.  The Target won’t get you if you run, and keep running.  And on that note…

Don’t Sprint (Unless You’re Almost Safe.)  If you want to rely on sprinting, you should have been born a cheetah.  There’s good evidence humans evolved to jog after animals across the savannah until they died from exhaustion and fright.  You remember the bit in Butch and Sundance where they go: “Who are these guys?”  That’s us, in the animal kingdom.  That’s humans.  I know a woman who accidentally killed her friend’s dog while taking it for a run—she’s an ultramarathonner, and turns out dogs aren’t built to run marathons.  That’s the human race right there.  We can sprint, when we need to, but that’s not how we’re built.   Write ten thousand words in a day and your wrists will cringe, your back will seize, your scavenger’s mind will yearn to do anything else.  Which is fine if you’ve just made it to that Last Redoubt called The End.  It’s a problem if you’re in the middle of Act III with 40,000 words left and Target closing in.  If you’re behind, if you’re in Target-held territory, figure out how to extricate yourself smoothly and dependably.  Yes, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in a couple weeks on a single roll of butcher paper, but (1) you’re not Jack Kerouac, (2) he was on a disgusting amount of Benzedrine, and (3) you’re still not Jack Kerouac.  Oh, and (4), he’d written three test drafts of the novel before he sat down with the butcher paper.  So:

Trust Your Plan (Most of the time.)  Stress makes human beings good at lots of stuff, but it shoots our reasoning abilities in the gut.  Literally!  Your body doesn’t know the difference between “oh god oh god tiger gonna eat me” and “this is a minor career setback that can be overcome with reasonable effort.”  So when you smell that rot and typewriter ribbon, you’ll manufacture all sorts of crazy ideas.  What the hell am I doing?  I should set fire to this whole manuscript.  I should set fire to this whole coffee shop.  Most insidious: this plan, these ideas I wrote back when I was safe, before the world began to burn, they’re all shit and I’m shit and oh my god we’ve been on the wrong path this entire time, let’s run left into the forest!  Which isn’t bad in itself, but odds are you don’t know how to navigate the forest, and there are actual honest-to-god tigers out there.  But sometimes you have to…

Listen to Your Gut (When it’s right.)  Yeah, I know, I just said don’t do this, but if this was a science we’d be on PhDComics and I’d have better job security.  Here’s the flip side of “trust your plan”—you made your plan before you met the Target.  You made your plan based on a Google Earth map of the territory you’d be running through, without setting foot on the ground.  Maybe that route you charted is uphill.  Maybe Google Earth was wrong (shock! horror!) and the route’s actually a dead end.  Maybe Godzilla smashed the Golden Gate Bridge, and you needed that bridge.  Yeah, your plan made sense when you drew it, but you know, now, that you’ve taken a wrong turn.  Here’s storytelling’s dirty secret, the ball they hide in those seminars about Aristotle and Freytag: our bodies know stories.  And just so we don’t hide the ball any further: yes, I’m talking about sex.  Just look at this diagram, which is super-industry-standard stuff I pulled from a Gamasutra article I found by googling Story Tension Diagram.  There are roughly a billion of these on the internet.

What’s that look like to you?  Really?  To me it looks like an excellent night in.  There’s a writing prompt here, but I try to keep this site pg-13.

But, and this is crucial, there is a difference between the voice in your gut that’s right and the voice that’s wrong.  That’s hard to learn.  You learn it on the ground, in unfamiliar territory, with Target closing in.  Some guidelines that work for me: the voice that says “this project is horrible, you’re horrible” is generally wrong.  The voice that says, “woah, wait a second, I’m really not into this” is often right.  For me, and feel free to disregard because I’m verging on Mystical Writer Mumbo Jumbo here, if I’m paying attention I can even tell where those voices are coming from.  The first sits behind and above my shoulders, pressing down and forward.  The second is a hole just in front of my spine, below the belly button, about where taiji folks will place the dan-t’ien.  Done with Mystical Writer Mumbo Jumbo for the moment.  Trust your gut.  Trust your plan.  You won’t survive without both.

Find Friends who Know the Target. This is a lonely fight.  It’s terrifying.  People lose all the time.  You will freeze, you will dive into the woods, you will hew to a plan when the landscape on which the plan was based lies in a million shattered pieces at your feet.  You need friends.  You need people who understand.  It’s best if they’ve been here before, if they’ve run from the Target, if they’re running now—but really, if you scratch the surface, everyone has a Target.  They might not realize it, but they do.  Find friends.  Lower your shields against one another so you can present a shield wall against the Target.  Beat an orderly retreat together.

Trust the Time Machine.  There’s a time machine in the Last Redoubt, and once you reach it, you can go back.  Those weird sentences you know you wrote?  You can fix them.  That unnecessary chapter?  Make it necessary, or cut it out.  That scene which starts too soon, or too late, you can start it on time.  Don’t flounder on the road, dreaming about the time machine.  Once you reach the Last Redoubt, you’ll have all the time in the world.  For now, you have to keep moving—so long as you know what direction you’re moving in.  This is especially true while the Target’s chasing you.  There’s no time for Joycean line-by-line angst.  Run.  Move.  Breathe.  Make mistakes.  If they are mistakes, you can fix them later.  But sometimes they aren’t mistakes.  Sometimes they’re bigger than that.  Sometimes they’re big enough to be genius.

It’s not about the Target.  Betrayal! you cry.  Treachery!  Treason!  Hogwash, I say: the target does not matter.   Repeat that.  If the Target matters, you will lose.  The Target is death, the Target is implacable, the Target is the mechanical pacing rabbit.  Don’t settle for surviving the Target.  Have something to live for.  Know what you want at the end of the race.  Know your Last Redoubt.  Know the friend you’ll rescue in the knick of time.  Aim for that swordfight, that first kiss, the final joke you’ve spent the whole book setting up.  Remember why you’re here—remember why you decided to write this book.  Justice?  Love?  Rebellion?  Taste it.  Smell it.  That’s what will pull you forward, through all the connective tissue, through all the wrong turns, through the jungle, through the stench of rot and ribbon.  Go there.  Take your reader with you.

I’m Writing this for You, and for Me.  There’s a reason I don’t do writing advice on this blog often.  Storytelling is the big human project.  We’ve been doing it for thousands of years—exploring its possibilities, developing forms and techniques, trying new things and rehearsing old schemes.  We tell stories about gods and we tell stories about atoms and we tell stories about people, who are even weirder than gods and atoms.  Storytelling is complicated, is what I’m saying.  I’ve thought about this stuff for a long time.  I’ve written way more than my 10,000 hours.  I still lose my way.  I come from schools of martial arts where teaching is what a master gives you, or a coach.  Senior students know what works for them—but they might not know enough to know that their advice only works in a certain context.  A fencer might feel he’s winning for one reason but might actually be winning for another reason altogether.  It’s mad.

And I’m no master.  I’ve published books.  I’ve been nominated for awards.  I write quickly, and well, and dependably.  And still I just finished a 12,500 word story—took me four days to write, and in the process I had every problem I’ve listed here, and more besides.  This is a letter to my future self as much as it is to you.  Maybe this will all come off as presumptive and weird.  But…

I started bouldering this year.  And one of the things I love about it is: there’s no master.  Just you and the wall.  And if you’re having trouble, one thing you can do is turn to the guy or gal next to you and say, “Damn, I’m having a hard time with this.  Any ideas?”  Their ideas might not work.  They might.  But either way they give you something new to take to the wall.

So that’s what I have for you this week: a bit of advice from someone else staring up the wall.

Go climb.  Kick ass.  Build something awesome.

The world needs more of that.

A Short Story for your Halloween

Happy Halloween, goblins and ghouls!

In celebration of this awesomest of holidays, I have a new short story to share with you.

A Kiss with Teeth, a tale of Halloween-ish import, went live on Tor.com this morning.  Here’s how it starts:

Vlad no longer shows his wife his sharp teeth. He keeps them secret in his gums, waiting for the quickened skip of hunger, for the bloodrush he almost never feels these days.

The teeth he wears instead are blunt as shovels. He coffee-stains them carefully, soaks them every night in a mug with ‘World’s Best Dad’ written on the side. After eight years of staining, Vlad’s blunt teeth are the burnished yellow of the keys of an old unplayed piano. If not for the stain they would be whiter than porcelain. Much, much whiter than bone.

White, almost, as the sharp teeth he keeps concealed.

You can read the rest on Tor.com.

Have a wonderful, and spooky, rest of the week.  Remember: Skeleton Jack says, SMILE.

Goblins: The Fungal Body Politic

Goblins: how do they work?

Okay, maybe this isn’t the Great Question of Our Time, but this is my airspace and I can write about goblins if I damn well please.

Goblins are a standard fantasy setting element deriving from folklore and more proximately (as with many other standard fantasy setting elements) from Tolkien.  Tolkien abandoned the term “goblin” after The Hobbit, though, preferring “orc.”  Goblins as gamers recognize them today spring largely from Gygax et. al.’s use of the species in as a common enemy for low-level players in Dungeons & Dragons.  The archetypical low-level D&D adventure features a handful of player characters sallying forth into a goblin warren to kill goblins and make off with goblin gold.

D&D has traditionally viewed goblins as fast-breeding humanoids, evil by definition, who salt away treasure and present an ideal target for adventuring parties looking for experience and gold.  This vision has a whole bunch of terrifying racist and colonialist implications, which others have critiqued in fictional form.  But what if we’ve been wrong about goblins all along?  What if evidence suggests goblins are much weirder than we thought?

Trawling around the internet last week, I found an old Daily MTG blog post about the creation of the Jund shard, a sub-world in Alara block and a bunch of you aren’t even reading this any more, you just see a string of “nerd nerd nerd” all along the screen.  Well, you’re the one who clicked on a link about goblins and fungi, so who’s the nerd now?

Still me, probably.

Anyway, I find worldbuilding in Magic: the Gathering interesting, so I read the article, and about halfway down the page, found the following quote:

High ground is bad; low ground is good. Dragons are aerial predators, and usually hunt at high elevations. Most goblins, who actually revere the thought of being eaten by dragons, live up on the mountain peaks, welcoming the draconic attention. Smarter prey species, such as humans, live in the relative safety of the bejungled valleys and lowlands (where they’re picked off by viashino and carnivorous plants instead).

Emphasis mine.

I hadn’t run across this particular piece of MTG lore previously, and it threw me.  Goblins don’t just revere the thought of being eaten by dragons, which would be weird enough—they’ve built an entire civilization on mountain peaks, the better to be so devoured.  What kind of even semi-intelligent organism would live in its apex predator’s habitat for purely ritual reasons?  Remember, we’re not talking about an occasional Moses-like quest up to the mountaintops to meet glory in a dragon gullet.  The article says “most goblins.”  And there are a lot of goblins!  That’s one thing goblins do: have a lot of themselves.

You can’t even explain this away by claiming this weird cultural quirk dooms goblins to extinction.  For one thing, cultures rarely doom themselves—the most obviously self-destructive ritual movements, like Shakerism, tend to be subcultural.  For another, the world in question, Jund, is described as being ruled by raw natural selection.  Nothing even slightly weak survives.  This is a realm of warrior kings and alligator men, carnivorous plants and enormous rhinoceroses.  So, if goblins exist here, it’s because they’re frighteningly well-suited for this environment.  And part of their being well-suited for this environment must involve being eaten by dragons.

Nor is this vision of goblinhood unique to this sub-sub-universe of the greater Magic: the Gathering cosmos.  Goblins exist in as many realms as elves, which is to say basically all of them, because elves are the meth of fantasy—an addictive chemical substitute for real excitement and novelty.  (Seriously.  Elves.  Not even once.)  (Except in Tolkien.  And Swanwick.  And dammit I’m just gonna pull a Whitman on this one, claim my right to self-contradiction, and return to my original argument.)  Wherever goblins appear in the Magic: the Gathering cosmos, they fit the same profile: insanely numerous, aggressive, and self-destructive.  Let me give you an example:

You don’t even need to read the text to understand what this card does: the chirurgeon is sawing off one goblin’s leg, while another goblin waits on crutches for his new leg.  The card lets you sacrifice goblins to help other creatures (the other creatures don’t even need to be goblins!)—which is a decent deal for a goblin player, because she’ll always have more goblins.  Or consider this card:

This one’s a little harder to understand just from the picture, but it isn’t that much harder.  Some goblins are trying to throw a comically huge Spy vs. Spy style bomb using a slingshot.  That’s a dumb idea, you may say.  The bomb could go off at any time!  And in fact this is true: when Goblin Bangchuckers tries to, you know, chuck bangs, you flip a coin, and if you lose the flip, the Bangchuckers kill themselves.

How is this a reasonable way to run a military?

Oh, they’re just goblins, you may say.  If you want artillery that works, call the dwarves!  Being bad at stuff is just a Goblin thing.  I mean, look at what happens when they do archaeology:

That’s an even less expressive picture, but, spoiler alert, goblins are horrible at archaeology.  A goblin archaeologist, presumably trained in the profession, stands a fifty percent chance of destroying whatever object he’s trying to unearth, a 50% chance of straight up killing himself, and a 0% chance of doing anything that you or I would call archaeology.  That’s even worse than Indiana Jones, who for all the justifiable criticism thrown his way has a 50% chance of actually retrieving the artifact he sets out to retrieve, and a 16.7% chance of getting it to a museum.  (Based on observable evidence from movies that actually exist, which is to say, Raiders, Temple, and Crusade.)

How on Earth, any Earth, do creatures evolve that are so bad at everything they do?  You could say that goblins didn’t evolve—but Word of God, which is to say, Word of Designer, indicates that natural selection does in fact apply in at least some Magic: the Gathering universes.

I propose: a species like the goblin will only arise if its evolutionary strategy is dramatically different from that of a mammalian scavenger species (e.g. us).  In English, which I do speak occasionally: goblins only work if what would be bad performance in mammalian scavenger species is in fact good performance for them.  Some aspect of goblins’ evolutionary dynamic must force them to self-destructive behavior.

Perhaps goblins have huge clutch sizes, or fast reproductive cycles.  That would explain their aggressive behavior, since a rapidly reproducing species needs more space, and expansion will bring them into conflict with their neighbors.  But this theory doesn’t justify individual goblins’ self-destructive behavior.  Nor does it explain the relative absence of competent professionals among goblin ranks.  If the best even a professional chirurgeon can do is kill one goblin to save another, if an archaeologist stands a fifty percent chance of killing himself whenever he plies his trade, we’re either dealing with a species that is predetermined to be Bad at Stuff, or one with some reason not to regard death as a big deal.

Which brings us to fungi.

Mushrooms and the like reproduce sexually and asexually, using spores released from the fruiting body of the fungus.  Asexual reproduction means the fungus doesn’t have much reason to care for its individual survival: its clones endure alongside its children.  The fungus is primarily concerned, to the extent anything concerns a fungus, with the question of spore dispersal.

Let’s ponder, for a moment, the kind of culture an ambulatory fungus might construct.  Individual fruiting bodies would probably seem, to us, utterly unconcerned with their own survival when confronted with large-scale dispersive destruction.  Struck with a fireball, or blown up by your own bomb?  No problem!  The force of the blast spreads your spores over the battlefield.  Chopped up by a surgeon to patch up some other creature (not necessarily a goblin)?  Great!  The new creature will carry you around for the rest of its life, dispersing your spores on the way.  Killed in battle?  Your spore-laden blood sticks to your adversary’s boots—and when she washes off in the nearest river, the current will carry your spores to unknown lands.  Eaten by a dragon?  Best of all possible worlds.  Assuming that your spores are resistant to a dragon’s intestinal juices, which is not implausible, being devoured by a dragon is a one-way ticket to dispersal throughout the plane—or even to other planes, if you’re very lucky, since some dragons have magical powers, including in some cases the power to shift from one universe to another.

Such an organism might even have a dramatically different sense of what being “good” at a trade might mean.  We want our doctors to heal us so we can continue our daily business, with an eye toward eventually reproducing in safety—an ambulatory fungus wants a doctor to help it disperse.  Our bombers want to survive; for an ambulatory fungus of the sort we’re imagining here, dying in a giant explosion is a good outcome.  The fungus we envision does not sow or reap.  It fights because battle is an efficient reproductive strategy.  Whatever it does, it does in a way that maximizes its potential spore dispersal.

This species sounds an awful lot like the goblins described above.  And Fungus Theory explains some other oddities of the species—for example, the fact that Magic: the Gathering goblins lack obvious primary or secondary sexual characteristics, and that a search of Gatherer, the database of all Magic: the Gathering cards, reveals a single nominally female goblin, the Goblin Matron, whose card art conveys no biological gender markers whatsoever.  “Matron” might be a purely social role in the Goblin community, that of an enabler of goblin reproduction.  Much more sensible if goblins are fruiting fungal bodies.

Seen in this light, rather than a designated target for “virtuous” adventurers engaged in campaigns of extermination and colonization, goblins become a complex, practically immortal species radically alien from the hominidae they regularly fight.  Goblins obviously wouldn’t be forthcoming about this difference—their long-term reproductive strategy relies on humanoids treating them as humanoids.  To a goblin, the human birth-death reproductive cycle would seem crude and disgustingly slow, the human insistence on throwing themselves into battle without promise of clone-resurrection borderline psychotic.  Goblins’ role as fantasy cannon fodder serves to spread their species to undreamt of realms and alien shores.  Who knows how many million goblins have spread to strange new worlds as a spore in an adventurer’s boot, as a growth on dragon fewmets, as a dried speck of blood on a planeswalker’s trouser cuff?

Consider the perspective of the goblin, suicidally immortal.  Humans build their tiny cities, dwarves delve, elves frolic in treetops.  But goblins thrive everywhere.  They always have been, and will always be.

Or don’t, and enjoy your Designated Antagonist Species.  I like my option better.

—

Thanks to Daniel Jordan, for the critical logical leap underpinning this essay.

Also: looking for a good Halloween read?  I just finished Peter Watts’ Blindsight, which is delightfully creepy, and contains some cool theory-of-mind loop-de-loops to boot.  Many folk seem to find Watts’ vision bleak; I don’t, which maybe means I’m more cynical than I thought?  Anyway.  Give it a shot, especially if you’re interested in science fiction as the realm of the Big, Old, and Weird.