James L. Cambias's Blog, page 15

Planetary Events Comes to Earth!

Most of what I've been writing lately has been fiction ��� The Godel Operation, some short stories in the Billion Worlds setting, and the followup novel (still in progress). But I call myself a "writer and game designer" for a reason: I haven't given up on writing game stuff. Recently I decided to take the plunge and try releasing some short self-published roleplaying products. The first of what I hope to be a long series is finally available.

Planetary Events is a supplement for any and all spacefaring science fiction roleplaying games, designed to help add some depth and realism to your star-spanning campaign. Too often planets in a space RPG are like rooms in a dungeon: you show up, do some stuff, and leave. When you come back, nothing much has changed. Planetary Events gives gamemasters a quick way to come up with events that change the situation on a world. Some are relatively small-scale, others can have effects which ripple through the entire campaign universe. It's "system-agnostic," which means it isn't tied to any one particular set of game rules. You can use it for Traveller (all editions), Starfinder, Star HERO, Stars Without Number, or whatever game you like.

I've put it up for sale at both DriveThruRPG and Itch.io, as a "pay what you want" product.

There will be other products in the future ��� although given my own broad interests and short attention span, you can assume the subject matter will vary widely. 

The Songs of Distant Earth and the Roots of Inspiration

For a long time I've enjoyed the music of Mike Oldfield ��� especially his longer, more complex works. Until a few years ago his stuff wasn't easy for me to get my hands on. Back when record shops existed, they didn't often carry his records. But with the rise of online music he's a lot more available.

Recently I've been listening to Oldfield's 1994 album The Songs of Distant Earth. It's a "concept album" based on Arthur C. Clarke's 1986 novel The Songs of Distant Earth, which in turn was expanded from Clarke's 1958 short story "The Songs of Distant Earth." (When you know you've got a good title, you might as well keep using it.) Inevitably, I dug out my copy of the book in order to re-read it. It's better than I remember, actually. I think I've aged into it.

According to Wikipedia, quoting Mike Oldfield's autobiography, the project was suggested by a record executive at Warner Music . . . but after re-reading the novel I have some suspicions.

Chapter 52 of The Songs of Distant Earth is called "The Songs of Distant Earth," and comes near the end of the novel. The mighty starship Magellan is preparing to leave the planet Thalassa and the locals have arranged a farewell ceremony. The high point is the performance of a work called Lamentation for Atlantis. That's one of the tracks on Oldfield's album, but the description of the fictional composition is a pretty good match for the whole album The Songs of Distant Earth by Mike Oldfield. In effect, he wrote the work Clarke described.

But right before Clarke's description of Lamentation for Atlantis, there's this:

It still seemed a miracle that after their art had reached technological perfection, composers of music could find anything new to say. For two thousand years, electronics had given them complete command over every sound audible to the human ear, and it might have been thought that all the possibilities of the medium had been exhausted.

There had, indeed, been about a century of beepings and twitterings and electroeructations before composers had mastered their now infinite powers and had once again successfully married technology and art.

I can't shake the suspicion that Mike Oldfield came across that passage ��� perhaps while reading the novel after the Warner Music exec suggested it ��� and read that little dig about "beepings and twitterings and electroeructations." And I suspect that noted electronic composer Mike Oldfield may have been a little miffed. I suspect that's when he decided to write the album, and show Sir Arthur that it wouldn't take a century for a composer to "marry technology and art" and produce an electronic work worthy of Clarke's own fictional musical masterpiece.

That's the best way to respond to something: show you can equal or surpass it. 

This is all supposition, and if Mr. Oldfield happens to read this and wants to refute me, he's welcome to do so. Meanwhile I think I know the real story.

Everything But The Quack

For some reason the local discount club store had ducks for $2.99 a pound. That's cheaper than I've seen duck in a long time, so I got one last time I was there. Diane wanted to try making duck confit, so we thawed the bird and began taking it apart today.

She cut up and partly deboned the duck, and popped the meat into a bag to cook sous vide for about thirty hours. (Confiture is long cooking at low temperature, covered by fat to keep the meat from drying out. Sound familiar? It's sous vide with duck fat instead of a plastic bag. We're just combining the techniques.)

But that's not all. As she finished with the carcass, I took the bits she left. I roasted the bones and skin ��� which browned them nicely and rendered out about a pint of duck fat. Then most of the roasted bits went into the stock pot, so I can make duck stock, which means duck soup ramen later this week. Some pieces of skin stayed in the oven until brown and crispy, because if you're going to cook a duck, you simply must get some duck cracklings out of it.

Our house certainly does smell good this weekend.

Why Odysseus?

My son is taking a class on Mythologies of the Ancient World, which means he's been reading things like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and other ancient works (in translation). And since we've been talking about what he's studying in class, that means I've been re-reading them and thinking about them, as well.

In particular, I'm struck by the portrayal of Odysseus in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Most of the other heroes in the Iliad are very mythological people. Achilles is half-god, and Hector is put up against him with divine aid because the gods want Achilles to look good. But Odysseus is very obviously a man, possibly even a real person. He doesn't want to go off to Troy in the first place, and once there he wants to finish the job and go home. He's clever and brave, but he's notoriously devious and lies as easily as breathing.

My personal comparison for Odysseus is Han Solo, in Star Wars. In the original Star Wars, most of the characters are quite fantastic. Luke is a fairy-tale hero, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a mythic space wizard mentor. But Han Solo is a recognizably contemporary working stiff. He's got a beat-up old freighter, he owes money to a loan shark, and he doesn't believe any of that nonsense about a mystical force field which pervades the Galaxy. He grounds the story in reality.

Odysseus has a similar role, at least in the Iliad. The Greek audience for Homer's epic could identify with Odysseus. He does the things most of us would do in that situation ��� assuming most of us were much more clever, attractive, strong, brave, and silver-tongued than most of us really are. He grounds the story in reality.

Which makes it kind of ironic that Odysseus is the one who winds up going on a fantastic sea voyage in the western Mediterranean in the course of his journey home. The most grounded character in the Trojan war winds up having the wildest adventures.

Ironic, that is, if you think of the Odyssey as a myth, bubbling up by some cthonic process out of the collective Greek unconscious. But if you consider the Odyssey as a work of fiction by an author, it's inevitable. Who else should be thrown into the middle of weirdness, with one-eyed giants, cannibals, wind gods, lusty nymphs, sorceresses, lotus-eaters, and sea monsters? A more mythic character like Achilles would be part of that weird world ��� he's probably related to Circe or Calypso.

No, it's a better story to put the skeptical realist Odysseus in the realm of monsters and fantastic islands. Three thousand years later, Jonathan Swift wrote a tale of a voyage to bizarre islands in a distant sea. And what manner of man did he send on that voyage? Lemuel Gulliver! A . . . recognizably Queen Anne era working stiff. And three centuries after that when I wrote about weird creatures at the bottom of a dark ocean on another planet, who was my viewpoint character? Rob Freeman, a recognizably near-future working stiff.

The whole point of showing fantastic things is to show how an ordinary person reacts to them. Fantastic people experiencing fantastic events makes one fantastic too many. The author of the Odyssey understood that, and so chose the hero Odysseus over all the other homeward-bound Greek heroes of the Trojan War as the viewpoint character. It could have been called the Menelaiad, but it wasn't. That was an artistic choice by a creator of literature.

More Free Time

It appears I won't need to bother going to this year's WorldCon. If they are willing to believe and promote lies about my publisher, they can get along without me. I urge everyone else who cares about science fiction to skip this year as well.

Steely-Eyed Missile Robot

Congratulations to the Perseverance rover on its successful landing on Mars. Pretty impressive job for a rookie pilot! Let's all wish it a long career of rolling around the Martian landscape.

ADDENDUM: Almost as impressive as the landing is the amazing improvement in data return. Forty-five years ago, when I watched the Viking landings on Mars, it took hours for the first still photos to reach Earth. Today Perseverance sent back pictures within a few minutes.

 

Notes on The Lost Road

I recently acquired a copy of The Lost Road, an unfinished work by J.R.R. Tolkien, edited and extensively annotated by his son Christopher Tolkien. The origin of the work is very interesting: according to Tolkien's own account, it grew out of a conversation he had with his close friend C.S. Lewis. "Tollers," Lewis told him, "There is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves."

The two of them decided that Lewis would write a space travel story and Tolkien would write a time travel story. Some versions of the story I've seen indicate they flipped a coin to see who would do which.

Lewis wrote Out of the Silent Planet, which he followed with a couple of sequels to create his astounding "Space Trilogy." Tolkien began The Lost Road, a story of a modern person's mind being cast back in time to the time of the fall of Numenor (aka Atlantis). He began a draft but ultimately gave up on it and decided to concentrate on The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings.

So . . . what if the coin flip had gone the other way? What if Lewis took on the job of writing a time travel story, and Tolkien cast his attention to outer space?

A time travel story by C.S. Lewis is certainly an intriguing prospect. I expect he would have focused on a historical period, probably the Middle Ages, allowing some contemporary characters from the 1930s to interact with the medieval world.

But J.R.R. Tolkien writing about outer space . . . ? What would that have been like? He wouldn't have been able to use his extensive "Middle Earth" legendarium as source material, as he did with The Lost Road.

 I suspect that Tolkien would have looked to Mars for his space story, just as Lewis did for Out of the Silent Planet. I also suspect he would not have had much patience for the mechanics of space travel, not even the technobabble handwaving that Lewis used.

Which raises the interesting question of whether Tolkien would have done as Lewis did, and send a contemporary human to another planet ��� or would he have done as he did in his fantasy works, telling a story entirely from within an alien culture? Tolkien being Tolkien, that would presumably require him to invent the entire language and mythology of his Martians, including poems and songs and folk tales.

But what kind of Martians would Tolkien have created? By the 1930s, science fiction was starting to move away from the idea of "men on other planets" toward the concept of extraterrestrials as the product of alien evolution in alien environments. Would Tolkien have gone along with that?

If he chose to write about a human civilization on Mars, we would have something very much like E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ourobouros, but with better names. I'm not sure how Tolkien would have addressed the question of whether the other planets of the Solar System are "fallen" worlds like Earth, or remain "unfallen." I suspect the former ��� his Middle-Earth stories mention ancient evils from outside the world, which would certainly provide perils enough for heroes to overcome.

That would be moderately interesting, but I find myself wondering how J.R.R. Tolkien might have handled a genuinely non-human species and culture. While I doubt he spent much time reading Amazing Stories or Astounding, he certainly must have been familiar with the works of H.G. Wells, like The War of the Worlds or The First Men in the Moon, both of which featured very non-human aliens.

So perhaps his space story would have involved some Martians ��� maybe bird-like beings, or insects ��� undertaking an arduous journey across the landscape of the Red Planet, on some mission to save the planet from some ancient horror from deep space.

The real question is whether Tolkien's heart would have been in the task, as it obviously was when he wrote The Lord of the Rings. Frankly I suspect it would not have been, but one can dream. A science fiction novel with the impact and quality of The Lord of the Rings, published in the 1940s, would have had a huge impact on the field. Science Fiction might have begun edging toward literary respectability a generation earlier than in our history.

It would also mean that science fiction would retain much more of a British flavor than it did historically. Instead of Asimov-Clarke-Heinlein as SF's "Big Three" of postwar SF we might remember Clarke-Tolkien-Wyndham in those roles, with Heinlein as an American also-ran.

And if science fiction remains "quintessentially British" would that in turn have affected national attitudes and policies? Would the Union Jack have been the first flag on the Moon, carried aboard a British Interplanetary Society atomic rocketship? Naturally the rest of the Commonwealth would be involved, with spacecraft launching from Woomera in Australia and specialists from four continents participating.

Why, we might even see an eccentric South African tycoon bankrolling a voyage to Mars by now . . .

Dinosaur Fundamentals

Here's an interesting science story: researchers describe fossilized soft tissue of a dinosaur cloaca ��� the first time this part of any dinosaur has been seen before. You can read about it at ScienceDaily (for the highbrow version), LiveScience (for the popular-science version), or Gizmodo (for the . . . Gizmodo version). The New York Times also has the story, but they have a paywall.

This paper reveals a lot about dinosaurs that was completely unknown up to now. We didn't really know what their genitalia were like. Now we do ��� they were (unsurprisingly) rather like modern birds.

I'm sharing this for two reasons. First of all, I've been hearing about it at home for about six months now, accompanied by dire warnings to keep it confidential until the paper appears. So now it's time to spill the beans.

Second, it's about dinosaurs! Just like in Bone Wars!

Arisia 2021

This weekend I'll be appearing at the venerable Arisia science fiction con. Normally it's held in Boston, but this year it's happening right on your computer. You can join it here: https://www.arisia.org

I'm doing three events this weekend. On Friday evening at 10:00 pm (EST) I'm doing a reading from my forthcoming novel The Godel Operation.

Saturday at 5:30 pm (EST) I'll be on a panel, "Cut the Boring Parts" about creating tension and writing lean prose.

And on Sunday at 10:00 am (EST) I'm doing a panel on "Solar System Tourism," covering places to visit on other planets, and how long we'll have to wait before you can vacation in space.

There's lots of other events going on at Arisia. Join and see!

The Lost Manuscripts of Lemuel Gulliver, Part the Second

A couple of weeks ago I posted about the exciting discovery in Oxford's Bodleian Library of unpublished notes and drafts by the 18th Century explorer and naturalist Dr. Lemuel Gulliver. That first post included Gulliver's discussion of how the difference in scale affected the architecture and habits of the Lilliputians. This excerpt is concerned with their dietary habits.

Concerning the Habits of the Lilliputians while at Table, I own I must admit they are the most gluttonous Nation I have ever had occasion to observe.

Immediately upon rising, each one breaks his fast with a cold Collation of Meat, Eggs, divers Sweets, accompanied by Beer, as the pangs of Hunger permit no delay for cooking. This first breakfast is followed at midmorning by a second, which any Englishman would consider more than ample for a dinner; with Soups, roast Fowl, Puddings, and suchlike Viands in great Abundance. At midday they take a Luncheon of smoked Meats or Fish, Eggs, and Nuts, all in considerable Quantities. At the setting of the Sun they dine, and those dinners are as great as the other meals of the day in combination. Even the meanest of Lilliputians has a dinner of three or four removes, with courses of Fish, Soup, roast Meat androast Fowl, &c. In the evening before retiring, these insatiable Lilliputians sup upon bowls of Porridge or Beans. All these immense meals are accompanied by Cheeses and Sweets.1

I did notice some curious lacunae in the Diet of the Lilliputians. They have little Appetite for Bread, and never consume Greens or Herbs, save as a kind of Garnish to the great platters of Flesh they devour. Nor do they enjoy any sort of Fruit in its natural state, but must needs cook all Fruits and Vegetables into a veritable Pap, often stirred with Cream or Butter.

I had the Occasion to ask my neighbor Dr. Darwin if there might be some Defect in the Digestion common to Lilliputians which would explain their insatiable Hunger.

"The only Defect is the small Stature of these Lilliputians, Dr. Gulliver," was his reply to me. "One may observe in Nature that the tiniest Creatures have greater Appetites than large ones. My own Pigeons eat more Corn in proportion to their weight than my Geese. The ratio, based on my own Observations, appears to be the cubic power of the fourth root of the weight of the Animal."2

I asked him to explain that in greater detail.

"Certainly. You yourself weigh some thirteen stone, I should judge. You mentioned that Lilliputian gentlemen typically weigh about two ounces. If your respective Appetites were in proportion to your weights, one would expect that a Lilliputian would eat only 1/1728th as much as yourself ��� which would amount to less than a fiftieth of an ounce per day. Obviously, however, you did not observe that."

I said that their Appetites were very much of an opposite character.

Dr. Darwin continued: "If my Observations are correct, a Lilliputian one-twelfth of your height would require food in the amount of 1/268 of what you yourself would consume. If an active Englishman such as yourself eats two pounds of food every day, if not more (here Dr. Darwin absent-mindedly patted his own considerable Paunch), then a Lilliputian would thrive upon an eighth of an ounce. That would amount to one-sixteenth of his own weight, or the equivalent of more than ten pounds of food per day for a man of your size!"

"That accounts for the Quantities eaten by the Lilliputians, but I am curious as to whether their dietary Preferences might also have a physical Origin," I said to him.

"I consider it indisputable," said he. "If you examine any domestic animals you will quickly note that those creatures which eat a coarse diet of Grass or even Oats devote a much greater Proportion of their bodily weight to Organs of Digestion, than those which thrive upon Flesh. These Lilliputians must consume the very richest of foods, and must cook them so as to make them as digestible as possible. I suspect that a Lilliputian condemned to live by Bread alone might eat all day yet become weak for Want of food!"

"This explains a matter which had long puzzled me," I said. "During my time in the Kingdom of Lilliput, there was seldom much great Difficulty in supplying my wants, as the Lilliputians maintained great Storehouses of victuals. I now see that compared to them, my own Appetite was comparitively meagre, and thus easily satisfied by them."

1It is possible that J.R.R. Tolkein may have read or heard of the Gulliver manuscripts during his decades as a professor at Oxford, as the similarity in eating habits between the Lilliputians and his Hobbits is striking. 

2Historians of science should take note that Erasmus Darwin here anticipates Kleiber's Law by nearly two centuries.