James L. Cambias's Blog, page 25

Gothic: The Hip New Trend

It's a common misconception that the Middle Ages were a time of regression, both intellectual and artistic. Anyone who actually knows something about the Middle Ages knows that's ridiculous, but unfortunately those people are a definite minority. And one piece of evidence often used to show the cultural "backwardness" of the Middle Ages is the difference between the polished, realistic art of the Classical era and the cruder-looking, heavily stylized work of the Gothic era.

What most people don't seem to get is that the Gothic style was a conscious artistic choice. It wasn't that Medieval sculptors lost the ability to carve realistic statues; they just didn't choose to. That wasn't what they were trying to do. And it's simply crazy to think that the builders of Chartres Cathedral built it because they couldn't build the Parthenon.

Let me give a more recent analogy. The late 19th Century was the apex of the hyper-realistic, "Academic" style in painting and sculpture in Europe and America. Artists were turning out works that rivaled the new technology of photography in detail and realism.

Twenty years later, we see the abstract and stylized art of the early Modernist period. Sculpture and architecture went from the Classical pastiche of the Beaux-Arts era to the almost Gothic-looking forms of Art Deco.  

Does this mean that the 1920s was a "regression" from the cultural heights of the 1890s? Doubtless some people at the time thought so, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any art historians of the past hundred years who would agree.

This is more than just a know-it-all saying gotcha. If you want to understand a work of art, it's always important to understand what the artist was trying to accomplish with it. Then you can decide if it's a success on its own terms.

Gothic art and architecture wasn't a failure to execute Classical forms, it was a new style. The people who built Gothic cathedrals and sculpted the images of that time were the cool guys, working in a hip new style that the old guard couldn't understand. All art begins as the cool new style, then becomes what everyone recognizes as art, and finally becomes the stodgy old school that the next cohort of hipsters are reacting against.

Random Encounters: Starbase Nineteen

The Starbase is a big space station in a distant system, serving as a command center and support base for the enterprising exploration ships of a federation of planets which are united. This is where velour-shirted or miniskirted starship crew relax before going where no man has yet gone.

Aboard the Starbase one can see a wide variety of different humanoid species from dozens of planets, including a few wary groups of visitors from hostile empires.  

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS ABOARD STARBASE NINETEEN

Roll 1d10 if you're staying in your quarters or aboard your ship; 1d20 if you're moving about the station.

Roll Twice and Combine
Plot Advancing Encounter: Someone or something connected to whatever brought you to Starbase Nineteen.
Alien Super-Intellect: It has taken human form, showing a quirky dress sense and an air of amused superiority, but its true form is an immaterial being which can ignore petty details like time, space, matter, and energy. It may decide to teach some randomly-chosen mortal (i.e., the player-characters) a ham-fisted moral lesson.
Fear Monster: It has psychic powers and lives by inspiring and absorbing the emotion of fear. In short, the starbase is haunted.
Replicating Swarm: Ancient alien repair drones have discovered the starbase and have gone into a frenzy of Von Neumann Machine self-replication. You can burn individuals with your energy pistols, but the swarm's numbers are increasing geometrically!
Shape-Shifter: It's a humanoid which can transform itself into exact replicas of other people. We assume this is a psychic ability to avoid explaining where it gets the clothes. Anyway, the Shape-Shifter is trying to deceive someone, probably one of the adventuring party.
Ion Storm: We call it a coronal mass ejection, but in the star fleet they've got a cooler name. The protective force fields around the base are at maximum power and nobody can arrive or leave for a day.
Spaceborne Pest: A small alien animal which embodies some contemporary social concern. Perhaps it reproduces too quickly, or eats too much, or perhaps it makes people suspicious of each other or hostile to new ideas. Or it could just lay eggs in your abdomen; that always works.
Starship Captain: Super-competent, morally grounded, and looking very sharp in uniform, the Captain can provide advice and some material help, but can't stay around to solve all your problems. Duty calls.
Time Weirdness: Some bizarre phenomenon is affecting the starbase and everyone on board. Maybe time is running backwards, or too fast, or is tied in a repeating loop; maybe beings from history or the far future are popping in; maybe people are being replaced by their doppelgangers from alternate timelines. Plenty of opportunity for personal drama while the scientists and engineers figure out how to fix the problem.
Abandoned Compartment: The optimistic Starbase designers included room for future expansion, so there are whole decks still dark and empty. This makes a great place for secret meetings, bug hunts, and dramatic confrontations.
Energy Field: It may be part of the base's normal systems, or it may be the result of a malfunction. Either way, this compartment is flooded with weird-colored "energy" that has some bizarre effect.
Mind Parasite: Small rubbery-looking creatures which can latch onto humanoids and control them. They strike from hiding and are very hard to get rid of without killing the host.
Pursuit! Roll again to see who's chasing you through the wide corridors.
Security Office: The crimson-shirted security officers are brave, stoic, and well-armed with energy pistols. Against monsters or powerful enemies they tend to die like mayflies. When there's a criminal case or other legal problem they're annoyingly literal-minded and always suspect the wrong person.
Sickbay: The doctors here can quickly patch up any injury that hasn't already killed you. Curing unknown alien plagues or the effects of Energy Fields, Mind Parasites, Spaceborne Pests, Time Weirdness, can take a little longer.
Sleazy Bar: Even the upright and forward-looking personnel of the starbase need to unwind, and this joint is run by a colorful civilian contractor who doesn't respect rules and regulations. He can offer contraband booze, wise aphorisms, and the occasional bit of illegal tech which either causes or solves problems. This is where one can meet rebels, smugglers, spies, and drunken spacers from hostile powers looking for a brawl.
Trader: A humanoid who may or may not resemble an ethnic stereotype from Earth history, this individual has things to sell ��� alien artifacts, contraband luxuries, maybe stolen goods. There's a 10 percent chance the Trader is really an Alien Super-Intellect and the goods for sale will turn out to be a test of character.
Trap: Agents of a hostile empire have laid an ambush for the heroes. They either want to assassinate, kidnap, or blackmail them as part of some larger scheme.
Tracks or Traces: Roll again to see what you find evidence of.

SITUATIONS ABOARD STARBASE NINETEEN

(Roll 1d6, then consult the table above to determine who A and B are.)

A desires B
A wants to capture B
A wants B dead
A wants to go somewhere
A wants to solve a mystery
A wants X

REACTION TABLE

Roll 2d6, modified for the situation and any personal qualities of the player-characters.

2-3: Immediate attack!

4-5: Unfriendly

6-8: Neutral

9-10: Friendly

11-12: Very Friendly

Random Encounters: On the Wine-Dark Sea

Sailing the Mediterranean in the Bronze Age was always an adventure, even if you didn't have to worry about angry gods. (And you always have to worry about angry gods.) Roll 1d20 each day when sailing, 1d10 when in port or beached.

Roll twice and combine
Plot-advancing encounter: Someone or something related to the purpose of this voyage.
Giant: He's big, strong, and has a particular sadistic way of murdering people. At sea he's got a boat and a gang of normal followers. Caution ��� he probably has divine parentage, so killing him may anger a god.
Helpful Friend: One of your friends from home turns up unexpectedly, with encouragement, sound advice, and helpful information. He may even give you a useful magical item. Later you learn he couldn't have been there.
Ketus: A huge sea monster, part fish, part serpent. It can crawl onto shore and destroy whole towns. Only a maiden sacrifice can appease it.
Pirates! A band of heavily-armed men in a galley with a charismatic leader, looking for treasure and loot. Totally different from the heroes.
Riddle: Roll again to see who poses the riddle. Typically, if you can't guess it, you'll be attacked or eaten.
Sorceress: She's part-divine, wholly attractive, and has magical powers few can match. At sea she's aboard a chariot drawn by serpents, on land she's got a palace and doesn't like guests. There's a 25 percent chance she'll fall in love with a visiting hero . . . and won't let him go.
Storm: Wind, rain, and lightning for 1d12 hours. If you've angered a god somehow, the storm is hurricane-strength and lasts for 1d6 days, landing you in unknown regions.
Stymphalian Birds: 3d6 man-eating birds as big as cranes, with bronze beaks and razor-sharp feathers. Each bird can launch a shower of feathers in a diving attack once per day.
Atlantean Ruin: Part of an ancient structure sticks up out of the water, and more is visible under the sea. There's a 50 percent chance the ruins are inhabited by mermen.
Charybdis: A sea monster which sucks in vast quantities of water, creating a destructive whirlpool. A skilful sailor may avoid the whirlpool, but nothing caught in it can escape.
Clashing Rocks: These rocks actively attack ships, trying to crush them. Only a superhumanly clever pilot ��� or one advised by a god ��� can get past the rocks.
Cretan Galley: A bireme of the Cretan navy, on patrol to drive off pirates, rival traders, and meddlesome heroes.
Divine Meddling: Some blatant and unsubtle meddling by a god. Roll 1d6. 1-2: Angry god trying to kill you, 3-4: Helpful god moving you along toward your goal, 5-6: Trickster god messing with you in a non-fatal way.
Friendly Island: A small island inhabited by peaceful, friendly people willing to help a boatload of strangers. They may have some supernatural protection against raiders, and they may have some custom which tempts the voyagers but risks angering the gods.
Moving Island: A small island with trees and wildlife, which moves around slowly. It's actually a huge sea creature and building a campfire drives it underwater.
Phoenician Galley: A bireme on a trading voyage. The crew don't like foreigners poking their noses into their exclusive economic zone.
Scylla: Another sea monster with six heads on long necks. From her perch on a rock she snatches people off passing ships.
Tracks or Traces: Roll again to see what recently passed, or is nearby.

SITUATIONS ON THE WINE-DARK SEA

A desires B
A wants to capture B
A wants B dead
A wants to go somewhere
A wants to solve a mystery
A wants X

Random Encounters: 1890s Manaus

In the late 19th Century, the industrialized world's demand for rubber shot up exponentially. Suddenly poor jungle regions had a valuable cash crop ��� and that quickly attracted ruthless men eager to cash in on the boom. Manaus, on the Amazon, grew from a remote outpost into one of Brazil's biggest cities. It was a place where fortunes were made and lost overnight, where adventurers and opportunists from around the world gathered, and where the primeval jungle was half an hour's walk  from a bustling modern city.

ENCOUNTERS IN 1890s MANAUS

(Roll 1d20 when you're out and about in town.)

Bruxa: A self-declared witch and magical healer. Most likely a fraud, but may know about strange effects produced by plants or animals unknown to science.
Con Man:He's got a sure-fire scheme that just needs a few hundred realsas seed money. Are you in?
Doctor:Idealistic, fresh from medical school in Rio de Janeiro, trying desperately to cope with street violence, insanitary conditions, and competition from frauds and folk-doctors.
Explorer: Just arrived from Europe, recruiting rowers and guards for an expedition into the interior. Won't say what the expedition is looking for ��� a lost civilization? Mineral riches? Or something more sinister?
Gambler:A master of games of chance, he doesn't even need to cheat. The laws of probability and the fact that half his opponents are drunk out of their minds on cane liquor make it unnecessary to cheat. He does keep a derringer in his fancy waistcoat to deal with sore losers.
Indians:1d6 natives of the Amazon basin, curious but unimpressed by this metropolis which has appeared out of nowhere.
Military Officer:He's trying to keep order and maintain Brazilian authority ��� not an easy job when his best men keep deserting to join the rubber collectors, while his worst men abuse their authority and take bribes.
Missionary:A sunburnt American Congregationalist trying to save souls. Roll 1d6 to see how long he's been out here. 1: Just off the boat, utterly naive; 2-5: Knows the ropes, has useful contacts; 6: Burned-out, lost his faith, drunk.
Plot-Advancing Encounter:Something connected with the reason the party has come to Manaus.
Remittance Man: A British gentleman who did something back home and now his family pay him to stay far away. He knows the place very well, and may be looking for the chance to redeem himself.
Rubber baron:One of the new-made tycoons who controls a significant part of the rubber trade. He got his fortune by being brave and ruthless, and he aims to keep it. He's armed, and has 1d6 goons close by.
Rubber collector:An underling who does the dirty work of terrorizing Indians, bullying tappers, and threatening rivals to meet the ever-increasing demand for latex. It's a job for men who are good at being brutal. There is a 60 percent chance that a collector in town is drunk.
Scientist: A savant from Rio or Sao Paulo, collecting and classifying the animals, plants, and mineral resources of the region. Everyone suspects he's looking for something valuable, or he's an informer for the government.
Secret Agent: A quiet British visitor, employed by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew near London. He's just here to gather some plant samples ��� rubber plants, to use in establishing plantations in British-controlled lands.
Steamboat Pilot: He's sailed the Amazon for decades and knows the river and its tributaries. He knows there are places outsiders shouldn't go, but if you pay him enough he'll take you there.
Thunderstorm:Heavy rain, strong winds, and lightning for the next 1d6 times 20 minutes.
Touring Opera Company:They're in town to perform Aida. Wealthy locals want to be seen at the performance, some youngsters may fall in love with singers, and the company manager is trying to locate a key set which has gone astray somewhere along a thousand miles of river.
Tracks or Traces:Roll again to see who you just missed.
Were-dolphin: The pink dolphins of the Amazon River are said to take on human form and come ashore to seduce mortals. In a non-magical game, this person is an expert swimmer who has the hots for one of the party.
Roll Twice and Combine.

SITUATIONS IN 1890s MANAUS

(Roll 1d6, then consult the table above to determine who A and B are.)

A desires B
A wants to capture B
A wants B dead
A wants to go somewhere
A wants to solve a mystery
A wants X

Vacation in Prague: Day 7

Over the past forty years of travel I've learned that one should always build in one or two unscheduled days when planning a trip. That way, if something's closed, or it's pouring rain, or someone gets a kidney stone, you have a little cushion so there's still time for all the things you wanted to do. And if there are no problems, then you've got a bonus day to spend as you wish.

Saturday the 20th was our bonus day.

In the morning Diane and I went out to a Farmers' Market, which was a bit disappointing. The food on display was lovely and impeccably clean, but all of it was obviously grown far from Bohemia, and it was all packaged for immediate consumption. No ingredients. I have no doubt that there is an actual farmers' market in Prague (probably several), but I expect it's out in the periphery someplace, easier for farm trucks to reach but probably much less scenic.

We did get some fruit for breakfast and took it back to the flat, along with some croissants from a bakery we passed along the way. After eating and showering the three of us set out a couple of hours later with two vague goals: find a thumb drive for Diane to use at the biology conference which was the whole reason we came to Prague, and possibly look in at the cinema museum.

Our course took us southeast, toward Wenceslaus Square (which is really a boulevard) and the more modern, trendy part of Prague. En route we stopped for lunch at a restaurant/pub called "Lokal" which has apparently been serving up the same hearty grub and beer since the 1920s (to judge by the decor). It has the "beloved and unchanging local institution" feel of a classic diner or a Southern cafeteria. Dumplings were had.

We gave up on the cinema museum, after determining that none of us was really enthusiastic about the plan. After that we just sort of wandered, looking for a thumb drive. In the U.S., one can find them for sale at most office-supply shops, department stores, and supermarkets, but apparently the Czechs only sell them at dedicated electronics stores. I don't know if there's not as much demand, or whether Czech computer users are more devoted to "cloud storage." It's not the sort of question one can ask easily.

We did see some lovely interwar department store buildings, with glass roofs and Art Deco sculptures. It appears that independence and the triumph of Modernism don't seem to have put a damper on Czech architects' love of putting statues on buildings, it just made the results more streamlined.

With a drive in hand we navigated homeward by dead reckoning, stopping along the way to get the gloppiest Prague treat: Trdelniks filled with ice cream. Trdelniks are a kind of cake or brioche wrapped around a cylinder and cooked over an open fire. I've found a couple of Web sites angrily asserting that they're not a traditional Czech dish but rather some rank imposture from Slovakia. Anyway, they're pretty good plain, and when filled with soft-serve they're . . . pretty messy. Imagine a giant ice-cream cone with a big hole in the bottom ineffectually plugged by a small cookie.

And that's about it for our trip. We spent the evening packing and getting checked in for our flight home. Robert and I handed all our spare Kroners to Diane to use during the week-long biology conference, and the next morning he and I got a cab to the airport. Sixteen hours later we were home.

Next Time: Impressions and Reflections.

Vacation in Prague: Day 6

Another late start on Friday the 19th ��� didn't leave the flat until past 11 a.m. The adventurers crossed the river again and braved the Prague light-rail transit system for the first time. Since most of our previous explorations had been within the rail-less Old Town section, we hadn't bothered. One purchases tickets at tobacconist shops and then use a scanner aboard the tram to activate them. This is a common system in Europe; in Naples one can only get subway tickets at the tobacco stand even inside the main train station. We managed to work out how to use the scanner on the tram with the help of a young Czech couple with a cute baby and matching hairstyles (kind of a Mohawk gathered into a ponytail). The young woman even gave up her seat to this aged tourist, so you can be sure I took the opportunity to yield it back at the next stop to the first even slightly middle-aged looking lady who boarded.

Our tram route involved a longish detour with a hairpin bend and a curve around to the north of Prague Castle, because of course streetcars don't handle steep inclines well. Our destination was actually off to the southwest of the castle: Strahov Monastery.

What with locating a tobacconist's shop and figuring out the tram system, we didn't reach the monastery until noon, which is when it closed for an hour so that the monks could celebrate Mass in the chapel. So we had a leisurely lunch at the restaurant next door. Bread dumplings were present.

The monastery had two main attractions we were hot to see. There is Yet Another Baroque Library Hall ��� two of them, in fact, one all dark wood, the other plasterwork and gilding. Gorgeous. As at the Klementinum, visitors could only look in at the doorway because a thousand people a day breathing on the books would turn the whole place into a mess of mildew in short order.

The other draw is the Cabinet of Wonders. This is a little museum of curiosities, mostly from the 17th and 18th Centuries. It's a mix of natural history, anthropology, and art. They've got some Egyptian statuary and a sarcophagus (sadly most of the Egyptiana was off-exhibit), a few Chinese porcelain figures and bronzes, a suit of chain mail from someplace, and a small cannon. The natural-history collection has lots of shells, a narwhal horn, two "elephant trunks" which our reproductive-physiology expert identified as whale penises, lots of fish skins, a couple of crocodiles, and some interesting rocks.

It's not really worthwhile as a museum itself; but as a historical exhibit about what an early private museum would have been like it's wonderful. Between the Cabinet of Wonders and the two gonzo libraries, the Strahov Monastery is the perfect lair for a fantasy-novel wizard or school of magic.

We decided to stroll back rather than take the tram, as it was all downhill and we wanted to see more of the left bank of the Vltava. That plan was interrupted by rain almost as soon as we got out of the monastery, so we took refuge in a cafe long enough to have dessert and wait out the worst of the downpour.

Our route back took us across the Charles Bridge, which is one of Prague's most popular sights. I don't know why. It's a nice old bridge with lovely statues of saints and the life of Christ ��� but you can't really look at the statues or the bridge, or admire the view from the bridge because at any given time there's something like two thousand other people on the bridge taking selfies and complaining about how crowded the bridge is.

At the Old Town end of the bridge we did see a gentleman showing off his big boa constrictors. One was simply big but the other was immense ��� five meters long, at least. Both snakes got a lot of attention, and the biggest one definitely seemed to be posing for the cameras.

Napped at our flat again ��� I heartily recommend a mid-afternoon nap while traveling; it breaks the day up into two distinct phases and keeps you from dragging around and snapping at one another. In the evening we had a ramble about the square and stopped at one of the open-air cafes to share a plate of salmon sandwiches and drink a glass of wine.

A note about drinks: Prague is famous for beer, but I'm not one of those people who can discourse for hours about the differences among porter, ale, and stout. The beer was good, even the stuff our local contacts disparaged. My beer tastes were formed in America in the 1980s ��� the last gasp of the regional German-name breweries in the U.S. before the rise of craft brews and hipsters going on about hops. The Czech brews reminded me a lot of those beers (it's no coincidence that "Budweiser" is named for a town in Bohemia), and that was fine with me.

With wine I can be a bit of a snob. I did my best to stick to locally-grown wine while we were in Prague. Czech wines are sweeter than the western European and New World vintages I normally drink (I don't know why wines get sweeter as you go east), but they were pretty good. Or at least the white wines were; since it was hot summer weather we didn't really want any reds. If I ever go back to Prague I may try to work in a visit to some local wineries, to get a better sense of what Czech growers are doing. But if you go, I recommend trying the local product.

Next time: Not Much!

Vacation in Prague: Day 5

On Thursday morning we ventured down along the riverbank south of the Charles Bridge, admiring the gorgeous Beaux-Arts buildings. We wandered as far as Prague's newest (and, in my personal opinion, most over-rated) architectural landmark, the "Dancing Houses." If you haven't seen pictures, it's a pair of vaguely whimsical modern structures made to give the impression of a waltzing couple. While I'm in favor of anything opposed to the tyranny of bland Internationalism, I also favor practicality in architecture. The groovy shapes of the Dancing Houses just scream "unusable interior space" and ��� sure enough ��� one of them had a prominent sign advertising space for rent.

From there we ducked inland and had lunch at the National Cafe, which sounds like a remnant of Communism but actually takes its name from the avenue on which it stands. The place was quite the cultural mecca in Prague's boom years before and after World War I. Our plan had been to have just a light lunch, but the menu was too tempting so that wound up being our main meal of the day. I had a delicious braised beef in sour cream sauce with cranberries (hadn't expected to see them in Europe) and the inevitable bread dumplings.

Thus fortified, the adventurers went a few blocks north to the Clementinum, or Klementinum, a former Jesuit college which now houses the Czech national library. The place started as a Dominican monastery, but in the 16th Century the Jesuits took over and constructed a sprawling Baroque complex which rivals Prague Castle in size.

Because it is an active library, you can't just wander around the interior, so we took the guided tour. There were big signs warning that the lift was out of order, so visitors should be prepared to climb lots of stairs. And climb we did. First we went two floors up a narrow iron spiral stair (with some traffic-management issues as another tour group was trying to come down at the same time) to the magnificent original library hall (it's the place in the picture if you do a search for images of "Clementinum Library"). For preservation reasons we were only allowed to look in the doorway, not go inside. We were also forbidden to take pictures, as the library hall is considered part of the Czech "national patrimony."

To an American, that seems odd. All of our "national patrimony" is ��� more or less by definition ��� in the public domain. NASA recently made its whole collection of space images available for free, and there's no copyright on the Declaration of Independence. One should note, however, that Americans don't have a history of bossy foreigners trying to steal our stuff.

The Czechs do have such a tradition, and one reason getting to that library hall was so difficult was that just before the Germans rolled into Prague in 1938, the staff of the Klementinum demolished the big stairway leading up to it, and built a wall across the doorway to keep the bossy foreigners from finding it.

They continued that ruse for fifty years, even while the next set of bossy foreigners, the Russians, used the building as a surveillance post, watching for menacing groups of four or more Czechs assembling in the streets below.

After looking in, we continued to climb. The stairs led up into the Astronomy Tower, where Jesuit astronomers used a camera obscura system to determine noon every day (and signal to the rest of the city by waving a flag). Above that was the observing level where actual stellar observing was done, and where we could get a spectacular daytime view of the city.

(Irony alert: one of my fellow tourists was reading The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins before the tour began. It's all about how awful "religion" is and how it promotes ignorance and superstition. Then we went to look at places where monks and priests did cutting-edge science.)

After enjoying the view we went back down those narrow stairs (the upper levels were excitingly creaky original construction), and walked back to our flat for a much-appreciated rest.

In the evening the adults went down to St. Nicholas Church on Old Town Square for a concert. The church is yet another amazing Baroque showpiece. It's a Hussite church ��� part of the dissident denomination re-founded in 1920 and drawing its inspiration from the martyred reformer Jan Hus. Ironically, the building itself is pure Catholic Counter-Reformation in style.

In a Baroque church it's only appropriate to hear Baroque music ��� Vivaldi, Bach, Handel, and some others, performed by an organist, a trumpeter, and a soprano. The music was lovely, a perfect ending for the day.

From what I could see, pretty much every church in Prague hosts musical performances every evening, at least during tourist season. The musical audiences fill the house, and I'm sure their admission fees are a huge help in keeping those great buildings in repair. But I did find myself thinking melancholy thoughts: people were once willing to die for their faith, but now the churches are just prettier-than-average concert halls.

I dropped off my fellow adult at the flat and went for a solo ramble in the general direction of Wenceslaus Square to the southeast. It was a fine evening and the streets were packed. I passed another TORTURE MUSEUM, and (for the second time that day) saw a massage parlor (the kind that actually give massages) offering the creepiest thing I saw in Prague: Fish Pedicures. The patient sits with his or her feet in a large aquarium, home to a lot of small, hungry fish. I don't know if there's a specific type of fish preferred for pedicure duties, or if any will do if they're hungry enough. The fish nibble all the dead skin off the patient's feet. I have no idea how well it works, and very little inclination to find out.

After a final drink at a cafe in Old Town Square, I also headed off to bed.

Next time: Wonders!

Random Encounters: Derelict Space Colony

When new, it was a glittering gem of the heavens: a rotating cylinder four kilometers across and ten kilometers long, with great mirrors to focus sunlight inside. It boasted towns, farms, schools, factories ��� a city in space. But time and economics haven't been kind to the colony. The resource ran out or the trade route never developed, so people began leaving in search of better opportunities. On-board systems failed from lack of maintenance and spare parts. Crooks and scavengers took over, but the decline continued. Decades later, the colony no longer responds to radio messages and seems to be completely abandoned ��� though it does still hold breathable air. A group of daring astronauts go aboard and find . . .

ENCOUNTERS ABOARD THE DERELICT SPACE COLONY

(Roll 1d20 when moving about inside the colony, 1d10 when stationary.)

Roll twice and combine
Plot advancing encounter: Something related to what brought the party to the colony.
Combat Robot: It's badly damaged, and was abandoned here decades ago, but it still has thick armor and deadly weapons. There's a 10 percent chance it simply attacks anyone it deems "hostile" (i.e. everyone); otherwise it has a more complex goal.
Criminals: A band of space pirates use the derelict colony as a place to stash supplies and hide out when the heat's on. There are 2d6 pirates, mostly space-adapted humans or uplifted chimps, in light armor and equipped with personal defense weapons. They want to know who any strangers are, and why they're in the colony. As always, dead men tell no tales.
Feral AI: Very intelligent but ruthless, it's trapped in the derelict colony's data systems and wants to get away before everything fails completely.
Ghouls: Nocturnal cannibals overjoyed to find some fresh meat. They move around using access tunnels below ground level.
Giant Rats: They've mutated and bred for size, and are at least as clever as their smaller cousins.
Mysterious Stranger: Eccentric, seems to know everything, and won't reveal how he got here. Will lend aid to any humanitarian project, but also lends his opinions on how to do everything.
Swarm: A huge swarm of big beetles sweeps through the area, stripping everything edible.
Weather: The colony's climate is getting chaotic. A sudden, intense windstorm accompanied by baseball-sized chunks of hail lasts for 2d20 minutes.
Fabricator: Amazingly, this small automated factory still works. It can produce any item up to one kilogram in mass. There is a 10 percent chance that the fabricator will run out of some ingredient and be unable to finish a given item ordered.
Fire! The colony's fire-suppression systems are failing, so a wildfire sweeps through an area 1d100 meters on a side. It spreads slowly, unless there's also a storm going on, in which case the fire moves faster than a running human.
Fugitive: He fled here to escape justice for a monstrous crime. The other factions avoid him out of fear. He wants some companionship and won't take no for an answer.
Holographic Game: Something has activated an ancient entertainment system, so this area's full of people in Musketeer-era costumes bantering, flirting, and challenging people to duels.
Remnants: 1d6 descendants of the colony's original population, now far gone in ignorance and fanaticism. They attack with spears and poison darts.
Ruined Hotel: Once a luxury spa, it's been stripped of furnishings and overgrown by weeds and vines. The Remnants (#15) consider it taboo; they won't enter, but they'll also try to kill anyone who does.
Spy Drone: The Criminals have sent out a small recon unit to track the intruders.
Swamp: A region 1d4 kilometers wide is flooded and choked with weeds and small trees. It's too wet to walk through, and too overgrown for boats.
Trap: A cunning net trap made of super-strong monofilament. Roll 1d6 to see who set it. 1: Criminals (see #4), 2-3: Ghouls (see #6), 4-5: Remnants (see #15), 6: The Fugitive (#13).
Tracks: Roll again to see what left traces.

SITUATIONS WITHIN THE DERELICT COLONY

A desires B
A wants to capture B
A wants B dead
A wants to go somewhere
A wants to solve a mystery
A wants X

REACTION TABLE

Roll 2d6 for each new encounter, +1 if the players outnumber those encountered, -2 if they are injured or fleeing something.

2-3: Hostile ��� will attack or take other hostile action.

4-5: Unfriendly ��� make threats, demand tribute, chase intruders away.

6-8: Neutral ��� no open hostility, will communicate.

9-10: Tolerant ��� willing to trade or make deals, won't give help for nothing.

11-12: Friendly ��� genuinely helpful and seek alliance.

Vacation in Prague, Day 4

After all the activity of the first few days, we took it easy on Wednesday. Got up late and had breakfast even later, with the result that we didn't even leave the apartment until past noon.

Following a suggestion from a Prague native (see below) we crossed the river to the lovely Letna/Letenska Park on the north side of the Vltava. The park is home to the World's Biggest Metronome, a David Czerny sculpture occupying what was once the site of the World's Biggest Statue of Stalin ��� which, given that this is Stalin we're talking about, must have been pretty damned big. And since everything on that side of the river is a lot higher up than the other side, we wound up climbing a lot of stairs again to get to the park ��� only fifty meters due up instead of nearly a hundred to reach the Castle.

The park was not our destination, though. That lay on the far side: the National Technical Museum. It's a cool science-and-technology museum, with exhibits on timekeeping, chemistry, and photography. The gallery of astronomical instruments includes a giant sextant once owned by Johannes Kepler himself. There's also an extremely comprehensive and interesting exhibit about printing.

But the heart of the museum is the two-story gallery devoted to vehicles. They've got planes, trains, automobiles, bicycles, motorcyles, a balloon, and probably some pogo sticks. Among other things there's the official car of Edoard Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia. Also a Spitfire of the RAF Czech Squadron (my impression is that "fighting your way back to your homeland" ties with "throwing oppressors out of windows" as the Czech national pastime). Great stuff. We prowled around for three hours.

After that it was time to rendezvous with our local contacts. Thirty-odd years ago that would have meant making a covert recognition signal, then passing documents at a dead drop. Last week it simply meant meeting the delightful young owners of Planeta9 Publishing, an up-and-coming Czech-language SF publishing house.

At their suggestion we all sat in a lovely beer garden overlooking the city, and spent a fun couple of hours talking about Prague, science fiction, aliens, crocodile reproductive systems, and the finer points of book cover design.

They finally had to leave, so we grabbed chicken "kebabs" (=gyros) at a stand in the park, then made our way back down to ground level and our flat. Other than a brief outing for more groceries, that was our day.

Awful History, Great Buildings

This seems like a good place to describe Prague. The heart of it is one of the most beautiful cities I've seen anywhere. (The suburbs look like the suburbs of just about every city in Europe I've been to.) Prague's history of foreign occupation and oppression just happened to exactly fit the worst eras of architecture.

So there are lovely Gothic structures from when Bohemia was an independent kingdom, but then the land was under foreign rule and wracked by war, so nothing important got built until the late 17th century. Once the after-effects of the Thirty Years' War finally died down there was a boom in putting up wonderful Baroque buildings (or retrofitting medieval structures with Baroque facades). That lasted until the political unrest of the French Revolution era through 1848, when the Habsburgs again cracked down on the country. So Prague missed the whole mid-19th century era of monotonous red brick.

Toward the end of the 19th century Prague became one of the industrial dynamos of the empire, so a lot of delightful Beaux-Arts buildings went up as the city expanded beyond its old walls. Independent Czechoslovakia saw some nice Art Deco construction in the 1920s, but then a decade of depression, another decade of occupation and war, followed by half a century of Communist rule meant that basically nothing got built in the center of Prague. They skipped the post-war glass box era, the moonbase buildings of the 1970s, and the "postmodern" glass boxes with doodads on top of the 1980s.

Nobody plunked an International-Style skyscraper into Old Town Square, or tried to cover the Castle with a glass pyramid. The only exception is the giant Sputnik-era television tower looming over the city on the eastern side like one of H.G. Wells's Martian fighting-machines. "Bearable" is probably the kindest way to describe it. Prague was also fortunate in that the old heart of the city didn't get wrecked by war. The Skoda works in Pizen got the lion's share of bombing raids, and the Red Army didn't have to fight its way into the city in 1945. Unlike London or Berlin, there was no need for horrible post-war "infill" construction in Prague.

I loved the buildings of old Prague. The guiding principles of local architects seem to have been: (1) More gilding! and (2) More sculptures! All the old buildings have fantastic gold detailing, or giant carved figures supporting balconies or perched atop the roofs. There's a cheerful lack of consistency, too: one can see angels and Green Men and caryatids all on the same facade.

A note to comic-book fans: Mike Mignola lied to us. His drawings of old Prague in his comics evoke a dark, creepy city, with crooked spires and blind-eyed broken angels. What he neglected to show is that those buildings are hot pink or chrome yellow, with gold mosaics like a Klimt painting over the entrance, and Tiffany glass fanlights. It's a setting for comic opera, not horror.

Next Time: How to Hide a Library!

Vacation in Prague, Day 3

On Tuesday the 16th we slept until nine and breakfasted on croissants and scrambled eggs, then set out to see the sights of the Jewish Quarter. This meant much less walking, as our flat was right in the middle of that part of town.

We began at the Old New Synagogue, which follows the international tradition that things with "New" in their name are often the oldest of that thing around. (Examples: Novgorod, one of the oldest cities in Russia; the Pont Neuf in Paris; and the New Forest in England, which will celebrate its thousandth anniversary in a few decades.)

The Old New Synagogue was built in 1270 and looks . . . well, almost exactly like a Gothic chapel, but with no crucifixes and more Jews. It does have little booths outside the main chamber with slit windows looking in, for the women of the congregation. It was nice to see that the Old New Synagogue is still an active synagogue.

The legend of the Golem of Prague mentions that the inert body of the Golem was stored in the attic of the Old New Synagogue, so naturally our adventurers had to snoop around to see if there's any truth to it. The synagogue does have an attic, but it can only be reached by climbing up a series of iron rungs set into the eastern wall. The bottom fifteen or twenty feet of the rungs have been removed, so nobody can get up there without a ladder or a crane. (No mere human, anyway. A supposedly abandoned attic would make an ideal secret headquarters for a crime-fighting man of clay.)

Our second stop was the Ceremonial Hall in the middle of the old Jewish cemetery. It was the headquarters for the old Jewish burial society, and is now a museum on the history of Jewish burial societies. I found myself wondering about the influences that group might have had on later Protestant fraternal orders, which were burial societies among other functions. Weirdly, one cannot actually get into the cemetery from the Ceremonial Hall.

Next door to the Ceremonial Hall is the Klausen synagogue, which was built in 1694 and looks . . . well, almost exactly like a Baroque chapel, but with no crosses and more Jews. Evidently Prague's Jewish community were willing to follow contemporary trends in ecclesiastic architecture. Nowadays the Klausen is a museum of Jewish rituals and practices, which most of our team of adventurers were already familiar with.

Still hunting for a way into the cemetery, which was right there, we worked our way around the block to the Pinkas Synagogue, undoubtedly the saddest of Prague's remaining synagogue buildings. It was made into a Holocaust memorial in the 1950s, so the place was stripped down to the bare plaster walls, which are covered with a list of names ��� all the murdered Jews of Czechoslovakia.

I found the memorial doubly sad, because it means that synagogue will never host another wedding or bar mitzvah ceremony. The well-meaning artists and architects who created the memorial destroyed the synagogue as a living institution.

Already in a morbid frame of mind we finally found our way into the cemetery, which is absolutely packedwith headstones. It looks less like a cemetery and more like a storage facility for headstones. One can roughly date them by appearance ��� the older stones are smaller and simpler, while the later ones get big and elaborate. This cemetery is no longer used for burials, I suspect because there is literally no room left.

The exit popped us back out at the Ceremonial Hall, and from there we walked south to the Maisel Synagogue, the last one on our tour. It's a much-rebuilt building, currently in its Franz Josef era Neo-Gothic incarnation. Like too many of Prague's synagogues, the Maisel is also a museum ��� in this case, of the history of Jews in Bohemia and Prague in particular. It did display some works by David Gans, the Jewish scholar and mathematician who was a contemporary and occasional collaborator of Brahe and Kepler during his time in Prague.

By then it was early afternoon, the perfect time to walk another couple of blocks south to Old Town Square in time to watch the famous Astronomical Clock strike two p.m. We kept our hands on our wallets in the crowd, as it seemed like perfect conditions for a pickpocket.

With our wallets intact we walked across the square, dodging people in giant inflated bear costumes, to the wonderful Gothic church of St. Mary Before Tyn, where we saw the grave of Tycho Brahe himself. The actual grave is marked with a plain slab bearing his name in big letters, but propped above it is the old marker, with a very long and hard-to-decipher Latin epitaph, plus a bas-relief of the great Dane himself.

After that we were dog tired, so plodded back to our flat for a nap and a change of clothing before our big fancy dinner out, at a restaurant called La Veranda (which did not, in fact, have a veranda). It was actually on the same block as our own building, so getting there didn't even involve crossing a street. We all got the six-course tasting menu and shared a bottle of Czech reisling on the waiter's recommendation.

The six courses consisted of:

(1) A tiny bowl of Vichysoisse, with a good potato flavor, not too milky.

(2) Beef tartare with little dabs of truffle mayonnaise. For some reason the Czechs have adopted beef tartare as a national favorite; it was on the menu at nearly every restaurant. From which we can deduce that the meat supply chain in the Czech Republic is reliable and well-inspected.

(3) Seared foie gras. This was amazing: the exterior was crisp while the inside was like a custard. We had to get more bread for the table with this course, as none of us wanted to waste a drop of lovely liver custard.

(4) Sea Bream, served simply enough with brown butter and lemon. Yum.

(5) A little beef filet with potato puree. It was described as sirloin but looked more like hangar steak to me. Excellent either way.

(6) Seasonal berries with white chocolate gelato and currant sorbet. I accompanied this with coffee.

All in all, an excellent dinner, and we cheerfully climbed five stories back up to our flat and collapsed.

Next Time: Technology!