James L. Cambias's Blog, page 3

Albacon 2023

Albany's long-running science fiction and fantasy convention is back up to full speed this year, with an impressive guest lineup, a full schedule, and a nifty hybrid live-plus-online format. As always, I'll be there ��� I said I'd be at their disposal for one full day, Saturday the 10th ��� and they're getting the most out of me before I vanish like fairy gold.

Saturday, 10:30 a.m.: Subterranean Science Fiction ��� A panel discussion about SF's long-running fascination with underground worlds. They definitely show up in my own work, so I'm looking forward to this. 

Saturday, noon: Science Fiction Stories Age Like Wine ��� I'll be moderating this panel on why some stories remain popular and thought-provoking while others get stale and feel obsolete. 

Saturday, 2:30 p.m.: Reading ��� I'll be reading a selection from my current work-in-progress, The Miranda Conspiracy. This will be the first chance for anyone but myself to get a taste of the next book.

Saturday, 4:30 p.m.: You Are Not The One ��� Another panel, this time about the sometimes (too often) overused trope of the "Chosen One" who gets to be the protagonist because the author says so. I have opinions about this.

Saturday, 8:00 p.m.: Can Good Stories Be Based on Bad Science? ��� My final panel of the day, which asks the question in the title. What's the difference between imaginary science, rubber science, and b******t science?

See you all at Albacon! 

 

Island of Lost Games: Fading Suns

It's been a while since we visited the Island of Lost Games, but there are still a few old and obscure titles on my shelf to explore. Today's game is 1996's Fading Suns, by Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg. It's probably the most well-known and successful of the Island's titles, but it never did manage to break out to popularity, even among hard-core gamers. Even at its peak in the late 1990s, I expect you could walk up to any random attendee at GenCon and ask if they knew anything about Fading Suns, with a pretty good chance that the answer would be "no."

The game was an attempt to build what we would now call a "media franchise" spanning computer games, tabletop roleplaying games, and tabletop wargames. I can find only one tie-in novel listed on Amazon, and I've never heard of any comics or graphic novels, which is a little surprising.

So: what is Fading Suns? A slightly snarky elevator pitch description might be "Nickelodeon's Warhammer 40,000." It had a lot of the same elements of 40K ��� a decadent quasi-theocratic interstellar empire, people using technology they don't really understand anymore, xenophobic humans alternately oppressing and being oppressed by aliens, and a generally apocalyptic feel ��� but it lacked the punk/metal tone, nihilism, and over-the-top weirdness of the British game.

In fact, Fading Suns was surprisingly optimistic. The empire is stagnant, the stars are going out ��� but the rulebook explicitly states that the player-characters can reverse this decline by being heroes. The universe is not doomed, the actions of individuals do matter, and humanity is worth saving.

The original designers started out working for White Wolf, and the influence of the World of Darkness games is strong. The world of Fading Suns has Nobles, Merchants, Priests, and Aliens. Each of those types can belong to one of several factions. The combination of class and faction provides certain advantages or powers, which are tied to the faction's role in the world.

So if you're a Noble, you can be one of the Atreides-like House Hawkwood, the Harkonnen-like House Decados, the heavily religious House Li Halan, and so on. Priests can be part of the Orthodox priesthood, the militant order Brother Battle, the mystical Eskatonic Order, or the flamethrower-wielding inquisitors of Temple Avesti. Merchants may be space-pilot Charioteers, cyborged-up Engineers, slave-dealing Musters, and others. Either you find this style of character creation which is innately tied to the setting fascinating and useful, or you find it constraining and frustrating.

The art and production values for Fading Suns were top-notch, the design was solid, it was well-promoted and had a decent string of support products. But somehow it never took off. There are two reasons for this, I think. The first was entirely outside the control of Holistic Design, the  publishers: the release of Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition in 2000, which basically vacuumed up all the attention and money in the hobby for several years. With Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring ruling the multiplexes, everybody wanted to do heroic fantasy adventure instead of science fiction.

The second reason was built into the game itself, and was a problem shared by a lot of other games before and since: it wasn't clear what the characters were supposed to do in a game of Fading Suns. There were plenty of possibilities ��� intrigue among the nobles, trade, hunting heretics, etc. In fact, I think there were simply too many possibilities. In D&D you fight monsters and find treasure. In Traveller you're either a merchant-adventurer or a mercenary. In Call of Cthulhu you investigate Lovecraftian stuff. The default adventure is clear to all.

Fading Suns's greatest strength ��� its unique and well-developed setting, with tightly-connected game mechanics ��� was also its curse. Most people simply couldn't easily fit themselves into a quasi-medieval space empire setting. And the ones who could were probably already playing Rogue Trader. David Lynch's Dune film came out before most potential Fading Suns customers were out of kindergarten, so there wasn't a good fictional model in front of everyone.

This is a huge problem in roleplaying games. Everybody says they want innovative settings, but they're lying. What are the most popular game settings? The generic fantasy of D&D, the generic SF of Traveller, the generic horror of the World of Darkness, the media juggernauts Star Wars and Star Trek, and the nerd-culture favorite of the Cthulhu Mythos. Quirky, idiosyncratic worlds like Fading Suns don't draw in as many players.

I kind of like quirky, idiosyncratic worlds. I used my own "Billion Worlds" setting for a campaign, but the amount of background information I had to provide (and invent on the fly) was daunting ��� both to me and to my players. It's a lot easier to say "you're on Tatooine" than to say "you're in the space habitat Summanus in the shadow of Jupiter, run by a paranoid supermind with a giant laser."

The rise of online gaming should solve this problem. Players looking for weird and unique campaign settings should be able to find each other and play via Roll20 or whatever. That was always the promise of the wired world. Unfortunately, in practice the reverse seems to be true: online games seem to cater to the most well-known settings, simply because it's really hard to find those player-needles who might appreciate someting unconventional in the giant haystack of the Internet.

I only ever played Fading Suns once or twice, but I did borrow some of the setting elements for other games, as I always do. It was a good game with noble aspirations, which ran aground on the realities of the market. It deserved better.

Notes on Lovecraft's Great Race

The "Great Race" ��� often known as the "Great Race of Yith" or "Yithians" (but more on that later) ��� are the villains (?) in H.P. Lovecraft's last major story, "The Shadow Out of Time." Written in 1934 and published the year before Lovecraft's death, the story is the narrative of one Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a tenured professor of Political Economy at Miskatonic University. The course of scholarship at that institution never runs smoothly, and in Dr. Peaslee's case his life and career are rudely interrupted on the morning of May 14, 1908, when an alien personality takes over his body in mid-lecture.

Once it figures out how to use a human form, the alien mind (still using Peaslee's identity, of course) goes on a course of intense occult and archaeological research ��� destroying Peaslee's marriage and family life in the process. "Peaslee" reads all the usual Lovecraftian books, sometimes making margin notes in unreadable glyphs. He travels the world, going to the Himalayas, the "unknown deserts" of Arabia, the Arctic, and the caves of western Virginia.

After five years of this, "Peaslee" returns home, builds a weird machine in his study, and ��� after a late-night visit from a "lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man" ��� reverts to his old personality and even picks up the lecture right where he left off.

He mends ties with his youngest son, gets his position at Miskatonic back (the power of tenure!), and tries to rebuild his life. But poor Peaslee keeps having weird dreams and disturbing fragments of memory. In 1915 he resigns again and starts trying to figure out what happened to him. Through sheer dogged scholarship across a variety of disciplines, guided by his dreams, Peaslee reconstructs the story. (If you haven't read the story, the next section will ruin a lot of the suspense.)

During those five years, Peaslee was time-napped back to the Permian or Triassic Era while an alien mind belonging to a species called the Great Race was in charge of his body.

Who and what are the Great Race?

Back in the Triassic era, they were giant cone-shaped beings with boneless, pincer-tipped arms and a single three-eyed head. They had an advanced technological civilization and battled even more monstrous creatures living on Earth at the time. But they're not really from around here.

Oh, the bodies are ��� though how those ten-foot mollusc-like things fit into the history of life on Earth is pretty hard to figure out. (See speculation below.) But the Great Race aren't the cone-things, not really. Their minds came from a "transgalactic" world called Yith, now a "black, aeons-dead orb." The Great Race camped out in the bodies of the cone-things for a few aeons, then fled en masse into the far future to escape the resurgence of a monstrous menace they thought they had sealed up for good. Their next host species will be the "hardy coleopterous race immediately following mankind," and after that . . . who knows?

There's much more to the story, but this is the necessary background for what I really want to think about: The Great Race.

Yith

In Lovecraft fan and gaming lore, the Great Race are often called the "Yithians," because they come from Yith. But . . . how true is that? Certainly they came to Earth from Yith. But was Yith their original home? Or just another way station on their mind-hopping journey through Time?

If we assume suitable hosts for the Great Race are pretty scarce, so they have to search in both time and space for new ones, then the gap between leaving one world and taking over another (see below for how that would work) is on the order of 100 million years.

How long they stay on a given world is likely more variable. They had to flee the Triassic era because of the deadly "Flying Polyps" which came to Earth from space, got imprisoned, and finally escaped. Presumably not every world gets invaded like that ��� although it's worth noting that in Lovecraft's timeline, Earth has been invaded from Outside at least four times since the Precambrian era, and there's no reason to think there won't be more in the future.

The Great Race's tenure on Earth was something less than 100 million years, if we assume they arrived during the Permian and fled just at the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event. That's a good lower bound. As to upper limits, well, no planet lasts forever, and stars get brighter as they age. Earth has been habitable for about three billion years, and has a billion or two years left before the Sun cooks it. But the Great Race need suitable hosts, and complex organisms didn't really evolve until about half a billion years ago. So let's say two billion years is about the maximum interval (it's probably less than that, since I doubt the Great Race would want to take over a dying world).

So we assume the Great Race has to change planets every billion years or so. The oldest stars are more than 12 billion years old, and Earthlike planets might have started forming about a billion years later (and it's entirely possible the Great Race are not wedded to Earthlike worlds). Tack on another three billion years for intelligence to arise, and the Great Race could have started out eight billion years ago. Yith could have been the seventh in a series of temporary homeworlds.

They had to jump forward from the Triassic sooner than they expected, but the "hardy coleopterous species" after humanity could well survive until Earth itself starts to get too hot for life. And after that . . . who knows? There's nothing to stop the Great Race from jumping from world to world, species to species, until the Universe gets too cold and dark for intelligent life.

Even that might not be the end. The Great Race, after all, have conquered Time. Maybe after they've gone through the whole duration of the Universe, they can jump back in time to some species near the beginning, and go through it all over again.

The Triassic Cone Thingies

And what about those rugose cone beings the Great Race took over back in the Permian era? What the hell were they? Intelligent molluscs? Some experiment of the antarctic Old Ones that got out of hand?

Obviously they were intelligent beings, though we have no way of knowing how much of their technological civilization was their own, and how much was the work of the Great Race. They might have been philosophical hunter-gatherers, or tentacled Bronze Age-style philosophers.

There is another possibility which explains a lot of things: maybe the cone-shaped beings were themselves alien invaders. Consider: they really don't resemble any lineage of living things on Earth. They're really big creatures, which means it would be hard to miss fossilized specimens in Permian rock. And how the ruthless super-intellects of the Old Ones would put up with some conical upstarts is hard to imagine. But if the cone-beings dropped out of the sky, with their own super-science and sorcery, then that would explain a lot. They just had the bad luck to get taken over by time-jumping minds from Yith not long after they arrived.

In fact, it occurs to me that the dreadful flying polyp monsters may have had a grudge against the cone-beings, and pursued them to Earth. The Great Race never knew it, but those monsters weren't interested in them, they were trying to destroy the poor saps whose minds were cast back a hundred million years to die on Yith. 

The Great Race Invasion

So what would it be like when the Great Race invasion happens? Do they all make the jump at once, so millions (billions?) of people just fall down and struggle around trying to learn how their bodies work?

That seems like a dangerous way to do it. From what we see when Peaslee is taken over, the victims need care and support while they adjust. This suggests that the Great Race would trickle in a few at a time, using their incredible intellects, advanced science, knowledge of secrets (gleaned from reconnaissance trips to times before and after the target date), and what Lovecraft describes as a "power to influence the thoughts and acts of others" which not-Peaslee displayed.

Instead of just research and exploration like Peaslee, these invaders would work themselves into positions of influence, setting up support networks for new arrivals. Ordinary victims of the target species might not even notice at first ��� a few cases of amnesia, but that new charitable foundation is ready to help the afflicted ones, so it's fine.

Then, as the Great Race becomes more numerous and influential, they would begin to transform society to fit their own preferences. Government would become "a kind of fascistic socialism" like what they had back in the Triassic, while technology would suddenly start to advance very rapidly. At a certain point, when all the Great Race have made the transition, the new arrivals would make war on the remaining members of their victim species. Enslaved or exterminated, those unfortunates would watch their world become alien and unfamiliar, perhaps never understanding why.

Reproduction

So . . . how do the Great Race reproduce?

After all, their bodies are stolen. If one of the Great Race, inhabiting a cone-thing body, reproduces using the process of asexual spawning via spores described by Peaslee, that juvenile won't be one of the Great Race, it will be a cone-thing, mentally. Sure, it will grow up in a civilization of the Great Race, but will it have their superhuman intelligence? Their mysterious powers?

There are two possibilities. The nicer one is that the Great Race is based on culture and knowledge rather than lineage, so that a cone-thing raised by the Great Race becomes one of them, and can go off to possess the hardy coleopterans with all its friends when the time comes.

To me, that seems a little too humane. I would expect something grimmer: physical reproduction among the Great Race is only practiced to replace the aging bodies of older individuals. Rather than raise their offspring, they simply replace them, taking younger bodies. The dying body inhabited by the mind of a frightened infant is presumably destroyed. It just seems appropriate to me that the Great Race would do the same thing on an individual level that they do as a species.

This in turn inspires an interesting thought: if you've also read Lovecraft's short story "The Thing on the Doorstep" you know that the sinister Waite family apparently do something similar, and have been doing it for a very long time. Is "Asenath" really a rogue member of the Great Race? Or did one of her distant ancestors learn the trick of mind-swapping from a Triassic time voyager? Are they allied with the mysterious cult which serves the Great Race on contemporary Earth? Or are they enemies?

Those are my own random thoughts about one of Lovecraft's most fascinating creations. If you want to know more about the Great Race, the obvious place to start is with Lovecraft's story, which can be read online. There's also a good two-part podcast about the story and the Great Race by The Good Friends of Jackson Elias.

Nope

I write science fiction. I'm a huge astronomy buff, and a fan of all things space-related. I'm theoretically in the middle of writing a series about designing alien planets and extraterrestrial civilizations.

So now that the United States Congress is holding hearings on whether there are alien spacecraft visiting the Earth, and whether the armed forces are holding samples of alien life or technology, I should be really excited, right?

Nope.

I don't buy it, just as I don't buy any of the claims of alien contact or sightings of alien spacecraft. Why not?

They aren't weird enough.

I can believe ��� I do believe ��� that there are other technological civilizations in the Milky Way, possibly more advanced than our own. I find it perfectly reasonable to think they would be able to cross interstellar distances. It might be difficult and costly, but a sufficiently wealthy and advanced civilization, with enough patience, could do it.

What can't I believe, then? Three things.

First, I can't believe that space travelers capable of crossing interstellar distances would keep crashing into patches of desert on Earth. The reported behavior of UFOs, or UAPs, or whatever we're calling flying saucers this week, doesn't match any rational goal. They aren't landing and gathering samples, they aren't deploying insect-sized probes, they aren't watching from high orbit. Instead they're flying around like World War II artillery spotter planes, and crashing like, well, World War II artillery spotter planes. I don't buy it.

Second, I can't believe that any alien beings, or "non-human biologicals" or EBEs, or whatever we're calling little green men this week, would be remotely humanoid. Every report I see of bipeds with two arms and a head on top with two eyes above a horizontal mouth makes me roll my own eyes and snort in irritation. Those are humans, not aliens. I long for a contact report about giant lobster creatures, or furry serpentine beings, or anything that isn't a stunt man in a rubber suit. Until I hear something like that, I'm not buying it.

Finally, I can't really believe that any modern technology is reverse-engineered from alien science. Tell me: which tech is alien? The Raptor rocket engine? The Fujitzu A64FX computer processor? The Moderna COVID-19 vaccine? I can't think of any current technology which isn't obviously a development from earlier machines or verifiable discoveries. If General Dynamics suddenly announced they could build cold-fusion generators, or Raytheon started marketing anti-gravity devices, then I could entertain the idea that these come from alien technology. But those things don't exist. I don't buy it.

Perhaps I'll be proven wrong. Maybe Congress will order the Air Force to unveil the aliens they've been hiding in the attic since 1946. Maybe those aliens really do look like big-headed humanoids with skinny arms. Maybe we have reverse-engineered faster-than-light drives. If I'm wrong I'll be ecstatic. Interstellar travel is possible! Alien intelligence exists! Wonderful!

But for now . . . I don't buy it.

France Excursion 2023 Part Nine: Reunion in Paris and Departure

On June 28 I had my last breakfast in Tours, said au revoir to Diane, and went off to the train station while she remained behind for another couple of days at the conference. I made the train in plenty of time, rode to the transfer at St. Pierre-des-Corps, and boarded the TGV to Paris. At no point did I have to show a ticket (cheapskate travelers take note).

I zoomed across the French countryside to the end of the line at the Gare Montparnasse, on the southwest side of Paris, then rode the Metro across town to the Gare du Nord at the north side of the city, and boarded a train to Charles De Gaulle airport. I passed completely through Paris without once setting foot above ground.

The train to De Gaulle was hot and seemed to take forever, but I did arrive in time for my scheduled appointment at the Objets Trouv��es office. Just in front of me was a man a few years older than myself, who had apparently lost a bag containing his phone, tablet, and even his hearing aids. He was understandably upset ��� especially when he got the same spiel I did a week earlier about going to the Web site. Without any electronics, how could he do that? And how could he get an email if his bag did turn up? In the digital, all-electronic world I think there should still be physical analog backups for everything.

Perhaps he had softened up the office lady's resistance, because when I came to claim my bag ��� which happened to have Diane's nametag on it rather than mine ��� I got only a little perfunctory official puffing and blowing about proper documentation before she made me sign an illegibly blurry scan of my passport to certify I had picked it up, and then gave it to me.

Everyting was as I had packed it, which was a huge relief. My hand did not stop clutching the handle of that bag until I reached my room at the Hotel BASSS (not a typo) in the Montmartre section of Paris.

After wasting two hours riding back and forth to the airport I still had a few hours and the weather was adequate. So after a quick rinse off in the phone-booth-sized shower in my tiny room, I went out to explore the neighborhood.

I climbed up the Butte de Montmartre (the big hill where St. Denis was martyred) but didn't go into the Basilica on top as line for entry was too long. The view across Paris from there was very impressive. After descending again I looked into the Church of Saint-Jean de Montmartre, an Art Deco era gem on the Place des Abbesses.

After a big fancy dinner at the restaurant across the street from my hotel, I wandered down to Boulevard de Clichy and passed by the famous old Moulin Rouge nightclub. Once the center of Paris's naughty nightlife section, the whole area is kind of bland looking, with a Starbuck's and the inevitable Irish-themed pub. The only trace I could find of Montmartre's "bohemian" past was a high proportion of Italian restaurants on the side streets. I strolled back to the Hotel BASSS (not a typo), crawled into my tiny bed, and went to sleep.

My flight out in the morning was scheduled for 9 a.m., which meant I had to get to De Gaulle by 7. Not wanting to trust my fate to the train again, I arranged for a taxi to pick me up at 6 a.m. Both I and my driver were early, which meant I had just enough time to grab a coffee and a croissant before riding off through the early-morning streets.

When you get through the security checkpoints at the international terminal at De Gaulle airport, the duty-free shops are incredibly lavish. All the famous luxury French brands have big stores. I looked for things to spend my remaining Euros on, but everything was priced way beyond what I had left.

After that there's not much left to tell. I flew to Dublin, stood in a lot of lines, sat around, boarded my flight back to New England, and read ebooks most of the way home.

France Excursion 2023 Part Eight: Heroes of the AEF

On Tuesday, June 27th, Diane had to head off to the neuroendocrinology conference, so I was on my own for the morning. I got some espresso and walked about more or less at random.

I went across the Loire via the Pont Napoleon, which crosses a large island in mid-river. The island is set up as a park, though at the entrance I did see a prominent sign warning that no camping was allowed because of sudden changes in water level.

I walked along the north bank of the Loire, looking across at the city. (The photo I posted for the first day was taken from there.) The riverside road led me to the square at the north end of the Pont Wilson.

One intriguing sight there was the six customhouses commanding the three roads that led out of the square. In the days before the French Revolution, those were for the collection of the internal tariffs on goods. I don't know the specifics, but I get the impression that one of the reasons France became so incredibly powerful after the Revolution was simply due to the removal of so much feudal deadweight on the economy.

I crossed back to Tours proper via the Pont Wilson, which was renamed after World War I. Before that it was the Pont Neuf ��� the "New Bridge" and of course it is the oldest extant bridge over the Loire at Tours. That almost seems like a law of nature. The Pont Neuf in Paris is the oldest bridge there, and Novgorod is the oldest city in Russia.

The bridge at Tours was built because Louis XIV was able to put a member of the House of Bourbon onto the throne of Spain. All of a sudden there was more trade between the two countries, after centuries of a quasi-Cold War along the Pyrenees. A big new road was cut through Tours, leading south toward Spain. That road became the Rue Nationale, which is now the main axis of the city ��� shifting the orientation of Tours from parallel to the Loire to perpendicular.

Just on the Tours side there is a monument I didn't see in any of the guidebooks: a fountain commemorating the feats of the American Expeditionary Force's logistics effort during World War I. It's a lovely sculpture and obviously very carefully maintained. The French were apparently deeply affected by the American aid in that war. I think every town in France has a "Rue Wilson." His reputation in the U.S. has declined considerably over the past century, but in France, Woodrow Wilson is still a hero. Frankly, they're welcome to him.

We met for lunch at a nice little restaurant called Bistrot d'Odile on the Rue Colbert, which had been recommended highly. There are a lot of restaurants in Tours and we only got to try a handful. I wouldn't object to just spending a few weeks in town dining out.

After lunch I packed and had a nap, then went out again in the late afternoon to get another Aperol Spritz and watch the people go by. Dinner that day was my only mediocre meal of the entire trip: a "kebab" sandwich (which we Americans call a gyro), which was surprisingly bland and starchy.

France Excursion 2023 Part Seven: Secrets of the Templars!

Monday the 26th was the last full day before the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology conference got underway, so we decided to go see what lies west of Tours, having gone east on all our previous jaunts. More or less at random we chose Chinon as our destination.

Chinon is a little town sheltered between a big river and a big castle. The Loire flows past on the north and just behind the town is an impressive ridge crowned by the massive fortress of Chinon. It has been a military strong point since the days when the Romans built a fortified camp on the site, and over the centuries it was expanded by Franks, Merovingians, Capets, and Plantagenets.

One of the most famous events to happen at Chinon was the meeting between Joan of Arc and Charles VII of France. According to legend he was in disguise but she picked him out of a crowd of courtiers. I don't know if that's true, but I can understand why Charles was so freaked out by her arrival. A medieval monarch must have had a very hard time getting his mind around the concept that Joan was leading what amounted to a peasant revolt supporting him. That never happened before, as far as I can tell. Peasants tended to rebel against their lords, but picking one side in a dynastic dogfight was a new development. In this case I think Joan and the rest of the French commoners were just so damned sick of the Hundred Years' War that they decided to end it.

The fortress is mostly a ruin ��� not due to any assault by enemies, but mostly due to several centuries of being used as a free building material depot by the inhabitants of the town below.

We saw the whole thing, from the top floor of the Clock Tower (one of the few towers that didn't get dismantled) all the way down to the dungeons. Apparently some leaders of the Knights Templars were imprisoned at Chinon for a while, and what is said to be the room they were kept in features some grafitti cut into the walls, said to be by the Templar prisoners. Or maybe by someone else. Still, if Dan Brown wants to use this as material for a thriller, here's a photo.

Walking around a giant castle and climbing stairs all morning gave us a good appetite, which we satisfied at a restaurant called Au Local, just outside the castle gates. Highly recommended.

After a leisurely drive back to Tours, I dropped off the rental car while Diane signed in at the conference. She went off to some opening ceremonies while I dined in the old section of town, eating Andouillette and putting away a demi-bottle of local ros�� wine. At the next table an intellectual-looking Frenchman about my age was sporting a "LOS ANGELES THUG LIFE COMPTON" t-shirt.

And so to bed.

France Excursion 2023 Part Six: Pandas!

On Sunday we set out early once again, heading up the valley of the Cher a second time. Our destination was the town of Saint-Aignan, home of the ZooParc de Beauval ��� one of France's best zoos. It's big, modern, and ��� on summer weekends, anyway ��� packed with visitors. We got there at opening time and stayed for a good five hours, in broiling sun on a very hot day. But the zoo was definitely worth the visit.

         As I mentioned, it's a fairly new zoo, dating back to 1980 when Francoise Delord ran out of room in her Paris apartment for her collection of birds and set up an aviary park at Beauval. Over the decades is has grown to include 35,000 animals from every continent. Building a zoo in the 1980s and 1990s meant that the Delord family could learn from a couple of centuries of other people's mistakes in zoo construction and operation. The enclosures are roomy, with plenty for the animals to do. I didn't notice any paths worn down by obsessive pacing by big cats.

         The big draw at Beauval is their collection of giant pandas, courtesy of the People's Republic of China. (Apparently China considers all pandas ��� like many other things ��� belong to China no matter where they are or were born.) The exhibit is very posh, and features big flatscreens showing videos of various French big shots at the zoo to welcome the pandas' arrival. There's also a lot of frankly fawning text panels about how swell China is and how grateful Beauval is for the right to show the pandas.

         I was actually more amused by a less showy exhibit, showing the famous North American Trash Panda (Procyon lotor).

         Personally, I'm always as interested in the two-legged animals wandering around the zoo as I am at the creatures inside the enclosures. My estimate is that a good 95 percent of the people at Beauval were French. I think I spotted maybe one group that included at least some Americans, and I heard a British accent at one point. Saint-Aignan is about three hours from Paris by car ��� a little long but do-able for a day trip if you don't mind getting up early and getting back late, but perfect for a weekend. Pack up the kids and leave the Place d'Italie at about 5 p.m. on Friday, drive down with a stop for a nice dinner around Orleans, and book a hotel for two nights somewhere along the Loire. Spend one day looking at chateaus and maybe visiting a winery or two, another day at the zoo, drive back Sunday evening and you're done.

         Hot and tired, we drove back to Tours along a scenic back-roads route recommended by the Green Guide, which passed through Montresor, one of the official Most Picturesque Villages in France. Dinner was at an adequate Thai place in Tours. There's an interesting guidebook waiting to be written, about the best "foreign" food in other countries ��� does Paris have better Vietnamese food, or Prague? Which European countries have the best Mexican food? And so forth.

France Excursion 2023 Part Five: Naps!

On Saturday the 24th we decided to take it easy. We slept about 11 hours, then I stashed the car in a garage for the day while Diane went out to find pastries for breakfast. We took our dirty laundry two blocks to the nearest laundromat: "Charlie et le Choco-Laverie," a hybrid cafe-laundry with wifi. There we caught up on various Web sites and social media while getting our clothes clean.

For lunch we picked a nice-looking place on the Rue Colbert, the old pre-18th Century main street of Tours which runs parallel to the river. I'm afraid I don't recall the name, but the food was good.

From there we wandered over to the Cathedral of St. Gatien (the first bishop of Tours), and stumbled across a concert in progress. It was a performance by a choir, small orchestra, organ, and half a dozen Scottish bagpipers. The first several rows of the audience were occupied by people in Renaissance costume, but the music was mostly recent, including a spirited rendition of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah."* I have no idea what was going on, but the music was nice and the cathedral is lovely.

We stopped at the science fiction bookstore Imaginaute and had a nice chat with the owner, shading as always into bitching about how kids these days don't buy enough books.

We napped away the hottest part of the afternoon, then I went out on my own in the evening to sit at a sidewalk table drinking an Aperol spritz and update my journal while watching the people, feeling exceedingly cosmopolitan.

If I had my way, trips would last longer and include more days like this one.

 

*How the heck did this song get turned into a quasi-hymn? Does nobody listen to lyrics?

France Excursion 2023 Part Four: Up and Away!

On Friday the 23rd we got up very very early, about 4:30 a.m., and bundled into the car for a drive up the Cher river to the little town of Francueil where we sat outside a deserted winery in the pre-dawn darkness. A few other cars pulled up nearby, and then the caravan of white trucks bearing the "France-Montgolfi��re" logo came tearing up, towing a trailer filled with a big basket, tanks of propane, and a big bundle of colorful nylon.

We were going ballooning!

The professionals inflated and released a little helium balloon, and watched its path in the light breeze as it floated off, and then we all piled into the trucks and drove off to the launch site. My guess is that they have a number of alternate takeoff points, based on which way the winds are blowing. With a balloon you don't have a lot of control over where you go, but you can pick where you're coming from. We drove some five or ten kilometers to the east and into a soccer field where two other balloons were already unpacked and inflating. They use gas-engine powered fans to fill the balloons with air, then heat it with propane burners until the balloon is upright.
Once the balloon was ready and we had our safety briefing ("Don't touch the fans, and when we land squat down and face away from the direction we're moving") eleven passengers clambered into the big basket, our pilot Fabien fired up the burners, and we took to the air!

Fabien used a light touch on the propane burner, keeping us quite low for the first part of the flight. Once we actually brushed the upper foliage of a tree. We were low enough to see a fox in one cow pasture below us. The sun rose just after we took off, and the golden dawn light made the landscape gorgeous.

Staying low meant our balloon was carried along by the breeze blowing down the valley of the river Cher. We could see some of the other balloons in the air that morning ��� I counted eight, others said ten ��� had gone higher and were veering off to the southwest.

The strategy paid off as we passed directly over the Chateau of Chenonceau, with a glorious view of the house and gardens lit by the rising sun. We began descending as we crossed the river, and touched down in a newly-cut hayfield. The farmer cutting hay paused in his work to come over and join us for a toast to the successful flight. The winery where our cars were parked was just a kilometer away.

It was still quite early, just past 8 a.m., when we got back to the car. Diane and I drove across the river to the town of Chenonceaux (the town has an x, the chateau doesn't). We found one cafe opening early and got ourselves some breakfast, then hung around in the parking lot until the chateau opened for the day.

Chenonceau is gorgeous, both from the ground and the air. It was a pleasure palace, built by Henri II for his mistress Diane de Poitiers, then claimed by his widow Catherine de Medici, who basically ran the country from there until her son Henri III was old enough to take over. The house was built on the foundations of a fortified mill, and has a long gallery section stretching right across the river Cher.

The gardens are typical French landscaping: lots of gravel and show those plants who's boss. There is a small modern English-style garden which to my taste is much more appealing. Also a hedge maze, and ��� for some unknown reason ��� a pair of classic old cars. Maybe they belonged to Catherine de Medici.

We spent the morning at Chenonceau and then drove north to the banks of the Loire, for a sumptous meal at the Chateau de Pray, another Michelin-starred restaurant and hotel in a 13th-century castle. I didn't keep a copy of the menu, but I know we started with a kind of vichysoisse with tiny clams (almost like a cold chowder), roasted artichoke, beef with a wonderful broth poured over it, goat cheese, and a kind of deconstructed strawberry shortcake for dessert. All quite delicious.

I have noticed some patterns in high-end cooking lately. I don't know if this is a long-term trend or just this year's fad. The chefs are definitely scaling back on the butter, cream, and lardons. Instead they're pushing a lot of umami with concentrated broths and reductions. Portions are quite modest, really. The focus is on flavor, not fullness. Diane actually lost weight on the trip ��� remember we were alternating fancy meals with long walks through castles and museums, often logging five miles a day.

After two hours at the table we finally finished, and drove just a kilometer or so down the river to Amboise, to visit the Chateau du Clos Luce, the final residence of Leonardo da Vinci. Unsurprisingly, the house is now a Da Vinci museum. Because all his artworks and original manuscripts are in the hands of much bigger and better-endowed museums, the Chateau du Clos Luce focuses on Leonardo's technology ideas, with constructed versions of some of the things he only doodled on paper. The house itself is pleasant, and the gardens are quite nice, but I can't say I learned anything I didn't already know about Leonardo da Vinci.

By that point we were both pretty tired ��� it was something like 14 hours since we woke up ��� so we drove back to Tours, had showers, and went to bed early. A great day in all.