James L. Cambias's Blog, page 41

Why I Don't Worry, Part 1

Last month, this New York Times article by Steven Johnson raised the alarming question: what if our efforts to find and communicate with other intelligent life in the Universe brings us to the attention of intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic who want to wipe us out? The author quoted Stephen Hawking, warning that the result of interstellar contact might resemble the conquest of the New World by the Spanish.

But there are worse things than a galleon-load of extraterrestrial Conquistadors dropping down out of the sky some afternoon. Instead of going to the bother of conquering the Earth, a sufficiently xenophobic and/or ruthless alien civilization might simply lob a few relativisitic planet-busting projectiles in our direction at 99.9 percent of the speed of light. A barrage of brick-sized warheads at that velocity would be an extinction-level event.

Scary stuff! Maybe we should try to hide. Maybe that's the reason we haven't yet detected any other civilizations: they're all either hiding or dead.

Except that I don't believe it, and this isn't just wishful thinking. Interstellar conquest or extermination are simply bad ideas. They're either literally impossible or so difficult and fraught with uncertainty that they might as well be impossible. (I am assuming real-world physics here, with the speed of light as an absolute speed limit.) I am not worried; let me explain why.

I'm going to consider the two cases ��� extermination and conquest ��� separately, although there's a lot of overlap among the reasons neither is practical. I will begin with interstellar conquest. There are three good reasons why nobody is likely to try conquest across interstellar distances.

I. Why? Seriously, why do it? What benefit would Earth get by sending out starships across tens or hundreds of light-years to conquer some other planet? If you're a Habsburg King of Spain, conquering Mexico makes perfect sense: you can ship home tons of gold, plant colonies which enrich the mother country through trade, and generally make out like a bandit.

But suppose Mexico was so far away that a galleon would have to sail for decades, if not centuries to reach it? And suppose sending a single galleon to Mexico would cost twice Spain's entire annual economic output? How keen on the project would King Charles be once you told him that?

If that's not enough to destroy His Most Catholic Majesty's enthusiasm for the conquering Mexico, suppose you told him that shipping anything back would cost just as much and require decades to build up the Mexican shipbuilding infrastructure? There is one bright spot for King Charles, though: it's not hard to send messages from Mexico to Spain, so you can mail back pictures, descriptions of the new land and its inhabitants, and maybe a few useful new ideas. But you could just as easily mail a letter to King Montezuma and ask him to do that, without those incredibly expensive galleons.

Conquering inhabited worlds across interstellar distances makes no economic sense. If the planet's technology is sufficiently primitive that a starship full of troops with AK-47s can overawe them and take over, then it's highly unlikely that world produces anything valuable enough to ship home. Certainly no non-biological substances are worth it; even diamonds, at $50,000 per gram, wouldn't be worth it ��� especially since one could probably find diamond deposits on uninhabited planets much nearer to Earth. (If anyone mentions "stealing our water" I'm going to drown him.) And if you like diamonds so much, developing ways to manufacture them would be a much more lucrative investment than sending starships out in search of some new Kimberley mine.

Bioproducts like heroin or truffles might be incredibly valuable, but the shipping cost is murder. It's far more practical to grab some of the plants or animals you want, take them home, and figure out how to raise them on your own planet.  

And that's assuming conquest is easy. I doubt that conquering the Earth would be easy. Past experience shows that even trying to conquer smallish chunks of the Earth is very difficult. There simply isn't anything on Earth valuable enough to make us worth conquering, especially given the fact that there's seven billion humans armed with everything from pointed sticks to hydrogen bombs who might object.

Well, what about ideology? The aliens could be fanatical Marxists, or devotees of some hyper-evangelical religion, or just really insistent about which way the toilet paper roll goes. Ideology was a good enough reason for 180 million deaths on Earth in the 20th Century.1 We certainly can't assume any hypothetical aliens wouldn't be just as bloodthirsty in the name of their preferred cause.

But it still seems unlikely. The more bloody-minded the ideology, the shorter the shelf life. Of the regimes responsible for that horrifying 180 million death toll, only one is still around (the Chinese Communist Party) and it has transformed itself into a considerably more housebroken form. Obviously we can't tell if this is a "rule" of history (most "rules" of history are bunk anyway), and we certainly can't tell if it would apply to an alien civilization.

However, there is another reason to doubt the existence of hyper-ideological alien civilizations, and that's our old friend the Fermi Paradox. Radiotelescopes are considerably cheaper than starships, so one would expect that any fanatical alien ideologues would be flooding the Galaxy's airwaves with propaganda broadcasts. After all, if they can make converts via radio it frees up ships from the Holy People's Armada to go after the stubborn ones. But we don't see any of that; just silence.

So I won't rule out ideology, but I assign it a very low probability.

II. How? How do you conquer a planet across interstellar distances, anyway? If you're deliberately sending out an invasion, the planet's inhabitants have to be capable of giving you some indication that they exist ��� which in practice means at least a 1950s-era technology.

Assume that's what you're going after. Assume also that a world with substantial industrial technology is going to have a pretty big population; at least a billion. And while it would be convenient if some or all of them joined your side when you land, there's no way to find out before you launch the fleet. So you have to assume it will be a contested invasion. Finally, we assume that you actually want to conquer the planet ��� which means most of it must still be habitable when the conquest is over. (We'll cover simple destruction in the next post.)

Let's use the British Interplanetary Society's Daedalus spacecraft as our model starship, and assume arbitrarily good suspended animation for the crew and the soldiers of our invasion force. We will use the American plan for "Operation Olympic" as the model for that invasion force. Olympic was the invasion of Japan which never happened because of the timely deployment of the atomic bomb.

Operation Olympic would have involved 14 Army and Marine divisions, 15 air forces, and the aircraft from 42 carrier ships. That's about 300,000 soldiers, 10,000 airplanes, and at least 20,000 other vehicles. That force, with its supplies, would have a mass on the order of 1 million tons (and that assumes hyper-efficient power supplies for the planes and vehicles so there's no need to bring fuel).

The Daedalus starship was designed for a payload of 500 tons. So you'd need 2,000 of them to carry that invasion force. Each one would cost about 200 trillion dollars (or about twice the annual GDP of the planet). We're ignoring the cost of the actual military force. So building the ships for this invasion would require the entire economic output of a planet like the Earth for 4,000 years! That fanatical ideology has to maintain its grip on its home civilization for a period as long as recorded history just to get the invasion force built.

Oh, and since they have to detect the target civilization before they start building this armada, the target planet has 4,000 years to invest all of its economic output into technology research, industrial expansion, off-planet colonies, and massive defenses. They also get the multi-decade flight time of the armada to prepare to resist (because launching that fleet will be noticed across interstellar distances).

Let's just say the odds don't favor the invaders.

III. Time Lag. This is an important point and bears repeating. Interstellar travel takes a lot of time. The fleet will spend decades or centuries in transit. All of which means that when the invaders arrive, the target planet will be a very different place from when they were planning the operation years earlier.

I can't imagine what the reaction from any strategic planner would be if you asked him to prepare an invasion force against an enemy, but all data about the foe is at least a hundred years out of date. You don't know what their population numbers are, you don't know anything about their economy, you don't know the size of their military forces, you don't know anything about their weapons . . . it would be insanity.

Now, it is possible that the invaders are incredibly advanced and powerful, so that launching such an armada would be easy for them, and their weapons could overcome any opposition. Their species might be a Kardashev Type II civilization, able to command the entire mass and energy resources of an entire star system . . .

 . . . except that such a civilization should be detectable across interstellar distances. Professor Fermi at the back of the classroom is holding up a sign: "WHERE ARE THEY?"

It seems pretty much impossible to conquer a planet across interstellar distances ��� at least, any planet which could possibly repay the effort of conquering it. If you want living space you can find worlds which aren't inhabited, or terraform lifeless worlds to suit yourself. If you want resources there's a vast number of lifeless bodies in the universe you can strip-mine. 

So I'm not afraid of aliens coming to take over.

But what if they don't want to take us over? What if they just want to exterminate us? I'll get to that next time.

 

If you want to see stories about aliens who aren't conquering the Earth, check out my new ebook, Outlaws and Aliens!

Island of Lost Games: Droids

(Sorry for the hiatus. Events happened.)

No, it has nothing to do with Star Wars. Droids is a fascinating and unique little roleplaying game which came out in 1982 from a company called Integral Games, in Arlington, Texas. The lead designer was Neil Patrick Moore, and according to the RPGGeek Web site Droids is his only title.

The game itself looks like a Traveller supplement: it's an 80-page stapled 5 1/2" by 8 1/2" black book, using the same clean interior layout format that Game Designers' Workshop used, and maybe five illustrations total. (In fact, my copy spent the past 35 years in the box of Traveller books.) It cost $7.95 new, at a time when a paperback novel was about a dollar cheaper.

So what's it about? Well, droids, mostly. In Droids, all the characters are intelligent robots in a post-apocalyptic world after a revolt of the machines wiped out humanity. Instead of rolling up a character with dice, you design one with a starting budget of twenty "Construction Points" (CP), which can be spent on things like locomotion systems, manipulating arms, weapons, powerplants, sensors, armor, and so forth.

There are some fun options in those lists of components: your locomotion can be wheels or legs ��� but can also be exotica like a helium balloon, a boat hull with a sail, or a tunnelling drill! Weapons include guns, lasers, and energy beams, as well as torpedo tubes for boat droids, and the "Fluid Gun," which is a giant Super-Soaker loaded with acid, freon, or glue.

So, yes, you can play The Terminator, marching around with a machine-gun arm, but you can just as easily be a glue-spraying balloonist droid, or a tunnelling mine-layer.

The characters exist in a lawless wasteland, and must cope with other droids, robot drones controlled by large computerized factories, natural and artificial hazards, and maybe a few deathtraps left behind by the long-gone humans. Combat is pretty straightforward, with a hit location system based on the size of the droid's components. So if your biggest module is a powerplant, that powerplant's going to get hit more often than smaller parts will. There's also a system to track wear and tear on components, which get more likely to break down if not properly maintained. It's all very clean and intuitive.

Droids does have the most unusual character advancement and/or treasure mechanic I've ever seen in a roleplaying game. When your character wins a fight against another droid, you can loot the wrecked body of your foe, detaching usable parts and bolting them onto yourself (or just carrying them to trade later). In D&D terms, the "monsters" become both the "treasure" and the "experience points" in a very direct and literal fashion. That right there makes this game something special. You're not just playing humans in robot costumes, you're playing machines, with a very different sense of identity than living organisms would have.

The game didn't include much gamemastering advice. There's maybe a page about possible droid societies, another page about random encounters, and a very simple three-page "dungeon" adventure set in a derelict factory. But in conjunction with something like Gamma World (or Metamorphosis Alpha . . .) it wouldn't be hard to create a much more elaborate setting in which the droids can explore, discover and solve mysteries, and perhaps build a society of their own.

As with so many relics from the Island of Lost Games, I never got the chance to play Droids. I did, however, include a tip of that hat to this obscure pioneer in an article I wrote for Steve Jackson Games's Pyramid magazine, called "CybEarth." It was about a distant planet inhabited entirely by robots after the human colonists were wiped out in a mysterious disaster. Most of the robots had created weird variations on the defunct human societies on their world, so I had Musketeer robots and Victorian robots and giant transforming-mecha Samurai robots. But one part of the planet was an anarchic wasteland where lawless feral robots roamed, fighting each other to survive. As in Droids, the survivors in that harsh part of the world were made of salvaged bits and pieces from defeated enemies. It was an homage that maybe half a dozen people could have noticed. 

Once again I ask the teeming millions out there: has anyone ever played Droids? It always seemed as though it would be a fun game, especially for a one-shot at a convention or the game store. Perhaps I'll make up some enemies and run a session some time.

(If you like stories featuring interesting nonhuman perspectives, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!)

Island of Lost Games: Universe

Universe was a science fiction roleplaying game published in 1982 by the well-known wargame company SPI, in partnership with the mass-market paperback house Bantam Books. That meant the game got fairly wide distribution in bookstores rather than just the hobby shop ghetto. Despite that, I don't think it sold many copies.

The game itself was a 108-page perfect-bound large-format softcover, and included a really spiffy poster-sized three-dimensional map of all the stars within 30 light-years of the Sun. That map was my primary reason for buying the game. Back in 1982 we didn't have Web sites like SolStation or Project Rho. In fact we didn't have Web sites at all. If you wanted to map out the nearby stars you had to get a copy of Burnham's Celestial Handbook and work out coordinates via trigonometry. I was already trying my amateurish hand at science fiction writing, and so $10.95 for a copy of Universe was worth it just for the map.

I have no idea where that map is nowadays. I hope I still have it.

SPI avoided the "cheesy early roleplaying game art" problem by including absolutely no interior art at all. The only illustrations are two pages of planet maps and the cover painting by John Pierard (almost buried under enormous amounts of come-on text). The rest of the book is nothing but dense-packed 10-point type and lots and lots of tables. Approximately 40 of the game's 108 pages are tables or photocopiable record sheets.

There's a brief introduction ��� What Is Role-Playing? ��� and a one-page outline of the future world the game takes place in. It's pretty generic. Scientific study of psionics makes psi-powered faster-than-light travel possible, humans colonize other planets, there's a Federation, there are robots, nobody's found any alien civilizations, now go play.

We begin with character generation, and in the process we begin to understand why Universe is an obscure piece of game history trivia rather than a beloved classic. Since SPI used the "case-style" rules format beloved of wargame publishers, I'll just go through the Character Generation Sequence. Bold text are headings and subheadings from the game, italics are my own drastic simplifications of what you do.

A. Character Heritage

Determine 4 Potential Multipliers

            Roll a die four times and consult the Character Heritage Table.

Calculate the number of Study Points the character receives

            Add up the numbers you just generated, then consult the Character Heritage Table again.

Determine the character's natural habitat

            Roll on the Habitat Table to determine what kind of environment you grew up in. Then, calculate skill modifiers for every other kind of environment, based on how different they are from your place of origin. Also, figure out your home planet's surface gravity and temperature.

Determine the character's social standing

            Roll on the Social Standing Table to figure out how much education and wealth your character has, based on family background.

B. Character Development

    5. Choose fields of study for the character

    6. Choose initial skills for the character

             Buy some skills.

    7. Determine the character's 9 Characteristic Ratings

            Determine your NINE character attributes by rolling on the Characteristic Generation Table and consulting the Characteristic Modifier Chart. Each one requires three steps.

C. Character Professions

    8. Choose a Profession for the character

            Make sure you fit the prerequisites for the career, otherwise you'll have to start over!

Declare how many years the character will practice his profession

            Cross-reference on the Employment Table to determine the actual number of years served.

Determine the effects of age on the character

            Using the actual number of years, roll on the Effects of Age Table.

Calculate the number of Skill Points the character receives

            Roll a die and apply the Skill Point Modifier from the Profession description to determine how many Skill Points the character gains.

Choose skills for the character

            Buy some more skills.

Determine benefits the character receives from his profession

            Roll a die and add the Actual Years of employment to determine what benefits the character gains ��� typically some money and gear.

So after 18 die rolls, consulting 10 tables, and looking up careers and skills, you've got a character.

Meanwhile the gamemaster has presumably been spending his time generating star systems, using the cool poster map and (mostly) accurate data on real stars. Using (inevitably) more tables and a really nifty Star System Log sheet, the gamemaster generates planets and determines what kind of surface environments they might have. He also figures out temperature, resources, and whether or not the planet has been colonized. Fairly straightforward.

Now what?

Now you have random encounters.

Seriously, that's the only thing the game provides for characters to do. Figure out what kind of environment the characters are in, consult the Terrain Effects Chart for modifiers, and then roll an encounter on the Encounter Table. You can meet hostile extraterrestrial creatures, deal with a malfunctioning robot, or outwit an Art Dealer, or avoid a Disease Carrier. In effect, the entire game is a "hex crawl."

You can also travel in space and have encounters there, but space combat is an entirely separate game, DeltaVee, NOT INCLUDED. (Boo, hiss!) Spaceships consist of a basic hull, which can be customized by tacking on various special-purpose modules. I actually liked that method better than Traveller's "stuff the hull" system, but the details in the Universe book were very sketchy.

One can see a lot of Traveller in Universe's DNA: the character generation system which builds characters as the product of their randomly-generated background. The laissez-faire interstellar government which lets planetary societies develop on their own. Much of the equipment. The inevitable psionics.

There were some nice bits in Universe. The wonderful star map, obviously. The star system record sheets were useful; I used them in my Traveller game so that systems could hold more than one planet. I also used the resources and trade goods chart. And there were a couple of gadgets in the game's list of equipment which were worth poaching.

But overall . . . a combination of "meh" and "huh?" Where Universe wasn't overly-complex it was vague and poorly-described. Most crucially, there was no sense of what the characters were supposed to do. Given the emphasis on environments and encounters, I guess the designers envisioned a Star Trek style game of exploration. A giant hex crawl. But the vagueness meant one never had a sense of why the characters were going to be exploring.

I don't know if anyone ever played Universe. I've never seen any adventure scenarios written for it, and I've never heard anyone's Universe game table war stories. Has anyone actually played a session of this game? If so, I'd love to hear about it. What did you do?

 

If you want to see some things characters can do in a science fiction setting, check out my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

 

 

 

 

Island of Lost Games: Metamorphosis Alpha

We recently got more bookshelves installed, which meant that my roleplaying game collection emerged from the closet where it had been piled up for more than a decade, and now stands again in proud alphabetical-by-title ranks, easily accessible. I found some forgotten treasures in there: my original Call of Cthulhu box set, the battered little old black Traveller box, and a lot of GURPS books I had forgotten I had.

Re-shelving also uncovered some obscure games, things I picked up here and there over the past thirty-five years: Mike Pondsmith's Dream Park, Greg Porter's Epiphany, Fading Suns from Holistic Design, Metamorphosis Alpha by James Ward, Tales of Gargentihr from Sanctuary Games, and SPI's Universe. I thought it would be interesting to look into those less-known games and do a series of posts about them. I begin with the oldest, Metamorphosis Alpha.

Metamorphosis Alpha is old. How old? It is copyright 1976; mine is the third printing, from 1978. It's so old the TSR colophon is still a little lizard-man with a halberd, before the company switched to a wimpy-looking wizard. It may be the first science fiction role-playing game ever, depending on whether you think Warriors of Mars was science fiction or swords-and-sorcery.

I have no clear memory of where I got this game. I probably picked it up at Hub Hobbies in New Orleans, but it might have been at a bookstore, or even in the dealer room at Vul-Con, the old New Orleans area Star Trek convention. I do know how much I paid for it: six dollars. I know that because the price sticker is still right there on the cover (that argues in favor of the hobby shop theory).

Physically, it's not very impressive: a stapled 32-page book with cover art of the kind only a pioneering roleplaying game publisher could love. There's also interior illustrations which wouldn't look out of place in the back of my 8th-grade math notebook. The only art credit is to David Sutherland (I should note that Mr. Sutherland's work got much better, and he was a mainstay at TSR for twenty years). But there's a lot packed into those 32 pages, in part thanks to the use of eyestrainingly small type and very narrow margins.

According to the introduction, in the year 2290 the mighty starship Warden was launched on a mission to colonize an Earthlike world many light-years away. As the ship traveled slower than light, the voyage would take decades to finish. The ship had to have a complete biosphere aboard, with thousands of animals, large open decks devoted to forest and grassland, and more than a million colonists living in a great city within the starship.

Disaster struck, in the form of a "cloud of radiation" in space, which damaged the ship's systems, killed off most of the passengers and crew, and created weird mutations in the surviving humans and animals aboard. The survivors regressed to savagery and forgot they were even aboard a ship flying between the stars.

In case you weren't paying attention in Science Fiction class, this scenario is lifted pretty directly from Robert Heinlein's novel Orphans of the Sky. The same idea was used in episodes of Star Trek and Space: 1999. Around the time Metamorphosis Alpha came out there was also Harlan Ellison's abortive TV series project, The Starlost. All involved huge generation starships, crews reverted to savagery, and mutations.

Players take the part of humans, mutant humans, or mutant animals. One starts by rolling up character stats, much as in Dungeons & Dragons, although the stats are a little different. Instead of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, Metamorphosis Alpha characters have a different set. There's Radiation Resistance, Mental Resistance, Dexterity, Strength, Leadership Potential, and Constitution. If you're playing a human, all you need after that is some gear and a name and you're done. But mutants get to roll for the number of physical and mental mutations their characters have, and then select from a list of things like "Taller" or "Multiple Body Parts" or "Wings" or "Telekinesis" or "Dual Brain." The gamemaster (known as the "judge") assigns mutants mental or physical defects to go along with their superpowers.

Naturally there are monsters to fight (or negotiate with) on this derelict starship. Things like Metaled Ones (super-intelligent badgers with armored hides and telekinesis) or Wolfoids (bipedal intelligent wolves with energy-reflecting fur and eyes capable of emitting radiation blasts). The game has no alignment system, so any beings can potentially be hostile, friendly, or maybe willing to negotiate. I think that's a deliberate choice of the designer: this is as much a game of diplomacy as it is of combat. The Leadership Potential attribute gives every character a chance to gain followers at each encounter.

Characters begin with typical low-tech gear like swords, bows, and armor made of plant fiber, but the ship holds all kinds of technological "magic items." Things like laser guns, robots, antigravity sleds, and the valuable "color band" bracelets which allow access to sealed-off compartments. Figuring out how to work their new technological toys is one of the main tasks in the game, and characters risk blowing themselves (or bystanders) up as they tinker. It's not quite as elaborate as Gamma World's flowchart for figuring out unknown devices, but I think part of the fun is supposed to be letting the players figure out what the thing is supposed to be from the gamemaster's disingenuous descriptions. (Perhaps it's no coincidence that these rules are on the facing page from the subhead "Relatives" ��� which explains how to let players roll up kinsmen to replace characters who die in the course of play.)

I get the impression that Metamorphosis Alpha was created to allow self-contained "miniseries" adventures rather than open-ended campaigns. For one thing, there is no mechanism for character advancement. You don't gain levels in Metamorphosis Alpha. If you wander into radioactive zones you might gain new mutations ��� but you could also develop new defects as well. As far as I can tell (and keep in mind I don't think I ever played the game ��� though I did pillage bits for Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller games), the main form of reward for characters and players is increasing knowledge and mastery of the giant starship, a growing band of followers, and more advanced items. The obvious "endgame" is to make contact with the ship's super-intelligent computer and land the starship Warden on a habitable planet somewhere.

It's an interesting hybrid of the game structures we now classify as "sandbox" and "story" games. Initially the Warden is a huge sandbox full of random encounters and perils to overcome, but as the characters discover more about their world it segues neatly into a story structure of unifying the warring tribes and making the starship great again.

Would I play Metamorphosis Alpha now? The game would certainly be fun for a one-shot lasting a few hours. I wouldn't have any trouble improvising an ongoing campaign from the relatively bare-bones material in the sourcebook, but then I am a science fiction writer so that's literally what I do all day. The main obstacle to running a game would be that I would be obsessively protective of my fragile, aging copy of the book. I think I might use it as inspiration for a Pathfinder or Savage Worlds game, and leave my venerable relic on the shelf.

 

If you want to read more adventures of strange beings and mysterious technology, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Obligatory Star Wars Post

There has been a certain amount of muted hoopla this week because it marks the 40th anniversary of the original Star Wars. One thing which I haven't seen anywhere else is a discussion of how different Star Wars was from most science fiction films up to that year. Quite simply, Star Wars turned SF cinema into part of the Action/Adventure genre; before that it was under  Drama. This turned out to be massively important.

If you look at the big-budget, high-profile science fiction films of the decade before 1977, what do you see? The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Stepford Wives, Phase IV, The Terminal Man, Zardoz, The Day of the Dolphin, Soylent Green, Solaris, Westworld, Logan's Run, The Andromeda Strain, A Clockwork Orange, Planet of the Apes (and sequels), THX 1138 (by some guy named Lucas), Colossus: The Forbin Project, 2001, and Charly.

And what do these movies have in common? They're all VERY SERIOUS. Nearly half the list are post-apocalyptic stories; half are Dreadful Warnings about technology out of control. Only four deal with space exploration at all, and in all of those contact with extraterrestrial life is shown as either dangerous, incomprehensible, or both. In short, the future ��� and the Universe ��� are simply no fun.

Oh, sure, there were some science fiction adventure films ��� but interestingly, most of them were not tales of futuristic derring-do, but period pieces based on Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne novels, with what we would now call "steampunk" explorers finding weird cultures in out-of-the-way places on Earth. And then the volcano erupts. It's almost as if the only way moviemakers could imagine fantastic adventure and exploration was to look to the past. (Interestingly, contemporary written SF seems to have gone through a similar phase in the first decade of this century.)

Of course there were monster movies, including the peak years of Godzilla. And the golden age of disaster movies, which are kind of science fiction. And, yes, there were low-budget pictures which have since become cult classics, like Death Race 2000. But in the big new theaters at the shopping mall, the science fiction movies were grim stuff.

Then Star Wars, and huzzah, science fiction is fun again. And by the way it made more money than studio executives could even imagine up to that point. Which meant that all subsequent SF cinema (for a good decade or more, anyway) had to be like Star Wars. Even movies that weren't at all like Star Wars (like Blade Runner) got marketed as future ADVENTURE! Science fiction, as a cinematic category, moved from Drama to Action/Adventure (one can argue that it was occupying the niche left vacant by the disappearance of the Western genre).

And this may ultimately have saved it. As movies have gone more global, it's harder to do a straight-up drama. How do you market a sensitive story about growing up gay in rural New Jersey in the 1940s to an audience in Thailand or Dubai? More importantly, how do you market a grim story about the loss of personal autonomy to computers in a totalitarian future to an audience in Shanghai or London who are coming to the theater to escape pretty much that exact thing in their real lives?

But a story about a cyborg superman fighting alien invaders crosses all cultural boundaries. You don't even need subtitles. Turning science fiction cinema from Drama into Action/Adventure may have saved it from following the Western into obscurity. The very fact that SF movies made gobs of money helped make all of what we now call "geek culture" shed its old pocket-protector stigma and enter the mainstream. Without Star Wars in 1977 you would not see The Expanse on TV in 2017.

I only hope we can square the circle. We've had the thesis of Campbellian cerebral SF movies, the antithesis of Star Wars and its imitators ��� can we create a synthesis which combines the virtues of both?

 

For SF stories which combine action and drama, buy my new ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

 

Battle on the Tabletop!

Combat in roleplaying games has a lot of variation, but most game systems break it up into two main components: how hard it is to hit someone, and how much damage that person can withstand.

So in Dungeons & Dragons, everything has an Armor Class, which determines what one must roll in order to score a hit. Armor Class is a combination of protection from armor and shield, the character's ability to dodge and avoid blows, and any magical protection guarding him from harm.

If you do get hit, you lose Hit Points. Hit Points represent your ability to shrug off damage due to your innate toughness, luck, and years of experience. That's why a high-level character has many more Hit Points than a novice: he's better at avoiding harm.

But isn't that the same as Armor Class? Isn't that also your ability to avoid harm or absorb damage? And what about Saving Throws? Aren't they also a measure of how well the character can keep from getting hurt?

Other roleplaying systems tried to address this paradox. In original Traveller, armor affected how well certain weapons could hit someone, but when a character did take damage it directly reduced his physical attributes ��� making him slow, or weakened, or reduced in stamina. When I first started playing Traveller I thought this was odd and unwieldy, but now I kind of like it.

GURPS made your ability to avoid being hit entirely a matter of agility and skill, and armor simply absorbed part of the damage done to you. GURPS characters could improve their skills with experience, but their damage capacity remained more or less fixed. Gamers accustomed to high-level D&D characters, able to ignore dozens of sword blows or arrows, were always shocked by how fragile even the toughest GURPS characters are.

Some systems tried to localize the damage, so that a hit to the arm would have different results than a hit to the leg or abdomen. (GURPS used that as an optional rule.) I always found hit locations to be overly complicated: instead of rolling twice (once to hit, once for damage), hit locations rules add a third roll, and probably an extra step of calculations to see how the damage to that body part affects the character.

Combat systems in roleplaying have to satisfy multiple contradictory requirements:

��� First, they have to feel realistic. A powerful sword blow or a hit from a heavy firearm should be deadly.

��� Second, they have to allow quick takedowns. The commando must be able to silence a guard before he can raise the alarm, and a burly bruiser should be able to knock down a scrawny heckler with one punch.

��� Third, they have to allow the player characters to survive. Which means an enemy commando should not be able to kill an unsuspecting hero before he can react.

��� Fourth, they should be fast-paced and smooth-running in actual play.

��� Fifth, they should allow for skilled swordplay, secret martial-arts techniques, and cunning tricks invented on the fly.

��� Sixth, they should be able to account for all possible situations, no matter how bizarre, and have clear rules about them to avoid arguments.

As you can see, these goals are contradictory. Emphasizing realism slows everything down and makes fights deadly (because real fights often are deadly). Emphasizing story means player characters are somehow much more lethal than non-player characters. Emphasizing play balance means weapons are often underpowered.

Sadly, there is no one great combat system which can do everything and please everyone. The trick, I think, is to decide what kind of "reality" the game is going to simulate, and find a system which does that well.

So if you're playing a Western, you'll need a combat system with quick-draw rules so that a highly-skilled gunfighter can get off the first shot. But that shot's going to be deadly ��� possibly leaving the wounded man time to gasp out a confession or a mysterious clue before dying. Armor is (mostly) useless and hit points are low, but gunfighters can make use of concealment or shoot from hard cover, and it's hard to hit a moving target so galloping out of town is usually a good way to keep from getting killed.

By contrast, a Musketeers game should have plenty of parries and counter-thrusts, with bonuses for chandelier-swinging or a goblet of wine to the enemy's face. Wounds are seldom fatal, though, and an opponent bloodied in a duel can be back in his box at the Opera in just a few days.

Complicating all this is the problem of the learning curve. It takes time and mental effort to learn a new game system, and often players simply aren't willing to do that much work. This is why you see gamemasters using the Pathfinder/D&D 3.5 system to run a modern espionage game, or Victorian ghost-hunters. The rules may be an awkward fit, but the players are familiar with them so just throw out some patches and house rules and get on with the game.

I'm a firm believer in simplicity. For instance, I think hitting and doing damage should be combined into a single die roll. Add up your bonuses, subtract the target's defenses, and the result is how much damage you do. Or perhaps have both combatants roll, with the difference as the damage inflicted by the loser. I think the fewer die rolls and the less mathematical calculating, the better.

Dice do have a place. I've tried various diceless systems and most were unsatisfying. In the Amber Diceless system, the "highest Warfare ability always wins" mechanic worked because the game was all about social conflict and intrigue rather than open fighting. But that's a highly specific setting.

Greg Porter created one called Epiphany which was diceless but still gave the player some agency: each character had one or more combat points (based on skill, physique, weapons, magical bonuses, etc.) but could allocate them to offense or defense. So a weaker combatant might still be able to overcome a superior foe by clever allocation. I've never actually played that one.

The actual "roll of the dice" does have some useful features. First, it marks an end to the decision-making stage. Dither all you like, but once you roll, you're committed. Second, it provides a good physical action and a moment of tension, mirroring the imaginary battle being waged.

All of us have a paradoxical relationship to violence. We don't like to be hurt, but as human animals we have a hard-wired urge to settle problems with physical action. (Men and women both: it was a female player who said "Enough talk, let's kill something" in a game I played in.) It's satisfying to come up with a cunning plan that avoids all confrontation with the enemy . . . but it's more satisfying to drive them before you, take their horses and goods and hear the lamentations of the women.

Game systems try to satisfy those conflicting desires. I think the key to a successful combat system is to know what desires you want to satisfy.

 

For two stories about conflicting desires and exciting combat, buy my new ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Book Review: Revenger

It's sometimes very difficult to tell the difference between a genius and a crackpot. Both can be geeky, eccentric, abrasive, or just plain annoying. There is, however, one foolproof "tell" for the crackpot: they don't share ideas. If someone comes up to me at a convention or a book signing and starts going on about some amazing idea they had, but can't tell me because I might steal it (or blab about it to someone who will steal it) . . . that person is a crackpot.

All the truly creative writers and game designers I know are constantly tossing off ideas the way dandelions give off seeds. They have far more ideas than they can ever get around to writing ��� and if an idea is really compelling they don't waste time telling me about it at conventions, they just write the damned thing.

This is all a roundabout way for me to explain why I'm not at all unhappy to see that British science fiction superstar Alastair Reynolds has written a novel with a setting almost exactly like something in my "this could be interesting" folder of ideas. Quite the reverse: now I can enjoy reading about that setting without doing any work at all!

The novel in question is his latest book, Revenger. It's a space pirate story set millions of years in the future, when the Solar System is a "Dyson swarm" of thousands of inhabited planetoids and space habitats. Hundreds of civilizations ��� both human and alien ��� have come and gone, and some of their ancient near-magical technology still lies hidden in abandoned asteroids. Bold solar-sailing adventurers go out treasure-hunting, braving the dangers of forgotten technology and empty worlds ��� and the risk of pirates who prey on the treasure-seekers.

A pair of upper-class sisters, Adrana and Arafura Ness, sign on aboard a treasure-hunting expedition, partly to restore their family fortune but mostly as a lark. Things turn very serious when their ship is jumped by the black-sailed ship Nightjammer, captained by the dread pirate Bosa Sennen. One of the crew sacrifices her own safety to help Arafura hide, while Adrana is taken by the pirates and the rest are massacred. Arafura vows to rescue her sister and get revenge, and from there the plot hurtles along as she fights to survive, gather allies and weapons, and hunt down the Nightjammer.

It's a cracking good pulp-style adventure story. The incomprehensibly far-future setting means we can have all the tropes of the 1930s Solar System: lots of inhabited worlds, grungy spaceship crews, ancient supertech, space pirates, and diabolical villains. But there's a titanium core of Real Science inside it all. There are parts which reminded me of Bester's The Stars My Destination, a nod to The Princess Bride, and even a tip of the hat to the animated Disney movie Treasure Planet.

This book could also be a master-class for writers in how to create strong female characters without falling into the trap of conflating strength and violence. Fura Ness is just bursting with agency, but she is still a girl in her teens, and accomplishes her goals with appropriate weapons: deception, manipulation, bargaining, and bribes. When she does engage in a physical conflict, Fura goes to extraordinary lengths to get hold of weapons which will give her an edge. There's no "waif-fu" in this novel; no 98-pound teenager beating up hardened killers twice her size. Nor does Reynolds shy away from showing the sacrifices and compromises Fura must make in her Ahab-like pursuit of the Nightjammer. Even she admits she was a much nicer person before her adventures began.

Revenger does feel slightly like an "origin story" and I wasn't surprised to read here that Reynolds is planning a sequel. No complaints from me about that: I want to find out what becomes of Fura Ness and see more of her world.

 

For more stories of thieves, abductions, and ancient technology, buy my new ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 4 and Conclusion)

At last we've come to the final stories in Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space. Time to wrap up and make a general assessment.

By His Bootstraps, by Anson MacDonald/Robert Heinlein: This is a well-known story, but I hesitate to call it a classic. It has a lot in common with Heinlein's other well-known time-loop story "All You Zombies" ��� in both stories, sad to say, the difficulty of working out the literally four-dimensional chess game of the plot completely overwhelms any other qualities of the story. They're neat stories in the same way an Agatha Christie mystery or a Baroque automaton is: one admires the workmanship but there's no chance of mistaking it for something alive. I wish the later Heinlein, at his peak around 1965, could have returned to this theme. Three stars.

The Star Mouse, by Fredric Brown: Sigh. I grow weary of wacky inventor stories, especially when the wacky inventor is prone to long paragraphs of exposition in a comical German accent. The anthologist's note for this story suggests it would make a charming cartoon, and I agree. Two stars (it would be three, but comical dialect exposition makes me cranky).

Correspondence Course, by Raymond F. Jones: This is a fun story about a man who signs up for a correspondence course and discovers it's much more advanced than he expected. I thought the "hook" of the otherworldly mail-order course seemed reminiscent of the beginning of the 1955 movie This Island Earth. Which was based on the 1952 novel This Island Earth, written by . . . Raymond F. Jones. No wonder it seemed familiar. Four stars.

Brain, by S. Fowler Wright: This could almost be a deleted scene from C.S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength; it's about the downfall of the Council of Scientists who rule England in the year 1990. From works like this, and Lewis's novels, and some essays by Orwell from the same period, I get the impression that the post-war Labour Party government in Great Britain may have relied a little too much on the "it's SCIENCE so shut up" argument. Still, this one is a little too over-the-top even for satire. One star.

Reviewing my ratings, I find the average rating for stories in this is just above three stars, so we'll take that as the overall rating for the entire collection. There are eleven four-star stories, so about a third of the total are genuinely first-rate work. The number of three-star stories is the same, and some of those are near-great, like "Nightfall" or "The Roads Must Roll."

It's the bottom third which frustrates me. The editors were putting together an all-star anthology ��� so why waste space on tomfoolery like "Time Travel Happens!" or filler like "Within the Pyramid" when they could have included C.L. Moore's "Shambleau" or Murray Leinster's "First Contact"?

I guess it's not too surprising that a collection published a year after the end of the most devastating conflict in human history would have a somewhat grim tone. Six of the stories are about the end of life and/or civilization, and another four concern either tyrannical future societies or attempts to impose tyranny, and there's even one about thwarting post-war Nazis equipped with "jetpack Hitler" super-tech (a reliable trope which continues to this day in various media).

There are four "wacky inventor" stories. As I mentioned, that's a subgenre which has more or less died out in the past few decades. I think the 1950s were the peak decade for them, in print, anyway (they have lingered on in film and television and show no sign of disappearing). The last new print story about a nutty inventor I can remember reading was "Big Jelly" by Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker, and that was published back in the 1990s.

I suppose wacky inventors have metamorphosed into freaky hackers (like my own "Captain Black the Space Pirate" from Corsair) but they are as much figures of menace (or power fantasies for geeks) as comic. Unlike wacky inventors absent-mindedly causing chaos, hackers in fiction are deliberately disruptive, and are usually very serious about it.

How do the stories in this collection compare to modern short science fiction? Well, the authors are not as concerned with literary quality. Contemporary SF and fantasy stories focus more intently on character and drama; you can't get away with just tossing out Big Ideas any more.

I think part of that is simply due to the greater access modern readers have to good-quality science nonfiction. You can get the sciencey Big Ideas straight now, much more easily than in 1946. Even wild speculative notions get an airing in the popular science media, and the tone is not hostile or mocking. When readers go looking for stories, they want more than fictionalized essays.

Despite the stereotype of the Campbell era as being full of technophilic boosterism, I think it's important to note how many of these stories are dreadful warnings about scientific hubris or possible misuse of new technologies. At least half the stories (not counting the two nonfiction pieces) are cautionary tales.

One interesting feature of this collection is how many of the stories ��� seven of thirty-three fiction pieces ��� are set in the reader's present day. That includes two time-travel stories (maybe two and a half, if you count "The Twonky"), three alien-contact stories, and one wacky inventor ("The Star Mouse"). In fact, there are more alien-contact stories set on Earth, in either the present day or "twenty minutes into the future," than there are stories in this volume about space explorers encountering aliens on other worlds.

So: if you come across a copy of Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space, grab it. There are some excellent stories, including a couple which are very hard to find otherwise, and it's a fascinating snapshot of the science fiction genre on the brink of its Golden Age.

 

For a look at some stories from my own Golden Age, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 3)

We're about two-thirds of the way through the book. Did the editors front-load the good stuff, or save the best for a boffo finish? Let's find out.

Asylum, by A.E. Van Vogt: Space vampires! One of the first discussions of what SETI researchers call the "Zoo hypothesis!" Identity games worthy of Philip K. Dick! Unconvincing tough-guy dialog! Also a slightly creepy future Earth society in which the use of "mechanical psychology" in schools has eliminated "murder, theft, war, and all unsocial perversions." In the past I've noted how obsessed mid-century science fiction writers were with the notion of psychology as an exact science and a reliable technology. Given how many writers and fans may have had at least a toe on "the spectrum," so to speak, I think they found the idea of an algorithm which can explain human behavior to be very appealing. Anyway, the story gets three stars.

Quietus, by Ross Rocklynne: A very short, melancholy story about alien explorers on Earth and the last surviving human. Four stars.

The Twonky, by Lewis Padgett/Kuttner and Moore: A bit of far-future technology lands in a contemporary middle-class home, in the form of a console radio with its own agenda. Still a lot of drinking used as a placeholder for comedy. This story was adapted into a Twilight Zone episode, but I've never seen it. Three stars.

Time-Travel Happens! by A.M. Phillips: A very odd bit of quasi-Forteana which seems very out of place in this collection (although Astounding did run Charles Fort's book Lo! as a serial in 1934). The article is supposedly nonfiction, about the once celebrated case of Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, two British academics who claimed to have slipped back in time to pre-Revolutionary France during a visit to Versailles in 1901. You can read their 1911 account here, and an analysis by Brian Dunning here. While I enjoy a little Forteana, I'm not particularly impressed by stale, reheated Forteana. One star.

Robot's Return, by Robert Moore Williams: A crew of robots come to a dead Earth in the distant future, searching for clues about their origin. Then they find them and the story ends. If you're keeping score, this is the sixth story out of twenty-five (so far) about the death of the human race. Two stars.

The Blue Giraffe, by L. Sprague De Camp: An entertaining story about mutations in an African wilderness preserve, which kind of dodges its proper ending. Bonus points to Mr. De Camp for actually knowing something about Africa when writing a story set there. Three stars.

Flight Into Darkness, by Webb Marlowe/J. Francis McComas: This may be the first Nazis in Space! story ever, as it beat Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo by nearly a year. Notably, one half-crippled German scientist is able to build an interplanetary rocketship in a basement, which makes Von Braun and Dornberger seem like slackers by comparison. Two stars.

The Weapons Shop, by A.E. Van Vogt: A classic, though I found it a bit unsatisfying. The story takes the robustly libertarian position that "the right to buy weapons is the right to be free" and then completely dodges the issue by making them magic superscience weapons which can't be used for "aggression or murder." As if the Founders had written the Second Amendment with a codocil limiting it to water pistols. And again with the psychobabble! Two stars.

Farewell to the Master, by Harry Bates: I only just learned that Harry Bates was the original editor of Astounding, and continued to sell stories to his successors after moving on in 1933. This story was the genesis of the great 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still. I have to say that the moviemakers improved on Bates's original considerably ��� although they did have to sacrifice Bates's scene in which the robot Gnut (Gort in the film) wrestles a gorilla, and the absolute killer of a final line. Four stars.

Within the Pyramid, by R. DeWitt Miller: A very unremarkable "ancient astronauts" story, which may have inspired Erich von Daniken to begin promoting the notion as "fact" twenty years later. This is barely a story at all; more like an essay. One star.

He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse: This is another utterly gonzo story, riffing on what was already an established sub-genre of science fiction ��� stories about people shrinking and their adventures in the microverse. Hasse cleaned up the table with this one, in which his hero continues to shrink, entering universe after universe nested within each other at the atomic level, like so many Russian dolls. Bonus points for having our Earth be one of the later places the hero shrinks into. Four stars.

This part of the book is a mixed bag: three top-notch stories, five lackluster or bad ones, so that the average for these eleven is between two and three stars.

(to be continued . . . )

 

If you want science fiction which is all top-notch, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 2)

This post continues my look at the ground-breaking 1946 anthology Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond Healy and John McComas. It's probably going to take at least four entries to cover the whole book. Last time I got through the first seven stories, and so far the collection has been pretty solid. The average rating is more than three stars out of four. Let's see if the rest of the book can maintain that level.

Seeds of the Dusk, by Raymond Z. Gallun: This is barely a story at all, more like a lightly-fictionalized essay about the concept of panspermia. The main character is a spore from Mars which lands on Earth in the distant future. Two stars.

Heavy Planet, by Lee Gregor/Milton Rothman: Natives of a high-gravity world encounter a wrecked spaceship and struggle to gain control of the secret of atomic power. The aliens are so-so, and again we get the near-mystical attitude toward The Atom. Three stars.

Time Locker, by Lewis Padgett/Kuttner and Moore: Another one of their Galloway Gallagher "wacky inventor" series. This one has a somewhat more intriguing scientific premise at the heart of it, but I still don't think the series as a whole is very amusing. Three stars, and that's being generous.

The Link, by Cleve Cartmill: Cartmill's the guy whose story about atomic weapons earned Campbell a visit from the F.B.I. because it was a little too accurate. This is a "dawn of Man" story, with the usual hero who invents tool use despite being an outcast because he's not as apelike as the rest of the tribe. As with the Gallun story mentioned above, this feels more like a fictionalized essay than a work of fiction. Two stars. 

Mechanical Mice, by Maurice A. Hugi: This is a story about Von Neumann machines (self-replicating devices) written a good half-decade before Von Neumann came up with the idea. Maybe we should call them Hugi machines, instead. The story itself is a "wacky inventor" tale with a refreshing vein of black humor. Four stars.

V-2 ��� Rocket Cargo Ship, by Willy Ley: One of the pioneers of German rocketry before World War 2 discusses what his former colleagues got up to after he left. What's interesting, from a modern viewpoint, is how much of this is guesswork on Ley's part. It was written while the war was still going on, and I don't think Ley was privy to all the findings by Allied intelligence-gathering, so he had to work from news reports and basic physics. It's also interesting to see that Ley identifies Hermann Oberth as the mastermind of the German rocket program; though Oberth was employed at Peenemunde it was Von Braun and Dornberger's show. But Ley fled Germany when those two were just starting their work sponsored by the German Army, and may not have known much about the operation. Four stars, as a historical document, if nothing else.

Adam and No Eve, by Alfred Bester: Another classic story, and a very grim one, about a space explorer whose hubris has caused the end of all life on Earth save for himself. Four stars.

Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov: This one is a classic, although it's amusing to me how many readers manage to Not Get It. Throughout the whole story the alien (but entirely human) characters are speculating about what will happen to their civilization on the once-in-a-millennium day when darkness falls on their world, and I think a lot of readers don't realize that all their speculations are supposed to be wrong. It's not the darkness that freaks everyone out so that they destroy their surroundings trying to kindle fires, it's (spoiler alert) the sight of the stars in the sky. The story has a strong central idea (from Emerson via Campbell) but I think it's more wordy than it needs to be. Three stars.

A Matter of Size, by Harry Bates: This is a terrible story, and I have no idea why the editors included it. It's scientifically incoherent ��� to the point where I wonder if Bates even took a high-school science class or bothered to look in an encyclopedia ever ��� and it's very slow and talky for an adventure story. The only clever bit comes far too late in the story, as the hero (who has been miniaturized down to insect size) figures out a clever way to cross the city without getting stepped on. One star, and that's being very charitable.

As Never Was, by P. Schuyler Miller: A time travel story about the "Grandfather Paradox," though with an interesting twist. Both of Miller's stories in this book are time travel stories. I don't know if he wrote a lot of them, or just did it well.  Three stars.

Q.U.R., by Anthony Boucher: Kind of a "wacky inventor" story, about a future genius with the amazing idea of building robots which aren't shaped like humans. You know, like pretty much all real robots in the modern world. In the past I've written about the disjunction when a science-fictional concept changes from metaphor to real technology, and you can see this story as marking that moment for robots. Since Mary Shelley, if not earlier, writers had been using robots as metaphors; Boucher's story shows the beginning of the change to writing about robots as real-world machines. The story has a lot of drinking in it. Reading about other people getting drunk is even less interesting than reading about other people having sex. Two stars.

Who Goes There? by Don A. Stuart/John W. Campbell: This is a classic, and a top-notch story in every way. It's the origin of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World, and of the very faithful 1982 film The Thing, by John Carpenter. One can also view it as a kind of unauthorized sequel to H.P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness, which ran in Astounding just before Campbell took over as editor. Four stars!

The Roads Must Roll, by Robert A. Heinlein: This is a good story with a simply bonkers premise. In the future depicted in the story, transportation isn't by car or rail, it's by giant high-speed conveyor belt roads. If you can manage to swallow that idea, then it's a pretty gripping story about an attempted power-grab by the operators of a vital piece of infrastructure. Tellingly, I don't think Heinlein ever made reference to the conveyor roads in any of his other stories; I don't think he could really swallow the idea himself. Three stars.

The average score for this batch is a little lower than the first set of stories: just under three stars. The Bates story drags down the mean ��� without it these stories would have the same average rating as the ones I looked at last time.

(to be continued . . . )

 

If you want to see two stories I think deserve four stars, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!