James L. Cambias's Blog, page 42

Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 1)

American literature doesn't have an official "Canon." There's no equivalent of the Academie Francaise to decide what is and what is not Literature with a capital L. But we do have some approximations: high-school or first-year college course reading lists, better-late-than-never Pulitzers, adaptations in Classics Illustrated Comics or Oscar-bait films . . . And of course, enshrinement in the Modern Library imprint from Random House.

Science fiction in America had a bad reputation in the days when most of it was printed in the pulp magazines. Sure, it sold well and was popular, but authors could never quite shake the stigma of writing trash. Talk to any science fiction fan or author over the age of 60 or so and you're bound to hear stories of parents and teachers throwing away science fiction magazines or paperbacks.

The birth of the Atomic Age in 1945 did a lot to erase that stigma. Suddenly atom bombs, rockets, satellites, nuclear submarines, and electronic computers were no longer wild science fictional fantasies but the subjects of serious news and popular science articles. One can only imagine how many triumphant nerds waved copies of Collier's Magazine featuring Wernher Von Braun's articles about the Conquest of Space in the faces of those parents and teacher mentioned above. "SEE?"

And in 1946 the doors of the Temple of Literature were opened: Modern Library published an anthology of short fiction and a couple of nonfiction articles called Famous Science Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. Both editors were established publishing-industry pros at the time, but McComas went on to write several science fiction stories of his own.

This is science fiction's first stab at the big time, at literary respectability. One would expect this to be the greatest all-star anthology ever. So what's inside? Here's the table of contents:

Requiem, by Robert A. Heinlein

Forgetfulness, by Don A. Stuart (actually John W. Campbell)

Nerves, by Lester Del Rey

The Sands of Time, by P. Schuyler Miller

The Proud Robot, by Lewis Padgett (secretly Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore)

Black Destroyer, by A.E. Van Vogt

Symbiotica, by Eric Frank Russell

Seeds of the Dusk, by Raymond Z. Gallun

Heavy Planet, by Lee Gregor (a.k.a. Milton Rothman)

Time Locker, by Lewis Padgett (really C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner)

The Link, by Cleve Cartmill

Mechanical Mice, by Maurice A. Hugi

V-2: Rocket Cargo Ship, by Willy Ley (nonfiction)

Adam and No Eve, by Alfred Bester

Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov

A Matter of Size, by Harry Bates

As Never Was, by P. Schuyler Miller

Q.U.R., by Anthony Boucher

Who Goes There?, by Don A. Stuart (Campbell again)

The Roads Must Roll, by Robert A. Heinlein

Asylum, by A.E. Van Vogt

Quietus, by Ross Rocklynne

The Twonky, by Lewis Padgett (Kuttner and Moore yet again)

Time-Travel Happens!, by A.M. Phillips (nonfiction, sort of)

Robot's Return, by Robert Moore Williams

The Blue Giraffe, by L. Sprague De Camp

Flight Into Darkness, by Webb Marlowe (J. Francis McComas, one of the editors)

The Weapons Shop, by A.E. Van Vogt

Farewell to the Master, by Harry Bates

Within the Pyramid, by R. DeWitt Miller

He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse

By His Bootstraps, by Anson MacDonald (Robert Heinlein)

The Star Mouse, by Fredric Brown

Correspondence Course, by Raymond F. Jones

Brain, by S. Fowler Wright

That's a pretty impressive list of contributors! I am a little surprised at some names which are missing; it appears the editors limited themselves to living and American writers (for fiction, anyway; Willy Ley had come over from Germany before the war). Still, it's surprising not to see Earl and Otto Binder, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, Neil R. Jones, Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson, or Philip Wylie ��� but editorial taste is a mysterious thing. It's worth noting that all but three of the stories in this volume are from Campbell's Astounding; I don't know if there was a business relationship between the editors or Random House and Astounding, or whether John W. Campbell had made his magazine such a leader in the field that it was simply inevitable that Astounding would dominate an "all star" collection.

Let's look at the stories. (Warning: I'm not going to give all of them equal attention, and some of the best ones may get the most cursory treatment because there isn't much to say about something great.)

"Requiem," by Robert A. Heinlein: This is a classic even today. A strong starter. The notion of an eccentric millionaire becoming the father of the space age seemed plausible in 1946, absurd in 1966, and nowadays seems very . . . topical. I have a feeling Elon Musk has read this story many times. Four stars.

"Forgetfulness," by Don A. Stuart/John W. Campbell: Touches on two themes Campbell returned to again and again ��� dying civilizations and psychic powers. A good story, but not the best by Campbell/Stuart. Two stars.

"Nerves," by Lester Del Rey: A medical drama set in a ridiculously dangerous atomic research facility. Something about atomic power, even before Hiroshima, seems to have opened the floodgates of metaphor in science fiction writers. The story, and the characters in it, treat atomic power as something supernatural. The combination of near-superstitious dread and (by modern standards) maniacal recklessness makes the story fail the suspension-of-disbelief test, and the medical drama based entirely on technobabble just isn't especially interesting. Two stars, and that's generous.

"The Sands of Time," by P. Schuyler Miller: This is an absolutely gonzo story, and Miller pulls it off wonderfully. Time travel! Dinosaurs! A Space Princess! Thrills! Romance! And a reasonably well-done depiction of field paleontology! Four stars.

"The Proud Robot," by Lewis Padgett/Kuttner and Moore: There was once a whole subgenre of science fiction which I have to say I'm very glad has died out. It was the "wacky inventor" story, and I think every SF writer working before about 1970 tried it at least once. This particular wacky inventor is a comical alcoholic, which isn't actually very funny. The plot involves some speculation about how television would change the way people consume entertainment, including some very prescient ideas about what we now call "intellectual piracy." That's pretty nifty, but it's offset by the fact that the story is about a man who invents a functional human-level artificial intelligence and nobody at all seems to think it's very important. Three stars.

"Black Destroyer," by A. E. Van Vogt: This one is a classic, it's great, it's got a great alien viewpoint character, it's a space-monster story that actually makes sense, and I can ignore Van Vogt's crackpot historical-psychological determinism because everyone was doing it back then anyway. This story demonstrates why I vastly prefer Van Vogt's short stories to his novels. Four stars.

"Symbiotica," by Eric Frank Russell: An exploration story with an interesting alien environment. But to a modern reader this story is weird. The space explorers are, more or less, the crew from the original 1931 version of King Kong, but with a spaceship instead of a tramp steamer. Everyone's very tough and hard-boiled, even the Martian and robot members of the crew. Fifty years after H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, the idea of biological contamination is a foreign concept. It's not even clear to me what the explorers are supposed to do on this alien world. I know, I shouldn't judge a story written eighty years ago by contemporary standards ��� but compare Russell's space explorers to the men in Van Vogt's story immediately preceding. The men of the Space Beagle act like astronauts; Russell's characters act like sailors on shore leave. Three stars.

(to be continued . . . )

 

If you want to compare my science fiction stories to the masters, you can buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Experience Points (Part 2): Problems and Solutions

Last time I asked if experience points in roleplaying games are necessary, and more or less talked myself into believing they are. But I can't say I'm happy about that conclusion. How come?

Because I think experience points and character advancement have a corroding effect on roleplaying campaigns.

Here's why: the unrelenting focus on winning XPs and leveling up tends to encourage players to think of their characters as they will be in the future, rather than as they are. I subscribe to a Facebook group for players of the Pathfinder roleplaying game, and one of the perennial topics of discussion is all the quirky and/or badass "builds" players come up with for characters in the game.

Now these "builds" are not interesting concepts for characters in the sense of being imaginary people with intriguing quirks or unusual outlooks on life. No, they're combinations of powers and abilities, formed by adroit use of the "multiclassing" rules in the game by players.

So, if my character is a 4th-level Fighter and then takes two levels as a Brawler and then one level as a Summoner, I can get this combination of abilities which will then let me do this weird or overpowered thing . . .

If Pathfinder was a point-based game system like GURPS, in which players really do build their characters at the start of play, this wouldn't be a problem. But many of the "builds" in Pathfinder require characters who are 10th or 12th level before the whole process is complete. Which means the player can be running that character for years of actual gaming before the "build" is complete. I strongly suspect that a majority of Pathfinder characters never reach their intended "build" because the Gamemasters get bored with the campaign or the players graduate high school and go off to college.

More to the point, it's a serious obstacle to the "immersion" in the roleplaying experience we all love if your character isn't a character but an incomplete set of abilities lacking only 5600 more XP to become the character you want. While the "hero's journey" of a character like Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker is interesting, we can also enjoy the adventures of "complete" characters like Conan or Han Solo. In the course of his adventures in the Star Wars films, Han experiences a moral awakening and meets the love of his life, but there's no sense that he gets better at piloting spaceships or beating greedy bounty-hunters to the draw in a gunfight.

The most common fix for this is to simply start the campaign at a higher level. If all the heroes are 10th level at the start of play, they can have all their cool powers already assembled. There is much to be said for this approach, especially since the heroes can go up against very powerful foes like dragons, giants, or mind-flayers.

True enough ��� but it also means the heroes are basically un-threatenable by any ordinary mortals. They're comic-book superheroes, not the Fellowship of the Ring. That rules out all kinds of potential adventures.

I'd like to propose a different solution, one which can be used with low-level characters, which preserves the entertainment value of leveling up and gaining new abilities, but which makes it impossible for the players to "live in the future" and obsess over what their characters are going to be.

Here's how it works: the gamemaster draws up a list of new abilities or improvements for the characters, and then hands them out unpredictably ��� possibly reflecting the experiences the heroes have gone through or the enemies they've defeated. So if the player characters faced a dragon and nearly got incinerated by its breath, the brave fighter could gain improved ability to resist intense heat, while the clever thief could get better at dodging. If they had to make peace between warring goblin tribes, the wizard might gain in charisma and the cleric gains the bardic ability to encourage others by singing.

This could also be used in reverse, to show the effect of curses or injuries. After fighting a vampire, the ranger is permanently weakened by having his life force nearly drained away. A bad burn from the dragon's breath might make the cleric less agile in the future as scar tissue slows her down.

In short, the players don't know what the future holds for their characters. (They might make suggestions or add items to the gamemaster's reward list, but they still wouldn't know what improvements their characters will get after any given session.) That's entirely reasonable: nobody, fictional or real, knows for sure what's going to happen. We have wishes and hopes, but those are often disappointed, or come true in ways we didn't expect.

I haven't had the opportunity to try this method myself, but perhaps I'll get the chance. It all depends on what rewards and penalties fate throws my way.

 

To see how characters I created deal with fate and chance, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Experience Points (Part 1): Do We Need Them?

For any fan of roleplaying games, the answer to the question in the title of this post is "Of course!" or maybe "As many as possible!" But I'm not sure that experience points are necessary for roleplaying games ��� and I've started to wonder if they're actually harmful.

If you're not familiar with roleplaying games, but for some reason are determined to read this post, "experience points" (hereafter XPs because I don't want to keep typing those words) are rewards given out at the end of a game session or the completion of an adventure, to reflect how much the player characters have learned and improved as a result of their exploits.

In the original Dungeons & Dragons, and all its descendants, characters accumulated XPs until they had enough to reach the next "character level" ��� at which point some or all of their abilities improved. Magic-users got to learn more spells, Fighters got better at hitting things, Thieves got better at sneaking and backstabbing, and so on. This is often called "leveling up." Other games allowed piecemeal improvement: one could spend XPs to improve a skill or a physical attribute. Games like GURPS or HERO System, in which characters were created by expending "character points" simply treated XPs as extra points which could be spent on new or improved abilities ��� or to "buy off" personal disadvantages. A few games ��� Runequest and Call of Cthulhu come to mind ��� didn't have XPs, but instead had players keep track of which skills the characters used during a game session, so that they could then make "skill checks" to see if those abilities improved through use. As a character got better at doing something, it became harder to improve via experience. (This system also had the odd side effect of encouraging players to use wildly inappropriate skills just to get the skill check.)

Now, while XPs are blatantly a "game mechanic" they do reflect a certain amount of both fictional and real-world realism. People do learn by experience, after all. A soldier who has been through combat is probably more skilled than a green recruit. A musician who has played the same piece a hundred times will do it better than someone who is still working through it for the first time. And in fiction there are numerous examples of characters improving and, well, "leveling up" over the course of a story. In The Lord of the Rings, Merry and Pippin transform from callow young upper-class Hobbit twits to capable warriors and leaders who can free the Shire from enemy occupation. In Star Wars, Luke goes from being a farm boy with an unlikely talent for flying to a powerful Jedi Knight.

But are XPs necessary? After all, there are plenty of examples of characters in fiction who don't "level up" at all in the course of their adventures. Odysseus is a cunning liar and a great archer when he sails off to Troy, and he's the same with a few more grey hairs when he gets back to Ithaca. In modern fiction, James Bond or Captain Kirk both start out hypercompetent and remain that way. (In fact, stories about hypercompetent heroes often focus on the ravages of time and whether they are losing ability rather than improving.)

I can think of one successful roleplaying games which didn't award XPs. Traveller, in its original incarnation, didn't really have an experience mechanic. Heroes were assumed to be highly-skilled veterans so there wasn't much room for improvement. Characters could sometimes take correspondence courses during their long interstellar voyages, but that was about it. So evidently XPs aren't necessary for a roleplaying game. . . . Or are they? Traveller eventually added an experience mechanic in later editions, and even at its most successful the game was never in the same commercial league as Dungeons & Dragons.

Players (not the characters, the actual people sitting around the table) seem to love getting XPs. Well, good old B.F. Skinner pointed out that "reinforcement" encourages subjects to repeat the desired behavior. You get what you reward. Giving out XPs for killing monsters and avoiding traps is a form of reward ��� and it's a reward for the player rather than the character. The character, after all, gets treasure, magic, prestige in the game world, and maybe a knighthood or a grant of land. The player leaves the table much as he arrived. Giving XPs to the character is a way to signal the player that he's done a good job. Quite simply, it's fun to watch your character get better at doing things, gain new powers, and maybe shed some of those pesky weaknesses. There's a bit of a "power gamer" in all of us.

Traveller, interestingly enough, was famous for its long and complex character creation system, in which the characters went through terms of service in the Galactic armed forces or civilian careers, picking up skills and material benefits before heading out on adventures. Generating Traveller characters was almost as much fun as playing the game ��� so maybe Traveller scratched that particular player itch in a different way.

And from a blatantly commercial standpoint, characters who "level up" can gain cool new abilities, which are explained in these cool new game supplements, which cost a cool thirty bucks each. In games without XPs, the only things players can drool over and spend money on is new equipment. In a game with XPs, they can drool over gear and character abilities, which means the publisher can sell two supplements instead of one. Note that I'm not sneering at mere commerce here. I've written some of those supplements. Especially in the 1990s and early 2000s, selling a constant stream of supplements was the only way to stay in business.

So perhaps we must accept it as a fact of life: XPs are a necessary component of roleplaying games. In anything but a one-shot scenario, you've got to give the players and characters some kind of reward. But is that a good thing? Does the endless quest for improvement drain attention away from other, equally important aspects of gaming? I'll take that issue up next time.

 

If you want to gain valuable experience by reading stories, buy my new ebook!

Convention Report: Albacon 2017

(". . . Featuring ME!")

I drove west through sleet, rain, and fog ��� but no snow, which was a huge relief as I was in a car without snow tires ��� to Albany, which looks as if someone decided to drop the 1960s capital city of a large post-colonial nation into the middle of a standard-issue Rust Belt American industrial region.

Because of my programming schedule I decided to have a substantial lunch before starting. The convention hotel, the mostly harmless Albany Airport Best Western, is on the Wolf Road commercial strip in northwestern Albany, so I could pick from just about every restaurant chain in existence, alternating with big-box stores, office parks, and nail salons. Nevertheless I managed to find a real gem: Maharaja Indian Restaurant, where I had a spicy, delicious, and gratifyingly cheap buffet lunch including a couple of dishes I've never seen before. Heartily recommended.

Then the convention!

My first program event was a critiquing panel, part of the Albacon writing workshop series. We only had one submission, a nifty little ghost story which I expect to see in print some time soon. It's a good thing there only was one story, because between the need to have the author read it aloud, and then allow six of us to bloviate on how it might be improved (summary: a couple of minor tweaks, then send it in!) there wasn't much time left for anything else.

The second event was about "Lost SF Themes" ��� concepts in science fiction which have more or less fallen by the wayside, either because of new scientific knowledge, social shifts, or changes in literary fashion. Science fictioneers love to pat ourselves on the back for some of our forward-looking predictions, but there are some embarassing skeletons in our closet. Psionics is the best-known one, but there's also a certain amount of embarassed throat-clearing whenever anyone brings up concepts like eugenics.

Nowadays, of course, it's a sure-fire identifying marker for the Bad Guys in a story, but there was a time when eugenics was one of the scientifical science things which would bring about a better world. Doc Smith's Kimball Kinnison was the result of a long super-scientific breeding program by the all-wise and benevolent Arisians, and Heinlein's immortal Lazarus Long came out of a secretive Victorian-era project by the Howard Foundation. Even a post-World War II work like Frank Herbert's Dune featured a hero who is the end result of a breeding program, and it's presented as at least morally neutral.

I spent the rest of Friday evening doing some socializing, first at the Ice Cream Social and then at the Art Show Reception. Albacon's not a big convention, so I think I managed to at least nod and say hi to all the other attendees. The ratio of "pros" to "fans" is probably greater than 1:1, and it's a wonderful opportunity for aspiring writers to interact with more experienced professionals with no barriers at all.

Saturday I rose early and had an enormous breakfast at Denny's. I think it was called the Self-Loathing Special or something like that. It was enough to fuel me for the rest of the day, which was good as I didn't really have time in my schedule for meals.

In mid-morning I did a reading from my current work-in-progress. I had to read from my laptop screen because (as one can see here) I didn't notice before the convention started that I would be doing a reading at all. This was the first time anyone but myself has seen or heard anything from the new book, and I was relieved to see it went over well.

Next up was the extremely fun panel "We're Off to See L. Frank Baum." I almost feel as if I need to apologize to the other panelists, except for fellow Oz obsessive Ryk E. Spoor. With two big loud Oz fans on the panel, I'm afraid the others may have been drowned out by the Ryk & Jim Show. I would happily have gone on for another hour if we had been allowed to. (I did take the opportunity to introduce a new batch of Oz enthusiasts to my theories about Agent Diggs and the unfolding secrets of Project CYCLONE.)

The bulk of the afternoon was devoted to my 7th-Edition Call of Cthulhu adventure, "The Drowned City." Net result: one character insane AND gruesomely killed by a tentacled horror, so I think we can count it as a success.

I had just enough time to dash out to my car and drop off the game bag before hurrying over to my next panel, on the Most Influential Games of All Time. Turns out I need not have rushed ��� the instructions to the panelists had us in the wrong room, and the correct room was still in use as the Costume Contest awards were given out. Still, we managed to start only fifteen minutes late. That was an excellent panel, and not merely due to my expert moderating. The five panelists brought an interestingly diverse array of knowledge and opinions to the table. I know I learned some things about the history of certain game concepts and mechanics.

And then . . . I left. I would have enjoyed the chance to stay longer, but I knew that a two-hour drive over the Berkshires with a chance of sleet and icy roads made leaving early the wisest decision. I definitely had fun for the twenty-four conscious hours I spent at Albacon this year, and there's a good chance I'll be there next time. Any science fiction fans within driving range of Albany should go.

Albacon 2017, Featuring ME!

On Friday and Saturday, March 31-April 1 I'll be a guest at Albacon 2017, the long-running convention in New York's capital city. There's a really impressive lineup of people attending: Charles E. Gannon, Stephen Hickman, Lawrence M. Schoen, Ken Altabef, Ken Burnside, Debra Doyle, Jim MacDonald, Chuck Rothman, Ryk E. Spoor, Ian Randall Strock, and many more.

But enough about them. Let's talk about me. I'm going to be doing a bunch of literary-type panels, and running a Call of Cthulhu session. Here's my schedule:

Friday, March 31, 4:00 p.m.: Writing workshop Critiquing Panel. Five pro writers provide suggestions, criticism, and analysis of stories submitted by con participants.

6:00 p.m.: Lost SF Themes. Four SF writers talk about tropes and ideas which were once standard elements of science fiction but now are pass��.

8:00 p.m.: Ice Cream Social. Come enjoy some sugary treats and watch respected SF authors spill chocolate sauce on their neckties.

9:00 p.m.: Art Show Reception. A more grown-up meet-and-mingle against a backdrop of works by fan and professional artists.

Saturday, April 1, 12:00 noon: We're Off to See L. Frank Baum. An appreciation of the Oz books and the growing canon of pastiches and adaptations in various media.

1:00 p.m.: Autographing. Bring anything and I'll sign it.

2:00 p.m.: The Drowned City. A Call of Cthulhu adventure for up to 6 players, set in the flooded streets and empty houses of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Characters will be provided.

6:00 p.m.: The Most Influential Games of All Time. Six writers and game designers discuss which games have had the biggest influence on the gaming hobby and pop culture in general.

 

If you can't make it to the convention, the next best thing to meeting me in person is to buy my ebook!

Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 8 (whew!)

Having finished the story several chapters earlier, Mr. Baum piles anticlimax on anticlimax by cutting away from the adventurers in the Nome Kingdom to the magical fairyland of Oz, where Ozma has been watching the whole thing on her Magic Picture.

I have to say Ozma is a little uncomfortably voyeuristic here. It's one thing for her to check in on Dorothy at a pre-arranged time every day ��� that's by Dorothy's own request and the little Kansas girl does have a habit of wandering into hair-raising adventures even when her friend the Lovely Girl Ruler isn't jerking her around by sorcery. But we have no hint that the Shaggy Man has any such arrangement in place.

Who else does Ozma watch on her Magic Picture? Perhaps a better question would be who doesn't Ozma watch? She could be watching you, right now.

I guess being an immortal and nearly-omnipotent Girl Ruler must get a little dull from time to time, so Ozma has to seek vicarious excitement through the Magic Picture. Since she will never grow old, and apparently will never have a family of her own, Ozma's life is kind of static and frozen. Only the Magic Picture can let her experience true joy and sorrow.

Anyway. Ozma has the Wizard (who has learned real magic and is no longer a humbug) magic the Oogaboolings back to Oogaboo. Then Ozma calls the Shaggy Man by means of a magic wireless telephone invented by the Wizard. That's right: they have cell service in Oz! This is a fantastically useful idea which I believe L. Frank Baum forgot about completely and never used in any of his Oz books again.

Shaggy refuses to come back to Oz because he has promised to stay with Betsy and Hank. Ozma dithers a bit but eventually decides to add Betsy to her collection of captive humans young friends in the palace. Seriously, Ozma is giving me the creeps in this book.

We wind up with an entirely unnecessary scene of the various talking animals bragging about how awesome their respective human pals are ��� Hank can talk now, and we even learn that Toto has been able to talk ever since his first visit to Oz but prefers not to.

And there Tik-Tok of Oz ends, and I for one am glad to be done with it. Overall, I have to say this is probably the weakest of Baum's Oz books. It's certainly the weakest one I've looked at in this series of blog posts. It has a lot of recycled material, rushes in spots where some exposition would be nice, is stuffed with padding in other spots, has a weird and unsatisfying structure, and ��� worst of all ��� the title character barely appears in it at all!

Only some of those flaws can be attributed to Mr. Baum's monomania about stage adaptations. That may account for some of the paucity of descriptions and the lack of any "big budget" magical wonders. But there's no excuse for throwing in a literal deus ex machina ending two-thirds of the way through the book, and then running out the clock, so to speak, with a lot of padding and fanservice.

There are some nice bits: Queen Ann's small-time kingdom and grandiose plan of world domination are a hoot, and it's a shame such a fun character gets tossed into a pit and ignored for most of the book. The mysterious land at the other end of the Hollow Tube (if Oz is in the Pacific between California and Australia ��� not far from Ponape ��� then the Grand Jinjin Tititi-Hoochoo's realm lies somewhere in the Sahara, which is certainly a good place to hide a magical fairyland) has some nice touches. I liked the Swiftian notion of a kingdom ruled by its only private citizen, although working that same joke just a few chapters after introducing the officer-heavy Army of Oogaboo does undercut the satire quite a bit.

Frankly (heh), I think Mr. Baum was just writing this one to meet a deadline. It feels tired. Other than the Roses at the beginning, there are no randomly hostile freaks or wacky wayside tribes. The only clever bits of fairy magic are recycled from other books. I hope the next book has more of the old magic. This one gets a gentleman's C.

 

For a pair of stories deserving a much higher grade, buy my new ebook!

Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 7

When last we left Our Heroes, the villainous Nome King had just transformed the Shaggy Man into a dove, transformed the Rose Princess Ozga into a fiddle (not that anyone really cares), chained up Quox the dragon, and was preparing to force Polychrome to marry him and stay in the underground kingdom forever! How will they escape this dreadful peril?

Pretty quickly, actually. Mr. Baum throws away all possible suspense and tension by just resolving all the problems by magic. Quox reveals that his gaudy rap-singer amulet was enchanted by Tititi-Hoochoo and has neutralized Ruggedo's magic powers. He pops it open and a half a dozen animated eggs emerge. Nomes dread eggs above all else, and the animated eggs drive all of Ruggedo's henchmen out of the throne room before chasing the sinister monarch out of the kingdom altogether. The dragon's amulet also reverses the enchantments wrought by Ruggedo, so that the Shaggy Man is no longer a dove and the Rose Princess Ozga is no longer a fiddle (not that it makes much difference).

Kaliko fetches Betsy and Hank from their hiding place, and then the dragon appoints him to be the new Nome King in place of Ruggedo. The villain is defeated, all is well, so the book must be over, right?

Nope. This odd mid-book climax is sort of a call-back to the original Oz book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Most people don't remember (because they're thinking of the movie) but in that novel the Wicked Witch is defeated and the Wizard flies away about two-thirds of the way through the book, and then there's a lot of tedious filler before Dorothy actually gets back to Kansas.

It's hard to figure out why Mr. Baum does that in this story, since it's apparently recycled from the very neatly-plotted Ozma of Oz. One would think that a stage play would put an even greater premium on building to a suspenseful and satisfying climax in the last act.

Anyway, having defeated the villain, Our Heroes go searching for the Shaggy Man's brother and the Army of Oogaboo. Quox, his mission accomplished, slides off back to the other side of the world via the Hollow Tube.

Ex-King Ruggedo inadvertently leads them to the Shaggy Man's brother, because he sneaks back to fill his pockets with jewels in the Metal Forest, a vast underground treasury where SMB is also imprisoned. Polychrome spots him entering via a secret door (Difficulty Class 20, according to my D&D books, but Nomes probably have the same +2 racial bonus to find secret doors that Dwarves have).

Within the Metal Forest, Polychrome, Shaggy, Betsy et al come across the Officer Corps of Oogaboo in the process of roughing up ex-King Ruggedo. Queen Ann and the other Oogabooicans are all tattered because of their long crawl over sharp rocks in the tunnel, and are desperate to find a way out of the Metal Forest, even though it is full of the kind of plunder they went out into the world to acquire by conquest.

Ruggedo is sent off to exile again ��� this time with his pockets full of jewels, so at least his retirement will be well-financed ��� and our heroes push onward. They find the Shaggy Man's brother after exactly zero searching and difficulty, but now a new problem arises: the ex-Nome King Ruggedo enchanted him to make him horribly ugly, and thanks to Tititi-Hoochoo's punishment there is no way for that enchantment to be reversed! The poor Ugly One (as the Nomes dubbed him) has to wear a mask to hide his face.

We also get some more recycled material: remember the lunch-box and dinner-pail trees in Ozma of Oz? L. Frank Baum did. One corner of the Metal Forest is a grove of trees bearing Three-Course Nuts, which come in three sections. One part is soup, one part is the entree, and last is the dessert. It was a neat idea the first time, and it's still a neat idea. Baum's description of the trees in Ozma is much more detailed and interesting. That's a problem I keep noticing in this book: Baum is, frankly, phoning it in. Things are told rather than shown, problems are resolved with disappointing quickness, as if he's in a hurry to just get the thing over with.

They stumble across Ruggedo again and he reveals the secret of reversing the uglification enchantment: the kiss of a Mortal Maid who had once been a Fairy, or maybe one who still is a Fairy, or still a Mortal; he can't remember now that he has lost his powers. Fortunately, the team includes Betsy (Mortal Maid), Ozga (Mortal Maid and ex-Fairy), and Polychrome (full-time Fairy with salary and benefits). The third time is the charm, so to speak, so the Ugly One can resume his true identify as The Shaggy Man's Brother.

Good-hearted Kaliko agrees to let Ruggedo stay on as a common Nome, the Rainbow descends nearby and Polychrome rejoins her sisters (no doubt with a reprise of the Daughters of the Rainbow dance number from the first act).

Poor Betsy, Hank, Shaggy, His Brother, Tik-Tok, Ozga, ex-Pfc. Files, Queen Ann, and the Oogaboolitans bemoan the fact that they are stuck in the Nome Kingdom so far from home. Ann in particular is ready to give up conquering the world and wants to return to her little kingdom.

I'm not sure why this is the case. Her campaign has been almost uniformly victorious. Aside from having to crawl through a rocky tunnel and tear up her spiffy uniform, she hasn't really endured any hardship, and the raid on the Nome Kingdom brought her to the Metal Forest, where jewels and precious metals literally grow on trees. Compared to Ann, her predecessor Cecil Rhodes was a failure at imperialism.

Next Time: Wizardry Ex Machina!

 

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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 6

Queen Ann Soforth's invasion of the Nome Kingdom gets off to a rocky start. (Get it? Rocky? It's funny because the Nome King rules a kingdom of minerals. That's kind of like rocks, see? Laugh, damn you!)

The Nome King tries to capture the Army of Oogaboo in a pit trap (Challenge Rating 1, according to my D&D books); Tik-Tok avoids it but his superior officers and Queen Ann herself fail their dice rolls and fall in. Tik-Tok marches straight on into the Nome King's throne room and informs Ruggedo that he has been conquered. Ruggedo declines, and there's a bit of a stand-off at gunpoint, but the Tarantino moment ends quickly when Betsy and Hank wander in.

The Nome King threatens Betsy, and she almost approaches Dorothy-esque levels of insouciance. The Nome King's steward Kaliko disables Tik-Tok, but a swift kick from Hank the Mule prevents General Guph from capturing Betsy. In the confusion, Kaliko, who is a decent enough chap even though he works for a megalomaniacal tyrant, leads Betsy to a small cavern refuge and supplies her with mushrooms and mineral bread with "petroleum butter."

Historical Digression: Petroleum butter was a reference Baum's audience would have recognized. Back in 1848 the inventor and entrepreneur Samuel Kier began marketing two patent medicines: Kier's Rock Oil, and Kier's Petroleum Butter. Patients were supposed to drink the Rock Oil, but the Butter was applied topically. Now since the main ingredient of Kier's Rock Oil was actual petroleum refined from a salt water well Kier owned in Pennsylvania, its medical benefits were limited to violent purging from both ends. Unsurprisingly, Kier's medical products were money-losers, so he switched to refining kerosene from his oil well and selling it as lamp fuel. With the price of whale oil surging at the time, Kier's kerosene was a hit, and the American oil business was born. Petroleum butter apparently lingered on as a skin protectant and treatment for burns, and we know it now as petroleum jelly. 

Anyway. Betsy stays hidden in her cosy cavern, but Queen Ann is more resourceful. She and her officers can't climb out of the pit, but she finds a side-passage and boldly leads her command structure into it. It's a literal Dungeon Crawl!

The Shaggy Man, waiting outside with Polychrome, Ex-Pfc. Files, and Ozga the Rose Princess, happens to mention that he intends to use the Love Magnet to overcome Ruggedo if Tik-Tok fails to conquer him. But the Shaggy Man has not reckoned with the Surveillance State ��� in the person of Ruggedo's henchman the Long-Eared Hearer. The Hearer hears about the Magnet and informs Ruggedo, who prepares a trap.

Shaggy gets tired of waiting, goes inside ��� and walks right into the Nome King's trap. He gets snared in ropes so that he can't reach the Love Magnet and wave it around to make Ruggedo love him. (This is a slight change from Baum's earlier depictions of the Shaggy Man's magic item: in past volumes just having it on him made people love him. Now he has to show it.) For some reason Files and Ozga follow him and also get captured by Nomes.

Polychrome, smart Cloud Fairy girl that she is, tries to wake the dragon, but Quox is too sleepy, and his hide is too invulnerable. So she goes to have a look at Ruggedo's throne room herself. The lovely Rainbow's Daughter doesn't need a magic magnet to make Ruggedo fall in love with her. He offers to let her captive friends go if she'll agree to stay and be his queen.

Ruggedo the Nome King is in good company here: another well-known underground monarch, Hades, also fell in love with a divine maiden of the upper world and used all his magic powers to capture her. In the case of Hades it was Persephone, and he was only able to keep her in his underground realm by trickery for half the year. (Presumably during her six months of absence the gloomy king of the shades of the dead played a lot of videogames and ordered takeout a lot.)

For a good-hearted fairy maiden, Polychrome is actually kind of hard-nosed: she won't stay in the underground kingdom even to save her friends ��� and her fairy powers make it quite impossible for Ruggedo's Nomes to capture her. So he decides to up the ante, and proposes to torture his other captives if Polychrome refuses to stay. But Ann et al have gotten out of the pit and cannot be found, and Betsy and Hank are safely hidden from the Nome King's Gestapo.

He does manage to transform the Shaggy Man into a dove, and with Ex-Pfc. Files and Ozga at his mercy, Polychrome flees again to fetch the dragon. This time she manages to wake him, and Quox storms into the Nome King's cavern. But once again Ruggedo, like all good supervillains, has a trap prepared, and the dragon is wrapped in heavy chains held by a thousand Nomes.

Evil has triumphed! Poor Ozga has been turned into a fiddle and Files into a bow! Can nothing stop the Nome King's reign of terror? Don't miss our next thrilling episode!

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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 5

Betsy Bobbin et al appear before Tititi-Hoochoo the next morning to hear his decision. Fortunately for them, the Jinjin is a Reasonable Authority Figure and thus is willing to overlook their involuntary passage through the forbidden Hollow Tube. (Why an all-powerful Jinjin never thought of simply closing the Tube, or piling up some logs and old mattresses to block the passage, is never explained.)

Tititi-Hoochoo declares that Ruggedo the Nome King is ultimately responsible and therefore must be punished. The punishment is pretty severe: Tititi-Hoochoo is going to send the unwilling visitors back through the Tube, accompanied by an Instrument of Vengeance, who will take away the Nome King's magic powers and drive him out of his underground kingdom to wander the surface of the earth, homeless and powerless.

That's a pretty severe punishment for dropping some trespassers into a tube.

Queen Ann Soforth is a little unhappy about being sent home without getting the chance to conquer Tititi-Hoochoo's kingdom, but is prudent enough not to force the issue.

The Instrument of Vengeance Tititi-Hoochoo has chosen is Quox, a young dragon who has gotten in trouble for being disrespectful to his ancestor, the Original Dragon who is venerated by everyone in the land beyond the Tube. Despite being a young dragon, Quox is already impressively large ��� large enough to carry all the travellers back through the tube in seats strapped to his back. He also, amusingly, carries an electric light on the end of his tail.

I suspect Mr. Baum imagined that Quox would be played by a piece of stage furniture ��� some kind of big rolling platform with a puppet head at the front. As we shall see, the Instrument of Vengeance spends a lot of time off-stage and leaves most of the avenging to his passengers.

Geek Note: according to my indispensable Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, a Young dragon could be a Large-sized creature, about 16 feet long from nose to the base of his tail. That's kind of small for a 24-seater. If, on the other hand, we assume Quox is a Young Adult dragon (and he is 3,056 years old) then he could be a comfortable 32 feet long, giving the travelers at least as much leg room as Southwest Airlines. (The only problem with the Young Adult dragon hypothesis is that Tik-Tok of Oz is not a Young Adult Novel. We know this because there's no pointless dystopian elements or angsty teen sex.)

With everyone aboard, Quox slides back through the Tube. But the Nome King once again has advance notice, courtesy of his servant The Long-Eared Hearer, whose abilities seem pretty obvious to the reader. Ruggedo also has a Magic Spyglass, which allows his chamberlain Kaliko to see that a Young Adult dragon is coming.

But since they can neither see nor hear any eggs, the Nome King is not afraid. All Nomes are apparently fireproof, so as long as they can chain up Quox he'll be harmless. He orders General Guph (who sadly doesn't get any spotlight time in this book) to surround the Tube entrance and wait in ambush for the dragon.

Along the way the Shaggy Man explains to Betsy how they can pass through the center of the Earth, and his explanation is entirely accurate. I really do think Mr. Baum must have consulted with a physicist about the Tube because of what the Shaggy Man says next:

"All the magic isn't in fairyland," he said gravely. "There's lots of magic in all Nature, and you may see it as well in the United States, where you and I once lived, as you can here."

We need to talk about the Shaggy Man. He first appears in The Road to Oz, stealing apples from the tree in Dorothy's front yard and trying to avoid the town of Butterfield, Kansas, and now he confirms that he is indeed a U.S. citizen. So why doesn't he have a name? Most people in the U.S. have names. None of us are known simply by adjectives. I'm James L. Cambias, not The Somewhat Above Average Height Balding Man. It would be hell to get all that onto my checks.

He has a brother, whose legal name is apparently The Shaggy Man's Brother, which is pretty hard, and shows some real lack of imagination (or too much) on the part of their parents.

There is one possibility I'd like to raise: that perhaps The Shaggy Man and His Brother actually have the surname Rogers. I suggest this because "Norville Rogers" is the given name of another famous Shaggy Man ��� well, Shaggy Teen, anyway ��� who is equally given to wandering about with strange companions and talking animals, and running afoul of magical enemies.

Back to our story. The Nome ambush fails because Quox shoots out of the Tube with such speed that he lands on a mountainside high above them. The Nomes launch a volley of spears which have no effect on the Dragon's impenetrable scales (evidently the Nomes don't have a helpful thrush to point out vulnerable spots). When that fails, Queen Ann sends her Army ��� or at least Tik-Tok, the only actual combatant ��� after them and the Nomes retreat underground.

Emboldened by this, Ann decides to invade the Nome Kingdom without Quox's help, and tells him he can go back to Tititi-Hoochoo right away, for the Nomes are as good as conquered already. Quox settles down for a nap instead, just in case he's needed after all.

Next time: pitfalls!

 

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Ozblogging: Tik-Tok of Oz, Part 4

And now we meet the great arch-villain of the Oz books once again: Ruggedo the Nome King ��� alias Roquat, as he was originally known. I don't know why L. Frank Baum changed the Nome King's name; the in-story explanation is that Roquat forgo his original name upon drinking the memory-erasing Water of Oblivion in The Emerald City of Oz, and so had to come up with a new one. Personally, I prefer Roquat, if only because Ruggedo isn't particularly rugged, and the new name isn't a good match.

Like any good supervillain, Ruggedo can detect the approach of enemies from afar, and has defenses ready. He first tries to halt the combined Oz/Oklahoma/Oogaboo incursion by activating the Rubber Country, which he hopes will bounce them away. But our heroes get through with only a little physical comedy. A little Googling indicates that the technology to make a proto-trampoline called a "bouncing bed" was already part of theatrical stagecraft at the time Baum wrote Tik-Tok of Oz, so I guess he wrote this section with that in mind.

The Rubber Country having failed, Ruggedo employs his ultimate weapon: the Hollow Tube. The Tube is nothing less than a tunnel which passes right through the center of the Earth! As Polychrome explains as the entire party falls down the Tube, it was built by a wizard to allow him to travel more conveniently, but the first time he used it, he shot out the other end and collided with a star.

Thankfully, the heroes emerge with much less residual velocity, and tumble safely to the ground on the other side of the world. What's interesting is that Baum's physics is pretty correct here: if something were to fall through the center of a solid sphere, it would accelerate on the way down (though the force of acceleration would steadily decrease to zero) and then decelerate on the upward leg, emerging with a net velocity close to zero.

Of course, air resistance would utterly negate this, limiting the tube-travellers' speed to the point at which drag counteracts acceleration, so they'd never reach the other side but instead oscillate back and forth several times before coming to rest in zero gravity at the center of the planet.

Perhaps the same magic which keeps the mass of the Earth from collapsing the Hollow Tube (and which protects travellers from the 5400�� Centigrade temperature at the center of the planet) also negates air resistance, as it only takes the party an hour to reach the opposite side of the planet. That's pretty close to correct, which makes me wonder if Mr. Baum consulted someone to do the math for him ��� possibly at the nearby Throop Institute, better known today as Cal Tech.

On the far side of the world they meet a Peculiar Person (with Baumian Capitals), who wears a crown and a scarlet robe decorated with a dragon's head emblem. His limbs are different colors ��� yellow, green, blue, and pink ��� and his feet are jet black. The Person leads them to a huge palace called the Private Residence. Just as the Army of Oogaboo has twenty officers and one private, this country is populated entirely by kings and queens, which means the ruler is he sole Private Citizen.

It helps that the Private Citizen is Tititi Hoochoo, the Great Jinjin, which means he's roughly as powerful as Galactus. When the Great Jinjin learns that it was Ruggedo who was responsible for sending the travellers against their will through the forbidden Hollow Tube, he resolves to punish the Nome King, and then vanishes.

His visitors, still a bit intimidated, are given the hospitality of the land. Betsy Bobbin and Polychrome are guests of the Queen of Light, who lives in a crystal palace and is attended by six lovely maidens, each representing a different form of light: Sunlight, Moonlight, Starlight, Daylight, Firelight, and Electra. Each one's costume is, of course, described in minute detail by Mr. Baum. (Presumably they could be played on stage by some of the same chorines who wore the Rose costumes earlier.)

The Queen of Light explains that this country is another Fairyland, and the maidens aren't just costumed attendants but actual fairy personifications of light. Polychrome seems to be at least vaguely familiar with them, being fellow fairies and all, but Betsy is full of questions until bedtime.

After the travellers fall into the Tube, Tik-Tok of Oz finally starts to get good. Baum's no longer recycling old material, and when he lets his imagination go wild about fairies he can really deliver the goods. Tititi-Hoochoo is properly intimidating, and the maidens of Light are a wonderful bit of new mythology. Before undertaking this Ozblogging exercise, I hadn't read Tik-Tok of Oz since some time in the 1970s, and had no memory of the earlier chapters. In fact, I was beginning to wonder if I had ever read it before. But the land beyond the Tube was familiar territory. That's the part I remember after forty years.

Next time: the Instrument of Vengeance!

 

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