James L. Cambias's Blog, page 44

Nostalgie du Geek: Champions!

The transition from high school to college is a big one for most people. You meet a whole new circle of friends. You live on your own for the first time. You probably try a lot of new things. It's a chance to "reinvent" yourself.

And if you're a huge geek who plays roleplaying games, it means you have to assemble a new gaming group.

In my case the college was the University of Chicago, and the new gaming group consisted of five or six of my fellow residents in stately Hitchcock Hall. We played a couple of different roleplaying games, but the one that we returned to most often was Champions, published by Hero Games.

Champions was (and still is), a superhero roleplaying game. It wasn't the first game to tackle the four-color world of comic-book superheroes, but it was the most successful, and remains in print to this day with only minor changes in mechanics.

Until I played Champions, all the games I had played used random character generation: you "rolled up" a character using dice to determine what that character's attributes were. That usually created an interesting mix of above and below average abilities.

Champions didn't do that. It allowed players to design their characters. If you wanted to play a super-strong indestructible hero, you didn't have to sit around rolling dice hoping for the result you wanted; instead you allocated points to the abilities you wanted the character to have. You could get extra points by taking "disadvantages" ��� which were typical comic-book problems like "Secret Identity" or "Hunted" or a "Dependent Non-Player Character."

Not only that, you could even design and fine-tune the powers your superhero had. The points bought actual game mechanical results, but the "special effects" were up to the player. So I might have a fiery superhero with a "flame blast" which I defined as a straightforward "Energy Blast" effect doing 1 die of damage per 5 points in the power (I still remember that without having to look it up). A different player might have a character with a "flame blast" ability, but define it as a physical attack. A third person might decide his character's "flame blast" was an explosion. And so on.

There were "frameworks" to allow characters to have several closely-linked powers without having to buy all of them at full price. My "flame powers" Multipower might include the aforementioned "flame blast" plus fire-powered flight, the ability to control fires, and maybe a "heat flash" capable of stunning foes without harming them.

All of this required a lot of calculation. Champions had a highly non-intuitive and fiddly way of calculating the cost of powers, involving a string of multiplying factors. Recall that this was all back in the middle 1980s, when personal computers were still bulky and expensive and most college students didn't have one. Instead of cranking it out on a spreadsheet we all did this by hand on endless sheets of scrap paper, with lots of erasing and scratching-out as one tried to squeeze out a precious few extra points by clever rounding off and "min-maxing." I typically reserved my weekends for game-geekery, but some of my acquaintances spent considerably more time at it. (One member of a different gaming group devoted so much time to designing Champions characters that his grades suffered and he had to transfer to another school.)

I learned a lot about game design from Champions. The process of designing characters clarified the distinction between game mechanics and "chrome" ��� the aesthetic component of a game which are not embedded in the mechanics. That led me to think about game mechanics in general, and to appreciate the value of having a consistent underlying logic to the game rules.

Champions's effect-based set of game mechanics proved relatively easy to adapt to other genres and settings. Instead of superheroes you could use the Hero Games system to run futuristic cyberpunk detective characters, or fantasy wizards.

This was an idea whose time had definitely come by the middle of the Eighties. Everyone was jumping on the "multipurpose game system" bandwagon: Hero System, GURPS, Torg, Basic Role-Playing, Dream Park, Rolemaster, doubtless many others I'm forgetting. All were based on the same seductive idea of building one robust but flexible game system (or adapting an existing system to have the necessary flexibility), and then churning out an endless supply of "genre supplements" for specific campaign types. The advantages were obvious: players would only have to learn one set of rules, once, and publishers would be able to sell many times more games.

Problems with the model appeared a few years later ��� I'll go into that issue more in some future post, but the short summary is that "realism" means different things in different game settings. But the idea has never gone away completely. The HERO system remains in print, and I've even written some books for it.

Champions also completed my transition to fully-plotted adventures. A comic-book style story has to have a villain, and that villain has to have a plan, and ideally there should be some fun set-piece action sequences. These are not the sort of things one can throw together on the fly by rolling some dice on a random-encounter table. Especially not when designing that master villain and all his henchmen requires as much fiddly number-crunching as creating a new player character. I never sat down to run a Champs game without a fully-prepared scenario.

Perhaps because I had already spent a couple of years playing Call of Cthulhu, my superhero adventures had more of a Batman feel than, say, Superman or the X-Men. There was always a mystery to be solved, which in turn led the heroes to the villain's sinister plan and then a final showdown.

The combination of painstakingly designed characters and painstakingly designed adventures made this phase of my gaming life the most "story-like" of all, I think. In hindsight, I wonder if my adventures didn't get a little constraining and "railroady" out of the need to fit the comic-book model. Another problem I noticed was that as the point-based heroes gained character points through experience, they tended to converge, buying up optimum attacks, shedding inconvenient disadvantages, and trading quirky individuality for game-mechanical effectiveness. (Since my Champions days I've noticed this problem with other games; another topic for another time.) 

Being a college student meant I didn't do as much gaming as I did in high school. The academic workload was heavier, I had to do things like buy groceries and cook dinner, and gaming had to compete with all the other entertainment options available on a university campus in a major megapolis.* All of those factors meant I didn't play as much Champions as I did D&D, Traveller, or Call of Cthulhu. But I had fun with Champions, and I'm proud to have written some products for that game system. Excelsior!

*Also: girls.

For two examples of thrilling adventures which could have been Champions adventures if I'd put superheroes in them, you can buy my new ebook!

Retro-Review: Rogue Moon

Imagine there was a novel which combined James Patrick Kelly's amazing short story "Think Like a Dinosaur" with Alastair Reynolds's brilliant novella Diamond Dogs. Imagine that novel was written in 1960 by a respected and influential science fiction author, editor, critic, and teacher with multiple Hugo and Nebula awards to his credit.

Now imagine how disappointed I felt when I finished reading Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys.

Rogue Moon tells the story of one Edward Hawks, Doctor of Science, who is running a secret teleportation project funded by the Navy. The teleportation device isn't a Trekian "transporter," rather it's a vacuum-tube-and-magnetic-tape version of an atomic scanner and 3-D "matter printer." The person, or object, to be transmitted is scanned ��� destructively ��� and converted to a signal which is then beamed to a receiver which reassembles it. They've even worked out a dodge (which becomes important) by which a second copy is assembled in the laboratory and popped into a sensory-deprivation tank to allow telepathic rapport with the transmitted copy.

Where are they transmitting people to? The Navy's secret Moon base, which was set up to study a bizarre and deadly alien structure found on the Lunar surface.

This isn't some far-future tale, by the way; it's pretty explicity set in 1960 or thereabouts.

The chief problem with the whole project is that the volunteers who get teleported to the Moon and try to enter the alien complex all die in horrible ways. The shock drives their "spare" copies on Earth mad. So not only are brave and highly-intelligent young men getting their minds destroyed, they aren't making any progress exploring the alien artifact/structure/whatever it is. Hawks is in danger of losing his funding.

Enter Al Barker. He's smart, arrogant, a war hero, Olympic skier, auto racer, and is literally suicidally reckless. He's perfect for the Moon project because he's been trying to kill himself for years. Barker's mind can handle the experience of dying repeatedly, until at last he makes his way past all the lethal deathtraps in the Moon complex, so that others can follow and begin studying it.

The Barker copy on the Moon has an epiphany about his life and gets over being suicidal, only to be informed by the copy of Hawks who has accompanied him on the final attempt that there's no way for them to teleport back to Earth and anyway there are already copies of themselves there, so they have to die now, one final time.

Okay, why was I disappointed? How can one not like a book about secret Moon bases, alien deathtraps, and retro-tech teleportation devices?

Simple: that's not what the book is about.

Seriously. We don't even learn about the teleportation system and the Moon base until more than a third of the way into the book. Barker's repeated attempts to get past the deathtraps in the alien complex are left entirely off-stage until the very end. All of the cool stuff is shoved to one side so we can savor the Fifties pop-psychology portraits of Barker and his high-maintenance girlfriend Claire Pack.

Here's a scene in which Dr. Hawks ��� who for the moment we will refer to as Wernher Von Braun ��� is meeting Al Barker, who we'll call John Glenn.

". . . Before she went, I had to knock the Frenchmen about a little bit," John Glenn said, and now his meaning was clear. "I believe one of them had to be taken off by helicopter. And I've never forgotten how one goes about keeping one's hold on her."

Annie Glenn smiled. "I'm a warrior's woman, Wernher." Sudenly she moved her body, and Glenn let his hand fall. "Or at least we like to think so." Her nails ran down Glenn's torso. "It's been seven years, and nobody's taken me away yet." She smiled fondly up at Glenn for an instant, and then her expression became challenging again. "Why don't you tell John about this new job, Wernher?"

[. . . ] John Glenn nodded. "Oh, yes, Doctor ��� I meant what I said earlier. Don't let anything she does or says let you forget. She's mine. And not because I have money, or good manner, or charm. I do have money, but she's mine by right of conquest."

Seriously? This isn't a question of different times, different standards. My parents were born about the same time as those characters would have been, and I can't imagine them, or any of their friends, or any actual human being then or now talking that way. Especially not when they're getting ready to discuss matters of super-secret super-science.

Later on, Claire dares Hawks to seduce her, and when he reacts like a normal sane man would, she runs off with the sleazy Human Resources director who introduced Barker to Hawks in the first place. Again, if Tom Wolfe is any guide there were plenty of discreetly-managed scandals behind the scenes of the Space Race, but I simply can't imagine Annie Glenn telling Wernher Von Braun "You've got to take me tonight," and then eloping with one of the contractors.

This isn't the usual problem with older science fiction stories. These characters aren't wooden, or juvenile, or two-dimensional. Quite the reverse: Algis Budrys is laying on Fifties Freudian psychology and "sophisticated" (in the cocktails-and-adultery sense) behavior with a builder's trowel. I'm not exaggerating when I say that nearly half of the book's page count is devoted to characters talking about their childhoods or sex lives. Hawks has his own relationship with a woman who picks him up hitchiking, and spends a lot of time telling her about his youth.

Oh, and Barker's big epiphany on the Moon is that he's been taking suicidal risks for twenty years because the other frat boys at Yale used to give him a hard time about being part Apache. Really.

The problem is the mismatch between those elements and the actual mystery at the heart of the book. There are alien deathtraps on the Moon and a teleportation device and a secret space program ten years before Apollo, and I'm supposed to care about Barker's relationship with his girlfriend? Barker, like John Glenn, is interesting because of the stuff he's going to be doing in the story. Few people would read Glenn's biography if he had remained a Marine aviator and eventually retired to do consulting work. We care about him because he flew in space. And we care about Barker because he's getting teleported to an alien deathtrap on the Moon. Which means that by not showing us that part, and focusing on the frankly tiresome soap opera elements, Budrys makes me care less and less about getting to the ending.

I'm probably being too hard on Algis Budrys, because he wasn't the only SF writer of that era who was replacing technobabble about rockets and circuits with psychobabble about complexes and repressions. Lots of SF writers ��� and editors ��� fell in love with the idea of psychology finally becoming a quantified, predictive science like physics or chemistry. (It's probably mean-spirited of me to suggest that my fellow nerds, then as now, were searching for the magic formula which would finally let them understand how other people behave.) And all the cool kids at the slick magazines were doing it, too.

Now I'm going to put on my writing-workshop pants and try to figure out how I would have written Rogue Moon. Start with the problem: the alien deathtrap. Show a volunteer getting killed. Then show him somehow alive on Earth, but insane. Then bring in Barker, and have Hawks explain what's going on. And do all this relatively quickly, in the first chapter or so.

Then actually show Barker making attempt after attempt. Show the strain it puts on him, but also the irresistable attraction it holds for him. His girlfriend leaves and he doesn't really notice. Hawks urges him to stop but Barker cleverly appeals to the higher-ups funding the project.

Finally, as in Budrys's version, Hawks joins Barker for the last attempt. They make it past the final barrier. But instead of a cheap epiphany, Barker simply shows a new serenity. The duplicates of Barker and Hawks on the Moon celebrate uproariously before walking out the airlock to die. The copies back on Earth, who survive, don't attain this enlightenment, but are aware they have missed it. End story.

I guess the only lesson to be learned is to avoid falling for current pop-psychology fads. When you're writing about people, base it on your own observations of how they act, rather than the latest Theory of Everything.

Oh, and don't hold the cool stuff back so long. Teleporting to the secret moonbase to face alien deathtraps!

 

(And if you're teleporting to a secret moonbase to explore alien deathtraps, you might enjoy some light reading for your trip: buy my ebook!)

Going LIVE!

I've finally dipped a toe into the waters of independent e-publishing. My e-chapbook "Outlaws and Aliens" is now live on Amazon! It's an affordably-priced little ebook containing two of my short stories ��� "The Alien Abduction" and "Object Three." The cover art is by Rob Caswell. You can buy it here. Makes a great way to use up that Amazon gift card you got for Christmas.

If this goes well, I plan to bring out all my old short stories in similar format. So BUY MY EBOOKS!

 

It's Not Christmas Without NORAD

Every year at this time I link to my favorite Christmas Web site: the Official NORAD Santa Tracker page. If you don't understand why this site is the sweetest, goofiest, and yet also the greatest embodiment of the Christmas spirit, you have the soul of a Krampus. And Krampus is not welcome in this airspace.  

Kitchen Report: Timballo

The Leopard, by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, is a landmark of Italian literature. There are many reasons to read it, but among others it contains some of the great dinner scenes in modern fiction. The meal in Chapter 2 begins with "monumental dishes of macaroni." But this isn't just a pile of pasta, oh no. Di Lampedusa describes the dish in some detail:

"The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a mist laen with aromas, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken, and truffles in masses of piping-hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede."

A few years ago, after re-reading the novel, I began to wonder about making something like that myself. I found a couple of different recipes for "Timballo alla Gattopardo" ��� that is, pasta pie Leopard-style. It quickly became apparent to me that the only things the recipes I found had in common with one another were the ingredients mentioned specifically in the passage above.

So I tried a couple of experiments, and have finally settled on my own version, which can be made in an afternoon and always gets a good response.

The crust: I make a sweet crust with plenty of cinnamon, as per the novel. Combine 3 1/2 cups of flour, 1/2 cup sugar, a tablespoon of cinnamon, a teaspoon of salt, and 5 ounces of butter (1 and 1/4 sticks). You can use margarine if you prefer. Combine the dry ingredients and the butter, either using a pastry-cutter or a food processor, then add water (start with 1/2 cup and add a little more at a time until the dough sticks together properly). Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and refrigerate while doing everything else.

The filling: 2 boneless chicken breasts or thighs, sliced; 1 cup chicken livers, cut up into 1-inch pieces; 2 ounces thin-sliced Italian ham, 2 Italian sausages, skin removed and cut into 8 pieces each; 1 cup of peas; 1 cup of grated Parmesan cheese; half a cup of good chicken stock; 2 hard-boiled eggs, and about 2/3 of a pound of small pasta (elbows or mini-penne).*

Sautee the chicken and sausage pieces, then set them aside. Cut the ham into thin strips. Sautee the chicken liver in butter, then add the peas, ham, cooked sausage and chicken, and about 1/4 cup of white wine. Simmer them together until the liquid reduces by about half, and add salt, pepper, 1/4 teaspoon of nutmeg, and 1/2 teaspoon of turmeric. Slice the eggs and put them aside.

Start preheating the oven to 350 F. Boil the pasta, drain it, and combine with the chicken stock and grated Parmesan.

Roll out 2/3 of the dough and use it to line a deep baking dish. I use a 9-inch springform pan about 3 inches deep, but a brave and self-confident cook could use a Pyrex or ceramic casserole.

Cover the bottom of the crust with about a quarter of the pasta-and-cheese. Reserve another quarter of the pasta for later. Mix the remaining half with the meat and peas, and pour that mixture into the crust. Top with the egg slices, then cover that with the reserved pasta. Now roll out the rest of the crust and cover the top, crimping the edge thoroughly to make a good seal. (If you wind up with some leftover crust you can make decorative shapes to put on top ��� a heraldic Leopard would be appropriate, or the insanely complicated flag of Bourbon Naples.)

Bake 45 minutes or until the crust has nicely browned. It should "rest" a few minutes before serving to give the interior a chance to set, although the novel suggests that was not how they did it under the Bourbons.

Slice ceremoniously and serve. You'll want to have a big spoon handy to round up stray filling. This is a good dinner for four to six people, or an impressive pasta course for a larger group. It would be suitable for a Christmas or New Year's feast, which is why I present it now.

I haven't tried any other fillings, but it seems like a dish which could support variations. Mushrooms are an obvious addition, and possibly chopped spinach if you want to pretend you care about "healthy eating." (Or use spinach pasta for an exciting green interior.) I suspect one could come up with a good seafood variant, substituting shrimp or lobster for the sausages, oysters for the livers, smoked salmon for the ham, and cod for the chicken.

*The observant reader will note the absence of truffles. If someone with a few hundred dollars to spare wants to buy me a couple of ounces of truffles, I'll happily put them in next time I make this and report on the flavor.

The Argument For Space

I've always been a fan of space exploration, which means I've often gotten into arguments with people over the value of doing it. NASA (among others) spends a lot of its public-relations budget promoting the importance of exploring space, but I think they focus on the wrong things.

On the NASA web page there's a whole section on "Benefits to You" which emphasizes the important and helpful "spinoff" technologies first developed for space exploration. It's a nice idea, but it's kind of wrong-headed, in my opinion.

After all, a critic might point out that the same technologies might easily be developed without the additional expense of doing space exploration. If NASA is studying sleep to help astronauts aboard the ISS, they could just as easily do sleep research without a space station.

The fact is that any large technology enterprise will generate spinoff devices and applications. We could be spending NASA's budget on digging a giant hole in the ground, and that would produce useful innovations in excavator and pumping technology. The fact that digging a giant hole might produce some incidental benefits doesn't justify doing it.

I think NASA and other space advocates should put more effort into justifying space exploration for its own sake. The Earth is a tiny part of the Universe. It's a tiny part of just the Solar System. If we restrict ourselves to just learning about the Earth that means we're ignoring the other 99.9997 percent of the Solar System. That's like focusing on part of one square foot of a field covering an entire acre. That square foot may be important to you, but the acre is likely to hold other things which may interest you, or be of value. You can't tell until you walk around.

Instead of holding up a can of Tang or a Teflon skillet, space advocates should be turning the tables on people who question the value of going beyond Earth: how do they know we won't find anything of importance? You can't know until you look!

Blogs I Read

Since I have twice this year had spikes in my blog traffic due to other people mentioning it on their blogs or on Twitter, I think it's time to do the same with my own mighty horde of followers. Here are the blogs I regularly read ��� with some important exceptions. I'm leaving off purely political blogs because people who share my outlook probably read them already, and people who don't agree with me would only scoff.

The Bleat: James Lileks's blog. It's typically a mix of hard-edged reporting about trips to Target or walking the dog, plus entertaining looks at old movie serials, small-town downtowns as seen on Google Street View, music cues from radio programs, and whatever else Mr. Lileks is on about this week.

False Machine: The amazing blog by game designer Patrick Stuart. Just his random jottings are enough to inspire whole campaigns.

Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog: The home base of Jeffro Johnson, a game blogger who has become the leader of a minor literary movement as the result of his extremely entertaining "Appendix N" series analyzing the source materials of the original Dungeons & Dragons. He also runs the blog at Castalia House. 

Overcoming Bias: This is Robin Hanson's blog, though from time to time he has guest posters. It's hard to categorize, exactly; Hanson is interested in futurism, problem-solving, how to compensate for our biases, and various other topics. He's also the father of the "Great Filter" concept.

Samuel Pepys's Blog: The greatest chronicler of the 17th Century is blogging his life, day by day, 353 years later. Keep track of what he eats, what's going on at Court, how his digestion is working, and the ongoing campaign against graft at the Navy Office.

Sippican Cottage Blog: A fun (if irregular) blog about life, furniture, music, child-rearing, and an old house in Maine. The series about sewer problems is epic.

The Suits of James Bond: An oddly fascinating blog about exactly what it says on the tin ��� the superbly tailored suits featured in the James Bond films. Makes one want to go down to Saville Row and get suited up.

The TOF Spot: SF writer Michael Flynn's personal blog, with random jottings, personal anecdotes, and occasionally some amazingly good historical writing.

The Unwanted Blog: A great blog about science, old aerospace projects, cats, rockets, and other random stuff, by Scott Lowther.

Inoculating Against Woo

A while back I posted a little joke about why Marty McFly's father George, in the movie Back to the Future, is the worst science fiction writer ever. One of my complaints was that George couldn't bring himself to publish his stories until a midnight encounter with a fake "spaceman" convinced him it was all real. I scoffed at that.

And I was right to scoff. One aspect of the science fiction field which always seems to surprise outsiders is how staunchly skeptical we are. Among science fiction writers and editors I doubt you'll find any who believe that UFOs are spaceships from other worlds. (I'd like to say the same about SF fans, but I know it isn't true.) There are few who believe in psychic powers, or ghosts, or Bigfoot, or any of the other topics beloved of late-night AM radio.

Note that ��� contra McFly ��� one doesn't need to believe in these things to write about them. Writers can and do write stories about psychic powers, flying saucers, and even ghosts. They just know those things are fiction.

There are many reasons for this skeptical approach. First is the generally higher level of scientific literacy among SF professionals. Most of them aspire at least to the "educated layman" level, and we have a strong contingent of professional scientists in the club. This, I suspect, is the primary reason why SF writers don't go in for UFOs: we can imagine better alien spaceships than a bunch of aluminum Frisbees pestering yokels in the remote and benighted Pacific Northwest.

But there's another big reason for science fiction's innate skepticism: it got an early inoculation against quackery and woo. That inoculation came courtesy of Raymond A. Palmer, the editor of Amazing Stories, and a writer he discovered and promoted, Richard Shaver.

There's an interesting book about the two men and the "Shaver Mystery" they created ��� which briefly made Amazing the biggest-selling science fiction magazine in the country. It's called War Over Lemuria, by Richard Toronto, and is well worth reading.

Very briefly: Richard Shaver was a man with a vivid imagination and some serious mental problems. He was institutionalized a couple of times, and for a while lived as a vagabond. His symptoms sound a lot like classic schizophrenia: he heard voices, which he eventually identified as thoughts beamed into his mind by evil "deros" ��� degenerate dwarfs living in vast ancient underground cities, who amused themselves by tormenting (and occasionally abducting) surface-dwelling humans.

Shaver wrote up his discoveries about the deros, and sent them to Ray Palmer, the energetic promoter who edited Amazing Stories. Palmer rewrote them and published them. But despite the fact that Amazing was a science fiction magazine, Palmer took the unusual step of presenting Shaver's accounts of his encounters with deros and adventures under the earth as fact.

The result was a huge controversy within the SF field. This all took place in the late 1940s, just as science fiction was seeing the first light of respectability shining down on it. After all, the world suddenly had atomic bombs, radar, rockets, and computing machines. All that "Buck Rogers stuff" didn't look so silly after all, did it?

The "Shaver Mystery" series in Amazing was a threat to that respectability. It was, or at least it sure sounded like, genuine crazy-talk. SF fan clubs reacted vigorously: they denounced Palmer and Shaver, they expelled pro-Shaver members, and they organized letter-writing campaigns to Palmer's bosses at Ziff-Davis publishing.

Eventually William Ziff asked Ray Palmer to dial it back, and Palmer ���either from genuine belief in Shaver's stories or because he resented the interference ��� decided to leave Amazing and start his own magazine. Amazing returned to its old niche as a science fiction magazine.*

I think the experience of the "Shaver Mystery" gave the whole science fiction field a huge shove toward the skeptical side where paranormal claims are concerned. In effect, Ray Palmer and his critics forced science fiction fans to choose a side: believer or skeptic, and most chose to be skeptics. That set the tone from then on.

Even when John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding, became interested in psychic powers, he was careful to keep his statements within the bounds of scientific possibility (and that was the era of J.B. Rhine's experiments at Duke, when psychic phenomena were at their peak of respectability). And since the end of the Campbell era, science fiction's devotion to skepticism has grown only more solid.

Richard Shaver and Ray Palmer inoculated science fiction against woo, and so far, that early resistance has endured.

*Richard Shaver, to his great credit, was able to overcome his mental issues and managed to build a stable life for himself as a farmer and artist.

Movie Review: Arrival

Short version: it's great, go see it.

Long version: I confess I was a bit worried when I got tickets to this movie. When I heard that Ted Chiang's great story "The Story of Your Life" was being made into a film I was very pleased and excited . . . but then I saw the trailer for the movie under its new title Arrival and it seemed to have a lot more running-and-shooty-bits than I remembered from the story.

I've seen what Hollywood did to stories like Heinlein's Starship Troopers, or The Puppet Masters; or Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles or "A Sound of Thunder." And "The Story of Your Life" seemed like a very difficult story to adapt. It would have been all too easy for some producer to decide to dumb it down and make just another "scary aliens invade" actioner, or the equally clich�� "misunderstood aliens arrive and mean Army guys want to waterboard them" story.

So, as I say, I was a bit worried. But when the movie began with a montage showing the tragically short life of the main character's daughter, I relaxed into my seat and began to enjoy myself. It's the daughter who is the "you" in the original short story title, and her inclusion meant the movie was actually going to follow Ted's story.

Which it did, almost line-for-line. I haven't seen a more faithful adaptation since Rosemary's Baby (according to Stephen King, Rosemary's Baby precisely tracks Ira Levin's original novel because the director, Roman Polanski, didn't know he was allowed to change things).

I'm not going to give any "spoilers" because the movie's still in theaters ��� though there isn't any kind of lame "twist ending" which woul ruin your enjoyment if I revealed it. Instead I'm going to mention some of the things that impressed me.

First of all, there are no villains. There are people whose goals are opposed to those of the heroine, but those goals are perfectly understandable and logical. There are no mustache-twirlers in this movie. I really liked that. It's also more suspenseful: you know an obvious villain will ultimately meet her doom, but what if the entirely reasonable antagonists turn out to be right?

Second, the movie has real aliens. I've griped in the past about how wedded moviemakers are to the "guy-in-a-suit" look for alien beings, even now that computer animation means you can put literally anything someone can imagine on the screen. I'm also tired of aliens with eyes-over-mouth faces that plug into the hard-wired face-recognizing parts of our brains.

Well, Arrival doesn't have any truck with that nonsense either. The alien Heptapods are extremely non-human, but still look like something which might have evolved on another world. They don't even have faces.

Third, the movie does a wonderful job of convincing me that "this is what it would be like." That's something I look for in movies: a sense that I'm really experiencing something fantastic. The movie Unbreakable gave me that feeling, as did the first 90 minutes or so of the movie Signs, and the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Arrival's depiction of how the world and the characters reacted to the aliens was utterly convincing to me. (One particularly nice note was how believably nervous everyone was before the moment of first contact.)

I hope Arrival makes a ton of money. Partly because I'm happy to see Ted Chiang get issued a Rich-and-Famous Contract, but also for what it might mean for future science fiction cinema. Arrival is not a dumb movie. It doesn't pander to any lowest common denominator. If it's a success then maybe we can finally drive a stake through the heart of the old myth that audiences are too dumb to "get" science fiction unless it's the excuse for showy effects in an action movie.

I have long suspected that blaming "dumb audiences" is a convenient crutch for dumb moviemakers. Moviegoers are smart enough to install HVAC systems, do other people's taxes, manage farms, repair vintage motorcycles, and sell real estate. It's absurd to think that the contrivances of storytellers are too hard for them.

If that's true, and if Arrival is reasonably successful. then maybe people who make movies will take note. Science fiction films don't have to be action-adventure; they can be dramas, or comedies, or mysteries, or all of the above. There's a century of excellent science fiction short stories waiting for someone to turn into screenplays.

I've got a couple. Call my agent.

Nostalgie Du Geek: Hearing the Call

In a couple of earlier posts I've described my reaction to my first two role-playing games, Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller. Those two were followed in the marketplace by a whole wave of other games in a variety of genres: Tunnels & Trolls, Universe from SPI, Gamma World, Chivalry & Sorcery, Metamorphosis Alpha, RuneQuest, Villains & Vigilantes, Top Secret, Boot Hill ��� and doubtless some others I'm forgetting.

I didn't play any of those. I got a copy of Metamorphosis Alpha because it was cheap, and I picked up Universe to get the three-dimensional map of nearby stars that came with it, but that was it. The various fantasy titles struck me as nothing more than D&D knockoffs, and the remainders just didn't interest me. I had to budget my allowance, and a roleplaying game cost as much as three or four science fiction paperbacks.

But then I heard about a new game: Call of Cthulhu. I think I first read a review of it in Dragon magazine, and was intrigued. That was right around the time I discovered the works of H.P. Lovecraft ��� and that discovery, in turn, was sparked by the inclusion of some Lovecraftian Great Old Ones in the D&D supplement Deities & Demigods. (After Call of Cthulhu appeared, TSR pulled the Lovecraft material out of later editions of that book; I've heard varying accounts of why that was done.)

I must have bought Call of Cthulhu shortly after it came out, possibly with some Christmas gift money in late 1981, or early 1982. It wasn't long before I talked my friends into trying it out. Recall that Raiders of the Lost Ark had premiered in the summer of 1981, so all of us were very enthusiastic about playing a game set in the era of pulp adventure heroes like Indiana Jones. Call of Cthulhu's 1920s milieu seemed perfect.

In fact, the campaign I ran for the next few years owed as much to Indiana Jones and Doc Savage as it did to H.P. Lovecraft. Around that time I acquired a copy of Philip Jose Farmer's biography of Doc Savage, and I shamelessly mined it for ideas. I can retroactively justify this by saying it was a "Robert E. Howard" style campaign, except that I didn't read any of Howard's horror stories until I was 35 years old.

The heroes in my group's campaign were definitely a two-fisted lot. The unofficial leader of the group was hard-boiled private eye Mike Slammer. Mike managed to survive several years of battling Lovecraftian horrors, chiefly due to a loophole in the game's famous Sanity rules. When a character encountered a mind-blasting horror, that character had to make an Intelligence roll before the Sanity check. A failed INT roll either prevented or reduced the effect of the Sanity roll, because the character simply failed to comprehend the cosmic wrongness which could unhinge more sensitive minds. Mike's invincible cement-headedness protected him against any threats to his psyche.

The pulpy tone of the campaign also meant that my heroes alternated between investigating Lovecraftian horrors and battling more conventional pulp villains, like the insidious Inca in Gray. (The Inca, by the way, introduced me to a problem which has bedeviled just about all my roleplaying games: the difficulty of having a recurring master villain when one's players are perfectly willing to shoot him in the face before he can finish his monologue.)

I ran Call of Cthulhu games for the rest of my high-school career, and into my first few vacations in college. Over time, as I read more Lovecraft and grew more interested in the history of "real" occultism, the tone of the games I ran shifted away from pulp adventure to more straight horror. My first winter in Chicago certainly inspired me to adapt Lovecraft's Antarctic horror story At the Mountains of Madness for my old group during summer vacation.

Call of Cthulhu was the first ��� and, really, the last ��� game for which I used a lot of published adventures. I had a couple of collections of scenarios, and ran some straight out of the books, while mining others for elements I could use in my own adventures. By the time I shifted to other games, I was already starting to think semi-seriously about submitting some of my adventures for publication.

While many roleplaying games have won awards, spawned licensed products and cross-media tie-ins, I think Call of Cthulhu is the only one to have set off a literary movement. The game got a whole generation of gaming nerds reading Lovecraft, and then reading other writers of his circle. This created a ripple which is still spreading.

Lovecraftian fiction went from being a relatively obscure corner of the horror section (crowded to one side by Exorcist knockoffs, Stephen King, and Ann Rice) to being pretty much the entire horror genre over the course of the next couple of decades. Go to a bookstore nowadays and look for horror stories: you'll find Dracula, Frankenstein, and a few Gothics in the Literature section, the Twilight books in the YA department ��� and shelves and shelves of Lovecraftian horror in the SF/Fantasy section.

Every year brings out another two or three original anthologies: Swords Versus Cthulhu, Shotguns Versus Cthulhu, Heroes of Red Hook. We've seen steampunk Lovecraft stories, feminist Lovecraft stories, postapocalyptic Lovecraft stories, and I'm sure "Rule 34" applies here as well. HPL himself is now enshrined in the Modern Library imprint from Random House, which is about as close to an official Canon of American Literature as one can get. I don't think any of that would have happened without the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game.

So how did it happen? How did a game based on the works of a (relatively) obscure author who'd been dead for fifty years become an enduring classic? (The game has now had a longer career than Lovecraft himself did.)

I think the answer is that Call of Cthulhu was the first cerebral roleplaying game. The emphasis wasn't on fighting, or even negotiation and problem-solving. The focus was investigation. In fact, in all the game publications the player characters are called the "Investigators." Call of Cthulhu appealed to people who liked finding out stuff, keeping notes, and making connections. Other games let players be vicariously tough or attractive; Call of Cthulhu lets you be smart. (Of course, being smart in that game is likely to get you killed, which means Call of Cthulhu appeals to players who think that's really neat.)

The game has been a steady seller, spawning variants like the X-Files inspired Delta Green or the pulpy World War II-era Achtung! Cthulhu. Call of Cthulhu itself is now out in a spiffy new Seventh Edition. I haven't tried out the new version. Maybe I'll just go dig in my game closet, pull out my 35-year-old boxed set, and try to drive some Investigators insane.