James L. Cambias's Blog, page 46

My Three Questions

I'm not a very spontaneous writer. If I depend on inspiration it won't turn up at the moment I need it. I have to put a lot of mental brute force into creating stories. Over the years I've developed a set of questions which must be answered before I can write a story. These may be useful to other people interested in fiction, so I'm revealing them here. Naturally, your own approach may differ, and I'm not asserting that these are the One True Way to write science fiction or fantasy.

The Cambias Test

This evolved out of an abortive project back in the 1990s to create an Alternate Histories roleplaying game. I think the creators were hoping to make something like the TV show Sliders, but the trouble with Alternate History is that all discussions eventually veer off into arguments about historical what-if questions.

My contribution was to propose that any Alternate Histories used in the game must allow the characters (and, thus, the players) to have experiences they could not have in our own world, past or present. So if you go to an alternate timeline and solve a murder mystery, that's not any different from staying home and doing the same thing. The adventure must require the alternate history. Maybe it's a world where personal gunfights remain an acceptable way to settle disputes, so the mystery puzzle isn't figuring out who shot the victim, but instead proving that the killer never issued a proper challenge before drawing his weapon.

I called this the "Cambias Test" and it got used as shorthand by others involved in the project before the whole thing kind of disintegrated. It's not actually original to me. C.S. Lewis once spent an essay griping about SF writers who used otherworldly settings to tell ordinary romances or adventures, and of course Horace Gold famously mocked the way pulp SF writers often transposed Westerns to the spaceways in his "Bat Durston" editorial. I'll stick to my own term because it's shorter, and because I'm terribly conceited.

In a science fiction or fantasy story, the Cambias Test is the question "Why is this fantastic setting or element necessary?" Now, this doesn't mean that every single thing in the story has to be important to the plot, but it does mean that the story can't be told without the fantastic elements. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea would not be the same story if Captain Nemo just had a regular sailing ship; his fantastic submarine is what allows him to wage a one-man war of vengeance against civilization.

What Do They Want?

Back in 2005, the legendary playwright David Mamet was producing a TV series about Special Forces soldiers, called The Unit. He sent a memo to the writing staff of the show which has become legendary as a concise three-page guide to writing drama. You can read it here.

Mamet says that in every scene the writers have to ask themselves three questions: "Who Wants What?" "What Happens If Her (sic) Don't Get It?" and "Why Now?" But really those three can be collapsed into the first. In a story (and in real life) characters are driven by desires, fears, and convictions. They want something, or they want to avoid something, or they believe that something is the right thing to do. Again, this isn't original to me; Plato said it first.

Now, the alert reader may have noticed that this question of "Who Wants What?" dovetails very neatly with the Cambias Test question above. If a character wants (or fears, or is morally certain of) something which does not exist in our contemporary world or in the past, then you've got a science fiction or fantasy story right there. Or the character may want/fear/believe something familiar to us, but is placed in a fantastic environment where it is impossible to get what he wants.

Andy Weir's The Martian takes that to about the logical extreme: his character Mark Watney wants to go on living, but he's stuck alone on Mars, a planet full of ways to die. It's a wonderful reversal of Robinson Crusoe: on his island Crusoe has all the fruits of lush Nature at his fingertips, but he struggles to build the tools of civilization. Watney has the most advanced tools of civilization at his disposal, but is on a sterile planet with no food or water.

Who Pays?

My third question is one I've never heard anyone else ask, but it's a good one. "How Do They Afford It?" When I'm writing about space exploration, especially in the near future, it's hard to avoid that question. We haven't sent a human beyond Low Earth Orbit in forty-four years now because of the tremendous expense. If I show astronauts in trouble on Europa, I have to know why someone thought it was worth the expense to send them there. (Or not: in Corsair the space pirate spends his time comfortably in a luxury hotel room in Thailand while commanding a robot spaceship doing the pirating in space.)

So in A Darkling Sea, the humans have a rather lavish presence on the distant world Ilmatar because the governments of Earth are using it as a territorial marker in space, to show their spacefaring alien rivals the Sholen that humans don't require their approval to establish bases beyond the Solar System. It's not a huge plot element, but I knew the answer as I wrote the book, so I had a pretty clear idea of what kind of resources the humans would have at their disposal.

A variant of "How Do They Afford It?" is "Why Didn't They Just . . . ?" If there's an obviously easier or cheaper way to do something (like sending a robot instead of a human astronaut) the author needs to figure out why that method wasn't used. This one retroactively shoots down a lot of classic science fiction stories: when reading Tom Godwin's classic "The Cold Equations," a modern reader's first question is "Why is that ship manned at all? Why not send a drone?"

Other questions arise during the process of writing, including the inevitable "Why I am I doing this at all?" But those three are the ones I think about when beginning a story. When I think of a particularly good answer, I know I've got something.

Nostalgie du Geek: Opening the Traveller Box

My roleplaying game life began with Dungeons & Dragons, because that was the only roleplaying game there was back in the summer of 1977. But that changed very quickly. That same year, Game Designers' Workshop published the first science fiction roleplaying game: Traveller.

I got my copy of Traveller some time in 1978, possibly at Christmas. My parents got it for me on the advice of my older sister, who had friends who played it. She deduced that if I was a big D&D fan despite not liking fantasy fiction very much, just maybe I'd be an even bigger Traveller fan since I loved science fiction.

When I opened that little black box I fell in love. Traveller was just so neat. The compact books, with their clean design and minimalist layout looked much slicker than the Dungeons & Dragons books with their slightly embarassing artwork. And the rules were equally clean and minimalist. Where Dungeons & Dragons was written as an introduction to the hobby for people unfamiliar with the concept, Traveller assumed a more knowledgeable readership. I liked that. I have little patience for being told what I already know, and I had even less when I was thirteen years old.

So what was in that box? Just three books. The first was called Characters and Combat. It had a style of character creation which was new to me ��� you didn't just roll up your six attributes, you worked out that character's entire back history. You listed your attributes using a string of cool "hexadecimal" characters, where 10 became "A" and 11 became "B" and so on. So your character's stats became a nifty little string of digits like "7669A8" or "6778C6" or whatever. Your history could be twenty or thirty years in the space navy, or as a merchant, or a soldier, a scout, or the mysterious "Other" career.

If you know anything about Traveller, you know that the career history character generation system included the possibility for your character to die before play actually began. Other people found that baffling but I loved it. It made character generation into a game in and of itself: the chance of death meant you had to balance that risk against the possible rewards of remaining in a dangerous service for multiple tours of duty. Without the risk, all Traveller characters would be 65-year-old retired admirals who are supplementing their pensions with smuggling and light thuggery.

The second book was Starships. It had rules for designing spacecraft, which meant picking the right combination of drive speed, interstellar range, weapons, and cargo capacity. It also had a space combat system based on vector movement ��� which is to say, Newtonian physics. Between developing algebraic tools to optimize my spaceship designs (no personal computer, no spreadsheet software back then) and the basic physics of the space battle system, that game vastly improved my math and science abilities. I was using the things I was taught in school.

The third book was called Worlds and Adventures. It was all about creating planets, planetary societies, ecosystems, and trade networks. That book had a profound influence on my life. I've re-written it twice, once for HERO Games and once for Steve Jackson. I studied astronomy in college because of that book. My science fiction gets praised for my world-building because of that book.

I ran Traveller games for my friends for the next couple of years. I never used GDW's "Third Imperium" setting because they hadn't really published that when I started. But I did use a fair number of the published adventures, which meant I wound up doing some rewriting to shoehorn them into my own fictional campaign universe.

One interesting feature of Traveller was that it had no "experience points." Your character was already a veteran of many adventures when play began, so there wasn't really any room for self-improvement. Instead, the emphasis was purely on material rewards: the PCs (one can't really call them "heroes") were out to get rich. And get rich they did. Especially when my players came up with the extremely clever idea of incorporating the game group as a partnership ��� which meant that even though individual characters might die, their wealth and possessions lived on. I commend this approach to all roleplayers as a way to keep those magic items from vanishing.

The only store in New Orleans which sold Traveller books (at first, anyway) was Hub Hobbies on Broad Street. That shop was about three and a half miles from my house by bike, and I made that seven-mile round trip almost every weekend to see what new GDW merchandise had turned up in the mildewy cardboard boxes on the shelf there.

I even dreamed once, very vividly, about a new Traveller product ��� not just a book but a whole new product line ��� with distinctive multicolored covers. I distinctly remember the sense (in the dream) of great excitement and anticipation as I found a whole box of those new Traveller books. But of course, in the dream I couldn't read them. My dreaming brain could imagine the covers, but wasn't quite clever enough to generate new game book text for me. (I had to do that myself, when awake.)

Traveller changed my gaming in another way, too: I started creating game adventures as stories rather than as "dungeons." I started paying more attention to how stories were put together. Would I have become a writer if I hadn't played Traveller? I can't say. But I am willing to bet that I would be a very different writer if I hadn't. So since I owe much of who I am and what I do to the game they created, I'd like to thank the men who made Traveller: Marc Miller, Loren Wiseman, Frank Chadwick. They changed my life and I'm grateful.

The Long History of Spin-Offs

It is practically a cliche to complain that modern movies and television are creatively bankrupt. I won't argue the point. But one piece of evidence often used to support that notion is the reliance of Hollywood and TV on spinoffs ��� shows or movies built around characters introduced in another show or movie. Trouble is, spinoffs are not a new development, and were just as common during times of great creativity.

First, a clarification. There's a sneaky method used in the TV industry, in which a character is introduced into an existing show (typically a hit series) solely in order to serve as an "embedded pilot" for a show about that character. One example famous among Trekkies is the old Star Trek episode "Assignment: Earth," which centered on the mysterious time and space traveler "Gary Seven," along with his goofy Sixties secretary and his cat (who might have been a shapeshifting alien). The only reason Gary & co. appeared on Star Trek at all was to piggyback on the success of Kirk & co.

Another example is the 1970s sitcom All in the Family, which famously spawned several spinoffs, including The Jeffersons and Maude. But while Sherman Hemsley as George Jefferson was a semi-regular character on All in the Family before getting his own show, Bea Arthur as Maude Finley appeared in exactly two episodes. I suspect those were more of an example of embedded pilots than an actual spinoff.

Anyway.

Once you start looking, it turns out that spinoffs predate television. The "Ma and Pa Kettle" series of movie comedies, which ran from 1947 to 1957, were spinoffs. The Kettles originally appeared as supporting characters in the Fred MacMurray-Claudette Colbert comedy The Egg and I, and were so popular they got their own movies.

The same thing happened with the "Dead End Kids" (a.k.a. the Bowery Boys, a.k.a. the East Side Kids, a.k.a. the Little Tough Guys) ��� Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, and half a dozen other youthful actors. They started out as fairly serious supporting characters in the 1935 Broadway play Dead End. The actors playing the Kids reprised their roles in the 1937 movie of the same name . . . and then went on to play the same characters in more than sixty movies over the next twenty-odd years, until the "Kids" were eligible to join the AARP.

Across the Atlantic, the 1938 film The Lady Vanishes featured two comic-but-adventurous cricket enthusiasts called Charters and Caldicott (played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford). They were so popular that they were brought back for the movie Night Train to Munich* and ten more films over the next decade, plus a radio series.

But to find the original spinoff we have to go much farther back.

In or around 1597, a chap named William Shakespeare (you may have heard of him) wrote Henry IV, Part 1. To relieve the somewhat numbing historical drama of the play he created his best-known comic character, the dissolute but charming Sir John Falstaff. If you're not familiar with the character, read the play.

Falstaff returned in Henry IV, Part 2 (along with just about all the other characters), and proved so popular that Shakespeare decided to spin him off into his own play, The Merry Wives of Windsor. A charming legend (not recorded until a century later) claims that Elizabeth I herself insisted that Shakespeare write another play about Falstaff ��� there being no network or studio executives available in the Sixteenth Century.

Personally, I suspect there were probably spinoffs well before Shakespeare wrote Merry Wives of Windsor. In any serial medium, creators will find a way to squeeze some more audience interest out of any popular character. The results may be good or bad, but don't say much one way or the other about the creative bankruptcy of the medium.

*An absolutely mind-boggling movie. It's got Rex Harrison as the most hilariously mis-cast super-spy in cinema, Paul Henreid as the evil doppelganger of his Casablanca character Victor Laszlo, and poor Charters and Caldicott left to do the actual heroics in the film.

Appalachian Spring, or Not

One of my favorite pieces of music is Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. I often listen to it while driving, but the last time I did that I realized something which had been scratching at the back of my brain for years: Appalachian Spring doesn't sound much like the Appalachians.

The main theme is a Shaker hymn, "Simple Gifts." The Shakers settled in New England, then spread through upstate New York to the Ohio River valley. They don't seem to have spent much time in the Appalachians*, and certainly the pious, celibate, teetotaling Shakers are not what comes to mind when one thinks of mountain folk.

In Copland's piece, the main theme based on that hymn is played on a flute, which is not one of the iconic instruments of Appalachian music. Where's the fiddle solo? Or the dulcimer? It's particularly jarring because Appalachia is a part of the country with its own strong and distinctive musical tradition; one could write anything and call it a "Rocky Mountain Suite" or "Sierra Nevada Concerto." Those mountains don't have a characteristic sound.

Aaron Copland was born in New York, studied in Paris and Rome, and traveled widely during his life. But I can't find any evidence that he actually visited the Appalachians at all (he may have ridden through them by train). It's a shame, really: when one hears how he adapted Western or Mexican styles it makes one wish to hear what he could have done with the sounds of mountain music. Of course, one can't blame him for the non-Appalachianity of Appalachian Spring; apparently when Martha Graham commissioned the work from him she hadn't chosen a title yet. So I guess it's her fault that the piece called Appalachian Spring is about the least Appalachian-sounding piece of American music.

*I'm aware that the mountains of New England are geologically part of the Appalachian chain, but nobody ever calls the Green Mountains or the White Mountains or the Berkshires "the Appalachians." They have their own identity. Plus, that mountain chain would also have to include the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, the Highlands of Scotland, and the mountains of Greenland and Scandinavia. So there.

Another Political Paradox

I've already mentioned that solidly loyal states are at a disadvantage in modern American politics, but there's another paradox I've noticed: Elections are determined by the people who don't care much about politics.

After all, the party faithful are the ones who care. The ones who read political blogs and listen to Rachel Maddow or Rush Limbaugh and forward emails to their friends and post inspiring stories on Facebook and react to things on Twitter. But those people aren't the ones who the candidates have to win over. They're in the bag.

The people who actually decide are the people who don't pay attention to politics until a couple of weeks before the election. The apathetic, the ignorant, or the uninterested.

This is where I'm supposed to deplore this state of affairs, but I won't. I actually think this is a good thing. Politics shouldn't be the most important thing in our lives. It shouldn't consume our attention day in and day out. It shouldn't drive us into a rage or despair because of something someone said somewhere about something.

Those apathetic "low information voters" are the smart ones. They understand that one's own life should be more important than the antics of politicians and their media shills. They understand that politics should not be a constant looming presence. That is true wisdom.

It's the smart, concerned, well-informed people who are idiots.

Perfection

Some time ago I was making a long trip by car on a summer weekend, and so as I drove I could see a number of families enjoying the nice weather with back yard cookouts. It made me realize something.

We will never know who made (or who ate) the greatest hamburger ever. It may have already been done, or it could happen next year, or decades from now (at least until backyard cookouts are forbidden).

Assume it has already happened. Somewhere, probably in the United States ��� this isn't chauvinism; we cook more hamburgers here than people do elsewhere ��� some barbecuing enthusiast made the perfect patty. Maybe he mixed in some salt and pepper and onion powder, perhaps a dash of Worcestershire Sauce. He grilled it just the right amount of time (either from long experience or lucky chance). He probably toasted the bun on the grill beside it (and we know that he spent a little extra to get good buns at the bakery, because this is the perfect hamburger).

The lucky recipient put the toppings on, and again either by skill or chance picked some sliced red onion, a dab of brown mustard, pickles, not too much ketchup, and a thick slice of homegrown tomato.

Did whoever ate that perfect burger even notice? Did he or she thank the barbecue enthusiast? Maybe say, "That was a really good burger!" Perhaps.

But I doubt either the cook or the lucky person who ate it even remembered a few hours later. Years later the person who ate it might reminisce about how good the burgers were at the barbecue enthusiast's place. The barbecue enthusiast who made it might try to replicate his success, but the elements will never be quite right again ��� the tomatoes won't be perfectly ripe in the yard that morning, the bakery stops making those buns, the fire in the grill is too hot.

Who made that perfect burger? Was it in a suburban back yard, or a hibachi on a city-dweller's balcony, or a portable grill on the beach? We'll never know. Just as we'll never know who made the perfect hot dog, or the best pot of chili ever, or the Platonic ideal of lasagne. Musical performances or athletic events can be recorded, books and paintings endure and can be copied, but food is transitory. The very act of experiencing a perfect meal destroys it.

Someday perhaps I will make something perfect. A batch of meat sauce for pasta, or the ultimate brown cabbage. And no one will ever know.

What are you cooking today?

That Show I Watched

This week marks the 50th anniversary of two science fiction icons. One is me, the other is Star Trek. Since we're practically twins, I feel as though I can be brutally honest about the show, the universe, and what has become of them.

First of all, it always surprises me how unfamiliar people are with the original Star Trek series (the "Old Show"). In many of the anniversary bloviations this week I've seen writers who should know better talking about the series's swashbuckling action. That's hogwash. If you go back and look at old TV listings from the period, you see Star Trek described as "drama." There was no category for science fiction, it obviously wasn't a western, a comedy, or a cop show ��� and it wasn't action-adventure, either. The famous shirt-tearing Captain Kirk fistfights happened only a handful of times in the three years of the show's run. Most episodes required William Shatner to do nothing more strenuous than sit in a large chair and furrow his brow.

Star Trek was similar to many TV shows of the 1960s: it was secretly an anthology show. The Enterprise, Kirk, Spock ��� they were all just the frame, like Rod Serling addressing the viewer at the beginning of every Twilight Zone episode. The actual stories focused on the guest stars. They played characters caught in some dramatic conflict, and the arrival of Kirk & co. were the triggering event for the story. They were the ones who were changed by the experience; Kirk et al flew off into the sunset at the end unaffected by the past hour's drama.

When the series was reincarnated with Patrick Steward as Captain Picard aboard a bigger, computer-animated Enterprise, the shows mostly followed that same format ��� although elements of ongoing soap opera interactions among the regular characters began to creep in, following the general trend of all television series in the 1990s. But by and large, the focus was on the guest stars and their self-contained dramas, as before. Why tinker with success?

The movies required a different approach. A movie needs to feel "bigger" than a TV episode, and that meant the films had to tackle bigger subjects. And since the stars of the TV show had to be the stars of the movies, there was no way their characters could remain aloof and fly off at the end unaffected. The movies had to be about them in a way the TV episodes generally were not.

The first movie (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) was pretty obviously a rewritten and savagely padded pilot episode for a relaunch of the series. Much time is spent introducing characters ��� including several "first drafts" of characters who later appeared on the Next Generation TV show. The story was a fairly standard TV episode (in fact, some unkind critics pointed out that it was essentially the Old Show episode "The Changeling"), pumped up to feature length with some frankly tiresome special-effects sequences and a lot of rather pointless "character moments" unrelated to the plot.

But then, ah, Wrath of Khan, the second movie. Evidently the director, Nicholas Meyer, read Gene Roddenberry's original pitch to the network back in 1964, that Star Trek would be "Captain Hornblower in space." Meyer went to his shelf, took down C.S. Forester's original Hornblower novel Beat to Quarters, and proceeded to translate it to outer space. Hornblower became Kirk, the deranged El Supremo became Khan Noonian Singh, and since everyone was getting a little too old for Forester's romance subplot, Meyer added an old lover and a long-lost son for Kirk. To cover his tracks he threw in some quotes from Moby Dick and proceeded to make one of the best space opera movies ever.

And that success, that near-perfect Trek movie, has (I'm sorry to say) poisoned the well. All subsequent Trek movies have been variations on Wrath of Khan. Some Bad Person, usually with a personal connection to Kirk or one of the other crew, has an Insane Villainous Plan involving a doomsday weapon, and our heroes have to stop him. This often involves wrecking the Enterprise. The films have added more and more emphasis on action-adventure rather than drama.

So, now that we're both looking at the big Five-O, I have some advice for my contemporary: stop trying to be what you're not, Star Trek. You're too old to be running around acting like an action movie franchise. Get back to the things that made everyone respect you when we were young. Find some talented guest stars, throw them into dramatic situations, and see how they resolve things. Best of all, you don't even need the frame any more. Everyone on Earth knows at least the basics of the Star Trek universe. You can tell stories in that setting with no starship dropping by before the opening credits. Call it "Tales of the Federation" or something. Leave the space opera to That Other Franchise, and do what you do best.   

Sandbox or Quest? Yes.

The style of a game campaign mirrors the fictional genres it is based on. The original Dungeons & Dragons was inspired by two strands of fantasy. The first was the fantasy adventures of Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Fritz Leiber ��� tales of roguish wanderers more or less stumbling across situations and resolving them with courage and steel (in the case of Burroughs's John Carter, he's a noble wanderer).

In short, they were a series of what gamers would call "random encounters." In "Red Nails" Howard's Conan is fleeing an enemy army (with the inevitable beautiful girl in tow), finds a lost city in the jungle, gets involved in the endless bloody feud of the inhabitants, fights a bunch of people, and eventually leaves. In The Eyes of the Overworld, Vance's Cugel is trying to bring a magical lens back to the wizard who sent him halfway across the planet. He goes from city to city, attempting to con the locals, but only sometimes succeeding.

Us professional writer types have a professional writer-type word for that kind of fiction: "picaresque." The term comes from the Spanish word picaro, or rogue. A picaresque story is literally a rogue's journey from one self-contained situation to the next. Us professional game designer types have a professional game designer-type word for that kind of roleplaying adventure: "sandbox." In a sandbox campaign, the gamemaster (or game designer) has created a setting with various monsters, conflicts, rumors, intrigues, and mysteries. The characters can explore the setting and choose which hooks to follow up. (Like kids playing in a sandbox, hence the name.)

The second strand of fantasy inspiring D&D was, of course, Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings. This has become the template for a whole subgenre: the quest fantasy. A quest fantasy differs from a picaresque one in that the heroes have a particular goal, and all the events of the journey (well, most of them) relate directly to accomplishing that purpose.

The Fellowship of the Ring fight various monsters and escape deadly perils, but nearly all of them are either minions of their terrible enemy Sauron (and his ally Saruman), or evil beings drawn to the power of the Ring Frodo is carrying. At no point do they wander into a village and try to cheat the local headman out of the price of a fancy dinner, or stop on an island where iron-skinned giants turn captives into weird shrunken dolls.

Naturally, the quest has its own reflection in roleplaying. It's a standard way to motivate the characters, and thus their players. The gamemaster can assign them a quest, and then throw obstacles at them until they accomplish it. It's especially popular as the "spine" for an extended series of episodes on the road.

The two approaches have their own strengths and weaknesses.

A sandbox encourages player agency. They get to decide what the characters' goals are goign to be. Ovethrow the tyrant? Put down the rebels? Defeat the evil cult? Stop the pirates? Join the pirates?

This agency and the lack of an obvious "story plot" can give the players a sense that their characters are adventuring in a real place and interacting with real people, whose lives don't stop when the heroes aren't around. But there's a disadvantage: the players may be paralyzed by indecision. What should they do? Too many choices!

Another problem common to sandboxes is that the player characters are likely to be bit players. After all, in the real world none of us are the most powerful people, so a band of random adventurers probably won't be the greatest warriors or magicians in the game setting. This can lead to the heroes getting their butts handed to them too many times, creating frustration for the players.

Finally, sandbox settings reward exploration and taking notes. The heroes can learn about the game world, form connections with NPCs, and uncover secrets ��� but players sometimes have trouble remembering the names of the other PCs, let alone that rumor they heard about the innkeeper three weeks ago. They may want to just show up and play, without memorizing the members of the ruling oligarchy and their ancient rivalries. Meanwhile the gamemaster has put so much damned work into his setting and wants to make sure the players can appreciate his genius! What do you mean you don't remember that House Foo has always been the deadly enemies of House Bar? I told you only six sessions ago! That's why the innkeeper betrayed you! He had green eyes, which obviously means he's descended from House Foo! I told you he had green eyes when you ordered your drinks!

By contrast a quest has one goal. Find/destroy/steal/activate the Magical Thingy, or kill/rescue/locate the Chosen One from the prophecy, or whatever. That keeps the players focused, but it also means that if they don't really want to do the quest, they're out of luck. It also promotes the feeling that the setting is simply the stage for their story rather than a living world.

The biggest single problem with a quest is that it can lead to "railroading." The gamemaster has come up with a series of encounters on the way to the big climax, and by God the players are going to have those encounters. If they come up with a clever way to skip ahead to the end, the gamemaster may try to thwart them in order to keep things "on track" rather than reward their creativity. I'm sorry, a storm comes up and blows your ship back to Portville. Looks like you'll have to take the Dragon Road through the Haunted Forest after all. Oops, an early snow has closed the mountain passes. The only way you can go is the Dragon Road through the Haunted Forest. Your teleport spell doesn't work. Just follow the damned road already!

Despite their pitfalls, neither approach is wrong. I have used both structures in games with success. Different games may work better with one structure or the other: certainly a "low fantasy" Robert E. Howard-style game is a natural match for a sandbox structure (though even Conan went on a few quests in his time; see The Hour of the Dragon for one example). And if you're running a Tolkein-influenced game a quest is practically mandatory. Science fiction games about scruffy merchants or mercenaries lend themselves to sandboxing, while young Space Knights can fly off on an intergalactic quest.

Until recently I would have said that horror games are a poor match for the sandbox style; after all, a horror story typically encourages a sense of mounting menace until the source of the horror is finally revealed. It's a quest, except that the object of the quest is scary and horrible. But recent game sourcebooks like The Armitage Files or The Dracula Dossier have shown how to use a sandbox style structure for horror adventures.

I've seen first-hand that the different structures appeal more to different types of players. Players who like to feel as though they're in a fantasy novel always enjoy a quest, while the ones who constantly "play tourist" in your game world will have fun in a sandbox. The "Method Actor" players who like acting out their interactions can go for either: a quest allows heroic sacrifices, betrayal, and all the drama of world-shaking events; but a sandbox lets them use all the stuff they put on that long character backstory page.

Players who just want to fight will probably prefer the clear goals of a quest, although if there are others in the party willing to keep track of the minutiae of the sandbox the butt-kickers will happily let them decide who the party's going to fight this week. "Strategist" players may appreciate the opportunity to understand and manipulate a sandbox setting, once they've decided what the objective is.

Players who enjoy "leveling up" and gaining power in the game world are likely to enjoy the opportunities for gaining social influence and wealth in a sandbox, although the notion of Saving The World on a big-deal quest can attract them (especially if there's a chance of keeping the Magical Thingy or looting the Dark Lord's treasury).

So: tailor the game structure to the genre and the players. The goal, after all, is for everyone to have fun. That is the only One True Way to do it: the fun way.

Congratulations Dragon Award Winners!

For several years now I've been telling everyone who'll listen that the major awards for science fiction and fantasy were in danger of becoming too obscure. The Nebulas are selected by the membership of SFWA, but don't get much publicity because (sadly) the organization isn't well-known outside the fraternity of SF professionals.

The Hugo Award is theoretically the wide-open fan award, chosen by the members of the annual Worldcon ��� but (equally sadly) the Worldcon has been eclipsed by the rise of the mega-conventions like the San Diego and New York Comic-Cons, and Atlanta's legendary Dragon-Con. Where the Worldcon has a membership around 4,000 people, these big new conventions bring in 75,000 or 100,000 fans ��� most of whom have never heard of SFWA, the World Science Fiction Convention, the Hugo, or the Nebula.

I've been urging that the Nebula Awards be given out at one of the mega-conventions. SFWA can still choose the winner, but the ceremony would be much more public, and maybe even boost the sales of the nominees. But people don't like to change their cosy ways of doing things.

So now it may be too late. This year Dragon-Con inaugurated the Dragon Awards, voted on by thousands of fans, not just limited to even the immense Dragon-Con membership list. Anyone can participate, and apparently a great many people did. The results were announced at Dragon-Con in Atlanta this weekend:

Best SF Novel: Somewhither, by John C. Wright

Best Fantasy Novel: Son of the Black Sword, by Larry Correia

Best Young Adult Novel: The Shepherd's Crown, by Sir Terry Pratchett

Best Military SF Novel: Hell's Foundations Quiver, by David Weber

Best Alternate History Novel: League of Dragons, by Naomi Novik

Best Apocalyptic Novel: Ctrl-Alt-Revolt! by Nick Cole

Best Horror Novel: Souldancer, by Brian Niemeier

Best Comic Book: Ms. Marvel (Marvel Comics)

Best Graphic Novel: The Sandman: Overture, by Neil Gaiman

Best SF/Fantasy TV Series: Game of Thrones

Best SF/Fantasy Movie:  The Martian

Best PC or Console Game: Fallout 4 (Bethesda)

Best Mobile Game: Fallout Shelter (Bethesda)

Best Board Game: Pandemic: Legacy (ZMan Games)

Best Roleplaying Game: Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition (Chaosium)

Congratulations to all of this year's winners!

 

 

 

Greetings, Fellow Cyborgs!

I write science fiction, and one enduring trope of science fiction is the idea of combining humans and machines ��� "cyborgs," to use the term popularized in the 1960s. The notion is far older, going back to Neil R. Jones's "Professor Jameson" stories, if not to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man That Was Used Up." Those two works neatly embody the two ways that science fiction has used the cyborg idea.

In Poe's tale the artificial parts of his fictional General John A.B.C. Smith conceal the fact that there is almost nothing left of him after his many campaigns. Smith is less than a man. This type of cyborg became more and more common in fiction as society became more industrialized and people worried about dehumanization by technology. A machine-man was a dandy symbol for that.

The other ancestral cyborgs, Neil Jones's alien "Zoromes" are the flip side of the dehumanized or "used up" human patched together with mechanical parts. The Zoromes are superhuman, immortal, and benevolent. Their artificial bodies let them venture out into the universe to explore strange new worlds, seek out new life and new civilizations, and boldly go where no machine-men have gone before. This was in 1931, by the way.

We see those two threads run through science fiction right to the present ��� dire warning of dehumanization versus utopian vision of transhumanism.

But both visions miss something really important: we've been cyborgs all along!

No, I'm not talking about eyeglasses, or even clothing (though both are perfectly good examples of low-tech "cyborg" equipment). I'm talking about something much more fundamental and universal: cooking.

When you cook food, you're using an external energy source (fire) to make the food easier to digest. You're breaking down protein and cellulose molecules before putting anything in your mouth. You're also warming it up ��� very important during those long Ice Age winter nights. All of those things require energy to accomplish, and if you don't cook with fire you have to supply that energy from your own body.

Let's put it into science-fictional terminology: "The inhabitants of Earth have become so dependent on technology that they are unable to eat most natural foods. Everything they consume must be processed using chemical energy, specialized devices, and chemicals." If that isn't a race of cyborgs I don't know what is!

Being able to tap external power sources is not a trivial advantage. It allowed humans to survive the Ice Age in Europe, Asia, and North America. It doubled or tripled human lifespan: a human whose teeth have worn out can still eat if the food is cooked enough. This allows those elders to pass on knowledge or look after the children while the younger adults are out hunting and gathering.

This is why I don't worry about the "dehumanizing effects of technology." Technology is the thing that makes us human.