James L. Cambias's Blog, page 47

The Joy of Research

My name is Jim, and I'm addicted to doing research.

There. I've said it and I'm not sorry, either. When I'm cured of this addiction just put me in the ground because I'm done.

How bad is my research addiction? Let me tell you my shame. For a while I played an online game called "Supremacy 1914." It's a strategic-level game supposedly based on World War I (although the actual gameplay is a lot more mobile than the actual Great War). As the game progresses, you can build factories and accumulate resources needed to construct more powerful weapons and vehicles for your armies.

The most powerful weapons are battleships (at sea), and railroad artillery pieces (on land). Because they're so powerful and expensive ��� and because of historical precedent ��� players can give names to their warships and superguns. At one point I was playing the game, and my starting nation was Romania. I did well in that game; Romania conquered the Balkans, expanded north into Austro-Hungarian territory, and worked out a partition of Turkey with the aggressive Egyptians.

My mighty Greater Romania could afford battleships and railroad guns, so I started building them. Which meant I needed to come up with names for them. For the battleships, it was obvious: I named them for Kings of Romania, and rulers of Wallachia, the predecessor principality of Romania. But for the cannons, I wanted something cooler. I wanted dragons.

So I spent more than an hour cruising the Web, hunting for the names of mythical Romanian dragons to use as names for cannons. In a game. Note that most of the other players didn't use the name function at all, or gave things names like "Battleship 1." Nobody cared about this but me, but I wanted to get it right.

But research also pays off in more than wasted time and abject geekery. A few years ago I was writing a novel about spies investigating supernatural goings-on in Ireland during World War II. I needed some non-supernatural pretext for the American government to send their team of investigators to Ireland. I read book after book about Ireland during "the Emergency" as the Irish government quaintly called it.

And then the answer dropped right into my lap. The wartime American ambassador to the Irish Republic was David Gray, Eleanor Roosevelt's uncle. Mr. Gray was apparently a rather ineffectial ambassador ��� and a devotee of Spiritualism. He had seances with an Irish medium and talked to famous dead people including his relative by marriage Theodore Roosevelt.

Perfect! An ambassador chatting with dead Presidents with an Irish national would be an obvious security leak worth investigating (and one worth investigating secretly to avoid embarrassing the Roosevelts). It could lead my characters into a web of real (well, "real" in the story, anyway) supernatural goings-on.

There's another example in a project I'm still working on. I'm sending some characters on a long space voyage to rescue an isolated outpost, but when they get there the outpost has mysteriously vanished. I thought of simply inventing a star system, but then one afternoon I spent several hours skimming through a database of exoplanets ��� real planets astronomers have identified in other star systems.

A few of them have even been given names, because even astronomers get tired of talking about worlds called "NLTT 41135-b" or "HD 87646A-b." One of the named systems is 55 Cancri, which has recently been rechristened Copernicus, after the pioneering cosmologist. Its planets have also been given names, honoring other astronomical greats: Janssen, Galileo, Brahe, Harriot, and Lipperhey.

Harriot caught my attention, because the astronomer Thomas Harriot was an Elizabethan-era scientist, a friend of Walter Raleigh . . . and the chief scientist on Raleigh's expedition to Virginia in 1585. That expedition scouted out a colony site on Roanoke Island, which was settled by a follow-up expedition in 1587 (which Harriot was not part of). We all know what happened to that colony, right?

Actually nobody knows what happened, except that the Roanoke colony disappeared mysteriously before the next expedition could arrive in 1590. So the planet Harriot is a perfect place to put my own "Lost Colony." (Actually I'm going to use an imaginary moon of Harriot, since the planet itself is a Jupiter-sized world where humans can't live.) I never would have found that without doing my homework. When you make stuff up, you're limited by your imagination. But real history can be crazier than anything you can imagine. When in doubt: research!

Nostalgie du Geek: My First Dungeons and Dragons Game

I've been playing roleplaying games for 39 years now. A friend showed me his copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set in the summer 1977 and I was hooked right away. I believe I got my first set for my birthday that Fall. Given that it saw the publication of D&D and the global release of Star Wars, 1977 was one of the great landmark years in geek culture, up there with 1939 and 1984.

In those days, the game didn't come with a sample adventure. Instead it contained the rules, dice (I still have a very worn-down green 8-sided die which came with that set), a set of "geomorphic dungeon maps" (you can see what they looked like here), and printed sheets listing monsters and treasure.

Our earliest adventures were entirely unstructured, not unlike a video game: the character (or characters once we could manage to get together to play in a group) enter a dungeon, fight monsters, and get treasure.

But within a matter of months we started to fill in the background. We drew maps of 8 1/2" by 11" continents and worlds, all heavily influenced by the endpaper maps in Tolkein's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I continually raided my parents' office-supply drawers in search of graph paper, and burned up a lot of nickels photocopying character sheets and pages of hex paper.

The characters we played were not the optimized, carefully-designed PCs one sees nowadays in games like Pathfinder. You rolled the dice to generate the six attributes, and tried to come up with some character class those scores might fit. Assigning numbers or doing some kind of "point buy" would have seemed like cheating. To be frank, I rather looked down on some of my friends who spent hours rolling up endless series of characters in order to get one with superior scores in every attribute.

Dungeon Mastering was frankly antagonistic: the DM was playing against the players. None of this huggy Millennial tomfoolery about "collaborative storytelling." The Dungeon Master was out to kill the characters, and resorted to all sorts of tricks to do it. There were whole books full of absurdly lethal traps (like these). This kind of "killer DM" behavior had precedent from the august Gary himself: the legendary unfair deathtrap dungeon "Tomb of Horrors."

It's important to note that there was still a social contract in force. The DM couldn't just say "you're dead." He (and in those days ALL of us were "he" ��� I didn't see a girl at a gaming table for another six years) could make up deadly traps, invent new monsters, and cursed magical items to throw at the players, but the rules had to be followed. That new monster (I was particularly proud of the Steel Dragon I invented) could have absurdly high stats, but if a player rolled well, the monster was killable.

Another saving factor was sheer incompetence. None of us knew all the rules, but the players could master the specifics of their own characters while the bloodthirst-but-naive Dungeon Master didn't always understand what his own creations were capable of. Monsters which should have wiped out entire parties without breaking into a sweat went down easily because they forgot to use their most powerful abilities. 

My friends and I played D&D off and on through junior high. I got a copy of Traveller in 1978 or '79, and that quickly took hold of my science fiction fan's soul. And then in 1981 Call of Cthulhu came out and became my primary game for the rest of high school. Both of them were more structured than our old "kick in the door" D&D games. I started to pay attention to things like plot and character motivations.

But nostalgia has a powerful pull. For about six months now I've been running a weekly Pathfinder session at my local game store, trying to re-create some of the freewheeling feel of those old marathon D&D games of the late 1970. It's quite liberating for me: I don't have to put a lot of mental effort into creating a "story" for my players. I just make up a list of random encounters and let them meet people and monsters and choose what to do. So far that has resulted in a revolution, a city sacked by pirates, and several buildings burned to the ground (because nothing says "player characters were here" like smoldering rubble).

The game goes on . . .

MidAmeriCon II, Day 4!

Sunday was a light day for me, and for everyone else as the con wound down. Lots of people standing in hotel lobbies having conversations while holding suitcases. My only event on the 21st was a panel on "How To Start A Writing Group" which went extremely well. I was the moderator, and my panelists did all the work. I think we may have started at least one Kansas City area writing group during the panel, as I saw some addresses being exchanged in the audience. If one of those writers becomes the next Gene Wolfe, I want a share of the credit.

Because I had lots of time, it was a lovely day, and I'm a cheapskate, I took the city bus to the airport instead of a cab or hotel van. It cost all of $1.50 and took exactly an hour. If you want to see some of Kansas City's service roads and suburban strip malls, take along a camera. 

Final Thoughts:

��� The Convention Center felt way too big for this convention. Most of the programming could probably have been accommodated by the function spaces in one or more hotels. I get the impression that the organizers were expecting more people ��� not an unreasonable expectation given the size of last year's meeting in London.

��� Only about 4,000 people showed up. I think that makes this the smallest WorldCon I've attended. I don't know if there was any big event in competition with it, or fans have been alienated by the incessant wrangling of recent years.

��� Kansas City was great. I found myself wishing I had left myself an extra day at the end for more tourism. The city has apparently put a ton of money into revitalizing downtown and it seems to be working.

��� The con-goers are aging. The most common hair color was grey, and I saw more mobility scooters than hall costumes. (This last despite a large number of prominent and vaguely offensive "COSPLAY IS NOT CONSENT" posters warning people not to take pictures of costumers.) This is a serious problem, it's not going away, and it would be a shame to see one of science fiction's greatest traditions die on the vine. Perhaps WorldCon should merge with one of the big media cons?

��� Futurist Robin Hanson wrote about his WorldCon experience on his blog, so you can compare his take with mine.

��� I had a lot of fun and the whole event seemed to go very smoothly. I'm sure there were crises and near-disasters which gave the convention organizers conniptions, but none of that was visible from my end. Congratulations to the Con Committee and the volunteers!

��� Next year, in Helsinki.

 

MidAmeriCon II, Day 3!

Saturday was a light-schedule day for me. I had a swim and a reasonably-priced breakfast at the Silver Spoon Diner across the street from my hotel, then went to the convention center to do a reading.

I read two stories, "Parsifal (Prix Fixe)" which ran originally in F&SF, and "A Right Jolly Old . . . " which appeared this past spring in the anthology Conspiracy! Afterward I answered some questions and talked about how the stories came to be (partly because I had thought the time slot was only 30 minutes and so had plenty of time to fill).

Once that was done I took another turn through the exhibit area and then sat in on a very interesting panel about "The Future of Cities."

In the afternoon fellow CSFW member Alexander Jablokov and I went to the World War I museum near Kansas City's Union Station (the station itself is also worth a visit). The museum is built into the hill beneath the amazing World War I memorial, and does a great job of explaining that most pointless of wars.

Riding the trolley back from the museum we spotted a steakhouse called Anton's which looked like a place worth trying. So after a stop at the hotel, Mr. Jablokov and I went back there for dinner, accompanied by fellow SF writers Mark Tiedemann and Rick Wilber. The steaks were huge and delicious.

Apparently by playing hooky I missed this year's fireworks: the expulsion of Black Gate editor Dave Truesdale from the convention after he delivered a long rant about the state of short fiction and the harm done by political correctness, at a panel on the state of short fiction he was moderating. Since I wasn't there I can't comment on the accuracy of his statements or whether he was being disruptive enough to warrant being kicked out of the con.

I will note that on a purely tactical level, expelling someone who complains that there's an insular clique within science fiction which is trying to silence dissenting voices doesn't really disprove what he's saying.

Anyway, congratulations to this year's Hugo Award winners:

N.K. Jemisin (best novel)

Nnedi Okorafor (best novella)

Hao Jingfang (best novelette)

Naomi Kritzer (best short story)

Neil Gaiman and J.H. Williams III (best graphic story)

The Martian, directed by Ridley Scott (best dramatic presentation, long form)

Jessica Jones episode "AKA Smile" (best dramatic presentation, short form)

Ellen Datlow (best editor, short form)

Sheila Gilbert (best editor, long form)

Abigail Larson (best professional artist)

Uncanny Magazine (best "semiprozine")

File 770 (best "fanzine")

Mike Glyer (best fan writer)

Steve Styles (best fan artist)

Andy Weir (Campbell Award for best new writer)

MidAmeriCon II, Day 2!

I got up early and had a swim in the hotel pool and a substantial breakfast (the breakfast menu at the Kansas City Marriott Downtown is an exact duplicate of the breakfast menu at the Boston Westin Waterfront hotel, which implies they both buy from the same food-supply company).

Then off to the convention center for my first panel of the day: "Oceans, the Wettest Frontier," moderated by Chris Weuve, with Laurel Ann Hill, Patricia MacEwen, and Alyx Dellamonica as well as myself. We talked about the odd sub-genre of ocean colonization stories from the 1970s, various ecological perils, and the odd way that surface ships (as opposed to submarines) only turn up in postapocalyptic science fiction.

I spent the next hour taking a turn through the vast exhibits hall, where I bought three or four books ��� including Lewis Pulsipher's book Game Design and a collection of essays on silent films by Kage Baker. I stopped in to see the final half of an utterly fascinating presentation on "The History of the Book."

After which it was time for my Kaffeeklatsch. That's a convention event at which fans can sign up to have a conversation with one of the guests (you have to supply your own coffee). In the past I've spent some Kaffeeklatsch sessions sitting wanly at an empty table, but this time I got to have a wide-ranging chat with SF editor/reviewer Rich Horton.

During a free hour after we were done Klatsching I got lunch at a food truck outside the convention center, sampling some Kansas City style barbecue. I'm still planning to have a go at a sit-down barbecue place, but the chopped brisket sandwich was quite good.

My final event for Friday was a panel on "Appreciating the Pulps," moderated by Mike Shepherd Moscoe and featuring myself, my fellow writer Scott Lynch, and the formidable scholar of pulp magazines Peter Balestrieri. I suspect the panel would have been just as informative if Mr. Balestrieri had been sitting at the front of the room on his own, without the rest of us, but we did our best to amuse.

After that I could relax and enjoy some of the other events going on. I watched five SF/Fantasy heavyweights (actually they're all pretty svelte) discuss "Nifty Narrative Tricks" and then sat in on a panel about "Mining History for the Future."

That brought me to dinnertime so I ventured over to the Power and Light District in search of food. There are some good places to eat there, which compensates for the shocking lack of restaurants around the convention center itself. The main focus appears to be drinking and clubbing, though, so I plan to look elsewhere for dinner on Saturday.

Of course, I can't really point a finger of scorn because after dinner I spent Friday night at two parties myself: the highbrow and civilized Asimov's/Analog party at the Marriott, and the EXTREMELY LOUD Tor Books party atop the Crown Plaza. How loud? There was a thunderstorm raging outside but we couldn't hear the thunder over the din of conversation.

With ringing ears I went to bed.

MidAmeriCon II, Day 1!

You may wonder why I refer to Thursday, August 18th as Day 1 of the convention, when there were several events on Wednesday the 17th. To answer that I must refer you to Southwest Airlines, which decided to cancel my Wednesday morning flight so that I didn't arrive in Kansas City until Thursday. So for me, Thursday was Day 1.

My plane landed slightly early on Thursday, just after 1 p.m. My first panel was at 2 p.m. Kansas City's airport is 20 miles from the downtown Convention Center, and I had to pick up my badge at Registration. I could hear the stopwatch ticking. Fortunately my cab driver covered the distance in only 25 minutes (but the fare was shockingly high; unless you're in a tearing hurry the way I was, find some other way to get out of KC's airport). I registered, picked up my packet of Program Participant stuff, and slid into the meeting room with a couple of minutes to spare.

That first panel, "Writing Games in Science Fiction," went very well. I was moderator, and the panel consisted of science fiction writers Becky Chambers, Andrea Phillips, and Peter Tieryas; with fantasy author Tim Akers. All of us had experience as either game designers or avid players, and there was a nice mix of gaming backgrounds: some tabletop players, some computer gamers. I may have been a little frazzled at the start, but after a few minutes the five of us settled into a nice rhythm and I think our discussion was productive.

After that I went to the "What's New at Tor Books" panel, hosted by about half the Tor editorial staff. There are some neat books coming up next year, but I don't have one in the lineup. The one I found most interesting is an upcoming fantasy, Sun Born, by Michael and Kathleen Gear.

When that presentation ended I spent some time hanging around with Tor editor Jennifer Gunnels talking about writing projects, and we were joined by my fellow CSFW writers Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, and Ken Schneyer.

For pure entertainment I stopped in at the "The Real Lab" panel, which featured five scientists telling fun horror stories about experimental mistakes, clueless lab techs, poorly-designed projects, and amusing disasters. (This is one of the best things about knowing scientists socially: they have some of the most hilarious anecdotes if you can get them talking.)

I dined at a brew-pub called Gordon Biersch, which had some tasty German food. At some point during this trip I'm going to try some of the famous Kansas City barbecue. Recommendations are welcome.

A Political Paradox

In most of the United States, if your vote matters, then it doesn't matter.

Huh?

Let me explain. We're all familiar with the increasingly polarized nature of our national politics. More and more, the country is divided into "Red" and "Blue" states. I happen to live in one of the Bluest of the Blue States: Massachusetts has a lot of fervent liberals and a powerful Boston-based Democratic political machine. The result is that Massachusetts reliably votes Democrat in Presidential elections, typically by a large margin.

Which means that if a national election is close enough in Massachusetts for a few hundred votes to tip it one way or another . . . then the Democrats have obviously gotten completely shellacked in the rest of the country and the results in Massachusetts don't really matter. Whereas if the national contest is neck-and-neck, this Blue bastion is certainly "safe" for the Dems and a vote won't have much influence.

The only place votes matter are in the "swing states," which are not secure strongholds for either party. The swing states get a lot of attention and wooing from the candidates. 

And that leads to a second political paradox: loyal voters get no reward. If you're a Massachusetts Democrat, the national party's not going to put much effort into securing your vote. You're in the bag. And if you're a Massachusetts Republican, the party has pretty much written you off. The same is true of voters in all the other solidly Red and Blue states. You're either taken for granted or disregarded as a lost cause.

If you really want more of a voice, you should try to make your state into a swing state. Vote for the minority party and try to shake things up. Which is more important to you: a symbolic but pointless display of loyalty, or a chance to eliminate the paradox and make your vote matter?

Important Note: no, alternative voting systems won't change this. Stop talking about alternative voting systems. Geeks love to talk about alternative voting systems and the subject just makes me tired.

 

MidAmeriCon II, Featuring ME!

On August 17-21 I'll be a participant at the 2016 World Science Fiction Convention. The convention moves around and has a different name every year ��� this year it's called MidAmeriCon II, and will be held in Kansas City, where everything is up to date. If you're anywhere in central North America that weekend, stop on by!

My schedule:

Thursday, August 18, noon-1 p.m.: AUTOGRAPHING. I'll be in the "Autographing Space" in the Convention Center with my signing pants on, ready to sign whatever you care to put in front of me.

Thursday, August 18, 2-3 p.m.: WRITING GAMES IN FICTION. I'll be moderating a panel on fictional games in science fiction and fantasy.

Friday, August 19, 10-11 a.m.: OCEANS: THE WETTEST FRONTIER. A panel discussion about SF stories set on oceans, on and beyond Earth.

Friday, August 19, 1-2 p.m.: KAFFEEKLATSCH. Join me, Toni L.P. Kelner, and Andrea Phillips for coffee and conversation about what we do and plan to do next.

Friday, August 19, 3-4 p.m.: APPRECIATING THE PULPS. A panel discussion about the charms and failings of classic pulp stories.

Saturday, August 20, noon-1 p.m.: READING. I have known how to read for years and years, and will demonstrate my skill by reading from one of my own stories.

Sunday, August 21, 10-11 a.m.: HOW TO FORM A WRITER'S GROUP. I'll be moderating a panel on how to start a writing workshop and what it can do for you.

Vacation in France, Day 10

We spent our day in Paris by walking. First we passed the (rather untidy) grounds of the Paris Observatory, then crossed the University district, went around the Grand Mosque, and finally arrived at our destination: the Jardin des Plantes.

Originally created as a place to cultivate medicinal herbs for the King's health, during the age of exploration it turned into a kind of botanical NASA, sending out expeditions all over the world to bring specimens back to France for study. Along the way it acquired a zoo, a large collection of minerals, and a Museum of Comparative Anatomy. No points awarded for figuring out which museum the comparative anatomist in the party wanted to visit.

Said Museum is a great old-school science museum. No "interactive" exhibits, no electronic bells and whistles, no cartoon characters. It's a warehouse full of skeletons, with a few densely-printed placards about where the specimens came from and their place in the history of life.

We learned something at the Jardin des Plantes: parents all over the world prefer to lie to their kids and make stuff up rather than stop and read the signs or admit ignorance. This is something we've seen at zoos and museums in the U.S., but apparently French parents do it, too.

Among the bones were some modern surreal sculptures of giant skulls, and in the entrance hall was an (unintentionally surreal) Beaux-Arts era sculpture of an orangutan strangling a native of Borneo. Now that's a museum!

With a camera full of images of bones we walked along the Seine and crossed over to the Isle St.-Louis and wandered about in search of lunch. Quite by accident we found a great place, where Diane got a strawberry gazpacho and a seafood salad, while I had a tomato salad (in which each wedge was from a different variety of tomato) and a sort of veal ratatouille which was delicious.

From there we crossed over onto the Right Bank in search of Mariage Freres, the tea shop which supplied Monsieur Gu��rard's restaurant in Gascony with tea. We found it on the Rue du Bourg-Tibourg and bought some fancy tea, then walked along the Rue Saint-Merri westward past Parisian hipsters to the famous Aurouze rat-catchers' shop on the Rue des Halles.

From there we crossed to the Ile de la Cite with the vague intention of looking in at Notre Dame cathedral, but the line to get in stretched halfway down the island so we kept on going back to the Left Bank for a stop at the Shakespeare & Company bookstore.* Then a look at the comics shops of the Rue Dante before stopping at a brasserie for lemonade and Kronenbourg.

By now we were getting rather footsore, but we struggled gamely on through the gardens of the Luxembourg Palace and finally back to our hotel for a shower and a rest. We covered approximately 10 miles during the day (including walking through the museums) so we rewarded ourselves with crepes and cider at a Breton restaurant near our hotel, and then collapsed into bed.

*Nope.

Vacation in France, Day 9

On July 7 we packed up our clothes, had a final breakfast at the Chateau Bellevue hotel, and drove back to Bordeaux. After a little hunting around in the neighborhood south of the railway station, we found the rental agency office and handed in our Corsa, then dragged our bags into the Gare St. Jean and boarded the TGV for a quick non-stop run to Paris.

We got off at the crowded and sprawling Gare Montparnasse and walked to the Hotel Apollon, where we had a reservation. The gentleman who checked us in was friendly and helpful, although he was practically obsessed with the idea of telling us how to get to the Eiffel Tower. Both of us had already seen it, but that didn't dissuade him. Can't have too much Tower, apparently.

After a rest up in our room, we resolutely ignored the helpful gentleman's advice and walked around the Latin Quarter of Paris, in a brief stroll lasting only five hours or so. We had an excellent Vietnamese dinner in a place on the Rue St.-Jacques, discovered a whole "Nerd Quarter" of Paris on the Rue Dante near the river, where there are half a dozen comics and game shops, and circumnavigated the cathedral of Notre Dame before turning back.

By that point all of Paris was gathering in cafes and brasseries to watch the France vs. Germany soccer match on big-screen televisions. Again, security was heavy, with roving patrols of the Army's "Vigipirate" units. We stopped for a snack at a sushi place (sushi is everywhere in Paris) on the Rue des Gait��s, and listened to the cheers get louder and more excited as the French team built up an unstoppable lead over the Germans. The crowd counted down as the clock ran out and then erupted in a frenzy of singing "La Marseillaise" and team fight songs, whooping, blowing car horns and trumpets, and cheering.

On that note, we went to bed, with one full day in Paris remaining ahead of us.