Gone To The Dogs

My second book for Vintage Science Fiction Month was Clifford D. Simak's City. The novel is what John Clute's Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls a fixup: a set of linked stories assembled into novel form (1). City was first published in 1952, but some of the stories collected in the novel go back as far as 1944.

The novel tells the future history of humans, dogs, robots, and mutants over thousands of years. Lots of people talk transhumanism. Let's face it: transhumanism is mostly just talky-talk. I mean monkey-talk.

But unlike the work of Cordwainer Smith, where for the most part in spite of transhumanist trappings people mostly don't change, in Simak's City, people really do change.

In fact, humans mostly just go away - most of them in a profoundly transhumanist way. Just read the short story "Desertion". It was very meaningful to rediscover this story of a man and his dog on Jupiter, and the union they achieve. I read this short story in an English class short story anthology, and along with Ray Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day", it has haunted me until now. The former is joyful but bittersweet. The latter is just so sad.

We see the rise of the mutants, and man's uplift of dogs - and the "handy" robot companions that man devises for dogs. We see robots: dutiful, wild, self-directed, lonely. We see several kinds of diaspora, including interstellar and multiplanar.

Has the book aged well? In terms of its vision of the future, I'd say it is a transhumanism unsurpassed; ironically, it's also a transhumanism that is rather embodied, and that keeps its feet on the ground. The novel does not pass the Bechdel Test, although Simak's characterization of women gets better in later novels.

(1) Closer to home here in Minnesota, Eleanor Arnason is also very good at writing collections of linked stories. See her Big Mama Stories and Hidden Folk: Icelandic Fantasies for examples (2).
(2) Huldufolk is worth looking up.

Strange Stars Fate - Now In PRINT!

I am happy to report that the Strange Stars Fate System Book is now in print!  I think that's all for today!

Really!

I mean it!

Warriors Of The Red Planet RPG - Now Available!

Both the print and PDF editions of Thomas Denmark and Al Krombach's  Warriors of the Red Planet RPG are now available. The beta version was very polished, and had lavish full color illustrations on the front and back cover. This edition has a more old-school cover, but also has significantly more interior illustrations including for monsters.

If planetary romances in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Leigh Brackett are your thing, AND you like old school RPGs, you should check this RPG out.  I have run the beta version several times in the last year, and had an opportunity to play in Brett Slocum's Tekumel games using WOTRP this fall!  The game does a good job emulating planetary romances - the best of any print RPG to date - and is very appropriate for Tekumel games set in distant, more high technology eras such as the Latter Times.

All my posts on tWarriors of the Red Planet from the Fate of Tekumel blog are linked here.

I ordered a print copy from Lulu today. I'll get the PDF once it's available through DriveThru.

Reading And Remembering

Today I overheard two of the staff at Moon Palace Books talking about posting David Bowie's list of his top 100 books. I read a G+ post over lunch in which someone said that the best way to honor an artist is to do something creative. I thought what I could do today is start a list of my top 100 books. 

I'm only including ones that I've read cover-to-cover. So no Bible and no Dhalgren. Yet.

In no particular order or precedence, here's a few to get us going:

1. Miguel Marmol by Roque Dalton. The autobiography of one of the founders of the Communist Party of El Salvador, interviewed by Roque Dalton, El Salvador's greatest poet, himself a martyr and exemplar of the next great revolutionary generation of the 1970s. If you only read one book on the '20's-30's, it should be this one. 
2. The German Ideology by Karl Marx (particularly for the 11 Theses on Feuerbach; it is possible to skip the rest).
3. Way Station by Clifford D. Simak.
4. Horses Make A Landscape More Beautiful by Alice Walker. The first book of poetry I read.
5. Poemas Clandestinas by Roque Dalton. Wrote poems that incited revolution.
6. The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James. Still the most important book about the Haitian Revolution.
7. The Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delaney.
8. The Once and Future King by T.H. White.
9. Ring of Swords by Eleanor Arnason.
10. The Corum Saga by Michael Moorcock.
11. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. All the world's rubbish about memes started here, but that's not why this book is important.
12. Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittengenstein.
13. The Violence of Abstraction by Derek Sayer
14. Babel-17, Nova, Empire Star, The Ballad of Beta-2, the Fall of the Towers trilogy, and the Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delaney. We'll leave a few lines for other people.
15. Dune by Frank Herbert.
16. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels.
17. The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius. I have a feeling this list may end up more Plato than Marx, but the real reason this book is on the list is because I discovered a possible reference in Boethius' text to the Gnostic prayer-poem "Thunder, Perfect Mind."
18. The Scar by China Mieville.
19. Muhammad by Eliot Weinberger. A very short book of beautiful stories about the life of the Prophet, composed as an act of resistance on the eve of Bush's disastrous invasion of Iraq. I read a selection from it at the M.A.R. Barker memorial. 
20. Night's Master & Death's Master by Tanith Lee.
21. The Long War and Power in the Isthmus by James Dunkerley. Two important works on the political economy of Central America.
22. The Elric saga by Michael Moorcock.
23. The Anti-Social Family by Michele Barrett and Mary McIntosh, and Women's Oppression Today: Problems in Marxist Feminist Analysis by Michele Barrett. The first of these is the most important, and critiques the central role of family ideology in our politics, and how little it offers families, women, or anyone else.
24. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography by David Halperin.
25. History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 by Michel Foucault.
26. Stone Butch Blues & Trangender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come by Leslie Feinberg. The former is a working class novel set in Buffalo, NY, and the latter is a chapbook published by World View Forum, the print house of Workers World Party.
27. Multitude by Michael Hardt and Tony Negri.
28. City by Clifford D. Simak.
29. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
30. The Tomoe Gozen saga by Jessica Amanda Salmonson.
31. A Different Light by Elizabeth A. Lynn.

SNSO! Strange Stars!

Last night was my first time running a Saturday Night Space Opera! event for our open group of players! I had eight players show up for my Fate Strange Stars game, which ran from 6 PM-10:15 or so at the Fantasy Flight Games Event Center.

We started with character generation, and that went pretty smoothly. I gave everyone a copy of the Strange Stars setting book, and copies of chapters Ch. 2 and 3 of the Strange Stars Fate Rule Book, which cover character generation and clades (races), respectively.

Jay's PC, and improvised Fate points!

The characters were:

• Shrike, a space-ninja. Shrike stands for Synthetic Humanoid Reactionary Intelligent Killing Engine. Shrike was a true human in a "robot suit." His goal was never to give up the game that he was not a machine. One of his aspects was a stock phrase: "I am NOT a human being!" 
• Dorchah, a Blesh (a crystalline insect with the downloaded memories of a human medic) with telekinetic abilities. This was the first time the player, Deanna, had played a tabletop RPG, although she is a World of Warcraft guildmaster! By the time of the climactic battle, she had really grown into her role as a combat medic, telekinetically putting respirator masks on the crew to protect them from nanites, and brewing up combat drugs to juice up the Hyehoon PC!
• Butkowski, a burly, ornery Smaragdine engineer. We're pretty sure Butkowski couldn't be his real name, but he was so touchy that his crewmates didn't want to push on this issue. In the climactic battle with a Van Vogtian Coeurl in a cargo elevator, Engineer Butkowski pulled a trick on the energy starved beast!
• Bhat Akana, a Voidglider. His name comes from the Hindi word meaning "Wonder." A bit before the climactic battle, Bhat Akana used his Voidglider senses, which include "hearing" way into the EM range, to determine that Shrike was most definitely not a robot! This was a very clever use of Voidglider base abilities skills.
• Tcar, one of the feathered but flightless avian uplifts of the Hyehoon clade! Looking at Eric's character sheet after the game, I noticed he dropped in a Star Trek reference, listing Tchar's homeworld as Skorr! Tchar was the ship's pilot, but used his claws to great effect in the battle with the Coerul!
• Taan, was a unique Moravec created by the most experienced Fate player. Taan is roughly humanoid, with three Waldo-like arms. Taan specialized in Creating Advantages during the combat, distracting the Coerul with the hypnotic gyrations of his three robotic arms, and in the last moments of the battle leaped onto the Coerul's back to distract it further.
• Arkadina, an extremely chipper and talkative member of the angelic Deva clade. She felt truly called to battle against the Coerul, seeing it as her opposite: a demon from the darkest depths of hyperspace, and a grave existential threat to her god. She landed many blows against the monster, and even managed to slice off one of the tentacles emerging from the beast's back!
• Aasimar, an androgenous Yantran technoshaman. She was committed to nonviolent diplomacy - even in the midst of battle, and Created Advantage against the Coerul by going into a trance and beginning a compassionate death trance for the beast. Every time Aasimar used her powers, her gender affect switched; the player created the gender pronoun indicator below (a tiny table tent) so that the changes were visible to the other players.

Fate is opimized for a group of 3-5 players and a GM. I've run Fate of Tekumel games with eight players, and that worked OK, but eight is really a big table to manage for a fast and furious Strange Stars game!

Here are a few things to make a big game like this go smoothly:

• Bring enough Fate point chips for everyone - OR, be ready to improvise with little pieces of paper. I seriously underestimated how many players we would have! Fortunately, Jay Mac Bride had brought along some colored index cards. People made their own Fate points using the cards, and I folded cards in half to create little one-use Boost table tent indicators.
• When big groups get excited, everyone is talking at once, and less extroverted players, who may have good ideas, can get frustrated. Enforce a more structured flow of play, rotating the action from player to player either clockwise or counter clockwise. I did this at the mid-game break at one player's suggestion. It made a real difference at the table. If memory services, this  procedure was part of the normal sequence of play with Diaspora too.
• Table tents with character names are critical. 
• I also create a GM map of players around the table, like the one below.

• Finally, I use a Leuchturm 1917 journal for all my notes - work, reading groups, and game prep - and in-game jottings. I use Bullet Journal notation wherever possible or to-do lists and record keeping. It really helps to have everything in one place, with a quick method for notes.

The players were very engaged, had high energy, great ideas, and pushed the action forward at a breakneck pace. It was a great game to GM on the coldest night of the winter.

Strange Stars A-To-Z: "V" Is For V&V

Illustration by David Lewis Johnson

"V&V"? That's Volkun & Voidgliders of course. But it could almost be the name of a roleplaying game - or at least a campaign using the Strange Stars setting!

These two races are tied together inextricably in Strange Stars.

The Vokun have an entire empire named after them. Their young are lean, aggressive, impusive, and ambitious. Their elders are corpulent, conspiratorial, and ambitious. But the Vokun are an empire in name only. The reality is one of clan elders vying against each other for commercial dominance and political power.

Think the Great Houses from Dune, but with no Emperor.

Every clan elder is a Harkonnen.

Which leads me to a new campaign idea. I'm currently rereading Dune for the first time since high school. I noticed someting in the text that had never registered before:

"We must not, however, ignore the possibility the Duke has contracted with the Guild to remove him to a place of safety outside the System. Others in like circumstances have become renegade Houses, taking family atomics and shields and fleeing beyond the Imperium."

So the Imperium has an outside? How had I missed that before?

Now, the Strange Stars setting has many outsides. The core setting we know through the Strange Stars Game Setting Book is just the fragments of what was once a much, much larger civilization. Many hyperspace nodes are now quiescent, hiding connections to long-lost systems waiting to be rediscovered. There are many systems out there in which to run, hide, and explore.

This is very useful game-wise. One could imagine a Vokun clan that has lost big in the political game. They might decide that their only option for continued survival is to strike out on their own.

Maybe they had time to assemble a clan flotilla. But maybe the elder only has time to evacuate with a single huge clan ship.  Alternatively, the elder might only have at his disposal a single modest space yacht.

Desperate times.

But no matter how desperate the times and how limited the resources, that evacuation will soon need to transform itself into an exploration and surveying mission. And eventually of course trade and commerical exploitation.

Because that's all the Vokun really know how to do.

So that clan elder will need at least one Voidglider, the sleek, space-skinned clade that serve as the Vokun's space scouts. The Voidgliders are expert at "sniffing out" hyperspace nodes. Perhaps the Vokun elder has a Voidglider who serves his clan already. But perhaps he doesn't, and the elder will need to mount a raid on the Voidglider space-reservation in order to get a scout or better yet at least have a breeding pair of the species.

An entire tribe of Voidgliders might be persuaded to come along with the Vokun evacuation fleet in exchange for a "better deal" in the future: no reservation.

There could be a whole Strange Stars campaign here: V&V.

Strange Stars Saturday - January 9

Saturday, January 9th, from 6-10 PM, I'll be running a Fate Strange Stars game at the Fantasy Flight Games Event Center in Roseville, Minnesota. This is our first Saturday Night Space Opera game at our new venue, which features a very comfortable play environment with a full service restaraunt and bar.

MISSION BRIEFING

The Ship wakes you up. There's something the Company wants - and it's OLD and BIG!

This is an adventure set in Trey Causey's Strange Stars game setting, featuring the Fate system rules I wrote for Trey's setting. Character templates for quick builds will be provided! The Fate system is easy and fun and the rules will be taught!

Jump over to the Saturday Night Space Opera blog to RSVP!