Fiction

Terry Pratchett’s The Light Fantastic is the second book in the Discworld series, and again I listened to it as an audiobook. It concerns a sort of crisis for the Discworld, with a “star” apporoaching and on a collision course. This one against features the main characters Rincewind and Twoflower (and of course Twoflower’s semi-sentient luggage), who were introduced in the first book, but adds a few more characters, my favorite of which was Cohen the Barbarian, an elderly barbarian warrior who has outlived his glory days and is, well, too old for the adventuring life. There’s a band of bloodthirsty druids out in the woods, there’s a trip to Unseen University, and of course we learn more about the magical spellbook that tricked Rincewind into opening it, so that one of its spells could escape into his mind and ruin his nascent wizarding career. All in all, it’s a fun time.   

That’s in, since a lot of people say it’s not as funny as his later Discworld books, but anyway I liked it a lot. One thing I’ll say is that Pratchett clearly was influenced by D&D, as well as sword & sorcery fiction, and I imagine he would have been fun to play with back in the 1970s. (Though I think he’d moved on to other things by the time I was starting out playing in the 80s? I’m not sure.) That’s not to say these books read like someone’s D&D campaign: far from it, but they do read like comedic fantasy written by someone who obviously played D&D. Then again, the other day my son told me that later on, Pratchett got addicted to Lemmings, and played it to such a level of distraction that eventually he deleted the game from his computer. I guess he was into games in general. 

It feels like what it is—a silly book from the 80s—but mostly in a good way. I had a lot of fun with this, sometimes laughing aloud as I drove along while listening to it, though it left me wondering what “real” Discworld books are like. I guess I’ll find out sooner or later, as I find these books great listening on my commute to and from work.  

Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Talents is even darker and more harrowing than the preceding book, Parable of the Sower. Butler did not pull her punches when it comes to her depiction of the future. I first read Parable of the Sower at a strange time, a time when it seemed frighteningly prophetic of certain trends in America, but of course with a little historical context, it’s easier to see the contemporaneous stuff she was commenting on in the book. Parable of the Talents, though, is even scarier because it depicts the flavors of depravity and wickedness we’re just starting to see slink onto the main stage of American life.  If Butler was critiquing the rise of evangelical, white-nationalist politics in the U.S. during the 80s and 90s in Parable of the Sower, in its sequel she describes something even more disturbing: the ascent of Christofascism in the midst of chaos. Which… well, yeah, it’s hard not to see that as a distinct possibility for the United States at the moment, even setting aside the depravity of the current Administration. 

Compared to the previous book, in this one there’s more violence, more cruelty, more viciousness, and, hand in hand with these things, much more religion. A lot of that religion is the kind of fascistic/white-nationalistic Christianity that indeed does seem to be on the rise in the real world. Alongside it, the book manages to show us what an alternative religion, Earthseed, looks like—at least in its nascent form—while also critiquing it. The book manages to be critical of Lauren Oya Olamina, the protagonist of the earlier book, whose journals make up the majority of Parable of the Talents, mainly because there are a couple of other narrators whose point of view we see: a snippet from Olamina’s brother Marcos Duran, and a lot of commentary at the beginnings of chapters from Olamina’s kidnapped daughter (formerly Larkin, renamed “Asha Vere” after her abduction). Asha’s viewpoint is complicated: she’s seen the worst of the Christian America church that Marcos preaches for, but seems nonetheless to be shaped by her experience growing up in that religion, in a typical Christian American family. She’s pretty disgusted with Earthseed, and it’s hard not to see her perspective as expressing some of Butler’s misgivings regarding Olamina and her mission to spread Earthseed.

Olamina is a visionary, mind you. But visionaries are often not the most wonderful people on a personal level, and neither, for that matter, are a lot of badly traumatized people. The horrors that Olamina and her Earthseed community experience are also an explicit critique on Christianity’s role in the horrors inflicted upon the world in our history: slavery, misogyny, witch-burnings, oppression of communities, slaughter of anyone who didn’t follow their religion, and more. So.. Butler seems to be voicing criticisms of both Olamina and of Christian America. Where she comes down on Earthseed, I’m not so sure: the ultimate outcome of the religion’s mission is hinted at at the end of the book, in a way that is, well, ambiguous, or so it seems to me. (This seems to be borne out by the abortive attempts at a third book in the series that Butler started to write, but never finished, as mentioned in this article.) 

In a way, I feel like the book is also on some level a critique of SF itself. Science fiction offers a drastically different vision of the world from traditional Christianity, and in some ways that divergence has characterized the split in modern American life: either you believe in science and technology, or you believe in Jesus and repudiate science (if not tech). The role trauma plays in the unfolding of Earthseed and Olamina’s, Marcos’, and Asha’s lives feels like an echo of the unresolved traumas that scar the creation and formation of America, too. The book is a litany of horrors, from sexual and homicidal violence to child-abduction. The little we’re permitted to see of these traumas makes it easier to sympathize with these characters, but also makes it necessary to stand back a bit, to see them with clear eyes, flaws and all, because one gets the feeling that Octavia Butler was, on some level, conveying a clear awareness that sometimes trauma irrevocably screws people up in ways that never heal and cannot be “fixed.” It’s not the kind of story that asks you to necessarily root for anyone over everyone else, or for one outcome over all others, and what would in some writers’ be a happy ending manages to be only sobering and haunting in Butler’s hands. 

Count Zero by William Gibson was an audiobook. I read Neuromancer in 1994, and have bought some of Gibson’s books over the years since, but never got around to reading any of them until now, for whatever reason. (It’s not that I didn’t like Neuromancer, because I genuinely did enjoy it, I just… never got back to Gibson. For whatever reason, once I got into Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker, I somehow always felt more drawn to them instead. I think their zaniness just feels more comfortable to me than the serious, ultra-cool vibe that Gibson seems to infuse into his books.)

Still, I enjoyed Count Zero a great deal. It’s a twisty, multi-threaded narrative in which what first seem like widely separated plotlines intersect, with a heady mix of the technological sublime (its AIs are posing as deities from Haitian vodou) and the late-capitalist-dystopian, just as one expects from a cyberpunk novel. I got used to the self-consciously “cool” style of the prose, and eventually it sort of melded into the general aesthetic of the story for me in a way I found far less obtrusive than I used to. In other words, I finally “got it” what’s likeable about Gibson’s style, or rather, about parts of his style that I sometimes struggled to really connect with before. 

It was especially enjoyable as an audiobook, because the reading by Jonathan Davis is just superb. I am eager to check out Mona Lisa Overdrive, the third in this trilogy.  

Comics

Next, I figured I might as well check out some Moebius, since I’d heard so much about his comics, so I (once again, via Hoopla) read the graphic novel The Incal, which was written by none of the than Alejandro Jodorowsky. This book is some deep gonzo, very horny weirdness. I shouldn’t have been surprised, knowing what I know about Jodorowsky, but surprised I was. The comic is highly episodic, basically telling the bizarre adventure of one John DiFool and some people who end up with him in his quest to keep the incal safe. For a lot of the book, it’s not clear what exactly “the incal” is, though it is clearly some kind of superintelligent object. (DiFool depends on it to save his life repeatedly.) 

For me, the story was more over-the-top and jumbled than suits my taste, constantly ramping things up to higher and higher stakes and crazier and crazier extremes, and far too often the solution to every problem is, you guessed it, the Incal.  Even with those flaws, though, I thought Moebius’ art is just gorgeous and the imagery is fantastic in places, and that made it worth reading even despite the shortcomings of the writing. I did find myself wondering what some of the outlandish titles were in the original French: “emperoress” instead of “empress” sounds weird in English, but I wonder what the French equivalent was?  

RPGs

Robin Laws’ booklet Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering is a really quick read, and as I read it I was struck by how much of what’s in it has been recycled into popular GM lore, and especially online GM advice content on sites like Youtube. Not only is some of this stuff literally recycled into Youtube content by popular D&D Youtubers, but some of the original advice given by those Youtubers is builds on some of the advice in this booklet. (For example, the taxonomy of player types—and the emphasis on the need to serve each player type with some game material that suits them—was probably innovative when Laws did it: now it’s kind of a more common insight that’s several Youtubers have explicitly discussed, albeit with slightly different taxonomies. Indeed, I’d argue that this framework has also inspired people to taxonomize “GM types” as well.) So, well, in a world with D&D Youtubers and RPG Youtubers in general, a fair bit of what’s in this book will feel familiar to anyone who’s spent time in RPG spaces online. 

That’s not to say it’s not a worthwhile read (especially since it’s so short) so much as to say that this is probably a testament to Laws’ insights and contribution to RPG theory. Of course, it’s also because a lot of the GM advice here is pretty sensible and straightforward. If you’ve been GMing for a year or two and still haven’t sampled the firehose of GM advice online, some (or a lot) of it will blow your mind and help you a lot. If you’ve been GMing for a decade and put effort into getting better at it, or if you have sampled from that online content firehose, then a lot of it won’t be so new to you, since you’re not exactly the intended audience. (The original intended audience lived in a world without Youtube and with scant RPG spaces online, of course.) That said, I’m a pretty experienced GM and even I found a few useful reminders of things in its pages. 

One of the issues with the book is that a lot of the advice is great, but requires a person who is already a good communicator. If you’ve looked at any of the Reddit subs related to RPG advice, you will see that this skillset isn’t necessarily one that RPG fans universally have. (If you haven’t, take a peek and you’ll quickly lose count of the number of times someone comes looking for advice when the obvious problem is poor communication.) Of course, it would be a bit much for the book to offer a masterclass in effective communication skills, but since so much of the advice assumes good communication skills, it’s going to be a mixed bag for some GMs. That said, if you have decent communication skills and the maturity, I think this can help you along the road to becoming a better GM if you’re in the right place for the advice it offers, probably somewhere early in your GMing “career.” 

I’ll note that I definitely have a reprint with a few updates, as the original version of the book dates back to the beginning of the century, but Laws’ bio mentions games he designed much more recently than that, such as Hillfolk. When I noticed that, it struck me that it would be interesting to see aa more thorough and expanded update from Laws, filled with new insights into GMing and what he thinks now, more than two and a half decades after he wrote this book, summing up what he’s figured out since and thought through as a GM and designer.  

This summer, my friend Esther is considering running Wicked Ones for us (written by Ben Neilson, with art by Victor Costa). This is a game I distinctly remember the Kickstarter for: I came very close to backing it, but didn’t, and apparently that was a lucky thing, as the promised book never materialized beyond being released in PDF form. In the wake of its failed Kickstarter, the game was released but set to a Creative Commons license (CC0: you can get it free on itch.io here, and nab the character sheets and other stuff over on github). Since it’s available for free, it was easy to download a copy to my tablet and check it out.

It’s a pretty interesting game based on the Forged in the Dark system. I say it’s interesting because it’s fairly close to Blades in the Dark in terms of fundamental design, but also diverges in ways that I found quite intriguing. The magic system, for example, I found far preferable to the magic system in the other FitD hack I know well, Runners in the Dark (the not-Shadowrun FitD game I’ve been playing for a year now). Likewise, the play loop is a little different, and there’s a whole territory maintenance loop involving the upkeep and expansion of a dungeon, which is a cool subsystem built off the original game’s turf system, but taking it to a new place. 

That said, the book could be laid out a bit better. It’s frustratingly scattered, with organization being… well, haphazard in a lot of places. We ended up spending two full sessions (albeit relatively short ones) creating our characters, populating the local map with factions, and designing our dungeon, and at least some of the reason it took two sessions was because we so often had to hunt around in the rulebook to figure basic things out.  

We’ve started playing the game, and are having fun with it, though. If you’re cool with being a bad guy in your FRPG, you could do much worse than Wicked Ones… as long as you’re used to FitD and willing to bear the pain of having to navigate a somewhat disorganized book.