Sci fi eras

While I love the unrepentant gratuitousness of pulp era science fiction art, like the covers for Planet Stories like some of the examples at that link, probably my favorite period of science fiction art is the period after that which predates the visual impact of Star Wars and cyberpunk and Mad Max and some of the other things that changed the way we view science fiction. Not that I don't appreciate the visual gestalt of those things, and not that this style of what would now probably be called retro-futurism of a sort didn't linger, especially in many book covers and movie posters, well into the 80s, but its heyday was more the 60s and 70s. Of course, it graced the covers of almost every science fiction novel published during this time, as well as many of the science fiction magazines like Analog and whatever else was still in print at the time (I seem to remember there being two big magazines when I was a kid, but I didn't read them.)

In any case, the art style reflects the culture and what was going on in the culture at the time, which is maybe why I love it so much. Not that the 60s and 70s were great times in many ways, and the 80s is what I consider my real "crucible" when it comes to my pop culture tastes, but in this particular dimension, at least, we were doing it right, and we've since lost that to a great degree. 

One of my favorite representations of this type art artwork was this book, which I checked out at least half a dozen times if not twice that from my local public library when I was a kid (I eventually bought myself my own copy. In nice shape too, at a used bookstore.) While originally published as The Challenge of the Stars in 1972, I believe, it was revised in 1978 as The New Challenge of the Stars, with the obviously Star Wars influenced cover art, and that's the version that I have and know. I didn't realize this, but it was also revised again in 2004 as Futures: 50 Years in Space - The Challenge of the Stars, and I've just ordered a copy from Interlibrary Loan so I can have a look at it. I might want to buy that one too; I think some of the art thumbnails I have below come from that version.

While the text was pretty cool, in a late 70s hopeful sciencey kind of way, what I really loved that every time you'd turn the page there's be a page of text and black and white images on the left, and a full color image of David Hardy's on the right. Every. Single. Page. This is a huge part of why this book was one of my favorites. Hardy is a good artist with a long pedigree in astronomy-related non-fiction art (although he also did plenty of science fiction, and even some album covers.) He had also done, I believe, a book about the solar system, which has been updated several times—unfortunately with new art. Not that the new art was bad, because it certainly wasn't, but because the old art then went out of circulation, which wasn't desirable. And I greatly preferred the older style to his experimentation with digital art. He's a better painter than he is a... digital artist, or whatever you want to call someone who uses that medium. 

Anyway, here's a few lo res images. These mostly either come from the 1978 or the 2004 revision, but they are low res scans, not hi res, good looking pictures. But you can still see why I love this stuff so much. 

What would the night sky look like from a planet circling a star just outside of the Milky Way's main disk, or perhaps in one of the MW's satellites? This, as well as the next three attempt to answer that.

That's probably my favorite of his subjects, although early "bubble" colonies with busy-bee astronauts and rovers on the Moon or Mars is a close second. 

Speaking of which, the next two are images of what a terraformed Mars might look like from Phobos or Deimos. You can see some of the bubble colonies in those as well.

Science Fiction bigger picture

I've obviously been talking quite a bit about Star Wars lately, specifically the Old Republic game, which I play off and on, and which is currently the better part of two months late in dropping their Legacy of the Sith expansion and associated 10 year anniversary stuff. Space opera like Star Wars, and Star Wars specifically, are pretty much always on topic for me. In fact, since I moved most of my roleplaying stuff to my Dark Fantasy Gamer X blog, that's been primarily my topic here, because it's not gaming related. Ironic that the main topic that this blog was initially created for had to get its own spin-off blog—which in turn hasn't had an update in quite some time—because I was mostly just using this blog as a pop culture journal or diary rather than for gaming content? Oh, well. Such is life.

Anyway, kind of by accident I stumbled across the space and science fiction themed ambient music of Stellardrone, a Baltic Lithuanian electronic music artist, who's work is... well, it's ambient. So it's not going to really stand out and make you notice it, but that doesn't mean that it can't be fascinatingly beautiful nonetheless, especially as background to something to which it is thematically appropriate. I like a lot of stuff like this already, and I think the YouTube algorithm led me to it because I'd been listening to bunch of Crockett's Theme remixes, especially some that are less synthwave and more ultra chill almost ambient stuff. In any case, listening to relaxing ambient science fiction electronic music on themes like auroras, or the Pleiades, or astronomical concepts like penumbras or ultra deep field telescopic images, or whatever reminded me that, of course, there's a lot more to science fiction than Star Wars. One of the songs was specifically called "Rendezvous With Rama" no doubt a reference to the famous Arthur C. Clarke novel of the same name. Of course, Rendezvous With Rama is also the apotheosis or pinnacle, at least, of exactly the wrong thing in science fiction; nebbish, bitter betas (or pederastic gay men, in the case of Clarke) trying to show off their "smart boy" credentials by exploring big ideas that ultimately aren't very interesting in "stories" that fail to bother having much in the way of plot or characterizations, because the big ideas are supposed to be sufficient to be fascinating on their own merit. And... occasionally they were. Mostly, however, the big ideas were kind of over-rated, often quickly outdated, and all-too-often were fairly transparent smug contemptuous rants against religion or other aspects of healthy, normal society that the "too smart for all that" arrogant betas were bitter about.

In fact, I kind of cordially (and occasionally less so) disliked almost all of the works of the so-called "Big Three." I never cared much for Arthur C. Clarke, I actively dislike Isaac Asimov, and I just never really got into Robert Heinlein. My exposure to "basic" sci-fi; sci-fi from either before the phenomena of Star Wars, or sci-fi that continued the traditions that predated Star Wars, were guys like Alan Dean Foster's Humanx novels, or Larry Niven's Known Space, or Edmond Hamilton's Starwolf trilogy. (In fact, all of those in particular were ones that I know for sure I read as a teenager and pre-teenager.) And of course I was a big fan of the earlier planetary romance like Edgar Rice Burroughs, and the space opera that immediately followed him, like Leigh Brackett's Eric John Stark or C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith. And I'd read some obviously imitative stuff like Lin Carter. Some weird, kinky stuff that honestly kind of creeped me out, usually by Phillip Jose Farmer or Piers Anthony, who seem like a real pervs and creeps. I can't remember the specific PJF books that I read that really turned me off, but for Anthony, anyone remember Phthor or Chthon? Shudder. And I knew a bit about some of the near-future stuff like Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, or Ben Bova's outer space thrillers. There was other really good stuff that I didn't know much about at the time, like H. Beam Piper and E. C. Tubb's Dumarest, but you can probably also see why with a landscape all over the place like my exposure there, Star Wars was like a breathe of fresh air; it had most of the stuff that was good about science fiction, even if it was a copy of a copy in many cases, and little of what was weird about science fiction. Plus, it was the first time that science fiction actually looked really good on the screen. The visual design and special effects; the spectacle of Star Wars is hugely important on why it succeeded where something else may not have. But spectacle isn't just the visuals, it's also the whole concept of space princesses and swashbuckling action and fast-paced stuff all going on. There's something to be said for the idea that everything that Star Wars did well, somebody else had done better before Star Wars did it, but Star Wars synthesized most of what was good about all that had come before, filtered out most of what was bad, and repackaged it in the most attractive package that it had ever seen up to that point. It's no wonder that it captured the hearts and minds of an entire generation. My generation, as it happens. But I read plenty of the rest of that "generic" science fiction in addition to Star Wars. When I discovered games like Traveller and Star Frontiers, they felt pretty familiar to me. Granted, they usually focused on the more action-oriented space opera type of story, but it also had more of the "generic science fiction" vibe going on with it too. To say nothing of things like the science fiction Choose Your Own Adventure books I read, like Third Planet from Altair or Space And Beyond or Space Patrol, or the space opera-themed Star Challenge series. Some of which had probably more of an effect on me than anything that Alan Dean Foster wrote. 

Anyway, I guess part of what I'm saying is that Star Wars feels much smaller than when it started, and it feels much smaller than the genre promised. When Disney+ shows are reduced to bringing in fan favorite cameo characters to make the shows interesting, then its clear that they've lost their way. Filoni is doing his best to save the brand from the destruction that Kennedy and others have wrought on it, but it probably won't be enough to just constantly try to remind viewers of when Star Wars was good and created good stuff that was new and original by warming it up and trotting it back out. I hate the stupid term "member berries", especially knowing that it was started by South Park, but it's actually got all of the appropriate nuance to suggest what all of this Luke and Ahsoka and Cad Bane cameo business is really all about.

Which is curious, given that Boba Fett was himself that kind of character not long ago, but they've managed to completely turn him into a different character that people don't care about nearly as much, except to make fun of his "like a bantha" line.

And playing The Old Republic usually sparks in me a renewed interest in doing more with Ad Astra, which is now Space Opera X. Likely that will actually be inertia that's overcome in the near term. But that's part of what I always loved about science fiction. Fantasy was reaching back into the romanticized past and yearning for our glorious heritage that was either lost or seems to have become everyday, boring or atrophied compared to what it used to be; science fiction was looking forward for the same things, though. That vibe, that sense of wonder, is integral to the success of both genres. I mean, heck—even post apocalyptic and cyberpunk stuff made sure to include plenty of that, in spite of their obviously darker tone. And, of course, that's exactly what's been removed from most of what has become the modern expression of these genres.

Not that there wasn't plenty of that already going on before. That's part of the reason I struggled with a lot of science fiction even written before I was born; it was either trying to be some kind of topical hysterical drama where the author runs crying to the fainting couch because of nuclear proliferation and the Cold War, or it was some kind of evil and sterile Satanic globalist planned society, stripped of any soul, or something like that. Cultural Marxism in its early stages. Science fiction and fantasy that doesn't allow you to see yourself except in an environment of constant wonder is just an empty, nihilistic shell of what the greats were able to do, and it fails deliberately.

Blade Runner

I didn't see the new Blade Runner yet.  This coming weekend looks pretty bad too.  Honestly, I'm probably OK with that.  Although I want to see it, I haven't been waiting with bated breath (not baited breath, although that common typo offers a fascinating idea for some kind of vampire trap or something) for it to come out.

As it happens, I think the original Blade Runner is one of the most over-rated films in all of science fiction.  It's really just not that interesting of a story.  The pacing is terrible, it's over-acted (especially by Hauer) and William Sanderson's character is just plain embarrassing.  There are other problems with the film, especially if you want to get really nitpicky, which I don't.  This is more my speed. (And I agree; I'd probably watch Air Force Two also.  But not Re-regarding Henry.)  For that matter, Ridley Scott is himself vastly over-rated.  Sure, Alien is a pretty cool movie.  I'll give him that one.  But with regards to Blade Runner, I often wonder sometimes if the only reason this movie is popular with the geek crowd is a combination of its visual design and the fact that it was pretty much the only cyberpunk movie ever made for years and years.

And maybe cyberpunk just isn't as compelling of a genre as we thought it was in the 80s.  Mad Max spiked barbarian post apocalyptic movies look dated too.  Now, the aesthetic of cyberpunk isn't a bad one.  Check out this collection of Star Wars figurines reimagined as cyberpunks, for instance.  And you can't go wrong with this awesome picture that made the rounds a while back.

Or this one.

And I do really like the analog-synth soundtrack of Blade Runner (by Vangelis).  I think a synthwave, purposefully retro-80s soundtrack would be entirely appropriate for AD ASTRA, for instance, even though it's a capes and lasers and swords space opera, not a cyberpunk in the least.  But AD ASTRA, like Star Wars before it, is capable and in fact designed specifically, to absorb just about any pulp or even quasi-pulpish influence.  Where Star Wars had an element of cyberpunk aesthetic (or maybe it's just sci-fi noir, which is pretty much indistinguishable) in the lower levels of Coruscant, for instance, AD ASTRA's urban blight ecumenopoli will have a similar vibe.  I'm perfectly fine with coopting the aesthetic of cyberpunk, at least sometimes, but I'm pretty distinterested in the themes of cyberpunk.  Back when they were written, they prefigured a lot of the same themes that artists like Ballard had already suggested (or for that matter, artists like John Foxx and Gary Numan—who could possibly tell me that the song "Are Friends Electric?" isn't a proto-cyberpunk song?)—the problem is that the reality has mostly come true (barring cyborgs—we just carry our smartphones around with us instead of having them installed directly in to our bodies) and if it has been dystopian, it seems nobody much cares after all.

By the way, that action figure guy has lots of Star Wars interpretations.  My favorites are probably, along with the cyberpunk one I linked to above, a basic Revision, and one more overtly in the Republic Serial vein.  I also notice that in his various reinterpretations of Star Wars, his Boba Fett analog is usually a lieutenant to his Darth Vader analog, and there's rarely an Emperor analog; Darth Vader is just the big bad guy.  In other words, Darth Vader is the Emperor, and Boba Fett is Darth Vader, rather than an intriguing hired gun who represents a kind of off-grid power.

Eras of sci-fi

Things are developing so rapidly in the pulp revolution paradigm that it's often difficult to keep track of what's going on where and what it all means.  My own perspective is a little bit unusual; I'm maybe just a few years older than Jeffro and Daddy Warpig (or maybe I just had different exposure to different sources) so I didn't really perceive the "Appendix N generation gap" the same way that they did.  When I was in junior high in the mid-80s, my friends and I were all pretty familiar with Appendix N sources, or at least many of them, and we read stuff like Lovecraft, Burroughs, Howard, Moorcock, etc. and assumed that everyone else who played D&D—and for that matter, everyone else who read fantasy—did so too.

But although my experience may have "straddled" the generation gap, so to speak, that doesn't mean that I had a lot of context about what was going on; it just means that I know what was on the shelves of my public library and the bookstores that I went to in junior high and high school.  I remember when guys like Eddings and Brooks kinda took over, but I also know that even as they did so, the shelves had a lot of space dedicated to Burroughs, to Robert Adams, to John Norman, etc.  I remember seeing issues of Heavy Metal swirling around in fandom—although they were notably less mainstream, and often had a touch of verboten soft-core porn vibe about them (they were behind the counters and had covers that prevented "innocent eyes" from knowing what they were really all about), at least as we perceived them.  I remember the Bakshi stuff, like Wizards (although I never watched it all the way through) and I had the old official AD&D coloring book, illustrated by comix-artist and all-around counter-culture van art and tattoo guy Greg Irons.

Of course, although this late 60s and early 70s van art Heavy Metal view of fantasy, which in some ways was a revival of the pulp aesthetic, in other ways was very different than the pulp aesthetic.  So, I think maybe it's time that I try to make sense of the various "phases" or movements of fantasy and science fiction as they evolved over time, and as they've been retroactively labeled by the pulp revolutionists.  Mostly, of course, so I can offer my own commentary on how much I do or don't like those particular movements but also just so I can make an effort to get my arms around all of the stuff that's flying around.  No doubt this will continue to evolve as more analytic and critical discussion from the pulp revolution guys continues to come out.

Proto and Early Fantasy and Science Fiction:  In the mid-19th century, writers like George MacDonald and William Morris wrote what were essentially the first fantasy novels, although they were essentially trying to recreate, in some ways, a former genre, the Medieval romance or chansons de geste.  Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is often called the first science fiction novel (a claim that is pretty absurd) but it was really Jules Verne and H.G. Wells that wrote the first science fiction that resembles what we call the genre now in the latter 19th century.  These and some other works set the stage for what are still very different genre foundations—fantasy is based on mythology and medieval romanticism, science fiction is not at all.

And this is significant.  In the next era, the distinctions between science fiction, fantasy and even horror, for that matter, become significantly blurred, reaching their apotheosis in the "weird tale" which was often specifically and on purpose a melange of all three elements.  You'll hear a lot of folks say something that sounds more or less like, "in the beginning, these were all one genre and the split was a deliberate thing."  While there's some truth to that that they did go through a phase where the genre separation didn't exist, and it was deliberately split during the Blue/Campbellian era, it's not true that it was so in the beginning.  The Pulp era was not the beginning for either of the three genres, and it was a deliberate phase change in literature.  What we've seen since the pulps is largely a return to norms that were more familiar.  Not necessarily better, of course.  But more familiar.

Red Speculative Fiction, i.e., the Pulps, i.e. The Gernsbackian Era.  Called by Daddy Warpig the "true" Golden Age of Science Fiction, as opposed to the next era which claims to be the Golden age but which is not.  As I just said above, this era was characterized by, among other things, a wild appreciation of anything that was cool.  A gratuitous awesomeness as a guiding force in what to write.  Fantasy? Mythology? Horror? Advanced scientific ideas?  Yes, all of the above were welcome.  Most importantly, they were stories of action and heroics, though.  Many of the genres that we now recognize today came from this delightfully novel approach—sword & sorcery was basically created by Robert E. Howard (and later added to by Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber and others) when he got tired of all of the historical research needed to create a "proper" historical swashbuckling romance, plus he wanted wizards and monsters if it was fun to include them.  Space opera is the story of big heroes out in space; battling galactic Empires, alien invasions, super-science and more.  The genre here was amazingly popular, actually—writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs were household names.  Even in other modes of presentation, pulp, heroic, swashbuckling "scientifiction" was a big seller, and Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were as big in the funny papers as Prince Valiant was.  Buster Crabbe made a lucrative film career and became another household name (even now, decades after his death and three quarters of a century after his apogee, most people have heard the name) playing pulp and pulpish swashbuckling characters—Tarzan, Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, cowboy heroes, and characters that sound an awful lot like Indiana Jones.  While mostly filmed in the 30s and early 40s, they were broadcast on TV heavily in the 50s and 60s... keeping a pulp aesthetic alive long after it wasn't really being published as much anymore.

This is some of my favorite writing of all time.  If you aren't already pretty familiar with it, then I suggest you pick up some Edgar Rice Burroughs (A Princess of Mars is probably the best place to start, but you also can't go wrong with Tarzan of the Apes—which, once you get past the initial novel, introduces a ton of surprising science fiction and fantasy elements as commonplace occurrences), some E. E. Smith Lensman stories, and a couple of Abraham Merritt novels.  Almost certainly once you do that, you'll want to read more.

Full disclosure alert: Edgar Rice Burroughs is my second favorite author of all time, and I've read almost everything he's written, most of it multiple times.  I dust off the best works every two or three years and re-read them, and try to find some other work, either a stand-alone, or one very late in one of his series (did you know that there are twenty four Tarzan novels, and most of them are entirely stand-alone?) that I haven't gotten around to yet.

Blue Sci-Fi, i.e. Campbellian Science Fiction, i.e. "Men With Screwdrivers."  This is usually called the "Golden Age of Science Fiction" and is heavily shaped by the editorial hand of John Campbell (hence the label Campbellian.)  In recent debates, it's been suggested that this should instead be called the Silver Age of science fiction, in ways that you'll see below.  It is synonymous with "Hard SF", at least to some degree, and this era—mostly the 40s and 50s—featured the claim that science fiction was only good science fiction if some scientific element was key to the resolution of the plot (according to numerous science fiction authorship books that I've read) and gradually developed a contempt towards the more out there elements of the pulp era.  Perhaps as an unanticipated side-effect, masculine values and heroic, masculine characters started gradually to fade from prominence and nerdy, scientific, nebbish folks prevailed (Mary Sues for the often bitter authors themselves.  Seriously; read Isaac Asimov's comments on knights and heroes in the forward to Cosmic Knights sometime.  I'm shocked that they went to press with that forward, when he was basically slamming the entirety of the content that the book offered.)

Of course, this is a spectrum, and there's still some Blue Sci-Fi that's quite good.  Some have called out the "rivalry" between Star Trek and Star Wars franchises and their fans as indicative of the Red(dish) vs. Blue(ish) brands of science fiction, but I personally think that this is pretty silly.  I mean, have you not seen those original Star Trek episodes?  They're absurd.  Space opera doesn't even begin to describe it. Star Trek was never as "hard" as its fans like to pretend that it is, even relative to Star Wars.

I do admit to being a fan of some of this stuff—quite a lot of it, actually.  Real genuine Hard(ish) SF like The Martian is pretty good stuff, and really intriguing to read.  However, the label might—might, I say; I'm willing to be convinced otherwise—be too tainted by smug, holier-than-thou Poindexters who've promoted the view that it's the only legitimate science fiction for a long time.

Another side effect of the rise of Blue SF is that fantasy was basically excised from the SF oeuvre, and became a parallel, separate genre.  An awful lot of folks are very strongly against the mixing of science fiction and fantasy even today as a result of this split.  More recent critics have pointed out that fantastic elements and magic aren't really any less fantastical and magical just because they have pseudo-scientific jargon attached to them, and propose that all but the hardest of hard SF is pretty much indistinguishable from fantasy except by the superficial trappings, rather than because of any inherent or intrinsic element of its own.  This is OK, though—many fans of fantasy and science fiction come to the genres with different expectations.  As writers like Tolkien (my actual favorite author of all time) came to prominence, he did so without any reference whatsoever to the pulp era.  The most recent work that he could maybe be called comparable to were Wagner's Ring and Morrison's oeuvre.  But even then, his true references were the Eddas, Norse and Anglo-Saxon sagas, Beowulf, etc. He wasn't the only writer dabbling in this format, of course.  Poul Anderson wrote some excellent work that has similar roots, to name at least one other writer of note, but again—he wrote without reference of any kind to the pulp era.

More side effects?  Curiously, pulp-like stories and characters thrived, except now in a new medium—comic books!  Of course, until the 80s at least, this meant that they were relegated to a true ghetto of the literary world from a critical and respect standpoint, especially when the Comics Code was implemented.  But comics thrived telling stories and creating characters that would have been at home in the pulps, and gradually, they had their own maturation (so to speak) into an entertainment form that was meant for adults as well.

Last but hardly least, sales plummeted.  If you look on Infogalactic, which I believe mirrors what Wikipedia says about it, it suggests that possibly this was merely the contraction of a bubble market.  Don't believe it.  As the actual space race was taking shape, we're to believe that science fiction shrank to a fraction of its former size as a genre?  No, it happened because science fiction largely forgot how to be fun and appeal to normal people, is my own pet theory.  This is also backed up by the idea that these same folks who said science fiction was a small niche market scoffed at the notion of Star Wars and were completely unprepared for what happened when space opera was once again put on the table as a viable genre.  Lots of science fiction followed, most of it more Red than not, and there was a flourishing of the genre for years.  But let's not get ahead of ourselves.

New Wave Science Fiction, i.e. "Purple" Science Fiction.  This was in some ways a reaction against the increasingly rigid, narrowing of the genre that the Blue SF wave created.  Embracing "soft SF" it also became consciously literary, political, counter-culture, etc.  In a way, this mimicked some of the old pulp tradition, but... well, not really.  Or rather, on the fantasy side of the house, this became a second pulpish wave, with works by Michael Moorcock, Jack Vance, Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard, etc. again blurring the lines between science fiction and fantasy, deliberately this time, in an attempt to do something different.  It's curious that this is the milieu in which Gary Gygax created Dungeons & Dragons and as Jeffro has pointed out repeatedly, it was a lot more wild and woolly than those raised on extruded fantasy product are likely to understand without sampling more of it.

Ultimately, although it had an impact on the development of the genre, it was doomed to fail for the same reasons that Blue SF failed—even though superficially they didn't resemble each other very much, both were just absolutely enthralled with a kind of vanity; a stroking of broken, dysfunctional self-esteem by the writers, who were constantly looking for some kind of respectability and ability to set themselves up above the rest of the proles.  New Wave very consciously adopted and propagated cultural Marxism and other nihilistic attitudes that made its implosion inevitable.  Heavily associated with the "van art and psychedelic drugs and free sex" counter culture made it something that was never really going to catch on with the mainstream other than as a novelty.  And the smug, "artistic", literary approach (a subset of cultural Marxist "anti-art" in my opinion) ensured that it could only ever achieve a minor kind of success—because most people just simply aren't into that.

One curious aside, though, is that as the New Wave broke down the Blue SF gate-keepers defenses, a lot of older pulp came back into print during this age.  Except now, with much cooler art by guys like Frank Frazetta.  Burroughs was reprinted in the 60s and 70s and on into the 80s.  Conan was "rediscovered" and reprinted. Even "lesser" pulp writers like Otis Adelbert Kline went back into print. The Ballantine Adult Fantasy series deliberately dug out lost classics (more of fantasy than of science fiction, but still—recall that during the pulp age and to a lesser extent in the pulp echo of the New Wave, the two genres were deliberately blended.)

While this was happening in science fiction, Tolkien's work suddenly became hugely mainstream here too.  It had been in print for some time (since the mid-50s, if I recall my original publication dates) but in the late 60s, Tolkien reached some kind of critical mass and went nuclear.  So much so that he almost single-handedly defined fantasy for more than a generation.  Sure, there were folks who fought against the blatant "Tolkienization" of the genre, and some of them I've mentioned here—some New Wave authors, Heavy Metal, Ralph Bakshi, the whole counter-culture van art morons, etc.  But the march of "progress" was inevitable, and demand for "more Tolkien" eventually overcame any other consideration.  By the time Eddings and Brooks were published, if not before, fantasy had evolved into extruded fantasy product—losing all of the genius of Tolkien, but (very superficially) resembling him while inching closer and closer to the pink sludge that we have way too much of now.

And science fiction (explicitly excluding fantasy, at this point) was splintering all kinds of ways.  The massive and unexpected success of the Star Wars franchise (although it shouldn't have been so unexpected, if the field hadn't been taken over by a bunch of idiots with a OneTrueWayism that is still hard to believe—even though I actually witnessed it) sparked an explosion of copycat space opera, but much of it was starting to get out of the written word.  TV shows like Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, the Flash Gordon cartoon show that I referenced last week, and more popped up all over the place.  The new market for video games heavily featured a lot of science fiction-themed works—this is still today perhaps the most fertile ground for truly innovative science fiction concepts to pop up.  In the wake of New Wave, stuff like cyberpunk flourished briefly—and then jumped into movies like Blade Runner or the high concept of Terminator.  Movies like Alien or Predator were huge hits.  Even Total Recall became a cult classic.

It's hard to even label this diversity in science fiction, but curiously—written science fiction was slowly fading during this era, or at least it seems to have to my notice.  It never disappeared, and contains plenty of diversity still, but by and large, the "science fiction" shelves at the library and bookstore seemed to have more older sci-fi and newer fantasy than new science fiction.

I admit that here, I'm speculating based on my own anecdotal experience, and am willing to be corrected by anyone who has any data that suggests otherwise.  I became convinced that fantasy was the genre of the written word, since movies based on it were universally cheesy and stupid, while science fiction became a genre of film—since written sci-fi that I stumbled across was either badly Blue Era dregs or stumbling into the upcoming pink generation.  Is this just my perception based on what I happened to watch and read?  Maybe.  But I happened to watch and read a lot.  Any sci-fi that I read that was good was already old.  And fantasy movies were the Barbarian Brothers, Beastmaster and Willow—poor copies of the Conan movie, which let's face it: was kind of over-rated itself. 

Pink Sci-fi, i.e. Social Justice Sci-Fi, i.e. Romance Novels in Science Fiction Drag.  And this is where we are today.  The gains of the 80s have largely been shunted out of the published world entirely, and if you want to find good science fiction OR fantasy either one, you need to either trawl through massive backlogs of self-published Kindle fiction, or buy a video game like Destiny or Far Cry or whatever, or look to the occasional good film or TV show to get your kicks.  It's hard to find decent published sci-fi (on either side of the divide, or works that don't care about the distinction between science fiction and fantasy and gleefully merge them) because the publishing houses, the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and every other "respectable" avenue for publication was caught in the counter-attack of the cultural Marxists.

As these labels were originally defined, there was a Blue vs. Pink divide; manly science fiction vs. girly romance novels that happen to feature werewolves or vampires or cyborgs instead of just regular people which gave them fantasy or science fiction trappings.  Diversity quotas and anti-white push-back took over the genre.  And, of course, sales continue to plummet—to the point where "big name" publishers like Tor will likely be out of business within a decade.  When you add to this Jeffro's Appendix N journey, the rediscovery of works that people just a couple of years younger than me apparently never read, and the influence of video games and anime and other venues of product that don't care what the publishing houses are doing, we get a strange diversity and conflict in the genre.

The Pulp revolution is another layer on top of this; a rediscovery of some of the old pulp titles, and—kinda like the OSR in the gaming community—a conscious effort to go back to the pulps as perhaps a starting point, but then do something unique from that starting point, pretending like all of the subsequent history of the genre didn't actually happen after all.  What would sci-fi have looked like if the pinks never took over at all?  What if New Wave never happened?  What if bitter, ugly, dysfunctional narcissists, perverts and other assorted weirdos like Asimov, Heinlein or Clarke had never risen to prominence and the genre just kept on trucking from a pulp base?

Luckily, the counter to the pinks is the ease of self-published, the Kindle and other ebook avenues, etc.  Sure, Amazon is pretty much an SJW converged company, so it may not be there forever if the culture war in this particular theater heats up enough that Amazon decides to eliminate the platform for neo-Blue or neo-Red authors.  But until that happens, you can actually ignore the pink slime entirely and have more to read than you could ever have imagined twenty years ago.

Space wizards

I picked up a Kindle book the other day, and I've already read half of it.  It was a free sample, but it's only the first of a (so far) nine book series.  Here's a trailer for the series itself.  I should point out that the first novel has been re-titled; instead of being called A Pilot's Pilot it's now Salvage Trouble.



To me, the most interesting thing about it is not that it's being compared to Firefly (which I never watched; and which seems to borrow from a bunch of older tropes anyway.  It felt more like a homebrew Traveller game fiction in some ways to me.) or even Star Wars; rather, it's the admission that given the General and Special Theories of Relativity, faster-than-light travel is impossible (Alcubierre's calculations notwithstanding which violates quantum physics anyway).  Most science fiction writers come up with some kind of handwavey approach to bridge this obvious difficulty, usually by referring obliquely (but without any serious discussion of the science involved) to hyperspace, or some other such standby.

Author J. S. Morin makes an intuitive leap to saying; look, all of those science fictional explanations for how FTL travel are really ascientific.  Let's go all the way and suggest that it is actual magic that makes it happen.  Artificial gravity, FTL travel, etc.—all of it, requires a wizard.  There's no scientific way to do it, so you need someone who already defies science to make it happen.

This cognitive leap isn't really unprecedented.  The Warhammer 40,000 setting has what is basically magic, and wizards and daemons which power their warp space travel.  Although Star Wars uses a semi-science fictional hyperspace explanation, the Jedi are basically space wizards, and Ben Kenobi is even referred to specifically as one in the first movie by Uncle Owen.  In the D&D milieu, from which the author admits to coming, it's even more explicit, with settings like Spelljammer and Dragonstar.

I'm giving serious thought to incorporating a similar idea now into my AD ASTRA campaign setting.  What would this change?  Surprisingly little, except that I may want to incorporate some kind of class that creates a wizard (to serve alongside my psychic ersatz Jedi).

As an aside; the author's homepage:  http://www.jsmorin.com/

John Carter of Mars

The cover on my older copy, by Michael Whelan

I actually missed the announcement that I meant to make in February, but maybe that's OK.  One hundred years ago, in the February issue of All-Story, the first part of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Under the Moons of Mars, attributed to pen-name Norman Bean, was published.  This is the first part of what was five years later republished in novel format as A Princess of Mars and is the start, many say, of the modern science fiction genre.  Not coincidentally, it's the primary basis (I presume; I guess I don't know for sure until I see it, although clearly it's been blended with The Gods of Mars and possibly Warlord of Mars too) for the upcoming John Carter movie which comes out this Friday.

I was going to hold off on my tribute until Friday, but since I "liked" the movie page on Facebook a while ago, I happened to get the message that the soundtrack was released today, and the mp3 download of it was one of the Amazon "Daily Deals" or whatever they call it.  Since I'm a fan of both John Carter and movie soundtracks in general, $3.99 was so cheap it was a no-brainer.  And that made me decide that it was time to do my tribute after all.

John Carter was rather obviously a huge influence on Flash Gordon.  Flash Gordon, in fact, aped most of the conventions, tropes, and settings of Barsoom--the Mars of John Carter stories--and made them even more mainstream.  George Lucas, of course, aped Flash Gordon, but he was self-aware and genre-aware enough to have also read ERB, and he knew about it.

ERB was also widely aped both during his own career highlights (Otis Adelbert Kline, Ralph Milne Farley, even Robert E. Howard, etc.) and later during a reprinting rennaisance in the 60s (Lin Carter, L. Sprague de Camp, Mike Resnick, Alan Burt Akers, John Norman, many others).

Barsoom cover of the first copy I read from the library, by Frank Frazetta

Barsoom was also, to bring this back to the world of gaming, a major influence on the Dark Sun setting, by the creators' admission.  It was also hugely influential on my friend Corey Reid's setting (which borrowed the name and many generic particulars) and was hugely influential on the development of DARK•HERITAGE frankly, although moreso in earlier versions of the setting than as it stands now.  And a number of Barsoom-like elements made it into D&D from the very earliest days--critters like the gorillon, for example, are clearly Barsoomian white apes (sadly, I don't think the banth ever got directly added to D&D--at least not officially.)

A Princess of Mars has always been one of my favorite books, and I've read it many times.  The plot and characterizations are relatively simple, yet likeable, and they all move at break-neck speed.  Some of the dialogue and situations are simply amazing.  That's not to say that Burroughs' weaknesses as a writer aren't also very and immediately obvious, but... well, they don't really detract much from his charm in this case.

His character Tarzan went on to be better known, and to sell many more books (or at least to have many more books published featuring him) as well as giving his name to a town in California, Tarzana.  That said, John Carter was always my favorite, and his influence, although perhaps not as well known and perhaps a bit more subtle, is still extremely pervasive in the fields of swashbuckling fantasy and science fiction alike.  I can't help but to give a hearty "Cheers!" to John Carter to celebrate (slightly belatedly) the 100th anniversary of his first publishing, as well as the also belatedly release of a movie based on the book--after many tries and many years--decades even--of attempts.  I'm always just a bit hesitant to see some of my favorite literary works converted to film, and clearly the plot has evolved considerably under the influence of the screenwriters from the starting point of the novels.  And, I'm not sure that the visuals of the characters are really what I was hoping for either.  But all in all, I'm excited nonetheless, and I can certainly forgive the movie for not being exactly what I want it to be as long as it's good in its own right.  And I remain cautiously optimistic that it will be.

Eisenhorn

I finished Dan Abnett's Eisenhorn omnibus, which includes the three Eisenhorn novels (Xenos, Malleus and Hereticus) as well as bridging short stories that connect them.  It was a fairly lengthy doorstop of a book; in large trade paperback format and nearly 800 pages long.  Granted, that still makes it smaller (as an omnibus) than some other single books in series like The Wheel of Time, The Sword of Truth or The Song of Fire and Ice.  Among others.  For those of you (ha! As if any of you would care enough to do this) who follow my "What I'm Reading" sidebar over there (on the left side) may have noticed, I've had this one on my list for quite a long time.  Months, actually.  Since sometime in the early summer.  It's now late October.  Most of that time can be explained by the fact that, well, yeah, it is a pretty big book, and it's been an absolutely crazy time in real life for me.  I've had very little free time to read, and I've also been interrupted, sometimes for relatively long periods of time, where I had to put Eisenhorn down and read something else due to constraints that had nothing to do with my desire to finish Eisenhorn.  But, I also have to admit that not all of that delay was caused by external constraints.  I'll get to that in a moment.

Eisenhorn is a Black Library imprint.  Black Library is the fiction publishing arm of Games Workshop, the company that makes, among other things, the Warhammer miniatures game, Warhammer 40,000, Blood Bowl, Necromunda, Inquisitor, Mordheim and more besides.  They've also in recent years had some pretty good success marketing those intellectual properties into computer games.  And, as any stop by pretty much any bookstore in America (Barnes & Noble, I guess?  Now that Borders is gone, are there any other chains I'm missing out on that are significant?) will show you, the Black Library section has grown just in the last few years to take up a surprisingly large amount of shelf space, at least equal to the Wizards of the Coast D&D novels lines, or the Star Wars and Star Trek novels lines.  Maybe larger.  Black Library is becoming a major force in fantasy and science fiction publishing.  And, as you can guess, their novels are set in the same fictional universes as their games--so they've basically got Warhammer--a darker, grimmer, Germanic take on standard Tolkienian fantasy with a heavy dose of Lovecraftian horror--and Warhammer 40k, a darker, grimmer take on a heavily Dune-inspired space opera that also has a heavy dose of Lovecraftian horror.  And curiously, a lot of fantasy, including space elves, space orcs, space hobbits and space dwarves.  There's also space demons and space wizards of sorts.  It's not hard sci-fi, by any means, but then again, not much of what seems to be really popular these days is, so I certainly don't hold that against it.  And, in fact, as a bigger fan of fantasy than of science fiction (in general) I wouldn't find that a problem in any case.

I went into Eisenhorn with extremely high expectations, which is usually not a good thing, based on the fact that I'd heard it described so often as "the best shared-world, licensed fiction that money can buy."  I could have possibly tempered that expectation by pointing out (to myself, at least) that that isn't necessarily saying much, as there's so much really bad shared world fiction out there, and only very limited shining stars in that field.  After having read the omnibus, I'm not sure if I agree or not.  It's good--don't get me wrong--in fact, Eisenhorn is very good.  But the best?  I dunno that I'd go that far.

The novels are told in a kind of retrospective, past-tense first person viewpoint.  Normally, a first person viewpoint helps to bring a sense of immediacy to a novel, but in this case, I think it did not.  Part of it was the past tense retrospective approach, where Abnett often would throw out asides that made it sound like it was all written long after the fact ('Gideon went on to be famous for his scholarly writings on this or that topic', for example, is an interesting bit of color about a fairly minor character.  It doesn't really bring a sense of immediacy to the writing, though, nor make us feel that Gideon is facing any significant risk in the narrative we're reading now.)  Part of this also may have been Eisenhorn's somewhat clinical, cold "voice" which was an important part of his character, but which made us feel oddly alienated from him, even as we got the story in his own words and from his own perspective.  Or maybe it's just the innate Britishness of Abnett that makes the book seem somewhat detached from this American's perspective.  Most likely it's a combination of all three factors.

An odd side effect of this curious detachment is that when I hit stopping places, I didn't really mind putting it down and letting myself be distracted, and I also didn't always feel compelled to pick it up again as soon as I was available.  There were times--even when I wasn't distracted by books that I had to read immediately because I needed to give them back, or movies or TV shows that I needed to watch and send back to Netflix, or whatever--where I just didn't make much progress in the novel because I just didn't feel like I had to dive into it an devour it--I was more than happy to take my time sipping from the novel, sometimes no more than a page or two a day for a week or more at a stretch.  Other times, though, the well-paced and well-structured plots of each individual novel had me reading a hundred or more pages at a stretch, unwilling to put the book down except when I had no choice.  But the odd, detached voice made me feel less connected to characters who should otherwise have been really quite intriguing; I found I didn't necessarily care all that much what happened to them.  Part of this was also the structure of the trilogy (as opposed to the structures of the individual novels within the series) where the plot did not flow as easily, and there were huge gaps, off-screen deaths and departures (or arrivals) and other significant changes to characters that we didn't actually get to witness.  I wonder if Abnett really initially envisioned this as a trilogy, or if that's an artifact of how they were later put together.  I'd be willing to believe that each novel was written as a stand-alone follow-up to the predecessor, without any eye towards what may follow later--it just doesn't feel tightly bound together as a trilogy to me.

Possibly, the next subsequent trilogy, the Ravenor omnibus, benefits from having been structured as a planned trilogy, although I've not heard that report from folks who have read it.  And Abnett is now claiming that he will top off the two trilogies with a third--a trilogy of trilogies, if you will--called the Bequin trilogy, and again, involving many of the same characters, although presumably significantly advanced in time from the point of departure where Eisenhorn ends.  Curiously, Eisenhorn also stops more than it ends, I thought.  The novel is clearly done, and then we get brief notes on what many of the characters did afterwards with their life, but at the same time, the final denoument is oddly lacking and unsatisfying, and it seems to preclude leaving a lot of open loose ends for the Ravenor or Bequin trilogies to follow up on.

In fact, all in all, I'd say that the Eisenhorn novels were strongly driven by plot, and not by character.  Not that the characters weren't interesting, because many of them were, but we got too little insight into most of them, and too little chance to see them as characters--with the exception of Gregor Eisenhorn himself.  In that case, what kind of plot do the novels have?  The main character, Gregor Eisenhorn, is an Inquisitor, a kind of intragalactic Special Agent in a setting where the lives of individuals are not highly valued.  It's also a setting where the danger from Lovecraftian entities from "The Warp", a kind of extradimensional space that is both the setting's equivalent to hyperspace and therefore a way to travel the stars as well as a source of psychic powers (i.e., space magic), daemons (I do love the British spelling of that word, by the way), and a dimension that is also strongly driven by human emotions, many of which, personified, have become humanities worst enemies--the Greater Daemons of Chaos--godlike powers who seek the ruination of the physical world.  Eisenhorn starts off as a fairly puritanical witch-hunter type, and the one character arc that we get to really see develop over the course of the novel is his "fall" if you will into radicalism; colluding with the forces of the alien and the daemon if necessary for the greater good.

There's some pretty nifty scenes that have a slight horror overlay, although Eisenhorn is way too much of an action novel to ever really stir any emotional response to the horror, but in many ways Abnett took some Lovecraftian concepts and made them his own.  Lovecraft never made non-Euclidean geometry sound like anything other than a dry and somewhat esoteric obsession; Abnett makes it seem genuinely disturbing at times.  He also does a good job of taking the concept of the "forbidden tome" and making it pretty creepy, including the Necroteuch (a science fictional homage to the Necronomicon, no doubt) and the Malus Codicium.  In addition, perhaps as an Easter egg to readers, Abnett specifically mentions The Book of Eibon as well, which is perhaps just enough Yog-Sothothery to tie the Warhammer Chaos mythos to the Cthulhu Mythos.  It was clearly heavily influenced by Lovecraft anyway.

One side effect of reading an omnibus is that I'm now strongly in the mood to read some unconnected and shorter stuff.  I'm going to finish the Conan collections by Del Rey by reading the third (of three) compilations, and I'm actually already fairly well on my way there.  After that, we'll see.  In general, after reading some short fiction, I crave the longer structure and detail of a novel, but I don't think I'm necessarily craving the often rambling and long-winded approach of a series.  I'll play it by ear and see what I'm in the mood to read after Conan is done--in spite of what my On Deck sidebar says.

For Eisenhorn, I definitely recommend the omnibus.  It's fun stuff for any fan of darker, action and mystery oriented space opera.  It's fun stuff for any fan of Lovecraftiana.  It's got a good pace and plot within each novel, although they feel like they were not originally intended to be a trilogy; just organic sequels that grew after the first one after it proved popular enough to spawn them.  I also don't know that I'd say this is the best shared world fiction I've read, or even if it is, if that makes it amongst the best that the genre overall can offer.  My impression of Eisenhorn is that it's pretty good---but it's not great.  I may eventually pick up the Ravenor omnibus too, but not anytime soon.

More X-men space opera

After seeing X-Men:First Class and reading the trade paperback of "The Rise and Fall of the Shi'Ar Empire" I've been inspired to look into more of the same. Dan Abnett and Andy Lannett (DnA, as their otherwise known. By the way, did you know that's the same Dan Abnett who wrote a bunch of Warhammer fiction a few years ago?) have done a lot of X-stuff that's pure space opera follow-ups to the shocking Vulcan storyline of Ed Brubaker, which "retcons" the story of Giant-sized all new X-men #1 in incredibly dramatic ways. So what have I got, and what have I read already?

I had to "ILL" (Interlibrary Loan) a number of the titles in trade paperback or even trade hardback. "Rise and Fall" is in our library, but I had to get "The Dark Phoenix Saga" (which is unfortunate, since I own reprints of 60-70% of it from Classic X-men already), "Deadly Genesis", "Emperor Vulcan" and "War of Kings". I couldn't get "Kingbreaker" and I'm not yet able to get "Realm of Kings" because of a weird quirk with our ILL website--someone else has it checked out, so instead of putting me in a queue, it just tells me it's unavailable and I can't check it out!

Anyway, I'm enjoying the superhero space opera enough that I might actually go and buy some of these trade paperbacks anyway. Maybe while I'm at it, I'll throw "Planet Hulk" and "Annihilation" and "Annihiliation: Conquest" in while I'm at it, just for fun.

Although frankly, although I really like some of the space-based Marvel characters, I could do without the Guardians of the Galaxy. Especially Rocket Raccoon. Who in the world came up with that character and thought he could be taken seriously?

Another alternate history proposal...

Lately, another alternate history concept has been percolating in my mind. So, the concept of aliens bringing civilization and technology to Earth is an old one, right? Erich von Däniken, ancient astronauts, the Pyramids built by mysterious technology... all of that is kind of old hat to science fiction fans nowadays, who have encountered many variations on that theme over the years. But what if they came back and gave people more technology in the semi-modern age? Specifically, around 1700 or so, the five great powers of Earth's history at the time have had fifty years to adapt to alien technology, and even biotech, with eugenics and supersoldier programs and more. This creates an interesting dynamic where Great Britain, France, Prussia, Russia, and Austria all have essentially futuristic societies, at least in some regards, with superpowered soldiers and more, all hurtling head-long towards the Seven Years' War.

But before it can happen, interstellar empires take notice. See, it turns out that the alien technology didn't come to earth because aliens were benevolent and wanted to give humanity a leg up. It came to earth because aliens were secretly priming earthlings to be bush fighters, guerillas, and conscripts in a struggle against other conquering alien races. Although not unique, Earth is a world with a lot of potential, and various alien powers make alliances with Earth nations, and they in turn are drawn into interstellar politics, which are undergoing a Cold War of sorts. Earthlings are the latest soldiers, spies, and sometimes reluctant ambassadors in this war, and they suddenly find that even with their new technology, they are woefully undermanned and underequipped.

A new generation of superheroes, genetically engineered with alien help to have superpowers, based on the highly flexible and adaptable matrix of human DNA, is seen as the new frontier in intersteller resources. Some intersteller nations want to simply enslave humanity and harvest humans to be raised as jannissary-like slave-soldiers. Others want to prop humanity up to use against their rivals. And humans themselves, from various nations around the world, either want to be left alone to chart their destiny on their own... or explore the vast new frontiers of space and carve out all new niches for themselves across the galaxy.

I could do most of this without the alternate history angle. Why do I want the nations and polities of the Seven Years' War, anyway? No good reason other than that I like them, and I think five powerful rivals that already existed in history makes for a more interesting dynamic than the world today. I also think it's easier than trying to build up someone else to have that multipoint "great powers" matrix across the globe. And it's interesting to not yet have a United States of America. In the real world, the American Revolution started shortly after the Seven Years' War (which is known in our country as the French and Indian War, due to it being the only theater that we were involved in at all, really). But with intersteller enemies, and the safety valve of colonizing other worlds completely out of Britain's control, the American colonists may not have had a sufficient spark to revolt... yet. Although backed up by intersteller allies, the off-world "Americans" probably have no patience for the high-tech Redcoats who follow them, trying to take resources that they've claimed for King George.

Anyway, etc. etc. There's lots of different things I can do with this. I'm interested in reprising the American Revolution and what led up to it with high tech superheroes, space travel and aliens, though. Could make for a fun ride. What do I do with this concept? No idea. I won't be running it as a game anytime soon, that's for sure. I'm unlikely to write anything in this setting. Maybe I just need to write it down here and see what else comes to me on it over time, to see if it's something I can do anything with or not.

Imperial Age

I love alternate histories. I'm always playing around with them. I'm not often clear on what exact purpose they serve, but I enjoy them for their own sake. I frequently like postulating them, and sometimes I even like incorporating weird or supernatural elements into them to see how things might have been different. One recent alternate history novelette by Charles Stross is "A Colder War" which postulates that Nazi Germany found R'lyeh on the bottom of the Baltic Sea and the Cold War, rather than being nuclear deterence in nature, was based around attempting to harness (or to counter) the influence of various Old Ones in the world. In practice, this is not too unlike the setting for the board game Tannhäuser in which the Union, British and American troops utilizing reverse engineered technology cribbed from crashed UFO's at Roswell fight the Kaiser's demonically summoned forces and Russia's Tesla and Slavic mysticism fueled armies in a World War I conflict that never ended.

I quite like this idea. The reason we had a Cold War throughout much of the 20th century instead of yet another World War was largely, in my opinion, because weaponry had advanced to the point that everyone was afraid to actually use it (it could also be attributed to the reduction of superpowers from about half a dozen to just two, but let's ignore that for the time being.) What if this happened earlier? What if it happened a hundred years ago in the early 1900s, before World War I was even fought? And yes, what if the nature of those weapons that everyone was too afraid to use was Lovecraftian?

Could the Empires of the early 20th century survive in a prolonged Old Ones related Cold War? Could Tsar Nicholas have fended off the Bolsheviks who overthrew his state in the midst of World War I in real life? Could the Ottoman Empire have survived? The Austro-Hungarian one? Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany? The British Empire? The American Empire? Would the Japanese Empire have continued to surge? What else would have changed between now and then if Imperialism had managed to survive for another 100 years longer than it really did? How would these nations evolve for an additional 100 years scared to death not only of their enemies but also of the very weapons that they themselves were developing?

Feel free to comment. I'm not exactly sure myself what all this would mean, but I'm thinking it through, and wondering what to do with it. Some short fiction ventures? One-shot gaming? I'm undecided. Maybe both. Possibly neither.

KOP

Just finished Warren Hammond's KOP this last weekend, which is actually an acronym, Koba Office of Police. Koba is the capital city (and only large city, for that matter) of the planet Lagarto, which is, in a few hundred years, an economically struggling and depressed "third world" planet where life is pretty grim and noirish.

There's a label floating around, back from the 50s (and beyond) of science fiction magazine Galaxy, who used to print examples of it on their back cover, called "Bat Durston." Bat Durston was a fictional fictional character, i.e., he didn't actually appear in any fiction other than the fake examples from the back cover. In those examples, there'd be two side by side paragraphs, one from Bat Durston, sherriff from an Old West type story, and then the exact same paragraph with the setting details swapped out for futuristic. Instead of being in Dodge City, Bat Durston would be on New Dodge on Mars. Instead of the Mojave Desert, it'd be Chryse Planitita. Instead of bandits or indians, it'd be green skinned Martians. Instead of a six shooter and horse, it'd be a ray gun and hovercycle, etc. Bat Durston was emblematic of a type of writing where a story from one genre is transparently transposed into another, and while the setting changes slightly, nothing "fundamental" about the story changes, and it could in theory still be swapped out into yet more genres.

This was seen as a bad thing, and Galaxy promised that "Bat Durstons" would never be seen in its august pages (although arguably it was, occasionally.) If you've read my blog much, you'll probably know that I don't necessarily think that a "Bat Durston" story is a bad thing. A lot of genre fans would greatly benefit from being familiar with the conventions of other genres, and a lot of genre writers would greatly benefit from implementing ideas that they get from outside of their "home" genre. KOP is a Bat Durston in a sense. It's not a "space western" but it is very much a "space hardboiled" or "space noir"--one of the comments from another writer on the cover claims that it's the best noir writing he's read since Dashiell Hammett!

Aging crooked cop Juno Mozambe patrols a beat on Koba. He and his old partner, Peter Chang (who's currently chief of police for Koba) were instrumental in reining in corruption in some respects in Koba--by institutionalizing it and partnering closely with an up and coming crime boss. We first meet Juno as he's shaking down money from prostitutes and bartenders in his protection racket.

We soon learn that things aren't as simple as they seem, though--Juno is pulled from his normal vice assignment to investigate a homicide, and he's partnered with a rookie idealist young (and attractive) new cop for the case. It quickly spirals out of control as he comes to realize that this is much more than a simple random murder, as it first appears, but is part of a hostile takeover of both the government, the police, organized crime, and new, much scarier corruption that makes Chang's tacit approval of "petty" vices seem like child's play.

I read this novel really fast, and I recommend it to anyone who has any interest in crime fiction of any kind. This is a nice counterpart to Blade Runner, in fact the ads showing in the background of Blade Runner advertising for a new life on the colonies, could in fact easily have been referring to Lagarto, amongst other places. So, if you like Blade Runner at all, you should give this quick and easy read a try.

My only complaint is that the novel seems to stop without completely ending. I'm not sure if that's a purposeful bait for the next novel, Ex-KOP (which is available now) or just a failing of the novel's structure (or both) but I'd like to see a bit more to the ending. If Ex-KOP starts off handwaving away the epilogue to KOP, I'll be greatly disappointed.

Optimistic solar systems

In conjunction with the last post on space opera and sword & planet, one of the hallmarks of these genres is that they posit an extremely optimistic view of how likely each of these planets are to support Earth-like life. Up until the 1960s or so, when unmanned probes first started giving us close-up views of Mercury, Venus, Mars and other planets, this wasn't necessarily out of synch with established science, but much of the material, especially the sword & planet retro genre, just ignored science altogether and had the fundamentally improbable ideas that Callisto, Ganymede or others were capable of supporting Earth-like life and human habitation as is.

Leigh Brackett's solar system which lasted in stories from the 40s through the 60s was a great example of what science fiction authors believed about the planets, and for its time, was reasonably accurate in its science, despite not really being categorized as hard science fiction. It bears numerous similarities with the science fiction settings of other writers of the time, including Moore's Northwest Smith stories, Hamilton's Captain Future setting, and even Kline and Burroughs's earlier adventure stories of the planetary romance genre. Mercury is believed to be tidally locked with the Sun, which creates a habitable belt along the terminator, and sun-baked and frozen areas outside of this narrow range. Under Venus's cloud cover, the surface is presumed to be a runaway tropical biota. Mars is a dessicated desert, fed by canals and populated with the decadent and degenerate remains of ancient civilizations.

I really like this optimistic approach to the solar system. The fact that Venus and Mars are completely incapable of harboring any kind of life as we know it is certainly very disappointing.

Another interesting side effect of this is the prevalence of one environment planets in the genre. As an example, let's look at Star Wars: you've got a desert planet (Tatooine), a forest planet (the moon of Endor), a swamp planet (Dagobah), and ice planet (Hoth), and more. I'm not quite sure what the need is to have the entire planet be engulfed in a single environment. Would Star Wars have been a significantly different story if Tatooine had been set in the Sahara, Hoth in Antarctica, Endor on the west coast of North America, etc. and the Death Star been a gigantic flying fortress capable of dealing out massive damage via superlasers? I don't really think so.

Star Wars regrets

Why did we have to get the prequel trilogy from George Lucas, when other people with licenses to play in his sandbox can come up with stuff like this? Lucas' insistance on control has blinded him to his flaws, and deprived us of what could have been some of the best movies ever made.

The Reavers of Skaith

I finally finished the final book in the Skaith trilogy by Leigh Brackett. If you remember my previous reviews for The Ginger Star and The Hounds of Skaith, you'll not be surprised that I'm disappointed in The Reavers of Skaith as well. Particularly so, because I really wanted to like them, but I just... didn't. Of course, you could also suss that out by the fact that it took me weeks to read this book, and it was only 208 pages long. In fact, when I sat down last night to finish it, I wasn't even as far as I thought I was; I was less than 40% done. I still buckled down and read the rest of the book in about two hours even so.

The biggest problem with the books is the characters. They just never felt anything like real people. They never felt like they had motivations that made any sense. They went through the motions of the plot, but that was it. This was actually quite literally true; throughout the entire series, the inexorable grip of prophecy and fate drove the plot forward, and the characters were just along for the ride. What is supposed to be an emotional, heart-wrenching moment is just flat and boring in this book; one character goes to inevitable death, without complaining, because it was her "fate" and she had foreseen it, and blah blah blah. The other characters just kinda stood around and watched her. The audience, i.e., me, just didn't even care.

The book ends very anticlimactically as well. There are arguably two main antagonists. One is killed off screen, and his ignominous defeat barely rates a three or four line mention tacked onto the end of the book. The second, as it turns out, has already lost by the time he confronts Stark, so the confrontation is robbed of any meaning or power.

I had really hoped to enjoy Brackett's magnum opus, as the collected Book of Skaith is sometimes called. I liked her other Stark stories set on Mars and Venus, including the novellas The People of the Talisman and The Secret of Sinharat, both of which I also own. I'm a big fan of some of her screenplay work, particularly (of course) The Empire Strikes Back and Hatari! Why did Skaith fall so flat?

Well, I've already discussed why I think it didn't work, but why did she write such a poor piece of fiction late in her life is really the question I suppose I'm asking. I don't know. Maybe she just isn't suited to the novel format? I can't say.

I'll probably (at some point) give her other big novel a try, The Sword of Rhiannon, but I'm not particularly thrilled to run out and track down a copy at the moment, given my reception to the Skaith novels.

In the meantime, I pulled Amanda Downum's debut novel, The Drowning City off my bookshelf, and that'll be the next novel that I have a go with. Oh, and for a change of pace, rather than the James Ryman Paizo commissioned cover, I actually am posting an image of the Steranko cover, which is what my books have.

The Ginger Star

Many years ago--in fact, so many years ago that it predates this blog, and belongs to the archive section of my other, older blog--I decided to embark on an "academic" exploration of the sword & planet genre. At the time, I was really just discovering that there were guys out there other than Edgar Rice Burroughs. I was just for the first time introduced to some of Lin Carter's writing, or Otis Adelbert Kline, and Alan Burt Akers, and others. Read some pastiche work by authors who've since gone on to bigger and better things, like Mike Resnick, Michael Moorcock, and Gardner F. Fox.

Actually, some of that experiment is still lingering, technically. I've had a few books from my rash of purchases that have still hung around unread until now. It wasn't that many months ago that I reviewed Thief of Llarn for example, and I've still got a copy of Transit to Scorpio on my to-read list.

Part of the reason--in fact, the main reason--that "academic" project fizzled was because practically none of the sword & planet books I was reading were really any good at all. In fact, several of them were so bad that they're strong contenders for the worst genre fiction I've ever read. You know you're in bad company when you're rubbing shoulders with Rose Estes' infamous Greyhawk fiction, or the exploration of Piers Anthony's bizarre fetishes through science fiction.

Of course, there were a few that stood out from that pack. Many times, this was because they did something truly unusual, or at least felt comfortable enough to break from the strict subgenre conventions. One such writer, and the character with which she did so, was Leigh Brackett, and the character was Erik John Stark.

Leigh Brackett is famous today largely for her screenplay work. She co-wrote The Big Sleep for instance (with William Faulkner, of all people) and the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back (she wrote the first draft, and then died (she was quite old at the time), Lawrence Kasdan took over from there). She also wrote the screenplay to another of my personal favorite movies, Hatari!, which is a Howard Hawks film starring John Wayne and Elsa Martinelli. Mrowr on Elsa Martinelli, by the way. Or at least on Elsa Martinella circa 1961 when she was filming this movie. They don't make movie stars like they used to. Up and coming (at the time) German actor Hardy Krüger, Red Buttons, Gérard Blain, and Bruce Cabot (of the original King Kong fame; much older in this movie, obviously) also starred. It probably would have been rude not to invite Krüger to take a role, since the movie was largely filmed on a ranch that he owned near Arusha in what was the country that changed its name from German East Africa to Tanganyika during filming.

Anyway... despite Leigh Brackett's career as a writer for film, of which obviously I'm a fan of (Empire Strikes Back was my "favorite" movie for years before I finally decided to let Raiders of the Lost Ark pass it up. None of which would matter much if I didn't have kids always trying to get me to define my favorites) she's also very famous as the writer of a bunch of pulp era science fiction, largely from the 40s, and her magazine of choice was Planet Stories. Her mileu was a typical one, in many ways, for 40s science fiction. She supposed that human life was common, and in fact native, on Venus, Mars, Calliso and Ganymede, and non-human life is also common on Mercury, Io, Europa, Titan and Tethys.

Eric John Stark was probably her most enduring character, to come from this pulpy mileu. A kind of spacefaring Tarzan or Mowgli, Stark was orphaned as a child and raised by rock-apes on Mercury. His adoptive family was later killed by Earthmen miners who wanted the land that the rock-apes live in, and Stark himself was kept as a kind of curio in a cage until he was rescued and re-raised as a human by Simon Ashton, a kind of planetary sheriff. Because of his unique background, Stark's animalistic upbringing is an incredibly important part of his character, and his bestial "alter-ego" if you will, N'Chaka, the Man-With-No-Tribe, comes to the forefront many times.

Stark figured in some important stories, including short stories that were later lengthened and adapted into novellas, named The Secret of Sinharat and The People of the Talisman as well as several other short stories: "Enchantress of Venus", "The Road to Sinharat" and probably a few others that I'm forgetting.

Although his character, on the surface, seems like a planet-hopping Tarzan, in reality he's a very different kind of character, and Brackett cultivates a very different kind of tone. Her husband, Edmond Hamilton (himself a pulp writer of space opera) said of her ouvre that she frequently wrote of strong men who pursued lofty goals only to have the story end unexpectedly, the plots transform into something darker and more serious, and the "heroes" left with nothing but a handful of ashes for their goals.
 

This is certainly true of The Ginger Star, the book that I'm reviewing in this post, now that I've finally gotten around to it. The picture I'm using here is from Paizo's Planet Stories line, but that's not the copy that I have. Prior to Paizo republishing this story, I had found and read the first two Skaith books from the library via interlibrary loan. I may have also read them as a kid, although I'm not 100% certain. I never did read the third and final novel in the series, so when I saw all three of them in a used bookstore for, I think, $2 each with the original Steranko covers, I didn't mind picking them all up again (not to get distracted again, but Steranko also did the pre-production artwork for Raiders of the Lost Ark. Good stuff.) This was now several years ago, and when I made my list of "books that I own but have not yet read" so I could make sure I actually did read them all, I added The Ginger Star and The Hounds of Skaith to the list, even though technically it wasn't true. I had read them, just not the copy that I own now.

Anyway, after that extremely lengthy background and introduction, I'm not sure that I've got a lot to say about The Ginger Star itself. It's a short novel, and was on the tail-end of that style of science fiction novels--less than 200 pages and roaring along at a good clip without enough in the way of character development or description, with a focus instead on plot. This, of course, means that almost all of the characters are in fact poorly developed, thin, and often uninteresting. Other than Stark himself, most of them feel like patsies, thrown up to meet the needs of the plot, and little else.

Plotwise, the story is also often frustrating in that Stark spends almost the entire book a passive character, prisoner to no fewer than four characters, who drag him along in an attempt to make him meet some prophecy or other. Tarzan never played such a passive role.

Despite that, the novel has some obvious attractions. The setting is very interesting. I tried to find confirmation for it online, and I couldn't, but I believe these might have originally been short stories, or at least set in the regular Brackett solar system setting, even if they were never published as short stories. The rumor goes that the Skaith stories were originally set on, respectively, Mercury, Mars and Venus, and were adapted into a single world, Skaith, when planetary science advanced to the point where the optimistic 40s type space opera proved that there was no way in the world that life could exist on any of those planets. Skaith as a setting also has strong elements of the Dying Earth subgenre, at least thematically, although Brackett approached those themes from a darker perspective than Clark Ashton Smith or Jack Vance ever did.

All in all, I found the approach to be interesting from an artistic perspective. Although the Skaith books may not be the most rollicking of adventures (despite what the cover blurbs said, Eric John Stark is not a swashbuckling space hero, he's an altogether different kind of character appearing in altogether different kinds of stories), the bleak and melancholic approach to space opera, or sword & planet (although I think this falls just shy of meeting the subgenre criteria there) is an unusual one. Besides Brackett herself, the only author I know who approached that type of setting with a similar mindframe was C. L. Moore, another atypically female early pulp writer of space opera. Her character Northwest Smith could almost be a contemporary of Stark, and although some of the details of the settings are not exactly the same, in broad strokes, they're so similar that I could almost see the two of them interacting; Stark as a mercenary for aboriginal peoples against colonial Earth corporations, and Smith smuggling them the arms they need for their dirty guerilla war.

In addition, the flaws of the Skaith books are not so crippling as to make the books unreadable, and given the short nature of them (all three of them together are still only a moderately long fantasy novel in today's terms, and would only be little more than half the length of a Robert Jordan or Steven Erikson novel) means that they're easy to check out for what they offer, and it's equally easy to overlook the flat characters and somewhat passive, cliched plot to see what Brackett brings that's unusual to the genre in terms of setting, tone and themes.