What makes SF work?

capture from the "uplift" sequence at the beginning of Kubrick's 2001

Recently, over on +Jeffro Johnson 's G+ stream, there was a minor kerfuffle over his reaction to the opening scene of 2001: A Space Oddysey.

Jeffro's objection hinges on the question of whether it makes any sense for these ape-like human ancestors to "suddenly" be imbued with an understanding of tools by "divine fiat" via the alien artifact.

To be honest, this is a story element that rubs me the wrong way as well, but given the film's success and reputation in the genre I had to ask myself why.

On the face of it, it seems a not unreasonable premise for a science fiction story - and in its favour it resonates with the questions that were surrounding human evolution at the time both the book and the movie came out.

The core of 2001 is of course Arthur C. Clarke's short story The Sentinel which he apparently wrote in 1948 as his entry in a BBC competition. [1] But this story only contains the seed of the idea, and forms the basis for the scenes on the surface of the Moon where the first Monolith is discovered in the film.  The rest of the film, and the book that was developed along with it [2] were grown from this seed, and are very much a product of the late 60s in many respects.

At the time the film was made, we knew much less about human evolution than we do now. [3]  The evidence we had at the time showed what appeared to be a sharp division between clear human ancestors (Homo lineage) who were using tools and fire and clear extinct great ape lineages who we thought were not [4] - ideas proposed to fill this gap ranged from special creation by supernatural agency through to a chance mutation that just happened to have "the right stuff."  In between, some exotic evolutionary histories were "floated" [5] including Zecharia Sitchin's ideas on alien intervention.

On top of this, the late 60s saw deep interest in altered consciousness [6] and a growth in interest in alternative ideas.  In this context, it's hardly surprising to find that evolutionary gap being plugged by what we now see as a rather silly idea [7] and accompanied by what amounts to a glorious on-screen religious experience.

Given this context and the fact that we accept even sillier ideas without blinking in other SF works, why should this seemingly innocent conceit be troubling, especially in a film that was received very well and raved about ever since? [8]

I think the issue is that "science fiction" is a rather large tent and although 2001, Star Wars, ERB's Mars stories and War of the Worlds are all stamped SF they actually operate under different rules.

The Force is acceptable in Star Wars because, despite being dressed up in space ships, blasters and robots, it's actually a fantasy so it operates under rules that demand resonance with mythic archetypes.  So long as it's internally consistent, a lot of the tech etc can be black-boxed without issue. (contradicting Ben Kenobi is an example of a failure to be consistent and as you point out it causes problems)

ERB's Mars stories are similar in that the world John Carter travels to doesn't have to be Mars - it just happens to have that sign hung on it.  Beginning to end, it operates on mythic levels so much can be accepted so long as it's internally consistent.

War of the Worlds again doesn't need Mars - that's just a convenient label that forestalls questions as to the origin of the aliens.  The point is the vastly superior tech of the alien invaders, the bumbling, over-confident early response of authorities, and the irony that the aliens are defeated by the fact we're too backward to have conquered microbes.  The tech presented is a reasonable extrapolation from things in use or being discussed at the time, in most cases, and the main thrust is the social reaction anyway so we can call this sciencey science fiction.

Here's where the problem lies:

Most of 2001 appears to be presented as a science/engineering hard SF story.  There's solid extrapolation, the tech itself and scientific advances are integral, and it appears to be a science mystery.  The scene with the "space flight attendant" delivering a meal, the meeting on the space station, the Moon excavation site with the Lunar Monolith, the suspended animation and other tech of the Discovery One en route to Jupiter/Saturn [9]

With the "discovery" of the orbital monolith[10] it becomes a first contact story, and to be honest the presentation of the aliens being so far advanced that we can't even grok them outside a psychedelic experience works, especially in historical context.

However, the premise of "uplift" as the moment of transition from ape to human is jarring in the context of the majority of the film. It's not an entirely unreasonable riff on the more out-there ideas of the day, but it's out of step with the majority in the middle - because it breaks the rules: 

It invokes mythic themes and deus ex machina in the context of what's written as a solid engineering SF story.  To my mind, this essentially puts the film (and the co-developed book) in the position of being two quite different stories which have been stitched together, which I think is what causes the slight sense of "wrongness" that rubs me the wrong way in the early ape scene and the transition to psychedelia at the end. [11]

Were I to be tasked with "fixing" the problem [12] there seem to be only two ways to go:

1. Cut the initial uplift scene, present contact with the aliens at the end as written but make the "descent into madness" less abrupt.

This makes the story a "hard SF" story about the implications of first contact and the smallness of humanity in the context of the universe.  This is a well-tried theme, yes, but to be honest I think that a version of 2001 that had taken this route would have rendered Sagan's Contact unnecessary - in fact, it would appear a rather wishy-washy effort in comparison, I think.

Consider: we are treated at the beginning to a paean to humanity's technical achievements:

• Travel to LEO and the LaGrange space station is so casual that Floyd is dozing in front of the picture window and an in-flight meal is served in exactly the same way it would be on a long-haul business flight.

• The space station itself is so basic and obvious a thing that it has lounges in the corridor.  There are hints that there are bars and cafes just off screen.  Certainly, they seem to have nearly unlimited access to Retro Modern style furniture catalogs!

• While it does seem as though everyone we meet has at least one PhD, this is also portrayed as fairly ordinary - what kind of future is this in which people have the luxury of nearly constant study?

• While the Moon excavation is clearly a grand thing, the implications of being able to bring such an industrial effort to the Lunar surface are stunning (or should be) - the infrastructure and comfort with working in space is amazing.

So here we have a society that has developed to the point where rather a lot of people have the luxury of pursuing intellectual interests to quite high levels, and technologies that in the 1960s were strictly speculation have become as casual as air travel and hanging out at Starbucks.  Amazing, right?  But there's more!

We learn that not only have we cracked cis-Lunar space and made it our own, but we are pushing to what seem to be the edges of what is possible to be known:

• The artificial intelligence HAL is displayed as not only a crown jewel of computer advancement, but so well developed that it's trusted as the caretaker for a human mission to the outer solar system.

• We've so mastered biology that suspended animation is considered a viable option for the Jupiter mission.

Think about this - to make a truly human-like AI such as HAL is portrayed to be suggests a rather deep understanding of the human mind, which in turn suggests that we think we are getting close to understanding our own "inner space" very well indeed.  On top of this, although the ability to suspend life via "deep freeze" is portrayed as being used for the first time on this mission, it's trusted enough to do this not with a "test pilot" crew but with the actual primary mission.  Can suspended animation missions even further out, perhaps even to the nearest stars, be very far behind? Even the space ship Discovery One suggests this, being equipped with a new kind of thruster that has allowed the mission to reach Jupiter in an amazingly short period of time.[13]

Clearly, humanity is being portrayed here as entering a glorious future of mastery over everything we could touch - and it's the shock of discovering just how backwards we still are that makes the story.  Indeed, it's the whole point of the story that started it all in 1948.

So: take this scenario, wow the pants off the audience with this truly incredible - and completely plausible - high tech future, take advantage of Kubrick's mastery with the camera to impress us not only with the vastness of space but with how effortlessly we seem to be conquering it.  We're set up to be the rulers of the universe, right?

But then we discover the artifacts.  We're shocked by the discovery we're not first, but even so the artifacts appear to have been left long, long ago [14] by someone who is long gone.  Aha! So we're the inheritors, and perhaps there's a message here for us?

We investigate, but the more we learn the stranger things get, until at last we're dragged kicking and screaming into the realization that we really are just "pathetic earthlings, hurling our bodies out into the void without the slightest inkling of who - or what! - is out there." [15]  This is the point at which the transcendent experiences can be presented, showing how we're just not capable of comprehending what lies beyond the veil, we're just not ready to inherit.

In this way, the story falls firmly in the "engineering SF" category, with some "plausible speculation" at the end that permits some philosophical musings.

Now, this is obviously part of where Kubrick and Clarke were going with this film, so it's an easy hack.  It's also clear that one purpose of the opening scenes is to serve as foreshadowing of modern humanity's stature in comparison to the Monolith Makers - like these apelike ancestors, we're reduced to hooting and shrieking our awe and incomprehension.

But the other purpose of those scenes is the problem - they're used to tell us that the very reason there are modern humans, the reason we have this talent with tools, is because the Monolith Makers gave it to us.

To me, this element of the message practically repudiates the whole "look how great we could be" engineering SF message of the rest of the movie and reduces the stunning SFX and implied setting to a footnote in service to the overarching "creation story" elements.  This is where the story rubs me the wrong way, so to be honest I think that in rewriting the film to be a true "hard SF" story I would be forced to either rework these opening scenes significantly (eliminating the monolith for example) or cut it entirely.

2. Keep the uplift scene, but add more "fantastic" to the middle. 

But let's say we like the whole uplift/special creation elements [16] - can we remake the film in that way instead? Absolutely!

We could keep much of the technical prowess demonstrated in the film, but it would have to recede into the background, be completely dominated by the human element.  More importantly, if we're going to be playing with this mystical theme I suspect we need to inject more mysticism into the body of the film.  This would lead us up to the transcendent experience effects at the end as well as underlining the "special creation" dimension.

The religious experiences at the end would need to be echoed in some way - we can retain "the transcendence of the apes" at the beginning in this case, but we can also touch on the theme again and again through the body of the film - perhaps by revealing clues that emerge from archaeology: this is veering into Sitchin's territory of course, but it's not unreasonable for this kind of mystical speculative fiction.

Moreover, I think there would have to be a stronger case for humanity as "special" all the way through - possibly by capitalizing on "religious experience" as a means of unraveling the mystery, portraying the ancestors who experimented with trances and drugs, who made such artifacts as the crystal skull, who built monuments like Stonehenge and Easter Island as being in touch with something deeper and more mysterious.  We might also show humanity beginning to master "psychic" forces - and this could even be woven in as legitimate SF, capitalizing on the fact that the CIA and KGB were (apparently) seriously looking into things like remote viewing and telepathy.  Presume that at some time in the future these experiments - and experiments with psychedelics - pan out, wrap it up as a new branch of human knowledge, and now we really have an argument for human specialness.

This sets the scene as the human mission makes its way into the outer solar system to investigate, and makes it possible for the closing transcendent experiences to be more comprehensible - in fact, it almost demands it.

Where the "engineering SF" version ends with humanity learning that we're just not ready to understand in the face of a new frontier we didn't even know existed, this version would logically end with humanity being invited across the threshold to join the true masters of the universe - it's in keeping with the almost alchemical tone of hidden secrets and special powers that "sublimating" to the next phase involves embracing the fact that in this new world we're just infants.

The message here could be given more explicitly, perhaps with a religious-experience-like exchange with our "elders" - in this version of the story we get a solid "fantastic SF" tale about mythic origins, hidden history, and humans as the chosen heirs of transcendent aliens.

--

You will notice, of course, that these are two very different stories.  I think that many of the same "beats" could be used in each film, but there are layers of meaning different in each approach, and of course they each are working toward a very different conclusion.

The thing about the film as it is that rubs me in a funny way is that it appears as though Kubrick and Clarke were trying to have their cake and eat it too.

They wanted to make a grand, glorious hard SF masterpiece, a monument to what they saw as the ultimate conclusion of the enormous technical strides that were being made in the 60s. They wanted to paint a future beyond the nervewracking nuclear worries of the day, where a (more or less) united humanity stretched out its hand to touch the stars...and learns just how small we are.  This is long before Sagan's famous "pale blue dot" commentary of course, and even before the comments of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins after they first looked back at the Earth from the Moon, but we had already heard the wonder in the voices of astronauts who had been in orbit and we were starting to get a true sense of the enormity of it all.  I think this is what they were trying to capture through most of the film.

But they also seem to have wanted to create a transcendent SF work, a "religious" experience embedded in the sterile human world of technology.

It's perhaps important to note here that Clarke's work frequently has religious themes, and in fact he had a long courtship with the paranormal that seems to have ended in the 80s or early 90s.  Clarke described himself variously as a pantheist (what he insisted be printed on his dog tags when he was in the RAF), an atheist, and a crypto-Buddhist (though he always maintained that Buddhism is not a religion) but his work actually explores all sorts of religious ideas, and this in combination with his fascination with the paranormal I personally think reflects a deep interest in the nature of self and identity, and actually was probably born out of his rational, scientific outlook on life and an openness to exploring whether mystical or paranormal ideas might have some foundation in fact.

Likewise, Kubrick himself has said that he didn't intend the film to imply "God" but rather that it's an exploration of the possibility that there might be intelligences in the universe so far removed from us that for all intents and purposes they might appear to be gods.  In fact, he has been quoted in an interview with American Cinematographer as going so far as to claim that the entire film is a refutation of the idea that there might be a god, saying:

"This film is a rejection of the notion that there is a god; isn't that obvious?"[17]

Given this knowledge of the attitudes and ideas of the two creators of the film, it seems unlikely that when we say "religious experience" they would have made a version of this film that literally required the experience to be religious, so reinterpreting elements of religion as being echoes of some kind of species-level memory, or even deliberate messages from our "sponsors" would seem to fit with the sort of thing they might consider using to generate a mythic version of the story.

Honestly? This is a very complex film.  It famously has far more non-dialogue scenes than dialogue scenes, and so is almost entirely a visual work - it's incredible how such complex ideas can be communicated via nothing but (admittedly incredible) screencraft.

I enjoy this firm very much every time I see it [18] but I'd be lying if I said I completely understood what Kubrick and Clarke were aiming for.  This really is a great film in my opinion (though of course I am biased [see 8 again]), and I certainly wouldn't demand it be "remade" to "fix" the dissonance that bothers me. [see 12 again]

But the fact is that two very different stories are being attempted here, and to me they don't seem to go together - the "rules" for each clash, and realising this can, I think, help to improve our own efforts.  The take-away, basically comes down to this:

1. SF stories (all stories, really) can be divided into clear types
2. These types have their own unique "rules of engagement" that follow from their foundations and the expected internal logic.
3. It might be possible to mix types (and therefore rules) but it will be a tricky process, and you will risk jarring the reader/viewer.

If we look back, I think we can see a number of films and (less often) books that famously suffer from criticism that can be traced to just this jarring effect - for just two very obvious examples:

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier - takes the "black box sciencey" core elements of the Star Trek universe and tries to graft on quasi religious themes, including a rather ridiculous interaction with "god".  While Star Trek had explored the nature of gods and beings far beyond mere humans in the past, the way in which the matter was engaged in this film was more mythic than materialist, and it rubs many viewers the wrong way. (the film obviously has other flaws as well, as a wealth of critical reviews are quick to point out)

Star Wars prequels -  I won't get into the weeds here, as there are many things to critique if the Internet is to be believed, but one element that gets routinely mocked is midi-chlorians. You might think that anyone who freely accepted the concept of the Force in the original trilogy shouldn't get so worked up about these microorganisms that apparently are the conduit between intelligent beings and the Force - but the issue here is again a mismatch between the sort of story Star Wars is (fantastic SF with strong mythic elements) and the nature of the midi-chlorian speculation - by trying to explain the Force "scientifically" in something approaching real-world terms, the films clash with the mythic elements and the result is an almost visceral reaction in some people.

As 2001 shows, even when blended by masters like Kubrick and Clarke, the combination of different story types can cause issues.  2001 works but the clash causes a roughness that wasn't necessary.

The type of story you're trying to tell is important - not because some types are superior to others, but because it takes a very, very careful hand to blend types successfully.  You must be aware of what you're doing and think through the implications very carefully, or you will be courting disaster.

--30--

1. The story apparently failed to place in that competition, but was subsequently published in the magazine Ten Story Fantasy in 1951, and republished several times in the next 2 decades. The apparently out of copyright version of this story is available online here.

2. An early example of book-film marketing tie-in.

3. Remember, the book was written concurrently with the making of the film, and the release in 1968 is long before important discoveries in paleoanthropology that inform our thinking now: Australopithecus spp were only just being accepted as human ancestors, and Homo habilis had only recently been accepted as a separate species.

4. In the 60s Jane Goodall's research was only just beginning to challenge the perception of chimpanzees as purely vegetarian foragers, with evidence of tool use and complex social structures that could be compared to humans.

5. Gratuitous pun referring to the Aquatic Ape "Theory"

6. This was perhaps the peak of Timothy Leary's popular visibility.

7. New information on tool use among non-human primates and even other more distantly-related animals, as well as new information on the human lineage itself makes the shift from pre-human to human more obviously a gradual one, eliminating the need for a "missing link"

8. Full disclosure: I have a soft spot for the film myself, having seen it in the ship's cinema on an Atlantic crossing.  I'd already been introduced to SF&F via Doctor Who and Star Trek reruns on the BBC, and having been forced allowed to watch things like the Planet of the Apes and various of the 60s era Greek-myths-made-film, but this is the one that is burned into my memory and is the foundation, I think, of my fandom.

9. The destination changes between the books in the series, but was Jupiter from the first in the film.

10. Is this a spoiler? They knew there was an "anomaly" there when they sent the Discovery One in the first place.

11. Let me be clear: I actually really like the Thus Spake Zarathustra ape scene at the beginning, and could be persuaded to like the closing religious experiences (which are actually not a bad surrealist pastiche) but they clash with the bulk of the film.

12. Which I won't be.  And to be honest, I would mock and revile any effort to remake the film anyway.

13. Yes, we can now get out to Jupiter in about a year - see the New Horizons mission, using a direct route (Galileo took 6 years using Hohmann transfers) - but at the time Apollo-type technology was the best available.  Saturn thrusters accelerated Apollo mission vehicles up to 25,000 km/h at launch, but the crewed vehicle travelled at speeds of between 2,000 and 5,000 km/h for most of the journey to the Moon.  At these speeds, it would have taken a crewed vehicle about 10 years to reach cis-Jovian space.  Discovery One was truly travelling at amazing speeds, even for us now.

14. But not in a galaxy far, far away, thankfully.

15. cf The Imperial Vortex.

16. To be clear, I don't actually think there's anything wrong with it - I just don't like how it clashes with the rest of this particular film.

17. I tried to find the origin of this quote, but sadly the original publication seems not to be digitally extant, and the only source cited seems to be Warren Smith's 2010 book Celebrities in Hell

18. Despite the fact it underscores the promises that we'd be on Mars in the 80s and into the outer system by the early 2000s.  Promises that were still being made when I started being seriously interested in SF, but which had died by the time I was old enough to really appreciate it.  Killed by the Reagan era, really.

Leigh Brackett - Queen of Space Opera

Leigh Brackett
(from Amazing Stories July 1941)

I confess: I am a big fan of old-style space operas, planetary adventure romances, and so-called science fantasy.

While I rarely if ever write that sort of science fiction, I can gobble up some of the old classics in one sitting and it's by no means difficult to understand why: these stories are pure fun.

Still, they're challenging, and it's not hard to understand why some people look down on them.  While the basic rule is "there are no rules" and scientific facts can go out the window when the story demands it, to be truly successful these sorts of stories do have to meet three touchstones:

1. The characters have to draw on key archetypes that resonate with the reader.

2. The settings must be internally consistent.

3. While deus ex machina events and "rule changes" can occur, it can't be haphazard: they must be dramatically consistent.

These kinds of stories were huge in early science fiction, and maintained a strong following even through the "hard" era of the 50s and 60s (when the market for new work in her style seemed to dry up) and as New Wave style came on the scene in the 60s and 70s. And the queen of space opera and planetary romance was Leigh Brackett, who was born 100 years ago today!

Brackett's impact still echoes in science fiction today: she entered the pulp markets near the end of their decades-long ferment of experimentation, took a genre that had been largely dismissed and sneered at, and elevated the space opera and planetary romance subgenres to an artform.  Just as we were learning how little like Burroughs' vision Mars and Venus were, she was building an intricate universe around the touchstones that make this kind of "science fantasy" not just readable but un-put-downable even in the face of obvious scientific impossibilities.

But she was by no means only a science fiction author - in fact although her first sales were SF short fiction (her first story appears to have been "Martian Quest" published in Astounding Science Fiction Feb 1940) she published other pulp genres as well and her first full novel was a hard-boiled crime novel No Good From a Corpse , which led to a series of other hard-boiled and noir works, including a number of screen plays.  Ultimately, though, she was best known for her SF stories and novels, especially those set in her version of our solar system.

Brackett's Mars and Venus started with the image painted by earlier authors like ERB - Mars as a marginal desert world of ancient and decaying civilization, Venus a wet and tropical world peopled by brash hunters - but her solar system was intricately interconnected, and many of her stories dealt with themes like the conquest of the frontier and the interplay of cultures, including the impact of colonization.  Her stories and novels sold well right up into the mid-50s, when the "harder" styles dominated and led to the death of many "sword and planet" and science fantasy venues, but she was still looked to for excellence in her chosen sub-genres.  She mastered the art of internal consistency and resonant archetype characters in a way that draws readers in.  So powerful was her mastery of these epic settings and archetype characters that L. Sprague de Camp famously bemoaned the fact that he had gone to Lin Carter first to co-author new Conan stories, saying that in retrospect Brackett's mastery of gloriously barbaric characters would have been a better fit.

After a decade writing mainly for film and TV, Brackett returned to her planetary romances in the mid-60s, and produced sporadically for the next decade until her death at the age of 62 in 1977 - in the midst of working on the screenplay for the film most often chosen as the best Star Wars episode: The Empire Strikes Back.

The debt modern SFF owes to writers like Brackett is huge, and yet she languishes largely forgotten - sadly, between The Great Culling of backlist titles in the 80s and the dominance of gritty, grimdark sorts of science fiction in the decades since she simply hasn't had the time in the limelight that is her due.

But what about now?  Perhaps the idea of ancient, decadent civilizations on Mars and solar system spanning intrigue and adventure seems a little quaint in a market that swallows up hard science fiction films like Gravity and The Martian, but then look at the resurgence of popularity for television shows like Doctor Who.  Perhaps the time has come to dust off the old space operas, perhaps re-tune them for a more modern sensibility, and let the sheer spectacle wow us again.

L is for Lone Wolf

Cover of the editions of Caverns of Kalte that I had. 

a series on games I wish I'd played more of.

Sometime in late 1984 (long after I had been introduced to D&D via the Elmore red box and had played several Fighting Fantasy gamebooks numerous times) I was travelling with my family and at a Motorway rest stop paused to peruse a rack of books.

At the time, it was rare to find SFF novels on those racks - they were usually cheapo romances or horror novels, but there was occasionally a fun-looking title and they were also most definitely not the sort of books you came across in ordinary book stores or in the library.  The romances were too tame to engage teenaged me (come on, it was 1984) but I learned quickly that the pulp horror novels in Motorway shops or by the till when you stopped for fuel were a cheap and easy way to kill some hours on a long trip even if it wasn't my usual choice of reading material.

This is how (for example) I came to own copies of those classics The Rats, Lair[1] and Slugs [2], it was where I usually bought Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and on this occasion it was how I discovered Lone Wolf.

FF gamebooks will always be the "home cooking" of solo RPG play for me, if only because the world they painted was so vivid and wide open.  But I'll have to say that when I picked The Caverns of Kalte up on a whim during that trip it blew me away.

Oh, I died terribly and often - these books don't work very well as stand-alones, because there's a coherent narrative that spans the series - and that caused frustration that led to me putting the book down early on and forgetting about it for a while.

But when I came back a few weeks later on a rainy afternoon and tried to play it seriously at the kitchen table I was hooked.  The publication quality was high, I remember, and the mechanics were more sophisticated than FF, but the big thing was this world and this character.  The FF world was vivid, sure, but like a Heavy Metal cartoon.  Lone Wolf felt finer grained, silkier.  There was a richness there that I couldn't put my finger on.

Sadly, the Lone Wolf series was hard to find in the areas I found myself in after that, and I never did see books 1 and 2, but I did end up owning several of them (3 and 7 I remember, but I'm not sure about the others) and played them several times.

It was frustrating, not having a coherent series - you can really tell that the books are designed to "snap together" into a storyline - but they were very satisfying to play when an actual RPG session wasn't possible, in ways that the FF books couldn't achieve.

These books, more than any other "choose your own" series, made me think about how these sorts of games are designed and the effort that goes into them.  I'd played with text adventures before [3] but this sort of brought it to the next level.  This wasn't just an information space of you could explore at random to solve a kind of "locked room" puzzle - in the Lone Wolf books each book was a space for exploration, but in addition to letting you explore as you liked, there was a need to drive the story forwards, to tie in to the next book and maybe even the one after that.  

I never really got a clear view of how the books worked on the broader narrative level until long after I had given away my few Lone Wolf books and had passed on to other phases of life.  But I do wonder if this kind of gamebook has things to teach us about how to leverage modern interactive media for entertainment. [4]  It will never be much more than a particularly eccentric hobby for me, I imagine, but it's a fun thing to think about and neat to realise how being a bored teen on a road-trip with family decades ago is still influencing my behaviour today.

As it happens, if you're curious the author of the Lone Wolf series, Joe Dever, and several of his collaborators on art and later installments, have agreed to allow the books to be "reprinted" in various formats online.  See Project Aon to download and experience it for yourself! 

###
1. Both these were reprinted for the publication of Domain in 1984 - ironically I don't think I ever read Domain, but if not for that book I would never have discovered these two.  I'm not a big "horror" fan (not this kind) but James Herbert gets a bad rap for these, I think, as I actually enjoyed them quite a bit. Of course, this is teenaged me talking again.

2. Slugs is...not in the same class as The Rats, I fear, and the sequel Breeding Ground I recall being frankly atrocious.  However, it was still entertaining and there are the mandatory titillating scenes and gratuitously gory descriptions that keeps a teenage horror reader coming back.  Shaun Hutson deserves kudos for hitting that sweet spot so perfectly so early in his career - and as I recall, I also discovered that a lot of the biology he exaggerated for horrific purposes was actually basically correct (though I never admitted to my bio teacher that I wasn't really a terrific swot).

3. Inspired by things like old ASCII mags that had whole adventures you could type up in BASIC, or teaching myself to hack the databases in games like Dungeonmaster on my ZX Spectrum.

4.  To a large extent Lone Wolf is behind my thinking in experiments on Twitter and elsewhere as I fumble toward some kind of multiplex storytelling in those media.

Yukio Mishima and Japan's Existential Crisis

Mishima making his speech to SDF regulars

On November 25, 1970, Japan had a sort of existential crisis.

Noted author and actor Yukio Mishima[1], was plugged deeply into the elite echelons of Japanese society, was a celebrated figure in literature and film both at home and abroad, with many awards and award nominations (including nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature), and is even today considered one of the most important figures in Japanese literature of the 20th Century.

On November 25, 1970 he entered the Ichigaya Camp of the Japanese Self Defence Forces with members of his Shield Society (楯の会 - tatenokai), took  the commandant of the Eastern Command hostage, and called on members of the JSDF to rise up and overturn the government, which he considered made up of bloodless panderers who had forsaken the beautiful parts of Japanese culture and pawned them for material wealth and the illusion of consumerism.  

The soldiers not only refused, they jeered him.

In the end, Mishima killed himself in a ritual suicide he had been planning for over a year - leading to speculation that he had no expectation that the coup would work, but that the whole event was a final, glorious drama. [2]

While Mishima was obviously driven by his own demons, he was also playing out an existential angst that continues to this day and that is rooted in that moment in Mishima's 20th year when he was told that everything he had been taught, everything that came before, was all wrong.

I think he endures because his work and his story echoes that sense of existential crisis, the continuing struggle to redefine the essence of Japan in a way that accepts what is beautiful while acknowledging the ugly parts of history, and at the same time empowers the country to take what is felt to be its rightful place on the global stage.

The struggle continues today in discussion over modification to the constitution (essentially forced on the country during the government restructuring following World War 2) to permit the JSDF to take part in peacekeeping and disaster assistance missions overseas - something they currently have very limited authority to do - and in Japan's turbulent relationship with China, Korea and some others in the region.

On the one hand, there are those who insist that the oath of pacifism enshrined in the constitution is a central tenet of the modern Japan, that confessing to and making reparations for the wrongs committed during the Imperialist era of the 20s, 30s and 40s is an obligation.

On the other hand, there are those who say that those sins have been paid for and it is time for Japan to take a place in the world more in line with its economic strength - that in fact the best way to help promote peace in the region and to make amends for the past would be to look outward and to put full strength behind development and peacekeeping projects to help their less fortunate neighbours stand beside them on the world stage.

Of course, on a third, more disturbing hand, there are those who advocate a return to the Imperial era, who want to kick out the "bad blood" of foreigners, to stand strong and proud without shame for what was done in time of war.

It's unfortunate that Mishima is today so strongly associated with the Black Van riffraff, because I think his work represents a more nuanced exploration of the issues than they seem capable of. [3]  

He deplored what he saw as the lickspittle policies of the post-war governments, and he hated the fact that the Emperor Hirohito had disavowed his divinity - but he deplored the policies because they made Japan subject to the moral decisions of another nation rather than taking responsibility for themselves, and he hated the disavowal because he felt that having used Imperial Divinity to convince so many to die in a cause acknowledged to be wrong, the Emperor had a responsibility to take their sins on himself rather than so easily dismissing them as a lie.

Mishima was a troubled man, and he was clearly wrestling with how to reconcile the evils of the past with the need to stand strong if Japan was to enter the 21st Century as a true nation rather than one trapped in thrall to colonial powers.  

He was deeply conflicted, and many of his creative works reflect that - indeed, his last work, the Sea of Fertility tetralogy, seems to use the canvas of Japan's history from 1912 to Mishima's present to paint a story of conflict and tension between the choices facing the nation.  It is perhaps significant that he leaves many troubling questions unresolved in each of the four novels, even as - in some cases - the novels to some extent answer each other's questions.

Standing on the roof of the Ichigaya Camp HQ, giving his speech to the thousand or so JSDF soldiers who had gathered, he seems to have been shouting less about a true call to physical revolution, but a challenge to the whole nation: 

• What are you willing to do to help Japan be reborn in its true form for the next century?
• How much are you willing to strip away to be strong?
• Are you willing to make the ultimate sacrifice and destroy what you have, your essence, as the coin to buy acceptance in the world?

Given this context, and knowing Mishima's obsession with Bushido, with the physical perfection of his body, and with youth (specifically, avoiding the decrepitude of age) it's been suggested that the whole affair may have been (at least in part) simply a way to freeze an image of himself in time, and to die as part of a grand drama. [4]  The timing of his death, the fact he seems to have been planning the event (including his suicide) for over a year, and the echoes of his final books in his actions over that year seem to suggest it - to say nothing of the (probably apocryphal) part of the story that has him delivering the manuscript for the last novel to his editor on the morning of the events leading to his death.

Likely, this is reading far too much into things - but the key question he seems to have been struggling with in his last works remains:

Should you be willing to sacrifice the essence of what you are to achieve a rebirth that will at best be temporary, at worst an illusion?

It's a question that still haunts Japan, manifested in the current debates around constitutional reform [5], and is a question that some other nations find themselves faced with today.

What do you do when the essence of identity is entangled so tightly with a dark past that demands repudiation?

I would hope that Mishima's conclusion isn't the only option.

###

1. Born Kunitake Hiraoka

2. See also the Japan Times article marking the anniversary of this event: 

3. Mishima's play "My Friend Hitler" was published two years earlier in 1968, and has often been taken along with other works and his obsession with elements of pre-war Japan such as Bushido and the Emperor as evidence he was sympathetic to uyoku dantai groups like the Nippon Dantai, There are certainly elements of fascism in his corpus and his philosophy, but ironically this particular play hints that the truth is far more complex: "My Friend Hitler" is a satirical look at the relationship between Hitler and two Nazi officials who he ultimately ordered assassinated, and has been interpreted as both preaching fascism and anti-fascism.  Personally, I think this play represents the mental tension he was struggling with: a hunger for the past that was shattered when he was 20 years old (when Japan surrendered and everything he had grown up with was declared a lie) and a yearning for a future where his country could be finally absolved of its sins and be true to its roots again.  His youth was a limnal time, and much of his work treads the muddy interface between opposites, so I think it's simplistic to read him as a fascist, particularly when in his own lifetime he spurned the actual fascist organizations around him and in fact he wasn't very popular among them at the time because of his stance on the culpability of Emperor Hirohito. (oddly, despite his ideas on Imperial divinity and his disapproval of Hirohito's evasion of responsibility for the actions taken in his name during and before the war, he apparently very nearly married the present Empress Michiko as a move to secure closer ties with the Imperial family.  Who knows what he had in mind.)

4. Like other readers, I find myself wondering if it's possible to kill yourself ironically, and if so if that was part of Mishima's goal.  Edmund Yeo's website has essay on the tetralogy by a poster named Justin that mentions this question, for example. (I suggest ignoring the apparently random cosplay photos - the essay itself is quite good)

5. Indeed, the Shield Society had its own "Committee for Constitutional Reform" that was working toward a draft for laws to enact Mishima's ideas regarding the "mistakes" that had been made in accepting the Constitution handed to the post-war government - and some of these suggestions are much the same as those being discussed today.

K is for Kabul Spy

a series on games I wish I'd played more of.

You are standing outside of an airport terminal building. Fields of tall grass surround the airport...

By modern standards, the graphics are terrible - but at the time it was groundbreaking, or at least it seemed so.

Even the premise is so far out of date many modern gamers would have trouble recognising the setting.

It was needlessly convoluted, and clearly written by people who had...limited knowledge of how "tradecraft" actually works. [1]

But something about this game calls to me.  Perhaps it was the fact that it was really the first game I ever had that both wasn't a home computer port of some arcade game and had graphics?  Maybe it was a melding of my enjoyment of Zork [2] with the flash [3] of what I got to see at the console in the corner store?

I don't know what it was, but I deeply regret the my teenage self was the lack of patience that I had for this and for other text adventure games [4]

The effort that went into these games was enormous, and the puzzles and plots built into them were often quite impressive.  But for me - well, for my 12-14 year old self - the sheer frustration of just getting past the first stages and into Afghanistan itself killed my spirit.

This is a shame - I loved some of the other games put out by Sirius Software (Gorgon, Sneakers) and although text adventure games were sort of a new thing for them everything I've read about this game since makes me think it was actually very sophisticated for the time.

To this day, I regret not staying the course and rescuing the professor...

The truth though, is that one of the reasons I regret not having played this and other text adventure games more is that to a large extent they informed my early gaming.  Not directly - as I already mentioned I actually didn't have the patience to play the game very much - but the interesting thing about some of the old text adventure games is that they bore a very close resemblance to choose your own adventure books.  In fact, there were manuals on the shelves of bookstores that explained how you could convert a self-written choose your own adventure book into a text adventure, and a few of them even included some snippets of code (in BASIC!) for you to start with, and gave instructions on how to build databases for managing equipment and other things.

So what has this to do with tabletop RPGs you ask?

Well, the fact of the matter is that with the enthusiasm for both the growing home computer market and the RPG market there was significant crossover - in fact if you look at some of the games first published in the early to mid 1980s, you can see this cross-pollenation.

Several print games have aspects that are clearly connected to computer gaming - some of these games even look unplayable without some kind of computer support, making me wonder if they were initially envisaged as some best-selling computer game that just never got the interest or the funding to get written, but for which the designer had hacked together mechanics and tables and such.

In the same way, some of the computer games of the era were quite consciously trying to shift tabletop gaming into the digital world, where computers could take over all the mechanics and let the players just...play.

In that sense, games like Kabul Spy are actually the spiritual ancestors of modern immersive console RPGs.

Or not.

But whatever they were, games like Kabul Spy are what I cut my teeth on, and I wish I'd given them the time they deserved.

###
1. Caveat: I'm no expert, but even a reading of the James Bond novels would have provided a primer.

2. This game still has staying power, even in this era of CGI!

3. In a relative sense - there were no animations that I recall.

4. Other than Zork II, which I spent hours on.

J is for Jorune

The latest in a series on games I wish I'd played more of.

One of the most inspiring images in gaming.[12]

In 1985, just before my family relocated from the UK to Canada, a friend of mine got his hands on the boxed set of an intriguing game we'd seen advertised in the pages of Dragon magazine [1] - Skyrealms of Jorune. 

This game seemed at first blush to somehow meld a 19th Century imagining of the Renaissance with science fiction and fantasy, and we were desperate to play it, but the publisher was quite a small one [2] and copies of the game were remarkably hard to find.  I've since learned that while Skyrealms of Jorune never really got any traction in the North American games market it was quite popular in the UK, so perhaps the problem was simply that such a small publisher could never keep up with demand.

In any case, get our hands on the boxed set we did [3] and we eagerly sat down to look through the books - and were immediately hungry to play.

The art, of course, was amazing. Back in the 90s, gaming art was just going through a renaissance, but even in that context it was beautiful - perhaps one of the most beautiful gaming books I have ever seen.[4]  But the universe...

There were no elves.[5]  Instead there was a many-layered history of waves of colonization on a far world.  Humans [6] were merely the latest, and society was already rich.  But then disaster struck, and the humans of Jorune were cut off from the wider civilization of humanity, and in true human form the reacted in the obvious fashion: by ignoring the treaties that had carefully established enclaves for them and instead carving out much larger realms with their superior technology. [7] High technology or no, the locals weren't to be so easily pushed around: using a kind of psionics deriving from the glorious vibrations of the crystal at Jorune's heart, the "natives" fought back, and the whole cast of sophonts on Jorune ended up back in the dark ages.

The game begins with a newly ascendant civilization in which the player characters are seeking citizenship - and in order to gain this boon, it's necessary to perform tasks and favours for an established citizen to curry favour and get sponsored.

The races presented, the rich history, the cultures described - they were like dreams to people who had been consuming Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard and all manner of Golden Age science fiction in the school library.  In the course of an afternoon we not only ploughed through the rulebooks, but brainstormed plotlines and adventures and backstories for characters and had grand visions of the campaigns we would play!

Then we started to really read the rules.

For a couple of kids who had previously played BXD&D almost exclusively the mechanics were nightmarishly complex.  When we first started to try to figure out how combat worked, we got so frustrated that my friend threw one of his miniatures [8] across the room and trashed it.  In the end, we never did even play through a short scenario that day, and it wasn't long after that that my family moved, and I never saw a copy of Skyreams of Jorune again - though I often looked at the ads in Dragon with a combination of wistfulness and bitter disappointment.

Many years have passed, and I have played a wider variety of games.[9] I sometimes wonder if the mechanics would make more sense to me now. Of course, if you poke around online no doubt you'll find the same comments and reviews that I see - all of which seem to agree that while the setting was luxurious, the rules themselves were horrifying.

But something else always comes across in online discussion of this game: Inevitably, someone steps forward to say that they played the game for some time with their friends, sometimes for a long time.

The setting was just that good.

Rumour has it that the rights to Skyrealms of Jorune are hopelessly tangled up [10] so it's not likely we'll see a reprint - or, considering the state of the mechanics, a reboot under one of the many excellent systems now being played. [11]

This is a shame, because it's one of the games I would dearly like to play.

####
1. Which we never bought, but flipped through at the bookstore - because we were die-hard fans of White Dwarf and were loathe to give "that yank rag" our money - so most of what I remember from that era of Dragon was the covers and the full page ads.

2. Surprising, considering the level of the artwork and the amount of advertising!

3. Second edition, I believe, published just a year after the release.  I'm told there was a third edition published in the 90s, but I never saw it - and it seems that there were printing quality issues that would have made that version alone unplayable.

4. It turns out that the main artist has since become a prominent concept artist for Hollywood - check out his achievements here. He started out as concept artist for Legend!

5. Gratuitous Talislanta reference, since we're talking fringe games.

6. Three species of us!

7. The other starfaring races had fallen on hard times after finding Jorune as well, apparently. An ill fated star indeed!

8. Lead - we were old school baby!

9. I also like to think that I'm smarter than I was at 15.

10. No doubt related to the computer game that was made.

11. Or could a film or TV series be considered? With modern CGI it would be fantastic to see the setting realised visually! Of course, we know that Hollywood would gut the concept and turn it into some kind of obscene parody of what it should have been.

12. The image from the cover of the 2nd Edition of the game, explained thus at this website: The caption reads "Death scene of Sho Copra-Tra, Sholari of Tashka" This is a complex and important scene to the setting.  The aged human is probably the muadra Gends, the first of the muadra trained in isho skills by Sho Copra-Tra himself.  A sholari is a priest, and Copra-Tra is another title meaning "master of Tra." The glowing orb between their hands is a naull orb; it is the simplest of isho manifestations, and reveals your personal essence.  It is used as a peaceful greeting among muadra.  Sho Copra-Tra's nuall is almost pure white, the visible portion of tra energy.  The huge figure in the back is a corastin.  These are simple beings of great strength, who frequently hire themselves out as guards. From their poses, it is likely that the human female and the corastin are servents of Gends.

I is for Imperium Galactum

The latest in a series on games I wish I'd played more of.

Today's entry is a short one for two reasons:

Reason the first is that I only vaguely remember playing Imperium Galactum at all.  I do remember it, but mainly because I felt ripped off by it.  I had a copy that had been ported to the Apple II that I traded for in 1984 - the demand was a copy of several ZX Spectrum games that I had acquired over time.

Not that either of us lost anything - in those days, copying your games was as simple as dubbing onto a fresh cassette tape. [1] Well, in my case a little more complicated since my Spectrum used cassette, but our Apple II+ used 5.25 floppies.

But the fact was that I copied several of my ZX Spectrum games onto a couple of cassette tapes and all I had to show for it was a poorly pirated copy of this strange game with inexplicable controls and no apparent purpose.

If only I'd known.

ISS games are well known for their strange obsession with odd conventions - like using the number keys for movement in an era when number pads were an unusual extra, not standard.  Seriously, who designs games they know their customers are going to have trouble using.

The other thing they're known for is having a rich selection of features, most of which are accessible via a not-necessarily-obvious set of hot keys.  I mean, the S key is already tied up with the "shoot" function, so obviously you need a different key to be the "save" key, right?  Sure, but why L? Particularly when this means the L key is now tied up and you need another key to be the "load" key so you can get at your saved games. Since this was a pirated copy of a copy, I obviously didn't have the instruction booklet that came with the game originally so playing the game was more like a cryptography test than a fun strategy game.[2]  The result? I mainly remember two or three attempts to play the game while getting progressively more frustrated and obsessing over how badly I'd been duped by the guy who claimed it was worth all three of the games I'd traded for it. [3]

Reason the second is that my memories of the game and what it was supposed to be like are completely obscured by memories of a later incarnation of the idea: Masters of Orion.

Masters of Orion was a slicker game written in a more sophisticated age.  If nothing else, it was written for computers that had already blown Bill Gates prediction that no-one would ever want more than 512kb of RAM out of the water. [4]  The game was point and click, and the graphics were attractive.  But ultimately it was the same game:

Imperium Galactum was the same kind of game, a game of galactic conquest in which you worked hard to manage the resources of your civilization to achieve technological advances and build up a fleet to be proud of. The shiny colours of Masters of Orion have faded my memory of IG, but what I do remember makes me wish my 14yo self had been a bit more patient in working out the controls[6] 

You see, like many games of the era - and remember, in this era there were even quite popular games that would only run on a UNIX station - what the game didn't have in glitzy features it made up for in sophisticated game play.  I remember learning a few things in those aborted sessions that MOO was never able to do for all its pretty pictures.  And I have learned since that it won awards and accolades in the PC magazines of the era for its sophistication in simulating a far future empire building exercise.

So I wish I had played it more, I wish I had learned more about how it worked - because as the years passed, my impatient 14yo self lost out on a neat strategy game that I now know would have been obsessive indeed.

###

1. Anyone else have fond memories of the coloured stripes waving back and forth on your TV as the program loaded?

2. I am making the actual keys up - I can't actually recall the controls, but it was pretty much like this.

3. Yes, neither of us actually gave anything up, and yet I was annoyed by the supposedly lost value.  If you feel the need to argue about this, take it up with my 14yo self.

4. I occasionally amuse myself by calculating how many times my old Apple II+ could fit inside an e-mail, or how quickly I would be able to download my entire collection of floppies onto my phone. [5]

5. Yes, I'm easily amused.

6. Or more resourceful in locating a copy of the instructions to crib from.