FATE SF

Happy Anniversary, STA App!

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Tue, 15 Aug 2023 00:44:00 +0000

It is hard to believe that B.C. Holmes' Star Trek Adventures character builder app is celebrating its second birthday today, but that is a fact! Over the past four years, I have been running an every-four-to-six weeks' LGBTQ+ themed STA RPG campaign. Our game reached its 49th episode this weekend, and I can't tell you how many main characters, supporting characters, starships, and space sectors I have created using this app!

So thank you to B.C. for creating it! I check it often, because new features are being added all the time.

Happy Anniversary! Engage!!!

Con of the North - My Games and How to Register

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Thu, 25 Nov 2021 00:46:00 +0000

Con of the North 2022 happens from February 18-20, 2022. Event sign-ups should go live on Thanksgiving. Advance sign-ups are already open for GMs. The convention will have both an in-person component and a virtual track. This year, I am opting for the virtual track.

Here's how to participate:

The convention website is here. That's where you start.
To sign up for events, you first need to register for the convention, which you do on the convention's Tabletop Events webpage here; click on the Buy Badges link to the upper right to get started. This page also has a link to the convention's Discord server, which is where most virtual events will occur.
It is worth scrolling down and reviewing the badge types. If you are looking for a virtual-only play experience, that is only $5.
Once you have purchased a badge you will be able to select events.
The Attend selector on the Tabletop Events page allows you to see the convention schedule and select events.

Here are the events that I am running as part of the virtual component of the convention:

Friday, 2/18, 6-10 PM CT: Dune: Guildbreaker (Dune RPG)
Saturday, 2/19, 8 AM-12 Noon: Everway: the Great Return (Everway-Silver Anniversary Edition RPG)
Saturday, 2/19, 4-8 PM CT: Tekumel Saturday Night Special (Fate of Tekumel RPG)
Sunday, 2/20, 12 noon-4 PM CT: The Lost City of Ammon (Lex Arcana RPG)

I am hoping to see some of you in my games!

ConFABulous 2021 Program Schedule

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Mon, 25 Oct 2021 23:32:00 +0000

ConFABulous 2021 is a free virtual gaming convention for LGBTQ+ people and their friends is scheduled for Saturday, November 6 (with some gaming events also scheduled for Sunday, 11/7).

ConFABulous will have one high quality programming track on 11/6, with panelists participating via Zoom, and broadcast on the convention's YouTube panel.

RPGs will happen on 11/6 and 11/7 via the ConFABulous Discord server.

See a panel you'd like to be on? See a game you'd like to play? The first step is to register for the convention. You sign up at ConFABulous.org. Then email confabulous.info@gmail.com if you want to be panelist or sign up for a game.

The convention website will be updated in about a week with the final schedule of programming and games, but in the meantime, here is the full schedule as it stands today:

Panels - Saturday, November 6

10-11 AM - What Have You Read Over the Last Year? The North Country Gaylaxians Book Club has continued to read an LGBTQ+ SF/F book every month, and we know that a lot of people have stepped up their reading and participation in virtual book clubs. What have you read, and was it good?

11:30-12:30 - Media Tie-Ins with Games: Catherine Lundoff writes media tie-ins for games, among other things, and specifically for Onyx Path Publishing’s World of Darkness series. She's written stories for the 20th Anniversary Edition of Vampire the Masquerade and the 20th Anniversary Edition of Wraith, and as of today, a story that became a game scenario for Ghost Hunters. She is eager to discuss media tie-ins and horror game writing.

1:30-2:30 PM - Hot Robin Covers - and Loki - Exploring the New LGBTQ Characters in Mainstream Comics and TV series based on the comics. What's queer, what's not so queer, and what's good?

3-4 PM - How did you get your gaming fix during the pandemic? What worked and what didn’t? What are you going to keep doing that you started in the pandemic? What games were you excited about this year? What games worked well this year and which ones didn't?

4:30-5:30 PM - What’s queer and good in new TV series? Includes Picard (second season), Lord of the Rings, Wheel of Time, Foundation Trilogy, Black Widow, Legends of Tomorrow, Killjoys, Batwoman, etc.!

7-8 PM - Ask A DM: Level-Up Time! Our ever-popular panel in which people talk about their experiences as dungeonmasters/gamemasters, and answer people’s questions about how to offer engaging and effective roleplaying experiences.

8:30-9:30 PM - An Expanded Universe After All: How Is the Star Wars Universe Changing With All the New TV Series, Movies, and Comics?

Gaming - Saturday, 11/6 and Sunday, 11/7

Saturday, 11/6, 1-3 PM - Troika! RPG: Adventure across the humpbacked sky! Troika is a complete yet wildly-open RPG. Players can expect to fly through mystic space, get lost in infinite cities of the gods, and meet strange & wonderful people all the while using a robust and familiar game system. We will be playing Micah Anderson's "Carnelian Riddle in the House of Indolent Blooms", an entry to the Troika! Pamphlet Adventure Jam, in which you are commissioned to rob a sphinx, infiltrating his garden party, meandering through a semi-hostile demiplane segregated from the flow of time. Up to 5 players. GM is James Bacigalupo.

Saturday, 11/6, 8- 11 PM - Thirsty Sword Lesbians RPG: "The Coffeehouse on the Edge" - You play a lesbian with a sword - and feelings and desires. You have a coffeehouse on the edge of fairyland to defend against gentrificaiton in this slice-of-life adventure in a world with magic, swordplay, romance, and creeping (creepy?) capitalism. Rules are easy to learn. Up to 5 players. GM is John Till.

Sunday, 11/7, 9 AM-12 Noon - MÖRK BORG RPG: A DOOM METAL ALBUM OF A GAME. A SPIKED FLAIL TO THE FACE. LIGHT ON RULES, HEAVY EVERYTHING ELSE. Up to 5 players. GM is James Bacigalupo.

Sunday, 11/7, 1-4 PM - Everway-Silver Anniversary Edition RPG : "The Quest for the Queer Sphere" - You play Spherewalkers with the ability to use gates to walk between worlds in this multicultural, mythic, high fantasy RPG. Out now in a new edition via Kickstarter, Everway uses a Tarot-like Fortune Deck to determine the results of character actions. The focus is on narrative and story. Rules are easy to learn. Up to 5 players. GM is John Till.

My Games At Gamehole Con 2021

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 16:55:00 +0000

I have four games planned for the virtual game track at Gamehole Con 2021, October 21-24, 2021. To sign up for these events, you need to register to attend Gamehole Con here. Once you have done that, you can select events. Events opened for sign up today!

Here are my events, and a convenient link on the Gamehole Con page to all the events that I am running:

Tekumel: Prince of Barsoom, Thursday, October 21, 1-4 PM CT: A new emperor sits on the Petal Throne and has charged you with hunting down a rebel Prince who has escaped through an interdimensional Nexus Point. Find the Nexus Point and follow the rebel Prince to Barsoom, the fabled Red Planet of of John Carter and Dejah Thoris. Swords & Planet adventure on two worlds! The Worlds of Tekumel and Barsoom involve adult themes including slavery and sexuality. While these themes are not the focus of the game session, players should be aware of this before signing up for this game session. Game will be run on the convention Discord server. This game uses the John Carter of Mars RPG (2d20 System) from Modiphius.

Tekumel: Over the Wall, Friday, October 22, 3-6 PM CT: Your clanhouse shares a wall with another. There has been no sign of activity next door in an entire day, which is extremely odd. Relations with the other clan are strained, as they have a history of not paying their fair share in wall repairs. The elders also suspect that the neighbors have tunneled under the walls of your clanhouse at some point. Considering the odd lack-of-activity next door, your clan elders authorize a little expedition over the wall, to find out what has been going on. The World of Tekumel involves adult themes including slavery and sexuality. While these aren't a focus of the game session, players should be aware of this before signing up for this game session. Game will be run on the convention Discord server. Fate of Tekumel RPG system.

Everway: the Great Return, Saturday, October 23, 6 PM-10 PM: More than 25 years ago, Wizards published an RPG with three booklets in a white box. Everway reinvented fantasy gaming, taking things to a mythic level in which you play Spherewalkers exploring the Multiverse. Characters were created using Vision Cards, and a Tarot-like Fortune Deck was the tool for resolving character and NPC actions. At the center of everything is the great City of Everway, the city with the greatest number of gates to other Spheres in the Multiverse. Now back in a new Silver Anniversary edition, this is your chance to experience this unique and visionary RPG for yourself! Visit everwayan.blogspot.com for more about the game and the setting. Game will be run on the convention Discord server.

Lex Arcana: Terrors in the Snow, Sunday, October 24, 2-5 PM: You are elite members of the occult investigative unit known as the Lex Arcana, a special chapter of the Roman Emperor's Praetorian Guard in a Roman Empire that never fell. You use augury, physical might, brainpower, and sheer Roman audacity and will to preserve the empire and conquer its enemies - natural or supernatural. On this mission, you travel to the snowy mountains to the north of Italia, where the elephants of Hannibal's legendary invasion of Italia have seemingly returned to terrorize the living. Game will be run on the convention Discord server. Uses the new English language edition of Lex Arcana RPG, the most popular Italian RPG!

Three on Climate

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Mon, 21 Jun 2021 02:42:00 +0000

Andrea Hairston's Master of Poisons is set in a fantastic version of West Africa besieged by an ever-worsening climate crisis. Poison winds blow from the east, gradually eroding and poisoning farmland, cities, and even the ocean. This is Hairston's first full-on epic fantasy, but her writing style is as vivid and at times bewildering as in her earlier novels. Short chapters of 4-6 pages are written from the point of view of Djola, an exiled member of the ruling Council of the Arkhysian Empire, or Awa, a girl who is in training to become a griot or storyteller.

Djola is on a quest to end the climate crisis; he searches for a magical cure that will prevent the collapse of the Arkhysian Empire. He loses his family, and eventually gains terrible magical powers. Awa is sold by her impoverished peasant farmer father to the itinerant Green Elders, who are gender nonconforming travelers, shadow-warriors, and mystics who live in the wilds to the east of the Empire. Awa has the ability to enter the Smokelands, which are a layered, spiritual otherwhere which faces an ecological crisis of its own. Gradually the stories of Djola and Awa come together as ecological, social, and political crises converge.

This novel was the June selection for the North Country Gaylaxians Book Club. As far as I know, I'm the only book club member who finished the book. Hairston's style in each of her novels is fragmented and demanding. The payoff doesn't happen quickly. In my case, I had to get to around page 250 before I felt certain I would read all 507 pages of the story. However, I am glad that I did!

***

One of the recurrent challenges for Hairston's characters is whether - and when - to use violence. They are trying to save their world from poison sands and from opponents who are only too willing to use violence (conventional or magical) to expand their power and to "control" (and sometimes hide) the crises their world is facing.

Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline is no "Ecologist's Cookbook"; people who are looking for practical advice on how to carry out eco-sabotage won't find anything useful here. Instead, Malm presents an ethical argument for the use of violence by the environmental movement. His argument will be pretty familiar to people who were active in CISPES in the 1980s. For both the Central America solidarity movement, and for the Salvadoran revolutionary movement, there was a recognition of the need for strategies that broaden the movement (i.e., bring more people into active participation) and strategies that radicalize the movement (i.e., the adoption of bolder, more militant strategies and tactics that advance the movement and take political ground from the enemy).

While the environmental movement of the 1990s certainly had elements that espoused and used violence (in particular Earth First! and proponents of the reactionary ideology of Deep Ecology), by the 2000s, the environmental movement had largely eschewed such tactics. Malm's concern is that the environmental movement doesn't present a serious challenge to fossil capitalism and climate change; we won't be able to stop climate change unless activists "raise the stakes" through tactical use of violence.

The examples of violence he uses are symbolic protest actions such as damage to private property (for example, letting the air out of SUV tires, and then leaving a note for the driver warning them that they have a flat tire, and why) and sabotage of oil pipelines (such as drilling holes in the pipes). The latter tactic is very similar to sitting on railroad tracks serving the munitions industry, or hammering in the heads of missiles. We've seen this before, and it is somewhat surprising that there isn't more of this going on in the contemporary environmental movement.

Malm isn't talking about cyberattacks that temporarily or permanently damage polluting infrastructure, or targeted assassinations of corporate officers or board members of polluting industries, which is somewhat surprising as there is not much in his line of argument that would suggest that these kind of actions are not in line with radicalizing the movement in the way he suggests needs to happen.

***

Nick Estes' Our History Is The Future provides ample reason to carefully consider the ramifications of violent tactics for the environmental movement. Estes' book is partly a history of Dakota resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), partly a history of the Dakota people and their struggle against European settler colonialism, over several centuries, and partly a history of indigenous social movements for human rights, treaty recognition, and environmental justice. Because so many frontline struggles for environmental justice today are happening on sovereign native land, and because U.S. settler colonialism has repeatedly shown no respect for native lives and sovereignty, and a great propensity to use violence and terrorism against native people, the struggles that indigenous activists have led against DAPL, the contemporary Line 3 project in Minnesota, and others are decidedly focused on using non-violent tactics.

Estes documents just how much force and violence police, paramilitaries, and the oil and construction industries have directed against native communities and activists. One can only imagine the repression that would occur if indigenous activists actually used Malm's methods in their environmental activism. This is something Malm's book fails to address in any way.

#StayAtHome: Mao Zedong's "On Contradiction" Study Companion

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Sun, 23 May 2021 15:32:00 +0000

Mao Zedong's "On Contradiction" is one of Mao's five really important philosophical essays. Originally presented in 1937 as a lecture at the Anti-Japanese Military and Political College in Yanan, "On Contradiction" explains how things change according to dialectical and historical materialism.

I'm also reading Georg Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness at the moment, and while they are both texts about historical materialism, and both owe a debt to Hegel, Mao's "On Contradiction" is much more in the Engels tradition in that he sees dialectics as explanatory in the realm of nature and science, as well as for history and human society. Strictly speaking, Mao's essay is a work of dialectical and historical materialism, whereas Lukacs confines dialectics to historical processes only, by which me presumably means humans-in-nature as opposed to all nature.

The edition I read, Mao Zedong's "On Contradiction" Study Companion, published in 2019 by Foreign Languages Press (Paris) is just that: 84 pages of text, with the left hand page being Mao's original text, while the right hand page is commentary on the text prepared by the Redspark Collective. The text is followed by three pages of footnotes from the original essay.

Redspark Collective's commentary is quite useful. It explains many of the early 20th Century historical events that had happened or were in the process of happening at the time the essay was written. Commentary also explains various philosophical currents in the ancient world, Europe, the USSR, and China that have influenced or are referenced in Mao's text. Finally some comments focus on more recent events, including the dogmatism of some followers of Shining Path outside Peru (for example, some Maoists outside Peru took up the Sendero policy of printing all brochures with red covers!), even pointing out that the revolution in Peru ended for all intents and purposes in 1990.

More apposite to contemporary concerns, the Redspark Collective commentary also points out where Mao got things wrong in light of factors like climate change and the persistence of antagonistic contradictions within socialist societies. I read the entire book yesterday, and will probably read it again once I finish Lukacs.

#StayAtHome: J. Sakai's "Learning from an Unimportant Minority"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 16:44:00 +0000

J. Sakai is a Japanese American radical who is best known for his book Settlers: the Mythology of the White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern. This book, Learning from an Unimportant Minority: Race Politics Beyond the Black/White Paradigm (2015) is the transcript of a talk he gave as part of the Festival of Anarchy in Montreal in 2014. It's a small book, and short at 118 pages; I read it in a few hours last night.

The title is sarcastic. Sakai doesn't really think either Asians or Japanese Americans are an "unimportant minority", but that is how they are often treated within a paradigm that looks at race as primarily Black/White. He's interested in this problem not as an academic exercise in critiquing binaries or dualism, but based on his life experience. But the talk opens with the case of a white man in Chicago who attacked several Asian men while they were fishing by Lake Michigan. The white guy got a reduced sentence because his companions included a white woman and a black male, and because he belonged to an anti-racist skinhead group. That's the context for Sakai's immediate concern with Asians as an "unimportant minority."

In the talk he relates his family's experience after leaving a WW II concentration camp for Japanese Americans. They moved to Chicago, and he learned how to interact with white people ("the rules") around age 9 from African American kids of similar age. He observes the ways in which Japanese Americans in Chicago "bargained" with a white power structure, as well as about his own (and other Asian Americans') activism in solidarity with African Americans and American Indians.

One of the most exciting stories he tells is about an American Indian armed occupation of vacant housing in Chicago,

Sakai doesn't think that race antagonisms will go away when capitalism is put down. He points to conflicts between the Japanese American community and other racial groups, and to class differences within the Japanese American community, and suggests that "contradictions among the people" will persist for some time after a revolution.

#StayAtHome: Suldokar's Wake, Periodical Release Issue #1

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 23:42:00 +0000

Suldokar's Wake is a science fiction RPG by Christian Mehrstam, the creator of Whitehack. Readers may know about Whitehack: it is a brief, extremely flexible reconstruction of a d20 RPG. Whitehack introduced one of the favorite features appropriated without attribution by Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: the advantage/disadvantage mechanic, referred to as double roll/half roll in the mechanics of Whitehack and Suldokar's Wake.

What we have here, in Suldokar's Wake, Periodical Release Issue #1: Aeonic Evil Returns is Mehrstam making something explicit that he believes is implicit with many RPGs. It is typical with many RPGs to release a core book or players' guide, followed by "supplements". So many, many RPGs are in fact serial publications. Christian Mehrstam decided to intentionally release an RPG as a serial product with a number of issues. It's an experiment to see what happens when you get intentional about this publication format.

The first issue pictured above is a gazetteer of sorts. There is a brief explanation of the publication strategy, a description of what you need to play, some content about design philosophy, information about dice mechanics used in the game, and then about 40 pages of setting description. That is followed by some explanation of mapping conventions used in the game, and a glossary of mechanical terms and in-world words.

The setting is interesting. It has a lot in common with Numenera, except that the author has taken the effort to present a coherent history of the world, something lacking in Numenera. The parts of the world hang together here, because the author chose to present a world with a history. It is a long history, with the rise and fall of human and non-human civilizations. There is a time abyss, such as we often see in fantasy and science fantasy, but it has concrete elements that hang together in a coherent way that leaves one wanting more information, while walking away with the impression that there is plenty of space for GMs to write new content for the game.

Back to the setting. Post-scarcity, long-gone ancient civilizations, and recently fallen starfaring civilizations. Human(ish) people, aliens, droids, solid-light holograms. An isolated planet, stargates no longer functioning. Crashed starships and generation ships. A planetary holointelligence. Pervasive nanotechnology, much of it gone wild. A subterranean world, with another planetary intelligence, this time fungal. Ruins to explore and pillage. Makers (replicators) no longer very programmable, with reproduction templates that can manufacture many goods while rendering the land around them barren: the makers strip resources from their immediate environment to construct their valuable products.

There is a lot to work with here. I read a lot of Numenera into this, but there are certainly other influences including Babylon 5, especially with all the hints of an ancient Shadow evil that is about to return, and STALKER, with people delving to recover inexplicable alien artifacts.

My edition of the product is 80 pages. The editing is spotty, but that's what happens when you buy a print on demand book right after its release.

You could run this game setting with Numenera, Fate, or Mutant Year Zero but if you are patient (as I was over the last couple of years) there was the promise of supplements. These supplements now exist:

Issue #2: Anatomy of Zira-Kaan Character has the rules for character creation (this is a light d20 system, with some intrinsic weirdness based on the author's interests) in 128 pages.
Issue #3: Rules of Inverted Reality has the game mechanics in 128 pages.
Issue #4: Depths of Devnull is huge. It clocks in at 330 pages, has all the rules and resources for GMs, as well as a 50 page adventure.
Issue #5: The Screen That Wasn't is a 19 page optional that summarizes all the key rules. Think of it as a GM screen in booklet form.

Links to order any of the books can be found at the Suldokar's Wake blog.

I'll be starting in on Issue #2 tonight. I ordered Issues #4 and 5 earlier this week, and look forward to their arrival!

#StayAtHome: J. Moufawad-Paul's "The Communist Necessity"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 19:12:00 +0000

I purchased J. Moufawad-Paul's The Communist Necessity back around 2014, when it came out in its first Kersplebedeb edition. There is a second edition from Kersplebedeb out now, which is about 10 pages longer, and you can download a free PDF of the first edition from the very fine independent Maoist publisher, Foreign Languages Press, right here.

J. Moufawad-Paul is a Maoist philosopher, the publisher of the M-L-M Mayhem! blog, and a frequent contributor to online discussions hosted by the Foreign Languages Press. It's unfortunate that it took me so long to read his book, but on the upside, in recent years I have read a good number of the texts he critiques in the The Communist Necessity, including Alain Badiou's The Communist Hypothesis, Jodi Dean's The Communist Horizon, and the Invisible Committee's The Coming Insurrection.

The Communist Necessity critiques each of these texts as an expression of movementism, which is a similar concept to that expressed by Featherstone, Henwood, and Parenti as activistism: the species of anarcho-magical thinking born of WTO protests and Occupy, which holds that the sheer momentum of action by diverse social movements is sufficient to bring about sweeping social change, and may even be sufficient to cause capitalism to disintegrate or just go away, without need any overarching revolutionary movement, party, leadership, or organization. So far, so good.

The next level of critique is directed at the theoretical apparatus used in these texts, in particular their over-reliance on philology ("the word 'communism' comes from the Latin words X,Y, Z," etc.), as well as a variety of post-structuralist critiques of grand narratives, end of history, etc., all tools that lack explanatory power in the real world.

These approaches are described as being a form of idealism. They are perhaps sentimentally tied to notions of socialism and communism, but they are utopian socialisms of the kind already critiqued and rejected by Marx and Engels. So why revert to rhetorical strategies that have already been rejected by historical social movements?

Perhaps part of this rejection comes from the fear of being asked to defend (or be seen as defending) various historical moments in the history of socialism and communism, such as the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, and the Cultural Revolution. Moufawad-Paul makes the point that past revolutionary cycles and theories have of course had their disappointments and shortcomings; he makes it clear that for him there is no need to hypostatize Leninism as a fixed form or universal, transhistorical political solution.

But why ignore recent and contemporary political struggles of the people's war variety: the Shining Path in Peru, the Naxalites in India, the CPP-NPA in the Philippines? The lack of engagement of these authors with those Third World movements is an interesting question, and it is easy to see the elevation of various forms of Theory (Lacan, Deleuze, Zizek, etc.) as just more eurocentrism. That is hard to deny. Like Trotskyism, the New-New Communists (my term) have a distinct lack of interest in and engagement with the Third World, both in terms of revolutionary theory from the periphery, and revolutionary practice there.

And that's where necessity comes back into the picture. The communist necessity is the demand for better lives and new forms of social relations being raised by movements in the periphery. Actual communist movements. Labor and social movements in the core countries of the capitalist world economy feel less sense of this necessity, and their movements embrace theory that doesn't recognize that necessity.

The critique of New-New Communists could be advanced further through a deeper awareness of world-system analysis. That area of study grew out of a critique of development theory, and has stayed close to Third World revolutionary theory and struggles. Over the last 40 years, it has also developed a strong understanding of the limitations imposed by the world-system on any revolutionary movement that takes state power. There are constraints on revolutionary agency that come from the inter-state system and the capitalist world economy, which is why practically all revolutionary movements that take state power fail to achieve their maximum program, and usually achieve far less.

While world-systems analysis is quite weak with respect to agency, it does bring attention to the challenges that revolutionary movements and states need to face, as well as to the challenges in internationalizing a revolutionary movement. This is especially important to consider with respect to people living in smaller states. Autarchic development is possible in large states with big populations and plentiful and diverse resources. Both the USSR and China demonstrated that. But it won't be an option for smaller states. That needs a lot of careful thought, but that is a project for a different book.

I intend to read some of J. Moufawad-Paul's more recent work, as The Communist Necessity was a provocative and enjoyable read.

#StayAtHome: Rivers Solomon's "The Deep"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 02:27:00 +0000

Rivers Solomon's The Deep is a great novel about the pain of the Middle Passage, and how people deal with historical trauma, individually and collectively. I am a big generation ship fan, and really liked Rivers' first novel, A Kindness of Ghosts, but this novel went a lot deeper for me. It probably helps that the novel is strongly suggestive of West African and Afro-Caribbean spirituality, and in particular belief in Ginen, and the lwa La Siren (a mermaid being). The novel is brief, disjointed, and powerful, and I am confident that it will reward rereading.

#StayAtHome: William Hope Hodgson's "The House on the Borderland"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Sun, 24 Jan 2021 23:48:00 +0000

Imagine Lovecraft, but without the racism. That's what William Hope Hodgson puts on offer with his novel, "The House on the Borderland". Hodgson's book was published in 1908, and his work was in fact an influence on Lovecraft. And that influence is easy to see: a big chunk of the novel is exactly the kind of investigation into the weird that Lovecraft wrote. Another chunk of the novel is visionary travelogue, a cosmic journey into the far, far future.

In this novel, two men go on a fishing trip in the Irish countryside. They decide to follow a river trail for a bit. The river goes underground, and then emerges into a chasm. Near the chasm they find the ruins of an ancient estate. There, they discover a manuscript, and set to reading it.

The first part of the manuscript relates the narrator's discovery that his home is under siege by Swine-Things. These seem to have emerged from the chasm, although as he sets about the defense of his house, he discovers a mysterious well plug in his cellar that seems to connect to the chasm. The Swine-Things have mesmeric abilities, and much later in the novel, we discover that they have the ability to deal wounds that glow green in the dark, and eventually feed some nasty form of fungal life.

It's worth noting that the Swine-Things (or creatures inspired by them) have made an appearance in other SF ranging from Doctor Who ("The Daleks Take Manhattan") to the Revelation Space setting of Alastair Reynolds, and Hodgson in recent years became an inspiration for old-school gamers as well, such as here and here and here. I know my friends Jim and Jason have read a fair amount of Hodgson, but I suspect many of his other fans have not. There is a lot more to the world than the weird tale as constructed by Lovecraft, and Hodgson offers new directions that gamers can pursue in their storytelling, such as the game, Casting the Runes.

In the second part of the novel, the narrator travels to the far future. The sun shifts to red, and then to black, and then a new, green star enters the picture. This part felt much like an early SF novel might, in which travel in space and time seems to use a conveyance (the house?), or even astral projection. The time travel sequence was much less interesting and suspenseful (and perhaps a bit tedious), but in reading it I wondered if Hodgson had read the astronomy of his time. I suspect so.

There are other books I am reading at the moment, but I'd like to continue reading this volume, and eventually take on The Night Land.

#StayAtHome: Yoon Ha Lee's "Hexarchate Stories"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 19:15:00 +0000

True Confession: While gay military erotica aren't exactly my thing, gay space operatic erotica certainly do hit the mark. Yoon Ha Lee's Hexarchate Stories delivers one of these in the short story "Gloves". More of this, please.

But the entire collection is really, really good. I believe this is Yoon Ha's second short story collection. His first one, Conservation of Shadows, is also quite good. Hexarchate Stories has one story which overlaps that first collection, "The Battle of Candle Arc". That story draws upon real history in the form of the Korean Admiral Yi Sun-Shin's incredible victory over a vast Japanese armada in the Battle of Myeongnyang, during the Imjin War. Moral of the story for GMs everywhere: make your space battles happen on interesting space terrain. Admiral Yi Sun-Shih used a whirlpool to his advantage to defeat a numerically superior force. Jedao does the same in this story by manipulating both the high calendar, which makes certain weapons more effective than others, and how the high calendar is spatialized in local space. I like this short story and have without a doubt read it more often than any short story by anyone.

There are a lot of great stories in this collection, and this was my second time reading it, this time for the North Country Gaylaxians' Book Club. While there aren't a lot of authors that I reread (other than Michael Moorcock), Yoon Ha's work really does merit that as there are all sorts of subtleties to the setting and the characters' interactions with each other that come out this way.

All of the stories in this collection take place in the Hexarchate universe featured in the Machineries of Empire series (which begins with the novel Ninefox Gambit). We get nice insights into the early years of both Jedao and Cheris, and it is nice to meet their families. There are two caper stories within the collection, the pre-Heptarchate "The Chameleon's Gloves" and "Extracurricular Activities", although the long novella with Cheris and Jedao II (Jedao-the-xenomorph) is also a caper story. Readers who have completed the Machineries of Empire series really owe it to themselves to read this collection, and especially the novella at the end, which in a number of ways integrates and completes the trilogy.

#StayAtHome: "Star Trek Vanguard: Reap the Whirlwind"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Mon, 28 Dec 2020 20:00:00 +0000

David Mack's "Reap the Whirlwind " is the third book in the Star Trek: Vanguard series, a set of Original Series novels set in the Taurus Reach, an area outside the Federation and bordered by the Klingon Empire, the Tholian Assembly, and the Federation. The Organian Peace Treaty does not exist yet, so the setting features intense espionage, sabotage, diplomacy, and intrigue among these three powers.

The intrigue isn't just about territory: there is a series of ancient alien archaeological finds on many worlds in the Taurus reach, finds that promise great power for the faction that can unlock their secrets. But one of the three factions would rather keep these secrets buried...

In Star Trek Adventures terms, the Taurus Reach is a campaign setting ripe for exploration and intrigue. There is Starbase 47 (the station name for this Watchtower-class starbase is Vanguard), the Federation's primary footprint in the sector, and the heart of Federation operations covert and overt in the area. There are four important starships in this novel: USS Endeavor, the Constitution-class starship assigned to the sector after the destruction of the USS Bombay; the USS Sagittarius, an Archer-class starship (the small ship on the book cover which is trying to dodge a Klingon D7), the operations "runabout" (as it were) assigned to the starbase; USS Lovell, a refurbished Daedalus-class explorer assigned to a Starfleet Corps of Engineers crew; and the Rocinante, a free trader whose Captain, Cervantes Quinn, is beholden to both the Orion syndicate and to Lt. Commander T'Prynn, the Starfleet Intelligence liaison to Starbase 47.

Yes, Rocinante does come up as a rogue ship name in SF from time to time, doesn't it?

I am not sure how accessible the book would be to someone just starting the series with this book, but there is a 30+ page glossary at the back. I plan to continue reading the series, even though I am not a huge fan of the ancient alien threat at the center of the series, and I find some of the characterization a bit tiresome; to wit, please either stop referring to female crew as the "brunette", or do the same occasionally with males; consider less frequent introduction of new female characters as annoying antagonists for male characters; consider not blowing up one of the two lesbian characters in the book, especially just after the characters' big break up scene.

So there are things in the series that annoy me, for sure. But in sourcebook terms, it IS a very interesting effort to create a setting for new Star Trek adventures (insert a capital "A" if you like; a Taurus Reach boxed set would be A GREAT IDEA for the RPG). You would really want this particular book in the series for its glossary, if you were going to use the setting in advance of a boxed set, and you'd want the first book in the series, Harbinger, for its nifty fold out map of both Vanguard and the exteriors of the Sagittarius. I know that this Archer-class starship has become a favorite for some Star Trek Adventures fans, as it is warp capable, able to land planetside, and small enough to be crewed by a handful of PCs.

I have even thought about using the Taurus Reach for convention-based scenarios; it's probably just a matter of time until I figure out a story I want to tell. In the meantime, I am starting in on book four of the series, Dayton Ward's Open Secrets.

#StayAtHome: Jenny Odell's "How To Do Nothing"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 19:04:00 +0000

If quitting Facebook forever really isn't an option (and it isn't for most of us), what should you do to avoid doing work for Facebook, Twitter, etc.? By work here, I mean letting the attention economy (pushing the "Like" button, hitting the refresh addictively, and retweeting or resharing the latest outrage) command your attention. Jenny Odell's "How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy" (2019) was written to explore that question. She suggests that the answer is to retrain our attention to notice people and details in our local environment and broader region.

She makes her case through storytelling and theory, ranging from ancient Greek philosophy to the art scene (she is a digital artist by profession), social theory, birding (her hobby), and nature walks. An important insight in the book is that the attention economy produces and relies upon a kind of siloed attention: while people are networked, each person's online experience is profoundly channeled and controlled by algorithms in a way that makes shared experiences nearly impossible. Instead, we have to focus our attention on local people and nature if we want to engage in authentic dialogue, community, and exchange.

Odell is incredibly skilled at weaving together different kinds of knowledge and experience, and she has a gift for explaining art, social theory, and animal behavior in ways that are incredibly accessible to the general reader. This was the December book for the Empire Reading Group, and a great book with which to round out the year.

#StayAtHome: John M. Ford's "The Final Reflection"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Sat, 05 Dec 2020 20:36:00 +0000

This was my first rereading of John M. Ford's The Final Reflection (1984) since its original publication some thirty six years ago (!). My first reflection is how much the novel (and, secondarily, the FASA Star Trek RPG supplement The Klingons, also authored by John M. Ford) have shaped my understanding of who the Klingons "really" are. I believe this was the first really sympathetic portrayal of the Klingons, written from a Klingon point of view. I mean, in my current post-Dominion war Shackleton Expanse Star Trek Adventures RPG campaign, there are Human-Klingon and Romulan-Klingon fusions, and there is even a small renascent Imperial Klingon States in the Expanse. In fact, one of my best pieces of game writing for this campaign was their "declaration" of the new IKS.

A second reflection, provoked in part also by some of the journalism about Star Trek: Discovery, is that the Klingons have been reinvented several times. So any Star Trek GM will need to decide which Klingons they are using - or which combination of Klingon-types they are select for the Klingons in their game. For example, while Worf in Star Trek: The Next Generation had this weird idea that repairing disabilities with prosthetics was somehow un-Klingon and/or dishonorable, the Klingons in The Final Reflection have all kinds of prosthetics - even obvious plastic facial prosthetics. Similarly, notions like the Black Fleet and the significance of "the naked stars" start here, with John M. Ford.

A final reflection is that whoever wrote Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, must have been influenced by The Final Reflection. There are just to many similarities in themes, and in the core conspiracies present in the movie to make this happen by accident. Some of Ford's themes spill back to Enterprise as well, particularly the "humans first" movement which seeks to cut off Earth from other worlds.

This is a very enjoyable novel, with a lot of action and a lot of heart, and some really evocative literary references as well. Anyone who has Klingons reading The Once and Future King is doing Klingons and Trek the right way.

It was nice to see an acknowledgement of John M. Ford in STA's new Klingon Core Book.

#StayAtHome: Paul Waters' "The Republic of Vengeance"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Sun, 29 Nov 2020 21:23:00 +0000

When I purchased Paul Waters' The Republic of Vengeance at Uncle Edgar's (the back room of Uncle Hugo's SF bookstore, where mysteries and historical novels live), Elizabeth told me that some of the regulars, who are fans of novels set in classical antiquity didn't like the homosexuality in the novel. Apparently they didn't look at the last paragraph of the Historical Note at the back of the book:

"It should perhaps be noted that bisexuality was ubiquitous in the ancient world, and well attested in the sources. Such behavior was not, in itself, an object of censure, and this remained true until the end of the classical period when the Church, wielding its growing political power, began to impose its own uniform blueprint on human relations."

This book in fact qualifies as a gay novel. Marcus, the Roman protagonist, is gay and a major arc in the novel is the development of his lifelong relationship with his Greek lover, the athlete Menexenos. But it is not a typical gay novel, as one of its abiding themes is a young man's quest for vengeance against the pirate who killed his father (and indeed a whole shipload of hostages, of which Marcus was the only survivor). This quest leads the young man into the Greek and eventually Roman war against Phillip the Fifth of Macedon, who has designs on the whole of Greece (and possibly the whole Mediterranean).

Rome is still a Republic, and during the course of the novel (albeit offscreen) Hannibal is finally defeated, while closer to center stage, Phillip and his pirate lover Dikaiarchos wreck chaos across the Greek peninsula. The last novel I read, David Anthony Durham's The Risen tells the story of the Spartacus slave revolt against Rome; it happens a bit after this novel, and I swear that there is way more explicit raunch, gay and straight, in Durham's novel than in Winters'. The latter is far more interested in Hellenistic philosophy than in gay sex, but Paul Winters tells a good story.

#StayAtHome: Spartacus, Corona, Cuboniks

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 19:07:00 +0000

Two of these books are among my best reads of the year. David Anthony Durham's The Risen is a novel of the Spartacus uprising during the Roman Republic. It is written in short chapters, each conveying the perspective of a different character who was part of the Spartacus movement. You get to see how the movement and individual characters evolve over time. I had dinner with David once (and with Nnedi Okorafor and Nalo Hopkinson) 12 years ago or so, and it is amazing to see how his career and Nnedi's have progressed. David is best known for the Acacia fantasy trilogy, but now that I have read "The Risen", I want to read another of his historical novels, Pride of Carthage, which is about Hannibal. This was my best read of 2020 to date; I read it slowly over the summer and fall. Like all really good books, finishing it leaves a bit of a hole.

Andreas Malm's Corona, Crisis, and Climate Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First Century was the other great read of 2020. It looks at the intersections between the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate crisis. It asks some difficult questions, like why did (most) states respond very aggressively to COVID-19 while choosing not to respond in significant ways to the climate crisis, which has been killing 150,000 people a year for the last four decades. The book makes a persuasive case that climate change is a primary driver of pandemics, as local habitat disruption forces pathogen-carrying species to migrate. Malm revises radical disaster theory (which emphasizes social factors as the drivers of disaster) by showing how capital in fact drives climate crises and in turn drives biological crises like pandemics. (Note that while the text engages with James O'Connor, one of the founders of Ecological Marxism, it fails to engage with other compelling radical ecologies, such as the Marxist eco-feminisms of Vananda Shiva, Maria Mies, and others. More on the exclusion of non-European thought in a bit.)

Malm's solution is a call for war communism to address the dual crises of pandemics and climate crises. This requires the exercise of state power, so anarchism is out because it rejects using the most critical tool. Similarly, social democracy is out, because it is ineffective in crisis periods. His deus ex machina is that simultaneous Leninist revolutions will happen in multiple countries - somehow. Because he doesn't engage with capitalism as a world-system though, there is no theory behind how these "simultaneous" revolutions might occur, or how they will stay true to their original goals once state power is taken. Here he relies on Adorno and Trotsky to keep the revolutions true.

You can't get more magical thinking or more Eurocentrism in one serving, and given the terrible track record of Trotskyism in the real world (zero successful revolutions, almost zero traction outside Europe and North America) this is a really self-defeating place to land. Still though, there is a lot of exciting food for thought in this small book, and much of the text left me very hopeful that positive, rapid change on a world scale still might be possible. Malm creates the sense of urgency for the change, and a sense of possibility; it's just that his analysis and prescriptions really need to step outside the European and Western Marxist frames.

Then there is The Xenofeminist Manifesto by the five-country collective Laboria Cuboniks. I read it in about an hour on the exercise bike, and you can too. The point of the text is a bit drowned out by its graphic design, but I gather the main points are to put forward xenofeminism as an anti-essentialist, pro-science, trans-friendly revolutionary feminism for the digital age. None of this is bad.

What is bad is the way that the text is absolutely smothered by the design. It reminded me a lot of the cover and interior of the Swedish old-school metal RPG Mork Borg ("Dark Fortress"), which came out 2 years after The Xenofeminist Manifesto.

Which images below come from the manifesto, and which come from the RPG? Choose your own adventure, but no more of this, please!

#StayAtHome: Tillie Walden's "On a Sunbeam" and "Cosmic Slumber Tarot"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Sun, 15 Nov 2020 21:50:00 +0000

The art above comes from Tillie Walden's SF epic graphic novel On a Sunbeam, which tells the story of a group of women and one genderfluid crewmember who travel the stars repairing abandoned space relics. Not relics as in spacecraft, but relics as in "old palaces" or other mysterious and long-abandoned structures hanging alone in the built environment of deep space. The starships we see are giant koi, and there are elements of space magic in the graphic novel. At 500+ pages, the story takes a while to "take in" and includes two storylines: the protagonist's school days, and her present life as part of a travelling architectural repair crew. Think about the design intent of the RPG Diaspora, remove all men from the picture (it totally passes the Bechdel test), and add space magic and you have some sense of the promise of this graphic novel. It also has one of the nerviest borrowings from classic SF: in particular, from Bradbury's "All Summer in a Day".

During the North Country Gaylaxian's discussion of the Walden book, we discovered that she has also created the Cosmic Slumber Tarot. This is a full-sized, full-color Tarot deck with two extra cards representing day and night. The art is very reminiscent of the author's illustration style in On a Sunbeam, in particular once we reach the vivid, mysterious and magical world known as The Staircase. The deck is charming and beautiful, and comes with a small hardcover guide to the deck. The cards and book come in a hard double box with a magnetic close. It is very reasonably priced at $25.

#StayAtHome: "The End of Policing" by Alex Vitale

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 23:27:00 +0000

Alex Vitale's The End of Policing is required reading for the movements seeking to abolish the police. In recent months in Minneapolis, gun violence and other crime has increased, and people in the neighborhoods closest to the uprising get no help in terms of routine public safety services. Since the Third Precinct burned, the Minneapolis Police Department seems to have fully withdrawn, as if telegraphing to residents: "So you want to abolish the police? Well, you are on your own. See how you like it."

To make matters worse, the city council members who pledged their "veto-proof" majority in favor of abolishing the MPD either willfully mismanaged the process so that nothing would be on the ballot (a required step to remove the MPD, as a chartered organization, from the budget) or were hopelessly naive about how to get to what they pledged to do. All of them need to go.

Vitale doesn't point toward a grand strategy to get rid of the police. What he does do, in topical chapter after topical chapter (e.g., on the limits of police reform, the fact that the police are not there to protect the public, homelessness, mental illness, school-to-prison pipeline, sex workers, gangs, immigration, and political policing) is that the police are not delivering good outcomes for the public, and that the major reforms proposed (i.e., sensitivity training, body cameras, specialty courts for the homeless, mentally ill, sex workers, youth in gangs, etc.) are ineffective.

For almost every situation, Vitale makes the case that social work and humane social policy are better than policing.

#StayAtHome: Melissa Scott's "Finders"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Sat, 12 Sep 2020 15:06:00 +0000

"Finders keepers, losers weepers" may be the inspiration for the title of Melissa Scott's 2018 SF novel Finders. The book was the September discussion topic for the North Country Gaylaxians reading group, and it was a very lively, wide-ranging discussion!

I read the book in three days, which is quite an accomplishment for me, as usually I get stuck in the first three pages of a Melissa Scott novel, and give up. I did that a few times in August with Finders, but used the Labor Day long weekend to push past that stuck point and read the entire thing. Somewhere between pages 75 and 100, this 360 page novel really took off for me.

This is fun space opera, that reminded some of the virtually assembled Gaylaxians of the novels of Andre Norton. Grand Dame with polyamory.

It also reminded me a lot of the setting of the Stars Without Number RPG, although the particular transhuman Ancients in the story background differ in some details.

So what's it about? Finders tells the story of a starship salvage crew of three: a poly thrupple to be specific, recently reunited. Cassilde, Dai, and Ashe are "salvors": salvagers who search sites of the Ancients (humans, possibly transhumans, from two civilizations ago) for the "elements" and for "Gifts." Elements are small, jewel like colored pieces of technology that are incorporated into current-era technology as essential components

(There isn't much discussion of this in the text, and maybe it will come up in future books in the series, but it would seem that current-era humans have lost the ability to create these high tech building blocks. So the basis of current-era technology is reliant on salvaging the space junk of the Ancients, and current-era people should eventually run out of this stuff that is the basis of their technology. Or so I'd guess. We'll have to wait for the sequels to learn if this is so.)

Gifts are unique, extremely rare artifacts composed of numerous elements. They can do truly miraculous things, like confer the ability to heal otherwise deadly wounds and arrest terminal illnesses. Exposure to Gifts creates sensitivity to the proximity of others who possess Gifts. This is dangerous, as gifts are transferable.

Salvage activity typically happens through the purchase of licenses to particular sites, ruins, space wrecks, or portions thereof. Our protagonists engage in legal salvage - typically. There are also claim jumpers/pirates who prey on licensed salvagers (and each other), and the plot of this novel centers on one particularly vicious claim jumper who will stop at nothing to acquire the Gifts of the Ancients.

Why? You will have to read the book to see what happens.

#StayAtHome: The Dialectic of Sex

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 22:33:00 +0000

Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution was one of the first radical feminist manifestos - if not the first. She points out in her text that at the time of publication (1970), there were no radical feminist utopias from which to draw inspiration (or a plan), so in the final chapter of her book, she writes the blueprint for a radical feminist utopia. (Although written in 1970, Joanna Russ' The Female Man won't be published until 1975.)

Firestone draws inspiration from Marxism, and specifically from Engels' method in influential works like The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. She critiques reformist "American Feminism" (suffrage, the right to participate in social fashions like being a flapper, etc.), Freudianism as a flawed feminism, the origins of inegalitarian gender roles and ideology, the notion of childhood as an ideological construct that become a specific stage of human life (ideology as lived experience and practice, as Althusser would later hold), racism as a subspecies of sexism, male gender ideology, and romance.

Firestone covers a lot of ground in a fresh way. She has a theory of totality.

The Dialectic of Sex puts forward a stages theory of human society that owes a great deal to Engels - and I like Engels, so no complaints there. And since there weren't any existing radical feminist utopian blueprints when she wrote Dialectic, in the last chapter of the book, Firestone proposes what a non-sexist society would look like: households, not families; collective child-rearing rather than parents; free love within a society free of gender norms. In short, a communist future, although perhaps not the one envisioned by many male Marxist-Leninists.

One can argue with whether certain elements for the future society would actually work, but one thing seems pretty clear: this radical feminism has very little to do with the contemporary brand of essentialism and transphobia peddled as radical feminism by the likes of J.K. Rowling and others. Rather, it points towards some of the futures proposed by Samuel R. Delany (Triton, Dhalgren, The Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand) and Cecelia Holland (Floating Worlds).

Science fiction, not fantasy. Pointing toward the future.

#StayAtHome: Three Classic Doctor Who Novels

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Tue, 23 Jun 2020 13:20:00 +0000

I read three more Doctor Who novels in the last couple weeks. The first of these was Brian Hayles novelization of the Third Doctor episode, Doctor Who and the Curse of Peladon. This classic adventure is set on Peladon (also the name of the young monarch) and presents a feudal world with an important mineral resource considering its future. The monarch needs to decide whether to join the Federation, an interstellar polity that includes Earth, the Mars of the reptilian Ice Warriors, Alpha Centauri (a green, single-eyed, multitentacled, hermaphroditic alien), and Arcturus (a pulpy, spidery little thing in a life support vehicle).

It's my favorite Doctor Who episode, and Brian Hayles' novel doesn't disappoint, providing a sense of the interior life of our characters. He also introduced a few inventions of his own, including Alpha Centauri's color changing according to their moods.

Next up was Terrance Dicks' novelization of the Third Doctor episode, Doctor Who and the Monster of Peladon. It is set 50 years after Curse. Peladon has been a member of the Federation for about 50 years, the Federation is at war with Galaxy Five, and Peladon is a critical supplier of the mineral trisilicate. The planet is ruled by Queen Thalira, but she is a monarch in name only; the real power is held by the chancellor, who is also the head of the temple of the royal beast-god Aggedor.

Aggedor has been manifesting as an apparition and disintegrating miners; this is bad for production. A rebellion is brewing, but there is also fear that someone else is manipulating things behind the (rock) curtain. (Hint: the villain is on the book cover.)

Dicks' terse style keeps the story moving, but doesn't add much that wasn't in the original story. No color changes for Alpha Centauri. Our big, green ambassador is also consistently referred to as a "he" which is jarring if you watched the original episode or read Hayles' novel.

The best read of the three was Ben Aaronovitch's Remembrance of the Daleks, which is the novelization of a Seventh Doctor episode. Aaronovitch is best known today for his Rivers of London urban police fantasy series, but this was his first novel ever. It is a humdinger, the best Doctor Who novel that I have read to date.

A number of years ago, I read Aaronovitch's later Doctor Who novel Transit, which is an original narrative rather than a novelization. Although rather notorious with Virgin Books for introducing the phrase "the taste of semen" to the Doctor Who canon, Transit's story about interplanetary skatepunks piggybacking on a hyperspace tube system left me wondering "what is the point of all this?"

Not so, with Remembrance. This is an incredibly fast-paced story, in spite of being a bit longer than the traditional Doctor Who novelizations, featuring a factional struggle between the Renegade Daleks and the Imperial Daleks on Earth, on Remembrance Day weekend, in 1963.

There are some fun Easter eggs in the story, including the Dune-like imaginary references included in some chapter heads, inserting Bernard Quatermass into the Doctor Who universe, and the implication that one of the supporting characters was friends with Alan Turing during the Second World War.

Recommended.

See The Everwayan for more #StayAtHome entries.

Doctor Who And The Irish Question

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Mon, 25 May 2020 22:43:00 +0000

Have any episodes of Doctor Who, or the books, comics, CDs, etc. dealt with the Irish Question, directly or indirectly? I can't think of any, but I'd love to hear from people who know of such episodes/media.

As an aside, many fans are quite fond of the UNIT characters from the 1970s, but UNIT itself: it's all to easy to imagine that this kind of paramilitary group was originally set-up as an anti-IRA death squad. Maybe they did that on the side; maybe their scientific advisor steered them onto a different path...

"Anarchy in Amhor"

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Sun, 14 Jul 2019 17:44:00 +0000

Source: https://library.ucf.edu/news/buffalo-soldiers-legacy-honor-value/

Last night, I ran the John Carter of Mars RPG for six players as part of our monthly Saturday Night Space Opera event; last night's games took place at the Source. In my Barsoom, Red Revolution has broken out in the far northern city of Amhor. A couple of months ago, a mysterious band of blue clad "mercenaries and pirates" had overthrown the despised and feared Jeddak of Amhor, the cruel Jal Had. Following Jal Had's overthrow, the blue clad warriors had reportedly plunged Amhor into chaos.

In the faraway Twin Cities of Helium, Princess Dejah Thoris had assembled a band of heroes to put the niece of Jal Had, a young female gladiator named Hadra Ja, on the throne of distant Amhor, winning the city as an ally of Helium. The amply-scarred Hadra Ja had made a name for herself as a capable warrior in the Arena of Lesser Helium. Our heroes agreed to help put her on the throne.

Our heroes soon found that they had their hands full. One character, Joseph Stands Alone, a Pueblo Indian, soon realized that Hadra Ja was almost entirely lacking in political instinct; she was a sword, and saw the sword as the solution to everything. He set out to begin her political education on the long flight to Amhor.

Once the PCs arrived at the city, a brave Okar and Joseph discovered the true nature of the blue clad mercenaries and pirates: they were two platoons of U.S. Army Cavalry! While the PCs didn't figure out all the background events, they soon learned that the 9th Cavalry Regiment, one of the all-African American Buffalo Soldiers regiments, had acted shortly after the overthrow of Jal Had to abolish slavery and execute slaveholders and slave merchants. The all-white 7th Cavalry Regiment's platoon, led by one Lt. Rice, used force of arms to try and stop the 9th. The 7th seized the palace, and allied with Red Martian mercenaries and the upper classes in the city, while the 9th went underground, stole a flying warship, and organized militias among the toiling masses and the former slaves.

The player characters ultimately allied themselves with the Buffalo Soldiers, and struck a deal with both the workers' militias inside the city, and a Green Martian horde that had been expelled from the city, to retake Amhor and put the young Hadra Ja on the throne.

The insurgents were successful. Hadra Ja has been installed as the new Jeddak of Amhor. She is supported by workers' militias, and has welcomed the Green Martian horde back into their Greentown enclave within the city. As for Lt. Rice, his whereabouts is unknown, as is the whereabouts of the warship seized by the 9th Cavalry Regiment.

Amhor is once again at piece, albeit a fragile one perhaps, and Helium has a new ally in the distant north.

(Oh, and in the real world, the 7th didn't have a Lt. Rice, but it did have a Private named Edgar Rice Burroughs.)

Mystifying Oracle

noreply@blogger.com (Tallgeese) — Fri, 19 Apr 2019 12:47:00 +0000

Mystifying Oracle ARU

I ordered an All Rolled Up (well, maybe TWO, one is still on the way) for my John Carter of Mars RPG dice. I decided to order the Mystifying Oracle, because I often spent time with a cousin when we were young playing with her Ouija Board. It also fits into the whole psychic medium, theosophy zeitgeist of the John Carter era.

Here's what the ARU looks like loaded with dice, three dry erase pens, and three canisters of tokens:

Here's the flat view of the ARU with John Carter of Mars RPG character sheets:

Finally, here's a close up of the rule book and a character sheet. The PC is from another world, but not Earth. Can you guess from where this character hails?