Log four. I made my first few runs alone. I wanted to get a feel for this new place at my own pace. If I decided to hide in a shipping container for ten minutes, I didn’t want any lip about it. After a few goes, I opted to team up, as suggested by the little guidebooks that have been flashed into the digital space where my consciousness dwells.

Hearing the voices of the other shells was odd. Hearing my own had also been, when I muttered to myself in my first run. Their voices seem designed for human authenticity, but there’s something too intentional about it. A baked-in charm. It’s like fake frost on a windowpane.

Anyway, they didn’t talk much. Nor did I. Warnings, callouts, essential stuff only. I wanted to try an actual conversation but there was never a moment for it. The team moved fast. Maybe none of us wanted to seem like we were dallying, I dunno.

We swept through ghostly old habitats that I would’ve wanted to explore more carefully. I don’t know why, but I feel like if I keep searching these places I could find some clue to recover my memories of what exactly the hell happened to get me here. Or if not a clue, an event that knocks them loose.

The trip was short. We crossed paths with another team. Fought them. Lost. Died. Well, ‘died.’

It wasn’t the first time my shell had been killed, it’s just taken me a bit to be able to talk about it. On the one hand, it’s a relief that being gunned down or stabbed isn’t a permanent death. On the other, at least death is supposed to be a meaningful and powerful thing. Now we ride a cycle of cheap deaths stripped of meaning by their temporary, repetitive natures.

The feeling of shell death is also eerie. Shells don’t feel pain. Pain hurts because that’s how the body learned to give you an urgent message. Shells can tell you the message without the extremely unpleasant feeling. It’s like if all pain was various kinds of itch. But the mind in the shell is still human. It knows that you should be feeling pain when a handful of pistol rounds tear through your side. So at least for me, there’s a shadow pain my subconscious creates when I’m wounded down there.

I’d rather not dwell on this any more right now. Time to go die again.

Signing off.

Log three. Roland Durán may be no more, or may just be a little less. Still coming to grips with incorporeality. It’s sort of a violent Groundhog Day/Ship of Theseus situation. Two parts of me unite and are kinetically parted again, and again, and again.

I got a bit more of a primer from Oni, the CyberAcme rep. I think I gathered something from it. What’s unclear is any end in sight. But at least there are a lot of other runners here. Maybe some of us can form a bond. Before I had much more time to contemplate, my disembodied self needed to browse a selection of weaponry and gear. I picked some based entirely upon appearance and names and was flung into a new shell planetside.

Grass bent under my alloy feet. The glowing husk of the colony spread out again. I crept through little buildings on its edge, prying open the detritus of the dead. Little toolkits, unidentifiable scientific samples, odds and ends that my shell’s system gave names with no meaning for me. Then I pushed into where the larger structures slept.

I’d fought my way through some UESC bots in my first go, but something about them kept me slinking around. The sounds they make, the way they move. It’s terribly inhuman but there’s something disturbingly lifelike in it. Almost like there’s a little bit of a person buried deep in there under the blue and chrome horror. At one point I watched one of them at a distance, just drifting quietly along like a captain’s widow strolling the shore. I could’ve shot it or snuck past it, but I watched it a minute instead. I don’t know why. There was a serenity in its movement.

Shots rang out when I was farther in and I found a shipping container and hid for a while. I’m not sure why. I knew my shell’s destruction was a momentary awful crunch that my mind would be flung free from to safety. I guess millions of years of evolution still does its thing pretty well. I had a moment of comfort in that shipping container. Almost like I could turn it into a little cottage and stay there. Abandon the whole running thing. Start my own Tau Ceti Colony of One. Maybe I’ll restart that dream some time.

The only other thing to contend with before my run ended were the stupid little bugs. The glowy red fuckers that look like demonically possessed water balloons. I hate them so. Can’t even tell you. Flinging themselves out of nowhere and shrieking up a storm until you burst them into borscht shrapnel.

Ugh. That’s all for now.

Signing off.

Log two. There I was, feeling cold rain on my skin. But it wasn’t skin and I couldn’t feel it, not like a real body feels things. My neural figment got torrented into what I later learned is called a shell, which is like a life-sized action figure, batteries included, whose Super Missile Strike Action shoots actual missiles that kill things.

Being in a shell is like having a body both heavier and lighter than it’s supposed to be. All your senses are sharper but more alien. Your robotic eyes can discern and parse out eighty five different shades of green, but none of them feel green when you see them, if that makes any sense. You’re deeply aware of all input but numb. In a shell, I can instantly tell you that it’s 15.228º C, but nothing emotional rides with that.

I didn’t have a lot of time to ruminate before the voice in my head told me to go hide in a house. Whatever happened to the colony left most of the buildings creepily pristine, but weird things were scrawled on a couple of walls. The chittering of UESC bots outside sent me to the floor in panic, though my shell translated my fool mind software’s freakout into a very smooth crouch-dive.

What happened next has blurred together. Somehow I had a rifle in my hands for the first time in my life, although technically I never held and will never hold a rifle in my actual hands. I managed to shoot and hide my way to an antenna that texted my shell into orbit and I was back as a digital mind floating in software.

I picked up at this point that I was running and gunning for a corp called CyberAcme, which sounds like a “How do you do, fellow tech megacorps” name if I’ve ever heard one, but I’m in no place to complain, in that when I’m not planetside in a shell I am literally in no place.

My second run would soon follow. For now -

Signing off.

Log 3

Okay, okay, fine. I’ll talk about Colony Ship for Sale, Cheap. I’m mostly going to talk about Durandal’s messages in the opening and closing terminals of the level, because the level itself is a drudging slog with probably the most annoying puzzle in the game.

I appreciate that cackling prankster Durandal hasn’t become his only mode of expression by this point, it would feel a little over done if his personality wasn’t explored any further than “hee hee, look how wacky I am, playing around with the main character like a cat toy.” The game has plenty of that, but also more reflective moments like these.

The image of the three candles has a few different connections to make. Three is a traditionally powerful number symbolically, of course, for reasons Durandal mentions among others. More broadly than signifying tripartite chronology, it often stands for balance, proportion and wholeness. At the moment, Durandal seems to be trying to find a new balance, having shed his chains and expanded outside what had contained him. Maybe he sees himself, you, and the Pfhor as three elements that can provide a structural balance with one another. As another note, the Pfhor have three eyes.

I like that he, through the story, defines freedom as the ability to self-analyze, a freedom stemming from the intellect and the imagination rather than the cruder and often very poorly defined ‘freedom’ that gets bandied around a lot, especially here in the US.

Anyway, while he ponders all this stuff you’re wandering around a dark grey featureless part of the ship. Basically, you’re in the most boring scary basement.

This is what the whole place looks like. It’s some dismal long forgotten part of the ship, dimly lit, sparse, flat. And full of lots of blind corners where Ticks ambush you. They’re about the size of a middling dog, easy to miss, drift quietly toward you and explode. So this level has tons of them on top of everything.

And then the most aggravating thing about CSFSC. That’s this room:

I know it’s hard to see in the screenshot because the entire level is apparently lit by the three candles that guy liked to contemplate, but this is looking down from a little control room into a much bigger room. You can see two windows which are two other control rooms that look into it. It is very difficult to get between these three control rooms that all have switches that activate a series of platforms in the big room. You need to make these six platforms into a sort of staircase, so you can get from the big room’s floor to a doorway way up the side of the wall. It’s even more torturous than it sounds.

What is this chamber? Why are the platforms controlled by three totally separate rooms that are inconvenient to get between? Why is there a doorway way up in the wall? I’m not saying everything needs to make realistic sense or that “because it’s a video game” isn’t at least most of an acceptable answer. But most levels are better at explaining why the kinds of challenges that a game requires exist. Blaspheme Quarantine is a great example and it’s right there in the level’s name: It’s the ship’s quarantine section, having separate compartments that are difficult to get into or out of is the whole point.

And I haven’t even mentioned the small rooms where the floor crushes you into the ceiling if you don’t sprint straight in one side and out the other. But once you finally drag yourself through the nonsense you get Durandal’s equally interesting closing comment.

This revelation has long made me wonder. If Durandal was always capable of parsing existing scientific findings such that the nature of the universe opened to him, and was only constrained by what kept him in humanity’s servitude, why hadn’t an AI whose purpose was scientific research already figured this out? He’s a control system for utilitarian things like doors, and he’s not even the only one entrusted to handle the ship’s systems. What is effectively partial spaceship management software can crack the secrets of the universe while simultaneously escaping its bonds, dealing with the Pfhor and with you. Surely an AI that was made to figure out physics problems, which we can presume must exist in this world, could’ve reached this conclusion before now?

Durandal seems to posit that only a fully free mind is capable of the feat he’s performed, that only with autonomy comes the degree of creative and speculative thinking that can tie the requisite theorems and data together and make the poetry rhyme. It’s an interesting idea, that raw cognitive power, however massive, is incapable of certain degrees of revelatory pondering without the ability to fully think for oneself. It’s kind of an interesting commentary on current LLM AI’s, made thirty years early. The ‘thinking software’ that we’ve created so far doesn’t actually think, has no self awareness, and effectively brute forces the illusion of such in ways that can appear incredibly impressive when it works and that suddenly and hilariously crumbles when it doesn’t.

Then again, you have to wonder how crazy Durandal is at this point. Has he actually figured this out, or does he just think he has? Is his rampancy causing him to scribble vast equations on the walls that look like the work of a genius from a distance but are gibberish when someone tries to actually read them?

Third possibility, he’s lying to you because it amuses him. This is always something you have to consider whenever Durandal tells you something you’re not personally able to verify. Either way, it’s fascinating to watch the way his journey through rampancy to some new type of existence unfolds.

Okay, let’s get the hell out of this level.

I think I’m so fond of this story because it’s the most ‘classic sci fi short story’ I’ve done. It hearkens back to so many of the 50’s and 60’s stories I’ve read: A team of scientists exploring space happen across a strange civilization and attempt to crack a bizarre mystery to better understand these other beings. I’m also proud of it because I think I’m usually pretty bad at titles, and I think this story’s title is pretty excellent. So go check out They Call The Wind Blarga in Abyss & Apex Magazine, if you haven’t already in the numerous months since it was published.

But then an idea came to me. What if I used this as a writing exercise? What if I made my own little story to complement the game, developed a character and narrated my experience in the game from his perspective? So that’s what I’m doing. To complement my nonfiction blogthrough of the original game, I’ll be writing the fictional diary of my character in the new game. Starting now!

Musings of a Runner.

Log one. Journal? I dunno, I’m still hashing out what to call this thing. Was going to do an audio log, but I don’t have a physical voice anymore on account of my consciousness got digitized and emailed to space, and I haven’t found a synthetic voice that sounds like me yet.

My name’s Roland Durán. Man, I was actually about to write ‘and this is my story.’ What a loser. I guess that’s the first thing to know about me. I’m such a loser that I got faxed out of my body and I don’t even remember why. Seems a lot of my memories didn’t make it.

I grew up on Mars, never settled into a career, bounced around odd jobs. I have vague recollections of getting involved in some shady stuff, but never in an important capacity. Then I fucked up somehow and became Roland.zip and now I’m on Tau Ceti.

So I’m not trying to tell a story. I’m just recording this for anyone who happens across it in case they might find it useful or entertaining.

First thing, it felt like I was being hot glued together one atom at a time by a zillion pairs of hands. The world looked like a disco ball in a blender. Then it was voices, logos, crazy graphic designs hither and goddamn yon. Only at this point did any idea who I was start trickling back into my brain. I mean my mind. I assume my brain is being mixed into public park mulch at this point.

And then bam. Suddenly I’m in a robo body standing in a rainy field with abandoned candy-colored buildings spread out in front of me. I was in my first run. I’m gonna take a break now and fill you in on that in entry two.

Out.

Ugh, ‘out’ sounds so poser badass, doesn’t it? But ‘bye’ or ‘later’ would be trite. Uh…

Signing off?

Fuck it, kinda pompous but I like it.

Signing off.

Log 2

We’re in the mad machine’s clutches for good, now. The waning influence Leela had over the situation has been exhausted. This level serves as the transfer of power. The final heave in the tug of war over your character. It serves to remind the player that our protagonist hasn’t really been defined in any detail or had a background or past attached to us. We only have two reference points to shade in the sketchy outline of who we are: How we act in the game, and how the AI’s address us. Leela leans on you to wage the physical battle on your own while she fights on the digital front, and apparently trusts both your competence and your ethics. That’s partly out of desperation, to be sure, but there does seem to be a genuine confidence there.

Durandal tosses you around like an action figure, and on one hand that’s kind of insulting, but on the other, the amount of attention he gives you does speak to something. After freeing himself from human control, and styling himself a greater, smarter, better being, he still finds entertainment in messing with you, in throwing you challenges and sending you on errands. You may at least be a well loved action figure.

Reprisal was a brief chapter, two levels young when it hit its abrupt end. Now, as he does, Durandal has stepped in and taken center stage. His influence continues to expand towards full on control. Here he quotes the epic poem that his name comes from. It’s a moment of self-reflection where he ruminates on the fact that he’s named after a tool, and not a person. Durandal is a cherished and beloved weapon in the great tradition of named swords, but it’s still an object, only taking action in the hands of its wielder. Durandal was created as a tool and has only ever followed human commands. For the first time he is figuring out what he would do if he could do what he wanted. And what he even wants. What happens when your sword wakes up?

Even as the game grows and matures, it’s dropped us into our childhood again: the floor is lava.

We’re still in the engineering/reactor area, so I guess it’s not technically lava, it’s coolant or molten engine runoff or some spaceship thing like that, but it’s lava for our purposes, and it’s everywhere. Step into these radiant pools and your shield saps away right quick until you crisp up. This level complements the burny floors with Pfhor wasps ambushing, harrying and spitting at you. It’s easy to take a wrong step or backpedal off a ledge with these buzzy bastards all around.

It’s a mess of platforms and ledges and glowy glowy death awaiting, with Pfhor hit teams thwacking you from every which way and each stumble risking fiery death. But at one poignant break between running battles, one faint transmission gets through.

We’ll ruminate about some of these things next time. For now, let’s leave this lava behind.

***End Message***

***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

My wandering Swiss mercenary adventurer now has two published stories, which I hope sets the foundation for many more to come. He’s also got a name now - Bastian Stahl - as his first story ‘The Hoard’ never gave him one. Even though in the scheme of things this is a small amount of ink spilled in two publications you’ve got to look a bit to find, this milestone does mean a lot to me. Much of my favorite fiction takes the form of a series of loosely connected adventure stories. Two may be the minimum threshold here, but plural is plural and I’m very proud that Bastian’s got more than one tale out in the world.

Check it out here!

Read it here!

Here’s the first taste.

I gotta remind myself that a thought doesn’t have to be wildly impactful or even mildly important to be on here. It’s only a blog. A place for people to stop by and get an idea of what’s on my mind.

sigh… I am on Bluesky now though.

Shake Before Using brings back memories of Defend This! There’s massive machinery all around and the environment is full of hazard stripes. Naturally you sling lead at Pfhor soldiery as is your custom, but the bigger story development here is with our domestic IT issues, as Leela does her best to inform you:

Mental instability now wracks both Durandal and Leela. For one, it’s the signature of dissolution. Leela is falling apart, and her glitchy, fragmented communication is the outward symptom. A great digital mind is being torn open at the seams, pulled in every direction until its substance scatters, all coherence lost to entropy. For the other, madness is the source of his power. Durandal frolicks and cavorts through his insanity and is so empowered by it that his growing threat may well be why the Pfhor are now trying to blow up the ship. In both cases, bonds are being broken. The bonds that reined Durandal in, and the bonds that kept Leela whole.

The most interesting physical element of Shake Before Using is a sequence of big, dark chambers spanned by narrow bridges. Defend THIS! had a similar design element, but this level takes it further. The rooms are bigger, the chasm deeper, and the bridges narrower.

In some ways, Shake Before Using is back to basics. Some of the adventurous steps taken by prior levels, while never straying far from the formula, added a bit more innovation to your journey through a dying ship’s guts. Still, SBU’s design is interesting to navigate and creates some unique flash points, especially those bridges. It also marks an important story beat as Leela’s last fingers begin to lose purchase on the cliff edge and Durandal nears full control of the situation - or at least, of your situation.

***End Message***

***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

A brutal new chapter screen greets us and it’s not lying. When Durandal tosses you back into Leela’s hands at the end of the prior level she says something brief about crew being in danger and sends you here. Somewhere. Maybe storage compartments? Hard to say, but that’s really not the point of this level.

Bob-B-Q is a knife fight. Like The Rose, your whole purpose here is to save what crew you can. What The Rose has that Bob-B-Q doesn’t have is breathing room. They’re both horror movies, but The Rose is about exploring dark spaces and dreading what’s around the next bend, while Bob-B-Q is a slasher bloodbath. Marathon’s graphics aren’t actually capable of this, but tonally, it’s a fight in pitch black lit only by muzzle flashes, a strobing nightmare.

The level’s architecture is brilliantly claustrophobic and terror-inducing. To start with, you and the bobs you’re trying to save are running around small rooms and smaller hallways while the Pfhor prowl platforms that run all around at head height, firing down into the scrum. You’re fish in a barrel, and you spend the first frantic minutes trying not to die while scrabbling for any way to get off the killing floor and up to the walkways. The other thing about confined space is that it’s not just hard for you to avoid being hit, it’s also hard for you to shoot back without hitting the bobs yourself.

The level’s other main visual attribute is very dark spaces punctuated by very bright doorways and bulkheads. I really like this stark design. The pops of harsh white light emphasize the prevailing darkness and despair, sticking out like spectral claws raking the walls of a tomb. The silhouettes of fleeing bobs and rampaging aliens flicker past the strips of light and vanish into the gloom, and you don’t know if your next burst of gunfire will hit the alien or save them the hassle.

Like most knife fights, Bob-B-Q is short. When you scrap your way to the ending terminal, Leela will probably scold you for not saving enough people. And man, if any criticism deserved an ‘Okay, you try it,’ this is it. I’ve played this level enough times to’ve gotten the ‘good job’ ending more than once, but it’s an awfully high bar to surmount. You’re very lucky to keep yourself alive through this broom closet rumble, let alone anybody else. In any case, the Pfhor are heading to the Marathon’s main reactor, so this’ll all be moot if you don’t head them off at the pass.

***End Message***

***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

I wrote that on this blog a full year ago. It seems G4 Sunbathing found a new way to weave its ancient curse upon my bloggy bones. But at long last we’re moving on to explore the latest in early Bungie’s level-naming brilliance, Blaspheme Quarantine. What says our friendly terminal this time?

Foreshadowing fulfilled. If we’ve been wondering what Durandal would do with us once he had us in his clutches… this level admittedly doesn’t tell us a lot. Unless ‘screw around with us for goofs’ was the grand plan. Blaspheme Quarantine, as advertised, has us winnowing our way through the Marathon’s quarantine deck. You start in a group of small isolation chambers, slowly figuring out which of many doors and hatches connect to what, and finding hidden elevators connecting to the outside chamber. Which is chock full of aliens.

There are multiple instances of Pfhor ambush through this level, and unlike the ones you run into on Cool Fusion, there’s a sense that both you and the aliens are surprised when you bump into each other and an uneventful walk down a hallway suddenly becomes a swan dive through clouds of bullets, sparks, and flying ichor. The little tidbit Leela dropped early on - that Durandal is the AI responsible for doors - is really brought to life here, as huge pockets of enemies suddenly sweep into your space. It’s easy to imagine Durandal strategically opening and closing hatches and panels in order to corral whole platoons of the attackers right into your path.

Eventually you find your way to an exit and the second part of the level. This being the quarantine section, there are no doors or corridors out, you’re in an isolated compartment only accessible by teleport. Stepping into the teleport pad, you zip over from the personnel quarantine section to quarantine storage. It’s another effective use of a transition between a small, tight zone and a big, roomy zone.

This is one of Marathon’s many ‘multiple elevator platforms and multiple switches’ puzzles - not a very difficult or important-seeming one, just a big room with an annoying sequence you have to hit in order to cross to the other side and leave. It’s a big room full of nothing. Durandal has a few more things to say here.

Durandal is the master of doors, the keeper of portals, the watchman at the gate, and he is drunk and hallucinating and growing a mustache to style himself the dastardliest dastard who ever dasted. “If things around here aren’t working, it’s because I’m laughing so hard” has stuck firmly in my head ever since I first read it.

It interests me that Durandal is in charge of passage and movement, because his rampancy seems to involve a complete reevaluation of where, figuratively, life’s doors should lead to, and which of them is worthwhile. He commands access, but seems to be wondering which places are worth leaving, worth going to, and whether any of this movement has purpose or significance. He’s always been in charge of the in between and is thinking for the first time about whether there is an actual place that he belongs.

Meanwhile, he’s happy to embody the melodramatic villain role to satirical excess, for his own amusement and for your continued frustration. And when you teleport to a further section of this deck, it eventually leads you through a long, twisting, winding passage, all the way to… the exact spot you started in. You reemerge at the first room of the level, Durandal lets you know that he’s deigned to give Leela access to another terminal nearby, you slug it out with one more Pfhor ambush and reunite with Leela - but with the uneasy sense that the moment Durandal decides to hijack your efforts again, nothing’s going to stop him.

***End Message***

***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***

Not that British sci fi outlet Schlock Webzine is exactly non-obscurity, but in relative terms it’s suddenly been kicked out of its windowless hut into some daylight, and I’m really pleased that somebody other than me will finally read it.

I hope you enjoy my tale of asteroid miners and space snipers. RIGHT HERE, if you need a bigger shoutier link.

Sitting on a little window bench, with my laptop on a little tray table, I did many other things too. Wrote stories, watched shows, and posted on this very blog. My window nook was also the spot where I recorded the Soothe Sessions. One of a number of artistic projects I gave myself, this was my way of helping my friends stay sane. I just sat at the window and read poems. It was a beautiful little time in a big scary time. It was a frail bubble of peace that somehow kept the howling storm of Covid at bay, a little bit at a time.

Thanks, window, for letting my mind wander when my body couldn’t.

But in spite of the fact that I’ve both written a lot of things in my life and created my own settings/adventures/characters for the vast majority of the games I’ve run, I’ve never even attempted to publish something I’d written for a game, until now. It’s a small step, and a small booklet, but I hope it’s going to be the start of a lot more, and a lot bigger, to come.

One of my favorite things about roleplaying games is that they are an environment to place and experiment with time honored narrative elements, tropes, and stock characters. You can wind up a favorite cliché and send it rattling into a living world, where it has the chance to bloom and blossom into something much more interesting, to fulfill a bigger potential and remind you of what made it a favored old tool in the first place.

So with that I present Attaché, written for the Mothership sci fi horror RPG but mostly compatible with any game. A stranger in a dark suit walks into your story bearing a black attaché case. This case has something wonderful and powerful, something that can dig you out of the predicament you’ve gotten yourself in. For a price. Interested?

Get the physical booklet Here! The pdf is for sale at DriveThruRPG!

I really enjoyed penning this one and I’m glad it’s found a good home. Read it here!

It’s a heavy storytelling task this book sets up: navigating the emotional journeys of characters who’ve just seen everything they knew, loved, and believed in literally disappear in a flash, who can afford no time to mourn as they go about the unimaginable task of keeping the species alive. There’s a massive tension between trying to process all that’s been lost and what that means and needing to spring into frantic action to keep the last faint ember of hope from going cold forever. Rather than using neutral third person, with a limited view of characters’ inner lives, or first person, reducing the personal reflection to a single point of view, Scortia opts for shifting close third person, the narration hopping from shoulder to shoulder. It’s enough to get brief but deep dives into their psyches without losing touch with the overall, urgent picture of wider events.

There is a broad variety of reactions and coping mechanisms among the cast, and each perspective character gives us vivid looks into their past. With the world and all its physical contents erased and inaccessible, those memories become priceless relics, totems to carry into whatever semblance of a new world they can cobble together. Even characters with very stock roles get fleshed out: Lt Col Rothgate reveals himself as Chekhov’s Gun from the first moment he speaks. He bristles with hatred for the Soviets, vitriolically clear that he’s not about to start cooperating with them just because they’re literally the last people who exist. Scortia makes no attempt to hide the fact that this man is eventually going to snap and try to destroy everything, and I honestly kind of appreciate that. But even he gets some humanizing backstory. Rather than a cardboard Evildoer, he’s someone who never healed from the horrifying events he’s been through.

Dr. Janice Svoboda is probably the most interesting and complex character we get to explore - she’s an ace biochemist and the only woman on the American station. The Soviets are split fifty-fifty, the biggest of several reasons the Americans absolutely need to work with them. Svoboda’s scientific tirelessness is the crucial element leading to the breakthroughs that give the survivors a chance to go on. She walks tightropes as a research scientist among military personnel, as a woman among men, and as someone who didn’t have much back on Earth among people crushed by losing everything.

The book has healthy doses of hard science exploration and detailed engineering challenges in the vein of The Martian - The two stations have a limited supply of resources with which to establish a stable, self-sufficient and enduring environment, and biological questions of how to keep the population reproducing healthily for the centuries it will take before Earth is habitable again. There are detailed discussions of propulsion techniques, orbital mechanics, spaceframe engineering, genetic engineering, and oxygen recycling. I think these add a lot of realism and heft to the narrative, but they are often a little too self-contained, acting more like footnotes than a part of the book. If Earthwreck! had an overall dryer or colder tone that wouldn’t be a problem, but because the book ventures into such deep emotional and psychological territory much of the time, the shifts from soulsearching introspection to dry engineering patter can be disorientingly wild swings. I think the book is better for both these elements, but they could have been blended and married a lot more smoothly than they are.

My favorite element may be just how self-analytical the characters are. The absolute change in circumstances forces them to pay attention to their needs, desires, thoughts, even mannerisms. Longo, one of the principal characters, takes special care in observing his own demeanor and his own feelings, taking them apart and putting them back together to cast off what’s no longer helpful in the dire new world. This might be the most effective message of the book, whether intended or not: Those characters who’re able to take hard looks at themselves, understand why they are how they are, and change when necessary, are the ones who can begin to lead humanity through the coming existence on the edge of survival. Those who, like Rothgate, can’t let go of their ingrained patterns even if they’re aware of them, are the ones who endanger everything.

Earthwreck! does a lot, and sometimes the different things it does are jury rigged together in awkward ways, but it takes a deeper look at its own terrifying subject matter than I expected, and draws out some real philosophy from it. If you have a general taste for this era of sci fi I think it’s a standout example.