The Girl with All the Gifts

I read a review of this book and thought it sounded interesting.  Suddenly just after that I was in a text conversation with my mom and dropped the name of the book.  It was actually my daughter who was on my moms phone just to tell me that they had hit town and were out shopping.  Anyway long story short, they bought the book and my daughter thought it was for her.  She mentioned it to my mom who the thought I wanted her to buy it for my daughter.  So it goes.

It's a good read.  My daughter read it an loved it.  I read it an thought it was very well done.  Some where along the line I redlized it was written in third person present tense which was pretty novel for me.  I'm not sure if this is a thing now but it made the prose more immediate in a way I thought worked well with the material.  I haven't been suddenly aware of tense like that since Steinbeck switched to first person in The Winter of Our Discontent so that was nice.  It could just mean I am a bit oblivious but I will take it as a win anyway.
After I read it my wife read it and couldn't put it down so I have to say this book is a real hit in our family.  If we all can agree it is a fine thing then I really have to recommend it.

The Girl With all the Gifts by M.R. Carey.

Full disclosure its last day of camping and the fire is guttering out, everyone's asleep and I'm pretty drunk at the moment.

Good book though.

on Ashen Stars (pt1)

If you wandered in here off the Internet and are wondering about the last two posts, well it's all about the Ashen Stars RPG I'm running right now.  The Pioneer poster is a hack on some content from the Pulp-O-Mizer all slicked up to provide some theme for the adventure I'm running.  The News Net Nine feed is some feedback and more theme for the same.  Just like all the other little story snippets you see on here from my characters or the session notes I post.   I think it's a good way to provide some extra oomph for the games and I'm going to continue to do it.

I did however want to break a bit from the vanity press shtick and write a bit about the Ashen Stars system and the things I'm liking about it.  First thing, I really like the game and I like it more now than when I started liking it.  I played a one shot and then I ran a one shot and then I agonized over using Ashen Stars out of the box.  I thought about trying to tack the things I liked about it onto a Mongoose Traveller game or something.  I even looked a bit into the Traveller 2300 AD material they put out so I could avoid dealing with some of the deeper depths of Traveller.  I admit I was hesitant to run a longer game in Ashen Stars even though I liked the basic concept.   Mostly I was worried that the Gumshoe system was too simple to handle a decent fight and too 'meta' to let the players loose themselves in the story.  In the end I decided to stick with Ashen Stars as presented and I am glad that I did because both those apprehensions were mis-apprehensions.

Combat, it turns out, seems to work just fine.   It is dangerous and so the characters are motivated to interrupt it after the first punch gets thrown or avoid to fights altogether and thus the combats seem much more fluid and natural than the big production numbers you find in some systems.  The point spend mechanic isn't getting in the way and I don't notice players hording their points.  The NPCs certainly don't have a problem, and I've found that having the points lets me control the NPC reactions to a much finer tune - having an NPC be calculating or cautious or desperate is a simple matter of spending accordingly.  I don't feel I have to pull punches or make tactical errors like I might in a d20 system -I can just do acting.   I can have a NPC throw out a couple points and a roll as a cautious feint, or load up the points if they are out of control or perceive themselves to be in dire situation.

Also, the setting material is much better than it seems.  The Ashen Stars setting material is a deliberate homage to a lot of mainstream sci-fi tropes and that might seem a bit goofy when you are reading the material.  But it isn't goofy at all in actual play.  Players pick up the tropes and benefit from all that associated material without bumping into objects in the mirror or stumbling over canons.  I can load up a alley with a press gang of Tavik, and it is easy for the players to feel like they are in a dangerous place without making jokes about Klingons or any of the other baggage that label entails.  Same for the technology, everyone gets tethers and NLD mode and osmotic punches right away.  It works because we are all thinking about klingons or tricorders and hyposprays, however the name has been filed off and everyone is free to have them act as the campaign requires.  It's the sci-fi analogue of the Elf/Dwarf/Halfling thing is so represented in fantasy.  The setting therefore feels fresh and new, but still very familiar and there is less time needed to set up things for the payoffs.

I wanted to get into the economic system but I think this post is too long already now.
So this is now a two part review of Ashen Stars.

The Many-Colored Land

One series of books that I think would make a really fun RPG, or a setting source book for an existing game, is the Saga of Pliocene Exile, aka The Many-Colored Land series by Julian May.  The blurb goes something like this:

There is a one way gate discovered that leads back in time from the early 22 century to the Pliocene epoch some 3 million years in the ago.  Naturally people go through it, it in fact becomes a social safety valve for the discontented and the criminal to escape the overly ordered society that earth has become.  And way back in the past there are strange, wondrous and terrible things afoot.  One group of misfits goes through the gate and finds themselves in the middle of it all.

These are an excellent read and manage to tie folklore into sci-fi in a way that is satisfying and consistent.  It's is almost the inverse of something like Shadow Run, instead of having magic mixing in with the near future world, it is near future science mixing in with historical fable.  I'd hate to spoil anything for you by revealing too much.  It's got fine characters, intrigue, humour and some pretty sweet battles.  It also has a pretty decent world that would be pretty easy to stage a campaign in.  I'm actually very surprised that there isn't a Gurps or Savage Worlds supplement for this setting simply because it is so robust and well designed and sometimes reads like someones very excellent extended RP campaign.  If I was going to run it I would have to figure out how the 'magic' and tech could work together which is why one of the generic systems might be easiest to use.  It would be a good setting for a more narrative game as well, Fate or Dungeon World maybe, perhaps even re-skin the Marvel Heroic Cortex system.

The whole series runs for 4 books, The Many-Colored Land, The Golden Torc, The Nonborn King and The Adversary.  It's a good read with an expansive cast of interesting characters and a satisfying conclusion.  The story also leads into a second trilogy about the future world called The Galactic Milieu series.  This series is pretty good as well and contains a lot of related material although it isn't required reading. The Galactic Milieu is not quite as strong as the Pliocene books in my opinion, but it is still a decent read and if you like the first books you can't go wrong reading both series really.

The Belgariad (and other books)

Well worn these books

I am think I was 13-14 when I first read Pawn of Prophecy, the first book in David Edding's Belgariad series.   I don't remember exactly when it was, but I do remember that I had to wait six long months towards the end for the last book to come out in paperback which places it in that time range.  I remember plowing through these books in long gulping weekends of reading and I remember they were just great fun.   I've read them a number of times since then and I've also read the follow ups and spin offs to the series which were way more formulaic and less interesting. The original run though, it was something.
I never knew that David Eddings was like 60 when he wrote this, I never would have guessed it.  For me it was exactly what 14 was meant to be and  re-reading it now makes me feel that way again.  I suppose if I was 60 I would take offense to this, 60 is probably closer to 14 than I suspect.

The Belgariad itself is a pretty straight forward journey quest, but it's well executed and the characters are fun to be around for the while you spend with them.  The writing is approachable and the world seems to hang together quite nicely.  Even the second trilogy, the Mallorean, is not a terrible read - and if you miss the characters and don't mind seeing them pace through the same character arcs again, it's not a total waste of time to read them.  It's not until the prequels that things fall into that dreaded protagonist hellbore that causes good worlds to revolve tighter and tighter around the actions of a specific group of heroes or an author driven purpose - like Heinlein's multiverse madly striving to mate with itself.  I'd stay away from the prequels.

I've been trying to get my oldest daughter to read the Belgariad series because she has been reading lots of these new tween adventure fantasy series.  She's having a grand time reading all that crap and I thought she might get a kick out of these as well.  She had her Harry Potter moment already -that  common milestone these days for kids that manage to read books.  Now that she's hooked on reading, I figured that she might like to see some of the books that blew my mind when I was young.

It's a long planned out trap actually - there are so many good books that hit me full on in the gut between 13 and 20 that I want to get her to read, and all of them had what people might consider 'Harry Potter' or 'Game of Thrones' levels of impact on me growing up.  I can't imagine being in a head space where I'd say that a single series of books was as influential as the popular opinion attributes the Hunger Games or Harry Potter - because in my experience there was a never ending stream of them.  Joel Rosenberg's Sleeping Dragon (the Guardians of the Flame series), Steven Kings's The Stand, Frank Herbert's Dune series, Asimov's Foundation series or oh my lord -  The Gods Themselves,  Robert Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land, Ursula La Guin's Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Pohl's Heechee Saga, Anne McCaffrey's Pern books, the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - oh just way way too many books and series to even list.  I have boxes of these books that I couldn't part with because they are associated with parts of my personality growing up.  These books defined me.  I have too many of these books. I had to take some and box them up for lack of shelf space.  So many of them come from those early years, and I have pull them out on occasion and re-read them - so I can remember who I am and who I wanted to be.

And people keep coming out with new ones.

Scary stories

Just the same as most reasonable people, I like stories and games involving zombies and vampires and ghosts other scary stuff.  Also psychological horror.  I don't much like the more modern gross out or torture stuff like SAW or Human Centipede.  B-movies can be charming but they have to be witty for me to like them- I prefer Evil Dead to something like Texas Chainsaw for example.  Tops in horror however has to be metaphysical horror, I like the whole uncaring universe, madness inspiring lore about old civilizations and weird dream realms and un-knowable alien races vibe in general.  I like that kind of horror way more, including where it crosses over into Fantasy or Sci-Fi like in Karl Edward Wagner's Kane books or in movies like Pandorum or Alien.  I dig that Cthulhu style mythos - but you know I hadn't actually read much Lovecraft.

Then I got my phone.

I haven't really made the jump to reading many books in electronic format.  I have grabbed a bunch of free books from Google Play including a Japanese fairytale book, Dracula, some Mark Twain and The Backwoods of Canada by a Canadian woman written in the early 1800s. Some good stuff there for sure but I got a lot more downloaded than I have yet managed to read. I have however found that the book clients on my phone to be a perfect platform for reading short stories.  For less cost than cup a coffee, I have got a copy of the Definitive H.P. Lovecraft from Kindle and am reading along with the HP Podcraft literary podcast.  This podcast is a light-hearted look at the stories of H.P Lovecraft done in the order they were published and is well produced and has some really good readings.  The commentators generally have some post story analysis and/or historical footnotes too - so is a great way to get into the writing.  It's also pretty funny and they bring in enough analysis to place the works, but not so much as to be dry.  I'd consider reading along with the podcast a light independent study type introduction, and it's a great way to catch up on your Cthulhu.  See I'm bettering myself.

I think I'm on episode 14 now - I just finished reading The Street and I'm going to download the episode tonight so I can listen to it in my car tomorrow.  I think there are 80-90 episodes so I have a way to go yet.  Good times.


*I need to brush up on my Robert E. Howard reading too.

Saturn and Varley and Movies

I was reading an article based on a link I followed from Facebook about a large cylindrical object pictured near Saturn's Rings.  Turns out this bit of weird space news comes up from time to time and people tend to forget things so it seems like this news comes out of nowhere but it doesn't.  A fellow wrote a conspiracy book about this phenomena back in 1996 called The Ring-Makers of Saturn.  I really haven't looked into this topic enough to get a sense of what is actually going on here, if this is people arguing over image artifacts on a camera lens or if there are oblong ice moonlets in that part of the ring due to explained/unexplained processes, or even if these objects are moving or stationary relative to the rings.  I do get the impression that it's not new news however.  Yes, people tend to think that everything they read on the web is new and I wonder how much of that is because we're simply skimming the cream off the top of the Internet and calling it knowledge these days.  Back when people wrote books, things had a little more place in time maybe.  This isn't about how bad the Internet is however, more just commenting on how lazy we can be.

The story did remind me of John Varley's books about a large world ship orbiting near Saturn called Gaea.  The series was called the Gaea Trilogy, or The Titanide, and consisted of three books, Titan, Wizard and Demon.  He wrote the first book in the series in 1979 and I wonder if there was a co-responding news items in astronomical journals in the 60's or 70's about long cylindrical objects in Saturn's rings that might have triggered the idea for him.  As for the books, I really enjoyed them when I first read them and I still enjoy them now when I revisit the series.  The first book has quite a different tone than the second and third.  The first is much more in the physical exploration vein, while the second and third are much more interested in social issues. I think that the series got better when it started exploring societies (large and small) instead of the Gaean landscape, but I like both themes really.  The characters were very good, I'm not sure I want to read more Titan stories because worlds can grow too large to sustain stories, but I do miss hearing about the characters actually, just like you'd miss hearing news about good friends.  I feel much closer to the characters from the Gaea series than I do about the characters in Varley's other books, despite some of those stories and worlds (and even characters) being better realized.  If you like a good Science Fiction book you should check out some of his other stuff as well, especially his short story collections, and Steel Beach which is a huge callback to the The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and a real evolution of that theme.

Thinking about John Varley got me to do two things, the first was to see if there was anything interesting he has worked on that I hadn't heard of.  I grew up reading authors like Burroughs, Niven, Robert Heinlein and Issac Asimov and I got their books from second hand books stores, and most of what I read was printed some years before I was born.  I am not used to my authors being on the Internet and I forget to look them up.  This is good and bad because when I do hear about a new book or series, it's usually in the book stores and I don't have to wait while it gets written, but it also means I often tend to misplace authors as well.  I popped John Varley into Amazon and saw indeed he's written some stuff in the last ten years I missed out on.  I didn't think I wanted to read his 'Lightning/Thunder' books just now but I dropped his book Mammoth on my wish list for later. It looks like something I could get into.

Anyway the second thing I did was to look him up on the Internet and I found he has a website.  The John Varley website is a bit of a mess visually but it has a bunch of stuff on it and really it's the content that counts.  I've only spent a few minutes on the site so far but he has the usual new book info, a bio, the bibliography and some interesting essays on there.  The big thing I noticed is that he's reviewed a frigging pile o' movies.  I think that's great and I will be eager to see what he thought of movies I've watched.  That's something I never considered before I saw it but hey, it would be good to compare notes on something like movies with a writer you have enjoyed.  I wonder what an Issac Asimov movie review blog would be like.