Just The Caffeine Talking

How I Did It #2: The Alien Abduction

"The Alien Abduction" is a pretty simple story: a group of animal-rights activists free an alien from a lab at Cornell University and flee with him to a house in the country. Then things start to go wrong. The narrator, Brian, is a local boy and chose the hideout, and his brother George turns up unexpectedly and has to be kept prisoner. The armless alien Siusheas reveals that the human researchers were experimenting with creating prosthetic hands for him, which makes the activists upset at the thought of another species following humanity's path to technological civilization. Finally the alien breaks loose and, being a large carnivore, annihilates most of the activists. Meanwhile Brian, at his brother's urging, contacts the authorities and lets them know where Siusheas is.

Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 3

Episode III:  The Crawling Chaos of Oz

Once past the poppies, our heroes finally reach the Emerald City. Despite the fact that Oz is a peaceful fairyland, the capital is a heavily-fortified walled city. It's not clear what the wall is supposed to keep out, as the Army of Oz consists of one soldier and one civil-service Guardian of the Gate, and the regime's most dangerous enemy is a witch with an army of winged monkeys. Evidently the Wonderful Wizard, like M. Maginot, has an exaggerated idea of the effectiveness of fixed defenses.

And then comes one of my favorite bits of total weirdness: the Guardian of the Gates informs our heroes that because of the sheer blinding beauty of the Emerald City, everyone must wear protective glasses. And to make sure nobody forgets, these goggles are LOCKED ONTO YOUR HEAD. Dorothy et al are completely unfazed by this bit of insanity, and blithely submit. It's a shame this particular bit didn't make it into the movie, because nowadays it would provide a ready-made metaphor for all sorts of nanny-state intrusiveness, from child-seat regulations to the proposed ban on salt in New York City. But I digress.

It's commonly repeated that Baum's description of the Emerald City is based on the "White City" of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. I confess I just don't see it. The description of the city sounds more like an Upstate New York small town like the ones Baum knew from childhood. Dorothy and co. pass by houses and shops rather than monumental Beaux-Arts buildings, canals, and fountains. The only building of any great size mentioned is the palace of the ruler of Oz in the center of the city. Again, the beloved ruler of a peaceful fairyland lives in a palace surrounded by high walls. Hmm.

Our Heroes spend quite a bit of time in the Emerald City. Out of a desire for drama, or just to delay things, the Wizard sees them individually, one per day for three days. The Wizard is a profoundly weird presence throughout their visit to the Emerald City. Dorothy heard from no less a person than the Good Witch of the North that the Wizard is as powerful as all the witches, Good and Wicked, combined. He hasn't been seen by any of his subjects in the Emerald City for decades. When Dorothy and the others finally get in to see him, he appears to each in a different form. He's like Nyarlathotep or something.

Dorothy sees a gigantic Head (gotta love Baum's use of Capitalization -- it's not a head, it's a Head), which the moviemakers adapted to great effect. The Scarecrow sees a lovely woman. The Tin Woodman is confronted with a hideous beast. And the Cowardly Lion meets a ball of fire. With the exception of the ball of fire, I'm not sure if there's any connection between the form the Wizard takes and the person he's appearing to. Surely the soft-hearted Woodman would be a better mark for the lovely lady, and the gigantic Head would be thematically appropriate for the brain-hungry Scarecrow. It is necessary for the Lion to meet the ball of fire, since he's perfectly ready to threaten the Wizard physically to get his way.

Despite the differences in how the Wizard manifests himself, the interviews are all basically the same:  the Wizard's price for helping any of them is the death of the Wicked Witch of the West. No filmic euphemisms here, no "bring me her broom" or anything. The Wizard is outright putting a contract out on the Wicked Witch, and Dorothy's party are his chosen assassins.

In both film and book this makes the Wizard remarkably ruthless. Given that his own forces were driven from the West by the Wicked Witch, it's hard to read this as anything but him knowingly sending a little girl and her companions to slavery or death at the hands of the Witch.

The only thing that keeps the Wizard from being an absolute bastard in this is that he probably knows Dorothy has already taken out one Wicked Witch on her own. But that simply raises a new problem: if he expects them to succeed, the Wizard is intending to defraud them, since (no spoilers, I hope) he can't actually grant any of their wishes. Is it wise to defraud someone who can casually destroy powerful witches, when you yourself have nothing but vaudeville patter and a few stage properties?

The best outcome for the Wizard would be for Dorothy and the Wicked Witch to annihilate each other, leaving him as the most powerful ruler in Oz and only the two Good Witches as his rivals. Maybe he doesn't have a plan, just trusting to luck and trying to postpone the reckoning as long as possible. That seems like something he would do.

Continued in Part 4!

Tales From the Archive: Secret of the Swamp

I wrote several Space: 1889 adventures for the late, great Challenge magazine during the 1990s. Since Challenge and Game Designers' Workshop are long out of business, I thought I'd reprint some of my old articles and adventures on this 'blog, as a service to anyone interested in one of the quirkiest, most amazing roleplaying games ever created.

If you haven't played Space: 1889, some of the terminology is likely to be strange to you. "Interplanetary Ether-Flyer" = steampunk spaceship. "Cloudship" = flying ship built of Martian anti-gravity wood. "Oenotrians" = bad guys (a Martian empire opposed to human colonization on the Red Planet). The quick summary: Thomas Edison invented space travel in 1869, and twenty years later the colonial powers of Earth have established footholds on Mars and Venus. The technology and society of the Victorian era are the same as in our own history, except where Martian antigravity wood, Edison "ether propellor" technology, and the work of various Mad Scientists have given things a boost.

This adventure appeared in Challenge #48. Before it was a magazine article, this particular adventure was an episode in the Space: 1889 campaign I ran in Durham, North Carolina between 1990 and 1997.

Within the campaign it was a diversion -- the heroes were trying to reach the British colony at Syrtis Major after their interplanetary ether-flyer crashed during a hijacking attempt by Fenian terrorists. They had come to Mars looking for a cure for the dreaded insanity virus from the Martian city of Bordobaar, which the Insidious Doctor Leng was planning to use on Earth as part of his plan for world domination and general Insidiosity. For the magazine version I made the adventure hook more self-contained.

My wife Diane managed to utterly boggle the other players during this adventure. In the first few sessions she had played a rather quiet, geeky Victorian "inventoress" but that was partly to allow the other players to build up some experience with the game and improve their characters. Once they set out for Mars, she replaced the inventoress with a character she'd already used in Chicago, the formidable journalist Amelia Peabody. Miss Peabody was considerably more . . . forthright . . . than the other character. When Diane seduced a Martian swamp pirate and then stabbed him to death with a hatpin once they were alone together, the expression on the faces of the other players were something to see.

After nearly 20 years, the adventure holds up pretty well. The only real weak point is the Martians capturing the player-characters. As any gamemaster knows, players absolutely hate to get captured. I once had a player try to hold off an entire army of Steppe Martian tribesmen (essentially Martian Mongols) by bluffing that his binocular case was a dynamite bomb.

Gamemaster Tip:  your players will cheerfully fight to the death rather than be captured. You can short-circuit this by simply telling them it happens. "The crash of a rifle butt on your head ends the discussion as you collapse into darkness." The players may resent being defeated by narration, but it's still better than having to stage-manage a battle in which the enemy will capture them without shooting them down like the mad dogs they are.

Ozblogging: The Wizard of Oz, Part 2

Episode II:  Incidents of Travel in Oz

Dorothy's journey to the Emerald City is about what you remember from the movie. Yellow brick road, finds Scarecrow, finds Tin Woodman, meets Cowardly Lion. Sure, the Wizard can help you, off we go.

The Cowardly Lion is a really big lion, presumably born in the usual way for lions. All the lions in Oz can talk anyway, and he's no different. He just wants to go to see the Wizard. The Tin Woodman has a long "origin story" of progressive cyborgization (which gets expanded and made even more bizarre in the novel The Tin Woodman of Oz).

But the Scarecrow is just a Scarecrow. No explanation of how he can walk and talk. No enchantments, no accidents with the Powder of Life, no "retcons" in later stories. He's just a man made of straw. I kind of like it that way. Too many writers get afflicted with a strange mania to explain everything. C.S. Lewis wasn't content with the surreal image of a gaslamp burning in a snowy forest, he had to go and explain where it came from. In science fiction, explaining too much is simply dull -- "infodumps," we call them. In fantasy it can be deadly. There are some things we just don't need to know. Baum can seldom resist giving us a backstory for his characters (even the Winged Monkeys get one), but the Scarecrow just . . . is. Hooray for him.

The journey to the Emerald City also reflects one ongoing trope of the Oz books. There's always a lot of friction when characters try to get anywhere in Oz. You can't just walk from the Munchkin country to the capital. You have to cross chasms and flooding rivers. You get stuck on poles. You have to get away from Kalidahs. Nothing's easy.

It's also interesting to reflect on the scale of fantasylands like Oz or C.S. Lewis's Narnia. They seem huge and diverse places, yet are small enough for a grade-school child to walk across in just a few days. Dorothy makes it from the land of the Munchkins to the Emerald City in less than a week, and her journey to the West later in the book doesn't take much longer. Assuming Dorothy's a healthy little girl used to lots of walking in turn-of-the-century Kansas, let's figure she can cover ten miles a day. That means Oz is no more than a couple of hundred miles from end to end. This magical fairyland full of strange isolated communities and bizarre subspecies is about the size of Pennsylvania. (Narnia is even smaller.)

Perhaps some of this trouble with scale is due to our own perspective as people of the 21st Century, accustomed to rapid car and air travel. I can drive across Massachusetts in an afternoon, so it seems like a small place. But the towns along the Connecticut River valley where I live are spaced at intervals of ten to fifteen miles, which is to say, a day's travel in the age of wagons and shoe leather. On foot, Massachusetts is big enough to hold wacky wayside tribes like the people of Northampton, isolated communities like Athol and Orange, and even some genuine wilderness in the Berkshires. When H.P. Lovecraft wrote his horror stories, a generation after Baum sent Dorothy to Oz, Massachusetts was still big enough to hold remote inbred towns full of dark secrets and inhuman races, and that was the age of fast trains and the Model T. Even in "realistic" Lovecraftian Massachusetts there was room enough for shoggoths and Deep Ones, so Oz can hold its share of Kalidahs.

What are Kalidahs? They're scary monsters in the forest. They have the bodies of bears, the heads of tigers, and big sharp claws. The Cowardly Lion gets a great moment when he's ready to fight off two Kalidahs even though they'll probably kill him. I wonder if there's an echo of the Kalidahs in the movie. Just before they encounter Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion, the adventurers get a nifty little musical number about "Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!" And what are Kalidahs? Tigers and bears!

After escaping the Kalidahs and emerging from the forest, they run into the poppies. In the film, the poppies are created by West as a trap for Dorothy. In the book, they're just another random deadly peril in the lovely fairyland of Oz. The nonliving Scarecrow and Tin Woodman aren't affected, and have no trouble getting Dorothy and Toto out of the soporific poppy field -- it's the Lion they can't budge. Which is about what one would expect: it's kind of odd in the film that the two of them are so helpless. Presumably Ray Bolger and Jack Haley could move Judy Garland without much effort. They were pretty fit guys. But a lion "the size of a cart-horse" would give even Victor Mature trouble.

Instead of Glinda deux ex machinating them out of trouble, they get help from an unexpected source. The tender-hearted Tin Woodman casually beheads (!) a wildcat chasing a mouse, and the mouse turns out to be no ordinary plebian mouse but the Queen of all mice. She and her people haul the Lion out of the poppies.

That's going to need a lot of mice. Assuming the lion has a mass of 500 kilograms, and each mouse can pull a load equal to its own mass, which we'll take as maybe 10 grams. Ignoring the mass of the Tin Woodman's improvised gurney, and the strings used to connect the mice to it, that still means the Queen had to call in 50,000 mice! The image of a horde of mice saving a lion is an interesting premonition of the scene in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, in which a flock of mice swarm over the body of the lion Aslan, gnawing away his bonds as he lies dead on the Stone Table. Both tales echo the Aesop fable of the lion and the mouse. I wonder if Lewis ever read the Oz stories. He would have been about the right age, but I don't know if Baum's books were available in the U.K. before World War I.

Continued in Part 3!

OzBlogging: The Wizard of Oz, part 1

Ozblogging:  this is the first in an irregular series of posts about L. Frank Baum's Oz books. I think Baum is unjustly neglected as a fantasy writer -- though I also recognize his considerable shortcomings. These little essays are not heavy literary criticism. I'm not going digging for complicated and unlikely interpretations of the books and characters. I'm just going to talk about random stuff that occurs to me. Think of this as me "liveblogging" as I read them.

Oh, and as far as I'm concerned, the Baum books are the only ones worth discussing. They are Canon, everything else is . . . not.

We begin with the first and best-known of the series,

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz!

Episode I:  Witches and Windstorms

Everybody remembers the movie, not the book. Even when I talk to my Oz-literate kids about the stories, we end up referencing stuff that's in the movie. The film The Wizard of Oz is such a classic, such an icon, such an absolutely damned perfect movie, that it has overshadowed the book for going on seventy years now.

Consequently I'm not even going to try to avoid referencing the movie as I write about the book. No matter how hard I tried, you'd all be seeing Judy Garland and Ray Bolger and Jack Haley Jr. and Bert Lahr in Technicolor, instead of W.W. Denslow's drawings.

The book, like the film, begins in Kansas. And, as in the film, Kansas is a dreary place. Baum describes the whole place as gray -- gray soil, crops burned gray by the sun, houses faded to gray, Uncle Henry and Aunt Em worn gray by a lifetime of work. In the film, Uncle Henry's farm is part of a community. There are bumbling farmhands, bothersome neighbors, and wandering mountebanks in the sepia-toned Kansas of the film. The book has none of that. There are no neighbors, no hired men, just a vast gray emptiness. Baum's Kansas is the Empty Quarter, the Waste Land, a place so barren and harsh that Aunt Em nearly has a heart attack the first time she hears little Dorothy laugh.

Baum's Kansas is so dreary that he doesn't waste much time there. The cyclone arrives by the fourth page of the story and blows Dorothy away in the house. While she's airborne like the Virgin of Loreto, we catch our first hint of just how bad-ass Dorothy is. In the film she's knocked out by flying debris, thereby setting up the whole story as a hallucination brought on by brain damage. Book Dorothy is tougher than that. Where most of us would be paralyzed by terror, expecting each instant to be smashed to bits, Dorothy eventually gets bored and decides it's time for bed. So while she's being hurled along through the upper atmosphere, she's cool enough to go to sleep. Gordon Cooper, the man who dozed atop an Atlas rocket during the Mercury program, would be proud.

The cyclone blows Dorothy to Oz, and safely lands her house in the country of the Munchkins, using the Wicked Witch of the East as a terminal braking system. As in the film, Dorothy is amazed at how lush and colorful the country is. The sepia-tone to Technicolor transition is a perfect metaphor, one I'm sure Baum would have approved of. In fact, the book does something similar, switching from brown to blue ink for the illustrations. When she's done gaping at her surroundings, Dorothy meets some Munchkins (who aren't quite the "little people" of the film, though they are described as being no bigger than Dorothy herself). And she meets the Good Witch of the North.

This is not Glinda. The film combined the Good Witch of the North with Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, into one character, "Glinda," played by Billie Burke. It works (and avoids a structural problem with the novel which we'll get to), but it creates a new difficulty almost as big. The Good Witch of the North (hereafter "North") knows that the Wicked Witch of the East's silver shoes (not ruby slippers, but everybody knows all about that by now, right?) are powerful magic items, but she doesn't know what they do or how to use them. She does give Dorothy a kiss on the forehead which will protect her from harm, and sends her off to seek the Great Oz. Fine. Makes sense.

Here's the problem: by combining Glinda with North, the movie makes her kind of a jerk, since she knows perfectly well how Dorothy can get back to Kansas, but sends her off on an extended wild-goose chase across Oz before telling her, fobbing her off with some handwaving about "you had to learn it for yourself." There is an interesting alternate interpretation of movie-Glinda's actions: by the time she finally lets Dorothy know the shoes can take her home, the little girl from Kansas has eliminated both Wicked Witches and the Wizard, leaving Glinda as the single most powerful sorceress in Oz, with a literal straw man on the throne of the Emerald City. This makes movie-Glinda rather Machiavellian, but it's still the most charitable interpretation. Otherwise she's just mean.

Anyway. Having sent Dorothy off to the Emerald City, North leaves the story, and we don't see her again until a cameo appearance in Road to Oz, nine years later.   

There's another big difference between the movie and the book in this section: the absence of the Wicked Witch of the West. In the film, of course, she shows up soon after Glinda, and is wild to get revenge for the death of her sister, East -- and to get her hands (or feet) on the ruby slippers. In the book, there's no sign of her, no hint of any family connection between the Wicked Witches, and West isn't even aware of Dorothy's presence in Oz until much later. In the film this has the effect of turning all of Dorothy's difficulties into a kind of proxy war between Glinda and West. Movie Dorothy is a pawn in Glinda's deep game. Book Dorothy is more proactive: she has a goal, and nothing is going to stop her. Don't get in Dorothy's way.

Continued in Part 2!

How I Did It #1: A Diagram of Rapture

"A Diagram of Rapture" is the first story I ever sold professionally. It appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in April of 2000, and began my regular run in that magazine. If you haven't read it, here's a brief summary:

A Fresh Pot

This is the maiden post of my new Web log. I contribute to another 'blog, the mighty Science Made Cool, but I wanted a place to write about books and writing, promote my own work, release old stuff which will never get reprinted, and generally gas about whatever I feel like.

In particular, I plan to use this 'blog for three main topics. First, I want to give "behind the scenes" tours of my own stories -- how they came to be written, why I made certain choices, and so on.

Second, I want to do "liveblogging" of classic books -- currently I'm working through the Oz books with my son and have prepared some long posts about them. If those are well-received, I may do the Narnia series.

And third, I want to reprint some of my old game writing, stuff that never got published or which appeared in magazines long defunct.

Some ground rules:  I will TRY to keep the site non-political. Mostly. I know perfectly well nobody's core beliefs have ever been transformed by something they read on a 'blog. Nor will my political opinions shift because of something you write in the comments. My opinion of you, however, can change quite dramatically. And by "you" I naturally mean some disagreeable stranger and not the witty and intelligent person reading this.

My kids read this. I won't shy away from adult topics, but let's try to keep the language at a PG level, okay? I won't delete the occasional "precision strike" but I do object to obscenity for its own sake.

Let's get started.