Just The Caffeine Talking

Some Bad News

It wasn't just 2016. It's not a "bad patch" we're going through. Your beloved childhood media icons are going to keep dying. FOREVER. Here's why.

It's about television. Movies have been around for a century. Movie stars have been dying almost as long. But I submit that movie actors, even the biggest and most enduring stars, never had the emotional connection to audiences that television stars do. It's simple arithmetic: even in the glory days of the studio system, even the hardest-working actors didn't make more than six or eight pictures a year. So if you were an obsessive William Powell fan and made sure to see every single picture he starred in, you might see something like twelve hours of William Powell in a year.

By comparison, if you were a fan of, say, Bonanza during its original run on NBC, you'd see thirty-four episodes a year, plus summer reruns. You'd spend an hour a week with Lorne Greene and Dan Blocker.

Movie stars were out-of-town relatives. TV stars were neighbors.

The rise of beloved TV icons came as Americans born after World War II grew up — the first cohort to spend their childhoods with a television in the house. So the first "iconic" TV stars are the ones whose careers began in the 1950s: Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, Robert Young, and others. But note that the first group of television stars were all established performers, born before the First World War in most cases. They began reaching the ends of their lives in the 1980s, as anyone who remembers the wave of nostalgic TV specials of that era may recall.

In the mid-1960s the TV networks made a push to recruit and feature younger performers, the better to cater to the "youth market" of the massive Baby Boomer demographic beginning to flex its consumer muscle. So on a show like Star Trek, for instance, both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were born in 1931, and thus were in their mid-thirties when the show premiered. That has remained the sweet spot for TV stardom ever since: the leads on the sitcom Big Bang Theory were also in their mid-thirties when that show began, forty years after Star Trek.

(Obviously all these points are generalizations: there are old actors and young actors, but unless one is a "child star" it's unlikely an actor can have the experience and exposure to be the lead on a series before age 30.)

Do the math: people who were in their mid-thirties in the 1960s were born about 1930, which means in 2017 they're in their late eighties. Life expectancy in the U.S. is about 80 years.

Much the same math holds for rock stars. The top acts in 1970 were all made up of performers born in the 1940s. They're all past 70 now, and being a rock star seems to have some . . . let's say long-term health effects. (Short-term effects, too: the famous "dead by overdose at 27" phenomenon as new-minted stars suddenly get enough money to buy all the drugs they want, which turns out to be ALL THE DRUGS THERE ARE.) So rock stars are also starting to "age out."

In short, get used to it. From now on every year is going to see the last of multiple beloved figures from your youth. The only light at the end of the tunnel is that the media fragmentation which began in the 1990s means that there aren't as many iconic performers nowadays as there were forty years ago. By the middle of the 21st century, actors and musicians will still be dropping dead, but their fan bases will be smaller. The reaction when that guy who was on an HBO series watched by 10 million people passes on won't be as strong, simply because most people will say "who?" when they hear the news. By 2040 we may hit Peak Celebrity Death Mourning.

 

Actors and musicians come and go, but characters in stories never die. Buy my new ebook and you can be certain those beloved icons will be with you forever!

Poe's Law of Tacos

Recently my son and I were driving along the commercial strip on King Street in Northampton when he asked (as teenagers do) if we could pick up some food. One of us suggested tacos, so we pulled into the unnatural hybrid Taco Bell/Kentucky Fried Chicken store for a snack.

On our way I joked that I was curious about what new way Taco Bell would devise to rearrange the same six or seven ingredients that make up all their menu items. I came up with the hilarious idea of a taco with the meat on the outside. (Well, I laughed.)

Then we went inside, and I ordered a "Naked Chicken Chalupa," mostly because it was prominently displayed on the menu board. I figured "naked chicken" meant some bogus skinless "healthy" chicken food product.

But when I unwrapped my taco, it was not what I expected. The taco shell was very thick and lumpy — was Taco Bell going in for artisanal handmade tortillas? I tried a bite.

It was . . . chicken. What I took for a taco shell was a sort of disk of chicken sliced (or pounded) thin, breaded, and fried in a U shape. The usual cheese, lettuce, sauce, etc. were inside this chicken "tortilla."

In other words, a taco with the meat on the outside.

Fast food has now passed the point of parody.

As food, the Naked Chicken Chalupa was adequate, not great. Kind of greasy, as you'd expect from a taco wrapped in fried chicken. I don't think I'm going to order it again. I do have some self-respect. 

UPDATE: The magisterial "Report of the Week" YouTube channel has now reviewed the Naked Chicken Chalupa. See it here.

The Ultimate Game World

For more than a year now I've been running a Pathfinder roleplaying game campaign at my local game shop. The players seem to enjoy it, and so do I. Though I use the Pathfinder rules pretty much as published, one thing I do not use is the "official" Paizo Publishing game world, Golarion.

I don't have any real beef with Golarion; it's yet another fantasy roleplaying game world, with a kinda-sorta Europeanish part, a vaguely Middle Eastern area, some Asiany places, some jungly places — basically all the entries in Diana Wynn Jones's Tough Guide to Fantasyland.

(Revealing note: I wrote the above paragraph with essentially no knowledge of the Golarion setting other than what I may have glimpsed in advertisements, and my familiarity with the tropes and cliches of roleplaying games. Feeling a pang of conscience, I went to Google and found my way to the Pathfinder Wiki, just to make sure I wasn't mis-representing the setting. Nope, I pretty much nailed it.)

I don't use Golarion because I've found a much better campaign world, one with fantastic landscapes, thousands of distinctive cultures, fascinating ancient civilizations, and awesome natural wonders. Best of all, this campaign setting is completely free and open-source, with millions of maps and reference works describing locations, mythologies, and groups in intricate detail.

It's called "Earth."

Now, admittedly, my version of Earth in the game has elves and dwarves and all the other boilerplate "playable races" from the Pathfinder rulebook, and of course it has magic and bizarre monsters, but the map is the same, and the peoples and cultures are mostly the same. I did make the executive decision to delete the Abrahamic religions because I don't want to step on anyone's toes, theologically. And I put Elves in control of Britain and France — but that just gives me pointy-eared pirates with West Country accents and swashbuckling sorcerous King's Archers, so that's good.

Why use a fantastical Earth rather than a made-up world? Two reasons: laziness and obsessive attention to detail.

Laziness means I can let Google Maps, the CIA Factbook, and Wikipedia do my world-building for me. Look up a place, look up who lived there around 1600 (the approximate date of the campaign), look up what religion they followed before converting to Christianity or Islam (if they ever did), maybe check one of those "Ten Things to See In X Place" travel articles for some local color or ideas, and voila! Prep work is done. I don't have to spend time reading up on the imaginary history of a game setting, because I've already spent forty-five years reading up on the history of the Earth.

Obsessive attention to detail means I don't have to think about questions like "Why does this fantasy setting in an alternate universe have humans in it?" or "Why do they have made-up gods but use real names of demons and monsters from Terrestrial folklore?" or "Why do these made-up cultures look so much like historical ones except for some annoying concessions to 21st-century sensibilities?"

See, I actually think about things like that, and they bug me. (I guess I side with Tolkein rather than Lewis in that respect.) I want my imaginary game world to hold together, which means I want to know why their human cultures and races manage to fall into patterns from Earth's history, despite radically different geography and history. (Steve Jackson came up with a clever justification in his "Banestorm" setting for GURPS: the humans of his fantasy setting actually are snatched magically from different places and times in Earth's history.)

Now, I don't want to tell anyone they're Doing It Wrong to use published settings. And I certainly don't want to discourage people from buying the products of hard-working game designers. But I do want to encourage gamers to learn about the real world, even if they prefer published settings. If you know more about, say, real Islamic history, it will definitely improve your understanding of the kinda-Middle Easterny places in your setting sourcebooks. The more you keep inside your head, the less often you'll have to stop to look things up.

Incidentally, if you want to compare my ability to create an imaginary setting with the way I depict a real place, check out the two stories in my new ebook!

Most Disturbing Thing You'll See Today

It's Carnival season again, which means it's King Cake season! 

Which means it's King Cake Baby season! 

I love my home town. Where else can one take pride in the "creepiest mascot" in pro sports? Here's a video made by the Pelicans which seems to glory in the unnerving nature of their mascot.

Those eyes. Those eyes in the night.

 

(If you like disturbing things, check out the two gritty science fiction adventures in my new ebook!)

Random Historical Trivia

Anyone who complains that the Electoral College used by the United States of America is too complicated should take a gander at the method employed by the Republic of Venice to select its Doges.

Step 1: The Grand Council (sort of a House of Representatives, except that membership was by invitation rather than election) would snatch a kid off the street and stand him up next to a big urn full of wax balls, some of which contained slips of paper. Then the members of the Council would file past and the kid would hand them each a ball, until thirty men were chosen.

Step 2: Those thirty would then circle around again, drawing lots until nine of them were selected.

Step 3: Those nine chose forty names from the membership of the Council. Each name required the approval of seven of the nine.

Step 4: Those forty then drew lots to reduce their number down to twelve.

Step 5: The remaining twelve then selected twenty-five names from the Council, requiring a vote of nine to approve each one. 

Step 6: Those twenty-five then drew lots again to reduce their number to nine.

Step 7: The nine chose forty-five members of the Council.

Step 8: Those forty-five were reduced by lot to eleven. At this point, the poor kid at the urn was probably near tears, so I assume they'd give him a cookie and send him home.

Step 9: The eleven men compiled a list of forty-one electors, each name requiring at least nine votes to get on the list.

Step 10: The forty-one electors chose the Doge, by a majority of at least twenty-five votes out of the forty-one.

If this system seems over-complicated, keep two things in mind:

1.) It was intended to eliminate the influence of parties and factions, and

2.) It worked for 529 years. 

 

If you like complicated plans with political overtones, check out the two science fictional caper stories in my new ebook!

Nostalgie du Geek: Champions!

The transition from high school to college is a big one for most people. You meet a whole new circle of friends. You live on your own for the first time. You probably try a lot of new things. It's a chance to "reinvent" yourself.

And if you're a huge geek who plays roleplaying games, it means you have to assemble a new gaming group.

In my case the college was the University of Chicago, and the new gaming group consisted of five or six of my fellow residents in stately Hitchcock Hall. We played a couple of different roleplaying games, but the one that we returned to most often was Champions, published by Hero Games.

Champions was (and still is), a superhero roleplaying game. It wasn't the first game to tackle the four-color world of comic-book superheroes, but it was the most successful, and remains in print to this day with only minor changes in mechanics.

Until I played Champions, all the games I had played used random character generation: you "rolled up" a character using dice to determine what that character's attributes were. That usually created an interesting mix of above and below average abilities.

Champions didn't do that. It allowed players to design their characters. If you wanted to play a super-strong indestructible hero, you didn't have to sit around rolling dice hoping for the result you wanted; instead you allocated points to the abilities you wanted the character to have. You could get extra points by taking "disadvantages" — which were typical comic-book problems like "Secret Identity" or "Hunted" or a "Dependent Non-Player Character."

Not only that, you could even design and fine-tune the powers your superhero had. The points bought actual game mechanical results, but the "special effects" were up to the player. So I might have a fiery superhero with a "flame blast" which I defined as a straightforward "Energy Blast" effect doing 1 die of damage per 5 points in the power (I still remember that without having to look it up). A different player might have a character with a "flame blast" ability, but define it as a physical attack. A third person might decide his character's "flame blast" was an explosion. And so on.

There were "frameworks" to allow characters to have several closely-linked powers without having to buy all of them at full price. My "flame powers" Multipower might include the aforementioned "flame blast" plus fire-powered flight, the ability to control fires, and maybe a "heat flash" capable of stunning foes without harming them.

All of this required a lot of calculation. Champions had a highly non-intuitive and fiddly way of calculating the cost of powers, involving a string of multiplying factors. Recall that this was all back in the middle 1980s, when personal computers were still bulky and expensive and most college students didn't have one. Instead of cranking it out on a spreadsheet we all did this by hand on endless sheets of scrap paper, with lots of erasing and scratching-out as one tried to squeeze out a precious few extra points by clever rounding off and "min-maxing." I typically reserved my weekends for game-geekery, but some of my acquaintances spent considerably more time at it. (One member of a different gaming group devoted so much time to designing Champions characters that his grades suffered and he had to transfer to another school.)

I learned a lot about game design from Champions. The process of designing characters clarified the distinction between game mechanics and "chrome" — the aesthetic component of a game which are not embedded in the mechanics. That led me to think about game mechanics in general, and to appreciate the value of having a consistent underlying logic to the game rules.

Champions's effect-based set of game mechanics proved relatively easy to adapt to other genres and settings. Instead of superheroes you could use the Hero Games system to run futuristic cyberpunk detective characters, or fantasy wizards.

This was an idea whose time had definitely come by the middle of the Eighties. Everyone was jumping on the "multipurpose game system" bandwagon: Hero System, GURPS, Torg, Basic Role-Playing, Dream Park, Rolemaster, doubtless many others I'm forgetting. All were based on the same seductive idea of building one robust but flexible game system (or adapting an existing system to have the necessary flexibility), and then churning out an endless supply of "genre supplements" for specific campaign types. The advantages were obvious: players would only have to learn one set of rules, once, and publishers would be able to sell many times more games.

Problems with the model appeared a few years later — I'll go into that issue more in some future post, but the short summary is that "realism" means different things in different game settings. But the idea has never gone away completely. The HERO system remains in print, and I've even written some books for it.

Champions also completed my transition to fully-plotted adventures. A comic-book style story has to have a villain, and that villain has to have a plan, and ideally there should be some fun set-piece action sequences. These are not the sort of things one can throw together on the fly by rolling some dice on a random-encounter table. Especially not when designing that master villain and all his henchmen requires as much fiddly number-crunching as creating a new player character. I never sat down to run a Champs game without a fully-prepared scenario.

Perhaps because I had already spent a couple of years playing Call of Cthulhu, my superhero adventures had more of a Batman feel than, say, Superman or the X-Men. There was always a mystery to be solved, which in turn led the heroes to the villain's sinister plan and then a final showdown.

The combination of painstakingly designed characters and painstakingly designed adventures made this phase of my gaming life the most "story-like" of all, I think. In hindsight, I wonder if my adventures didn't get a little constraining and "railroady" out of the need to fit the comic-book model. Another problem I noticed was that as the point-based heroes gained character points through experience, they tended to converge, buying up optimum attacks, shedding inconvenient disadvantages, and trading quirky individuality for game-mechanical effectiveness. (Since my Champions days I've noticed this problem with other games; another topic for another time.) 

Being a college student meant I didn't do as much gaming as I did in high school. The academic workload was heavier, I had to do things like buy groceries and cook dinner, and gaming had to compete with all the other entertainment options available on a university campus in a major megapolis.* All of those factors meant I didn't play as much Champions as I did D&D, Traveller, or Call of Cthulhu. But I had fun with Champions, and I'm proud to have written some products for that game system. Excelsior!

*Also: girls.

For two examples of thrilling adventures which could have been Champions adventures if I'd put superheroes in them, you can buy my new ebook!

Retro-Review: Rogue Moon

Imagine there was a novel which combined James Patrick Kelly's amazing short story "Think Like a Dinosaur" with Alastair Reynolds's brilliant novella Diamond Dogs. Imagine that novel was written in 1960 by a respected and influential science fiction author, editor, critic, and teacher with multiple Hugo and Nebula awards to his credit.

Now imagine how disappointed I felt when I finished reading Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys.

Rogue Moon tells the story of one Edward Hawks, Doctor of Science, who is running a secret teleportation project funded by the Navy. The teleportation device isn't a Trekian "transporter," rather it's a vacuum-tube-and-magnetic-tape version of an atomic scanner and 3-D "matter printer." The person, or object, to be transmitted is scanned — destructively — and converted to a signal which is then beamed to a receiver which reassembles it. They've even worked out a dodge (which becomes important) by which a second copy is assembled in the laboratory and popped into a sensory-deprivation tank to allow telepathic rapport with the transmitted copy.

Where are they transmitting people to? The Navy's secret Moon base, which was set up to study a bizarre and deadly alien structure found on the Lunar surface.

This isn't some far-future tale, by the way; it's pretty explicity set in 1960 or thereabouts.

The chief problem with the whole project is that the volunteers who get teleported to the Moon and try to enter the alien complex all die in horrible ways. The shock drives their "spare" copies on Earth mad. So not only are brave and highly-intelligent young men getting their minds destroyed, they aren't making any progress exploring the alien artifact/structure/whatever it is. Hawks is in danger of losing his funding.

Enter Al Barker. He's smart, arrogant, a war hero, Olympic skier, auto racer, and is literally suicidally reckless. He's perfect for the Moon project because he's been trying to kill himself for years. Barker's mind can handle the experience of dying repeatedly, until at last he makes his way past all the lethal deathtraps in the Moon complex, so that others can follow and begin studying it.

The Barker copy on the Moon has an epiphany about his life and gets over being suicidal, only to be informed by the copy of Hawks who has accompanied him on the final attempt that there's no way for them to teleport back to Earth and anyway there are already copies of themselves there, so they have to die now, one final time.

Okay, why was I disappointed? How can one not like a book about secret Moon bases, alien deathtraps, and retro-tech teleportation devices?

Simple: that's not what the book is about.

Seriously. We don't even learn about the teleportation system and the Moon base until more than a third of the way into the book. Barker's repeated attempts to get past the deathtraps in the alien complex are left entirely off-stage until the very end. All of the cool stuff is shoved to one side so we can savor the Fifties pop-psychology portraits of Barker and his high-maintenance girlfriend Claire Pack.

Here's a scene in which Dr. Hawks — who for the moment we will refer to as Wernher Von Braun — is meeting Al Barker, who we'll call John Glenn.

". . . Before she went, I had to knock the Frenchmen about a little bit," John Glenn said, and now his meaning was clear. "I believe one of them had to be taken off by helicopter. And I've never forgotten how one goes about keeping one's hold on her."

Annie Glenn smiled. "I'm a warrior's woman, Wernher." Sudenly she moved her body, and Glenn let his hand fall. "Or at least we like to think so." Her nails ran down Glenn's torso. "It's been seven years, and nobody's taken me away yet." She smiled fondly up at Glenn for an instant, and then her expression became challenging again. "Why don't you tell John about this new job, Wernher?"

[. . . ] John Glenn nodded. "Oh, yes, Doctor — I meant what I said earlier. Don't let anything she does or says let you forget. She's mine. And not because I have money, or good manner, or charm. I do have money, but she's mine by right of conquest."

Seriously? This isn't a question of different times, different standards. My parents were born about the same time as those characters would have been, and I can't imagine them, or any of their friends, or any actual human being then or now talking that way. Especially not when they're getting ready to discuss matters of super-secret super-science.

Later on, Claire dares Hawks to seduce her, and when he reacts like a normal sane man would, she runs off with the sleazy Human Resources director who introduced Barker to Hawks in the first place. Again, if Tom Wolfe is any guide there were plenty of discreetly-managed scandals behind the scenes of the Space Race, but I simply can't imagine Annie Glenn telling Wernher Von Braun "You've got to take me tonight," and then eloping with one of the contractors.

This isn't the usual problem with older science fiction stories. These characters aren't wooden, or juvenile, or two-dimensional. Quite the reverse: Algis Budrys is laying on Fifties Freudian psychology and "sophisticated" (in the cocktails-and-adultery sense) behavior with a builder's trowel. I'm not exaggerating when I say that nearly half of the book's page count is devoted to characters talking about their childhoods or sex lives. Hawks has his own relationship with a woman who picks him up hitchiking, and spends a lot of time telling her about his youth.

Oh, and Barker's big epiphany on the Moon is that he's been taking suicidal risks for twenty years because the other frat boys at Yale used to give him a hard time about being part Apache. Really.

The problem is the mismatch between those elements and the actual mystery at the heart of the book. There are alien deathtraps on the Moon and a teleportation device and a secret space program ten years before Apollo, and I'm supposed to care about Barker's relationship with his girlfriend? Barker, like John Glenn, is interesting because of the stuff he's going to be doing in the story. Few people would read Glenn's biography if he had remained a Marine aviator and eventually retired to do consulting work. We care about him because he flew in space. And we care about Barker because he's getting teleported to an alien deathtrap on the Moon. Which means that by not showing us that part, and focusing on the frankly tiresome soap opera elements, Budrys makes me care less and less about getting to the ending.

I'm probably being too hard on Algis Budrys, because he wasn't the only SF writer of that era who was replacing technobabble about rockets and circuits with psychobabble about complexes and repressions. Lots of SF writers — and editors — fell in love with the idea of psychology finally becoming a quantified, predictive science like physics or chemistry. (It's probably mean-spirited of me to suggest that my fellow nerds, then as now, were searching for the magic formula which would finally let them understand how other people behave.) And all the cool kids at the slick magazines were doing it, too.

Now I'm going to put on my writing-workshop pants and try to figure out how I would have written Rogue Moon. Start with the problem: the alien deathtrap. Show a volunteer getting killed. Then show him somehow alive on Earth, but insane. Then bring in Barker, and have Hawks explain what's going on. And do all this relatively quickly, in the first chapter or so.

Then actually show Barker making attempt after attempt. Show the strain it puts on him, but also the irresistable attraction it holds for him. His girlfriend leaves and he doesn't really notice. Hawks urges him to stop but Barker cleverly appeals to the higher-ups funding the project.

Finally, as in Budrys's version, Hawks joins Barker for the last attempt. They make it past the final barrier. But instead of a cheap epiphany, Barker simply shows a new serenity. The duplicates of Barker and Hawks on the Moon celebrate uproariously before walking out the airlock to die. The copies back on Earth, who survive, don't attain this enlightenment, but are aware they have missed it. End story.

I guess the only lesson to be learned is to avoid falling for current pop-psychology fads. When you're writing about people, base it on your own observations of how they act, rather than the latest Theory of Everything.

Oh, and don't hold the cool stuff back so long. Teleporting to the secret moonbase to face alien deathtraps!

 

(And if you're teleporting to a secret moonbase to explore alien deathtraps, you might enjoy some light reading for your trip: buy my ebook!)

Going LIVE!

I've finally dipped a toe into the waters of independent e-publishing. My e-chapbook "Outlaws and Aliens" is now live on Amazon! It's an affordably-priced little ebook containing two of my short stories — "The Alien Abduction" and "Object Three." The cover art is by Rob Caswell. You can buy it here. Makes a great way to use up that Amazon gift card you got for Christmas.

If this goes well, I plan to bring out all my old short stories in similar format. So BUY MY EBOOKS!