Just The Caffeine Talking

Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 3)

We're about two-thirds of the way through the book. Did the editors front-load the good stuff, or save the best for a boffo finish? Let's find out.

Asylum, by A.E. Van Vogt: Space vampires! One of the first discussions of what SETI researchers call the "Zoo hypothesis!" Identity games worthy of Philip K. Dick! Unconvincing tough-guy dialog! Also a slightly creepy future Earth society in which the use of "mechanical psychology" in schools has eliminated "murder, theft, war, and all unsocial perversions." In the past I've noted how obsessed mid-century science fiction writers were with the notion of psychology as an exact science and a reliable technology. Given how many writers and fans may have had at least a toe on "the spectrum," so to speak, I think they found the idea of an algorithm which can explain human behavior to be very appealing. Anyway, the story gets three stars.

Quietus, by Ross Rocklynne: A very short, melancholy story about alien explorers on Earth and the last surviving human. Four stars.

The Twonky, by Lewis Padgett/Kuttner and Moore: A bit of far-future technology lands in a contemporary middle-class home, in the form of a console radio with its own agenda. Still a lot of drinking used as a placeholder for comedy. This story was adapted into a Twilight Zone episode, but I've never seen it. Three stars.

Time-Travel Happens! by A.M. Phillips: A very odd bit of quasi-Forteana which seems very out of place in this collection (although Astounding did run Charles Fort's book Lo! as a serial in 1934). The article is supposedly nonfiction, about the once celebrated case of Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, two British academics who claimed to have slipped back in time to pre-Revolutionary France during a visit to Versailles in 1901. You can read their 1911 account here, and an analysis by Brian Dunning here. While I enjoy a little Forteana, I'm not particularly impressed by stale, reheated Forteana. One star.

Robot's Return, by Robert Moore Williams: A crew of robots come to a dead Earth in the distant future, searching for clues about their origin. Then they find them and the story ends. If you're keeping score, this is the sixth story out of twenty-five (so far) about the death of the human race. Two stars.

The Blue Giraffe, by L. Sprague De Camp: An entertaining story about mutations in an African wilderness preserve, which kind of dodges its proper ending. Bonus points to Mr. De Camp for actually knowing something about Africa when writing a story set there. Three stars.

Flight Into Darkness, by Webb Marlowe/J. Francis McComas: This may be the first Nazis in Space! story ever, as it beat Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo by nearly a year. Notably, one half-crippled German scientist is able to build an interplanetary rocketship in a basement, which makes Von Braun and Dornberger seem like slackers by comparison. Two stars.

The Weapons Shop, by A.E. Van Vogt: A classic, though I found it a bit unsatisfying. The story takes the robustly libertarian position that "the right to buy weapons is the right to be free" and then completely dodges the issue by making them magic superscience weapons which can't be used for "aggression or murder." As if the Founders had written the Second Amendment with a codocil limiting it to water pistols. And again with the psychobabble! Two stars.

Farewell to the Master, by Harry Bates: I only just learned that Harry Bates was the original editor of Astounding, and continued to sell stories to his successors after moving on in 1933. This story was the genesis of the great 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still. I have to say that the moviemakers improved on Bates's original considerably — although they did have to sacrifice Bates's scene in which the robot Gnut (Gort in the film) wrestles a gorilla, and the absolute killer of a final line. Four stars.

Within the Pyramid, by R. DeWitt Miller: A very unremarkable "ancient astronauts" story, which may have inspired Erich von Daniken to begin promoting the notion as "fact" twenty years later. This is barely a story at all; more like an essay. One star.

He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse: This is another utterly gonzo story, riffing on what was already an established sub-genre of science fiction — stories about people shrinking and their adventures in the microverse. Hasse cleaned up the table with this one, in which his hero continues to shrink, entering universe after universe nested within each other at the atomic level, like so many Russian dolls. Bonus points for having our Earth be one of the later places the hero shrinks into. Four stars.

This part of the book is a mixed bag: three top-notch stories, five lackluster or bad ones, so that the average for these eleven is between two and three stars.

(to be continued . . . )

 

If you want science fiction which is all top-notch, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 2)

This post continues my look at the ground-breaking 1946 anthology Famous Science-Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond Healy and John McComas. It's probably going to take at least four entries to cover the whole book. Last time I got through the first seven stories, and so far the collection has been pretty solid. The average rating is more than three stars out of four. Let's see if the rest of the book can maintain that level.

Seeds of the Dusk, by Raymond Z. Gallun: This is barely a story at all, more like a lightly-fictionalized essay about the concept of panspermia. The main character is a spore from Mars which lands on Earth in the distant future. Two stars.

Heavy Planet, by Lee Gregor/Milton Rothman: Natives of a high-gravity world encounter a wrecked spaceship and struggle to gain control of the secret of atomic power. The aliens are so-so, and again we get the near-mystical attitude toward The Atom. Three stars.

Time Locker, by Lewis Padgett/Kuttner and Moore: Another one of their Galloway Gallagher "wacky inventor" series. This one has a somewhat more intriguing scientific premise at the heart of it, but I still don't think the series as a whole is very amusing. Three stars, and that's being generous.

The Link, by Cleve Cartmill: Cartmill's the guy whose story about atomic weapons earned Campbell a visit from the F.B.I. because it was a little too accurate. This is a "dawn of Man" story, with the usual hero who invents tool use despite being an outcast because he's not as apelike as the rest of the tribe. As with the Gallun story mentioned above, this feels more like a fictionalized essay than a work of fiction. Two stars. 

Mechanical Mice, by Maurice A. Hugi: This is a story about Von Neumann machines (self-replicating devices) written a good half-decade before Von Neumann came up with the idea. Maybe we should call them Hugi machines, instead. The story itself is a "wacky inventor" tale with a refreshing vein of black humor. Four stars.

V-2 — Rocket Cargo Ship, by Willy Ley: One of the pioneers of German rocketry before World War 2 discusses what his former colleagues got up to after he left. What's interesting, from a modern viewpoint, is how much of this is guesswork on Ley's part. It was written while the war was still going on, and I don't think Ley was privy to all the findings by Allied intelligence-gathering, so he had to work from news reports and basic physics. It's also interesting to see that Ley identifies Hermann Oberth as the mastermind of the German rocket program; though Oberth was employed at Peenemunde it was Von Braun and Dornberger's show. But Ley fled Germany when those two were just starting their work sponsored by the German Army, and may not have known much about the operation. Four stars, as a historical document, if nothing else.

Adam and No Eve, by Alfred Bester: Another classic story, and a very grim one, about a space explorer whose hubris has caused the end of all life on Earth save for himself. Four stars.

Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov: This one is a classic, although it's amusing to me how many readers manage to Not Get It. Throughout the whole story the alien (but entirely human) characters are speculating about what will happen to their civilization on the once-in-a-millennium day when darkness falls on their world, and I think a lot of readers don't realize that all their speculations are supposed to be wrong. It's not the darkness that freaks everyone out so that they destroy their surroundings trying to kindle fires, it's (spoiler alert) the sight of the stars in the sky. The story has a strong central idea (from Emerson via Campbell) but I think it's more wordy than it needs to be. Three stars.

A Matter of Size, by Harry Bates: This is a terrible story, and I have no idea why the editors included it. It's scientifically incoherent — to the point where I wonder if Bates even took a high-school science class or bothered to look in an encyclopedia ever — and it's very slow and talky for an adventure story. The only clever bit comes far too late in the story, as the hero (who has been miniaturized down to insect size) figures out a clever way to cross the city without getting stepped on. One star, and that's being very charitable.

As Never Was, by P. Schuyler Miller: A time travel story about the "Grandfather Paradox," though with an interesting twist. Both of Miller's stories in this book are time travel stories. I don't know if he wrote a lot of them, or just did it well.  Three stars.

Q.U.R., by Anthony Boucher: Kind of a "wacky inventor" story, about a future genius with the amazing idea of building robots which aren't shaped like humans. You know, like pretty much all real robots in the modern world. In the past I've written about the disjunction when a science-fictional concept changes from metaphor to real technology, and you can see this story as marking that moment for robots. Since Mary Shelley, if not earlier, writers had been using robots as metaphors; Boucher's story shows the beginning of the change to writing about robots as real-world machines. The story has a lot of drinking in it. Reading about other people getting drunk is even less interesting than reading about other people having sex. Two stars.

Who Goes There? by Don A. Stuart/John W. Campbell: This is a classic, and a top-notch story in every way. It's the origin of the 1951 film The Thing From Another World, and of the very faithful 1982 film The Thing, by John Carpenter. One can also view it as a kind of unauthorized sequel to H.P. Lovecraft's At The Mountains of Madness, which ran in Astounding just before Campbell took over as editor. Four stars!

The Roads Must Roll, by Robert A. Heinlein: This is a good story with a simply bonkers premise. In the future depicted in the story, transportation isn't by car or rail, it's by giant high-speed conveyor belt roads. If you can manage to swallow that idea, then it's a pretty gripping story about an attempted power-grab by the operators of a vital piece of infrastructure. Tellingly, I don't think Heinlein ever made reference to the conveyor roads in any of his other stories; I don't think he could really swallow the idea himself. Three stars.

The average score for this batch is a little lower than the first set of stories: just under three stars. The Bates story drags down the mean — without it these stories would have the same average rating as the ones I looked at last time.

(to be continued . . . )

 

If you want to see two stories I think deserve four stars, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Retro-Review: Famous Science-Fiction Stories (Part 1)

American literature doesn't have an official "Canon." There's no equivalent of the Academie Francaise to decide what is and what is not Literature with a capital L. But we do have some approximations: high-school or first-year college course reading lists, better-late-than-never Pulitzers, adaptations in Classics Illustrated Comics or Oscar-bait films . . . And of course, enshrinement in the Modern Library imprint from Random House.

Science fiction in America had a bad reputation in the days when most of it was printed in the pulp magazines. Sure, it sold well and was popular, but authors could never quite shake the stigma of writing trash. Talk to any science fiction fan or author over the age of 60 or so and you're bound to hear stories of parents and teachers throwing away science fiction magazines or paperbacks.

The birth of the Atomic Age in 1945 did a lot to erase that stigma. Suddenly atom bombs, rockets, satellites, nuclear submarines, and electronic computers were no longer wild science fictional fantasies but the subjects of serious news and popular science articles. One can only imagine how many triumphant nerds waved copies of Collier's Magazine featuring Wernher Von Braun's articles about the Conquest of Space in the faces of those parents and teacher mentioned above. "SEE?"

And in 1946 the doors of the Temple of Literature were opened: Modern Library published an anthology of short fiction and a couple of nonfiction articles called Famous Science Fiction Stories: Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. Both editors were established publishing-industry pros at the time, but McComas went on to write several science fiction stories of his own.

This is science fiction's first stab at the big time, at literary respectability. One would expect this to be the greatest all-star anthology ever. So what's inside? Here's the table of contents:

Requiem, by Robert A. Heinlein

Forgetfulness, by Don A. Stuart (actually John W. Campbell)

Nerves, by Lester Del Rey

The Sands of Time, by P. Schuyler Miller

The Proud Robot, by Lewis Padgett (secretly Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore)

Black Destroyer, by A.E. Van Vogt

Symbiotica, by Eric Frank Russell

Seeds of the Dusk, by Raymond Z. Gallun

Heavy Planet, by Lee Gregor (a.k.a. Milton Rothman)

Time Locker, by Lewis Padgett (really C.L. Moore and Henry Kuttner)

The Link, by Cleve Cartmill

Mechanical Mice, by Maurice A. Hugi

V-2: Rocket Cargo Ship, by Willy Ley (nonfiction)

Adam and No Eve, by Alfred Bester

Nightfall, by Isaac Asimov

A Matter of Size, by Harry Bates

As Never Was, by P. Schuyler Miller

Q.U.R., by Anthony Boucher

Who Goes There?, by Don A. Stuart (Campbell again)

The Roads Must Roll, by Robert A. Heinlein

Asylum, by A.E. Van Vogt

Quietus, by Ross Rocklynne

The Twonky, by Lewis Padgett (Kuttner and Moore yet again)

Time-Travel Happens!, by A.M. Phillips (nonfiction, sort of)

Robot's Return, by Robert Moore Williams

The Blue Giraffe, by L. Sprague De Camp

Flight Into Darkness, by Webb Marlowe (J. Francis McComas, one of the editors)

The Weapons Shop, by A.E. Van Vogt

Farewell to the Master, by Harry Bates

Within the Pyramid, by R. DeWitt Miller

He Who Shrank, by Henry Hasse

By His Bootstraps, by Anson MacDonald (Robert Heinlein)

The Star Mouse, by Fredric Brown

Correspondence Course, by Raymond F. Jones

Brain, by S. Fowler Wright

That's a pretty impressive list of contributors! I am a little surprised at some names which are missing; it appears the editors limited themselves to living and American writers (for fiction, anyway; Willy Ley had come over from Germany before the war). Still, it's surprising not to see Earl and Otto Binder, Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton, Neil R. Jones, Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson, or Philip Wylie — but editorial taste is a mysterious thing. It's worth noting that all but three of the stories in this volume are from Campbell's Astounding; I don't know if there was a business relationship between the editors or Random House and Astounding, or whether John W. Campbell had made his magazine such a leader in the field that it was simply inevitable that Astounding would dominate an "all star" collection.

Let's look at the stories. (Warning: I'm not going to give all of them equal attention, and some of the best ones may get the most cursory treatment because there isn't much to say about something great.)

"Requiem," by Robert A. Heinlein: This is a classic even today. A strong starter. The notion of an eccentric millionaire becoming the father of the space age seemed plausible in 1946, absurd in 1966, and nowadays seems very . . . topical. I have a feeling Elon Musk has read this story many times. Four stars.

"Forgetfulness," by Don A. Stuart/John W. Campbell: Touches on two themes Campbell returned to again and again — dying civilizations and psychic powers. A good story, but not the best by Campbell/Stuart. Two stars.

"Nerves," by Lester Del Rey: A medical drama set in a ridiculously dangerous atomic research facility. Something about atomic power, even before Hiroshima, seems to have opened the floodgates of metaphor in science fiction writers. The story, and the characters in it, treat atomic power as something supernatural. The combination of near-superstitious dread and (by modern standards) maniacal recklessness makes the story fail the suspension-of-disbelief test, and the medical drama based entirely on technobabble just isn't especially interesting. Two stars, and that's generous.

"The Sands of Time," by P. Schuyler Miller: This is an absolutely gonzo story, and Miller pulls it off wonderfully. Time travel! Dinosaurs! A Space Princess! Thrills! Romance! And a reasonably well-done depiction of field paleontology! Four stars.

"The Proud Robot," by Lewis Padgett/Kuttner and Moore: There was once a whole subgenre of science fiction which I have to say I'm very glad has died out. It was the "wacky inventor" story, and I think every SF writer working before about 1970 tried it at least once. This particular wacky inventor is a comical alcoholic, which isn't actually very funny. The plot involves some speculation about how television would change the way people consume entertainment, including some very prescient ideas about what we now call "intellectual piracy." That's pretty nifty, but it's offset by the fact that the story is about a man who invents a functional human-level artificial intelligence and nobody at all seems to think it's very important. Three stars.

"Black Destroyer," by A. E. Van Vogt: This one is a classic, it's great, it's got a great alien viewpoint character, it's a space-monster story that actually makes sense, and I can ignore Van Vogt's crackpot historical-psychological determinism because everyone was doing it back then anyway. This story demonstrates why I vastly prefer Van Vogt's short stories to his novels. Four stars.

"Symbiotica," by Eric Frank Russell: An exploration story with an interesting alien environment. But to a modern reader this story is weird. The space explorers are, more or less, the crew from the original 1931 version of King Kong, but with a spaceship instead of a tramp steamer. Everyone's very tough and hard-boiled, even the Martian and robot members of the crew. Fifty years after H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, the idea of biological contamination is a foreign concept. It's not even clear to me what the explorers are supposed to do on this alien world. I know, I shouldn't judge a story written eighty years ago by contemporary standards — but compare Russell's space explorers to the men in Van Vogt's story immediately preceding. The men of the Space Beagle act like astronauts; Russell's characters act like sailors on shore leave. Three stars.

(to be continued . . . )

 

If you want to compare my science fiction stories to the masters, you can buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Experience Points (Part 2): Problems and Solutions

Last time I asked if experience points in roleplaying games are necessary, and more or less talked myself into believing they are. But I can't say I'm happy about that conclusion. How come?

Because I think experience points and character advancement have a corroding effect on roleplaying campaigns.

Here's why: the unrelenting focus on winning XPs and leveling up tends to encourage players to think of their characters as they will be in the future, rather than as they are. I subscribe to a Facebook group for players of the Pathfinder roleplaying game, and one of the perennial topics of discussion is all the quirky and/or badass "builds" players come up with for characters in the game.

Now these "builds" are not interesting concepts for characters in the sense of being imaginary people with intriguing quirks or unusual outlooks on life. No, they're combinations of powers and abilities, formed by adroit use of the "multiclassing" rules in the game by players.

So, if my character is a 4th-level Fighter and then takes two levels as a Brawler and then one level as a Summoner, I can get this combination of abilities which will then let me do this weird or overpowered thing . . .

If Pathfinder was a point-based game system like GURPS, in which players really do build their characters at the start of play, this wouldn't be a problem. But many of the "builds" in Pathfinder require characters who are 10th or 12th level before the whole process is complete. Which means the player can be running that character for years of actual gaming before the "build" is complete. I strongly suspect that a majority of Pathfinder characters never reach their intended "build" because the Gamemasters get bored with the campaign or the players graduate high school and go off to college.

More to the point, it's a serious obstacle to the "immersion" in the roleplaying experience we all love if your character isn't a character but an incomplete set of abilities lacking only 5600 more XP to become the character you want. While the "hero's journey" of a character like Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker is interesting, we can also enjoy the adventures of "complete" characters like Conan or Han Solo. In the course of his adventures in the Star Wars films, Han experiences a moral awakening and meets the love of his life, but there's no sense that he gets better at piloting spaceships or beating greedy bounty-hunters to the draw in a gunfight.

The most common fix for this is to simply start the campaign at a higher level. If all the heroes are 10th level at the start of play, they can have all their cool powers already assembled. There is much to be said for this approach, especially since the heroes can go up against very powerful foes like dragons, giants, or mind-flayers.

True enough — but it also means the heroes are basically un-threatenable by any ordinary mortals. They're comic-book superheroes, not the Fellowship of the Ring. That rules out all kinds of potential adventures.

I'd like to propose a different solution, one which can be used with low-level characters, which preserves the entertainment value of leveling up and gaining new abilities, but which makes it impossible for the players to "live in the future" and obsess over what their characters are going to be.

Here's how it works: the gamemaster draws up a list of new abilities or improvements for the characters, and then hands them out unpredictably — possibly reflecting the experiences the heroes have gone through or the enemies they've defeated. So if the player characters faced a dragon and nearly got incinerated by its breath, the brave fighter could gain improved ability to resist intense heat, while the clever thief could get better at dodging. If they had to make peace between warring goblin tribes, the wizard might gain in charisma and the cleric gains the bardic ability to encourage others by singing.

This could also be used in reverse, to show the effect of curses or injuries. After fighting a vampire, the ranger is permanently weakened by having his life force nearly drained away. A bad burn from the dragon's breath might make the cleric less agile in the future as scar tissue slows her down.

In short, the players don't know what the future holds for their characters. (They might make suggestions or add items to the gamemaster's reward list, but they still wouldn't know what improvements their characters will get after any given session.) That's entirely reasonable: nobody, fictional or real, knows for sure what's going to happen. We have wishes and hopes, but those are often disappointed, or come true in ways we didn't expect.

I haven't had the opportunity to try this method myself, but perhaps I'll get the chance. It all depends on what rewards and penalties fate throws my way.

 

To see how characters I created deal with fate and chance, buy my ebook Outlaws and Aliens!

Experience Points (Part 1): Do We Need Them?

For any fan of roleplaying games, the answer to the question in the title of this post is "Of course!" or maybe "As many as possible!" But I'm not sure that experience points are necessary for roleplaying games — and I've started to wonder if they're actually harmful.

If you're not familiar with roleplaying games, but for some reason are determined to read this post, "experience points" (hereafter XPs because I don't want to keep typing those words) are rewards given out at the end of a game session or the completion of an adventure, to reflect how much the player characters have learned and improved as a result of their exploits.

In the original Dungeons & Dragons, and all its descendants, characters accumulated XPs until they had enough to reach the next "character level" — at which point some or all of their abilities improved. Magic-users got to learn more spells, Fighters got better at hitting things, Thieves got better at sneaking and backstabbing, and so on. This is often called "leveling up." Other games allowed piecemeal improvement: one could spend XPs to improve a skill or a physical attribute. Games like GURPS or HERO System, in which characters were created by expending "character points" simply treated XPs as extra points which could be spent on new or improved abilities — or to "buy off" personal disadvantages. A few games — Runequest and Call of Cthulhu come to mind — didn't have XPs, but instead had players keep track of which skills the characters used during a game session, so that they could then make "skill checks" to see if those abilities improved through use. As a character got better at doing something, it became harder to improve via experience. (This system also had the odd side effect of encouraging players to use wildly inappropriate skills just to get the skill check.)

Now, while XPs are blatantly a "game mechanic" they do reflect a certain amount of both fictional and real-world realism. People do learn by experience, after all. A soldier who has been through combat is probably more skilled than a green recruit. A musician who has played the same piece a hundred times will do it better than someone who is still working through it for the first time. And in fiction there are numerous examples of characters improving and, well, "leveling up" over the course of a story. In The Lord of the Rings, Merry and Pippin transform from callow young upper-class Hobbit twits to capable warriors and leaders who can free the Shire from enemy occupation. In Star Wars, Luke goes from being a farm boy with an unlikely talent for flying to a powerful Jedi Knight.

But are XPs necessary? After all, there are plenty of examples of characters in fiction who don't "level up" at all in the course of their adventures. Odysseus is a cunning liar and a great archer when he sails off to Troy, and he's the same with a few more grey hairs when he gets back to Ithaca. In modern fiction, James Bond or Captain Kirk both start out hypercompetent and remain that way. (In fact, stories about hypercompetent heroes often focus on the ravages of time and whether they are losing ability rather than improving.)

I can think of one successful roleplaying games which didn't award XPs. Traveller, in its original incarnation, didn't really have an experience mechanic. Heroes were assumed to be highly-skilled veterans so there wasn't much room for improvement. Characters could sometimes take correspondence courses during their long interstellar voyages, but that was about it. So evidently XPs aren't necessary for a roleplaying game. . . . Or are they? Traveller eventually added an experience mechanic in later editions, and even at its most successful the game was never in the same commercial league as Dungeons & Dragons.

Players (not the characters, the actual people sitting around the table) seem to love getting XPs. Well, good old B.F. Skinner pointed out that "reinforcement" encourages subjects to repeat the desired behavior. You get what you reward. Giving out XPs for killing monsters and avoiding traps is a form of reward — and it's a reward for the player rather than the character. The character, after all, gets treasure, magic, prestige in the game world, and maybe a knighthood or a grant of land. The player leaves the table much as he arrived. Giving XPs to the character is a way to signal the player that he's done a good job. Quite simply, it's fun to watch your character get better at doing things, gain new powers, and maybe shed some of those pesky weaknesses. There's a bit of a "power gamer" in all of us.

Traveller, interestingly enough, was famous for its long and complex character creation system, in which the characters went through terms of service in the Galactic armed forces or civilian careers, picking up skills and material benefits before heading out on adventures. Generating Traveller characters was almost as much fun as playing the game — so maybe Traveller scratched that particular player itch in a different way.

And from a blatantly commercial standpoint, characters who "level up" can gain cool new abilities, which are explained in these cool new game supplements, which cost a cool thirty bucks each. In games without XPs, the only things players can drool over and spend money on is new equipment. In a game with XPs, they can drool over gear and character abilities, which means the publisher can sell two supplements instead of one. Note that I'm not sneering at mere commerce here. I've written some of those supplements. Especially in the 1990s and early 2000s, selling a constant stream of supplements was the only way to stay in business.

So perhaps we must accept it as a fact of life: XPs are a necessary component of roleplaying games. In anything but a one-shot scenario, you've got to give the players and characters some kind of reward. But is that a good thing? Does the endless quest for improvement drain attention away from other, equally important aspects of gaming? I'll take that issue up next time.

 

If you want to gain valuable experience by reading stories, buy my new ebook!

Convention Report: Albacon 2017

(". . . Featuring ME!")

I drove west through sleet, rain, and fog — but no snow, which was a huge relief as I was in a car without snow tires — to Albany, which looks as if someone decided to drop the 1960s capital city of a large post-colonial nation into the middle of a standard-issue Rust Belt American industrial region.

Because of my programming schedule I decided to have a substantial lunch before starting. The convention hotel, the mostly harmless Albany Airport Best Western, is on the Wolf Road commercial strip in northwestern Albany, so I could pick from just about every restaurant chain in existence, alternating with big-box stores, office parks, and nail salons. Nevertheless I managed to find a real gem: Maharaja Indian Restaurant, where I had a spicy, delicious, and gratifyingly cheap buffet lunch including a couple of dishes I've never seen before. Heartily recommended.

Then the convention!

My first program event was a critiquing panel, part of the Albacon writing workshop series. We only had one submission, a nifty little ghost story which I expect to see in print some time soon. It's a good thing there only was one story, because between the need to have the author read it aloud, and then allow six of us to bloviate on how it might be improved (summary: a couple of minor tweaks, then send it in!) there wasn't much time left for anything else.

The second event was about "Lost SF Themes" — concepts in science fiction which have more or less fallen by the wayside, either because of new scientific knowledge, social shifts, or changes in literary fashion. Science fictioneers love to pat ourselves on the back for some of our forward-looking predictions, but there are some embarassing skeletons in our closet. Psionics is the best-known one, but there's also a certain amount of embarassed throat-clearing whenever anyone brings up concepts like eugenics.

Nowadays, of course, it's a sure-fire identifying marker for the Bad Guys in a story, but there was a time when eugenics was one of the scientifical science things which would bring about a better world. Doc Smith's Kimball Kinnison was the result of a long super-scientific breeding program by the all-wise and benevolent Arisians, and Heinlein's immortal Lazarus Long came out of a secretive Victorian-era project by the Howard Foundation. Even a post-World War II work like Frank Herbert's Dune featured a hero who is the end result of a breeding program, and it's presented as at least morally neutral.

I spent the rest of Friday evening doing some socializing, first at the Ice Cream Social and then at the Art Show Reception. Albacon's not a big convention, so I think I managed to at least nod and say hi to all the other attendees. The ratio of "pros" to "fans" is probably greater than 1:1, and it's a wonderful opportunity for aspiring writers to interact with more experienced professionals with no barriers at all.

Saturday I rose early and had an enormous breakfast at Denny's. I think it was called the Self-Loathing Special or something like that. It was enough to fuel me for the rest of the day, which was good as I didn't really have time in my schedule for meals.

In mid-morning I did a reading from my current work-in-progress. I had to read from my laptop screen because (as one can see here) I didn't notice before the convention started that I would be doing a reading at all. This was the first time anyone but myself has seen or heard anything from the new book, and I was relieved to see it went over well.

Next up was the extremely fun panel "We're Off to See L. Frank Baum." I almost feel as if I need to apologize to the other panelists, except for fellow Oz obsessive Ryk E. Spoor. With two big loud Oz fans on the panel, I'm afraid the others may have been drowned out by the Ryk & Jim Show. I would happily have gone on for another hour if we had been allowed to. (I did take the opportunity to introduce a new batch of Oz enthusiasts to my theories about Agent Diggs and the unfolding secrets of Project CYCLONE.)

The bulk of the afternoon was devoted to my 7th-Edition Call of Cthulhu adventure, "The Drowned City." Net result: one character insane AND gruesomely killed by a tentacled horror, so I think we can count it as a success.

I had just enough time to dash out to my car and drop off the game bag before hurrying over to my next panel, on the Most Influential Games of All Time. Turns out I need not have rushed — the instructions to the panelists had us in the wrong room, and the correct room was still in use as the Costume Contest awards were given out. Still, we managed to start only fifteen minutes late. That was an excellent panel, and not merely due to my expert moderating. The five panelists brought an interestingly diverse array of knowledge and opinions to the table. I know I learned some things about the history of certain game concepts and mechanics.

And then . . . I left. I would have enjoyed the chance to stay longer, but I knew that a two-hour drive over the Berkshires with a chance of sleet and icy roads made leaving early the wisest decision. I definitely had fun for the twenty-four conscious hours I spent at Albacon this year, and there's a good chance I'll be there next time. Any science fiction fans within driving range of Albany should go.