Just The Caffeine Talking

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I saw The Last Jedi the weekend it came out, and I've been thinking about it and discussing it with my family (especially my son) sporadically since then. I'm not going to write a review; suffice to say that I give it a B and leave it at that. Nor am I going to reel off a long litany of plot holes and bad choices — there are hundreds of hard-working other nerds on the Internet who've been doing that for weeks.

Instead I want to ask a question, and in order to do that I must prepare the ground. The Last Jedi had some serious plot holes, mostly centering around the long chase sequence which occupies the middle third of the film and is notable for its lack of tension and the large number of "why didn't they . . . ?" questions it has spawned. Why didn't the Empire, or First Order, or whatever the guys in white armor are calling themselves these days, send ships ahead to ambush the fleeing Rebel, er, Resistance task force? Why couldn't a giant space battleship hit a fleeing cruiser when they seem to be only a mile apart? Why could small craft leave the cruiser, travel to distant planets, and return, yet the whole point of the cruiser fleeing was to reach someplace to call for help? There are others. Many others.

But my question isn't any of those. In fact it isn't about any of the specifics of The Last Jedi at all. It's about why nobody asked any of those questions before filming began. A big-budget "tentpole" movie like any of the Star Wars films is an immense undertaking. The number of people involved takes something like ten minutes just to scroll past on the screen during the end credits. Hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake — and literally billions of potential profit in the future.

I'm a science fiction writer, and my novels and short stories are five or six orders of magnitude smaller than a Star Wars film, at least in monetary terms. Yet I submit just about everything I write to the mighty Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop, so that eight or nine of my fellow SF professionals can work it over. Even if it's just a short story we spend a couple of hours tearing it apart, looking for flaws and suggesting improvements.

The people making the Star Wars movies don't seem to do that. As far back as Return of the Jedi one sensed that nobody was even trying to point out plot holes or bad ideas. When it was just George Lucas writing the prequel trilogy, one could possibly explain it as the creator's runaway ego and nobody having the authority to tell him to make changes. But now that Disney owns Lucasfilm, that shouldn't be an issue. And yet the problem remains.

I was once a tiny cog in the Star Wars apparatus. Back when West End Games had the Star Wars roleplaying game license, publishing Greg Costikyan's groundbreaking rules, I submitted several adventures to their house magazine, the Star Wars Adventure Journal. Even my pitches had to be accompanied by FIVE signed assignment-of-copyright documents, surrendering those ideas to Lucasfilm forever. One of my published adventures even made it into "canon" — a planet I created turned up in one of my son's Clone Wars comic books, which gave me a few days of Awesome Dad status when I pointed it out.

The odd thing about the Star Wars universe is how much of the worldbuilding and "continuity" are left to the tiny cog people — game designers, licensed fiction writers, toymakers, and the like. When one of the movies makes some lunatic assertion (example: "the Galactic Republic has no army") it's up to the cogs to come up with some way to explain it (answer: "the Republic was like the U.N. and relied entirely on member worlds for military forces"). The cogs are going to be working overtime to explain some of the issues in The Last Jedi.

And that leads to my question: how is this possible? How can a huge, successful company like Disney manage one of the most valuable "media properties" which has ever existed in such a slapdash way? For the price of about one minute of CGI special effects they could hire the entire membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America to "workshop" the script, long before a single nail gets hammered by a set-builder or a single concept artist puts pencil to paper. They could have a salaried "chief nerd" position dedicated to tracking continuity and maintaining the "bible" of the Star Wars universe. This has been done before: Peter Jackson hired Tolkein consultants for his Lord of the Rings film trilogy, and set designer Mark Okuda was the unofficial "Trexpert" for Star Trek: The Next Generation.

What's depressing is that it all ultimately comes down to respect. Respect for the material and respect for the audience — and the attitude toward the material directly reflects the attitude toward the audience. The viewers have shown they love that material and want more; contempt for one is contempt for both. The audience respects the material. The tiny cogs respect the material. The hundreds of people buried in the credits at the end of the film respect the material. Why can't the people whose names are at the top show the same respect? And why does Disney hire people who don't respect the Star Wars universe to oversee it?

 

For some stories which I really respect, buy my ebooks  Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!

Counting Down

Once again, it's time to link to the greatest Christmas Web site ever. I refer, of course, to the NORAD Santa Tracker. As I write this, their countdown stands at 6 hours and 41 minutes. The tracking begins at 6:00 a.m. GMT, which is when the sun is setting in New Zealand and the Pacific, and the right jolly old elf takes off.

The site has more big-business sponsors than it used to, but the underlying sweetness still shines through. One night a year the men and women of NORAD take time off from guarding against the threat of sudden war to keep the world informed of the location of Santa Claus. (Of course, someone's still on watch, even on Christmas eve.)

Random Encounters: The Bar Outside Area 51

It's a tumbledown roadhouse on a desert highway, no cute signs, no come-ons for tourists. Inside it's shabby but comfortable. The customers are mostly crewcut types with sunglasses. But the photos on the walls include shots that can't be anywhere in the Solar System. This is the bar where the people who Know The Secrets go to hang out after work.

ENCOUNTERS AT THE BAR OUTSIDE AREA 51

(As always: roll d20 when you're moving around the bar, d10 if you're seated for a long period.)

1. Roll Twice and Combine
2. Plot-advancing encounter: Someone or something related to whatever has brought the player-characters to a remote highway in Nevada.
3. Alien: It's a spindly, huge-eyed "Grey" alien in a tacky tourist cap and Hawaiian shirt, drinking strawberry daiquiris and trying to pick up humans for some "examinations." In conflict it uses its telepathic blast power.
4. Artie: The resident bore, skinny and intense. He's full of secret conspiracy theories, all of them guaranteed wrong. In actuality he's trying to find out what you know and who your masters are. He packs a small revolver in a leg holster, which everyone can see because he wears shorts.
5. Bob, the dog: He's part Golden Retriever, part everything else, and thanks to a mutation his IQ is about twice what yours is. He is curious about people, especially if they smell interesting. Other dogs are in awe of Bob.
6. "Doctor G": He's a con man selling "genuine alien artifacts," typically for 1d100 times 10 dollars (no checks), though he's more than willing to haggle (and loves to swap merchandise). Roll 1d100 for what he's selling. 1-50: useless junk, 51-80: military salvage worth a tenth of what he's charging, 81-90: actual secret Air Force or NSA cutting-edge tech, 91-95: inert alien machinery or metal, 96-00: actual working alien tech. Note that Dr. G's descriptions of what items do often have nothing to do with what they actually do.
7. Men In Black: (Actually they hire women, too.) 1d6 government agents in black suits and dark sunglasses, armed with automatic pistols and one ray gun. They're very suspicious of strangers.
8. Poltergeist: It's been haunting the place for years — a disembodied psychic presence which uses telekinesis to play puerile practical jokes on customers.
9. Power Failure: The lights and air conditioning go off for 1d6 minutes. That might provide cover to do something . . .
10. The Thing Under The Table: It's a shapeless purple blob, 1d100 lbs. in size, which glows faintly when it's eating. The staff have tried everything to kill it, but even the tiniest scrap of purple goo eventually regenerates. It tries to swallow anything smaller than it is.
11. Abandoned newspaper: It's yesterday's Las Vegas Sun, except that every news story begins with praise of the Pharaoh Nyarlathotep, who reigns over America from his palace in Baltimore. All the news is strange (except the sports results, which are exactly the same as in any other newspaper). The waitress says a trucker left it.
12. Angie: She's a lovely runaway looking for a ride, and if you look into her violet eyes you'll have to use all your willpower to resist falling in love with her. When you're alone she reverts to her true form, a large insect with a paralyzing sting who wants to lay eggs in your abdomen.
13. Bikers: 2d6 members of the Los Chupacabras motorcycle gang. They're tough, tattooed, and have alien implants giving each of them a different low-level special power. They all have knives and half have pistols, and they don't want to be bothered by anyone.
14. Bulletin Board: Mostly cards for local businesses, but there is a tattered flyer offering "Good pay for risky work" with a single tear-off phone number remaining at the bottom of the page.
15. Graffiti Table: The surface of this table is covered with names, jokes, numbers, and crude little pictures, drawn or carved by generations of diners. Reading it all gives anyone a bonus to knowledge of conspiracies or the secret history of the world.
16. Haunted Jukebox: It has a large selection of vintage rock-n'-roll and country songs, but whatever song you pick will influence what happens to you in the next 24 hours.
17. Mister H.: An incredibly old and frail-looking man, he insists on eating with new, still-wrapped utensils, and always has steak and green peas. He knows a lot about secret aerospace projects and old Hollywood secrets, and tips the waitress with a new hundred-dollar bill.
18. Party Room: Right now it's hosting 2d6 Reptilian aliens in human disguise, drinking ridiculous "tropical" cocktails and dining on plates of live rabbits. Anyone who isn't on the bar staff is assumed to be the "special main course" they're waiting for.
19. Polybius Game: A beat-up old coin-operated video game which implants a hypnotic command in anyone who plays it for more than 10 minutes.
20. Tracks/aftermath: Reroll to see what you find traces of.

SITUATIONS IN THE BAR OUTSIDE AREA 51

(Roll 1d6 to determine the situation, then roll on the table above to identify who is involved.)

1. A desires B
2. A wants to capture B
3. A wants B dead
4. A wants to go somewhere
5. A wants to solve a mystery
6. A wants X

For more tales of aliens and shady characters, buy my ebooks:  Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!

Pulp Trek!

I've noticed that discussions of Star Trek — especially as it enters its second half-century — focus on its "cerebral" nature, and how it addressed social problems and moral dilemmas related to real-world politics. That may well be true, but I think there's an even more important component of Star Trek's DNA which goes unrecognized.

I refer, of course, to pulp science fiction.

"Pulp?" you say. "I thought Star Wars was the heir to the pulp tradition, while Star Trek embodied science fiction's more cerebral side!"

Not so.

But let's define some terms. What do we mean by pulp science fiction, anyway? Obviously, stuff published in the pulps, mostly before World War II. A good description comes from this Web site (www.vintagelibrary.com): "Bigger-than-life heroes, pretty girls, exotic places, strange and mysterious villains all stalked the pages of the many issues available to the general public on the magazine stands."

Or, to put it more simply: stuff like what Doc Smith wrote.

So let's actually take a look at Star Trek — the original Star Trek, which ran from 1966 to 1969 on NBC. I can't summarize the whole series here, but let's look at the first twenty episodes, when the show had a real budget. In order, they are:

"The Man Trap" — shapeshifting alien salt vampire pretends to be Dr. McCoy's old girlfriend and starts killing the crew of the Enterprise. The creature is the last of its kind, but can't restrain its predatory instincts. Except for the shapeshifting, this is very similar to A.E. Van Vogt's "Black Destroyer," a classic pulp story.

"Charlie X" — kid orphaned on a distant world has been given godlike powers by super-advanced aliens. When he boards the Enterprise there's no one to restrain him, and his absolute power begins to corrupt him. This one is not really pulpy, because Charlie isn't defeated by a clever scientific superweapon or a good right cross to the jaw.

"Where No Man Has Gone Before" — an Enterprise crewman's psychic abilities are awakened by an accident, and, just like last week, his absolute power begins to corrupt him. This one is pulp because the evil supermind guy is defeated by a combination of a battle with a heroic supermind and a blast from a nifty-looking ray gun rifle.

"The Naked Time" — a virus makes everyone on the Enterprise drunk. Also: handwavium time travel. This one is pure pulp.

"The Enemy Within" — transporter accident splits Kirk into Good and Evil versions. This might have been a pulp story except that I suspect most editors would have asked how the hell it's supposed to work.

"Mudd's Women" — shady character trafficks women to space miners using a drug to make them more desireable. This is exactly the sort of racket the Lensmen would have been smashing. Full pulp.

"What Are Little Girls Made Of" — archaeologists on a remote planet, led by Nurse Chapel's old boyfriend find a way to make robot duplicates of people. This is straight out of Doc Savage.

"Miri" — a planet just like Earth was ravaged by a plague which kills only adults. This one, I admit, isn't a pulp story at all.

"Dagger of the Mind" — the Enterprise visits a planet where a power-mad scientist has turned a mental-therapy system into a sinister mind-control device. The villain is thwarted by a scrappy dame. Full pulp!

"The Corbomite Maneuver" — the Enterprise encounters an overwhelmingly powerful alien ship, overcomes it via clever ruses, and discovers it was all just a test. I'd say this is less like Pulp era science fiction and more like a story from the 1950s Campbell age.

"The Menagerie, parts 1 and 2" — two-parter recycling the original pilot episode about the Enterprise encountering a world of superminds with powers of illusion. This one is pure pulp — a fight with giant space Cossacks, green-skinned dancing girls, an ancient world of decadent superminds, and Captain Pike triumphs via steely will, cleverness, and the help of not one but two scrappy dames.

"The Conscience of the King" — the Enterprise transports an acting troupe which may contain Hitler. Not pulp. Arguably not even science fiction, as you could tell the same story aboard a steamer in the 1950s.

"Balance of Terror" — a really swell destroyer-vs.-submarine story in space. Not especially pulp, either.

"Shore Leave" — the crew visit a planet where things they imagine start coming to life. They discover it's an ancient alien amusement park which can read minds. I can imagine this one as a pulp-era story, probably played for comedy with an irascible captain getting more and more furious with his crew's "crazy" reports from the planet.

"The Galileo Seven" — A shuttle is down on a world with big furry hostile natives, and Spock has to come up with a clever improvisation to get the crew rescued. This isn't a pulp story, it's almost a perfect Campbell-era science-problem story.

"The Squire of Gothos" — the Enterprise encounters a whimsical godlike being who messes with the crew until his parents show up. Not really pulp.

"Arena" — based on an actual science fiction story by Fredric Brown, written in 1944. Neither the Brown story nor the Trek episode is especially pulpy, despite the premise of two warriors fighting to determine the outcome of a war between their civilizations. Brown's story is actually a science-puzzle story, while the Trek story tops that with a "take a third option" resolution.

"Tomorrow is Yesterday" — a straightforward time travel story about the Enterprise visiting 1960s Earth by accident, and the crew's efforts to avoid causing any paradoxes until they get home again. Not particularly pulpy.

"Court Martial" — a legal drama and/or murder mystery episode, hinging on the first depiction of computer "hacking" I'm aware of. Not pulp.

So, of the first twenty Star Trek episodes, we've got ten pulpy episodes. A solid 50 percent pulp. Not bad for 1966, a generation after the wartime paper shortages killed off the pulp magazines.

Now, let's contrast Star Trek's first season with that year's written SF: the 1967 Hugo nominees. There were 23 nominees for Best Novel, Best Novelette, and Best Short Story that year, including The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, by Robert Heinlein; Babel-17, by Samuel R. Delany; Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes; "The Last Castle," by Jack Vance; and "Neutron Star," by Larry Niven. A really great year to be reading science fiction.

Of those 23 stories and novels, I have read or could find summaries of 21. Only 2 (The Witches of Karres, by James H. Schmitz and "The Last Castle," by Jack Vance) could be seen as pulpish in tone. The rest are Campbellian or New Wave, or unclassifiables like the works of Thomas Burnett Swann.

So the pulp content of written SF in 1966 was about 10 percent. In other words, Star Trek was five times more pulpy than the stories being published in science fiction magazines and books at the same time.

I point this out because there's a curious idea going around that stories (or films, or TV episodes) cannot have the fun of pulp science fiction without sacrificing the rigor of Campbellian hard SF or the greater attention to character which came with the New Wave.

A stool needs at least three legs to stand. Science fiction stories, in whatever medium, need all three of those elements. Without scientific rigor they're not science fiction. Without pulp's tradition of romance and adventure, they're not interesting. And without attention to character, nobody cares enough to finish the story.

So instead of drawing ever-smaller boundaries around what's real and proper SF, let's follow Gene Roddenberry's model and draw a really big circle, encompassing adventure, science, and literary quality. Then we can go where no man has gone before.  

 

For more tales of places where no man has gone before, buy my ebooks:  Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!

Random Encounters: The Cloud Island

Cloud Island is a mile-wide mass of solid cloud, shaped rather like an egg. It was settled long ago and is currently ruled by a Cloud Giant sorcerer. The island serves as a free port and marketplace for ships and creatures that sail the sky or venture through the ether.

ENCOUNTERS ON THE CLOUD ISLAND

(Roll 1d20 if the characters are moving about the island, 1d10 if they are stationary.)

1. Roll Twice and Combine
2. Plot-advancing encounter: The adventurers meet someone or something connected with whatever reason has brought them to the Cloud Island.
3. Fungi From Yuggoth: 1d4 aliens like winged crustaceans, with the frost of interplanetary space still thawing on their wings. They are armed with ray-projectors and have come to trade for rare minerals, human brains, and arcane secrets.
4. Gremlins: 1d4 gremlins have decided to bedevil the player characters with sabotage and mischief.
5. Invisible Stalker: This unseen horror was conjured up by a wizard to assassinate a particular person, but the magician's instructions were unclear and he died soon after. The Stalker remains bound by the dead wizard's spells, has long ago become completely insane. It stalks the island, selecting victims according to some mysterious criteria.
6. Mischievous Sylphs: 1d6 air elementals who mean no serious harm but delight in annoying and taunting "groundlings."
7. Pterosaur Pirates: 1d8 goblins with trained Pterosaur mounts, armed with crossbows and grappling-hooks. They normally raid towns and ships on the surface, but if nobody's looking they might snatch something here on the cloud island.
8. Sky Dwarves: A group of 1d6 Sky Dwarves, who live within cloud islands and build sky ships which seldom touch the ground. They are lawful merchant sky sailors, armed with shortswords. They may have exotic items to trade.
9. Storm! The island has floated into a storm system, and gets pelted with hail and lashed by 100-mph winds for 1d4 hours.
10. Winged Apes: 1d6 semi-intelligent creatures like chimpanzees with huge bat wings. They lair in caves on the underside of the island, and fly up to snatch food and loot. They are armed with spears and crude swords.
11. Electric Spider: A giant spider with an electricity-generating organ has spun its web across the path. Anyone touching the web gets a powerful shock and must resist paralysis.
12. Ether Tower: Within this enchanted tower there is no air, no gravity, no warmth. It is home to visiting space-dwellers who find it comfortable.
13. Giant Eagles: 1d4 great golden eagles have nested here on the cloud island. They protect their nests fiercely but have a tremendous amount of knowledge to share about the world and the sky.
14. Ki-Rin: A noble aerial unicorn of East Asian legend, this semi-divine beast will help those in danger.
15. Lightning Deposit: A section of the island 100 yards across has developed a powerful electrical charge. Anyone entering gets hit by 1d4 lightning bolts per round.
16. Lightning-Peddler: A grizzled old sky-sailor selling jars of lightning, sealed bags of wind, and bottles of distilled aurorae from a small handcart. Note that if the cart overturns his wares might spill . . .
17. Novice Thief: A young lad who got up to the island somehow and is determined to slay its giant ruler.
18. Ruined Observatory: Savants built this tower to study the sky and the atmosphere, but their group dissolved and the building is abandoned. It may hold valuable information, and possibly dangerous items.
19. Yeth Hounds: 1d4 demonic hounds of the Wild Hunt, living as feral scavengers on the Cloud Island. If they catch you alone, you're prey.
20. Tracks/aftermath (reroll to see what you find traces of)

SITUATIONS ON THE CLOUD ISLAND

(Roll 1d6 to determine the situation, then roll on the table above to identify the people or creatures involved.)

1. A desires B
2. A wants to capture B
3. A wants B dead
4. A wants to go somewhere
5. A wants to solve a mystery
6. A wants X

For more tales of places beyond the sky or weird islands, buy my ebooks:  Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!

 

Retro-Review: The 8th Annual of Year's Best SF (Part 4)

We're on the final stretch now in our read-through of Judith Merril's 8th Annual of the Year's Best SF, covering stories published in 1962.

The 26th story in the collection is Zenna Henderson's "Subcommittee," about the budding friendship between a human child and a young alien while the adults are conducting a tense peace conference. Yes, a mutually genocidal war ends because of the Power of Friendship. But it's well-told — and bonus points for actually taking place beyond the Solar System. Three stars.

Next is "The Piebald Hippogriff," by Karen Anderson, a very slight fantasy — really more sketch than story — but it's very charming and sweet. The best comparison I can think of is if Ray Bradbury wrote a story set in a Lord Dunsany world. Four stars.

"Home From the Shore," by Gordon Dickson, is a fitting capstone for the fiction content of the book. It's part of Dickson's novel The Space Swimmers. The story focuses on a conflict between the ocean-dwelling Sea People and the suspicious government of the land-dwelling humans. Even after re-reading I can't quite tell if Dickson's ocean-dwellers are genetically engineered for their environment or if he thinks they would evolve new traits in only three or four generations, but that's a minor quibble. The story itself is melancholy, with strong echoes of Kipling. Four stars.

We're not quite done. The book also has a wrapup of short science fiction in 1962 by Judith Merril which is mostly taken up with her score-settling with Time Magazine's critic over a review of the previous Year's Best collection. The Time critic had the same problem with the 7th Annual that I have with the 8th, apparently: not enough actual science fiction in it.

And finally there's an essay by Anthony Boucher about science fiction novels of 1962 — and it certainly was a good year, if only because it saw the publication of The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick, Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper, and Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time.

The average score for the stories is just over three stars, so that will suffice for the whole book.

As I mentioned above, my own opinion of The 8th Annual of the Year's Best SF is rather like that of the Time reviewer Ms. Merril spends so much time taking to task. There are 28 stories in this book. Eleven of them are explicitly fantasies, and another three borderline cases (they wear science fiction hats, but are fantasies or parables). That's half the book.

There's also the fact that these stories were written in a year after Kennedy set the goal of landing a man on the Moon, the year of the first communication satellite, two Vostok and three Mercury missions, with Soyuz and Gemini space craft under construction. And yet in this book only seven stories actually involve space travel — and three of those are the allegedly whimsical Martian essays by Reynold, Pohl, and Russell. The rest are resolutely Earthbound.

I can't escape the suspicion that Ms. Merril was trying to show that science fiction wasn't "gee whiz outer space kid stuff" anymore. Hence the focus on stories from slick markets (The Saturday Evening Post, Playboy, the New York Times) instead of the grubby confines of the genre magazines. That also explains the emphasis on political parables and fantasies; college English teachers love that stuff.

Here are some stories from 1962 which didn't make it into the Year's Best:

"The Dragon Masters," by Jack Vance (Hugo winner)

"When You Care, When You Love," by Theodore Sturgeon (Hugo nominee)

"The Ballad of Lost C'Mell," by Cordwainer Smith

"The Shining Ones," by Arthur C. Clarke

"Passion Play," by Roger Zelazny

All of them are science fiction, and all of them are better than anything in this collection.

 

For more high-quality SF, buy my ebooks:  Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!

Random Encounters: Remote Frontier Starport

Today's Random Encounter Table takes us to a distant star system at the edge of explored space. The spaceport can be either an orbital station or an outpost on the surface of a planet. Because this is the frontier, equipment is patched-together and law enforcement is lax and ad-hoc. 

Use this table to generate roleplaying adventures, story hooks, or excuses for being late tomorrow morning.

ENCOUNTERS AT A REMOTE FRONTIER STARPORT

(As always, roll d20 when moving, d10 when stationary)

1. Roll Twice and Combine
2. Plot-advancing encounter: A person or thing related to the reason the player-characters have come to this remote frontier starport.
3. Alien: Nobody knows where it's from or can understand what it wants, but it's obviously desperate. It has amazing technology and unknown powers. Will you help?
4. Animal breakout! Someone left the gate of the quarantine pens unlocked and now 2d6 animals are loose in the starport. Some are valuable, some are dangerous, and all might be carrying diseases or parasites which could ravage the local ecosystem.
5. Bounty Hunter: A tough free-lance lawman has caught up with the player-characters. Either he's after them for something they've actually done, or he's got the wrong suspects but is determined to bring them in anyway.
6. Merchant: She's got a valuable cargo which needs to get off-planet at once — but her ship's down for repairs for at least a week.
7. Smuggler: She's also trying to move some valuable merchandise off the planet, but this has to be done without anybody finding out. The merchandise is definitely illegal, and may be dangerous or morally horrifying.
8. Space Force Officer: He just finished up his tour of duty and is looking for people to help him take down a slave-trader who has powerful allies in the government.
9. Storm! Intense weather shuts down the port for 1d6 hours.
10. Wealthy Traveler: She's obviously rich and apparently completely scatterbrained. She needs a little help and will reward the player characters handsomely. Actually it's a con game and once she gets their money (or their ship, or their identity chips) she vanishes completely.
11. Brawl! A band of 2d6 space pirates have squared off against 2d6 Star Force crewmen. The port's lone security officer isn't getting involved. Pick a side and wade in — or take advantage of the distraction.
12. Broken-Down Spaceman: He's too old and sick to fly in space, and depends on charity to survive. But he knows a few things nobody else does: lost ships, secrets, exotic worlds. Some might even be true.
13. Contamination! There's been a leak — could be radiation, or toxic chemicals, or biological material — and this whole section of the starport must be sealed off until it's cleaned up.
14. Courier: She's got a vital message which needs to reach someone, but there are enemies hunting her. The player-characters have to take the MacGuffin (they may not be aware of it).
15. Pirate Hangout: This bar's been taken over by 2d6 space pirates. Merchants or scouts get mocked, but Star Force crews are going to get a fight.
16. Scientist: He's recruiting for an expedition to study something weird in a dangerous place. Alien ruins, or deadly creatures, or perhaps an isolated tribe with bizarre customs. The pay is adequate. What could go wrong?
17. Scout: She just got back from the outer frontier and she's acting kind of odd. It might have something to do with the alien parasite that's slowly consuming her from the inside.
18. Vermin Lair: A nest of 2d6 mutant spider-rats. They're clever, capable of setting crude traps (and avoiding traps set for them). They steal things, possibly valuable or dangerous items. They fight viciously when cornered.
19. Wreck: A ship which is too beat-up to sell. Might contain useful salvage — or something hidden.
20. Tracks/aftermath (reroll)

SITUATIONS

(Roll 1d6 to generate a situation, then consult the table above to see who is involved.)

1. A desires B
2. A wants to capture B
3. A wants B dead
4. A wants to go somewhere
5. A wants to solve a mystery
6. A wants X

For more bizarre encounters with shady characters in remote locations, buy my ebooks:  Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!

Retro-Review: The 8th Annual of the Year's Best SF (Part 3)

Picking up where we left off last time, at the halfway mark.

"MS. Found in a Bus" by Russell Baker, is a bit of alleged political humor from the New York Times. Baker was a Times columnist from 1962 to 1998. This very short piece is (I think) a satire of espionage thrillers and science fiction in general. (I say "I think" because it might be making fun of some long-forgotten incident of 1962, but if so the satire is so recondite I can't figure it out.) I have to say that including a piece so blatantly contemptuous of science fiction in a collection of the year's best science fiction is a startling bit of desperate status-seeking by the editors. One star.

"The Insane Ones" by J.G. Ballard is an interesting meditation on sanity and freedom. It's set in a near(ish) future where all forms of psychological manipulation, from psychotherapy to advertising, have been banned. This means there is a "right to insanity" and psychiatrists have to practice in secret. Somehow the society is also tyrannical, though it's hard to square that with the premise. Ballard spends a fair amount of effort trying to warn the reader about the dangers of this highly improbable future, which I think weakens the story quite a bit. It would have been better to play it absolutely straight and see what kind of a world results. Two stars.

The next story is "Leprechaun" by William Sambrot, who was a fairly prolific writer in the 1950s and early 1960s. As the title suggests, this is an Irish story, but not a fantasy. The titular leprechaun is (spoiler alert!) a little green man from space. And that's pretty much the whole story right there. Two stars.

"Change of Heart" by George Whitley inadvertently illustrates a huge change in attitudes between 1962 and 2017 — or even 1972. It's a sea story about mutant superintelligent underwater creatures hostile to man. Sounds pretty scary, right? Except the creatures in question are dolphins and whales. Just a few years after this story saw print, they became the mascots of the nascent environmental movement, and one of that movement's first great victories was the ban on commercial whaling. So an "evil whales" tale is jarring to modern sensibilities. It's not a bad story, though; I'm pretty sure Mr. Whitley must have spent some time at sea. Three stars.

"Angela's Satyr," by Brian Cleeve, is a comic fantasy about a Sicilian girl who falls in love with a satyr (and he with her). But when they try to get a local witch to transform him into a human, it goes awry. For a story about a satyr it's surprisingly non-bawdy — though Mr. Cleeve has a shrewd and unsentimental attitude about men and women. Three stars.

"Puppet Show" by Fredric Brown is about a weird-looking extraterrestrial envoy who comes to Earth in a tiny Western border town, on a mission to test humans for xenophobia before establishing formal contact. It's short and entertaining, though not particularly deep. Playboy was running a lot of SF in 1962, apparently. Three stars.

"Hang Head, Vandal!" is by Mark Clifton, and appeared in Amazing Stories. It's set on Mars, which makes it exactly the second story in this anthology which doesn't take place on more-or-less contemporary Earth. (So far.) It's about a project to conduct some very risky nuclear-power research on Mars, which accidentally sets off a slow-motion chain reaction, destroying the planet. Which turns out to be inhabited. (Anybody out there NOT GETTING THE MESSAGE?) Everybody is sad. One star.

Next up is an odd tryptich of essays about Mars. The first is "Earthlings, Go Home!" by Mack Reynolds. It's a comic take on Mars and Martians which originally appeared in Rogue magazine (a kind of Playboy-lite). Two stars, and that's being generous.

The second is "The Martian Star-Gazers" by Frederick Pohl, a whimsical look at what Martian astronomy would be like. (Not very different from Terrestrial, it turns out, but with funny names.) Two stars.

And finally we have "Planetary Effulgence" by no less than Bertrand Russell. It's a rather leaden satire about (hold your breaths, everybody!) the dangers of war, and how we should all just get along. Thanks for clearing that up for us. One star.

The last one I'm going to look at this time is "Deadly Game" by Edward Wellen. It's an odd and creepy little story about a game warden who devises a unique way to protect the animals in his assigned territory, by selective breeding for intelligence so they can take care of themselves. Three stars.

Next time I'll finish the book and provide a little round-up of the contents. In the meantime, buy my ebooks!