Just The Caffeine Talking

Lovecraft and Claptrap

This past weekend I attended (as a humble paying member) NecronomiCon 2019 in Providence, Rhode Island. If you know anything about horror fiction or games you can probably guess that NecronomiCon is a convention focused on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, the father of modern horror. I had a great time and plan to go back for the next iteration in 2021.

In connection with the con I decided to re-read Lovecraft's famous essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." It's a good comprehensive survey of horror fiction up to HPL's time, with a fascinating introduction laying out his theory of what horror (or as he calls it, "weird fiction") should be.

As I was reading it, something struck me. Lovecraft knew a hell of a lot about horror fiction, and his analysis of it was quite thorough and profound. But when he touched on other subjects, I started to realize that he wasn't as erudite as his scholarly fictional characters — and probably not as erudite as he thought he was.

H.P. Lovecraft was mostly self-educated. He read widely and exhaustively. He really did know a lot.

BUT . . .

He had the problem common to many autodidacts: without any formal teaching, it's very hard to tell serious scholarship from bogus. So Howard evidently read, and uncritically swallowed, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race. If you're hoping it's a "Shadow Out of Time" novelization, I'm sorry to disappoint you: it was a work of racist pseudoscience popular in the 1920s. It even gets a shout-out in The Great Gatsby, of all places. (F. Scott Fitzgerald is using it ironically, though: his vapid, decadent character Tom Buchanan is worried about the decline of the Nordic peoples.)

In "Supernatural Horror in Literature" Lovecraft refers to the grimoire "The Key of Solomon" as some immemorially ancient text, but by the 1920s serious medievalists knew it was no older than the 14th Century. He also makes reference to Margaret Murray's Witch-Cult theory as fact, though it was always controversial. He believed Charles Fort's accounts of paranormal events, even though (somewhat sadly) Fort's credibility suffers as soon as you start looking at the sources he cites. His views of the Middle Ages are the standard erroneous 19th-Century mix of Enlightenment anti-Catholicism and Victorian self-congratulation. And anyone who took high-school geometry can recognize that one of his favorite shuddersome adjectives, "Non-Euclidean," isn't quite as sanity-blastingly unnatural as he seems to think.

This is all quite ironic because of course HPL considered himself a great skeptic and materialist, and planned (unsuccessfully, alas) to write a series of "debunking" works with none other than Houdini himself!

Now, I'm not just making fun of a dead man's mistakes. As I mentioned, I think Lovecraft's self-education suffered from a lack of guidance. The only reason I can spot his errors is that I did have the benefit of many very good teachers, both in high school and in college. Without that advantage, he wound up siezing on authoritative-sounding works which were nevertheless wrong.

This is not a problem confined to people named Lovecraft in the early 20th Century. It is a HUGE problem today. We all probably know at least one person who has just read the One Book That Explains Everything. In past decades that book was usually either something by Noam Chomsky or something by Ayn Rand. More recent examples are left as an exercise for the reader.

There is a difference between ordinary "punditry" and the One Book That Explains Everything. It's hard to pin down precisely, but I think a key feature is that pundits — be they Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow — make no secret that they are expressing their own opinions. They are making a case, attempting to persuade. Whereas the authors of the OBTEE genre simply assertthings as true, in a very authoritative way, with just enough evidence that only a real expert can spot the flaws.

This is where it gets good. I propose that not only did Lovecraft absorb some intellectual claptrap from writers like Grant and Murray, I think he also (perhaps unconsciously) learned from them how to convincingly put across his own made-up lore in the same way.

He's got all the tropes of bogus nonfiction in his fiction: the casual allusions to things as true (like the existence of "pre-human civilizations" or lost continents), the appeal to bogus authority (e.g. the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred himself), selective use of quotations (Lovecraft mixes real occult bits with made-up lore of his own and makes extensive use of fictional newspaper clippings), and specific-sounding but vague details (we get directions to both Dunwich and Innsmouth, but you can't quite find them).

These are hugely effective ways to sell the reader on your story's background details in fiction (or in games). One reason we're still reading Lovecraft in a new century is the extremely convincing way he plants his fantastic horrors in a base of reality. Do likewise, and people may be organizing conventions in your honor in 2119.

A Matter of Principle

Waldo's momentum is 34,974 kilogram-meters per second.

Now you'll never find him.

Unleash The Wild Hunt!

No, not the one with mythical hounds and/or Celtic deities crossing the sky on dark nights. The one with University of Chicago students taking a break from being obsessive overachievers in order to overachieve obsessively. Here's this year's list. Can you get all these things before noon Sunday?

 

And if you haven't got the time or energy for that, you could always read my book.

Be Careful What You Wish For

It's an old lesson, but one we must re-learn every now and then.

Recently I began to suffer from "gamemaster withdrawal" after half a year or so without running any roleplaying campaigns. I was bursting with ideas for games, so finally I sent out a call for interested players, and drew up a "prospectus" of games I'd like to run. The idea was that the players could vote on which campaign appealed to them.

I kept it simple. The prospectus had six campaigns on it:

• "Unknown Stars" — a classic Traveller game of mercantile exploration in a newly-reopened subsector,
• "Beyond Tomorrow" — a D20-based "Gamma World"-style campaign of space voyagers returning to a devastated far-future Earth,
• "Against All Flags" — a more-or-less straight historical pirate game set in 1714,
• "SHIELD Stories" — a game of doughty SHIELD agents in a world of superheroes (essentially my version of the Agents of SHIELD TV show),
• "Lost Decade" — a Call of Cthulhu campaign about characters who have all just recovered from amnesia and must find out what they were doing over the past ten years, and
• "A Billion Worlds" — I kind of just threw this one in on a whim, a campaign using a fictional far-future hard SF setting I've been developing for a fiction project.

Most of them were pretty low-effort. The simplest would be the pirate game, since my own knowledge of the world in 1714 is good enough to let them just sail around and bump into people.

The SHIELD campaign was almost as easy, especially since I intended to let my players occasionally take the roles of the mysterious "Steering Committee" setting objectives and priorities for the agency's operations. Their decisions would determine what kind of missions Col. Fury would hand out to their agent characters. All I needed was access to a couple of Marvel Comics fan wiki sites, and forty years of reading comic books.

The Traveller campaign and "Beyond Tomorrow" needed a little more preparation, but they were confined to fairly limited areas so I could generate some worlds or places for the party to explore, and expand only as needed.

The Call of Cthulhu game needed a bit more preparation, but I had not only a lot of existing support material for the game, but also H.P. Lovecraft's entire corpus to steal from.

So, no matter what game my players picked, I could run it without a lot of effort. Easy-peasy.

Guess which one came out first in the vote? That's right — my unlikely dark horse candidate, "A Billion Worlds." For that one I have to come up with dozens of intelligent species and subspecies inhabiting a billion artificial habitats, asteroids, terraformed moons, and planets, with eight thousand years of history to invent.

Now, fortunately, I have to do most of that anyway for the new novel I'm working on. So the roleplaying game and the science fiction project can borrow from each other.

Maybe this is for the best, really. Low-effort campaigns don't test my powers at all. The Billion Worlds won't be easy, but I doubt I'll get bored with it.

Boskone 2019

This Friday and Saturday I'll be appearing at the venerable Boskone science fiction convention, at the swanky Westin Waterfront hotel in Boston. Here's my schedule if you want to join in.

Friday, February 15, 4:00 p.m.: The Most Alien Aliens

A panel discussion about creating aliens and what our depictions of them say about ourselves. With me, Stephen Kelner, Jeffrey Carver, Laurence Brothers, and Karl Schroeder.

Friday, February 15, 7:00 p.m.: Game Editing

A discussion of how editing works in different kinds of games, and why it's important. Featuring me, Carlos Hernandez, Melanie Meadors, and M.C. DeMarco.

Saturday, February 16, 10:00 a.m.: Classic Dungeons & Dragons

Join me for a very old-school Basic D&D game. Characters will be provided. This session is only one hour, so be prepared to think fast!

Saturday, February 16, noon: Reading

I'll be reading from Arkad's World and taking any questions my listeners might have.

Saturday, February 16, 4:00 p.m.: Signing

I'll be at the signing table with Dan Kimmel, Bracken MacLeod, and Karl Schroeder. I'll sign whatever you bring me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pop Culture: Hold On to Your Hats!

As cultures develop a large and relatively affluent middle class, they develop what we call "pop culture." The upper class have "high culture" more or less by definition, and the lower class don't have the leisure time or spare wealth to create culture at all.

Tom Wolfe chronicled this in post-WWII America, as people got rich enough to indulge subcultures like custom cars, surfing, and stock car racing. It's a damned shame Mr. Wolfe never got around to examining some other products of that boom: science fiction, comics, and (a bit later) roleplaying games.

It happened elsewhere, too. As Japan became the world's second-biggest economy, Japanese pop culture items like anime, manga, J-pop girl groups, and giant monsters became global phenomena rivaling America's. The same happened for Korea in the 1990s.

Well, in the past twenty years China has acquired a middle class of 340 million people. Three hundred million in Africa are now urban and middle class. A quarter of a billion in India. So the number of pop-culture "consumers" — and the number of pop-culture creators — has more than tripled worldwide.

This means that American pop culture and European pop culture and Japanese pop culture will soon be joined by equally huge and influential Chinese, Indian, and African creations. Not just new comic books and movies, but new genres. The as-yet-uncreated equivalents of roleplaying games or custom vans.

And not a moment too soon. As anyone paying attention to Hollywood will attest, American media are in a creative slump right now. There are a heck of a lot of remakes, reboots, sequels, and "reimaginings" going on. Not to mention an increasingly frenetic mining of older "properties" for material. A 69-page picture book by Dr. Seuss has spawned two feature-length films, when it originally required some creative padding by Chuck Jones just to make it into a half-hour cartoon.

I can't predict when, but I'm willing to bet that in the next few years an Indian "Bollywood" or Nigerian "Nollywood" film will be a global breakout hit, as big as Star Wars or Harry Potter. Some Latin American or Chinese children's entertainment will be picked up as cheap filler content by global media companies and turn into a huge fad to rival Pokemon.  

For a writer, this is an . . . interesting time. On one hand, translation rights on books now bring in almost as much as the English-language royalties. The downside is that I'm already competing with Cixin Liu for readers in both America and China, and I'm certain he will be followed by a bigger cohort of new talent. And that's just within written science fiction. I'm also competing with other media.

I think one reason science fiction magazines have been having a rocky time in the past few decades is partly due to the sheer amount and variety of other options. Even if you only like science fiction, you still can choose among Japanese anime, Japanese and European comics, Anglophone novels, American films, and European computer games to satisfy your scientifictional craving. That landscape is only going to expand.

It's going to be quite a ride. Let's see what the new Global Nerds can do.

Mr. President, We May Be Looking . . .

. . . at a wargames GAP! Apparently the Pentagon needs to find replacements for the generation of beardy wargame grognards who are starting to fail their final saving rolls. Here's an article about the problem from War on the Rocks.  

Dragon Awards!

Congratulations to this year's Dragon Award winners:

Best Science Fiction Novel: Artemis by Andy Weir.

Best Fantasy Novel: Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson.

Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi.

Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel: A Call to Vengeance by David Weber, Timothy Zahn, and Thomas Pope.

Best Alternate History Novel: Uncharted by Kevin J. Anderson and Sarah A. Hoyt.

Best Media Tie-In Novel: Leia: Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray.

Best Horror Novel: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King.

Best Comic Book: Mighty Thor by Jason Aaron and James Harren, Marvel Comics.

Best Graphic Novel: Brandon Sanderson’s White Sand Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, and Julius M. Gopez, Dynamite Entertainment.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series: Game of Thrones, HBO.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie: Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy PC/Console Game: Middle-earth: Shadow of War by Monolith Productions.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Mobile Game: Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery by Jam City.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Board Game: Red Dragon Inn 6: Villains by Slugfest Games.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Miniatures/Collectible Card/Role-Playing Game: Magic: The Gathering Unstable by Wizards of the Coast.

Island of Lost Games: A Footprint in the Sand!

Exciting news about one of the first titles I covered in the "Island of Lost Games" series — John Hill, one of the original Droids gaming group, ran across my post and sent this reply:

I enjoyed your recent post about the game "Droids", though the circumstances that led me to discover it leave much to be desired.  The gentleman that is listed in the "Edited by..." credit of the Droid book, Derek Stanovsky, passed away unexpectedly on Nov. 1, at the age of 54.  I was trying to find leads to Neil Moore to inform him of Derek's passing.  Sadly, I, and several others that had some involvement with Droids failed to find any leads to Mr. Moore.

I find it delightful that there is a conversation and interest in this game after all these years.  And to answer the question at the end of your article, I have indeed played the game.  Sadly, Droids was developed at a time that I was very busy with my engineering degree, so I didn't get to play it extensively, but I definitely recall playing a few sessions with Neil as Game Master.

I'm attaching a photo you may find amusing.  Originally, we we're going to use photos of droid models instead of the illustrations.  I took apart several of my various tank and spaceship models and built some Droids.  Everyone loved the model, but the pictures left a lot to be desired.  If only we'd had the image manipulation stuff available now, I'm sure we could have made it work.

Thanks again for the kind words about the game.

Here's the photo of Mr. Hill's Droid model.

It's wonderful to hear from someone with a connection to the game. If anyone knows where to find Neil Moore, drop me a line and I'll forward the information to Mr. Hill.

 

For more stories about relics of the past and adventures in the future, buy my ebooks: Outlaws and Aliens, and Monster Island Tales!

Random Encounters: Steampunk Paris

I'm starting a new feature of the 'blog this week: your Weekly Random Encounters. Each week I'm going to post a new random encounter table for a particular setting. Use these for roleplaying games, story prompts, or as a kind of I Ching to predict your week. I'm also appending the Situation generator to each entry.

Our first Random Encounter Table is for Steampunk Paris, where the powers of science have transformed the city into a Vernean fantasy — or nightmare.

ENCOUNTERS IN STEAMPUNK PARIS

(roll 1d10 if the party remain in one place, 1d20 if they are moving through the city)

1. Roll Twice and Combine.
2. Plot-advancing encounter: Something or someone connected with the reason the party have come to Paris in the first place.
3. Enthusiastic Students: Claude and Mimi Ardan, students at the Sorbonne Institut des Études Extraordinaires. They are naive and helpful young mad scientists in training.
4. Gendarmes: 1d6 Paris policemen, equipped with flame-resistant cloaks and electric truncheons. They are either on regular patrol, looking for the adventurers, or responding to a call about a disturbance.
5. Giant Sewer Rats: 2d6 rats as big as Jack Russell terriers with near-human intelligence. They are stealing food, but might pick up anything small and shiny.
6. Luddite: Henri Lenoir, anti-technology terrorist armed with handmade black-powder bombs and a sharp rapier.
7. Murderous Ape: A brain-augmented Orang-outang, driven mad by surgery and armed with a straight razor. It gets around the city by rooftops and trees.
8. Robbery: 2d6 bandits on steam unicycles pull off a daring heist. They are armed with gas and smoke grenades.
9. Runaway Automaton: A mechanical man whose regulation machinery has broken. It is hostile to everyone.
10. Weather: A heavy downpour lasting 1d4 hours.
11. Abandoned Factory: This giant automated furniture plant shut down after a financial scandal. The building holds rats, pigeons, dangerous machinery, and a few street urchins.
12. Aristocratic Troublemakers: 2d6 young dandies armed with sword-canes and pocket derringers, drunk on absinthe and pineal extract, looking for amusement and/or trouble.
13. Cycle Race: There are 1d100 speeding bicyclists and a dense crowd of cheering onlookers between the player-characters and their destination.
14. Fille de Joie: Alluring young woman who is fronting for a gang of 1d8 organ-harvesters. They want a good healthy spleen.
15. Fire!: A building on fire. There are people trapped in the upper stories and the flames threaten to spread to neighboring structures. The Fire Brigade may not arrive in time!
16. Low Dive: A basement tavern catering to crooks and science-spawned mutants. Upper-class types, scientists, or detectives get a very unfriendly reception.
17. Mimes!: They appear to be street performers doing the classic "invisible box" routine. Actually they really have been trapped inside forcefield bubbles for days and are getting desperate.
18. Street Market: The next couple of blocks are crowded with vendors selling produce, old clothes, cheese, old books, live poultry . . . and whatever the adventurers really need right now.
19. Workers' Demonstration: 2d100 burly laborers protesting the Government. They are angry and it wouldn't take much to turn this into a riot.
20. Tracks/aftermath: Reroll to see what traces they come across.

SITUATIONS

Roll 1d6 on the table below, then roll on the table above to determine who A and B are.

1. A desires B.
2. A wants to capture B.
3. A wants to harm or kill B.
4. A wants to go somewhere. B may wish to prevent this.
5. A wants to solve a mystery. B doesn't want the truth to be known.
6. A wants something. B may have it, or want to get it.

 

For more perilous encounters, check out my new ebook Monster Island Tales!