A few months ago, while poking around several old boxes of role-playing game supplements I had left over from the 1980s, I happened upon a reference to a sci-fi novel that I remembered enjoying when I was a teenager, and which was an inspiration for the old RPG Gamma World. The novel was Hiero's Journey (1973), an adventure story pitting a biracial Canadian priest with psychic powers (and you don't find enough of those in fiction, do you?) against post-apocalyptic mutants in the 75th century. After doing a little online research, I learned that the novel, pulpy and goofy as it was, still evoked fond memories from other SF fans, and that it was apparently one of the inspirations for Dungeons and Dragons, which struck me as odd given the large difference in genre between the novel and the game. In an effort to solve this riddle - how did a post-holocaust SF novel inspire a fantasy role-playing game - and as a tribute to a "good bad book" (in George Orwell's phrase) that is still entertaining, I plan to devote a number of future blog entries to Hiero's Journey.
The novel's author, Sterling Lanier, also merits attention: he wrote several science fiction novels in
the '70s and '80s, and he was the publishing-house employee who first decided to publish Frank Herbert's classic novel Dune, which alone should guarantee him a place (if a small one) in the SF pantheon. Lanier was also one of the few science fiction writers to graduate from my alma mater, though he was rather less talented than some of his fellow Harvardians (Edgar Pangborn, Hal Clement, Anne McCaffrey, Ursula LeGuin). Not everyone gets to be famous when they grow up, and perhaps it's as well merely to be useful and inspiring.
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