Games That Don't Suck: Splendor

(For a list of games in this series, click here and scroll down.)

The latest entry in our series of “Games That Do Not Resemble Monopoly in the Least, and Thank Goodness for That” comes from the same company that produced Seven Wonders. It also employs two of the same mechanics as its Belgian predecessor, drafting (players take cards from a common supply) and engine-building (players accumulate advantages based on previous card buys). Technical and intimidating as this may sound, Splendor is an even easier game to learn, and a quicker one to play, than Seven Wonders. Ostensibly, the players (2-5 of them) take the role of Renaissance princes trying to amass wealth in the form of precious gems, buildings, ships, and artwork. That premise, though, is just a thin skin overlaying a simple game with potential for deep play.

The game “board” consists of twelve face-up cards in three rows, ranked according to their expense, and replenished as players buy old cards. Each card bears a colorful illustration, a cost, and a banner identifying the assets it gives the purchaser. All cards supply one permanent gem, which the holder may spend on all subsequent buys. Many also give victory points, of which players need 15 to win. Players purchase cards with gems, usually several gems of different types: rubies, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds, opals, and wild-card gold pieces.

On his or her turn a player can take three gems of different colors, or two gems of a single color (if that gem stack is full), or buy a card. S/he may alternatively reserve a card for future purchase, taking the reserved card in hand and acquiring a gold piece at the same time. The gem supply is limited, and all of a player's assets and cards (reserves excepted) always remain on display, so adept players can interfere with one another's plans by taking scarce gems or buying cards they think someone else wants. Limiting inter-player interference are a 10-gem ceiling on each player's hoard, and the possibility that a card even more useful to one's opponents will replace the card one has just bought.

Adding another layer of complexity to the game are nobles, large cardboard counters, each bearing the image of a Renaissance monarch or aristocrat, who permanently “visit” players who have amassed sufficient wealth. One can only “purchase” nobles with permanent-gem cards, usually four of each of two colors or three of three. Each noble counter gives the recipient three points, but acquiring them can distract players from buying expensive permanent-gem cards with a higher point value. The noble “option” multiplies the pathways players can take to win the game.

I find Splendor strangely mesmerizing. The quality artwork and the solidity of the gem counters and noble tokens draws one into the game's mental space, and figuring out which path one will take to victory, and which combination of gem tokens and permanent-gem cards will take one there, presents the mind with an ever-shifting puzzle. One must also keep in mind the progress of one's opponents and measures one can take to slow them down. It's a short game for all that, usually lasting only 25-30 minutes. As with Seven Wonders, I have almost never been able to play just one game of Splendor at a time.

Sorry, Ladies, C.S. Lewis Finds You Tedious and Icky

The Narnia novels, which C.S. Lewis wrote as children's stories, generally avoid sexual themes. An episode in the final book that Lewis's readers call “the problem of Susan” thus becomes multiply alarming: it brings sexuality (teenage romance) into the series and then condemns it, and the women who express it. In The Last Battle (1956), Susan Pevensie was denied re-admission into Narnia – and thus allegorically into Heaven – because she dared develop an interest in “makeup” and “boys,” neither of which left her time for Narnia or Aslan. Several authors have subsequently addressed Lewis's callous dismissal of Susan in their own stories. Ana Mardoll last month drew her followers' attention to a recent and curiously moving addition to this Susan Pevensie subgenre, “Elegant and Fine” by T. Kingfisher (alias Ursula Vernon).

Kingfisher speculates Susan turned away from Narnia because she and her siblings, who after all had grown to adulthood in the ancient kingdom, had all taken lovers there, of whom fate or Aslan had robbed them when it (or he) forced them back to Earth. Lewis showed no particular interest in his young protagonists' adult lives in Narnia and the psychological impact of losing those lives, but “you cannot live to be thirty years old and have it wiped cleanly from your mind.” Susan remained a thirty-year-old woman trapped in a girl's body, and sometime after the narrative of Prince Caspian, she decided she would not let her heart and mind remain broken. She left Lewis's children's story for her own grown-up one. For the crime of growing up, or refusing to live meekly as a “tame woman” at the feet of untamed men and Lions, Lewis cast Susan into perdition.

All due praise to those of Lewis's fans who do not accept this condemnation. His characters, especially the female ones, have dignity and depths that their literary creator hinted at but refused explicitly to acknowledge. Arguably, Lewis could not show these dimensions because he regarded many of his fictional characters as subalterns, intrinsically inferior to the princes and gods who really made things happen in the world. In an earlier post here I observed that Lewis's dislike of outspoken women, unruly students, and insubordinate “lesser breeds” (dwarves, animals, commoners) is of a piece: he argued quite explicitly that people could not be happy if they did not recognize their subordinate stations and learn silence and obedience. In the same essay Lewis averred his belief in equality before the law, but insisted one should not carry this into the church, the family, the classroom, or any place that really mattered to him.

I suspect Prof. Lewis's confident defense of inequality suffered a major blow after the Second World War, when many if not most Britons decided to pursue social equality as well as the legal variety. His later writings on subordination and rebellion, particularly those concerning the subordination of women, are those of a curmudgeon and escapist, fighting a battle lost long ago. Lewis's harrowing of liberally-educated Jill Pole in The Silver Chair, and his damnation of sexually-maturing Susan Pevensey, both occur in a fantasy world far removed from this one. Later in the 1950s, Lewis transferred his misogyny to another speculative genre, that of science fiction. In one of his last published works, “Ministering Angels” (1958), he suggested that many men, if unable to live in a world of meek and submissive women, would prefer doing without the female sex altogether. In the story, a bureaucratic Earth government sends two sex workers to an all-male colony on Mars. The “angels,” one a meddling female bureaucrat and the other an aging prostitute, are to minister to the colonists' carnal needs, but the astronauts have no wish for their company and indeed would rather flee Mars than stay with them.

In fairness, Lewis wrote this story as a response to an earlier essay in the same magazine (Fantasy & Science Fiction), “The Day After We Land on Mars,” in which Robert Richardson argued that men settling on the red planet would probably require regular visits from “nice girls” to boost “morale” and keep them from falling into bad habits, like masturbation and homosexuality. Lewis's speculation is less emetic than Richardson's, but he obviously wrote it to advance a particular message: no “nice girls” would ever fill such a role, and men did not necessarily need or want women's company in any case.* Together with Lewis's fantasy story “The Shoddy Lands” (1956), whose narrator expresses horror at women's vanity and their bodies (he finds bikini lines particularly icky), “Ministering Angels” and the later Narnia novels all yearn for isolation from the feminine. All express the wish that women – actual, mature women with their own opinions and carnal desires – would simply go away, and that a just God would arrange an afterlife free of their troubling presence. This sounds hellish to me, but for Lewis 'twere better to reign in hell than have to listen to assertive women in heaven.

* Lewis did marry during these last years of his life, and the marriage grew into a happy one, but his wife Joy was in poor health and neither expected the union to last long. Joy Lewis died in 1960.

Luke of Winchester, We Wish We'd Never Known You

(For the previous post on this trilogy, click here.)

A well-wrought adventure trilogy follows a standard format: introduce the protagonist and central quest in the first volume, use the second book to enlarge the setting and cast of characters, and make sure the finale goes off with a bang. Ideally, the middle book should leave the protagonists in some peril, raising the stakes for the reader right before the start of the concluding volume. John Christopher's Sword trilogy breaks with this pattern, but does so to powerful effect. The series's second installment, Beyond the Burning Lands, plods along, slowing the plot in order to expand the setting and introduce new characters (Cymru, Blodwen) or develop old ones (Peter). It ends, however, with a decisive fight that moves Luke Perry to the height of his fortunes: master of his home city of Winchester, betrothed to the beautiful Blodwen, and ready to resume his father's conquest of the south. If the author so dramatically raises Luke's hopes and fortunes, however, it is only to dash them more thoroughly in the final chapter, The Sword of the Spirits.

As in many tragedies, Luke is author of his own downfall. We receive a premonitory glimpse of his hubris early in Sword, when the young prince violates the rules of war to subdue a rebellious city. Luke succeeds in this campaign, and it only feeds the recklessness and willfulness he has displayed throughout the series. Shortly thereafter Blodwen comes to Winchester, and Luke learns that his fiancee was serious about a remark she made in volume two, that she was the mistress of her own mind and heart. When he jails his betrothed for thwarting him in his own city, the people of that city prove that they are not his playthings either: Luke's captains depose him and cast him out. 

A different character might learn humility in that figurative and actual wilderness, and in fact Christopher does offer Luke a chance at a different life, in the form of a village of “savages” who live happily together and hold all property in common. A wounded Luke takes shelter with the villagers, and one of their spokesmen urges him to remain with them longer and recover from the "sickness" of "jealousy and pride." Their guest refuses.

Instead the former Prince of Winchester heads into his past, to the sanctuary of the Seers and across the Burning Lands to Klan Gothlan. Now all of the plot elements Christopher introduced over the previous volumes – the Seers' technical knowledge and lack of scruples, the Wilsh love of novelty and machines, and Luke's own bloodlust and desire for vengeance – come crashing together with explosive effect. The Seers make twentieth-century weapons, the Wilsh provide soldiers, and Luke supplies tactical leadership to an army that marches into England and re-enacts A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. In the end, however, Luke does not get the outcome he desired. Rather than give away the trilogy's denouement, I will note that the title of volume three has at least three meanings. The “Sword of the Spirits” is an actual sword Luke received from the Seers; it is also a metaphor for Luke, whom the Spirits – or, rather, their human interlocutors – have turned into their means of reunifying England. It additionally refers to a force that can prove stronger than fury and cold steel, a force Luke cannot understand.

The big surprise of this trilogy isn't the climax of its plot, but the outcome of Luke's character development. Many fantasy stories allow their main character to develop into a wiser, stronger, more mature version of their once-callow selves. Christopher shows Luke no such mercy: the princeling begins the series as a narcissistic lout and ends it as a soulless, rage-blinded killer. By the midpoint of Sword of the Spirits, it becomes obvious to more mature readers (this is why I enjoy this novel so much more as an adult) that Luke is not the hero he thinks he is, that his foes and foils are actually the more noble and progressive characters. Blodwen "betrays" her betrothed because she falls in love with someone else, and because she has repeatedly told Luke she is her own woman, not his property. Winchester's captains depose Luke because he has become a tyrant and the monarchy a liability. A forward-looking young prince, Eric of Oxford, wants to become Luke's friend but turns his back on him when he sees what bloody work Master Perry has done to recover his throne. And Luke's oldest friend, Martin, renounces his position with the Seers and demonstrates to Luke that there are powers at least as effectual, and as revolutionary, as the technology Luke thinks he understands. At the very end of the story, Luke only understands that he has helped unleash changes he cannot control, changes that will create a new society with no place for him. Sad news for Luke, but good news for nearly everyone else in his milieu - one doesn't want a happy ending for the man who turns out to have been the story's villain.

A Future of Blood, Fire, and Monsters

John Christopher, whose work I’ve blogged about here before, achieved his fame as a writer of dystopian fiction for young adults, several decades before it became cool. His most famous books, the Tripods novels, have been translated into eight languages and adapted into a BBC series. His best works, however, are almost certainly the three volumes of the Sword of the Spirits trilogy (1970-72), which while written for teenagers have enough plot-layering and thematic sophistication to appeal to the most literate adults. I am pleased to see that Simon and Schuster has recently brought the series back into print.

Like the Tripods books, the Sword trilogy (The Prince in Waiting, Beyond the Burning Lands, and Sword of the Spirits) offers the reader a world where all is not as it seems. Luke Perry*, the trilogy’s viewpoint character, lives in what resembles a medieval fantasy kingdom, a cold and violent land of warring walled cities, of brave knights and dwarf craftsmen and deformed mutant servants, and of mysterious Seers with arcane powers. At the edges of this barbarous civilization prowl horrible monsters and tribesmen with savage customs. To the north, fearsome volcanoes light the skies and block explorers from the southern cities.

It all sounds rather like a Robert Howard novel, but gradually Christopher reveals that he is telling not a fantasy story but a post-apocalyptic one. Two centuries before Luke’s time, a global natural disaster destroyed the industrial civilization of our own era, and solar flares flooded the world with radiation, producing the dwarves, mutants, and monstrous animals that make the new world a fantastic distortion of the old. The survivors of the disaster, believing it the result of nuclear war, turned against the machine civilization they blamed for producing it. One group, however, retained knowledge of the age of machines, which it kept hidden in hopes of one day reintroducing science and industry to a more stable society. Savvier SF fans will have already figured out that this group was the Seers, ostensibly the defenders of the new era’s religious faith and of its people’s animus against technology. Like the rest of Luke’s world, they have a double identity; they also have a secret plan.

Luke, who at the start of the trilogy is mainly interested in ice-skating and in winning his home city’s annual tournament, learns only gradually that the Seers intend to use him and his father to advance their agenda.With their help, the elder Perry mounts a coup that puts him on the throne of Winchester, with Luke his Spirit-nominated successor. Later, Perry Sr. turns his attention to conquering neighboring cities, with the goal of creating a unified kingdom - one into which the Seers can reintroduce the old civilization. The new order, however, is jealous of its privileges and customs, and it has strong defenders, including the princes of other cities and Luke's amiable but ambitious half-brother Peter. When the ensuing storm of fire, blood, and treachery subsides, much of the Perry family lies dead and Luke finds himself in exile, hiding with the Seers in their Wiltshire sanctuary.

By the end of Prince in Waiting, more perceptive or mature readers will have noticed that there is something seriously wrong with Luke. He is short-tempered, prone to deep depression, and terrified of humiliation, which drives him to stupid risk-taking and stupider fights. One could lay some of the blame for this on Luke's parents, on his self-destructive father and his vapid, narcissistic mother. However, the violent social environment in which Luke matures gives him little opportunity for self-reflection, and rewards some of his dumber risk-taking, like his near-suicidal fight with the flesh-dissolving bayemot in Beyond the Burning Lands. 

If that second novel of the trilogy is less engaging than the first, it probably stems from Christopher's turn away from Luke's inner life and struggle with his personal demons. The author instead uses the middle novel of the trilogy to advance the series's plot and enlarge its setting. Luke reconciles himself with Winchester's new ruler, accompanies a diplomatic party across the volcanic Burning Lands, and visits the city of Klan Gothlan in the land of the Wilsh. He and his southern companions express their wonder at and disgust with these odd people who prefer good food and art to fighting, who use simple machines and accept polymufs as equals. Dumb luck allows Luke to defeat the bayemot, and the Wilsh king, Cymru, takes a liking to this strange little wolverine in human form, and even offers him the hand of his daughter Blodwen. (Blodwen, one of Christopher's few decent female characters, expresses an ambivalent opinion of the match.) At the book's end, pressed to the wall by a treason conviction, Luke wins the crown of Winchester by combat, and reaches the peak of his fortunes.

And then everything goes to hell.

(To Be Continued...) 

* No relation to the actor, as far as we know.

One Step Forward, Twenty Steps Back: The 2015 Hugo Ballot

A couple of years ago I relayed several reports that the World Science Fiction convention, where one might expect to find a degree of forward-looking progressivism, had become instead a bastion of white male conservatives, adherents of a vision of sci-fi one might call Rockets and Reactionaries. Last year, SF fans and authors had a welcome conversation about the prospects for women and minorities within the field, and that summer a first-time author’s novel about artificial intelligence and gender identity (among other things) won the Hugo, Nebula, and John Campbell Awards. 

This year, the political wheel has turned again, and in the reactionaries’ favor.
 

A group of conservative sci-fi and fantasy fans, calling themselves “The Sad Puppies” (a dreary in-joke), have for several years sought to pack the ballots for the fan-selected Hugo Award with works by fellow travelers. This spring they finally put together enough votes to achieve this goal. A quick look at the top of the 2015 Hugo ballot reveals that nearly all of the nominees in the five main print categories - novel, novella, novelette, short story, and related work - match the conservatives' slate (or one of those slates). One of the nominated titles comes from an obscure fanzine named for our old right-wing friend, Orson Scott Card. Another appeared in the conservative journal Sci Phi. Nine of the twenty-five nominees were published by an outfit called Castalia House. Charles Stross has tracked down the details on this press: founded by Theodore Beale, a game designer and author who writes under the modest sobriquet Vox Day, Castalia publishes mil-SF anthologies, Day’s own work, and a few non-fiction titles, including a Home-Schooling course in astrophysics.

It is fair to call Mssr. Beale, who more-or-less drafted the winning ballot in this year's Hugo-grabbing campaign, an ultraconservative. It is fairer to call him a white supremacist, a deep-dyed misogynist, a religious zealot, an isolationist, and a supporter of nationalist extremist parties like the True Finns. Beale’s fondness for this Finnish party may explain why he established Castalia in Finland. That he and his followers have incorporated their political alignment into their fan-dom is clear from the list of heroes Beale includes on the press’s front page: J.R.R. Tolkien (Catholic conservative), Gilbert K. Chesterton (Catholic reactionary), C.S. Lewis (patriarchal Christian reactionary), Robert Howard (racist scumbag), John W. Campbell (racist, overbearing, Scientology-supporting weirdo), and Herman Hesse. Actually, Hesse might seem a bizarre addition to the list, but I imagine his dystopian fiction The Glass Bead Game appeals to Mr. Beale’s quasi-medievalist mind, and his press takes its name from that novel's setting.

I mention all of this because I think outsiders and casual fans don’t often realize how politicized SF is and always has been. Modern fantasy was, until recently, a reactionary genre, and science fiction's “Golden-Age” authors were predominantly white male technocrats whose geekiness and cultural disaffection allowed them to ignore their other privileges. This only began to change in the late 1960s and ‘70s, concurrently with the civil rights movements, the return of American women to the workplace, and the migration of the counterculture into the mainstream. These social changes made it easier for female authors to enter the field, and let authors and fans discuss issues that made previous generations uncomfortable, like gender politics, sexuality, and alternative social and political systems.

The men (they are almost all men) threatened by female and minority authors, or by novels and stories that challenge social norms, usually also feel threatened by changes in the larger world. I suspect many believe that if they can "reclaim" their fan community and authorial genre for conservatives, they can use that beachhead to resist, or perhaps partially to reverse, the unpleasant changes occurring in the larger society. I suppose I should be heartened by their affirmation of my own belief that SF and fantasy stories can make an impact on mainstream thought and politics. Marxists, of course, have long understood that stories and other cultural institutions determine the desirability and limits of change within a society, and thus the extent to which people can redistribute power. Conservative authors like C.S. Lewis and Orson Scott Card learned this lesson some time ago, and they and their latter-day followers are playing the Gramscian culture game to win. Those who enjoy science fiction and fantasy stories, or whose loved ones enjoy them, ought to bear in mind that these have never been apolitical genres, and that today there are well-organized people who want them all to serve a retrograde political agenda.

C.S. Lewis Redux: On Your Knees and Forget the Fees

In her ongoing takedown of C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair, Ana Mardoll noted a peculiar declaration made by Lewis's co-protagonist Eustace Scrubb. Eustace had been a liberal atheist in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but during and after that story he became an "Aslanite," and decided to regard his involuntary voyage with King Caspian as an ennobling religious adventure. Early in Silver Chair, meeting with a potentially helpful "Parliament of [Talking] Owls," Eustace felt obliged to tell the conclave that he was "the King's man" and suspected them of conspiring against the king. Mardoll interpreted this as an assertion of privilege - male, human, and class privilege (trifecta!) - and I think that's an insightful finding. I would like to add, though, that Lewis was also weighing in against deliberative, representative bodies, against parliaments of all kinds, and in favor of kings and royalists.

Lewis had been increasingly willing to display his royalism in the Narnia novels. He had inserted a billet-doux to monarchy into Voyage of the Dawn Treader, remarking that the Pevensie children's return to Narnia "was as if King Arthur came back to Britain...And I say the sooner the better." The rest of that novel's plot, as Mardoll observed, Lewis predicated on the right of kings to place their personal whims above the needs and safety of their own people. Well before writing the Narnia novels, though, Lewis had matured in a Britain whose elite viewed democratic government with suspicion and the monarchy as, if not irreproachable, then at least an exalted estate unjustly threatened by Parliament. England's Parliament had fought two civil wars with kings in the 17th century, toppling one and beheading another, and had subsequently taken control of the royal purse, the armed forces, and even the terms of the royal succession. Meanwhile, Liberal and Tory politicians took turns crafting the myth of a patriot king, a monarch who stood above politics and truly represented the national spirit. This image, as Walter Bagehot and Douglas Adams observed, helped distract the public from the colorless men who actually held power, but it also slowly undermined the respectability of Parliament. Small wonder that an elitist like Lewis, or one of his mouthpiece characters, would consider a parliament grubby, furtive, and disreputable, little more than a band of (WAIT FOR IT) Owl-iver Cromwells.

In his earlier work, Lewis made an even more explicit case for monarchy than he did in the Narnia novels. In his 1943 essay on "Equality," Lewis described monarchy as part of God's plan for the world, a plan based on the due subordination of all lesser mortals to their superiors: of men to kings, women to men, students to teachers, and animals to humans. What made this plan unworkable, the amateur theologian argued, was the Fall: after Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge, corruption entered the world, power decoupled from divine right, and one could no longer safely grant unrestrained authority to anyone. Rights, whether or subjects or women or animals, came to replace divine right. But both civil rights and liberal participatory government were, to borrow Paine's phrase, "the badges of lost innocence." Both were necessary, but only in the sense that clothing or medicine were necessary; neither nourished the spirit or contributed to individual happiness. Personal and spiritual fulfillment, Lewis argued, could only come from private subordination: the self-abasement of worshipers before their gods, the admiration of commoners for royalty, the submission of women to their husbands. No-one can know true happiness unless he, or especially she, learns to grovel.

This last point helps illustrate why Mardoll and other readers have found the Chronicles of Narnia so problematic. Lewis's medievalism, his monarchism, his love of irresponsible privilege and an authoritarian God, and his contempt for women (like Susan Pevensie or the Head of Eustace's school), are of a piece. Equality and democracy are, he feels, ugly necessities, and those whom Lewis considers inferiors should acquire the habit of subordination, learn to kiss their chains in private even if they don't display them in public. It is not enough that subject peoples obey their betters - they must also learn to love them. The two are, indeed, one and the same thing, even in the realm of physical love: in that 1943 essay, Lewis argues that women cannot find sexual fulfillment unless they are dominated by their husbands.

Far be it from me to offer marital and relational advice to half the world's population, beyond acknowledging that that there is a fetish for just about everyone, and that there is almost certainly a constituency, though probably not a large one, for Fifty-Shades-of-C.S.-Lewis cosplay. The difference between me and Lewis is that he knows, absolutely, what will appeal to all women in the bedroom, what the best way is to manage all children's schools, what form of government will make everyone happy, and what kind of deity is the best and only one. Such moral self-confidence may make one a productive writer or preacher, but it makes for a lousy teacher and adviser. It probably also makes one a lousy human being.

**

Above right: King George, C.S. Lewis's secret boyfriend.

Above left: C.S. Lewis gets the knout out of the bedroom cupboard.

Good News from Narnia

I am pleased to report, belatedly, that Ana Mardoll has resumed her extended critique of C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia with a chapter-by-chapter commentary, already well advanced, of The Silver Chair. This is exciting news to Your Humble Narrator, as this fourth volume of the Chronicles was my favorite of the series. As Mardoll explains, it's the one that most closely resembles a "Tolkienesque" adventure story, with fell wildernesses, fearsome giants, a mysterious underground city, and unlikely heroes seeking a lost prince. It is one of the few C.S. Lewis novels whose heroes I like, probably because Eustace and Jill were raised as liberal atheists and Puddleglum the Marsh-Wiggle is reliably gloomy and curmudgeonly. It is also just as morally problematic as its predecessors: Lewis remains monstrously unkind to his heroes, and his Christ-analogue Aslan is even more of an authoritarian, unhelpful As-hole (so to speak) than usual.

I am particularly glad to share this news because Mardoll had announced last fall that she was withdrawing from blogging, due to a spate of online bullying that had become intolerable. I am glad that she has bravely chosen to re-engage and apply her critical intelligence to the Narnia books, which we too often  recommend to children without understanding the many morally toxic lessons that Lewis wants them to learn. Personally, I can't wait for Mardoll's deconstruction of The Last Battle, the most blatantly racist and misogynist volume of the series.