Bow Chicka Wow-wow

Hiero's Journey, Chapter Eight:

(For the previous entry in this series, look here.)

Rafting around the site of the ruined, drowned city, Hiero and co. eventually find an island formed by the collapse of a skyscraper, where they rest briefly and Luchare has a crying fit. Hiero decides to quiet the princess down with a long snog, and tells Luchare he loves her, though this probably is a bad thing because “I have been set a task so important that the last sane human civilization may fall if I should fail to carry it out” (178). Modesty is apparently not one of Per Desteen's virtues.

Continuing through the city, the rafting trio comes upon a kind of grotto formed by several tall ruins and ruined walls, in which, below the water's surface, they see what appears to be the projecting spire of a sunken building but actually turns out to be a “giant fin.” Lanier builds up to this pretty well; he may be poor at other things but he knows how to build tension.

Evading the giant mutant fish monster, or whatever it was, Hiero et al. discover a sort of shangri-la – a small, sunlit island at the edge of the city, where one of the inundated city squares opens onto the larger lake. Here, amidst wild birds and tranquillity, the author indulges in a bit of mildly misogynistic romantic fantasy. While Hiero spends his time on the island making weapons, Luchare “arrange[s] her hair” and tosses flower petals at the warrior-priest, a symbolic gesture about which even Papa Freud would say “Nope, sorry, too obvious for me.” Eventually, after a languid conversation in which Hiero belittles Luchare's “barbarous” home kingdom and demonstrates his brilliance by guessing that the princess was escaping from an arranged marriage, the two humans surrender to one another's dubious charms, and Gorm grants them some much-needed...triracial isolation.*

In Lanier's defense, one might say he was characterizing Luchare as immature and a bit spoiled (which she necessarily was, given her background), and perhaps some women find insults and demonstrations of mental prowess appealing. I think they generally don't exist outside of geeky fantasies, but what do I know? I am reminded of a scene in the movie Owning Mahowny:

Frank: Hey, Dan, let me ask you something. Why do you always dress like a douchebag?

Dan: Some girls go for that, Frank.

Maybe so.

Since this is an action novel and not a romance, Lanier mercifully spares the readers his version of post-coital conversation, moving quickly to the next fight scene. A band of humanoid frog-mutants, apparently mistaking the adventurers for very large flies, paddles up to the island in small boats and attacks Hiero and co. However, the frog-mutants have a weakness: their flesh is mildly phosporescent, which makes it easy for the good guys to see them in the dark. They prove no match for Klootz, who charges into the Evil Frog People like a big moosy tank; Hiero and Gorm and Luchare easily mop up the survivors. (Lanier includes a nice detail here, of Klootz shaking blood from his antlers after the fight [188].) These were, in modern parlance, merely trash monsters, but the bosses aren't far behind.

Coming next: Campy villains and a deus ex machina or two.

* Only about five people would understand this double-entendre, but as Roseanne Barr once said, "Some jokes are just for me."

In Memoriam: Andrew Sewell (1971-2013)

Cliched though it may sound, the most important thing Andrew Sewell taught me was how to be myself. When we attended middle school and high school together, back in the 1980s, there was no cultural cachet attached to being smart, or nerdy, or to having an interest in science fiction or fantasy. My sister, who was a few years older than us, referred to such interests as “girl repellent”; they wouldn't necessarily lead to bullying, but they certainly wouldn't make one popular.

The most refreshing thing about Andrew, aside from the great breadth of his interests, was his cheerful insouciance regarding others' opinion of them. If he liked something, he would indulge in it and let others know, and what he liked was almost always intellectually stimulating, or entertaining, or funny, or all of the above. It was Andrew who introduced me to the works of Terry Pratchett, back when there were two Discworld novels rather than thirty; to John Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline, still a breathtaking story 30 years later; and to the novel Marooned in Realtime, and the first appearance in fiction of the concept of a technological singularity. It was Andrew who accompanied me and my brother Patrick and several other friends to our first Doctor Who convention, and got to see Colin Baker's monstrous ego firsthand. Andrew had been watching the show since childhood, and I still remember him bellowing “Exterminate! Exterminate!” into an electric fan to simulate a Dalek's voice. Andrew also helped my brother and me crack some of the tougher text adventure games from Infocom, and spent a year helping Pat develop a text-based computer game centered around a Turkish taffy factory. And of course he was always a ready, if highly opinionated, player in any role-playing game my brother and I cared to host, be it Dungeons & Dragons or a more obscure offering like Call of Cthulhu.

If we grew out of these childhood interests, we did so only very slowly. Andrew and I still shared them after college, when we were both living in our parents' basements and figuring out what to do next with our lives. Having a fellow gaming and sci-fi fan living nearby helped make that otherwise dull and lonely time entirely bearable. Our interests by then inclined toward old-fashioned war games, which Andrew generally won unless he was unfamiliar with the outcome of the battle they simulated (a history degree is good for something after all), along with a new card game called Magic: The Gathering, which we played obsessively in the winter of 1993.

We stayed in touch for the next decade or so, and Andrew continued to demonstrate that he was a good person as well as a smart one. He congratulated me when I got my doctorate and my first permanent job, reminding me that he now knew two Dr. David Nichols in Indiana, the other being a licensed drug researcher at IU. Andrew also expressed his sympathies on learning of my parents' protracted divorce, comforting me with the memorable words “This too shall pass.” It was around this time I learned of Andrew's health problems, but in discussing them Andrew used the same phrase. Cheerful stoicism was another essential part of his character.

Now the obscure interests Andrew so enthusiastically pursued are the cultural currency of young people everywhere. Terry Pratchett is an international best-seller, Dr. Who is wildly popular on both sides of the Atlantic, and fantasy role-playing games, or at least their online variants, have hundreds of millions of players. Being a sci-fi nerd is the new normal. If a time traveler from the 1980s were to ask me today “What does popular culture look like in the early twenty-first century?” I would reply “Go back to 1985 and ask Andrew Sewell what he's interested in.” Sometimes a nerd is just a visionary who is generous with his ideas and interests. I am privileged to have been one of the beneficiaries of Andrew's generosity..

Nineteen Eighty-Four Redux

In the wake of Edward Snowden's revelation that the National Security Agency has been routinely spying on millions of Americans' emails and online activities, sales of George Orwell's novel 1984 have risen 5800 percent on Amazon. (All purchasers have, of course, earned themselves a spot on a new NSA watchlist and a reserved cell at the Federal Ministry of Love, now under construction near Osawatomie, Kansas.) I'm sure the Orwell estate appreciated the boost in sales, but 1984 didn't really need it; it was an instant classic when it first appeared at the start of the Cold War, and high school teachers have preserved its canonical status ever since. It has also been an important influence on science fiction novels and films, like Terry Gilliam's Brazil and Cory Doctorow's recent YA novel Little Brother, even though Orwell was himself ambivalent toward the newfangled SF genre and determined to stay within the literary mainstream. I addressed the question of whether one can regard 1984 as a work of science fiction in this blog entry, published last year but now a bit more topically relevant.

Passages

During the last couple of weeks the field of literary science fiction suffered two heavy losses: Iain M. Banks (1954-2013) and Jack Vance (1916-2013). Banks' death was the more shocking, even though he announced that he had terminal cancer two months ago, because it hit him in the prime of his writing career. His books sold briskly in Britain and the United States, and two of his non-SF novels, The Crow Road and Complicity, became a TV mini-series and a movie, respectively. Perhaps his most famous SF-nal achievement was the Culture series, nine novels set in and around a vast interstellar civilization called, simply, “The Culture.” As Charles Stross noted, The Culture was unusual for a future utopia insofar as one could imagine people actually wanting to live in it: it was egalitarian, liberal, un-plagued by scarcity, and respectful of individual differences. The Culture's individualism found perhaps its best expression in the whimsical names adopted by each of the vast, hyper-intelligent starships on which most of its people lived: Synchronize Your Dogmas, Well I Was in the Neighborhood, Arbitrary, and many more.

Making a utopian future interesting for readers is a challenging task, which Banks accomplished by surrounding The Culture with other galactic civilizations, some small and primitive, others large and powerful, and most of them cruel and vicious. Nearly all of the Culture novels take place outside of the eponymous civilization, on worlds where Banks could indulge his talent for describing (and deploring) intrigue, treachery, genocide, and bloody-mindedness. Some of these outsiders were nearly as powerful as The Culture itself, and probably thought The Culture's humaniform residents were too sybaritic, too dependent on their hyper-intelligent computers (or Minds), to resist a serious aggressor. This was the view held in the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, by the antagonistic Idirans, whose attitude toward The Culture was rather like that of Nazi Germany toward the United States. We all know how that turned out: given sufficient will a peaceful civilization can beat its plowshares into swords, and an advanced civilization can make a lot of plowshares.

Where did The Culture find the will to fight (and, in later novels, to interfere with) its anti-utopian foes? To some extent, it followed the British imperial model of recruiting agents from more militaristic outside cultures, e.g. Cheradenine Zakalwe from Use of Weapons. In what may be his best Culture novel, however, Banks indicates that a leisure society will always retain the ability to plot and fight wars because leisure societies are interested in having fun, and it will always be fun to out-think an opponent. Player of Games is one of Banks's few novels to revolve around a civilian protagonist from The Culture, Jernau Gurgeh, a gaming master who agrees to subvert another civilization's political hierarchy by entering its prestigious ceremonial strategy game. Games, Banks implicitly argues, help hold a civilization together by displaying its values and sublimating its internal conflicts. A cosmopolitan society that can master many different games can manipulate many different cultures. Readers of this blog can see why this idea might appeal to your narrator.

**

Jack Vance is perhaps the more obscure of the two authors, and his death comes as less of a surprise; Mr. Vance was in his 90s, his health had been bad for some time, and his output had declined with age. Vance, however, was one of the grand masters of science fiction, the author of 60-plus books dating back to 1950, and the winner of several of SF's principal awards for his short fiction.  He was cited as a creative influence by many younger authors, including Michael Chabon, Neil Gaiman, Ursula LeGuin, and Dan Simmons. Perhaps his best-known sci-fi writing was the five-book series “The Demon Princes,” though he was probably better known for his fantasy novels, such as the Dying Earth saga – set in a far-future Earth where magic worked – and the high-fantasy Lyonesse series. Distinguishing between Vance's fantasy and SF output is, however, somewhat unnecessary, because he wasn't really interested in speculating about technology, alien life, the struggle between Good and Evil, or any of the principal themes of those two genres. His one big technical contribution to the fantasy genre was the Dying Earth novels' mechanical conceit regarding the functioning of magic – namely, that magic spells occupied a discrete space in the human mind, and that once cast one had to relearn them. This later became the basis for the “Vancian” spell-casting system in Dungeons & Dragons, surely one of the most influential written works (for better or worse) in modern fantasy.

Otherwise, Vance's SF and fantasy novels were rather similar to one another. While his plots were perfunctory and his characters tended to be almost inhumanly cool and asocial, Vance's books were a pleasure to read because of the author's style: elegant, mannered, drily funny, and ironic. Consider the following from the first paragraph of his novella “The Last Castle:”

Toward the end of a stormy summer afternoon, with the sun finally breaking out under ragged black rainclouds, Castle Janeil was overwhelmed and its population destroyed. Until almost the last moment factions among the castle clans contended as to how Destiny properly should be met. The gentlemen of most prestige and account elected to ignore the entire undignified circumstance and went about their normal pursuits, with neither more nor less punctilio than usual. A few cadets, desperate to the point of hysteria, took up weapons and prepared to resist the final assault. Still others, perhaps a quarter of the total population, waited passively, ready – almost happy – to expiate the sins of the human race. In the end, death came uniformly to all, and all extracted as much satisfaction from their dying as this essentially graceless process could afford.

As in his longer novels, Vance adorns his story with exotic landscape features and interior furnishing, and with footnotes and sidebars full of fictional erudition: a reverse-translation of an exclamation by a future nobleman, a list of the families of House Hagedorn (complete with descriptions of their respective liveries), and notes on some of the modified alien creatures employed by the humans as servants. Such details don't advance the plot, but they contribute immeasurably to the artistry of the story. One reads Vance's novels not with deep concern for the main characters – no-one feels much concern for people whose main feature is “punctilio” - or breathless anticipation of what will happen next, but with the more sublime pleasure of a connoisseur enjoying an objet d'art. This is not a pleasure that goes stale, and I suspect we will be reading Vance's novels at least as long as we will be reading Banks's. I regret the loss of both writers, but am glad they left behind so weighty a legacy: 3-4 shelves of books between them, all readable, some masterpieces.

Midst the Ruins of Fabled Toronto

Hiero's Journey, Chapter Seven

(For the previous entry in this series, click here.)

The seventh chapter of Hiero's Journey, "The Forgotten City," begins by briefly shifting our point-of-view to Hiero's companion Luchare, who is depressed by Hiero's capture and delighted when Per Desteen mentally informs her and Gorm that he's escaped. Gorm is puzzled by Luchare's depression, which suggests that Gorm, clueless about human emotions and motivations, is Lanier's alter-ego in this novel, and Hiero just his Mary Sue. (I'll pause while you go look that up.)

Meanwhile, Hiero resolves his fight with the giant lampreys, fending off one of them by jamming an oar into its maw.  Not terribly creative, but effective nonetheless.  He also determines that the Evil Unclean Mutants have sent three more boats to follow him. One of these manages to come within crossbow range before Hiero finally reaches the shore and finds a place to hide. S'duna, the EUM High Priest, sends Hiero a sharp but ineffectual mental death threat before departing.  I believe S'duna is clean-shaven, or this would be an appropriate time for him to twirl his mustache.

Luchare and Gorm find Hiero and have a brief tiff/early lovers' quarrel regarding Luchare's homeland, the details of which need not concern us here except to say that Luchare is apparently turned on by metis priests who belittle Fair D'alwah. The party then continues eastward, heading toward a point where they can cross the Inland Sea and explore the ruined cities south of it (so that Hiero can find his mythical computer). At length they reach one of the old Dead Cities* of the pre-apocalypse era, some of whose gutted buildings are still jutting out of the water, despite the atomic destruction of others. This seems unlikely – Hiero & co. reach the city 5,500 years after doomsday, and by then the metal supports for any high-rise buildings would have corroded through, and wind and water would have knocked down the remaining walls. But Lanier was writing before The World Without Us, so we'll cut him a little slack. When the chapter ends, Hiero & co. are building a raft wherewith to pass the ruins and then resume their journey along the shore of the Inland Sea.  

Coming next: The dating secrets of the Senior Killmen.

*What city this once was I do not know, though given Lanier's predilection for Things Canadian I suspect it might be Toronto.

Guilty Pleasures: Escape from New York

The current decade may be the golden age of dystopian young-adult fiction, but the jaded, economically stagnant 1970s were the golden age of dystopian science fiction movies. They were cheap to make (plenty of abandoned factories and vacant lots to film in), and they reflected the American and European public's skepticism about the future. Examples include Silent Running (set in outer space but with an ecological catastrophe back on Earth), Soylent Green, Sleeper, Rollerball, Deathrace 2000, A Boy and His Dog, Logan's Run (both movie and TV series), the first television adaptation of Brave New World, the short-lived children's show Ark II, and, at the end of the decade, The Last Chase and Mad Max. While released in July 1981, Escape from New York should be included in this cohort, given that it grew out of four cultural and political developments of the 1970s: post-Watergate political disaffection, the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81, rising crime rates, and the ongoing decay of what the opening voice-over calls “the once-great city of New York.”

The premise of the film is, I suspect, fairly well known. It is 1997, and a crime-ridden, embattled United States has become a police state, albeit a negligent one; to deal with its growing criminal population the U.S. government has turned Manhattan Island into a vast walled prison camp for undesirables. After the American president (Donald Pleasence) crash-lands in New York on his way to an important peace summit, condemned war hero Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell) is recruited to infiltrate Manhattan and rescue the prez. Mayhem, in the form of gun fights, car chases, an unexpected reunion with an old partner in crime (Harry Dean Stanton) and his squeeze (Adrienne Barbeau), and a climactic confrontation with the prison's capo, The Duke (Chef), ensues.

I became aware of EFNY in the summer of 1981, when my brother and I saw an ad for the board game version of the movie (produced by TSR Hobbies, the D&D people). We were thrilled to learn the game was based on a movie, and we nagged our mother until she took us to see it. I think she must have liked the film as well, because as I recall we went to see it twice in the theater, and many times on video thereafter. The movie did well in general release, making $25 million (four times its cost), creating a brief period of fame for director John Carpenter, turning former child-actor Kurt Russell into an action-movie hero, and even spawning a lousy sequel in 1996. The dystopian future it predicted did not, for the most part, come to pass. World War Three did not break out, the American violent crime rate dropped after 1990, and New York City recovered; even Manhattan's former crack houses are now high-rent apartments. (We do live in more of a police state than we did in 1981, thanks, curiously enough, to a plane crash or two in New York City.) It remains an appealing and entertaining movie nonetheless.

Part of Escape's lasting appeal comes from its memorable characters, each played by a first-rate actor or actress.*  It is great fun to watch Isaac Hayes take command of the stage without saying a word, Harry Dean Stanton connive and lie, Adrienne Barbeau flesh out her few lines with great facial expressions, Frank Doubleday camp it up as Romero, Donald Pleasence transform from a fearful wreck into a ball of murderous rage, and the disaffected anti-hero Kurt Russell develop a trace of conscience.  The movie also deftly blends three film genres, at least two of which remain popular: action movies, “Fall of New York” films – a discrete genre between 1970 and 1990 - and science fiction. The sci-fi trappings are restrained, limited to a few James-Bond gadgets and the prison warden's extensive surveillance computers**, and give the film an air of near-future realism, much like another 1981 sci-fi movie, Outland.  

It is as an action movie that Escape really shines. Carpenter took the existing conventions of action films and imparted his own brilliant, berserk twists to them. Most modern action films have running gunfights; EFNY has gunfights in which the protagonist uses his gun to perforate walls and then dive through the cut-outs.  Other action films have car chases; EFNY has a pimped-out town car chasing a taxi cab on a bridge covered in land mines. Some action films have a gladiatorial contest between the good guy and the bad guy; Escape has Snake fighting a seven-foot-tall professional wrestler with a nail-studded baseball bat. Many action films have comic relief; EFNY has a prisoners' drag show singing "Everyone's Coming to New York" and a lovable old cab driver (Ernest Borgnine) who flings molotov cocktails while listening to "Bandstand Boogie." All this in just an hour and forty minutes of run time. What's not to like?

Yes, I have heard that there is a remake in the works, and no, I don't plan to see it, unless it is directed by Edgar Wright or the Coen brothers.

Above image from Wikimedia Commons. Escape from New York is copyright (c) 1981 by Avco Embassy Pictures, Inc.

* With the exception of a few minor parts played by people of varying degrees of talent. Carpenter plays one of the helicopter pilots, and one of the Secret Service agents on Air Force One is played by Gerald Ford's son.

** Fun fact: computer animation was so expensive in the early 1980s that Carpenter “simulated” it with actual ink-drawn animation. To make the film's wire-frame "computer" animation of Manhattan, the FX technicians built a model of the city and lined the buildings' edges with glow-in-the-dark tape. Another fun fact: Escape's matte shots of Manhattan were painted by James Cameron.

Games That Don't Suck: 7 Wonders

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

Civilization-building games have been around since the publication of the Civilization board game in 1980, and they have been popular since Sid Meier developed the first Civilization computer game in the early 1990s. Such games, which require players to build resources, develop cities, make scientific breakthroughs, fight wars, and build monumental Wonders, can be very rewarding, but they generally also have complicated rules and take many hours to play. Game designers have been trying to develop a “Civilization lite” board game for some years, with limited success. With their 2010 game 7 Wonders, though, author Antoine Bauza and his marauding Belgian play-testers may have finally reached this goal, creating a game with the feel of a civ-builder but much less complexity and a much shorter play time.

In 7 Wonders players focus on developing a city associated with one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: Rhodes, Ephesus, or Babylon, for example. Game play takes place over three Ages of six turns each. During his/her turn, a player usually will focus on building up his/her city or constructing its wonder. A player may do one of three things on each turn:

Construct a building (the standard action),
Build a stage of his/her wonder, or
Cash in a card for 3 money, used to buy resources.

Wonders earn victory points, and each has a special ability associated with it that the player earns after building the middle stage – such as an extra resource, extra money, or a free science field (see below). The heart of the game, however, is the construction of city structures. Some of these produce raw materials, like wood or stone (sorry, Catan players: no sheep); some produce finished goods, like glass; some generate coins or give a commerce bonus; some generate military strength that helps earn military victory points; some (like temples and statues) simply give victory points; some give fields in a particular science (of which there are three, symbolized by a gear, a compass, and a tablet); and some, known as guilds, give victory points for certain sets of cards or other “criteria.”

On his/her turn, a player can build one structure or wonder stage provided s/he has sufficient resources for it. If the player's city doesn't have resource structures that produce some or all of the goods needed to buy the new building or stage, s/he can buy resources from a neighboring city for 2 coins per resource, provided that neighboring city actually produces that resource. One can only buy resources from the cities of one's immediate neighbors – the players to one's left and right. (This is one of the ways the designers have kept play time to an hour, even if there are more than 2-3 players.) There are also some structures that, once built, allow the player to build later Ages' structures for free – a workshop, for instance, allows a player to build a free laboratory.

The players' building choices are limited by the availability of resources and by the game's core playing mechanic: card-drafting. Each player starts each Age with seven cards, of which s/he selects one to build (or to use as a marker for a Wonder stage or to trade for three coins), passing the rest to the player sitting next to them. This gives players an opportunity to deny neighboring players the structures they might need to pursue a particular game strategy, like a military buildup or an accumulation of scientific buildings. On the next turn the player takes one card from her new hand, which she received from the player sitting next to her, and builds it (or uses it as a Wonder marker or for cash), and so on until they have only one card left, which they discard. This occurs after six turns and marks the end of an Age.

Before new Age cards are drawn and passed out, the players resolve military conflicts. Military structures generate from one to three crossed sword-and-shield symbols, representing each player's military power. Each player with military power will automatically fight a war at the end of each Age with their neighbors. Whoever has the most sword-and-shield symbols in these conflicts receives a military victory marker, ranging in value from 1 to 5 victory points (depending on the Age), for each battle they win. Each loser receives a defeat marker worth -1 points. Apparently these are fairly limited wars, which is just as well. Plenty of wargames on the market for those who prefer conflict simulations.

At the end of the game players earn victory points (VP) in seven ways:

1. for completing the stages of their Wonder
2. building civic structures that are worth a specified number of points
3. building certain mercantile structures that are worth victory points
4. building guilds and meeting the conditions on them
5. winning military conflicts
6. for their coins (1 VP per three coins, rounded down)
7. and for scientific fields, on an exponential scale. For each set of cards with the same scientific field (compass, tablet, or gear), the player receives a number of VP equal to the square of the number of cards. Players also receive another 7 VP for each set of three different fields. These points can really add up.

There are many different strategies for accumulating points, but in my experience a balanced approach works best. One can rack up a lot of points with a pure-science strategy, but someone who has been focusing instead on building civic structures, winning battles, and building their Wonder can usually accumulate more.

**

One of the nice features of the game is there are relatively few parts – just the seven “wonder boards” (the players' play mats), the cards representing structures (which can double as markers for stages of a wonder), coins, and military victory markers. There are no resource tokens because one cannot pile up resources from turn to turn, and because resources are automatically generated by everyone's resource structures. It is also a quick game to play, even with 6 or 7 players, because one can only interact (trade, fight) with one's immediate neighbors. And players need not merely focus on building up their own civilizations, because the drafting mechanic allows them to affect what cards their neighbors receive, and military conflicts can yield a lot of points for their winners toward the end of the game. The “screw-thy-neighbor” aspects of the game, however, do not dominate so much that they produce many hard feelings. The most common reaction I've heard from new players at the end of their first game is “Let's play again!”

Are there any shortcomings? 7 Wonders was designed for both American and European players, so some of the cards and Wonder boards use symbols whose meaning can be opaque to beginning players. Fortunately, these are decoded in the rule book. Also, some people might be deterred by the $49.99 price tag. As with Dominion, however, this game has at least $100 worth of replay value.