19th Level

I discovered Ursula Le Guin back at the University of Connecticut in my final year. I had the opportunity to take a few electives - my last year included classes like Age of the Dinosaurs and Science Fiction - and the Science Fiction class included her The Dispossessed. It was my favorite book in that class - and to this day it remains one of my favorite books. Subtitled An Ambiguous Utopia , it's great science fiction that makes you think. It doesn't give easy villains but rather people trying to do the best they can. Ms. Le Guin passed away on January 22 at the age of 88. She lived a long life and had a successful career - in my opinion her greatest works are among the greatest of the 20th century. She bridged genres and made it look easy. There was a hardness to her science fiction, such as a universe with no faster than light travel. But her stories were very much social ones, exploring ideas such as sexuality and gender roles, anarchy, capitalism, etc. Her Earthsea n...

What an amazing age we live in with NASA reporting the discovery of seven terrestrial planets orbiting the star TRAPPIST-1 with at least three and possibly all of the planets in its habitable zone. Now that doesn't necessarily mean any of the planets have life. In our solar system there are three planets in the habitable zone - Venus, Earth, and Mars. Obviously Earth is a pretty good place to live and living on Mars is something that might be feasible some day. Not so much Venus however. What is amazing is while the star is relatively close - 39.5 light years from Earth - it is well beyond our abilities at present to even come close to being able to make a trip. While at Warp 6 it's a little more than two months away the fastest spacecraft made by humanity thus far would take well over a hundred thousand years to get there. Bit of a bummer... I've rather enjoyed a lot of science fiction which treats the laws of physics realistically and still manages to t...

I'm binging my way through The Expanse  right now. I've not read the books the series is based on but I've added them to my reading list. The very short version is settlement of the solar system has begun, with Mars colonized and a rival to the UN of Earth and the Moon while the asteroid belt is a place that gets exploited for its resources. And the political situation of the solar system is getting rather explosive. One of the things I like about The Expanse  is it is hard science fiction but it doesn't bore the viewer. Ships have gravity based on their acceleration - if they're not accelerating the crew is in freefall. On a spinning colony, poured water does not drop straight down but is affected by the Coriolis effects of the spinning. Characters don't spend time discussing the complexities of orbital mechanics. I'd love to see a science fiction RPG that pulls this off without making players and GMs cry. Games like XXVc, GURPS Space, and Travell...

Mars with an Arctic Ocean, Image by NASA The internet got some scientific excitement yesterday with NASA's announcement of discovering evidence of water on Mars. This got me thinking to science fiction set in our own solar system - primarily in RPGs. It's not a particularly common setting, especially once you remove retro style games which focus on a pulpier version of the solar system such as Space: 1889 and Rocket Age . Those are wonderful games, but I'm talking games set in a slightly harder setting. Off the top of my head, I can think of a few - many of which I've minimal familiarity with. The one I know best is probably TSR's old XXVc RPG , published in the late 80s and early 90s. It gets a fair amount of negative attention, largely due, I suspect, to the fact that heirs of the John F. Dille, creators of Buck Rogers, were in control of TSR and dictated this game be made. With that caveat, I do feel it to have been an unappreciated game - looking at the ...

The Left Hand of Darkness   I first discovered Ursula K. Le Guin in my last semester at UConn, in the first half of 1994. I'd met almost all of my engineering requirements, needing two computer classes - compilers and graphics. I also needed some additional credits and it turned out they could be in literally anything. So I rounded my college experience out with classes in racquetball (yes I got a credit to play racquetball!), dinosaurs, and science fiction. Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed was one of the works we covered in our science fiction class. I absolutely loved it. The entire class actually proved to be rather influential for me - it introduced me to various science fiction movements, an introduction to fanzines, exposure to early debates on the proper term for science fiction, and even an introduction to the "slash" fiction of the 1970s. It was a great class - I was disappointed I never had the opportunity to take the class the professor taught in the f...

HP Lovecraft (from wikimedia) I've been following some of the debate around the World Fantasy Award trophy for various forms of fiction being a bust of HP Lovecraft. The controversy seems to have taken off when Nnedi OkoraforNigerial-American Nnedi Okorafor one the award for best novel in 2011. Another writer,  Daniel Jose Older, began a petition for the bust to instead honor African-American writer Octavia Butler. Why the controversy? As it turns out, Lovecraft was a racist. I would say he was one even beyond the standards of his time, a far from enlightened time, which saw the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan (an organization he professed to admiring). You can sense his fear of corruption from mixing of the races throughout his works. "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", probably my favorite Lovecraft work, is a particular example of this, with interbreeding between humans and Deep Ones. I'll let one of Lovecraft's poems speak for itself: On the Creation of Niggers...

(Warning - there be spoilers for the movie Prometheus as this is more a discussion than a proper review.) As I mentioned previously, I saw Ridley Scott's Prometheus over the weekend. I've long been a fan of the Alien  series of movies (though for some reason my parents didn't take me when I was seven years old to see the original when it first came out. Going through high school and college I was a fan of the Dark Horse Comics various spinoff series (which manage to get more and more invalidated with every new release, though they are still well worth reading in their own right). The nasty chest-bursting xenomorphs from the series inspired tons of creations in my science fiction gaming - I added my own xenomporph's to my FASA Star Trek game, coming up with the idea of the critters being biological weapons. So, what of Prometheus?  Despite clearly taking place in the same Alien universe, it is not truly an Alien movie. A variation of the familiar Alien xenomorph ...