Bookpost #3

Illustration by Reiko Murakami for "The Worldless," from Lightspeed

 

As I finish off my reviews of last year's reading, I'm breaking things into groups, both because they happen to be neatly divisible according to little themes and because three of them are short-story collections and two-thirds of this post will be me yammering about all those stories in one big jumble.

The Incal (Alejandro Jodorowsky and Jean Giraud)

The Colossus (Sylvia Plath)

Bright Dead Things (Ada Limón)

One comic book and two poetry collections that I've read before and return to for comfort or inspiration. The Incal is usually more appealing for the astounding Moebius art than the Looney Tunes plot half cribbed from Dune, but I actually found myself appreciating the latter this time. I've bought a couple tarot decks since I last reread the book, and knowing a little about the tarot and the Fool's Journey made the story a lot richer and the seemingly one-dimensional characters legible as archetypes and signposts along John's path.

As for poetry, well, I'm a sap and a basic bitch. I love “The Conditional,” I don't care what anybody says. “State Bird,” “Drift,” “Roadside Attractions with the Dogs of America”—lots of great Limón, and if a bunch of them are schmaltzy and sentimental and extra, well, we all deserve to be a little schmaltzy and sentimental and extra sometimes. Plath, of course, was a colossus herself, and this is some of her best work: “Night Shift,” “The Eye-mote,” “Departure,” “The Bull of Bendylaw,” “Mushrooms,” “A Winter Ship.” Some of these lines and fragments will rattle around my head every day as long as I live. “Blameless as daylight I stood looking…”

 

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)

The Empusium (Olga Tokarczuk)

Two short novels, new to me, by authors I know and love. One old, one new, both excellent. Both creepy, mysterious fun, and both told by memorably weird (but heartrendingly believable) unreliable narrators. Secrets, sinister rural locals, haunted places. Read them both, and if you haven't read The Magic Mountain, don't let that stop you from enjoying The Empusium; there are some little jokes and riffs and references you'll miss, but nothing essential. (But do read The Magic Mountain, too.)

 

Too Like the Lightning (Ada Palmer)

Blindsight (Peter Watts)

Two chunky contemporary science fiction novels that Reddit loves but I don't. (Lesson learned: Don't get SF book recs from Reddit.)

Palmer and Watts are both obviously brilliant people, and there's a lot to like in these books (especially the alien life Watts imagines), but I don't believe either of them understands human beings very well (I know Watts, with all his enthusiasm for evolutionary psychology, doesn't). The dialogue in both is unnatural beyond bearing; the characters are difficult to differentiate from one another except by their stations and the trappings thereof. (And the narrators, in stark contract to Jackson's and Tokarczuk's, are unreliable in a showy, overwrought, unconvincing way.)

Both novels feature impossibly gifted people doing inconceivably consequential things, which has been done to death in SF for at least a century now. Watts at least has the excuse of having his cast be the crew of a spaceship far from Earth, whereas Palmer's narrative takes place on Earth among billions and yet is driven, in nearly every respect down to the smallest details, by the actions of a dozen or so John Galts. Spare me! Let me read about regular people doing regular human things, please!

Setting aside the tedious Richard Dawkins and Ayn Rand of it all, and in spite of the authors' evident intellectual gifts, both novels revolve around unsatisfying ideas. The thesis Watts presents in Blindsight (that consciousness is maladaptive, an evolutionary dead end that makes humans unfit for survival) is silly, and the evidence he invents to support it—in the striking absence of any at all in the real world—is sillier. If Palmer has a thesis beyond “the Enlightenment was cool and important,” I don't have the patience to slog through three sequels and find out what it is (which also means I may never know whether the characters' unseemly obsession with race and gender in an ostensibly post-racial, post-gender world served some later narrative purpose).

 

Never Whistle at Night (eds. Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr.)

The Best of World SF: Volume 2 and The Best of World SF: Volume 3 (ed. Lavie Tidhar)

My disappointment with The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 did not deter me: I finished the year with a whole lot more short genre fiction. And a lot of it was great, and refreshingly different from what I'm used to! (I've linked below to those stories first published in online magazines; holler if you see any I missed that are freely available.)

North American SF authors are, and have for a long time now been, preoccupied with dystopian and post-apocalyptic themes—climate disaster, totalitarianism, a creeping anti-Enlightenment. Those are entirely sensible things for North Americans (and everybody else) to be worried about, but it does sometimes feel like we're going in circles, retracing our steps in the paths laid down by Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and others decades ago. (On the other hand, Palmer and Watts are, if not exactly Pollyannas, certainly techno-optimists in a material sense—both of the above-panned novels feature societies that have arrested, or at least adapted to, climate change and that represent at least somebody's idea of utopia—and look how far that got them with me. You just can't win.)

Colonialism casts a long shadow over these stories, nearly all of them told by writers from outside what used to be called “the First World” or by Indigenous authors in the United States and Canada. They're thinking about the history of colonialism, its legacy, the scars it left behind, and the new forms it has taken and threatens to take. Many of them are thinking about the climate, too, but in ways contingent on colonial history. Where many First World fictions imagine a universal apocalypse or near-apocalypse—a world in which every human, or nearly even human, dies, and where every existing society is overthrown (and we do get a bit of that here, as in the charming “Old People’s Folly” by Austrian author Nora Schinnerl, one of the few Western Europeans in either volume; not to pick on Schinnerl, but it's tempting to read in the Western preoccupation with universal apocalypse an inability to imagine a future in which Western hegemony is displaced)—a lot of writers from once-colonized places see in the crisis “merely” a worsening of what's already bad, a noose tightening around the Global South and the most vulnerable in the “developed” world. Climate disaster means privation, war, hunger, migration, dispossession, displacement. These themes dominate the volumes edited by Tidhar, interspersed or overlapping with the theme that dominates Never Whistle at Night: reckoning with genocide and cultural vandalism. Resentment, desire for revenge, regret and yearning for traditions forgotten or effaced, and hope for cultural renewal are especially evident here among the work of Native American, African, and Southeast Asian writers.

There are also just a lot of fun, inventive genre ideas in these volumes. “The Substance of Ideas” by Clelia Farris (translated by Rachel S. Cordasco) in World SF Vol. 2 and “Catching the K Beast” by Chen Qian (translated by Carmen Yiling Yan), “Two Moons” by Elena Pavlova (translated by Kalin M. Nenov and Elena Pavlova), and “Symbiosis Theory” by Choyeop Kim (translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort) in Vol. 3 all have wonderfully weird alien life. “Salvaging Gods” by Jacques Barcia, “The Clay Child” by Dilman Dila, and “Between the Firmaments” by Neon Yang in Vol 2.; “Behind Her, Trailing Like Butterfly Wings” by Daniela Tomova, “Act of Faith” by Fadzlishah Johanabas, “My Country is a Ghost” by Eugenia Triantafyllou, and “Ootheca” by Mário de Seabra Coelho in Vol. 3; and “Uncle Robert Rides the Lightning” by Kate Hart and “Eulogy of a Brother, Resurrected” by Carson Faust in Never Whistle treat divinity and spirituality in various interesting ways (some touching, some thought-provoking, some unsettling). “The Regression Test” by Wole Talabi, in Vol. 2, is one of the best stories about AI I've read in a long time—and God knows I've read a lot of them.

“The Farctory” by K.A. Teryna (translated by Alex Shvartsman) in Vol. 2; “The Worldless” by Indrapramit Das and “Echoes of a Broken Mind” by Christine Lucas, in Vol. 3, and “Capgras” by Tommy Orange in Never Whistle are, I think, the very best of the bunch. Also memorable or powerful or just plain fun: “At Desk 9501” by Frances Ogamba, “Dead Man, Awake, Sing to the Sun!” by Pan Haitian (translated by Joel Martinsen), and “Waking Nydra” by Samit Basu in Vol. 2; “The Foodie Federation’s Dinosaur Farm” by Luo Longxiang (translated by Andy Dudak), “I Call Upon the Night as Witness” by Zahra Mukhi, and “Where the Trains Turn” by Pasi Ilmari Jääskeläinen (translated by Liisa Rantalaiho) in Vol. 3; and “Navajos Don't Wear Elk Teeth” by Conley Lyons and “Heart-Shaped Box” by Kelli Jo Ford in Never Whistle. And I should give a special shout to the aforementioned “Old People’s Folly” by Nora Schimmerl and “Hunger” by Phoenix Boudreau in Never Whistle, both of which I believe were debut stories, and both of which are impressive.

These books aren't perfect—there are some clunkers in all three, particularly in Never Whistle, and all three are plagued (as it seems everything is these days, when editors don't edit and proofreaders have all been fired) by typos. I'm definitely richer for having read them, though. I picked up a few things that are going to go straight into my SWN campaign, and I've got a long list of authors whose work I'll be looking out for. I've already picked up (and am greatly enjoying) Wole Talabi's Convergence Problems!

Flyover Country: Chapter 6

"Exodus" by Sparth

 

Continued, incredibly belatedly, from Chapter 5. It's a good thing our campaign moves slowly, because I am way behind on this! Thank goodness for my semi-decent note taking.

* * *

Having extorted a thousand credits from poor bewildered Orlando Ilunga and decided not to throw him to the Najeeb-syndicate wolves, at least for the time being, the crew hastily fills Quora's hold with cargo (more on that later), blasts off from Freeport, and heads out of the Betharan system for the first time ever. Transit downtime means opportunities to study the data they pulled from the terraforming facility (Mustang identifies all the sites on Morrow climatically likely to grow delicious truffles), the culinary arts (Sarai potters around in the galley), and each other (we learn that Roman has siblings; we learn absolutely nothing else about them or him). Orlando they leave stewing in his bunk (there are six on the ship and BQ has opted to eschew the use of one, preferring to sleep in the pilot's seat).

Quora arrives in Marquez, the outermost system in the Commonwealth of Free Worlds, around midday on the 11th. An encrypted message from Leila Pak awaits the crew. She explains the terms of their ship lease, their working relationship with ValuDyne, their company's merchant license (including that they're not bonded for travel outside of hazard level-0 and level-1 regions, as defined by the Commonwealth Ministry of Public Safety), and her expectations regarding the crew's availability for intelligence-gathering tasks; she also directs them to her office in the city of Satu Mare on the planet Rustam. Her tone is chipper, and she's clearly excited about the opportunity to meet the crew in person (especially Mustang). She's arranged transit and landing permits and a berth in Satu Mare.

Even with all their figurative paperwork sorted out by IRIS, the process of entering the Commonwealth and going through customs is time-consuming; traffic is heavy, and several ships are in the queue ahead of them. They are routed to Sarkar Station, where a punctilious customs officer logs the ship's registration, business, flight plan, crew and passengers, and cargo (confirmed with a scan). As they wend their way through Commonwealth bureaucracy, news arrives from Betharan with the next several ships to drill into Marquez: Gang warfare in the Collines, a scandal in the Najeeb organization, a territorial push by the Bautistas, and so forth. Nothing about the PCs, Manny, or Orlando, at least not by name.

Once they're clear of Sarkar, with their flight path down to Satu Mare preapproved thanks to Leila, things speed up, and by the afternoon of the 12th, they've made planetfall. More news—of the latest turns in the emerging Penrose Crisis—reaches them shortly before they set down.

* * *

Together with Gombad, Marjan, and Opis, Rustam is one of the four signatory worlds of the Commonwealth Charter. It's the most Earth-like of the four, but that it's saying much; it isn't nearly as lush as Morrow. Rustam's seasons are harsh, water is scarce away from the shallow equatorial seas, and agriculture is a challenge. Large stretches of the planet are covered in steppe grasses rooted shallowly in weak soil; elsewhere, bare desert prevails.

Still, the air is breathable and, with irrigation, crops can be grown throughout the lower latitudes. Consequently, and in stark contrast to the other three major Commonwealth worlds, Rustam's population is widely dispersed; whereas nearly all of the population of Gombad, Marjan, and Opis is concentrated in a handful of densely populated urban areas, and the largest settlement on each is home to tens of millions, Rustam has hundreds of settlements, the largest of which are home to only a few million people each. Being less dependent on the state for the most basic of necessities has given rise to an independent, somewhat recalcitrant character among the Rustamese people.

Whereas Gombad, Marjan, and Opis bring the Commonwealth material advantages, particularly production capacity (food and medical technology; starships and astronautic equipment; and arms, tools, and consumer goods, respectively), Rustam's contributions have always been less tangible. The planet is a center of academic and cultural power, home to the Commonwealth's finest universities and some of its most popular entertainers. Tradition holds that, in the days before the Scream, Rustam was the administrative capital of the fledgling Sector.

Animal husbandry is better established here than plant agriculture. The Rustamese taste for red meat is seen as something of a cultural oddity on the other Commonwealth worlds (some Marjanis do raise goats and sheep, but eat their meat sparingly). Some wheat is cultivated, as are grapes; bread is another Rustamese peculiarity, but wine is a significant export.

* * *

The crew's first order of business in Satu Mare is to meet Leila, receive codebooks and other spycraft materials (encryption keys, manuals, etc.) from her, and get briefed on several situations IRIS would appreciate a low-profile look into:

• The Rustamese livestock company Enderlein & Sons has long been rumored to be hiding a huge hoard of pretech from the authorities. Probably baseless, says Leila, but do put some feelers out while you're planetside, see if anybody bites on the wares you're offering. Could be a straw buyer for Enderlein, or somebody who has or can establish a connection to Enderlein's pretech operations, if they exist.
• Pretech cultists are always a nuisance on Marjan, but they mostly confine their activities to scrabbling around in the dirt planetside. There seems to have been some infiltration of the workforce at the Marjani Arsenal's orbital works lately; could be nothing, could be they're making some kind of move. Leila wants them to put out feelers there too, and make it known that they'd be interested in buying as well as selling (ship parts, weapons).
• Rustamese separatists are plotting to bomb government offices at Port Kyungu. Leila doesn't need the crew to do anything about it, just a heads up.
• Foxglove Pharmaceuticals is a Gombad-based company owned by Perez-Enciso Capital Management (PECM). There are reports that they're using a secret lab on the PECM-owned station above Morrow, Lopez Ring, to conduct illegal experiments. The first of the aforementioned cargoes the crew took on in Freeport are plants grown on Morrow that provide raw materials for drugmaking (daffodils, poppies, borage, echium, etc.). Leila asks the crew to shop the drug components around, see if anybody from Foxglove bites and whether they can make any kind of connections to supply their operations on Lopez on their way back to Betharan later.

There are protests going on all over Satu Mare; Leila explains that there are always protests going on somewhere in pretty much any Rustamese city—the Rustamese love protesting, marching, going on strike, occasionally rioting—but this is an unusually intense period. There's a “Day of Indignation”: protests against the anticipated annexation of Morrow, against the draft, in favor of at least two different separatist movements, against the Orthodox Church, against PECM, and related to some relatively minor local issues, like working conditions at local universities. Mostly a unified expression of displeasure with the Commonwealth and other institutions, but there are some major fault lines among the protestors. Nothing to worry about, just be aware and stay alert.

When it's the PCs' turn to ask Leila questions, BQ pipes up. He knows of a trafficker in antiquities who operates from Rustam, somebody who might be able to give the crew a lead toward alien ruins or interesting artifacts—a fellow by the name of Nobu Stephanidis. Can Leila direct them to him?

She can. He's 16 hours away by high-speed rail, though, in the city of Porto Seguro; if the crew wants to fly rather than take a train, a similar amount of time or longer will be taken up by filing flight plans, securing landing permits, and whatnot. (They'll take the train.)

At this point, the crew splits up, with Sarai leading one group to arrange some commodity transactions (including a successful sale of those drug precursors they bought on Morrow—they make a tidy 10k credit profit—and the purchase of some ludicrously expensive wine, a bottle of which Batias promptly steals) while Roman and the others take the tram out to Satu Mare National University of Engineering (SMNU). Among the commodity brokers, Sarai connects with a man by the name of Danus Ragar, who might be able to find them a job shipping something to Lopez Ring on their return to Morrow. Roman, meanwhile, has an in at SMNU with Dr. Abdul Lei, a geoengineering professor who's able to offer them some potential leads on selling their pretech stuff and their terraforming data.

SMNU isn't the only institute of higher education in Satu Mare, though, and the whole crew soon reconvenes at another: Philip Asuni College of Science and Technology (PACST). Here, Roman is on a personal vendetta against a scientific rival (i.e., he wants to yell at somebody who wrote a journal article he thinks was stupid), but Sarai is still wheeling and dealing.

* * *

The second item the crew loaded in Freeport? A hundred pallets of Hoop Cola.

See, Sarai (whose player took the Henchkeeper focus) is always on the lookout for lost souls and hard-luck cases she might bring into her orbit. She met Hoop Barrett in a karaoke bar in Freeport; he was drinking away his sorrows after the business venture he poured his heart, soul, and life's savings into—the eponymous Hoop Cola, a carbonated beverage flavored with gentian root extract—was ruined when a larger competitor flooded the market with a cheaper alternative. Sarai is also always on the lookout for business deals, of course, and the opportunity to score a whole warehouse full of high-quality knockoff Moxie was too good for her to pass up.

And now it's time for that wise investment to pay off. Gentian-root soft drinks may be old hat on Morrow, but on Rustam? An exotic luxury import. The crew laid the groundwork for Hoop Cola's conquest of the Commonwealth at the Satu Mare spaceport, luring several security guards into an impromptu sharpshooting competition with Mustang, passing out free Hoop Colas to the spectators and awarding a case of the stuff to the runner-up and a whole pallet to the winner. The town is abuzz.

Now Sarai switches tacks. An exotic luxury import? Why not a performance-enhancing sports drink? While Roman is berating poor Dr. Isabel Johar in the biochemistry department, Sarai buttonholes PACST's athletic director and spins some nonsense about the curative properties of gentian root and Hoop Cola's proprietary blend of high-quality electrolytes. She secures a contract: 150 credits per one-ton pallet for the entire cargo, with a standing resupply contract at 125 per ton. Now she just needs a local liaison. She recruits another lost soul—Jenny Beck, an unhappy PACST engineering student on the verge of dropping out—and puts her to work as Hoop Cola's Satu Mare brand rep.

* * *

Next, it's off to Porto Seguro. After snoozing on the train while the dun plains of Rustam whip by outside, the crew splits up again. Sarai goes shopping for trade goods. Roman, troubled by a guilty conscience over the death of Donald Nunes, mulls over the possibility of establishing a Donald Nunes Memorial Track and Field Scholarship via their new contacts at PACST, and in the meanwhile decides to take Orlando under his wing and teach their not-quite-a-prisoner the rudiments of university-level chemistry.

Batias and Krissa follow their unerring instinct for trouble to a gun shop where, in a dark back room, the proprietor sells Batias a black-market thermal pistol, which Batias immediately uses to menace said shopkeeper. They wander around outside looking for food, try taking combat stims for fun (a half-dose each), smash the empty bottle of ludicrously expensive wine Batias has been toting around all day, and get scolded by a couple of public security officers, who issue each of them a 10-credit citation for littering and public nuisance. Batias vows never to pay.

Mustang and BQ head off to meet Nobu, who turns out to be a gruff and very cagey old man who's loath to give up any information without a quid pro quo. He does, however, have some work the crew might do to get in his good graces, if they happen to be on their way to Opis…

Apertures

Red Tree, Yellow Sky by Georgia O'Keeffe

There's an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts here in Boston (organized by the San Diego Museum of Art and now making its way around the country) that brings together a great number of works by Georgia O’Keeffe and Henry Moore, two artists I'm pretty familiar with but whom it would never have occurred to me before to connect. As it turns out, the curators found some rather striking parallels in their lives and work, one of which is pleasingly highlighted by the exhibition catalog (a Moore sculpture shot against a blue background on the front cover nearly recreates an O'Keefe on the back).

O'Keeffe and Moore weren't just fascinated by a lot of the same things as each other, though; they were fascinated by a bunch of things that tend to preoccupy folks in our 21st-century indie RPG world: skulls, ancient ruins, desolate landscapes, megaliths, spooky holes, weird little guys. They both had a sense of, and an eye for, the fantastic, and ways of turning mundane things into exotic or alien ones—blowing delicate little bird bones up to a thousand times their natural size and casting them in solid metal, or carving them from a tree trunk; transforming a snail shell into a mountain or a knot in wood into a mysterious portal.

All of which means that a trip to the art museum ends up being pretty good campaign inspo. Inscrutable artifacts, alien landscapes, strange creatures, wondrous magics—it's all here.

Elephant Skull by Henry Moore

Egg Form: Pebbles by Moore

Head of UNESCO Reclining Figure by Moore

Maquette for Atom Piece by Moore

Pond in the Woods by O'Keeffe

Leaf Motif, No. 2 by O'Keeffe

Black Place I by O'Keeffe

Red Hill and White Shell by O'Keeffe

States of Exception

Detail of Frontal Self-Portrait by Käthe Kollwitz

I was an odd little kid, obsessed with the Second World War, and I grew up into a college student still preoccupied with it, with the ideologies that animated it, with its attendant disasters and atrocities, and with the era in general. I wrote an undergraduate thesis about Zionism and Black nationalism. I read and thought a lot about the Holocaust.

Consequently, I learned, from a too-early age, that Americans do not want to think deeply, or much at all, about how and why these things, particularly the Holocaust, happened. The narrative I encountered, over and over, was that Hitler was a singularly bad man and the Germans a singularly, peculiarly obedient people (this was a great vein of humor for Boomers to mine in the 80s and 90s). It could probably only happen there, and with him at the helm. And it definitely could not happen here, because we Americans love liberty too much. We’re too independent minded, too skeptical of authority, too rebellious, too big-hearted.

This thinking persists today, decades later. American exceptionalism has become (if it was ever otherwise) tautological. We can’t be authoritarian, because we’re free. We can’t be undemocratic—we invented democracy! Freedom and democracy inhere in our land, in us, in our sacred laws. The first thing Hitler did, American conservatives darkly intimate, was take away German citizens’ guns. And they, the obedient sheep, let it happen! Not me, they say. No Gestapo man would come and take my guns away. They wouldn’t take my neighbors—I wouldn’t let them. They’d never take over in the first place. I wouldn’t allow it. We wouldn’t. At the first whiff of totalitarianism, we’d buck them.

In point of fact, of course, all of this is untrue, starting with the “Hitler took away their guns” thing. Weimar Germany had very strict firearms regulations; when the Nazis took power, they did tighten these restrictions even further for Jewish citizens and other enemies, but they loosened them for Party members. As the man said, “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

It should go without saying, but it doesn’t: The vast majority of Germans did not experience the Nazi regime as whatever you think of when you hear the word “totalitarian.” The boot did not stamp on all faces equally—it stamped on very few at all, in the big scheme of things, at least until the war started. 1930s Germany wasn’t 1984; it wasn’t even the postwar German Democratic Republic (i.e., East Germany).

Unlike the Stasi, the Gestapo did not have the manpower, the resources, or the inclination to establish a surveillance state. They did not spy on “regular people” (i.e., apolitical or pro-Nazi ethnic Germans). If you belonged to the compliant majority, they did not take your guns, or read your mail, or pay any attention to you at all (unless perhaps you were denounced by a neighbor or a jealous spouse, and even then they paid a lazy, indifferent kind of attention).

Even if you weren’t particularly compliant, they left you alone as long as you kept your dissent to yourself. The state was willing to accommodate anybody who didn’t belong to one of the minorities it sought to destroy and who did not actively obstruct its efforts. Many people—many good people, including many beloved artists and writers (like Käthe Kollwitz above)—went into “internal exile.” They retreated to the countryside or walled themselves up in their apartments and disengaged from Nazi society. Nazi society condemned them and denigrated them but left them alone, by and large.

For the vast majority of Germans, even most of those passive dissidents in internal exile, there was no reign of terror (not until the bombs starting falling, anyway). The Gestapo weren’t a sinister death squad—they were just federal police. Raids happened, people were snatched from the streets or shot in their homes, but so what? That’s what happens to criminals, terrorists, vagrants, illegal immigrants, and other unreliable elements. Whether you approve or not, it’s happening somewhere else, to someone else, and it doesn’t seem exceptional or extraordinary. You might not agree with all the new laws, but they are the laws now, and this is just law enforcement at work.

All of which is to say: Not only could it happen here, it already has. Totalitarianism isn’t equally perceptible to all. The Jim Crow South was totalitarian for Black people; for many white people, it was idyllic, practically utopian. Contemporary American life—even our present idyll under Biden, before the storm—is authoritarian in the extreme for undocumented immigrants, people subject to carceral control, the very poor, and many others. And it will get much worse, long before there are soldiers on your street or bombs falling on your roof.

What Is Scary?

Exodus concept art by Archetype Entertainment

You'd be forgiven for assuming that I'm posting this because it's Halloween. You'd also be forgiven, if you've been keeping up with my social/travel calendar, for assuming that I'm posting this, belatedly, because I attended the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival last week and have been thinking extra hard about horror movies. But no, I'm posting this because I just watched about half of a YouTube video about some videogame I'd never heard of before today. The brain works in mysterious ways.

See, my reluctant participation in the annual rite of Star Citizen remembrance involved a bunch of YouTube watching, after which the algorithm was like, oh, you like ambitious science fiction videogames with no release date in sight? Check this out! It's called Exodus. It's got a bunch of former BioWare devs at the helm! And some novelist you've never heard of but whom people seem to like is involved! So is Matthew McConaughey, for some reason! In fact, here's Wooderson himself narrating some spooky lore about the game's bad guys. This all seems like it should be more or less up my alley.

But here I am, just a couple minutes in…rolling my eyes?

It's not just that it's not scary. There's a lot going on here that seems lazy. They're called the Mara Yama, for one thing. Big “Just give me Satan, but make it Buddhist” energy. The visual design of the ship in the opening shot is cool, but haven't we seen the rest of this before? A little Giger, a little Doom, a little Halo, a little Firefly. A heaping helping of Warhammer 40k. What if the Dark Eldar were also the Flood? Is that anything?

(Oh, remember how everybody in Star Citizen is some white dude named Ernst or Steve? A cursory survey of the Exodus site and marketing materials turns up characters named Jurgen, Edith, Kendall, Torrance, Evan, Max, and Tom. At least the space monsters are Indian!)

Of course there's nothing new under the sun, and if you can put a fresh, well-crafted spin on some beloved old trope, more power to you. (On the other hand, there's deja vu all over the marketing materials. Haven't I seen these “awakened bears” before? Weren't uplifted bears in StarDrive? And in Starfinder? Haven't we done “disposable workers engineered to thrive in harsh environments” a hundred times now? Haven't I seen this concept art before, in Mass Effect, Interstellar, Prometheus, Destiny?) But if it's not original, it has to be good. If it's supposed to be the scariest thing in the universe, it should be scary. This isn't scary.

Scaring players in videogames is hard. Startling them is easy enough, which is why jumpscares in dimly lit corridors are a staple of horror games. Rattling them requires a little more finesse, but is also reliably achievable, hence effects that impair the player's vision, hearing, or movement likewise being staples. Actually instilling fear in them? That's a tall order.

Fear is the expectation of danger, of pain, of harm. You can't cause (literal) pain to a player via their digital avatar, and your ability to harm that avatar is mechanically constrained. Few games punish a player more severely for failing to avoid or overcome danger than by taking her time (making her start over from a saved game or a checkpoint), and those that do tend to compound that injury only by removing some accumulated reward (money, experience points, items)—which is, at the end of the day, just time transmuted into another form.

Rather than fear of harm, the player is more apt to experience anxiety about avoiding frustration (or, if the stakes are low enough, just sheer frustration). Even when a single-player videogame features what is presented as irreversible harm—the ability to lose irreplaceable items, for instance, or the permanent death of the character—it's usually only an extreme version of the same: you can do the whole thing over. Once again, you've only lost time. There are a few interesting exceptions to this rule, like the infamous art game Lose/Lose, but they're few and far between.

In a tabletop game, of course, everything is different. Not only is the prevailing TTRPG convention to accept loss, change, and character death and incorporate those things into the shared narrative, but it would scarcely be possible to retrace one's steps with perfect fidelity as in a videogame (whether returning to a “checkpoint” or “saved game” or starting the entire narrative over and trying to do everything the exact same way). Thus you can scare a TTRPG player by threatening their character (you can even cause them physical pain, or something close to it, by harming or threatening their character, so…you know, be careful). But you can also scare a player by threatening another player's character, or even (especially!) an NPC.

It's a lot harder to do that in a videogame, which is narratively rigid and usually incapable of reacting or adapting to the player's actions in diverse, believable ways. It's not impossible, though. Videogames can often wrench more emotion out of the lives and deaths of minor, plot-inessential characters (I'm thinking of Paul Denton in the original Deus Ex, poor Miria in Fallout 2, a half-dozen people in Disco Elysium) than they can out of threats to people the player is being railroaded into saving (or trying and failing to save). Part of what makes Disco Elysium so great is that although you, the player, don't really have any control over what happens in “the main plot,” neither does your character. You're not being railroaded into the unearned drama of glorious success or harrowing failure, you're just stumbling through a situation too complex and too far advanced to be resolved by one cop's (or two cops') heroics. Most of what you can do to help or harm is just little stuff around the margins.

All of which is to say that while the Mara Yama would be terrifying if they existed in real life, hard as that is to imagine, and might be terrifying in the hands of a novelist talented enough to bridge that imaginative gap, they can't hope, as videogame adversaries, to be much more than an annoyance. An action-adventure game's avatar is fearless; what harm can fear-eating monsters do to him? They wouldn't even be good TTRPG antagonists; there's something both too circular and not interactive enough about “they're scary because they torture you and consume your fear and pain.” A scary enemy needs to actively threaten the things the players care about: their friends, their reputations, their social status. Maybe their magic swords, once in a while.

And videogames? Permadeath can definitely be scary, especially in dynamic settings—multiplayer survival shooters create some incredibly tense moments. But in single-player games, it's hard to scare players more than you frustrate them. SOMA is probably the scariest narrative game I can think of, and it's scary not because of anything that adversaries do to your avatar, but because it uses the model of the videogame avatar to force you to think about your own mortality, your own ephemerality, your own ontological contingency.