Check Check

 

There was a conversation on the r/osr subreddit the other day about “eschewing ability checks”—the author wanted advice about how to kick the habit of calling for checks, operating under the assumption that correct OSR practice is to roleplay everything and, well, eschew checks. Some people did just say, “Yeah, don't roll checks,” but the response was varied. The top comment, though perhaps incomplete, is excellent advice:

I call for an ability check when I am on the fence about whether something should happen or not. […] if I'm torn, if I really can't decide for myself, I let the ability check decide.

Randomness and unpredictability are a big part of the fun of a game, but although the GM hopefully creates a lot of unpredictability and (seeming) randomness for the players, the players don't necessarily generate the same for the GM. Particularly in trope-heavy genres like fantasy and SF, with the weight of generations of gaming and storytelling history bearing down on you, it's really easy to reach for the obvious or familiar, not just when developing a setting (vaguely Celtic elves, caves full of goblins, dwarves with Scottish accents) but also when responding to questions or uncertain situations on the fly.

Random tables help a lot. I'm running a Stars Without Number game for a bunch of 5e veterans (and a couple newbies) right now, and right from the start (sector creation, where you have to puzzle out head-scratchers like hundreds of millions of people living at a medieval technological level on a planet without an atmosphere, or the capital of a regional empire having a population of only a few hundred) it's taught me a lot about how much more engaging and exciting things are when you let the dice lead you away from your own reflexive inclinations. And as in setting and NPC creation, why not in the way the world and the NPCs respond to the player characters?

Yeah, I want my players to actually describe what they're doing, and I'm going to wave away checks that are just a complete waste of time—like, yes, you're searching the room for the hidden thing you know is in here somewhere, you're obviously going to find it given enough time—but whenever they propose something where the two (or more) possible outcomes present a real narrative fork in the road, even a very silly or trivial one, I turn to the dice instead of just picking the most logical, probable, or convenient outcome. I think that's what's missing from the comment I quoted at the top: Just not knowing whether something should happen isn't quite a high enough bar. Sometimes you have no idea what should happen, but it doesn't really matter either way. If the difference between success and failure in the check is your players getting a few more coins or having to fight five guys instead of six guys, yeah, don't bother with the check. Just make a decision by fiat, and you might as well err on the side of rewarding them for making the effort.

But if it's going to take the whole story in a different direction, even in a small way? If whatever results from this check will have ramifications for the rest of the campaign? That's cool. They want to take over the computer system and blast all the guards out of the airlocks? They want to convert the kobolds to their religion and persuade them to overthrow the dragon? They want to go completely off-script and, say, poison the governor and then replace him with a clone? Let them cook. Let the dice decide.

It's fun for smaller stuff too, even completely trivial things. One of my players wanted to make tiramisu from various imperishable synthetic crap in a spaceship's galley. Seems like a tall order, but her character had gone to culinary school at one point in her youth, so hey, why not just set a very high difficulty target and see what happens? And she nailed it. So now she's canonically a genius in the kitchen. Doesn't affect the story right now, but later? Of course it's going to come back in one way or another. And we are all the richer for it.

 

Till the Rusting of Guns

"Great blocks of manstone, built by people for people"

 

The Austrian Civil War ended 90 years ago today. I think really it was over in just a day or two; most of the fighting was in Vienna, where the Schutzbund (the leftist militia) held out for not much longer than 24 hours. Stephen Vincent Benét wrote an indelible poem about it, which I think about probably once a week most weeks, but more often in February.

"Red Vienna," the era of democratic socialist government which ended with the Civil War, was one of the great socialist success stories of the 20th century and left a mark on the city that even four years of fascist rule followed by seven years under the Nazis (and several under a rain of Allied bombs) couldn't erase, especially in the form of an astoundingly ambitious social-housing program. Today, Vienna is one of the most affordable, livable cities in the developed world in part thanks to that legacy: a majority of the population lives either in public housing in or government-subsidized cooperatives.

The Megadungeon of Tomorrow

 

Once again, I find myself thinking about THE LINE, the absurd megastructure the Saudis are erecting in the desert near the Red Sea. And yeah, they're actually doing it! They've dug much of the foundation pit. They're putting down pilings. It's happening.

No, they're never actually going to finish it, but we are going to end up with some kind of vast and trunkless ruin out there in the desert. Maybe the people of the future will get to explore it. In fact:

The Line is designed to be divided into 140 modules—each 200 meters wide, 800 meters long, and 500 meters high. Each module could house up to 80,000 people. The first five modules will be each be designed by a different architecture studio.

That…kinda sounds like a megadungeon. Actually, it really sounds like a megadungeon. So without further ado, here are some tables for exploring a deserted desert megastructure composed of modules approximately 200 by 800 by 500 meters, which once housed up to 80,000 people apiece.

* * *

This module of the megastructure is…

1. Unfinished, with wind-flayed tarps flapping raggedly over gaping holes. Building materials and construction equipment are piled all around.
2. Half ruined—just the skeletal superstructure remains in some places, while others are intact and still sealed off from the wilderness.
3. Rent open near ground level, letting the sand penetrate the broken interior.
4. Punctured higher above, allowing something from inside (a stream of snowmelt water, a riot of plant life, a noxious gas) to spill into the desert.
5. Weathered but unbroken, perhaps accessible through a door or vent where security systems have failed.
6. Immaculate, gleaming, reflective, and impenetrable. Try the next module.

 

The dominant animals in or around this module are…

1. Nothing. Just wind and ghosts.
2. Baboons, whose chattering, grunting, and barking create a constant din.
3. Striped hyenas, eerily silent, watching from every shadowy corner.
4. An innumerable horde of goats. The clatter of horns resounds regularly as bucks fight over mates. Goat shit is everywhere underfoot.
5. Vultures, which roost high above by the thousands. What can they all be eating?
6. Wolves, lean and cunning, who gather in small packs and spar over territory. There is an almost human wisdom in their eyes.
7. Snakes of all descriptions, basking in the sun or lying torpid in the shade. Might actually be jinn in serpent form.
8. Feral humans who answer to no language but their own.
9. Muscular four-armed apes with photosynthetic fur, escaped from a secret lab somewhere else in the ruins.
10. Lizard people with chameleonic skin and prehensile tongues. They didn't escape from a lab; they've always been here.

 

The ground-level and lower floors of this module…

1. Were a mixed-use community, with middle-class apartments, shopping, offices, schools, and more.
2. Constituted an immense automated factory, churning out weapons for export. Maybe the machines are still operable?
3. Were one huge self-aggrandizing exhibit about the genius of the megastructure's designers and the wisdom of its financiers. Lots of holograms.
4. Featured a panoptic security station, the hub of an endless network of cameras and recording devices. There's a beefy armory, too.
5. Was Venice-themed, with canals leading everywhere and no way to get around except by gondola.
6. Are stuffed with what mostly seems to be building-services machinery, but some of which serves no discernible purpose.
7. Were dedicated to power generation and transmission. The solar panels and wind turbines are long dead, but the battery banks still have juice.
8. Were a transit hub where a high-speed overland rail station met a cluster of vertical lifts and a small airport for E-VTOL aircraft.
9. Are a necropolitan labyrinth of niches containing millions of perfectly preserved human corpses. Who were they? What are they doing here?
10. Were a colossal convention center with vaulted ceilings and multiple theaters. All the trappings of the last convention are still here.
11. Contained a few of those secret labs that the carnivorous mushrooms and four-armed apes keep escaping from.
12. Were all just one vast warehouse for storing salt from the megastructure's desalinization systems.

 

The garden atrium in the middle of this module…

1. Is mostly dead, a half-petrified tangle of decaying logs, bone-dry tinder, and strangling vines.
2. Is completely overgrown, one contiguous vertical jungle through which you can barely see the platforms and walkways. Watch your step.
3. Has been overtaken by strange invasive plant (or fungal) life, perhaps escaped from one of the megastructure's many secret labs.
4. Is somehow operating exactly within parameters despite decades (or centuries) without any human input.
5. Was replaced with giant aquariums and pools, which hopefully haven't all sprung leaks.
6. Is largely taken up by a titanic theme park, including roller coasters several hundred meters high.
7. Contained a towering artificial mountain, half ski resort and half alpine-climate zoo. Watch out for snow leopards!
8. Is the only way to reach the upper floors; none of the elevators, trams, gondolas, or E-VTOL craft in this module are functional. Hope you aren't afraid of heights.

 

The upper floors of this module…

1. Were a mammoth business district. Angular towers of steel, glass, and marble rise above atria featuring austere fountains and abstract sculptures.
2. Were colonized by refugees from the lower levels, who rebuilt the whole structure as a warren of tiny homes and cramped alleys like Kowloon Walled City.
3. Were a sprawling recreational complex, including sports stadiums open to the sky.
4. Are covered with arcane symbols and incomprehensible messages scrawled in old blood, and scattered with the desiccated corpses of long-dead sacrificial victims.
5. Were either a high-concept mall or an enormous art installation; it's hard to tell. Lots of pedestals, plinths, dramatic lighting, and fake waterfalls.
6. Are a reason-defying maze of tunnels and corridors that somehow keep leading you back to the ground level, though you never descend.
7. Are a self-contained luxury community still inhabited by trapped, long-isolated elites who are living out a longer, even grimmer version of J. G. Ballard's High-Rise.
8. Are surmounted by a spire that stretches hundreds of meters beyond the roof of the megastructure, tapering to a single room just big enough for one person to sit in.
   
9. Are periodically visited by outsiders who land their VTOL aircraft on the roof and then do ruin-porn photoshoots and/or hunt poor people for sport.
10. Dissolve into a welter of gravity-defying concrete structures and geometric forms. Previous travelers have lashed some of them together with rope bridges.

 

If you search every nook and cranny of the module, you might find…

1. A literal Olympic-sized swimming pool filled two-thirds of the way up with gems and precious stones.
2. An improbably complete collection of game-worn Lionel Messi jerseys.
3. A Samsonite attaché case containing incontrovertible proof that Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone. (Nobody cares about this anymore except eccentric old history nerds, though.)
   
4. At least one magical lamp with a powerful jinni trapped inside. The jinni will grant you one wish. (You were expecting three? Don't be greedy.)
5. One 15-kiloton tactical nuclear warhead of French manufacture, 1974 vintage. Does it still work? Probably not. But who knows, give it a try!
   
6. A trove of arcane tomes long believed lost to posterity (and perhaps for the better).
7. A malign entity that knows your heart's deepest and most shameful desire. Unlike the jinni, it doesn't grant wishes; it just mocks you.
8. A vault containing 57% of all the South African Krugerrands ever minted.

 

The strangest thing about this whole module is…

1. How humid it is. You can barely breathe, the air is so thick.
2. The way the ambient light periodically changes color and intensity. Where is it even coming from?
3. The video projected on every blank surface and blasting silently from every screen: an unending loop of a man delivering an angry speech. 
4. The higher you go, the weaker gravity seems to become. You already felt about 20% lighter by the time you got inside the ground floor.
5. It smells like fresh bread. Everywhere there's something that should stink—a dead animal, rotting garbage—the bread smell just gets stronger.
6. The constant wailing, so faint that it seems like any other noise would drown it out. But you always hear it. It's always just loud enough.

Lore24: The Pale of Sanctuary

From "Terra" by Calder Moore

 

I bounced off Mastodon late last year, and I'm not really following these instructions to the letter, but the important thing is just writing a little something every day, right? That and sharing it with the world, which brings us to this post.

* * *

The Pale of Sanctuary is not a new idea, but developing it as a TTRPG setting is. I've been running a Stars Without Number game for the past few months using the default meta-setting—rolled up a sector, whipped up some factions, had a jolly good time detailing things far in excess of what was necessary—but of course the soul cries out for more. A bigger canvas! A unique science-fiction setting entirely of my old invention! All my favorite stuff and nothing I don't like! (On that note, I started writing about things I don't like in recent SF and a couple of my dislikes metastasized into an entire post of their own. Oops!)

So what do I want from a bespoke SF setting? I want it to be set extraordinarily far in the future, so that I can get as weird and wild as I want with human civilization. But I do want a recognizably human civilization, not a post-singularity hivemind. In fact, I don't really want to deal with advanced computer technology at all. Yet I do want terraforming, interstellar travel, massive orbital habitats, and things of that nature. How do I square that circle? A Dune-style cultural taboo against thinking machines!

What else? I want to try jettisoning some of the fantastical technology that's de rigueur in SF games. No artificial gravity, no faster-than-light travel or communication. I'm imagining zero-gravity combat with nets, darts, blades, and the like, and I'm imagining interplanetary societies that have to cope with years-long lag times when communicating, or trading, with their neighbors. Then I find myself backtracking a little: I still want some FTL travel to be possible, for the sake of being able to offer various different campaign types (and for the sake of mystery), I just want human society not to have mastered it. Massive objects of uncertain origin, with no human crew, course their way through parts of the Pale following constrained but not perfectly predictable courses, like riverboats steaming up and down a watercourse (except that instead of steaming, they're jumping from star to star in the blink of an eye). This River shifts and swells and shrinks and slows according to no pattern a human can ever fully discern. The riverboats resist any attempt to use them to violate causality, as well as any attempt to use them for major military operations.

Now, what sort of interstellar societies might be sustainable in a setting without (reliable, predictable) FTL? The really obvious one is a feudal empire, and (surprise!) I love Dune, so I'm sold already. It's also a great opportunity to subvert the idea of the totalitarian evil empire; in this empire, the left hand has no clue what the right hand is doing. Some nobles are good (some Miyazaki influence bleeds in here), some are bad, some are diligent, some are disinterested. The center cannot hold, etc. This also suggests an exotic counterpart: a society that labors, with great effort and at great cost, not to see its constituent parts diverge even across tens of light-years. A society obsessed with continuity and consensus, where change comes at an almost literally glacial pace. Part bucolic solarpunk degrowth utopia, part totalitarian communist surveillance state, with duty-bound commissars criss-crossing the spaceways fighting to keep everything, and everyone, in line.

Throw in a third, looser confederation, some independent planets, a deep history wherein the empire sprawled out from its heart to encompass nearly all the Pale, back when populations were smaller and laws less defined, only to convulse and contract and spit out offshoots. Accept that some things are placeholders and it's not all polished and perfect yet. Hardly anybody's going to read it anyway! Here's one month's work:

1. The knights of the empire (placeholder name?) and the commissars of the union (placeholder name) are similar, even mutually sympathetic figures, held up in their respective societies as paragons of honor and self-sacrifice (both groups are, of course, fallible and corruptible, much as each society would like to pretend otherwise), prepared to give up decades of their lives, maybe the entire length of their lives, to travel the stars and enforce the law. The law of the union is of course superficially quite distinct from that of the empire, but many of the fundamental principles are similar. Both are ultimately derived from the Rule, which is older than the empire itself.

2. The universal language promulgated by the First Emperor and now widespread throughout the empire, the union, and all the worlds of the River was derived, based, so the story goes, on the emperor's deep studies of ancient texts, from several prominent Indo-European languages (i.e., it's Anglo-Esperanto), and is written with a script, also carefully selected by the emperor, derived from Hangul.

3. The Dissentient Synod is an anticlerical, antimonarchic faith community that periodically crops up around the fringes of the empire.

4. Aaru is the green and pleasant world at the heart of the empire, a watery planet of low-lying continents and island chains, mighty rivers, and, at most latitudes, mild seasons marked by periodic heavy rainfall. It is quite hot in the tropics and temperate nearly all the way to the small polar icecaps; water is an omnipresent feature nearly everywhere, from vast marshlands to mangrove forests to shallow river valleys cutting through lush steppes.

5. In secret, wary of old taboos and prejudices, some scholars attempt to study the evidence of technological civilization in the space beyond the Pale, working to decipher the “language” of the Outsiders, if indeed that is what the strange, sporadic signals are, and to predict their motions and actions.

6. The confederation (placeholder name?) and the independent systems that defy the emperor's divine authority are known as the Recusant Worlds. Irredentist extremists apply this epithet to the union as well.

7. The noble dead of the empire lie in state in the Hall of Tears for a public mourning period commensurate with their rank.

8. Rumors persist of androids, synthetic beings that simulate human life perfectly. It is said that they were created in the distant past, during the Age of Strife or before, and can even reproduce as humans do; they are, some stories say, indistinguishable from humans down to the molecular level.

9. Some things are allowed on the River and some aren’t, but it’s never entirely clear what the restrictions are. Obvious military force is never permitted, but some traders are able to travel with modest quantities of weapons and others are blocked from shipping so much as a brace of rifles.

10. “Backwaters” are systems visited by the River so infrequently, or so inconsistently, that torchship travel is, on average, faster (assuming one can find crews willing to put up with it).

11. The Ministry of Concordance works to prevent political, legal, cultural, or any other kind of social drift among the far-flung worlds of the union; commissars from the Ministries of Concordance, Memory, and Safety (collectively, the Ministries of Coordination) typically travel together on decades-long tours of duty. Such a unit is called a troika.

12. The ancient laws of war put stiff restraints on the sorts of brutal tactics a knightly caste with access to outrageously powerful warships but without the means (or manpower) to invade and occupy densely populated planets might otherwise gravitate toward. Terrible crimes were committed during the Age of Strife, long ago.

13. Any military or police operation outside of one’s home star system means years spent away from home, maybe decades, and all without direct supervision. Unimpeachably loyal, highly effective soldiers are at a tremendous premium. They are generally promised great rewards and instilled with strong beliefs in the righteousness of their work, and their leaders are loath to risk them, or even send them away from their home ports, except when absolutely necessary.

14. The worlds of the empire, and many beyond, uphold the sacred rights of hospitium, including the obligation of nobles to provide hospitality to interstellar travelers (who are assumed to be, almost by definition, nobles themselves). This is a tremendous, and dangerous, privilege for those commissars and diplomats of the union who have occasion to travel beyond their own borders.

15. The ruling caste of the empire, or at least the tradition-minded among the high nobility, never trim their fingernails and rarely use their hands for any purpose except eating.

16. Various parahuman and epihuman clades exist in the Pale—populations who can be traced back to some deliberate, engineered split from the main human line, optimized for various environments (like gravity considerably higher or lower than human standard). Such tinkering with the human genome has long been forbidden by the Rule, but long-established clades are not regarded as aberrant.

17. The Inmost Houses of the empire are descended from the clans that backed the First Emperor during the Great Conjugation; the Utmost Houses are descended from those that opposed him. The Low Houses are descended from those who attempted, dishonorably, to remain neutral.

18. On the periphery of the union is an archipelago planet with beautiful calm seas and abundant life whose people live a mostly premodern life (albeit with access to modern medicine and the other rights afforded by their government).

19. Elsewhere on the union's periphery is a world of endless steppes; shallow, wide river valleys; broad deltas; and long, low lines of hills, where enormous storms boil up over the plains. The people, mostly farmers, live in low, sturdy homes half-buried in sod banks or hillsides.

20. Far out on the edge of the Pale is a wilderness planet honeycombed with sprawling concrete structures, some recognizable from their past purposes, others totally inscrutable, all overgrown.

21. Anchorite redoubts [pinched from Dan] are mysterious structures of widely varying form and size, having in common only that they drift in zero gravity or freefall and that they are, or at least seem to be, impenetrable. Some are found in asteroid belts, others orbiting barren planets, still others in deep space. They are occupied, it is thought, by humans or parahumans who in ancient times chose to remove themselves from the affairs of the greater galaxy for unknown reasons. None responds to communications, although some do show faint signs of activity, like venting waste heat.

22. An underground progressive movement in the union has taken up the slogan "continuity leads to destruction."

23. Near the edge of the Pale, a rarely contacted planet is scattered with mostly abandoned cities still ritually visited by the rural people descended from their onetime inhabitants.

24. On more than one world in the empire and union alike, rock-hewn cities crowd underground caverns, paraterraformed to be human-habitable below a pitiless surface.

25. Old and persistent tales tell of a certain order of Outsiders, or servitors of the Outsiders, who enter the Pale to judge the righteous and the wicked and to enforce the Rule. Opinion is fiercely divided as to whether these Arbiters are angels, demons, aliens, or something else entirely, if they even exist.

26. The highest principle in the empire and among most religious groups in the Pale is not "good" but "truth" (which is understood to mean, among other things, "loyalty" and "obedience"). Falseness and disloyalty are the most loathsome sins. "Wide is the gate and swift is the river that leads to Falsehood, and many go by it," however.

27. Imperial nomarchs (ruling nobles with circumplanetary or interplanetary fiefs) are ideally twins; one governs from the family's ancestral seat while the other, with a comitatus (a retinue of sworn companions) goes abroad as a knight.

28. “In the beginning, God created the dark and the light and all the heavens. He set the stars and planets in motion and spread life across the cosmos, and human beings were his greatest creation. And he made seven great angels to govern creation, and bestowed upon them wondrous powers and set many lesser orders of angels beneath them. But when he instructed these lieutenants to serve his favored children, there was dissent. The first and greatest of the seven, who was the right hand of God and is now become the Adversary, would not kneel before human beings, and rebelled against his Creator, and overthrew the throne of heaven.”

29. The emperor is widely believed to have access to the memories of all previous emperors, or to literally share a mind with all previous emperors, or in fact to still be the First Emperor, a deathless soul, millennia old, who simply migrates into a new body when their old one wears out.

30. Government in the union, at every level, is a representative consensus-based democracy with delegates chosen by sortition; being selected to participate in an interplanetary congress is a tremendous honor but also a life-changing burden.

31. In the absence of any kind of immediate responsiveness or alacrity on the part of delegates, a lot of the day-to-day business of maintaining order in the union and responding to people’s concerns falls to the vast bureaucracy.

Unsavory Patterns in Contemporary Science Fiction

It's me, hi / I'm the problem, it's me

 

1.

We lay our scene in an all-powerful empire of the far future. (We will soon understand that the empire, founded on and sustained by slavery, torture, mass murder, and stranger, even more heinous crimes, is irredeemably evil.) A longtime soldier of the empire embarks on a journey that will bring her into contact with a quasi-human outsider and various other plucky misfits, and their efforts merely to survive will eventually snowball, over the course of a trilogy of novels, into a plot to overthrow the empire.

Is it N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy? Is it Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire? Is it Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch? That's right: It's all three. (Well, okay, in the latter case, it's the quasi-human outsider who's the main character and who takes the disillusioned human soldier under her wing, but close enough.)

I liked all of these series, to be clear, enough to have read all nine books. There's a lot to enjoy in them. But I didn't love them. Each has its particular minor flaws, but the one flaw I can't get past in any of them is the one they all share: that overarching plot, which makes two changes (one trivial, one quite ugly) to a hoary old cliché.

The foundation is Star Wars, a trad hero's-journey tale that's been recapitulated a zillion times and remains part of the bedrock of young-adult science fiction and fantasy. (The Hunger Games and Red Rising are two popular YA series that follow this formula closely; there are myriad others I'm less familiar with.) Distancing the work from its YA cousins, the second of the two changes makes the conclusion more ambiguous. Instead of a tidy victory for the rebels, replacing the evil empire with its good twin, we get a state of uncertainty: civil war in Lee, civil war interrupted by uneasy peace in Leckie, and a post-apocalyptic tabula rasa in Jemisin.

The bigger change appears right at the start: The authors swap out their protagonist. Instead of an innocent young person from the imperial periphery, we follow a soldier who has been a more-or-less loyal servant of the empire for much of her life.

Now, all three authors are American. (Yes, the author is still dead, but context matters. All three series are American.) All three series debuted during the second Obama administration, when the American far right was ascendant; Lee and Jemisin concluded their trilogies under Trump, when an outright fascist future for the country suddenly seemed possible. All three authors are liberals, and all three bring a liberal lens to their work. Lee in particular concerns himself with the fate of liberal democracy, imagining it to be a forbidden idea in the distant, hyper-fascist future, and society's last and best hope for reform. Leckie doesn't bring democracy to the Radch, but does imagine liberal reforms: pacifism, an end to body-snatching technoslavery, etc. Jemisin's entire world is an implicit critique of extractive capitalism and indifference to environmental concerns.

Here's why that context matters, and why the change in protagonist is significant: Each book asks us to identify with a servant of empire, somebody spiritually if not literally situated in the imperial core, somebody deeply implicated (regardless of what misgivings they have) in the empire's crimes. Rather than an innocent victim from the periphery (a farm boy, a miner), we now have a protagonist who is at best a victim turned perpetrator. If we are Americans, and college-educated Americans at that—which a large, perhaps predominant part of the readership are, yours truly included—this act of identification isn't much of a stretch. We do live in a vast, cruel empire founded on slavery and genocide and sustained by brutal warfare, economic terrorism, and the despoilment of the planet. We are deeply implicated in the empire's crimes. The fantasy of tearing down the empire, or a corner of the empire, and beginning to build a better world is a powerful one.

Unfortunately, these stories have no idea what a better world than ours looks like; they can only imagine a worse one. In each far-future setting, the steps the protagonists take toward a nebulously better world are merely steps back toward 21st-century American liberalism. An end to technoslavery and ritual torture, an end to wars of blatant territorial expansion, the restoration of representative democracy, an end to wildly irresponsible geoengineering. Not only do they offer us nothing we don't, in principle, already have, but the means by which they imagine achieving this non-progress are inaccessible, impractical, or unacceptable for us: personal access to the elite of society and the liberal application of instrumental violence.

Few of us are acquainted with senators (or anyone of consequence). And sure, violence is fun in stories (make-believe violence is this blog's bread and butter, in fact), and violence sometimes gets things done in real life, too—I'm not a proponent of total nonviolence as a political strategy—but, at this juncture in American history, it can accomplish little more than gratifying and fattening the security apparatus and its far-right paramilitary adjuncts.

The analogy from our reality to a more luridly, baroquely evil one inadvertently permits us, even encourages us, to become complacent about conditions in our own society. If we lived in this world, if things were this bad, we would, like our plucky heroes, stand up and fight. But it's not that bad, so we don't have to. (Yet. Vote Blue!) Sure, we've got concentration camps at the border and a million people imprisoned without trial and we're aiding and abetting a couple of genocides overseas, but at least we're not literally torturing children in perpetuity to power our magical technology. (Which reminds me: Do we have time to delve into this atrocity? Alas, we do not. Some other time.)

These stories offer no solutions to our problems and no tools more subtle than a bomb. Instead, they lull us into quietism, assuring us that hey, things could always be a whole lot worse.

 

2.

This one's so ubiquitous that it features, incidentally, in two of the three trilogies discussed above (Lee and Leckie), and so boring that I don't have much to say about it. Everybody's thinking about “artificial intelligence” these days, yet nobody can imagine anything other than a humanoid robot. It's robots all the way down. Occasionally scary killer robots (Ex Machina, M3GAN) but usually loveable, just-like-us robots whom society unfairly discriminates against but our heroes recognize as equals (the aforementioned novels, Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series, The Creator—one of the worst works of science fiction I've ever encountered—Chappie, the list goes on).

We still have I, Robot. We have Blade Runner. We have Data from Star Trek. We have Neuromancer, for God's sake, which did more interesting things with AI four decades ago than anybody seems capable of today. We don't need a thousand new variations on robots, replicants, or androids, especially if they have absolutely nothing interesting to say and mostly serve as confusing, hamfisted metaphors for human prejudice. We don't need more robotic serial killers, either. (And we sure as shit don't need more Skynets.)

Everybody please just shut up about AI until we have something more interesting to say than “it's scary” or “we should be nice to it.” Thanks!