A Reckoning

A couple weeks ago, as we all tried to distract ourselves from the inaugural sword of Damocles, a prompt went around Bluesky, inviting people to share their “most millennial complaint.” Moira Donegan answered the call: “Playing video games is not cool,” she declared, “and it was a mistake to elevate this anti-social pastime that mostly involves engaging in solitary fantasies of domination and violence into a respectable hobby.”

Predictably, Donegan got dragged for this. Kim Kelly got dragged for agreeing with her. Many people insisted that this was, in fact, a boomer complaint, not a millennial one (Donegan acknowledged that possibility herself). Many other people called her an idiot, ignorant, uneducated, a loser. Some people, rather perversely, called her a sexist. A few attempted to ridicule her idea by analogy: Can you imagine if people talked this way about books? About literature?

I have spent many thousands of hours of my life playing videogames, but I was not one of those people. In my heart, I knew the truth: “solitary fantasies of domination and violence” might be a bit dated, but Donegan was more right than wrong.

* * *

The next day—Inauguration Day itself—Edward Ongweso Jr. dropped an essay on his Substack that was both apt for that most Damoclean of occasions and relevant to this debate about games. To begin with, he traced the contours of the gambling industry and connected it to other contemporary American enterprises that prey on the poor and nearly hopeless, desperate people hoping for one big score—buying in on the right meme coin, hitting the most improbable sportsbook parlay, literally winning the lottery. He explained what an enormous, lucrative business gambling has become, how it has eclipsed the vast market for illicit drugs. From there, he moved on to consumerism, AI, exterminism, things falling apart, rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem—it's all worth reading. I got stuck on the bit about gambling, though.

Since surpassing illicit drugs in revenue, gambling has been eclipsed in its turn by an industry that stole not just its crown but its name. Before videogames grew to be a market juggernaut that generates nearly a quarter-trillion dollars a year of revenue, “gaming” was synonymous with “gambling.” This etymology isn't the only strong connection between the two businesses.

Ongweso's essay draws extensively on the work of sociologist Natasha Schüll. In her 2012 book Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas, she wrote of slot-machine players, whose obsessive behavior had by then come to represent the vast majority of casino revenue, that “what addicts them is the world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm they derive from machine play.”

In a conversation with former Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges, Schüll elaborated: “What they’re playing for is not to win, but to stay in the zone. […] This is more about mood modulation. Affect modulation. Using technologies to dampen anxieties and exit the world. We don’t just see it in Las Vegas. We see it in the subways every morning. The rise of all of these screen-based technologies and the little games that we’ve all become so absorbed in. What gamblers articulate [in interviews] is a desire to really lose a sense of self.”

Of the industry, she said, “It’s predation on a type of escape where people are driven to exit the world. They’re not trying to win. The casinos are trying to win. They are trying to make revenue. They’re kind of in a partnership with the gamblers, but it’s a very asymmetrical partnership. The gamblers don’t want to win. They want to just keep going. Some people have likened gamblers to factory workers who are alienated by the machine. I don’t see it that way. This is more about machines designed to synchronize with what you want—in this case escape—and [to] profit from that.”

This is an apt description of slot-machine players and gambling, of course, but as Schüll alludes to with her remark about “screen-based technologies and the little games that we’ve all become so absorbed in,” it might be an even more apt description of gamers and gaming. What are microtransactions and battle passes and the endless treadmill of live-service content if not revenue-extraction machines synchronized with players' desire for anesthetic escape?

For players who don't want the jackpot, who want only to keep going, to stay “in the zone,” the gaming industry now offers myriad games without lasting victory, without an endpoint, without closure. Many people have drawn connections between slot machines (and Skinner boxes) and certain types of game before—these are the perils, we hear, of F2P games, of freemium games, of mobile games, of bad games, trash that's beneath the contempt of real gamers. But the Faustian exchange of a steady flow of microtransactions for the opportunity to live in the zone forever isn't just made in trashy mobile Gacha titles anymore; it's everywhere. The bad apples have spoiled the bunch. Every game is a slot machine now. One battle royale after another, forever. One raid after another. One puzzle after another. One match after another. One content drop after another. One achievement after another. One season after another. Forever.

It's not even limited to games. People think of “gamification” as the process of making “real-world” activities more like videogames, but it's actually more a matter of making everything (including videogames) more like slot machines. What is a social media feed if not an experiential slot machine, one that rewards you, quasi-stochastically, with entertaining content? The algorithm puts just enough boring chaff (and ads) in front of you, for just long enough, that the dopamine-rush thrill of your last hit fades, and then bam, something that's just the sort of content you crave slides across your screen, and the rush is back. Over and over. Forever.

One of the reasons I started this blog at the start of last year was that I was getting sick of social media; I found myself posting to Twitter and Reddit less and less, interacting with other human beings less and less, but scrolling more and longer. Pulling the lever, waiting for something good to turn up, but really just paralyzed by that hope, that expectation, the not-quite-pleasure of having an itch and believing that it's about to be scratched. Any minute now.

One of the reasons I got into TTRPGs was that videogames were starting to feel the same way.

* * *

“But not all games are like this," you might protest. More and more of them are, of course; battle passes and games-as-service content drip-feeds and meta-progression mechanics are oozing their way into every genre, into every storied franchise (this crap has even slimed its way into Civilization now, much to my dismay), but it's true: There are some indie games, some retro games, and even the occasional rare few examples of AAA auteurism that prove the rule.

The thing is—and with apologies to the folks who love games and think that pornography is inherently, irredeemably bad and wrong—you could say the same of pornography. Porn doesn't have to come from some giant, sleazy media company. It doesn't have to be celebrated at lurid awards shows in Las Vegas or shot in some dismal corner of the Inland Empire. It doesn't have to involve human trafficking or drug abuse. It doesn't have to be violent. You can make porn with your partner or with your friends. It doesn't have to be for profit; you can distribute it for free or ask for donations. You can write fun, clever scripts, build fantastical sets, make amazing costumes, and tell interesting stories that just happen to be smutty. Or if you're not likely to do any of that yourself, you can probably find porn like that on the internet somewhere, or at least at a film festival—porn that makes you laugh, makes you think, fosters human connection, gives you new ideas.

But is that what you think of when you think of porn? Is that what anybody thinks of? Is that what you assume any significant percentage of pornography consumers are consuming? If somebody says to you, “Yeah, I love porn,” or if somebody tells you, “I can't wait to get home and watch porn until I fall asleep,” does your mind go to that Shangri-La of ethical, creative, uplifting pornography? Or do you just think, Wow. Gross.

When somebody says they're a gamer, what do you think of? We joke about the word; we love our memes. “They targeted gamers,” we chuckle. “Gamers rise up!” We explain that “Sure, I play games, but I'm not a gamer,” or “I'm a gamer, but not, you know, a hard-r gamer.” That ironic distance masks real aversion. Gamers gave us Gamergate. Gaming, especially online, means encountering puerility, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, a whole raft of antisocial behaviors. It has a whiff of sulfur about it, the perfume of the extreme right. To tar all of gaming, and everybody who enjoys videogames, with that sulfurous stigma might be unfair, but it's not entirely unfair. Yeah, there are plenty of kids and women and old folks and others who aren't of that ilk enjoying games—or if not truly enjoying them, at least experiencing a world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm—but it's those hard-r gamers who drive the discourse, they who are the face of the hobby and the drivers of the industry.

* * *

The industry has embraced, with both arms, a vision of videogames as ludicrously profitable narcotic slop. The most vocal, visible gamers—gamers as an identity group—are unpleasant reprobates, many of them Nazi fellow travelers. Are these facts enough to damn games and gaming? Probably not. Most cultural products in the profit-driven hell we inhabit are crap, after all, and practically everything has detestable, and noisy, partisans. There are still diamonds in the rough, games that make us think, that make us laugh and cry, that teach us things, that expand our horizons.

Here I have to turn from objective facts to my own fragile, anecdotal, peculiar subjectivity. For me, playing a videogame, even a game I once loved, or a game of a type I once loved, even a game that isn't precision-engineered to lull me into that world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm, now often feels palpably, uncomfortably hollow. I emerge from time spent playing a videogame like a sleeper emerges from a dream, holding on to a few rapidly fading emotions, bewildered by the dissonance between how intensely things mattered just moments ago and how pointless or incomprehensible they seem now, in the light of day. I'm left with vague memories, or just impressions, and maybe a haphazard sort of narrative that, like a dream, retains some waning interest to me but falls to boring, incoherent pieces the moment I try to explain it to somebody else.

I am a dreamer, of course. You're reading a blog (ostensibly) about TTRPGs; how could its author be anything else? I'll never be one to turn up my nose at escapism: I've loved science fiction and fantasy since I was a little kid, I love novels, I love movies, and I still love games. We all deserve a little escape once in a while; the real world isn't always a great place to be. But to return to that analogy raised by the angry mob on Bluesky—how would I feel if somebody dismissed novels as a disreputable, antisocial waste of time? I'd roll my eyes. Solitary, sure, but never antisocial. To read a novel is to enter into intimate discourse with another mind. It's escapism, sure—the world dissolves—but it's escapism with an endpoint, a clearly marked exit. Through the novel, we immerse ourselves in other places, other times, other lives, and then we return to our place, our time, our life richer, wiser, more thoughtful.

I might've learned a little about medieval history from Crusader Kings 2, a little about trains from Railroad Tycoon, a little about everything from Civilization, but I don't know that even those games truly enriched me. I don't think they taught me anything important about myself or anybody else. The vast majority of the videogames I've played taught me nothing at all, imparted nothing to me. There are very important exceptions, of course—I've written about a few of them here, like SOMA, Cyberpunk 2077, and above all Disco Elysium, and there are others, farther back, that meant a lot to me and changed me in meaningful ways. Planescape: Torment and The Longest Journey come to mind.

In the big scheme of things, though, these games are oddities, exceptions, lightning in a bottle, relics of a bygone age. There will never be another Disco Elysium. There will never be another Planescape: Torment. There might be another Cyberpunk 2077, but it's probably a decade away, and I'm not holding my breath. For every gem, there are a thousand mindless treadmills, a thousand carbon-copy cash-ins on whatever the latest extractive fad is, a thousand software-shaped delivery vehicles for the algorithmically driven microtransaction apocalypse. We've all heard the story: StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty made less money for Blizzard than a single $15 microtransaction horse in World of Warcraft. Whatever games were when you were a kid—whatever they were before that moment, before that horse buried Wings of Liberty—is dead and long, long gone.

There's still cool stuff happening in the world of videogames, of course. It's happening in spaces that are less commercial (like the whole constellation of indie games sites driven by donations and pay-what-you-want offers) or entirely noncommercial (like the beautiful community that continues to churn out world-class content for my beloved Quake nearly three decades after its release). Some of the most interesting games of the past decade have been treated with outright hostility by the industry; think of Robert Yang's long war against the homophobes at Twitch. Cool stuff still comes out of more conventional games spaces, too, often when people play games in unintended ways. Look how much more interesting a tactical shooter becomes when a streamer plays it as though his life actually matters—the live-die-repeat treadmill of gameplay gives way to something more affecting, more truly immersive, more like the empathy machine we've so often been promised games could be.

Give me empathy in videogames. Give me auteurism. I'd rather play a new Quake map—and have direct contact with somebody else's mind, their ideas, their creative spirit—than step back on the treadmill of MMOs or CCGs or MOBAs or PvPvE FPSes or whatever fresh hell the industry unleashes next. But better yet, get me off the computer. I'd rather play a board game with family than play Quake by myself. And I'd much rather play a TTRPG with friends: tell a story together, experience something new together, escape the world together without leaving it behind entirely. I don't want to dissolve the world, to annihilate it. I want to make the world richer, more enjoyable, more inhabitable. Better.

Good luck to me, right?

* * *

I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, during the first Trump administration, near Inman Square, where there's a cute little commercial row. It's a slice of small-town Americana in the city: no national chains, just a bunch of local small businesses, including the sorts you hardly see anywhere else anymore, like old-fashioned travel agents and mom-and-pop delis. There was a store there (I think it's still there) that sold textiles, candles, plants, cozy home goods. They were very into hygge back in 2016; there was a sign in the window for months after the election that asked, “HOW CAN HYGGE BE PART OF OUR RESISTANCE?” I always laughed.

The answer, of course, is that it can't—not really. Maybe making things hyggelig gives you a sense of control in a crazy, off-kilter world and that buoys your mental health and keeps you from falling completely and irrevocably into despair. Maybe. And maybe your Animal Crossing village or your Tears of the Kingdom contraption or your collection of Hearthstone cards does the same. But those things also anesthetize you. They remove you from the world, numb you to pain and struggle and sorrow and pity, and remove you from other people, from everybody else experiencing those things, people you might be able to help, people who might be able to help you (not entirely unlike hygge, in fact, although that's an essay for another occasion).

Yeah, you make friends playing videogames, once in a while. You see the same handles in the same lobbies, or you run into the same opponents, or you run dungeons with the same guildmates. Once in a while, a real connection is formed. People famously have gotten married to friends they made playing MMOs. But 99% of people? 99% of the time? Ships in the night. Traveling companions for a time, but not heading to the same destinations.

Videogames are not inherently antisocial, but the industry has shaped the vast majority of them, including the biggest and most popular, into something profoundly antisocial, something socially corrosive. The vast majority of players have quietly acquiesced. Even superficially “social” multiplayer games are not fostering real connection; they are offering a shared experience of quietism, no more social than slot-machine gamblers making small talk, or sitting side by side in amiable silence, as the life seeps out of them.

Are videogames a moral abomination? Have they no redeeming value at all? Should everybody quit playing them? Of course not. It's not like we'd all turn away from our screens and suddenly, in a great upwelling of solidarity and togetherness, join hands and defeat fascism with the power of love or whatever. If we didn't have videogames, we'd have other vices. We already do; everybody has vices, and there's nothing wrong with that. But we could certainly stand to be clearer-eyed about them, about what they're doing to us, about who benefits from them.

I texted my best friend (the man behind Roman Balan, for those of you following my Stars Without Number campaign, and like me a lifelong enjoyer of escapism and player of videogames) about Moira Donegan's post when I first saw it. I sent him a barrage of messages that began with “I'm probably too much of a coward to weigh in, but…” (look at me—12 days later, I've worked up the courage) and ran for nearly the length of this blog post. When I was finally done monologuing at him, he delivered a more eloquent and far more succinct summation of the whole thing. He quoted the late, great David Lynch: “I wish what every addict wishes for: that what we love is good for us.”

Flyover Country: Chapter 7

"Industrial District 2" by Andreas Rocha

Continued from Chapter 6.

* * *

BQ presents himself to Nobu Stephanidis as a fellow enthusiast of ancient artifacts and alien relics. With quiet intensity, he describes a symbol he saw in his youth on faraway, icebound Ayaz, a mysterious sigil inscribed on otherworldly material, evidence to the youth of the existence of a higher power. He's sought for more signs or remnants of his alien gods ever since—has Stephanidis ever seen such symbols?

He has, in fact—but the crafty old man won't give up valuable information for nothing. Instead, he offers a quid pro quo arrangement: He's planned a heist and needs a crew to carry it out. He'll provide the details, they'll get the goods, and if they bring back a few choice pieces he has his eye on, he'll cut them 20% and give BQ what info he has on his long-sought alien relics—and the PCs can keep whatever else they manage to grab during the operation. Our band of ne'er-do-wells, of course, jumps at the opportunity. The target is on Opis.

* * *

The Commonwealth's capital world is in some respects quite Earth-like; its orbit is at almost exactly 1 AU, its rotational period is close to 24 hours, its year is 376 days with a leap day every fourth year, it is nearly the same size as Earth, and its gravity is more than 80% of standard. The main differences are its star—the subgiant Usil, though it appears nearly six and a half times larger from the surface of Opis than Earth's sun did from our ancestral homeworld, is significantly dimmer—and the climate.

Opis had many qualities that made it an attractive terraforming candidate back in humanity's golden age, but the colonists who first settled it began with a world more like Venus than Earth, wracked by intense volcanism and shrouded in a toxic atmosphere. Undettered, they built enormous pretech terraforming engines to still the planet's seisms and purify its air. Unfortunately, this work was not complete at the time of the Scream. The engines labored on, but the talents and technology needed to maintain them were lost, and over the succeeding centuries, they have failed one after another.

Opis is now experiencing catastrophic climate change in fast forward: a runaway greenhouse effect, terrible storms, and an atmosphere difficult, and often downright dangerous, to breathe. What were forests and meadows mere decades ago are ashfields and deserts today. Crops have failed across most of the surface. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have buried entire settlements. All but the hardiest settlers have abandoned the new towns of last century and retreated into the planet's largest, oldest settlements, where overcrowding is now a serious problem.

Nearly all of the vast population (three-quarters of the Commonwealth's billion-plus citizens) is now packed into a few sprawling urban areas: paraterraformed canyons and craters, massive tower blocks sealed against the atmosphere, warrens of subsurface tunnels and chambers. Many industrial and infrastructural spaces underground and in the interiors of massive arcologies are now hived with informal housing and markets. In and around the densely populated cities, the terraforming machinery has been kept functional, or replacements have been jury-rigged, and areas of seismic stability exist. Nothing can prevent storms of dust, sand, and volcanic ash from sweeping across and sometimes into the protected areas, however.

For now, the people endure, but with every passing year, their prospects grow darker. The ever-more-intensive effort to import protein from the Karyatis system is not economically sustainable in the long run; the need to construct and maintain superfreighters, and protect their shipping lanes, is a tremendous burden on the Marjani shipyards and the Commonwealth Militia Navy. But for all its troubles, Opis remains a major center of commerce and industry. Many state-owned enterprises, including GeOpis, ComAtom, and the Interplanetary Public Broadcasting Company, are headquartered here, as are a number of prominent private companies, including Omni Armory, media giant Ad Astra, and Banik Technologies. Offworld businesses, particularly Seneschal Systems, have extensive facilities here, and Mosylon has a massive embassy complex in the city of Anchorpoint.

* * *

Nobu has his eye on a (relatively) smaller city in the southern hemisphere, Sokhna; he wants the crew to loot a country estate nearby. The area, once a pleasant wooded suburb, fell outside the zone of planetary engineering control and is in danger of being utterly destroyed by seismic or volcanic catastrophe, although thus far nothing worse has happened than a firestorm sweeping through the vegetation, some noxious air blowing through the area, and substantial ashfall. A certain ambitious young Member of the Popular Assembly, Nana Malik, was forced, along with other property owners in the area, to abandon her country house; she wasn't there at the time, and lost many objects with great sentimental—and some material—value.

Since nothing catastrophically bad has happened to the house in the months since it was quarantined, she's begun to agitate to be allowed to return and pack up some of her possessions. Although she comes from a wealthy, influential family, she's trying to maintain a squeaky-clean image as a legislator and is unwilling to bend or break the rules to get her things back (as many of her neighbors have done). Stephanidis has taken notice of her efforts, done a little research, and surmised that it's worth an expedition.

The quarantined suburb is adjacent to a restricted area that's closed to unauthorized civilians but remains staffed by security personnel, researchers, and maintenance workers; there's also some traffic through the area as construction and maintenance teams take the highway to still-operational facilities north of Sokhna. Near the city's outskirts, there's a vehicle depot, sheltered in the lee of some mountains, that serves these various purposes.

The crew will need to:

1. Get to Sokhna.
2. Find a way to either smuggle weapons and equipment off the ship or acquire gear in the city.
3. Find a low-key way to get outside the city (nearly all of which is underground) and into the restricted area.
4. Get their hands on a vehicle to drive out to the estate.
5. Pick a route that gets them to the Malik estate in reasonable time without exposing them to the security station above the highway to the east.
6. Defeat the estate's security systems and break in.
7. Load up the loot and get it back through spaceport security and off the planet somehow.

The house itself—Nobu has a pretty comprehensive trove of images—is a large two-story building with a deck on the ground floor and a wraparound balcony on the second floor; much of the structure, including the central spaces on both floors, is floor-to-ceiling “glass” (actually a very durable transparent polymer) and everything is attractively appointed, with art everywhere. There's also a substantial, much more austere basement about which Nobu has less intel; there are presumably security bots and other expert systems still defending the property.

* * *

The crew blasts off from Rustam early in the morning on the 14th and has an uneventful trip to Usil. Mustang, back in her home system for the first time in years, flirts with trying to reclaim her bygone celebrity; as the ship glides planetward, she posts a brief hello to short-form video app TannTann, then an ASMR cooking video. They touch down at Sokhna Spaceport late on the 17th, having transferred 500 credits to a helpful traffic controller to “expedite approval of their flight plan and landing clearance.”

Batias has tapped his mysteriously wide and deep network of connections to line up a meeting between Roman (presenting himself as the crew's science officer) and Faisal Rao, director of the local GeOpis office. It's nearly midnight by local time, but Rao is still at his office, so the crew heads straight there as soon as they're through starport security. Rao tries to bargain hard, but he doesn't have the best poker face—it's obvious he badly he wants what the PCs have. Centuries of climatic, seismic, and geomagnetic data from a pre-Scream facility monitoring the stability of a terraformed planet's environment, and the computer systems that produced and crunched that data? It could—as Dr. Lei's endorsement suggests, Roman points out—lead to a breakthrough in arresting the ongoing terraforming failure that threatens Opis.

Rao puts his cards on the table: The absolute limit of what he could authorize in payment on short notice would be 272,000 credits, and that would represent his department's entire budget for the year; he needs to hold on to a few thousand credits to cover expenses until the central office can reimburse him. The PCs aren't likely to get more than 270,000 credits anywhere—not without a lot of waiting and bureaucratic wrangling, at least—and maybe he can sweeten the deal for them with some in-kind assistance. Do they need access to a ground vehicle? Are there any…legal snafus he could help them smooth over?

Why yes, Roman says, there certainly are. If Rao could take them on as contractors and put together some paperwork that would allow them to move a few crates off their ship in the guise of sensitive survey equipment, and a few more crates back onto the ship in the guise of sensitive geological samples—no scans of any of this sensitive stuff permitted, please—they'd be much obliged. And they'll definitely take the ground vehicle, too. “Say no more,” says Rao. “Please.”

Mustang has backed up the data to the ship's computers, but the PCs agree to give Rao exclusive license to it for the next two years. (After that, maybe they'll take it to Munda and see if there's a buyer there too.) Handshakes all around. The deal is done, and the path to Nana Malik's estate looks a great deal clearer.

The PCs go shopping for equipment (pressure masks and outerwear for the noxious Opisian weather) and provisions (a couple cases of wine, a big jar of krill-encrusted peanuts) and debate when to launch the heist. Several of them have other business they'd like to attend to in Sokhna: Sarai and Mustang want to look up old friends; Krissa hopes to find a trained telekinetic who can teach her some exercises to help her master her fledging powers in that discipline, and her discomfort with using them. If the job goes sideways, they won't have time to do any of this while making their getaway.

But Stephanidis has stressed that time is of the essence—Malik's public statements about the valuables she left in an empty house in a deserted area will no doubt have drawn other looters and scavengers. They decide to return to the ship, assemble their gear, and prepare to roll out at dawn. Rao will have an ATV transport and secure, properly documented crates waiting for them. Early on the 18th, they set forth.

The Year Gone By and the Year to Come

Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon (photo by Rosalie O’Connor)

2024 was a fine year for me, personally—I am healthy, gainfully employed, happily partnered, and securely housed, and I got to travel a bunch, including to Mexico, Portugal, and Colombia. I went to film festivals in New Orleans and New York, too, and watched something like 130 movies—mostly old ones, but 40-ish new releases, of which Conclave, Nosferatu, and Nickel Boys were the best big ones. Loved a lot of the indie horror I saw at those festivals too: Cuckoo, Dead Mail, I Saw the TV Glow, Timestalker, Dead Talents Society. Hated Civil War so much I might have to write a whole blog post about it. Adored the Fall Experience at the Boston Ballet; Crystal Pite’s The Seasons’ Canon was overwhelming in the best way, one of the most extraordinary things I've ever seen on stage. I've written a bunch already about the books I read in 2024, but I'll shout out three short stories from the New Yorker (all published within a month of each other, as it happens) that I really liked: “Autobahn” by Hugo Hamilton, “Ambrose” by Allegra Goodman, and especially “My Camp” by Joshua Cohen.

But I'm gonna not do a whole big cultural review roundup like I did last year. 2024 was not a year of culture. 2024 sucked. It feels like the whole world is going down the tubes; my benighted country certainly is.

What am I going to do about it? I don't know. Maybe it depends on how bad it gets. Maybe I shouldn't let it depend on that. Certainly I'll kvetch. Maybe I'll start attending DSA meetings again. I'll volunteer. I'll write. Writing probably isn't worth much more than voting, but at least it gives me a sense of activity, a sense of control. I can always kick myself for not writing enough!

I started this blog last January with a flurry of activity, but lost steam after June. I posted 33 times in the first six months of 2024, and then only 11 times in the second half of the year. July and August were very busy for me—three weddings on three continents in a five-week period, plus a move across Boston and a subsequent comedy of ISP errors that kept me mostly offline until September—but I didn't do a great job getting back on the horse in the fall. My plans to participate in a couple more jams (Anne's Summer LEGO RPG Setting Jam and CLAYMORE's FIST: JAM OPS V, to be specific) halted at the doodling-in-a-notebook stage and then dissipated. My Lore24 effort fizzled out. I still haven't finished any of those Traveller-inspired lifepath tables.

But some things did turn out well! My little Flyover Country recap, as much as it lags behind the game itself, has been fun to write, valuable for running the campaign—it helps me keep the big picture in view and reminds me of loose threads and fun ancillary characters I can return to—and hopefully useful to a few people new to, or curious about, Stars Without Number. The one jam I did get myself in gear for was fun, and I was quite pleased with the result. My satirical/fantastical take on the ridiculous Saudi megaproject THE LINE was a hoot, if I do say so myself.

So what do I want to accomplish in 2025? Definitely carry on with the campaign recap; after some fits and starts and a holiday hiatus, Flyover Country is set to resume this Monday, the 13th, and I still have lots of catching up to do. Finish entries for multiple jams this time—let's say three this year, at the very least. Work on that little lifepath project. Flesh out some of the ideas I threw at the Lore24 wall, because there's a lot I like about that setting (or meta-setting). Write some fantasy stuff. Write something for FIST (and play more FIST). Write something that feels like Quake.

And, hey, maybe I'll actually publish a Quake map this year. Hopefully I'll publish some short fiction too. Maybe I'll flee into exile. Who knows!

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!