Bookpost #6

 

I know, #5 was only like four posts ago, but it's been many months in the interim! Thankfully, my drive to read is not as repressible by bad moods as my drive to write.

 

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Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke)

I think this is one of those things that, like a lot of Silver Age science fiction, you have to read as a kid to really love. Having encountered a bunch of its ideas filtered through all manner of improbable other channels (e.g., the novelizations of the Doom games—which I absolutely adored as a kid—riffed on the whole “aliens that look like demons from Christian mythology” thing), and being about seven decades too late for any of its ideas to seem forward-thinking, I can't say I thought highly of it. Sexist as a matter of course, trying hard to be racially progressive but stepping on every conceptual and linguistic rake imaginable (including the n-word over and over again), and too didactic to have much in the way of compelling plot. Cool ideas but fairly lifeless execution. A classic museum piece.

Platform Decay (Martha Wells)

It's Murderbot! We love Murderbot, don't we? My assessment of System Collapse still stands, more or less (“All the Murderbot books are starting to blur together in my memory a bit, which I think is 50% the extremely generic titles and 50% that, well, there’s a bit of a formula at work here. Still enjoyable!”) but this one, thanks to an interesting setting and a few gripping action scenes, actually stands out more in my memory than the couple that preceded it. Lots of grist for the Mothership module mill here. The humor is wearing a little thin, though.

Uprooted (Naomi Novak)

One of my best friends gave me Spinning Silver as a gift a while back, expressing regret that she hadn't been able to find a copy of Uprooted, which she liked better. And I've talked to at least two other people since who made the same assessment: Oh, you liked Spinning Silver? You gotta read Uprooted! It's even better! Well, I finally did, and reader, I did not like Uprooted nearly as much as Spinning Silver. It was enjoyable, certainly, and the first act is a clever twist on a bunch of hoary old wizard-school tropes (although the enemies-to-lovers stuff could hardly be hoarier or more bluntly telegraphed), but I thought it outstayed its welcome a bit—one grueling battle or other ordeal after another after another only to arrive at exactly the conclusion we expected all along. It did make me want to write more Cairn stuff, though, so that's a win.

The Correspondent (Virginia Evans)

Read this in order to make an informed guest appearance at the same friend's bookclub while visiting her. Found it not only to be pretty good, generally speaking, but oddly resonant with my own life; in some ways, the protagonist is a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God version of my mom (my mom is great, for the record; the grace of God is powerful stuff). Evans does an excellent job of giving her a voice that remains consistent and recognizable even as she code-switches widely across different media and different correspondents. A believably and reliably unreliable narrator.

Antarctica (Claire Keegan)

Borrowed this from my dad on a camping trip after he'd finished it, thinking I'd never read any Keegan. Kept surprising myself by realizing “Oh, I've read this before” and dimly remembering what came next—turns out I'd previously read at least six of the 15 stories in here. The narrative structures are sometimes a bit conventional, building methodically to a climactic moment of horror or catharsis, but the prose is wonderful, and her ability to conjure rural Ireland and the American South alike is striking. “Ride If You Dare” is my hands-down favorite.

Late Fame (Arthur Schnitzler)

Pretty lightweight, but enjoyable and evocative. Unsparing of its characters (and the tendencies of theirs you will surely recognize in yourself and people you know), but warm and good-hearted on the whole. I'm curious to see the serendipitously recent film adaptation starring Willem Dafoe and Greta Lee, both of whom I love.

The Great Believers (Rebecca Makkai)

Squarely part of the weird, uncomfortable little micro-genre in which straight women write relentlessly bleak, borderline cruel tragedy porn about doomed gay men. Credit where it's due, though, she's a great writer. Strong characters, a compelling story (or set of interlinked stories), a wonderful not entirely nostalgic vision of 1980s Chicago.

Orbital (Samantha Harvey)

Insubstantial but charming and beautifully written. Lovely descriptions of the station, of Earth from orbit, of the inner lives of the astronauts, of the fragility and impermanence of everything we know and care about.

The Cactus League (Emily Nemens)

Oddly gets a bunch of little things wrong about baseball, and doesn't really go anywhere narratively or thematically in the end, but features distinct, well drawn characters, some of whose little lives are tremendously moving.

The New York Game (Kevin Baker)

Baker is kind of an annoying old-school crank when it comes to baseball stats and strategy (the word “ribbies” appears repeatedly, God help us) but the New York history is delightful and hey, he is writing about ancient history, after all, as baseball history goes. A bottomless well of fun trivia.

Trouble and Her Friends (Melissa Scott)

In the same used-books section of the senior center shop in Hot Springs, Montana, where I scored the whole History of the Runestaff series and a bunch of Andre Norton novels for two bits a pop, I grabbed a couple of Melissa Scott hardcovers (for the relatively princely sum of $1.25 each). Was just flipping through things, reading the first couple paragraphs of each book to see if the prose was any good, liked the cyberpunk cover design of this one, enjoyed the first page, picked up another of Scott's (see below), thought the first page of that one was pretty solid too, bought them both. A whole year later, I finally got around to reading them. And they're really good! This starts out feeling, as a lot of early-90s SF novels do, like a relic, extraordinarily conservative in some of its predictions of the future a century hence, wildly over-optimistic about others. It just gets better and better as it goes, though, with strong characters and a keen eye for the social and political dimensions of the technology Scott is interested in (even if the technical dimensions are now quite dated). She has a wonderful yen for giving everybody and everything unusual, improbable names.

Dreamships (Melissa Scott)

Like Trouble, this features a mostly queer cast of characters; unlike Trouble, here Scott has confidence enough to imagine a future in which being gay or bisexual is so normal that it goes entirely unremarked on. Readers who are not old enough to remember the 1990s probably cannot fully appreciate how optimistic and visionary this was back in 1992, but it warms the heart. This one is a fun blend of cyberpunk and planetary romance, and again combines some rather dated ideas about future technology's physical form and capabilities with some really sharp, prescient ones about the social, political, and economic aspects of advanced computing and networking. The ethnic jumble of the setting being substantially Chinese and American made me think, naturally, of Firefly, and wonder whether that show's creators had read this. And, in silly Firefly-related news, I recently watched Flowers of Shanghai—I've been on a huge Tony Leung kick—and its score finally jolted me into realizing, 25 years late, that the Firefly score is an erhu-heavy mashup of American Western music with Chinese classical. Which, for all the show's heinous flaws, including its abject failure to ever live up to the promise of the setting (or feature Asian actors), is pretty neat.

Mothership Module Review: Iron Tomb

 

For my second module review, I'm going back to the first Mothership one-shot I ever ran. It makes an instructive contrast to Orphans (subject of my first review); the latter is absolutely dripping with atmosphere and is wonderfully written, whereas Iron Tomb is less evocative and less imaginative, but benefits from a tight setup (whereas Orphans is loose to a fault). It is unfortunately not super fresh in my mind—it's been almost a year since I ran it—but I was recently making some recommendations for how to introduce people to Mothership (including players new to RPGs in general) and brought up this one (and the author's similar Year of the Rat), so I thought I should go back to my notes and dig into what I liked about it (and what I didn't) and why I think it's a great place to start.

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WHAT I DON'T LIKE

My Orphans review started with the praise and eased into criticisms; I'm going the other way here, because I think the two are mirror images of each other in that sense. The premise here is not particularly creative: The PCs are boarding a derelict archaeological research vessel to recover its black box at the behest of an insurance company, and there's a revenant on board that killed the crew. The writing isn't very evocative, either. It leans hard on Egyptian imagery and language (scarabs, sarcophagi, pharaohs, “the Heket-Neph”); we're inches away from “ancient aliens built the pyramids” territory. It's a trifold pamphlet, space is at a premium, and reaching for a shorthand vocabulary of familiar “mummy's curse” stuff is efficient, I suppose, but it's still not getting high marks.

The layout of the ship, too, might be a victim of size limitations—the whole interior of the pamphlet is a keyed map, and it would've been hard to represent a more complex deck plan in that space. But, again, I just don't like it. This is by no means a shortcoming limited to this module or this author; it's pretty common in Mothership modules for a ship to be represented as a rectangular block of rooms on a single plane, with no verticality and no opportunity to do interesting stuff with zero-G movement. But yeah: A bunch of rectilinear rooms opening from a central corridor, not a lot of depth, few (and short) paths other than going left or right off the main hallway.

 

SO THEN WHY DO I LIKE IT SO MUCH?

Well, the monster's great, for one thing. Most of the pseudo-Egyptian stuff is, like I said, uncreative: alien tombs, hieroglyphs, canopic jars, etc. But in truth, it's easy to modify that kind of set dressing and it hardly matters in the game. Say “logograms” or “runes” or whatever instead of “hieroglyphs,” it all works the same, and your players probably don't even notice either way. Say the expedition was to an ice planet and the tombs were atop phallic spires. Whatever.

The monster, which the PCs are going to interact with repeatedly and consequentially, is a lot cooler than just “space mummy.” Yes, there's a classic mummy's curse situation where if you disturb the grave goods inside the sarcophagus bad things happen, but in this case, instead of the dude in the coffin getting up and lurching after you, a swarm of nanobots invades your body and turns you, from the inside out, into an implacable undead cyborg hunter–killer. Neat! It's got weird magnetic powers, strange weapons, spooky sensors. It gets tougher and tougher the more damage you do to it. It's easy to outrun but implacable. And there's a little puzzle to be solved that can neutralize it.

That might be Iron Tomb's strongest point. What makes it a great way to show new players the ropes, though, is that the PCs' goals are simple and clear, yet still challenging. Their one firm objective is to get the black box from the ship's bridge. They know exactly where it is, they just need to get in there. And they have two obstacles to deal with: First is the monster, which is slow but deadly and relentless. Having somebody lead it away from the bridge while somebody else grabs the box would be simple enough (if risky), but unfortunately there's a second obstacle—access to the bridge is blocked by some scavengers who've barricaded themselves there. They don't want to come out while the monster is stomping around, but if the PCs force entry, they'll fight.

And that's it. There's a Macguffin they need, it's in the possession of some NPCs who won't give it up without getting something in return (or fighting for it), and there's an extremely dangerous monster on patrol that they never have to stand and fight, but that will prevent them (unless they can trick it, trap it, or outright defeat it) from standing still in one place for long enough to, e.g., force open the door to the helm. There's not much else here, and some of the details are incomplete or confusing (see my nitpicks below), but you don't really need more than this. There are a bunch of different ways players can approach the situation, including plenty of interesting applications of starting gear, and the main threat is always dangerous without ever being likely to back them into a no-win situation.

 

NITPICKS

Space is limited on the pamphlet, of course, and the Warden can use their imagination, but there are some appealing but undercooked elements here. Collateral damage from the monster's attacks has busted the ship's generator, for instance, meaning that (until repairs are made) only one of several secondary systems can be powered: cryogenics, remote door controls, life support, and lighting. It seems from context that cryogenics is functioning—the food in the freezer hasn't melted, and Captain Carvington hasn't died. No lights and manual function only for the doors makes sense, but if the life support isn't working…how long hasn't it been working? How close are the scavengers trapped on the bridge to suffocating?

Similarly left ambiguous is the purpose of the captain's keycard. Is it needed to get into the captain's quarters? Can it open the door to the helm? Is it just a bit of fluff that serves no purpose now that the ship's controls are inoperable?

While those items go underexplaioned, a few other things get more of the limited pamphlet space than they need. We have no idea what the PCs will be paid for the job (just salvage rights, I guess, which are contested by the scavengers), but we are told that they must recover the black box within 72 hours or face a 500mcr fee. What's that about? Why would they ever be tempted to spend three whole days on this ship, even if the life support weren't failing?

Likewise, a fair amount of space is devoted to a detailed description of what will happen, over the course of three months, to anybody who opens another sarcophagus (there are five total; the research ship's crew opened only one). This is 1) beyond the scope of the module; 2) really unlikely to happen, given that opening a giant stone sarcophagus can't be done casually, there isn't any incentive to do it, and the disincentive has been telegraphed very strongly; and 3) not all that interesting to play out if it does — it's basically “can you get to and pay for a doctor, or do you want to roll a new character?” (Now, if there were two open sarcophagi—or some infection vector less telegraphed than “whoever opens the sarcophagus gets cursed”—Captain Carvington could also be infected, and we might have an interesting follow-up incident, or news item, after returning to port.)

 

SUGGESTIONS

You may or may not want to tweak the Egyptian stuff and prep a little more background info (the identities of the original crew, what's in the captain's log, what the dig site and tomb look like in the recordings you can find in the lab, etc.). You might also want to prep some contingency plans for certain character-creation outcomes; it's likely your PCs will have no obvious way to get into the bridge without the scavengers' help (in which case you might want the captain's keycard to be capable of overriding the interior lock once the doors are powered), and on the other end of things, a smart rifle will make the monster much, much easier to dispatch (so maybe house-rule some magnetic technobabble interference that screws up the rifle's targeting systems and diminishes or eliminates its anti-armor property against this enemy).

What you'll definitely want to do is come up with a more strictly defined situation for the generator. I decided that cryogenics and gravity (undefined in the pamphlet) were fully powered by the damaged generator and that the lights and life support were running on dwindling battery power: The ship's interior is dim and flickering, the air already stale and thin, when the PCs arrive; it just gets worse from there. Turning off cryogenics condemns the captain to death; turning off gravity puts everybody without zero-G training in a bind (while the magnetic monster just stomps around unbothered). If they don't want to do either of those things, the PCs have a few hours to repair the generator or cut a deal with the scavengers. (Or they can wait until they all pass out and then force their way in if they happen to have a laser cutter or explosives. And are really cold-blooded.)