Names for the Future

I've written before about naming things in fiction (or worldbuilding, if you will), and I've written, albeit somewhat narrowly about a couple specific fictional worlds, about the default whiteness of the future. Now I'm going to tie those two threads together: When dreaming up a science-fiction setting that's somewhere in our ostensible future, how should one name things and people? What kind of pitfalls are there?

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The first of the latter is obvious, already discussed in my second link above: Don't just project your own cultural context into the future. Even setting aside how unrealistic and chauvinistic this is, it's boring as hell, because writers have been doing it forever. A ton of classic SF is like this, including some of our most beloved and influential works, like Star Trek, which committed the cardinal (if not original) sin of having all humans be from Space America and using alien species to represent foreign cultures. Despite not being set in our future, Star Wars did much the same—the good humans are mostly white Americans, the bad humans are most white Brits, and (even before the most egregious racial caricatures of Japanese and Jamaican people arrived in The Phantom Menace) the aliens are foreign.

So, you know, don't do that. But what are the alternatives? You've always got “just make it up” as an option—separate your future setting so far in time or space from our world that the traces of existing human cultures are gone or at least illegible. But that's actually very difficult, because it's really hard to imagine a culture entirely disconnected from your own. Language is such a powerful vector of culture that, you know, how can you write anything in English and not bring a bunch of Anglo-American cultural baggage with you?

Easier (and consequently more popular) is to think about how we get from our present day (or maybe our past, in an alternate-timeline setting) to your future, populate your setting with people descended from the people of the present, and use their names (or names derived from those, or otherwise from their cultures, if you want to get fancy with it). And it's just good for the setting in general, for your understanding of what you've imagined, to have a sense of the transition from now to then, rather than “the future will be just like now, but with phasers and warp travel and no money.”

A couple examples of how other folks have done this:

The names of the pilots in the game Brigador communicate a lot of the backstory. It's not too strict, not too didactic, but the patterns are easy enough to see—a lot of the Nobreans have Brazilian, or plausibly Brazilian, names (Portuguese, German, Japanese, etc.); the Spacers have a bunch of Finnish and (posh) English ones. This is a universe where the Global North and Global South both went to space, but at different times and in different relationships to capital. It's sketched out pretty loosely, but it's highly effective.

The Expanse does something similar (caveat: I've watched the show but haven't read the books). To some extent, the population of the Solar System is just an extrapolation from the Earth's current population—there are people of Chinese and Indian descent everywhere, including some of the most powerful figures of the setting—but there are are some specific touches that tell part of the backstory. Indian and American (specifically Texan) influence shape the culture of Mars, and the show's casting of Belter characters makes clear, in an understated way, that the most exploited people of the future are the descendants of the most marginalized of today (the two most prominent roles for Black actors on the show are Belters, and Belter extras and minor roles lean non-white more than characters on Earth or Mars).

And there's Dune, of course, which does some bigtime handwaving about the 20,000-year gap between its publication and its setting but is still explicit (in a way that the films have, unfortunately, somewhat effaced) about the cultural descent of its characters, particularly the Fremen, who represent a purposefully, conservatively preserved Arab culture (albeit with a few other influences; “Sietch Tabr” is derived from two Cossack terms) where other people have gone through more of a melting pot. Other terms in the setting suggest the wider influence of Arabic (bashar, jihad, caid, amal, etc.) as well as Persian (padishah, siridar), Turkish (kanly), and various Western European languages (landsraad, levenbrech, faufreluches). In medicine (the Suk school), religion (prana-bindu), and science (axlotl, s'tori) we see Asian and Native American influences, but the military–political feudal hierarchy clearly has foundations built on European and Middle Eastern cultures; we also see this in family names (Atreides is Greek, Harkonnen is Finnish, etc.).

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Now, if you're imagining the future of humanity, as those examples suggest, you have a bunch of options, and they depend a little on the scope of what you're creating. You got a cosmopolitan space empire with relative freedom of movement, and you don't want to do any extra legwork? You can probably just extrapolate from Earth's present-day demographics and call it a day. Lots of Indian names, lots of Chinese names, lots of Hispanic names, you're good. And if you're looking at a fairly narrow setting, like a single colony planet, just pick a couple groups you find interesting. The colony was established by a Franco-Congolese corporation, the first wave of colonists were Congolese and Filipino, and they later brought in some Egyptian specialists to work on an agricultural project. There's a francophone elite, most people speak a new creole, there's an Arabic-speaking minority, maybe you've got some religious groupings that cut across class lines in interesting ways, etc.

In between, though—say you're developing a whole sector for a Mothership (or Stars Without Number) campaign with a dozen systems, a whole bunch of planets and moons, a whole future history to think about. Who originally settled this place, and for what purpose? How many independent settlements were there? Were there multiple waves of colonization or waves of immigration to established colonies? You can get way out in the weeds on this, if it tickles you (as always in worldbuilding), and imagine secondary and tertiary cultures developing from present-day societies and then meeting on the extrasolar frontier and influencing each other in new and different ways.

But you can also keep it pretty simple. Think of that racist-ass backstory for Starlancer and Freelancer. The setting for the latter being almost entirely American, British, German, and Japanese (with a few Mediterranean pirates on the margins) may be terrible, but the mechanical premise works for quickly spooling up a playable region of space. Pick origins for three or four original colonies of whatever flavor (pure corporate feudalism, a mix of state and corporate identities, whatever—it depends a lot on where your setting lands on the continuum from hard SF to space fantasy), bring in some second- and third-wave migrants, imagine how everybody interacts and how things develop.

Personally, I think it's fun to imagine who on our Earth gets second (or third) pickings in space. Forget about all the countries (or multinational unions) that have advanced space programs right now—the Americans, Russians, and Chinese went out there first and grabbed all the plum spots near Earth; the Europeans and Japanese were right behind them. Now pretty much all of the usual suspects for cultures/names in SF are out of the picture. Who's up next? Look at projections of economic growth and send a couple rising economic powers to the stars. How about Indonesia and Brazil? How about South Korea, Mexico, and Turkey? Nigeria and Ethiopia? Or go even more speculative, and imagine Egypt getting the United Arab Republic back together, the Democratic Republic of Congo experiencing a high-tech transformation, India balkanizing and an independent Dravida Nadu going into space, or whatever else strikes your fancy.

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There's another dimension here that kind of cuts against what's future-historically probable, and might cut against what's fun and interesting to you, but that's worth considering, and that's the fact that, if you're reading this, you probably work in English, and most or nearly all of your own audience is engaging with your work in English, many of them coming from a place of English monolingualism or near-monolingualism. Diversity and historical plausibility are great for verisimilitude, but consider the phonology and orthography of the languages your names are coming from. Some are, in practice, a lot more easily grasped by your audience than others.

On the orthographic front, English speakers struggle with languages that use the Latin alphabet but include unfamiliar letters, use a lot of diacritics, or use familiar letters to represent unfamiliar sounds. Think Vietnamese or Polish. Do Trần Thanh Mẫn and Đỗ Văn Chiến sound much like those letters would in English? (Pop those names into Translate and find out!) Do Krzysztof Gawedzki and Mieczysław Grydzewski look pronounceable in English at all, at least to the average American? (My grandma was Polish, and maybe yours was too. Imagine otherwise!)

On the phonological side, native English speakers struggle with tone even when they can hear it, and there's no way to communicate tone in writing without diacritics that mean little or nothing to English speakers (Vietnamese strikes again). The singular Chinese (and Korean, and Vietnamese) name 李 gets transliterated into English in a dozen different ways (Lee, Li, Lei, Ly, Lý, Ri, Rhee, I, Yi, etc.); meanwhile, the entirely different names 羿, 易, and 伊 are also transliterated as Yi. Also 余 and 于 sometimes! And maybe 衣? (I do not speak any Chinese at all and am leaning pretty hard on Wikipedia here, bear with me.) You also see this to some extent with Wu, Wang, Liu, Chen—a lot of the most common Chinese surnames. And it's made even worse by given names (one of the most common Chinese given names, 丽, is also transliterated as “Li”).

All of which is to say that, if you're using Vietnamese names or Polish names, your readers are going to stumble over them (or just wildly mispronounce them, or both). If you're using Chinese names…well, you're not really using them, in a sense. You're only using part of the word, and you're flattening a whole dimension of sound and meaning away into nothing. So although it might work against your vision of a futurologically realistic setting, consider massaging things so that you're pulling from languages that are easy for English speakers to get their heads (and tongues) around.

Happily, if we refer back to those speculative third-wave space programs, Turkish, Indonesian, and Swahili are all, being or having been trade languages or bridge languages binding together diverse populations, among the easier non–Indo European languages for English speakers to grasp in general, not just phonologically. For languages more closely related to English, there's Spanish, of course, but also a lot of Indian languages, including Hindi/Urdu. Korean is phonologically a bit trickier than Japanese (and syllable-timed, like Japanese), but it's not tonal. Portuguese is more difficult than Spanish, but it's close enough that Americans think they get it even when they don't. Arabic and other Semitic languages (like Amharic) aren't easy for English speakers to pronounce well, but good transliteration (and familiarity via the news, unhappily) mean they don't struggle too much.

And all the major Nigerian languages are tonal. Can't win ’em all. At least they're not monosyllables!

Populating an Alien Ecosystem (with Gameable Stuff)

I've been running a homebrew adventure for my Mothership crew that began life as a response to one player's yearning for a Scavengers Reign TTRPG experience but has turned, both in development and at the table, away from being a wilderness-crawling survival adventure and toward being more of a horror mystery (which, incidentally, has made it more suitable to pitch for the Jump-9 Writers Grant, which I'm probably gonna do). Still, I put a bunch of work into coming up with zany alien life for the players to puzzle out and the PCs to interact with. I started out by coming up with a fairly novel planetary setting, then sketched out a few biomes the PCs might traverse, came up with a few broad-strokes ideas about what flora and fauna looked like (basic body plans, colors), and then got down to coming up with a bunch of details about the first biome they'd be in. Using various tools, particularly this handy generator based on Sebastian Romu's work and the very charming Exquisite Biome by Caro Asercion, I cooked up a half-dozen animals and a dozen plants.

As is so often the case with this kind of detailed game prep, it was a lot of fun, but the juice wasn't worth the squeeze in terms of gameplay outcomes. I had a ton of information, but a lot of it was totally extraneous, and what wasn't extraneous was often imperceptible to the PCs, or perceptible only if they took a sustained interest in something. And how were they supposed to know what to study in depth? I came up with some clues about interactions among my xenobiota (this crab-like invertebrate is drawn to this plant-like organism; the bark on this “tree” seems to be consumed by some other lifeform; these things seem only to grow near these other things) but the only way to get that information across was to either hope they asked the right question or make an exhausting info dump. There were other problems, too—turns out my friends, bless their hearts, are squeamish about murdering vertebrate animals.

I need a system that's more player-directed. Give them a broad sense impression of their environment, then let them ask questions and have their interests or needs drive what gets created (or fleshed out) ad hoc. What looks edible? What could we use as a parasol? Can we turn any of this into a prybar? Consequently, I need simpler, faster tables for generating lifeforms. This'll be handy for the game I'm presently running, but it'll be essential for a more open-ended, more squarely Scavengers Reign–inspired campaign, which is something I do want to return to. I want these rules to:

• Be usable at the table without interrupting the flow of the game. A couple die rolls, some immediately gameable results. Should be worth using for more in-depth prep, too, but it's essential to just be able to roll a fistful of dice and instantly be able to tell the players something that's evocative and that they can act on.
• Produce a range of sensory impressions. What does it look like? Does it have an odor? Is it making sounds? (“What does it feel like?” and “What does it taste like?” are important too, but they can and should wait for a more methodical investigation, which helps reduce the number of rolls that have to happen all at once.)
• Give results for lifeforms analogous to plants, fungi, and invertebrate animals that have a high probability of being useful to the PCs. No need to be “realistic” about it, especially when Scavengers Reign (where practically everything is useful or interactive) is the North Star. It is a game, after all. (And perhaps there's a good lore justification for a high degree of usability and combability with human anatomy or technology…)
• Give results for lifeforms analogous to vertebrate animal that are interesting without demanding that the players go hunting, and ideally encourage nonviolent interaction (but also sometimes encourage the players to guard against being hunted).
• Occasionally provoke stress checks. Gotta keep the players on their toes.

 

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The sensory qualities are pretty straightforward. I've already been trying these out at the table, where they work great; they probably aren't enough to bring things to life from first principles, but given that I already have a good sense of what plant-like stuff and animal-like organisms generally look like here, these prompts are enough for an off-the-cuff description of something new.

 

d20 colors (2d10 for photosynthetic organisms; this is under a K-type main sequence star):

1. White
2. Ultraviolet (appears black or dark purple to human vision)
3. Violet
4. Periwinkle
5. Azure
6. Teal
7. Olive green
8. Lime green
9. Gold
10. Saffron
11. Amber
12. Orange
13. Vermilion
14. Scarlet
15. Amaranth
16. Maroon
17. Infrared (appears black or dark red to human vision)
18. Black
19. Pink
20. Powder blue

 

d10 textures:

1. Smooth and rigid
2. Smooth and soft
3. Abrasive
4. Ridged
5. Scaly
6. Stippled
7. Sticky
8. Velvety
9. Spiny
10. Porous

 

d10 animal sounds:

1. Trilling
2. Chirping
3. Barking
4. Roaring
5. Shrieking
6. Singing
7. Trumpeting
8. Wailing
9. Rattling
10. None

 

d5 plant sounds (or maybe d10, with 6–10 being none):

1. Creaking
2. Clacking
3. Rustling
4. Rattling
5. Whispering

 

d10 odors:

1. Fragrant, like floral perfume
2. Resinous, like pine sap
3. Sweet, like ripe berries
4. Sharp, like citrus fruit
5. Minty, like…mint
6. Burnt, like coffee or woodsmoke
7. Yeasty, like rising bread or old socks
8. Acrid, like cleaning fluid
9. Pungent, like garlic or horseradish
10. Putrid, like rotting matter

 

d5 (dominant) flavors:

1. Sweet
2. Salty
3. Sour
4. Bitter
5. Umami

 

d5 intensities (for odor or flavor; might be better as a weighted scale on a d10):

1. None (or imperceptibly weak)
2. Weak
3. Distinct
4. Strong
5. Overwhelming

 

Working out what organisms are useful to the PCs is a little trickier. I might want to weight these differently, and I might want a roll to determine how many parts of an organisms are useful, and which parts (a plant analog might have tasty but nutritionally empty leaves, nutritious but unpleasant-tasting bark, and poisonous roots, for instance). On the other hand, that might be something I can just leave to player initiative/discretion. As a rough first draft, at any rate:

 

d10 useful/harmful qualities

1. Inedible (can't be digested)
2. Inedible (repulsive, possibly emetic)
3. Inedible (toxic)
4. Edible but neither flavorful nor nutritious
5. Edible and flavorful but not nutritious
6. Edible and nutritious but not flavorful 
7. Edible, flavorful, and nutritious
8. Has pharmacological properties
9. Can be processed into tools
10. Can interface directly with the human body

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.

Bookpost #5

Yes, it's (past) that time again. And again, we're just going to skip over the stuff I don't have anything positive to say about. Being catty and trashing other people's work may be fun, but it's not nice. Life is short. We're all trying our best.

* * * 

Tokyo Ueno Station (Miri Yu)

Beautiful and oddly lively, for all that it's a profoundly sad novel about a dead homeless guy and the crushing weight of class and caste in Japanese society. I find it really interesting how much contemporary(-ish) Japanese art, like the films of Juzo Itami and Satoshi Kon, prominently features, or even (as in this novel and Kon's Tokyo Godfathers) focuses directly on the homeless, a population that, by official measures, scarcely exists in the country.

HHhH (Laurent Binet)

A fascinating blend of gripping true story and dizzying metafiction account of trying to write a gripping true story. Not as confident as Binet's Civilizations, which I read first, and less enjoyable overall, but the lack of confidence is part of the point, and how much are you supposed to enjoy learning about the rise of the Nazis and how they strangled the life out of Europe, even if a few of them do get theirs in the end?

Severance (Ling Ma)

For all that this was prescient about what a disastrous pandemic originating from China would look like (Ma predicted the ubiquity of KN95 masks and remote work, among other things, well before COVID arrived), I think it's been unfairly pigeonholed as “a pandemic novel,” when it's really much more about The Way We Life Now. The real pandemic was capitalism! (But seriously, a beautiful, provocative, hilariously funny novel, one of the best I've read in recent years.)

Short Letter, Long Farewell (Peter Handke)

A weird, endlessly digressive little novel that I didn't tremendously enjoy as I was reading it, but that has stuck with me more than I expected it to. Handke had a way of conjuring up powerfully vivid little scenes and communicating the disjointed, discursive thinking of his oddball narrator (which is to say, probably, himself) such that you can really get into the head of a guy you have very little reason to relate to.

Plague Ship, Ordeal in Otherwhere, and Garan the Eternal (Andre Norton)

Found these last summer in the same used-books section where I snapped up Moorcock's Runestaff books—same yellow and yellowing little old 1970s paperbacks (somebody in Hot Springs, Montana, was plugged into exactly the same influences as Gygax and company). I'd never read any Norton, one of the most prolific SFF authors of the 20th century and, right alongside Moorcock, one of the chief influences on D&D (and thus on pretty much all genre media of the past 50 years). I grabbed one from the '50s, one from the '60s, and one that was started in the '40s and finished in the '70s, and they're all delightfully representative of their time periods, going from the hypermasculine star-trader heroics of Plague Ship (which is basically just a short Traveller campaign) to the psychedelic quasi-feminist zaniness of Ordeal in Otherwhere and then Garan lurching from baroque Sky Captain silliness in his postwar debut to apocalyptic drear (and also trippy past-lives Eternal Champion stuff) in the Nixon-era conclusion. Definitely going to be on the lookout for more Norton in my used-books beachcombing.

Creative Surgery (Clelia Farris)

I was put onto Farris by Lavie Tidhar, who included her story “The Substance of Ideas” in Best of World SF: Volume 2. For better and worse, I think he chose well — that story, which is included in this collection, remains my favorite. They're mostly great, though (I also liked “Gabola” and “Secret Enemy” quite a bit), and every single one has something arrestingly memorable going on.

Fire to Fire (Mark Doty)

Another book, albeit an almost entirely different one, where my point of entry (in this case, “Messiah: Christmas Portions”) remains my favorite of the author's work, but I'm not the least bit disappointed. Many beautiful poems here; Doty is an observer of the minutiae of life, particularly urban life, with few equals. Love “Chanteuse,” and not just because it's about, and so vividly evokes, Boston.

Broken Stars (ed. Ken Liu)

Another one that I found my way to via Tidhar's Best of World SF series, and as much as anything I've tracked down following the spoor of one of those stories, this reinforces my belief that all the best, most interesting stuff happening in SFF is happening outside the United States, if not outside the Anglosphere entirely (although, in fairness, a couple of these were originally written in English). “Moonlight,” “The Snow of Jinyang,” and “The First Emperor's Games” are all fun little confections, playing with genre tropes or mashing up short fiction with other media (“Moonlight” is by Cixin Liu; I was not a fan of The Three-Body Problem, but I think his style is very well suited to this sort of wry short fiction). The best of the book, and one of the most affecting, thought-provoking stories I've read in a long time, is “What Has Passed Shall in Kinder Light Appeal,” which like many (most?) of the works in this collection concerns travel through time and our perception thereof.

Delicious in Dungeon, Vols. 1–4 (Ryoko Kui)

Super fun stuff, can't wait to read more. Incredibly good about taking a lot of what's weird and irrational about D&D and digging into it, spinning out rationales for it and deriving all kinds of fun little plots from it. The whole dungeon ecosystem is a great idea, but all the individual parts of it are particularly wonderful fuel for game writing.

The Living Mountain (Nan Shepherd)

Strange and beautiful. Some of the best work I've ever read not so much about nature but about being in nature, being embodied in the natural environment—the sensory experience, and not just the sights and sounds (although she has keen and unusual observations about how the mountain atmosphere plays tricks on the eyes) but the touch and taste of it too, the sensations of walking barefoot, napping under the sky, drinking spring water straight from the creek. Also a good reminder that you might write something truly great and not be able to find a publisher for it, not be able to find an audience for it, and that doesn't diminish its greatness. Shepherd had the pleasure of seeing it published (and become beloved and influential) late in life, after it'd sat in a desk drawer for 30 years. Not all artists are so lucky!

The Vanished Birds (Simon Jimenez)

Didn't love the story or setting, but still found a lot to like. Strong, well drawn characters, some arresting imagery, good writing throughout. The first shift of perspective is extremely powerful, a wonderfully lived-in illustration of the effects of time dilation, of what it's like to live, travel, and love in an interstellar society. The second shift in perspective, and the subsequent elaboration of one character's backstory, is much weaker, and the novel never finds it way back to the heights of the first two chapters.

Radical Warrior: August Willich's Journey from German Revolutionary to Union General (David Dixon)

It's not perfect (like almost everything published these days, it could've really used more and better editing) but I am not going to look a gift horse in the mouth when the universe hands me a full-length biography of my favorite, and heretofore criminally obscure, Civil War general. The full story of Willich's life is even more delightful than what I knew from Wikipedia and anecdotal scraps from other histories. A truly modern man, two centuries ahead of his life, and deeply flawed in ways that only make him more relatable to me. It is crazy what posters dudes like Willich, Marx, and Engels were. People joke about like, “Oh, imagine if they'd had Twitter!” but no, I don't think that would've actually changed much. They were tweeting at each other in the broadsheets and in handbills, and exactly the same dumbass ways leftist bros snipe at each other online today, right down to accusing each other of being both gay and cucked. It's magnificent. And also, for all that he was a temperamental egotist with a death wish, for as much as he enjoyed the sound of his own voice and was a political naïf, Willich was truly heroic. Not just a brilliant, and appallingly physically courageous, military officer, but a courageous thinker, a courageous ally to oppressed and marginalized people (particularly Black Americans), and somebody who sought—for all that he enjoyed fame, acclaim, and the perks of leadership—not to command but to empower others, to give them the tools to defend and perfect a people's republic.

Bookpost #4

Ah, I've been negligent.

It's been a fallow season for me, TTRPG-wise; I've been going through some drama in my personal life, and my long-running Stars Without Number game has gone on a “hiatus” that will probably prove to be permanent. I had a falling out with one of the players, and nearly all of the others have gone through something major of their own in the past couple months (two had deaths in the family; two are about to have their first kid). Most of the group continues to meet, but sporadically now, and often with only two or three players. We've been trying out Black Sword Hack, which is delightful and great for some drop-in, drop-out adventure-of-the-week action, but after literally years of getting six people together every week, almost without fail, seeing the game come to this is tough. And missing my best, most enthusiastic player—who was one of my closest friends, too—is tougher still.

But life goes on. I'm not doing much TTRPG stuff, but I'm writing poetry and fiction, I'm drawing, I'm playing board games, I'm cooking. And I'm reading a lot! And I haven't done a post about books since January! So now there's way too damn much to go into detail, and I'm skipping over a bunch of things I didn't like or don't have much to say about. But the highlights:

Convergence Problems (Wole Talabi)

The last thing I mentioned in the previous post was, reasonably enough, the first thing I read this year. And it was great! The quality of the stories is a bit uneven, but the best are fantastic, and even the weaker ones are different enough from what's popular in American SF, and offer enough insight into Nigerian society and culture, to be fascinating.

How Not to Network a Nation (Benjamin Peters)

If/Then (Jill Lepore)

Two different 1960s-centric nonfiction stories about the technological futures we didn't have. Lepore is a much, much better writer than Peters (no offense, Ben), and her book infinitely more readable, but the subject matter of How Not to… is, to me, much more interesting. Kinda wish Lepore would write about it!

All for Nothing (Walter Kempowski)

Old Filth (Jane Gardam)

Two great literary novels about some of the darkest corners of 20th-century history that are way, way funnier than they have any right to be.

Sabriel, Lirael, and Abhorsen (Garth Nix)

History of the Runestaff (Michael Moorcock)

The Languages of Pao (Jack Vance)

A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge)

A bunch of “Can you believe I'd never read this before?” SFF classics. (Okay, maybe Pao specifically isn't exactly a classic, but it's the first Jack Vance I'd ever read, so that's something.) Love a lot of the worldbuilding detail in Nix's work, particularly the musical magic. Love how clear it is that OD&D was just “let's turn the Runestaff books into a game.” Love a good old SF take on the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, Vance's vocabulary, and his eye for environmental detail (his characters leave a lot to be desired, though). Absolutely adore the over-the-top, overstuffed space opera plenitude of Vinge's Zones of Thought setting.

Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (Stanislaw Lem)

The Two of Them (Joanna Russ)

Always Coming Home (Ursula K. Le Guin)

Five Ways to Forgiveness (Ursula K. Le Guin)

A bunch of new-to-me works by beloved favorites. Memoirs isn't the most gripping narrative, but it's a fascinating perspective on American Cold War paranoia from an outside perspective. The Two of Them is vivid, incredibly well drawn, and repeatedly heartbreaking. And both of the Le Guin books, well, shame on me for not having read two of the best works by my all-time favorite author earlier. Five Ways is gorgeous, incredibly moving, far more romantic than you'd expect from her. Always Coming Home is just astounding. A whole world, a whole philosophy, a whole way of living.

Empire of Pain (Patrick Radden Keefe)

Yeah, it really is that good. And they really were that bad.

Godwin (Joseph O'Neill)

Funny, strange, thought-provoking. Wonderful characters; the degree to which the narrators are utterly distinct and different from one another and both absolutely believable is real virtuoso writing.

Total Chaos (Jean-Claude Izzo)

A fun, pacy, trope-heavy crime novel that is so thick with culturally, geographically, chronologically specific detail that it's easy to forgive the many predictable beats.

You Dreamed of Empires (Alvaro Enrigue)

Best thing I've read all year. One of the most memorable, strange, immersive, exciting novels I've read in quite a few years, in fact.

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!

What Is Scary?

Exodus concept art by Archetype Entertainment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Future So White, There’s Only One Shade (of Skin)

A digital simulacrum of Mark Hamill stars in Squadron 42

Like many nerds who grew up in the 1990s playing the Wing Commander and X-Wing games, I backed infamous forever-in-development space sim boondoggle Star Citizen ages ago, and I keep up with its development. The rumor mill has it that this October—mere weeks from now!—will bring momentous news about the project, perhaps even a release date for Squadron 42, its single-player component. What better time to check in and see how the multiplayer side of the game’s coming along? My decrepit old potato of a PC can barely run it anymore, but it’s a pretty enough slideshow, and I can tootle around in my ship (and in my ship), marvel at the sights, and daydream about what might someday be. And I can reflect on all that’s gone wrong.

If you’ve never played Star Citizen, you might know it—if you know it at all—as vaporware, a scam, a crowdfunding horror story. It is, in fact, neither vaporware nor an outright scam, but it is an incredible monument to poor planning and mismanagement, and a warning about what can happen when you give a couple of dreamy visionaries a billion dollars with no deadlines or guardrails. The whole thing is like a giant game of exquisite corpse; not only does the left hand not know what the right is doing, neither of them knows where the feet are or whether the kidneys are functioning. Even as the developers strip entire mature systems out of the game to replace them with more sophisticated, more complex iterations, they keep adding new material that’s obsolete on arrival: spaceships that don’t support the new resource-management system, static environments that don’t use the destructible terrain or physicalized scenery they’ve so exhaustively developed, mission content that doesn’t make use of the dynamic simulated economy they’ve been promising for a decade now.

This haphazardness is nowhere more evident than in the writing. The basic premise of the setting is a fun kind of Silver Age science fiction throwback, with human civilization representing, in Asimovian fashion, the Roman Empire in space, and various alien species standing in for the Celts, the Germans, the Arabs, and the Persians. It’s inherently mildly racist, of course, and a bit on the nose besides—the Germanic aliens are literally called the Vanduul, and the plot arc that will see them driven ahead of some as-yet-unrevealed space Huns to sack space Rome (Earth), upon which event the center of human civilization will move to space Byzantium (the confusingly named Terra), has been telegraphed from light-years away—but it’s not a bad setup. They haven’t ever done much with the Roman theme, though, because two stronger influences have strangled it.

One is simple nostalgia for the SF films and shows of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Rather than on-theme sites and institutions drawn from Roman culture and history, most of what we’ve got so far is pure cinematic pastiche. There’s off-brand Coruscant and off-brand Cloud City, a Tatooine and a Hoth, an entire Blade Runner planet, ships modeled heavily on Alien’s Nostromo and its sequel’s dropship, and so forth. And hey, fair enough. People love nostalgia, and they love pastiche. The other influence, though, is the lede I buried all the way down here under four paragraphs of faff.

* * *

Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are the brainchildren of brothers Chris and Erin Roberts, games industry veterans who started out at Origin Systems, where they created the Wing Commander games—a series of story-driven space combat simulators, heavily influenced by Star Wars, and a number of spinoffs, including Wing Commander: Privateer and Privater 2: The Darkening, which brought open-world gameplay to the Wing Commander setting. Electronic Arts purchased Origin, and the brothers Roberts left, with much of their staff, to found a new studio, Digital Anvil, with backing from Microsoft. There, they created the spiritual predecessors of Squadron 42 and Star Citizen: Starlancer and Freelancer, respectively a story-driven space combat simulator in the vein of Wing Commander and a wildly ambitious Privateer-like open-world game set in the same universe. (When Freelancer inevitably went way over budget and way past its due date, Microsoft intervened, slashed the most ambitious elements, and shoved a pared-down but functional game out the door as soon as they could. No such luck, for better and worse, for Star Citizen.)

Starlancer was a prequel to Freelancer, relating how the setting of the latter came to be. It began in the 22nd century, with two Earth-based superpowers struggling for control of the solar system. It was literally East vs. West: the Western Alliance (the United States, Japan, and Western Europe) against the Eastern Coalition (China, the former Soviet Union, and the Arab states). It’s a latter-day Cold War scenario concocted by a bunch of guys who grew up on Red Scare propaganda and Ronald Reagan speeches, so of course the perfidious Easterners kick off the action by launching a brutal surprise attack on the West, obliterating France and Italy. A jolly little space war ensues, but despite the player’s best efforts, the West eventually loses. In defeat, they launch five interstellar colony ships—one American, one Japanese, one British, one German, and one Spanish—on a centuries-long journey to settle the star systems that will become the setting of Freelancer.

Freelancer, then, is a far-future setting in which basically everybody is of American, British, German, or Japanese descent (the Spanish colony ship malfunctions; they end up as a mysterious, piratical minor faction). It’s a little weird, and, again, ever so mildly racist, but the game’s backstory justifies it effectively, and it has some advantages in scene-setting and storytelling. Where it doesn’t work so well is in Star Citizen.

* * *

You see, despite not having a naively reactionary World War Three background to explain away the nonexistence in the setting of much of humanity (although I don’t believe Starlancer or Freelancer ever considered the existence of India, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, or Latin America in the first place), Star Citizen and Squadron 42 pick up right where Freelancer left off. In what’s likely meant to be an homage to those older games, American, British, German, and Japanese proper nouns dominate the setting. In-game brands are occasionally Japanese (Musashi, Sakura), occasionally German (Behring, Kruger), and otherwise almost universally Anglo-American. Named historical figures are likewise: Croshaw, Messer, Bishop, Hurston. The cast of Squadron 42? Gillian Anderson, Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Mark Strong, Ben Mendelsohn, Liam Cunningham, John Rhys-Davies—obviously a star-studded gesture of affection for the genre movies and shows the developers love, but equally obviously lily-white (and overwhelmingly male). Everybody in this universe speaks English; everybody has an American or British accent.

It’s a microcosm of the whole directionless design process. There’s no overall plan, there’s no vision, there’s no explanation of how anything got anywhere. There have been a whole lot of choices made in isolation: let’s cast this guy we love, let’s have a throwback to Freelancer here, let’s name a character after somebody’s mother-in-law or God knows what. No individual choice is terrible, but a thousand of them add up to something unsettling—a future for humanity in which early 21st-century Anglo-American culture remains hegemonic, in which nearly every person of any importance or consequence is white, in which vast swathes of humanity have apparently vanished without a trace. (And the stand-ins for non-white, non-Anglophone people are literally aliens.)

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of obsessive, encyclopedic “worldbuilding,” but there’s something to be said for having a thoroughly, holistically developed setting for fiction like this. Star Citizen is by no means alone in fumbling its way to an accidentally white-supremacist future (its sometime rival Elite: Dangerous is much the same, as of course are most of the classic genre films and television shows these games draw from); it’s what happens when a bunch of British and American (and German and Canadian, in Star Citizen’s case) creators, drawing on their own milieu and their favorite media, develop a setting piecemeal without considering the big picture. But a few weeks from now—we can dream!—Squadron 42 might have an official release date, and this wildly ambitious game, which for all its faults features some extraordinary technology and gorgeous art, might be one step closer to reality. A lot of eyes will be on the United Empire of Earth; it’s a shame they won’t be seeing something more thoughtfully imagined and representative of humanity’s rich real-life diversity.

Bookpost #2

Something else I’m way behind on: cataloging and reviewing my reading this year. Here’s a partial account.

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (Jonathan Katz)

I knew some parts of Smedley Butler’s biography (like the Business Plot, of course), and I knew of the U.S. role in the establishment of banana republics favorable to business all over Latin America (thanks in no small part to Stephen Kinzer’s excellent The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the American Empire), but I never knew the extent to which Butler was the Forrest Gump of imperial warmongering. Some of these episodes—the Marines holding the Haitian legislature at gunpoint and forcing them to essentially sign away their sovereignty; Congress engineering Panama’s secession from Colombia at the behest of American banks—are so sordid and cartoonishly evil you’d scarcely believe them in fiction.

The Other Wind (Ursula Le Guin)

Like some of the short stories, I’d never read this one before. I think I was at just the wrong age for it when it was published—too old for kids’ fantasy books, in my teenage mind—and then I simply didn’t pick it up as an adult, for whatever reason. I wonder what I would have made it at age 17 or 25; now, on the heels of rereading The Farthest Shore and Tehanu, I found it surprisingly hopeful and youthful in spirit. A beautiful conclusion to the Earthsea saga.

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson)

For a guy who loves Neuromancer as much as I do, I really haven’t read enough of Gibson’s later work. Or maybe I have, because I didn’t love this. Aseptic and lifeless, clever but purposeless. Not nearly as prescient as it was, I gather, hailed for being at the time.

They Will Dream in the Garden (Gabriela Damien Miravete)

I asked a friend for some obscure SFF in translation for a book swap, and she delivered. Short stories, some science fiction, some fantasy, some horror, some hybrids, almost all excellent. “The Synchrony of Touch” and “The End of the Party” were my particular favorites, the former for its elegiac strangeness, the latter for making a hoary old theme fresh and new.

Bliss Montage (Ling Ma)

Another gift from a friend, more genre-bending short stories, another big hit. Here, the hilarious and the surreal keep melting, or crashing, into the deadly serious and the all too real. Lots of troubled, or troubling, relationships; domestic violence features in several stories (including the excellent, and very funny, “Los Angeles”) and haunts others. “Office Hours” is particularly good, a challenging, uneasy, fascinating blend of the cozy and the sinister.

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (eds. R.F. Kuang and John Joseph Adams)

Having read and enjoyed a bunch of short genre fiction, I thought back on my childhood love and diligent collecting of Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. I knew Dozois had passed away and the series had ended with him, but had anybody picked up the baton and started something similar? Hey, somebody had, and R.F. Kuang had guest-edited the most recent edition!

It was a bit of a disappointment. Lots of amateurish work, lots of pieces that strain the definition of “short fiction” (and mostly not in fun, experimental ways), lots of shallow treatment of hot-button topics. There are some winners, though; Isabel Kim’s “Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist” is the absolute hands-down standout. Alix Harrow’s formally (if not thematically) inventive “The Six Deaths of the Saint,” Chris Willrich’s cute Star Trek satire “The Odyssey Problem,” and Maria Dong’s strange, unsettling “In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird” are also good.

Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary (Gao Wenqian)

Imagine how nonplussed everybody in my life was when I spent a couple weeks after finishing this being like, “Okay, I know you already think Mao was bad, but what if I told you he was even worse?!” Zhou’s biographer intended this as a corrective to decades of official hagiography, showing us that the man was, after all, only human, and flawed like all of us. He was human, of course, and he was flawed, but I’m now convinced he was one of the most extraordinary human beings of his time, and very much worthy of praise (if not sainthood).

The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World (Arthur Herman)

You ever read something that covers a bunch of subject matter you don’t know very well, and then gets to a subject you do know quite well, hundreds of pages in, and you realize, wow, this author knows less about this stuff than I do, and he’s made a bunch of elementary mistakes, and what if the whole book has been like this and I just didn’t know? Yeah. Also, the titular thesis is a bit fashy (in spite of Herman’s protests-too-much efforts to distance himself from the far right) and the title itself gets laboriously worked into the text about nine hundred times, which is just annoying.

System Collapse (Martha Wells)

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!

Prophet Song (Paul Lynch)

Gorgeous, harrowing, haunting. Exemplary evidence for the argument that the novel is a powerful, perhaps unique medium for generating true empathy, for conjuring up other lives, other people, letting you walk in their shoes, experience their fears and sorrows, and bring something of them back to your own life—a memory, a feeling, some moral clarity and guidance, a light in the dark. Right up there with Kairos. The best books I’ve read all year.

Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel

I read this immediately after Prophet Song, which was a tough act to follow. Had I jumped into it after, say, Murderbot, would the prose have seemed so pedestrian, the characters so thinly developed and undifferentiated, the setting such a lazy pastiche of scenes from filmic zombie apocalypses? Maybe, maybe not. But I still don’t think I’d have loved it. This is very much a conservative, even reactionary, perspective on civilization and crisis—makes the case that some fragile membrane (a thin blue line, one might say) is all that protects us from savage violence, from people turning feral, from the whole human species unlearning centuries of science and engineering. Wrong! All wrong! People aren't feral monsters in waiting. Pandemics don’t work this way (as we all know now thanks to COVID). And you can make penicillin in your kitchen!

Alien: Heresy

Alien: Romulus does Alien 3

Sabrina and I saw Alien: Romulus on Wednesday. We prepared by watching all six of the previous films in the series (no, we didn’t bother with AvP) in the preceding six days. I had seen them all save Alien: Covenant before, but some not for 20 years or longer. Watching them all in a row gave me a newfound appreciation for some and inspired some flamin’ hot takes about others.

For all that the series is beloved, for all its immeasurable influence, most of the individual films haven’t been highly rated. The first two are widely—almost universally—regarded to be the best, and sometimes “the only good ones.” Are they? Let’s quickly review the other five.

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ALIEN 3

Although all four films from Alien 3 to Covenant have their haters, Alien 3 probably comes in for the most contempt, and it’s easy to see why. This film kills off two of Aliens’ protagonists before the curtain even rises, knocks off a third fairly early on, and finally dispatches Ripley herself in the end—not a recipe for fan enthusiasm. It went through a famously hellish development process, which is abundantly evident in the theatrical cut. Even setting aside the bold choice to kill off a bunch of beloved characters, it’s just not a good movie. The screenplay, hacked together from parts of better work that was deemed unfilmable (i.e., too expensive), is poorly paced, clumsily plotted, and largely (albeit not entirely) characterized by indistinguishable characters and unmemorable dialogue. The special effects are terrible, too—the crude CGI xenomorph doesn’t even look consistent from one scene to the next.

ALIEN RESURRECTION 

Resurrection too has its vocal detractors. People don’t like the campy extravagance of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s direction, the Joss Whedon script full of one-liners and zingers (essentially a dry run for his show Firefly), or the sinister Ripley clone who behaves little like the character they know and love. The script definitely has its rough (or just plain embarrassing) patches, but for the most part, this thing is a hoot. It shies away from suspense and leads hard on body horror, gross-out weirdness, and visual verve. And after two straight performances of strained, uncomfortable heterosexuality, Ripley finally gets back to being quietly gay. With robot Winona Ryder, no less!

PROMETHEUS 

Prometheus is probably the least common choice for “worst Alien movie” (except perhaps on the technicality that “it’s not really an Alien movie”), but for all its merits (and it has many—it’s a beautiful film), it is almost certainly the dumbest. Thanks to a truly awful screenplay by the ever-detestable Damon Lindelof and a few poor casting choices, the cast are not the least bit believable as a team of academics; they bumble along, making every possible wrong or stupid decision, while a convoluted story unfolds around them that tries to turn a bunch of ancient-aliens conspiracy goofiness into a grave, portentous fable about creation and mortality. None of it works, and the cowardly decision to have the Engineers just be big bald Dr. Manhattan types instead of elephant-headed giant ETs is a petty but particularly bitter disappointment for me.

ALIEN: COVENANT 

Covenant tries to square the circle of being a proper sequel to Prometheus and bringing the series back to its sci-fi horror roots, with mixed results. The screenplay, Lindelof-free, is much improved, but still saddled by many of the previous film’s poor choices, and once again features a whole mess of characters whose job it is to travel through space and explore alien planets yet who seem to have no idea how to do that safely. Taking a page from Alien 3, it dumps some of the previous installment’s ballast by unceremoniously murdering a main character offscreen. Michael Fassbender is an absolute treat, though.

ALIEN: ROMULUS 

Romulus, at the end of the day, is an Alien clip show. It has a ton of potential—great production design, wonderful practical effects, some very cool set pieces—but it is determined to cram every frame with Easter eggs and homages, and eventually pivots from homage to simply regurgitating iconic lines and images from the previous six films nonstop through its last half hour. The use of AI to recreate the late Ian Holm (and not even to reprise his role from Alien, but simply to portray a similar character) might be the single lowest point of the series. (For all that, it’s mostly enjoyable!)

* * *

So is my heretical take that Resurrection is good, actually? Well, yes, but it’s kind of a corollary to a much hotter take: Resurrection might be the second-best of the series, which means that Aliens isn’t. In fact, it’s one of the worst, and it’s guilty of almost everything that the subsequent sequels (and prequels) catch hell for. Take off your rose-colored Millennial nostalgia glasses, and let’s run down its list of sins. Aliens…

1. Rewrites the main character. Alien 3 especially gets shit for this (Resurrection gets more of a pass, I think, because it’s not meant to be exactly the same character); people don’t like meek, maudlin, suicidal prison-planet Ripley. But superheroic good mother Ripley is no less of a departure from the unsentimental, no-nonsense professional we met in Alien. The gloomy, beaten-down Ripley is relatable, at least, like the original Ripley just having a bad day at the office. This Ripley isn’t.
2. Undoes the ending of the previous film in order to shoehorn in an otherwise incompatible plot. No, it’s not as egregious as killing half of the characters offscreen or bringing one back from the dead, but it is pretty ridiculous that Aliens sends Ripley straight back to the planet she just escaped from, and without much in the way of motivation. Burke never satisfactorily explains why it’s important that she join the mission, and her choice is ultimately framed as the fulfillment of a self-evident need for her to face her fears. Big Reagan-era self-help energy here.
3. Departs from the tone and mood of the previous film. For some reason, Alien 3’s bleakness and Resurrection’s gonzo campiness come in for constant criticism, but Aliens gets a pass because “it’s an action movie, not a horror.” But it’s not just a shift of genre. Aliens is basically an R-rated children’s movie, complete with a plucky preteen deuteragonist who’s never in any real danger, a schmaltzy found-family narrative with intimations of a (hetero) romance, a raft of wisecracks and one-liners, and an improbably happy ending. None of it has aged well; the whole thing has a slightly camp quality (in contrast to Resurrection’s intentional campiness).
4. Dilutes the impact of the monster. This is a common problem in horror sequels, and Aliens commits all the usual sins: it multiples one implacable monster into a legion of uninteresting cannon fodder, making them individually fragile and disposable; it shows the monsters more, relying less on mystery and the viewer’s imagination; and it adds new types of monster, something that the prequels catch a lot of heat for but that started right here. Yeah, the queen is a cool design, but it proves to be a very slippery slope.
5. Drives the plot in order to tick various boxes rather than to follow a consistent internal logic. We want to go back to the planet and fight aliens, so we go back and fight aliens without a satisfactory justification. Gotta keep the characters on the surface—guess we’ll stick an alien in the dropship (never mind that none ever goes outside). We want another ending where an alien gets blown out an airlock, so we contrive to have the queen follow the characters up to orbit after a false ending. We need a bunch of fodder for gory kills, so the Marines show up under strength, with inadequate equipment and no knowledge of what they’re up against. Does Burke even want this mission to succeed?
6. Overstuffs the cast with forgettable, generic characters. We’ve got the green young officer, the grizzled NCO, the Latina stereotype (played by a white woman in brownface, no less), the aviator-wearing pilot, and…eight others? A couple of them come into focus eventually (hetero love interest, panicky whiner) but most are just meat. And yet they get names, they get screen time, they get dialogue. Instead of eight near-identical grunts with speaking parts, there should’ve been three dozen extras (because although the cast is too big, the deployment is bizarrely small, and perplexingly includes no crew for the ship itself).
7. Diminishes the environmental terror of the setting. We go right back to the same planet Ripley just left—an awe-inspiring wasteland of freezing temperatures, howling winds, and hellish precipitation, which humans could traverse only clumsily, in bulky spacesuits—and thanks to some hand-waved terraforming, everybody can now walk around without so much as a face mask. (Never mind that there are facehuggers afoot!)

And those are just the flaws it shares with its successors. What might be the worst thing about it—something that really sets it apart from the others—is how dated it feels. It spoils some of the groundbreaking gender progressiveness of Alien by pushing Ripley into a more archetypically feminine mold, making her both a mother figure and a heterosexual love interest to a male soldier. It traffics in the casual misogyny, racism, and homophobia of its benighted time, which is both embarrassing on its face (again: brownface!) and a pretty grievous failure of science fiction writing. The air of anachronism extends beyond the cracks about gay sex and illegal immigration, too. Why do the Colonial Marines have American flag patches on their uniforms? Why does most of their equipment look like vintage kit from the 20th century?

There’s also a more subtle but more sinister message in the soldiers being—behind their charmingly roguish exteriors—universally virtuous, brave, and admirable, and not at all complicit in the evil deeds of their slimy, untrustworthy, ignoble corporate taskmaster. Cameron had Vietnam in mind when he conceived the story, an allegorical tale of good soldiers thrown into harm’s way by corrupt leaders disconnected from reality and ignorant of the situation on the ground. Like an American clean Wehrmacht myth, it’s a cryptofascist revision of Vietnam history, of a piece with the lie that returning servicemen were spit on by hippies and antiwar protestors. But the very existence of the Colonial Marines is a poor choice, too, diluting and confusing the monolithic power of The Company. No longer is this a post-government hypercapitalist dystopia; now it’s just 1980s America in space.

* * *

It’s still fun! All of the sequels and prequels are fun in one way or another (and all have bits and pieces ripe to be plucked for a TTRPG campaign—expect to see their influence seep into lots of content on this blog in the coming months). Each is flawed, too, in many of the same ways: riddled with plot holes, stuffed with too many uninteresting characters, ignorant of quarantine protocols. None even comes close to matching the quality of the original Alien.

The seven films together do not form a coherent whole—and that’s fine. Down with canon, I say. Down with lore. Down with the franchise. Up with a diverse roster of filmmakers taking an iconic horror baddie for a spin and not worrying much about continuity or fan service. Speaking of which—isn’t it high time a female director helmed one of these things? Give Claire Denis an Alien film!