Apertures

Red Tree, Yellow Sky by Georgia O'Keeffe

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

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

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

Elephant Skull by Henry Moore

Egg Form: Pebbles by Moore

Head of UNESCO Reclining Figure by Moore

Maquette for Atom Piece by Moore

Pond in the Woods by O'Keeffe

Leaf Motif, No. 2 by O'Keeffe

Black Place I by O'Keeffe

Red Hill and White Shell by O'Keeffe

States of Exception

Detail of Frontal Self-Portrait by Käthe Kollwitz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Is Scary?

Exodus concept art by Archetype Entertainment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!