RPG Articles

The emotional quality of this book is amazing. At least the first half, the second half is a little… Zardozish. That isn’t really accurate, but it’ll do.

Unlike Zardoz, this is worth going through. It’s a sci-fi story from 1953, with an interesting concept and some great insights. In the first half. Unlike Armor, where the second half was eventually so very worth it, this just dissolves into the same territory so much sci-fi of the era does.

The book, if nothing else, reinforced my belief that prose is superior to poetry for conveying a feeling. Poetry is too concerned with structure, and people that write it are too concerned with playing at word games to make an impact. I generalize, naturally, but that’s the overall view I have. Word games are fun, to be sure, but people always talk about it conveying feelings. Compare any damned thing you like with this for bringing across a deep depression conveyed by isolation-

“The sap falls and the bear sleeps and the birds fly south, all doing it together, not because they are all members of the same thing, but only because they are all solitary things hurt by the same thing.”

I mean, that’s just brilliant. Thankfully I was already depressed, so it just put a slight edge to it.

Go, any who find this, and read it. The damned thing breaks down, but it was such an early time for the genre that everyone felt they had to shoot for utopia.

Good lord what a piece of shit.

No, seriously. If someone gives you this book, I’d suggest you only hang onto it for starting fires. It’s some ok to pretty good artwork filled with the author jerkin’ his Jesus complex over and over.

The premise: A blue light shrinks everyone down. Adults average six inches tall.

As premises go it isn’t really bad, but the writing is. Everyone freaks out, and I do mean everyone. Except for the precognitive son of some dude in an office building. See previous reference to Jesus Jerkin. I don’t know about you, but I’d be way more concerned if I was the only one shrunk. I have enough self-image issues. But no, we’re expected to believe that mankind would devolve to barbarism and tribalism within an afternoon because of this. It just doesn’t wash. A good writer could probably suspend disbelief enough to play with the concept, but that isn’t what we get here.

In the short- Boring, bible thumping garbage without a single thing to recommend it. People ooh and ahh over the artwork, but it really isn’t all that impressive. Some panels are good, most are about average. We can only hope the author accidentally strangles himself while flogging the bishop over his Left Behind collection.

The real horror- It’s already optioned as a movie.

I think that last name is keeping this dude down. I can’t even look directly at it without feeling a little vertigo.

As I read this I found myself thinking “Huh, Michael Clayton in space“. This isn’t really fair, but it’s not really that far off either.

It’s set in a pretty believable future, with nothing on that score to niggle at me. I know, obviously my hate machine is slowing down with old age, right? Just wait until I bother to talk about Brian Aldiss here, that’ll convince you otherwise. The setting is the moon, where the five mega-corporations of the future have created a large settlement that seems to be equal parts industrial park and tourist trap.

The first scene in the book is the only one that bothers me. One of, if not the, primary characters has arrived on the moon and is awaiting an overdue escort. Another fellow makes conversation with him, which, towards the end is becoming somewhat strange in its forced “hey let’s go hang out buddy” tones. Then another fellow flanks the main character, sits silently for a few minutes, then starts talking to the other random dude, both trying to sweep our main man off to parts unknown.

I don’t know about you, but by this point I’d have gotten the fuck out of Dodge, yet our main man never even acknowledges that this episode seems entirely like an attempt to roll a man with obvious resources.

If you can let that slide you’ll be treated to some great characters. The book builds slowly, but strongly, with only a few times where I felt something was a misstep. Characters don’t grow so much as they’re revealed, like watching someone carve a statue from raw stone, and by the end I was surprised by the revelations, yet they remained totally believable.

I look forward to digging up the next book.

This book was delightful to read. It was interesting to find a lot of parallels to my own experiences, minus the vagina and international backpacking. I suppose I shouldn’t say experiences, but rather emotions. Mostly a bag of schizophrenic voices convincing me to do things that I knew weren’t a good idea and so on.

Here and there she rolls off onto a tangential story from her childhood, which the rest of the tale clearly illustrates the dents these events left in her character, and it’s done so seamlessly that you really absorb the impact, relating it starkly against the present day her (the her as related in the story). That’s the other thing, it’s all written from that time’s perspective, rather than as a person telling you something that happened to them in the past, which I found worked very well here.

Anyway. The book is an incredibly personal look at a young person’s sex life and I highly recommend it.

I read a lot. Most of it is, to be kind, unimportant. A while back I was reading/listening to the Deathlands series. It’s set roughly 100 years after a nuclear war, primarily between the US and the USSR. It’s pulpy, but really fun. Towards the end of book two it starts to play the rough patriotism card, but reigns it in before starting to make me discard it. I had just finished the Graphic Audio version of number 18. While waiting for 19, I decided to try Doomsday Warrior, which is from the same publisher.

After only a few minutes I sensed this may have been a mistake. Let’s review what you need in an atomic apocalypse story.

1)Very few survivors, at least per place. Small population centers.

2)Poor communications. Telcos gone, radios very few and far between. Add a lack of trust and you’re off to the races.

3)Mutants of some kind, preferably somewhat believable. Rather, believable enough for what, really, is cheap entertainment.

4)General breakdown in knowledge.

That’s kind of it, I think. Aside from that you just need good writing, like any story. Let’s examine this one.

The main hero is Tom Rockson. I shit you not, his name is Rockson. He is described as being “The ultimate American”. So, that’s a red flag. Next is that while it’s indicated that 2/3rds of the world’s population, and that most of that was the flattening of the US. 100 million during the attack, 75 million within the year. Looking at census data, it seems that the population in 84, when this was written, was about 235 million. So, fine, so far so few. Could probably be less initial survivors, you know, but whatever. Now we get to hear how the Soviets “won” because they had advanced missile killers. I know, I know, the Cold War had everyone worried, but seriously. Ok, we’ll let that slide. Oh, the other thing is that the intro here describes all the main players and lays out their motivations, which is a bad sign of explainitis. Anyway. The Russians build 40 fortresses, for some reason, and take over. One minute we’re told that 90% of plants and animals are extinct, but then we’re told about mutant animals, and forests. Turns out that there’s “free cities” left, built on the edge of radioactive hot zones, which house the last AMERICANSFUCKYEAH people. 75 of the fuckers, with 1000 to 40000 people each. Living next to hell pits. Riiiiight. Described as “fiercely democratic”, and natural selection has made them 10 times more resistant to radiation, plus they use Spartan style child selection. More on that in a minute. So already we’ve broken some guidelines, in that we have a lot, like a lot a lot, of people working together with a fair amount of communication somehow.

About this rad resistance business. Ok, fine, it’s not too ludicrous to be in a story, though if you were to amplify my radiation resistance ten fold there’s still no way I could live in fallout, but we’ll let that slide for now. Having that and roughly a million people is pushing it pretty far though. Now, apparently these super democrats also put their children out into the night, where they have to survive 20 below temperatures. Yeah. This would totally allow you a population of roughly a million.

Then you get some other crap explained to you. Like the white markings on the radiation resistant generation. If I recall accurately, I’m picking this post up from an old draft, Tom there had…. STARS!! That’s right, he’s so patriotic he’s covered in stars. Jesus wept.

Finally we get to his hometown, which was built into a mountain by the survivors of some people stuck in a roadway tunnel that had the entrances collapsed during the nuclear strike. That’s right, people stuck in gridlock then trapped in a radioactive tomb survived long enough to build a city in a mountain. He wanders into this place, naturally the most advanced of the free cities, and eventually wanders into the gym, where his “She’s totally not my girlfriend, but hot sex friend” is sparring with a martial arts instructor. Not only did they survive to build a city, but they apparently had a strong kung-fu tradition to hand down. The lady eventually gets her ass handed to her, then Tom and the teacher throw down, ending in a draw, because the woman can’t be better than him, and neither can some random Chinese guy.

Sometime around then they talk about the weapons of these free cities. Instead of knocking off a million AKs or M16s, they created their own gun design, which is better than the Russian’s arms, and manage to churn out by the thousands.

So, effectively, within like 20 pages, the story as set means the Russians have lost. There is no feasible way for them to hold the region, and in fact it won’t even be a struggle, relatively speaking.

Then there’s the icing. The evil Soviets have a machine that erase your personality and imprint you with good commie thoughts. They bring one of the test subjects in to parade in front of some higher up and he starts asking if she would do this or that or the other thing. All in the affirmative. Then he asks if she would kill Tom Rockson, I believe even calling him The Ultimate American, and she starts screaming. Then she dies. Not just says “I dunno, he’s hunky” or passes out, but flat out dies.

I stopped reading about three pages beyond that, when the horror caught up to my brain.

I picked this up at the library because it was regular paperback sized. I truly expected nothing, but was rewarded for my moment of whimsy.

The story borders on the incoherent at times, but it’s fun. My only real complaints are that the flow of time feels incredibly halfassed in parts, causing the relationships between characters to have a very accelerated feeling, and there’s a couple moments where she tries to batter you with sentiments that have only formed in the crudest manner. An example. One of the crew she ends up with is an alien, who looks very human, and it turns out that his race was rendered incapable of aggression, by humans during a conflict, which, for some reason, caused us to build up this system of master and slave wherein each of them is basically adopted by a human. It’s a pretty weak concept already, but whatever, I’ve let Star Trek get away with worse. The thing that got me was this sequence where she saves his life, becoming his de-facto (is that supposed to be hyphenated??) master, then basically orders him to do whatever he wants, then he dies, choosing to save the pilot’s life. Yes, very touching. Except we never get to know anything about him beyond this stupid story point, which is there SOLELY to add a sap layer. There’s about 5 lines of interaction between him and anyone, all of them sort of vapid or bitchy. That one was the worst. What made it extra bad is that it came on the heels of another one, which I’ll go ahead and tell you about. They picked up this alien baby, from an amphibian race, and it nursed on this synthesized feed goo pasted onto people’s chests. It was cute, added the possibility for some warmth, even toed into that warmth a smidge, but wasn’t overbearing, wasn’t a look at me monkey. Then an evil scientist, which has the baby at that point, shoots the pilot with a disruptor beam, aka the turn that into meatloaf ray, hitting him in the arm. The heroine tussles with him, getting the gun, then… blasts him in the chest, doing lord knows what to the baby alien. At this point she left my mind as a hero in the rough, launching herself in that much lauded territory of being The Retarded Bitch What Shot A Baby. Seriously now, there was no reason to not shoot the bad guy in the head, pelvis, stomach, legs even, or whatever. It was an obviously calculated move to allow her to whinge about how she’s a terrible bigot and whatever. She isn’t, she’s just stupid, which is kind of worse, and sort of shadowed the character, for me, the entire rest of the story.

Don’t let those negatives throw you, however, not everything can be gold, especially on a first novel, and the book definitely has merit. The characters aren’t groundbreaking, but they’re fairly well done, and the central character is caustic, flawed, and self aware enough to be interesting. Plus the overall universe is good. I’d have to say it feels like a warm-up to what should be a great sequel.

Huh. Apparently there’s already a sequel. Let’s hope she doesn’t feel so rushed this time.

So, let’s just put this out there, I don’t enjoy reading Dick’s stories. After a lifetime of Twilight Zone and good stories his stories typically just anger me. I know, he was an important voice and did important things for sci-fi, but everything of his that I read was just… well… crap. He often insists on using a ton of dialogue, but never bothers to develop separate voices, so it’s like listening to carbon copies talk. Then there’s the BIG TWIST, which, for me, has almost no intellectual or emotional impact at all, so it leaves me wondering why bother.

The flipside is that I think it’s good to read things for their critical value, even if you don’t like them, even if they’re demonstrably bad. Like Lord of the Flies. As a story it’s terrible, as a depiction of the British world view, and the view of at least some of its citizens, it’s priceless.

So I picked this up at the library. It’s really rather enjoyable, I’m happy to say, both as a story and as a captured collection of viewpoints. Don’t read the back cover though, whomever wrote that must have just skimmed the book. The essential crux of the story is that of the Soviet/USA cold war dragging on so long that it’s become a culture unto itself, with weapon designers being the new fashion moguls. It’s a tough story to write, and at times that certainly shows, but worth reading.

Comparing this to the handful of short stories and other books of his that I’ve read, I think that what causes me to so strongly dislike his stories, typically, is because he was incredibly lazy. He makes wild leaps with no foundation, and instead of demonstrating what he wants to show you, he has a pair of clones describe it to each other. This book manages to largely avoid that, though sometimes just barely.

Go, read it, or tell me why I’m wrong.

So, I’ve started reading this, in between reading all of the Bond books. It’s from the early 50’s, which is important to keep in mind when reading it.

I’m only a short ways in, through the first tale and into the second. The thesis this is written under is similar to a lot of stories I’ve read from that period, with the addition of sentient dogs. Really they aren’t even an addition, since I don’t get the impression you interact with them in the slightest. So, the basic thought pattern, thus far, is that technology, specifically personal aircraft and cheap, clean (hah!), nuclear power have made cities obsolete. Everyone moves to the country, with incentives from the government, in order to make nuclear war “impractical”. You have to let these statements slide, because duh, the 50’s. This sort of naivety is rampant in sci-fi of the time. No, I don’t know why anyone thought a dominant species with increasing birth rates and longevity would be able to spread out with 10 to 100 acres to a family.

Still, it got me thinking. I’ve come up with nothing new, but it did remind me of other things I’ve read, which seem to hold true enough to be what gave me pause at Simak’s assertions about people, as a whole, wanting to live in a country scene. To make a gross generalization of my own, there’s effectively two types of people, those that chafe psychologically at close contact with others, and those that thrive in it. It’s held true throughout our development where a segment of a population decides “fuck it, I’m outta here”, and they wander to some obscure part of the world, generating a new frontier. After them come people that aren’t really sure about this frontier stuff, but see a profit to be made from trading with the crazy people. From there you have a steady influx of support structures and people that are more and more the city type, until bam, you have a city, or at least a concentrated group of humans. By this point the wandering folks are old, and settle into a rural community to farm, mine, ranch, or whatever with their families. Eventually it gets to be too much for some of the people there, and off they go again, to make new frontiers.

There’s always some justification, like gold, beaver pelts, or whatever, but I really think it’s just a genetic impulse, driving them from groups of people and into new territories. It’s a good life strategy, because it helps maximize our diversity and strengths. You have a few people that go out, get strange diseases, killed by strange animals, or die off from other inhospitable conditions, and then the survivors eventually breed back into the main line. Misfits always drive evolution. Errors that turn up uniquely useful.

Ok, so this isn’t really a review of the book, but rather some meandering thoughts I had. So far there’s little to distinguish this from other books of the time, except for a really idealized version of dogs. Apparently the author never saw packs of dogs running around, forgetting the civillity we train them into. I like dogs, a lot, but the idea that they wouldn’t fight or make wars, given the capability, is pretty thin. Nibbler once ran around stabbing the walls with a knife she stole from an open dishwasher, and really it was just a matter of time before that went bad, know what I mean?

PS- I’m not a fan of the latest layout of WordPress’ article writer panel.

This is just a small note to anyone writing a book or story. If you’re going to make up some poetry or lyrics for the story, think twice. Examine whether or not you really need to. If you have heat stroke and decide yes, this is really what you need, then write a rough draft and have people that don’t like you, not just don’t know you but actually dislike you, read through it. Chances are good that it is awful, but strangers and friends will be too polite.

I hesitate to call this a book review. It had interesting characters, and some old, but trusty, story elements, but anything that could be called climactic was left out. It really just sort of becomes someone talking about how crappy modern America is, and how we should have more God in our lives. It’s better than that sounds, but still a really awkward bag.
In the end it sort of came off like a collection of story ideas that he edited together, so it just didn’t satisfy me at all.
It’s short, very short, so read it if you’re bored or something and it happens to be around.