Category Archives: SF

How Did I Ever Run This Game in the 80s?

I have been a role play gamer since 1979 when my friend Jim, whom I met in Basic Training for the U.S. Navy, introduced me to AD&D. Very quickly I experimented with number of other RPG game systems in those early years when new game systems appeared like mushrooms after a moist summer evening. Fantasy Games Unlimited provided two of the system I played the most besides AD&D, Villains and Vigilantes, a comic book role playing game where with the right dice rolls a normal person’s punch could do more damage than a nuclear weapon, and Space Operaa game of high adventure among the stars that allowed everything from Star Trek style campaigns to Star Wars and everything in between.

Space Opera has three credited authors two fat core rule books, and apparently no editor. The rule books are riddled with typos, inconsistencies, and no logical organizational layout. Character creation can be a lengthy process taking hours to perform all the rolls, computations, and decisions in establishing your hero. In addition to all that the rules can get quite detailed in trying to model nearly every conceivable situation. Literally there are paragraphs devoted to performing a hand-off when one character has to pass an item to another character during combat or chaotic events.

Despite all this Space Opera turned out to be the sweet spot for my style as a game master. During the early to late 80s I ran a number of campaigns many of which are still fondly remembered. The wide-open setting, the rules that encompassed nearly every conceivable science-fiction trope, and the sheer imagination made this my favorite to run and a favorite among my players.

But, all the fiddly rules, calculations, and record keeping were a serious challenge. Space Opera, if you run as Lieutenant Saavik would, that is by the book, creates vast amounts of record keeping, some of which I kept up with, some of which I ignored, and some I fudged. Certainly, many of the detailed calculations I approximated rather than compute to their final precise answer.

Last year, after discovering I still had my original rulebooks and that all of the materials were available for purchase as PDFs online, I, at the urging of my players, launched  a new Space Opera campaign.

In the intervening decades I have become a little more focused on following game rules and of course that makes Space Opera quite a challenge. With the game decades out of print there is little, but not zero, fan support on the internet. When this game was published there was no internet and advanced players socialized through BBS. I have found a few data sheets that help turn the game into something more manageable and provide some assistance in the more detailed bits such as an excel spreadsheet for character creation.

Now I have turned my weak spreadsheet skills to the task and have started creating my own game aids. I have completed a worksheet for computing a character’s chance of advancing a level in a particular skill. One cell required an IF statement that was nested 18 times, but it works. Next up a ship’s log to record fuel use, maintenance requirements, and travel time computation. After that a campaign calendar to track these things for my players.

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Quick Hits July 17, 2020

Burn the GOP to the Ground

 

Pence would have been far from perfect but leaving corrupt incompetent Trump in has made the pandemic far worse and that is entirely at the feet of the spineless Republican politicians.

 

 The Towering Inferno Still Holds Up.

 

I’ve been watching this on HBO (I have the DVD, but HBO is in High Def.) and thoroughly enjoying a style of filmmaker that has fallen out of favor. Loads with stars and taking the time to tell stories. Though you gotta wonder about a team of firemen walking around with plastic explosives and detonators.

 

New Story Ideas beginning to bubble in my brain

 

This damned crisis, both global and personal, has been sapping my creativity but an idea for another Sf/noir is starting to take form in my head. It would be on a generation ship where sharp distinct classes have formed between crew and colonists and the murder that shatters the secrecy at the heart of the noir.

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Intertextuality and Vulcan’s Forge

Last night I watched a video essay on YouTube that argued the central flaw of most of Disney’s newer slates of film came down to a misuse of intertextuality. Intertextuality is when the text of one work impacted by the text of a previous work. It can be used as a powerful tool to explore themes and idea raised by the original work either in that work’s own text or as interpreted by the new text. An ideal example would be Tom Stoddard’s play Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead which follows as its central character Rosencrantz & Guildenstern two minor characters from Hamlet and uses that conceit to explore concept of narrative and fiction.

The essay argued that lazy utilization of intertextuality in the Disney live action remakes and the extended Star Wars trilogy resulted in a cheap ‘fan service’ rather than using the references to earlier works to comment either those previous pieces or to deepen the content of the new ones. The exception for Disney being the Marvel Cinematic Universe which stretching across more than 20 films and ten years is a grand experiment in intertextuality and uses those connections to paint deeper, richer, and more engaging emotional lives for its characters.

This leads me to think about my own debut novel Vulcan’s Forge. I shall avoid spoilers for the plot of that story but I will touch on how it itself is a work of intertextuality.

The protagonist of Vulcan’s Forge is Jason Kessler and on the colony of Nocturnia his job is to use mass media, principally film, to create, sustain, and reinforce the colony’s culture derived from mid-twentieth century Americana. To promote an idealized version of that culture, which honestly is more mythology than history, some films are elevated in their importance while others are banned as ‘corrupting.’ Jason, an ill fit for this suffocating version of American culture, is dismissive of some films and longs for the forbidden fruit.

Ideally, and only someone who has read the novel and also is unaware of the films it references can answer if I succeeded, the story can be read and enjoyed without understanding the film references but on an intertextual level the movies that Jason derides and the ones he adores informs the readers of the nature of Jason’s character.

Hopefully my use of intertextuality expands and deepens Vulcan’s Forge but even if I missed the mark making all of those film references was damn fun.

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SF Movie: Attraction (2017 – Russian)

After seeing clips of this film on a special effects YouTube program my sweetie-wife and I became interested in seeing Attraction. This was the same show that sparked out interest in the WWII Russian movie T-34 which was silly but fun.

Attraction is about a large alien spacecraft that crashes to Earth causing massive destruction and loss of life in the Chertanovo district of Moscow. The protagonist is Julia daughter of s senior military leader from whom she is estranged over the death of her mother. When Julia’s friend is killed in the alien’s crash landing, she and her boyfriend, along with his street gang, become fixed on the ‘invaders,’ though the aliens have remained unseen and taken no overt hostile actions.

What follows is a decent SF movie that manages to avoid most of the over used tropes while exploring Julia’s relationship with her boyfriend, her father, and herself. The movie at point looks to be retreading the tired excuse that the aliens are ‘here for out water,’ but then manages to subvert that expectation. With decent acting, writing, and impressive special effects Attraction is well worth the two hours of screen time. We watched it in the original Russian language

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Lifeforce: 35 Years Later and Still a Terrible Movie

Sometimes I will revisit a movie I disliked and check-in if it was the movie that was bad or my take on it. Usually the movie is at fault and Lifeforce, currently streaming on HBO, is no exception.

Released in 1985 and part of Cannon Films’ attempt to expand into big budget cinema Lifeforce, adapted from the novel The Space Vampires, is about a derelict alien spacecraft discovered in the coma of Halley’s Comet by a joint American and European manned space mission. The commander of the mission Col. Tom Carlsen (Steve Railsback), and seriously as a friend of mine once clued me in you can pre-judge a film’s quality by the haircuts of the ‘military’ characters and Carlsen’s is terribly non-regulation. Carlsen and his crew discover three aliens with human forms within the craft and bring back to Earth. Something goes wrong and the European space vessel Churchill arrives in Earth orbit but itself now a derelict. A rescue mission finds everyone aboard dead but the three aliens, still in their suspended animation, unharmed and the aliens are brought down to ground. The aliens are of course not dead and ignite a sweeping plague of energy vampirism, and not the cool kind that you get from Colin Robinson, that threatens humanity.

With a budget of 25 million dollars and box office receipts of under 12 million, which I and two friends were part of, Lifeforce crashed and burned on its release gathering neither critical nor commercial success. In some circles the most memorable aspect of the movie are the numerous exploitive nude scenes by the actress Mathilda May. ( I am pleased to report that this did not derail the young woman’s acting career and still is currently still working with nearly six television and film credits.) Lifeforce is a movie that cannot make up its mind as to what it wants to be. At times it’s a sensual vampirism flick, at other times it’s an invasion of body snatchers paranoia movie and by the end it’s an apocalyptic zombie movie with a tacked on happy ending.

There is scarcely an aspect of this movie that works, not in direction, casting, writing, or production design does this film make any sort of sense. Though I will admit that the end credit score by Henry Mancini is a terrific march.

While Lifeforce has found a following as a cult film it is not something anyone really needs to watch.

 

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Why Love Some Bad Movies and Not Others?

Recently I re-watched on HBO, though I own the Blu-ray, 1980’s Xanadu. This film along with Can’t stop the Music is credited with the inspiration that created The Golden Razzie award for bad cinema. Now I can both recognize that Xanadu is in many ways a terrible film, miscast, no character arc, very nearly plotless, but it is also a film that is near and dear to my heart. It is a romantic film centered on dreams and the message that dream don’t die we kill them. And what Xanadu is to me other bad movies are to other people, but it’s the rare bad film that really generates this sort of feeling.

Star Trek: Insurrection is a terrible film that is also essential a romantic film, not in terms of Eros but in rather prioritizing inner emotional life over reason, with a central message but that movie is a tedious bore and its message if examined closely is one that advocate murdering those who do not think as you do.

There lies the answer to the conundrum, it is in the emotional resonance that a bad movie can rise to something special. There are those for whom Star Trek: Insurrection is a beloved film, no doubt due to deep emotional connection to the characters of the cast. (I’m an old fart and more emotionally tied to the original series than and subsequent entry.) So, while Xanadu is mostly a string of expository scenes linking musical numbers it is in my own heart that its emotions truly lie. I love the film not because of what it is but because of who I am.

 

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Quick Hits

I’ve started outlining a new novel proposal. I have already stepped through the five acts and bullet pointed all the major beats, Now it is time to produce a prose document synopsizing the story and show that to my editor. It’s another dark cynical SF story.

Also, I am working my way, finally, through Netflix’s Marvel Limited series The Defenders but so far, and I have watched six out of eight episodes, I am far from impressed. The writing on this one fails to lock into the voice for the various characters and they instead feel like that they have the shape of the personalities but lack the depth. There has been a tendency, possibly created by time pressures, to go for the most obvious plot turn or bit of dialog. Several times I have mentally delivered the upcoming dialog before the character on screen actually utters it.

San Diego has recieve3d the go ahead from the State Government to move forward into loosening social distancing restrictions and Saturday I will be at Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore to sign stock of my novel Vulcan’s Forge.

 

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Revisiting Previous Works

For various reason I pulled out of duty digital storage a novel that I had written ten years ago back in the distant annals of 2010.

This novel was the first attempt to set a story in the fictional universe where Vulcan’s Forge takes place. In fact, without that previous setting creation I doubt that there would ever have been a Vulcan’s Forge as the setting gave me the answer as to what the McGuffin and core plot elements I had been searching for.

However, that manuscript when presented to the first batch of beta readers fell flat and I determined that the flaws were so deeply seated it would require a complete re-write from the ground up and place it aside.

Thinking it might be worth revisiting that story I loaded the manuscript up on my iPad and began my re-read.

The flaws from 2010 are still there and the book would have to be written over again from page 1 to be salvageable. Moreover, I can see where I rushed through sentences and scenes hastily putting things down without taking the time to let them breathe and create the tone that would have been required to sustain the tale. Still, the core conflict, characters, and plot elements all work. This is a book I can make work and now with a decade’s more experience I can see how to do that.

I am also in the middle of craft a new outline for a new story. The couple of sentence description interested my editor and so I have at least two worthy projects to chase.

 

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Looking Back on Star Wars

Today, May the 4th, is the date that fans traditionally celebrate the Star Wars saga of movie.

Star Wars was released in 1977 into a cinema environment so different from the current one, COVID-19 issues excluded, that fans today could have a distinctly difficult time envisioning it. When the first film appeared, it was not the standard practice to open in thousands of theaters across the country and now the  world on the same date. Rather movies opened in perhaps a few hundred locations and then the printed moved from city to city making people wait for highly anticipated films. So, it was weeks and weeks after the movie’s premier before I saw Star Wars. I was already a science-fiction fan and thoroughly enjoyed the movie despite it being more akin to fantasy than any sort of SF. Few could have foreseen that this adventure film was going to radically change motion pictures.

1980 brought The Empire Strikes Back and proved that the audience reaction to Star Wars was not a fluke. Despite a darker theme a different director, and lacking a proper ending, the sequel proved as successful of the original and planted the seeds for a fan community with both good and bad actors and rampant plot speculations that we live with today.

Return of the Jedi arrived in 1983 and concluded the central plot of the three films. Though the weakest of the original trilogy with many of the characters reduced to simplistic versions and its climatic final battle a  thinly disguised commentary on the Vietnam war, one that misunderstand how that war was finally resolved, Jedi produced an emotionally satisfying resolution to Luke’s character arc leaving him in a place of emotional maturity and moral soundness.

16 years after the trilogy’s conclusion Lucas returned to theaters with more films set in the Star Wars universe, a set of prequel movies dealing with the backstory of Darth Vader and the disintegration of the Republic into the Galactic Empire with the movies The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith. These films proved to be a disappointment. Abandoning the earlier, ‘lived in’ art direction from the original trilogy for a polished, metallic, façade that had no life of its own and with characterization reduced to nothing for the sake of plot propulsion. Still a younger generation of fans embraced the new movies and the franchise proved to be economically a powerhouse in two different centuries.

2015, ten years after the conclusion of the prequel trilogy and the sale of the property to Disney Studios, a new slate of Star Wars movies began with The Force Awakens. Set a generation after the original films the movie returned to the space opera roots of the franchise and repeated core plot elements of Star Wars while introducing a new cast. This was followed by the divisive but brilliant The Last Jedi a film that divided the fan base inciting heated, passionate commentary from admirers and critics of the new thematic ground it broke. 2019 saw the end of the Skywalker Saga with the release of The Rise of Skywalker a movie that was more chase and escape that character and theme. Along with the release of two standalone feature films, Rouge One a film that in mood had more to do with the 1970s that the original Star Wars and Solo another backstory and backfill installment the franchise took in more than 10 billion dollars in box office revenue no counting television, specials, shows, and a flood of merchandising but the long last effects of this amazing profitable franchise will not be found in the growing bank accounts or the endless derivative cinematic followers but in the changing technology of film production. Non-linear editing enhanced theatrical sound systems, photorealistic digital effects, and digital projection are just some of the breakthroughs pioneered by Lucas and his companies. No matter the varying quality of the films as cinema Star Wars and all of its spin-off and sequels have created a new and limitless world for all of us.

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A Prolog and Chapter One Are Not Interchangeable

I’ve started reading a new novel, no I am not going to name the book because as this is not a review site I only name titles when I love the work, and I am concerned about how the whole thing has started.

This novel opened with Chapter One and spent about 12,000 words on a set of characters that I realize we are unlikely to ever see again. The event of those pages clearly was important to the plot that unfolds in the rest of the story and set up many crucial details that I can see the author intends to use through the adventure. However, since none of our principal characters are around in these scenes this feel terribly like a prolog to me and not the opening chapter of a story.

I may have spent 12,000 words getting to know characters, understanding their emotional lives, and concerned about the troubles they face, but now all that emotional investment feels wasted.

This is related to the troubles with stories that end with ‘it was all a dream’ an its variations or sequels that undo all the emotional stakes from previous installments. (I’m looking at your Alien 3.)

Ideally when people engage with your fiction, by reading, listening, or viewing, they should become emotionally invested in the characters and the outcomes of their struggles. The resolution of the story and the plot and the return on that investment with catharsis or pathos being the final reward. When it ends as a dream then it’s like that check bounced and we’re left with nothing for the emotional currency we’ve spent. The check has bounced. In the case of Alien 3 after we’ve come to really care about Newt and Hicks in Aliens and desperately wanting for Ripley to save them both the sequel comes along and repossesses out victory making us into suckers for caring.

This novel has pulled me into these characters lives and now has waved a hand and said, ‘Don’t think about them anymore. Here’s new people to get emotional about.’ But I’m now burned and I am more likely to keep my emotional distance wary of the author is going to again steal characters away. Had this been labeled a prolog I would have been emotionally ready to learn things but not become attached. The poor doomed rangers at the start of A Song of Fire and Iceare not our main characters and telling us that it is a prolog allowed us as the readers to learn the vital information their story needed to tell us without playing us for suckers.

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