I had a few idle moments today and decided to have some fun.
(If anyone can figure out how to make the embeded widget start in a paused state so that people can have the option of pushing “play” instead of having it run as soon as the page loads, please let me know. Until then I’ve protected it behind a “Read More” button.)
NASA has recently announced the discovery of a bacteria in Mono Lake by Dr. Felise Wolfe-Simon which uses arsenic instead of phosphorous for its phosphorylation.
This may not sound all that impressive at first glance, but what Wolfe-Simon has discovered is a little critter which uses a substance inherently poisonous to every other form of life on the planet as one of its most elementary building blocks. It’s literally an entirely alternate path by which life could potentially evolve (and even thrive) in environments which would be completely hostile to (most) terrestial life. (I’m radically summarizing here. For a better summary, follow the link.)
As a scientific discovery, this is interesting in its own right. And its potential application in science fiction (from alien lifeforms to the utterly transhumanic) is pretty obvious.
But reading about this discovery also tickled my brain into thinking about the deeper substrates of fantasy. Here’s a quick quote from the link:
Phosphorus plays an important biological role in the form of ATP (Adenosine triphosphate), which is a cell’s “energy currency.” ATP is key to metabolic functions, and works by activating structural proteins & enzymes through donating its phosphorus groups.
On the Periodic Table, arsenic sits directly below phosphorus (meaning, among other things, they have the same number of valence electrons). In humans & other forms of life, arsenic can be deadly, since it disrupts cellular respiration by competing with phosphorus & diminishing ATP formation.An organism that uses arsenic in its biochemistry is “alien” to what is known, since it must have ATP-like molecules with arsenic swapped in phosphorus’ place and because they must have evolved mechanisms such that arsenic doesn’t kill them. All signs point to this announcement being tied to the work of biochemist Felisa Wolfe-Simon, who theorized in the past that the unusual ecosystem in California’s Mono Lake could have led some life to follow a different “evolutionary pathway.”
What other alien biochemistries could we imagine swapping into that process? Something alchemical? Something magical? Something celestial? Something other-planar? What pulses life through a migo’s cells or Cthulhu’s rubbery skin-substitute? What allows a dragon to process its food so efficiently?
This wouldn’t mean, of course, that dispel magic is going to automatically cause a dragon to cease to exist (any more than putting a plant in the shade will cause it to instantly wither). Such creatures might suffer from prolonged exposure to antimagic fields, but otherwise they’re probably fine. (Although we’d have to call into question fantasy’s prolixity for half-breeds.)
How could such life evolve? Well, it might arise naturally in a world permeated with magical energies. Or it might spawn from an artificial creation (perhaps even accidentally so). “Life will find a way” is hokey as science; but we’re not exactly dealing with science here: So when the animated rugs in the flying castle suddenly start mating with each other, we might not be quite as justified in our shock.
To a certain extent, of course, this has the danger of becoming “precious world-building”. (World-building that really has no meaningful impact on the game or narrative for which the world is ostensibly being designed.) How can we make this stuff actionable?
Stuff like Mitochondrial Eve from the Parasite Eve games suddenly begin to arise quite “naturally” out of injecting magical juju into your life cycle. Half-breeding could introduce a vector for infection and either explain ancient racist prejudices or justify fresh outbreaks of hate crimes and intolerance in your campaign world.
Literally incompatible biologies coming into conflict: The dark fey rising up out of the underdark aren’t just a threat to life and limb; their dark fairy circles are doing whatever the opposite of “terraforming” is. (Magiforming?) Cysts of alien, incompatible life spontaneously blooming in remote regions or incursions of malevolent extra-planar intelligences.
Why can’t we eat the monsters we’re killing? Because they’re fundamentally incompatible and indigestible. (“Don’t eat the demon-flesh, kid. It will fuck you up.”)
Did you know shadows weren’t originally undead in OD&D? They are something strange and other; something so utterly unnatural that our eyes can only perceive them as a living, tumescent absence.
All nature is a war. This kind of stuff just sort of firms up the lines of battle.
I’ve recently been reading my way through I6 Ravenloft and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Although I haven’t finished the latter, I am so far impressed with the way in which it remains faithful to the original module while expanding the material in interesting ways. (It even includes functional notes for stripping out the extra material in order to return the module to something very close to its original form if a shorter adventure is desired.) I am less impressed with the textual bloat which has become endemic in most modern adventure modules. Much of this text seems to be included in the name of being useful (reminding the DM of basic rules like how trip attacks are adjudicated), but it has the practical effect of making it more difficult to rapidly gloss the truly necessary information at the game table.
But I digress.
What really inspired this little post is the Weird Happenings table on page 15 of Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. It’s a nice little table, the first entry of which reads:
The sound of a voice screaming comes from somewhere in the castle; it sounds exactly like one of the PCs.
As I normally do when reading module text, I immediately visualized how I would handle that at the gaming table. It would go something like this:
1. Randomly determine the PC. (Let’s say a ranger named Afrau.)
2. Hand that player a note reading, “Write two sentences on this note and then hand it back to me.”
3. Take the note back.
4. Say, “You suddenly hear the sound of screaming coming from somewhere in the castle. It sounds exactly like Afrau.” (point at Afrau’s player)
In doing this, I would be practicing something that could be called “metagame special effects”. The idea is that I’m using purely metagame activities in order to influence the players’ perceptions of the game world.
In the case of this Weird Happening, I specifically want to create for the players the uncertainty, fear, or paranoia which would be experienced by their characters if they suddenly heard their companion (standing right next to them) screaming from some distant corner of a haunted, vampire-ridden castle.
1. I’m secretly rolling dice without any apparent reason for doing it. This creates uncertainty and curiosity in the players. Why am I doing that? What am I hiding from them? Is something about to happen? What?
2. By exchanging notes with a player, I’m specifically creating the awareness that there is secret knowledge being exchanged. That knowledge could be anything. In this particular case, it’s a bluff. What I’m creating is the legitimate possibility that the character may have been secretly teleported away and replaced with a double or an illusion.
Something happened. Only one of them seems to know what it was. And that character is now both (a) standing calmly beside them and (b) screaming from another part of the castle.
Without creating a legitimate atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty at the game table (however subtle it may be), the scream can be easily dismissed as “flavor text”. Some players may find it “spooky” or “creepy”. But they probably won’t take its deeper threat seriously.
EXTRANEOUS SPOT CHECKS
Another example of metagame special effects is my use of “extraneous Spot checks”. In my games, I will periodically call for Spot checks regardless of whether or not there’s anything interesting to be spotted. Newcomers to my games tend to get paranoid when their high rolls fails: “There must be something. What did we miss?”
Eventually, of course, all of my players eventually figure out that I’m frequently “crying wolf” with these checks. I don’t care. The more experienced heroes may no longer be quite so skittish or paranoid as they jump at imaginary shadows, but the tool is still useful: First, it obscures the metagame knowledge of “he’s called for a Spot check, must be something interesting”. Second, it can be a useful way to passively refocus attention on the game world when extraneous distractions and chitchat have derailed the players.
(I don’t simply make the Spot checks secretly because: (a) I’d rather avoid the hassle of needing to track the PCs Spot modifiers. (b) I’d rather have the players actively involved in that moment rather than passively waiting for me to roll dice. (c) It eliminates any arguments about, “Whaddya mean we got ambushed? Don’t I get a Spot check? Did you remember that I get a +3 versus spotting cyborgs?” (d) I really like the utility of being able to gently refocus attention through applying a game mechanic instead of saying, “Please focus.”)
FOCUS ON THE “HOW”
In short, it’s not just enough to know the “what” you’re trying to communicate; you also need to give some thought to how you’re communicating it.
For example, here’s another Weird Happening from that Ravenloft table:
A random PC hears the soft giggling of a little girl; no one else can hear it.
How would you handle that at as a GM?
How the hell did it get here so fast?
December was a somewhat frustrating month for me creatively. My creative vision became completely focused on a 10-minute transhumanist science fiction play written in verse. Although I spent quite a bit of time researching it, toying with it, and eventually laying out the largest chunks of it, the play just refused to gel. And so, after having it consume all of my creative thoughts and energies for the better part of a month, I’m left with nothing to actually show for it.
Ah, well. That happens upon occasion.
And the month wasn’t completely destitute.
The American Shakespeare Repertory staged The Merchant of Venice, the 19th reading in the Complete Readings of William Shakespeare. Supporting that production, I wrote several essays: The Textual History of Merchant, Elizabethans and the Jews (Part 1 and Part 2), The Pound of Flesh, The Great Conversion, The Soul of Shylock, and The Four Sallies.
I continued my work with the South High Theater Alumni Alliance, which gives a newsletter presentation of local theater productions starring alumni from one of the premiere high school theater programs (which also happens to be my alma mater).
I’ve also been working on converting Margaret Frazer’s stories and novels into Kindle ebooks. In December that included “This World’s Eternity”, “Shakespeare’s Mousetrap”, and The Outlaw’s Tale.
I’m also been working as the dramaturg for Walking Shadow Theater’s Drakul, an original adaptation by John Heimbuch. December saw the bulk of my work on this project to date, and I’m really excited about it: The script is not only the best and most faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that I’ve seen to date; it also tells a truly compelling story of the sequel to those infamous events.
The show will be running February 11th thru 26th in Minneapolis, MN. If you’re local (or passing through), you should check it out.
And I’m looking ahead to 2011. There’s some exciting stuff on the horizon.
Studying the lost authors of early fantasy and science fiction is often a humbling lesson in the fickleness of fate. Authors who were just as talented and creative as Robert E. Howard, Isaac Asimov, H.P. Lovecraft, or Ray Bradbury have been largely forgotten by later generations. Nor can their modern anonymity be explained due to a lack of influence or popularity — in many cases they were more influential and popular during their publishing careers than contemporaries who remain well-known today.
I first became aware of this phenomenon in the mid ’90s when Kurt Busiek pointed me towards Mutant, a collection of stories written by Henry Kuttner that had played a major influence in the creation of the X-Men by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Kuttner, I discovered, had influenced an entire generation of science fiction authors. In 1946, at the height of the Golden Age of Science Fiction, fans were asked to choose between Isaac Asimov, Theodore Sturgeon, A.E. Van Vogt, and a dozen others to name one of them as the World’s Best SF Author. They chose Kuttner. Kuttner married C.L. Moore, who had already become known as the First Lady of Science Fiction. The two of them writing together created an amazing corpus of work at such an incomprehensible pace that it required more than twenty pseudonyms to publish it all.
Kuttner died in 1958. Moore retired form writing. And for half a century their works slowly faded into obscurity. Discovering these lost jewels of speculative fiction (including Fury, which remains one of my Top 10 Science Fiction Novels of all-time) was a real wake-up call.
In the past 10 years or so the information-deluge of the Internet coupled with global access to catalogs of used books and small press collections have started to return many of these Lost Authors to the light. Among them is Clark Ashton Smith.
I originally encountered Smith’s writing about a decade ago when I found a collection of his Zothique stories (set on the last continent of a dying Earth). These stories made me want to read more, but it proved devilishly difficult to find more of Smith’s writing in print. (At reasonable prices, anyway.)
So when I heard several years ago that Night Shade Books was planning to publish a five volume series collecting all of his stories, I immediately signed up for a subscription. Unfortunately, the series has proven to be absurdly lethargic in the pace of its releases. In fact, it has yet to be completed (although there is great hope that the last volume will appear later this year).
This has not prevented me, however, from sitting down recently to enjoy Volume 1: The End of the Story.
The series presents Smith’s writing in the chronological order of its composition, starting in 1925 with “The Abominations of Yondo”. This was a story that I had read before, but had no idea that it was Smith’s first stab at speculative fiction. It is a remarkable freshmen work, effortlessly conjuring forth an alien and fantastical environment of an utterly unearthly character. This, in fact, becomes Smith’s defining strength as an author. The alien planets, alternate universes, and ancient epochs in which he sets his stories are not merely distant in time or space; they are utterly alien in their character.
The sand of the desert of Yondo is not as the sand of other deserts; for Yondo lies nearest of all to the world’s rim; and strange winds, blowing from a pit no astronomer may hope to fathom, have sown its ruinous fields with the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns. The dark, orblike mountains which rise from its wrinkled and pitted plain are not all its own, for some are fallen asteroids half-buried in that abysmal sand. Things have crept in from nether space, whose incursion is forbid by the gods of all proper and well-ordered lands; but there are no such gods in Yondo, where live the hoary genii of stars abolished and decrepit demons left homeless by the destruction of antiquated hells.
“… the gray dust of corroding planets, the black ashes of extinguished suns.” Could anyone mistake such a place as merely being the analog of some Earthly wasteland?
The strength of “The Abominations of Yondo” aside, however, Smith’s talent did not spring forth fully formed from the brow of Zeus. And this volume, containing as it does Smith’s earliest efforts, has a fair share of formulaic work: “The Ninth Skeleton”, “Phantoms of the Fire”, and “The Resurrection of the Rattlesnake”, for example, are paint-by-number horror “shockers”. “The Last Incantation” and “A Night in Malneant” are thin and predictable morality tales.
But even in these weaker tales there is a vividness of description and a poetic quality of verse which raises them, however slightly, above similar fare. (With the exception of “Phantoms of Fire” which is simply a bad story by any accounting.) The dead streets of Malneant, in particular, continue to echo through the chambers of my mind many long nights after I finished the tale.
There are, similarly, far too many tales starring self-inserted writers of pulp fiction and poverty-stricken poets. But here, again, Smith manages to use this weak conceit to good effect from time to time. For example, “The Monster of the Prophecy” is the tale of a struggling, poverty-stricken poet who is plucked off the street by an alien visitor from a distant planet. Not only does the poet’s writing become famous, but he himself is given the opportunity to adventure among the stars. In synopsis, the tale sounds like ripe fodder for a Mary Sue. But, in practice, Smith sidesteps the abyss and produces a memorable (if somewhat flawed) tale.
If Smith suffers from a consistent flaw throughout this volume, it is the weakness of his plots and the forgettable quality of his characters. In some ways, however, this flaw stands in complement to his strengths: His tales often read as travelogues of the bizarre, featuring cipherous everymen who serve as the readers’ empty avatars as they wander through the alien vistas.
In many ways, the stories reveal Smith’s true passion as a poet: Many read like tone poems, and I found the book most enjoyable when I chose to sample its contents instead of trying to barge from one tale to the next from front cover to back.
I am curious to see, as I continue to work my way through Smith’s oeuvre, whether his poetic mastery of language and his mind-blowing descriptions of fantastical landscapes will become wedded to plots of substance and characters that you can care about.
On the other hand, I feel this review will be read as more negative than it perhaps should be. In addition to “The Abominations of Yondo” and “The Monster of the Prophecy”, this collection also contains “The Venus of Azombeii” (in which the characters do explode off of the page with a surprising passion), “Thirteen Phantasms” (in which a morality tale is twisted and turned into something unpredictable and beautiful and special), “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” (which could be described as capturing all the vigor and spirit of Howard’s Conan stories and wedding it to Smith’s fantastical vision, except for the fact that it was written three years before Conan appeared), “The Metamorphosis of the World” (which, although flawed in parts, is majestical in its scope), “Marooned in Andromeda” (an excellent entry in the travelogue category), and “The Immeasurable Horror” (featuring one of the most memorable depictions of the jungles of space opera Venus). And these are all excellent tales which anyone might be well-advised to read.
Perhaps more importantly, Smith’s eye for the fantastic is utterly unique. The influence of his writing has been widely felt, but if you haven’t read his own work, then you’ve never read anything quite like Clark Ashton Smith.
GRADE: B+
Clark Ashton Smith
Published: 2007
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Cover Price: $25.00
ISBN: 1597800287
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