The Articles of Dragon: "Luna, The Empire and the Stars"

Heads-up: over the coming weeks and months, you'll be seeing a lot of posts about articles that appeared in the Ares Section of Dragon. To some extent, that's just a function of my own personal preference for science fiction over other genres. However, it's also a function of just how good so many of the articles that appeared in that section were or at least how strong my memory of reading them still is decades later.

A good – but also peculiar – example of what I'm talking about appeared in issue #89 (September 1984). The article in question is "Luna, The Empire and the Stars" by Niall C. Shapero. As its title suggests, it's another entry in the series detailing the state of Earth's Moon in various SF RPGs, such as Gamma World and Traveller. I was a big fan of these articles, all of which were intriguing in one way or another. This one was no different.

However, what did separate "Luna, The Empire and the Stars" from the others in the series is that it was about a science fiction roleplaying game that I had never read, let alone played – Other Suns. I knew of the game, of course. Its publisher, Fantasy Games Unlimited, ran regular advertisements for it in the pages of Dragon throughout 1983 and into 1984. Based on the fact that FGU had already published Space Opera, a kitchen sink SF RPG with a notoriously incomprehensible ruleset, I assumed that Other Suns would be more of the same.

While this assumption on my part would ultimately prove to be wildly incorrect, I plead that this article – by the game's designer no less! – played a huge role in leading me astray. "Luna, The Empire and the Stars" describes the future history of the Moon, starting with the establishment of Colony One near Copernicus Crater in in 51 AE (1996). The use of the Atomic Era dating system from H. Beam Piper's stories was the first of many things that gave me a false impression about Other Suns. Piper proposed an alternative dating system that used the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945 as its starting point. It's a little silly in some respects, but, from the perspective of a sci-fi author writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, it's somewhat understandable, given all the popular talk of "the Atomic Age" and the like.

Besides being wildly optimistic about the prospects of a manned lunar colony just a dozen years in the future of when the article was published, Shapero postulates many other equally implausible things, though, to be fair to him, he wasn't the only person to assume the Soviet Union would survive beyond the 20th century. The article likewise buys into speculations about the rise of Japan as a Great Power that were commonplace in the 1980s, especially in SF literature. However, in Shapero's vision, Japan's rise is quickly countered by the USA, forcing the Japanese to form an alliance with Communist China. Worsening relations between the Sino-Japanese alliance and America eventually lead to World War III, resulting in the deaths of two-thirds of Earth's population.

Fortunately, the American and Soviet lunar colonies are unaffected by the devastation and agree to work together to rebuild Earth in the aftermath of the war. Through their efforts, some semblance of normalcy returns to the planet, though life is still difficult. The newly-established world government is weak and corrupt, leading the military to launch a coup that eventually replaces it with a hereditary monarchy. The First Terran Empire is born. If you think this all sounds vaguely reminiscent of the CoDominium of Jerry Pournelle, you're not alone. That's what I thought too, when I first read the article and yet another reason why I assumed that Other Suns was a hard-edged military SF game.

I can't say that I loved this article or thought it was particularly innovative, but it intrigued me. In 1984, long before the Internet, I was limited in my knowledge of any games that I didn't see on the shelves of local stores. While it was certainly possible to make use of mail order to buy games I only ever saw advertised, I rarely availed myself of it, because I wanted to see the game and hold it in my hands before I bought it. This was especially true of games like Other Suns, whose advertisements were cryptic at best. That's why articles like "Luna, The Empire and the Stars" were so important to me. In principle, they gave me a sense of what the game was actually like.

But, as I said in my original Retrospective post on Other Suns, this article did a very bad job of that. That probably explains why, even now, it looms so large in my memory.