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. 

H. Beam Piper's Guide to Life

He spends the somber midnight hours patrolling through the Altoona shops, watching out for trespassers and possible fires.

At 7 A.M., he goes home to the third-floor apartment he shares with his aged mother, and gets into pajamas and drinks a glass of black Jamaica rum––"not Porto Rico––I'm very bigoted on the subject of rum," he says.

"Then I light up my pipe with Serene tobacco––been smoking that brand the last thirty years––and either go over what I wrote the previous day or plan out what I'll write that afternoon. I usually go to bed around 8:30 A.M."

"I wake up about 3:30 or 5 P.M., depending on how much sleep I've been doing without the past few days. I have breakfast, which consists of a bottle of 7-Up and a pot of coffee––black, of course. Then I get to the typewriter, and work two to four hours, which gives me time to have dinner and report to work at 11 P.M."

That's an excerpt from a 1953 article about H. Beam Piper, perhaps my favorite science fiction author (and a huge influence on my own Thousand Suns). The article appeared in The Pennsy, which was an in-house periodical for employees of The Pennsylvania Railroad Company, for which Piper worked as a night watchman. The article included the following two photographs, both of which I think are just awesome:

In addition to being a night watchman for the PRR and a writer, Piper was an avid collector of weapons, owning 80 antique pistols and 50 bladed weapons of various sorts, such as the 450 year-old French sword shown in the photo above.

Piper was a true original. They don't make writers like him anymore.

Giving the (re)Boot to Fuzzy Nation

Curmudgeon that I am, I'm not the target audience for "reboots" of pre-existing media, which is good, since my assessment of them, with few exceptions, veers between vainglorious hubris and Philistine brand-building, with enough unoriginality to cover both ends of my critical appraisal. In days of yore, when someone felt that someone else had an idea worth swiping, that's what they did -- swiped it and then reworked it into something they felt was better, or at least different enough to justify its existence. This is the process that got us Flash Gordon, after all, and, later, Star Wars. But that was back before our culture started to view creative works primarily as a source of marketable "intellectual property" rather than simply as works of art. Call me an old fogey, because I miss those days.

So, when I heard that John Scalzi, a writer about whom I know little -- yes, yes, we've already established that I'm out of touch -- had written a reboot of H. Beam Piper's 1962 Hugo-nominated science fiction classic, Little Fuzzy, I can't say that I was pleased. Piper is one of my favorite SF authors of all time. His Terro-Human future history series, of which Little Fuzzy is a part, exercised a profound influence over Traveller and on me. My own SF RPG, Thousand Suns, is explicitly dedicated to his memory and much of Piper's ideas and terminology can be found in its pages.

There is even a supplement to Thousand Suns, entitled Transmissions from Piper, that collects several of Piper's short stories under one cover, along with game statistics for some of what appears in them. Transmissions from Piper was possible because most of Piper's literary output, including Little Fuzzy, is now in the public domain. If someone wished to do so, they could create a game, movie, or TV show using Piper's material free of charge, much in the same way they could do the same with, say, Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Similarly, they could produce new books utilizing the settings and characters Piper created.

At first, that's what I'd thought Scalzi had done with his book, Fuzzy Nation, released last month. I thought it was a continuation of the Fuzzy series by a contemporary SF author. We've already had several of those previously, none of them very good in my opinion, but their existence never bothered me because they told new stories in Piper's world rather than attempting to retell the original. Similarly irksome is that Fuzzy Nation is frequently described as an "authorized" reboot, Scalzi having secured the blessing of "the Piper estate." Now, I don't know about you, but when I hear the words "the Piper estate," I assume it refers to some living, breathing human being(s) with a connection to the living, breathing human being who penned these stories, but that's not the case at all. "The Piper estate" is Penguin Books, a corporation that, unless I am mistaken, has allowed Piper's works to fall out of print -- great custodians of the man's legacy they are!

Needless to say, I went into reading Fuzzy Nation with a bad attitude, so I was almost certainly predisposed to dislike it. What I found, though, was not a book I disliked, let alone hated, so much as one whose very existence seemed pointless. Fuzzy Nation takes slightly more than twice as many pages to tell roughly the same story that Piper did and less charmingly. Just take a look at the two covers I've reproduced along with this post. In the original, the protagonist, Jack Holloway is a septuagenarian loner who spends much of his time meditating on his physical decline, while Scalzi transforms Holloway into a by-the-numbers thirtysomething rogue with a messy past, including, conveniently, an ex-girlfriend who works for the corporation whose agents are the novel's antagonists.

I could no doubt make great hay over this change and what it says about us as a culture, but I'd rather make two additional and, I think, more damning comments about Fuzzy Nation compared to its illustrious predecessor. Little Fuzzy is, ultimately, an exploration of the nature of sentience and what it is that separates us, the readers, from mere animals. The question of whether the "fuzzies" that Holloway discovers on the planet Zarathustra are in fact sentient or merely very clever animals is the central conflict of Piper's novel and he handles it with surprising depth and insight. Scalzi's reboot deals with the same question and, while capably handled, it nevertheless lacked a certain something present in the original.

That something, or rather somethings, was the characters. First and foremost, Scalzi's fuzzies (or "fuzzys," as he inexplicably spells their plural) are fewer in number and much less fully realized. They come across more as plot devices than actual characters, whereas Piper was able to flesh them out to such an extent that one can easily tell Ko-Ko from Goldilocks from Cinderella and so on. In a similar vein, nearly all the characters, including Holloway, are portrayed as self-serving jerks, except for the ones who go beyond self-serving and seem just to be evil (i.e. nearly everyone who works for the Zarathustra Corporation). I am certain that Scalzi felt that he needed to portray the characters in this way in order to make them more "believable" and "realistic," but, truth be told, it made them seem more like stereotypes from Central Casting than real people. Part of what makes Piper's original story work so well is that even the antagonists who deny that the fuzzies are sentient have their good points. That makes the conflict of the novel richer and much less easily divisible into "good guys" and "bad guys," even if it's obvious we're supposed to sympathize with the pro-sentience side of the argument.

In the end, Fuzzy Nation doesn't really bring anything to the table that Little Fuzzy didn't except greater length, shallower characters, and profanity. In short, it's a typical product of the 21st century media machine. It's not bad in its own right, but it is a pale shadow of the book it's rebooting. Other than the fact that Scalzi's name (presumably) carries more weight with contemporary SF readers than does Piper's, I can't figure out why this book was ever published. Even more baffling is why Scalzi bothered to write it, as he could just as easily -- and likely to better result -- have written a new novel dealing with similar themes to those of Little Fuzzy.