James Nicoll Reviews

Twenty Five to Life by R. W. W. Greene

Julie Riley is two years too young to get out from under her mother’s thumb, and what does it matter? She’s over-educated, under-employed, and kept mostly numb by her pharma emplant. Her best friend, who she’s mostly been interacting with via virtual reality for the past decade, is part of the colony mission to Proxima Centauri. Plus, the world is coming to an end. So, there’s that. When Julie’s mother decides it’s time to let go of the family home in a failing suburb and move to the city to be closer to work and her new beau, Julie decides to take matters into her own hands. She runs, illegally, hoping to find and hide with the Volksgeist, a loose-knit culture of tramps, hoboes, senior citizens, artists, and never-do-wells who have elected to ride out the end of the world in their campers and converted vans, constantly on the move over the back roads of America. 

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Damon Knight’s Orbit anthology series was published between 1966 and 1980. Over fourteen years, Knight edited twenty-one volumes (which I own), as well as one volume featuring the best stories from Orbit (which I don’t own because what would be the point when I already had the stories in question). Offering stories that ranged from avant-garde to more standard fare, Orbit came to be viewed as suspiciously intellectual by some of the grumpier SF authors, with consequences that will be seen when the relevant volumes are reviewed. 

Time is not science fiction’s friend. It can be particularly hard on cutting-edge works, whose social views may age badly while the aspects that were ground-breaking at the time were so widely copied in the following decades later it’s now hard to understand the initial praise. Will Orbit stories now reflect quaint values? Will what was then new seem ho-hum? I sure hope the stories are (mostly) neither troglodytic nor passe, because I have agreed to review all twenty-one volumes. 

Onward!

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Inspired by Aaron de Orive’s 2020 First Ten RPGs, a brief account of the roleplaying games I have played most recently, beginning with the most recent and working backwards. Number Ten: Steven Long’s Hero System 5^th Edition.

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Forever Curious by Jetse de Vries

In an intellectual clash of galactic proportions, the biggest mystery in the Universe encounters the smartest girl from Earth. Na-Yeli Maya is humanity’s champion exploring the forbidding Enigmatic Object. She’s not truly alone, as her exosuit is armed with the most advanced quantum computer — and obnoxious digital assistant — ever, and her tri-schizoid condition enables her to call up her ultimate warrior and lateral thinker personas in times of dire need. Along the way, she partners with a stranded Moiety Alien and adopts a group of hypersounders, as they make it all the way into the Core. What will they find? 

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Inspired by Aaron de Orive’s 2020 First Ten RPGs, a brief account of the roleplaying games I have played most recently, beginning with the most recent and working backwards. Number Nine: Leonard Balsera’s The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game.

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Sibyl Sue Blue by Rosel George Brown

Stop a murder, save two planets!

Who she is: Sibyl Sue Blue, single mom, undercover detective, and damn good at her job.

What she wants: to solve the mysterious benzale murders, prevent more teenage deaths, and maybe find her long-lost husband.

How she’ll get it: seduce a millionaire, catch a ride on his spaceship, and crack the case at the edge of the known galaxy.

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Inspired by Aaron de Orive’s 2020 First Ten RPGs, a brief account of the roleplaying games I have played most recently, beginning with the most recent and working backwards. Number Eight: Monte Cook’s Numenera.

Numenera is a science fantasy roleplaying game set one billion years in the future. At least eight great civilizations have risen and then collapsed. Player characters live during the ninth civilization, the so-called Ninth World. It is a world rich in remnants of vanished cultures, not all of which appear to have been human.

Character generation is extremely simple: ​“I am a [descriptor] [noun] who [focus/main talent].” Thus, one might be a strong barbarian who fights, or a wise archaeologist who learns, or so on. We didn’t play it for long but the game mechanics seemed perfectly functional. 

As I recall, I played someone from the Eight World who craftily froze himself so that he could emerge in the time after the Eight World fell and dominate the barbarians to come with his wonders of technology. He got his timing wrong so he emerged to discover he was armed with technology slightly less sophisticated than Ninth World technology. Whoops. 

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May 2021

21 works reviewed. 10 by women (48%), 7 by men (33%), 2 by non-binary authors (10%), 2 by authors whose gender is unknown (10%), and 9 works by POC (43%)

Year to Date

106 works reviewed. 57.5 by women (54%), 42.5 by men (40), 3 by non-binary authors (3%), 3 by authors whose gender is unknown (3%), and 44 works by POC (42%)

Grand Total to Date

1854 works reviewed. 1040 by women (56%), 772 by men (42%), 24 by
non-binary authors (1%), 18 by authors whose gender is unknown (1%), and 523.75 by POC (28%).

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Three Twins at the Crater School by Chaz Brenchley

Mars, the Red Planet, farthest flung outpost of the British Empire. Under the benevolent reign of the Empress Eternal, commerce and culture are flourishing along the banks of the great canals, and around the shores of the crater lakes. But this brave new world is not as safe as it might seem. The Russians, unhappy that Venus has proved far less hospitable, covet Britain’s colony. And the Martian creatures, while not as intelligent and malevolent as HG Wells had predicted, are certainly dangerous to the unwary.

What, then, of the young girls of the Martian colony? Their brothers might be sent to Earth for education at Eton and Oxbridge, but girls are made of sterner stuff. Be it unreasonable parents, Russian spies, or the deadly Martian wildlife, no challenge is beyond the resourceful girls of the Crater School. 

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Inspired by Aaron de Orive’s 2020 First Ten RPGs, a brief account of the roleplaying games I have played most recently, beginning with the most recent and working backwards. Number Seven¹: Kenneth Hite’s horror investigation RPG, Trail of Cthulhu.

Although mechanically quite distinct, Trail draws on the same body of work as Call of Cthulhu, namely noted timorous xenophobe H. P. Lovecraft. Providence’s most famous racist’s fiction provides a rich world in which the answers to every question are deeply regrettable, assuming the asker lives long enough to comprehend what they have discovered. 

Trail uses Robin D. Laws’ Gumshoe game mechanics. Characters are generated using a points-based system. As I recall we used pre-generated characters, so my knowledge of that end of things is minimal. The game is skill-based, with players trying to exceed a target number (usually 4). Results can be improved by drawing on points from the relevant Investigative Abilities Pools, which the player must decide to do before seeing how their d6 betrayed them.

To be honest, I only learned enough of the rules to play the game. Looking at it in more detail now, I see there are two modes of play, Purist or Pulp. In the purist mode, player characters are bugs on the fast-moving windshield of the Mythos. In Pulp mode, they are somewhat more durable, a veritable mouse in a tiger’s cage. Either way, it’s probably best to have a back-up character or two. 

I find the Ability pool mechanics a bit counter-intuitive. Once the pools are used up, it becomes much harder to succeed at tasks. I suppose this could represent cognitive fatigue but I am not used to thinking of skills as something with a finite number of uses. Otherwise, Trail was a perfectly fine little game. 

1: Yes, there was a different 7 but I discovered the author is a person I don’t want to promote. Ironically, that 7 was itself a replacement for an entirely different game that was problematic in its own way, both in terms of the designer and the unmentionable group of people with whom I played it. Ah, well. There is no limit to how often I can apply Damnatio memoriae.

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