Science fantasy gets a makeover

It was Empire of the Petal Throne, not D&D, that hooked me on roleplaying, and the reason for that is I was into sword-&-sorcery and science fantasy rather than the Tolkienesque strain of epic fantasy that caught on through the late 20th century. You know how a duckling follows the first thing it sees when it hatches? Ten-year-old me discovered fantasy through Mike Moorcock’s Mars books and A Planet Called Krishna by L Sprague de Camp. There was no looking back – or forward – from that point on.

Genre is slippery, so bear with me, but technically those books belong to what is now defined as sword-&-planet or planetary romance:

‘Planetary romance is a sub-genre of science fiction that has a close relationship with fantasy in the sense that the cultures that are described are very frequently pre-industrial. The pseudo-medieval warfare with bows and arrows and swords is frequently reminiscent of medievalist fantasy, but this is also a space in which some writers explored American notions of the primitive, mapping the mythology of the American West on to the plains of another planet.’

- Farah Mendlesohn & Edward James, A Short History of Fantasy

Usually spacefaring humans arrive – or better still, get stranded – on a planet at an ancient or medieval level of technology. Sometimes, as in Vance’s Planet of Adventure series, the indigenous civilization has technology of its own. Then it can shade off into Flash Gordon territory, if the natives fully understand their advanced devices, or Tekumel, where the remnants of ancient technology are rare and thought of as magic.

Outliers here (I can’t resist a digression) include Arthur Landis’s Camelot novels, which I basically agented to Don Wollheim back in the early ‘70s. That has some tropes you’ll see recurring: human operative dropped into a more primitive world with just a few bits of kit to give him some magic powers. Swords, princesses, mystic powers, and high adventure – the familiar ingredients of Star Wars, but drip-fed rather than delivered by fire hose.

I call it science fantasy because I don’t seem any intrinsic difference between those planetary stories and, say, Lin Carter’s Thongor books, which are set on a lost continent in Earth’s distant past but still have all the familiar elements. Likewise our own Abraxas setting.

As science fantasy stories are set in ‘exotic’ civilizations, there’s usually a lot of world-building. That could explain why science fantasy has been largely superseded by the Tolkien/Game of Thrones/Witcher variety, in which the settings are more-or-less identikit medieval Europe. We in the West seem to be less enamoured of other cultures than we used to be. In the last century, exotic customs were occasion for surprise and delight. We found them intriguing, and the more troubling elements like suttee looked like they’d been safely banished by modern secularism. Nowadays the news tends to focus on the less quaint features of other cultures: morality patrols, girls being denied education, ancient artworks being blown up, the demonization of gays and albinos, gang-rape of low-caste women, 'honor' killings, and mobs murdering people of other religions. Is it a coincidence that many Westerners have retreated into a genre of fantasy that depicts a cosy cosplay version of their own past? A kind of fantasy where bad things are only done by bad people, so as not to have to face the different and disturbing ways that a whole society can behave? Of course, actual medieval Europe wasn’t a bit like that, but the difference is it is comfortably dead and gone so fiction can feed us the denatured version.

I’m only speculating as to the causes, but certainly there’s little interest these days in all the cultural minutiae we were presented with in games like Empire of the Petal Throne. In most Tekumel games these days, the participants no longer bother to try roleplaying Tsolyani. What grabs them is all the science fantasy stuff. They want to stand apart, to be the clued-up modern folk luxuriating in a sense of superiority over all those 'primitive' NPCs.

If you've hung around here long enough you'll know that the rich diversity of human culture is precisely what I personally find enthralling; and when it comes to fiction, the more different from modern Western democracy the better. But I've also noticed that the books, movies and games I like are not usually the million-sellers. In this post I'm trying to figure out the kind of makeover science fantasy needs to avoid bombing like John Carter. What does it take to turn it into the opposite of the kind of niche culture-gaming that can barely muster a cult following? It seems that if Tekumel were ever to break out of its ever-shrinking ghetto, those Star Wars style mass-market fantasy tropes mentioned above are the strengths it should play to.

What would that look like? Imagine Star Wars several centuries on. A single planet isolated from the rest of the empire or republic or whatever. Science is largely forgotten, apart from a few Christopher Johnson types who everybody else thinks of as wizards. If you find a light sabre it’s like picking up a magic sword. Droids are tantamount to elves, immortal and nonhuman. The Force is – oh well, that’s always been about black and white magic.

So this reboot of Tekumel would take its cue from Star Wars, blurring all the ethnographic particulars and instead foregrounding the elements that are easy for modern audiences to grok:

• Alien powers that have set themselves up as gods
• Remnants of near-magical super-science
• Shapechangers meddling in human affairs
• Secrets of the ancients known only to a few
• Robotic guardians that are dangerous but can be reprogrammed to become servants (Terminator, golems, etc)
• Swordplay and derring-do
• A world in which a few people can make all the difference

Culturally it would retain only the specific Tekumel USPs that might resonate with modern audiences:

• Non-white societies
• Women, gays & trans characters are fully accepted and equal
• Stereotypical nonhumans are there for flavour (the Stepin Fetchits of modern fantasy)

The weird linguistics would need to be downplayed. I've spent four decades listening to D&D players sneering at Tekumel's "unpronounceable names". Gamers can't be bothered to figure out consonants like tl and ts, never mind ng and nd. In any case, most Tekumel players already don't say the name of the planet correctly. It should be TAY-koo-male; they tend to pronounce it TECH-you-mell.

A reboot like this wouldn’t  involve entirely abandoning the more obscure bits of Tekumel culture. They just wouldn't get mentioned. It can be useful for any fantasy setting to have those ‘iceberg details’ supporting it, as long as they don’t get in the way of the 95% of players who want to ignore them. Given easy docking points for new players and a familiar rules system, maybe it could avoid the demise that Steve Foster predicted and prescribed for thirty years ago.

Why I think Tekumel would be worth such a reboot is because it has dwindled to barely a cult interest, and yet it does have those USPs and it’s a truly American sui generis of fantasy, something original in a field where almost everything else is a mutant strain of Lord of the Rings. Also, it has a champion in Steve Jackson, who once offered to publish a set of three GURPS Tekumel books. M A R Barker, who I think everyone agrees had extremely poor judgement, turned that down for a publishing deal with Lou Zocchi to release an RPG that nobody even remembers anymore. Tekumel has become in effect the obscure but authentic R&B that achieved breakthrough success only when diluted and dumbed down to become white rock & roll (think Numenera in this analogy). Maybe there’s a way to give it one last shot, even if that means chucking out most of what diehards like me cherish about it.

Love and a sense of wonder

Unless you achieved full consciousness prior to 1977, it's hard to explain what science fiction was like back then. For one thing it was called SF not "sci-fi". And there was none of the Errol Flynn stuff we see today. Well, that's not quite true. There were throwbacks like E.C. Tubbs' Cap Kennedy series. Don Wollheim sent me a stack of those books back in the mid-70s when I'd made a slighting remark about space opera. Little did either of us know that the whole bloody field was about to be set back forty years by George Lucas.

SF was proper, you see. Interesting. Literate. Diverse. Unsettling. Brimming with wonder. I liked it because it stretched me more than the adventure stories I read as a kid. At its best it could boggle the mind and the imagination. The nearest we've got to that these days, outside of books, is Black Mirror.

That's why I like this Kickstarter, In Other Waters, a game by Gareth Martin in which a stranded xenobiologist explores an alien world. That sounds exactly like the kind of perfect science fictional setup that exists on the cusp between the awesome and terrifying infinitude of the cosmos and the all-conquering power of science and reason. Bleak and hopeful, if that makes sense.

The game is relationship-driven, which immediately ticks another box for me, and as well as the game itself backers can get a book detailing the strange lifeforms of this alien world.

I'm slightly wary of recommending In Other Waters because the Kickstarter campaigns I like tend to plummet like Icarus. But Cultist Simulator did okay, so maybe the jinx is broken. This one has a week to run, so if you grok grown-up SF you know where to find it.

And while we're talking crowdfunding, another project you might want to take a look at is Chernobyl, Mon Amour, "a roleplaying game of love and radioactivity set in the Zone of Alienation". I couldn't resist that and plonked my money down right away, so hopefully the Morris Effect won't scupper it. This one is by Finnish designer Juhana Pettersson, who was inspired by a Ukrainian urban myth about a criminal who fled into the Zone and became so radioactive that the authorities had to leave him there.

"You know that there is no return from the Zone. Your crimes are such that society will no longer accept you, and the only thing you have left is the possibility of a new life in the radioactive forest. As you settle into the Zone and meet its inhabitants, you start to yearn for something more. You want love."

Chernobyl, Mon Amour is on Indiegogo, but only for a couple more weeks.

Ia! Ia! Cthulhu fhtagn!

"The only flaw in this stuff is R.E.H.'s incurable tendency to devise names too closely resembling actual names of ancient history -- names which, for us, have a very different set of associations. In many cases he does this designedly- on the theory that familiar names descend from the fabulous realms he describes -- but such a design is invalidated by the fact that we clearly know the etymology of many of the historic terms, hence cannot accept the pedigree he suggests. E. Hoffman Price and I have both argued with Two-Gun on this point, but we make no headway whatsoever. The only thing to do is to accept the nomenclature as he gives it, wink at the weak spots, and be damned thankful that we can get such vivid artificial legendry."

That's Lovecraft himself, sui generis creator of an entire mythology, talking in a 1935 letter to my old penpal Donald Wollheim about the work of Robert E Howard (specifically, his invented history of "The Hyborian Age").

I have to agree with HPL. Fantasy novels full of names culled from the author's vague memory of bits of history and myth are the main reason I don't read much fantasy. We can allow Howard to get away with it, as HPL did, because, firstly, he was an exceptional writer and, secondly, he did at least understand the derivation of the names he was using. He would put Aesir in a northern clime, have swarthy barbarian mercenaries waiting for their pay outside the walls of Carthage, and so on. It helped to paint a picture. It was a conscious choice by the writer, it wasn't laziness or ignorance.

But most fantasy writers are not blessed with Bob Howard's vivid imagination or natural storyteller's instincts, and cities called Vishnu in a medieval-ish Western-y setting just come across as witless. Likewise confusing the function and even gender of historical Greek or Roman gods - just make up your own, for Zeus's sake.

Lovecraft was a man who stuck to his guns even more than Two-Gun. Whatever the cost (and it seems to have been huge, in terms of health, finances and happiness) he steered a straight course by the principles of his craft. In his lifetime he enjoyed nothing like Howard's popularity among the readers of Weird Tales, despite the proselytizing efforts of a small and devoted band of followers.

But look, here we are seventy-five years later and the Cthulhu Mythos is one of the great modern IPs. I'm not sure Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola would have careers without it. (That's a joke, by the way, but only just.) The reason it has such power is because it is a pure and complete sub-creation, as Tolkien called it. When Lovecraft needed a name for an invented god, he didn't do the easy thing and reach for Bulfinch's.

The lesson, I guess, is that if you want to create great fantasy (and fantasy, when it is done well, can be great indeed) then take the path less travelled. Dig down into your own imagination. Invent places we've never seen outside of dreams and give them names that resonate on a deeper level than just "Kishapur" or "Ragnarberg". You may die a pauper's death, but your existence will have brought to the world something of true and incomparable value: originality.