The Machine Stops

I had no idea there were so many adaptations of E M Forster's 111-year-old science fiction novella The Machine Stops. These two student film versions, for example (above and below).



Those movies are both quite abbreviated, but at 44 minutes this radio dramatisation does justice to the story:



Or if you want the original Forster prose with no modern trimmings, try the audiobook:



Or you could go full purist (you just know that's my call, right?) and read the thing.

And why now? Because Forster proposes a world of extreme social distancing in which everybody communicates via the Machine (the Internet, basically). He thinks it would become a dystopian nightmare, requiring technological collapse to restore the soul of mankind. The reality is that, like most futures, it may not appeal to us Cro-Magnons but it will be the accepted way of life for those who grow up with it.

Not that we'd ever want to give up all in-person contact, sure, but there are upsides. Our roleplaying games have benefited because we now don’t have to travel across London to get to the game – and that's never a pleasant prospect on a weekday evening. So instead of two and a half hours’ gaming once a fortnight, we can now fit in three or four hours every week. And, pushed online by necessity, I'm hooking up with friends I sometimes don't see for years at a time. Even when the pandemic is really over (spoiler: that's probably not when politicians tell you it is) there are some good habits learned now that will be worth hanging onto.

"Only connect!" as Forster said. If only we could pop back in time and tell him about Skype.

"I don't read Twitter. I only write on it."

A guest post by George Orwell today. This was originally written in February 1944:

When Sir Walter Raleigh was imprisoned in the Tower of London, he occupied himself with writing a history of the world. He had finished the first volume and was at work on the second when there was a scuffle between some workmen beneath the window of his cell, and one of the men was killed. In spite of diligent enquiries, and in spite of the fact that he had actually seen the thing happen, Sir Walter was never able to discover what the quarrel was about; whereupon, so it is said -- and if the story is not true it certainly ought to be -- he burned what he had written and abandoned his project.

This story has come into my head I do not know how many times during the past ten years, but always with the reflection that Raleigh was probably wrong. Allowing for all the difficulties of research at that date, and the special difficulty of conducting research in prison, he could probably have produced a world history which had some resemblance to the real course of events. Up to a fairly recent date, the major events recorded in the history books probably happened. It is probably true that the battle of Hastings was fought in 1066, that Columbus discovered America, that Henry VIII had six wives, and so on. A certain degree of truthfulness was possible so long as it was admitted that a fact may be true even if you don't like it. Even as late as the last war it was possible for the Encyclopedia Britannica, for instance, to compile its articles on the various campaigns partly from German sources. Some of the facts -- the casualty figures, for instance -- were regarded as neutral and in substance accepted by everybody. No such thing would be possible now. A Nazi and a non-Nazi version of the present war would have no resemblance to one another, and which of them finally gets into the history books will be decided not by evidential methods but on the battlefield.

During the Spanish civil war I found myself feeling very strongly that a true history of this war never would or could be written. Accurate figures, objective accounts of what was happening, simply did not exist. And if I felt that even in 1937, when the Spanish Government was still in being, and the lies which the various Republican factions were telling about each other and about the enemy were relatively small ones, how does the case stand now? Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of "facts" which millions of people now living know to be lies. One of these "facts," for instance, is that there was a considerable Russian army in Spain. There exists the most abundant evidence that there was no such army. Yet if Franco remains in power, and if Fascism in general survives, that Russian army will go into the history books and future school children will believe in it. So for practical purposes the lie will have become truth.

This kind of thing is happening all the time. Out of the milions of instances which must be available, I will choose one which happens to be verifiable. During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audiences with stories of devestating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purposes of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen. So with innumerable other events of the past ten or twenty years. Is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion a genuine document? Did Trotsky plot with the Nazis? How many German aeroplanes were shot down in the Battle of Britain? Does Europe welcome the New Order? In no case do you get one answer which is universally accepted because it is true: in each case you get a number of totally incompatible answers, one of which is finally adopted as the result of a physical struggle. History is written by the winners.

In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell fewer lies about it than our adversaries. The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits "atrocities" but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future. In spite of all the lying and self-righteousness that war encourages, I do not honestly think it can be said that that habit of mind is growing in Britain. Taking one thing with another, I should say that the press is slightly freer than it was before the war. I know out of my own experience that you can print things now which you couldn't print ten years ago. War resisters have probably been less maltreated in this war than in the last one, and the expression of unpopular opinion in public is certainly safer. There is some hope, therefore, that the liberal habit of mind, which thinks of truth as something outside yourself, something to be discovered, and not as something you can make up as you go along, will survive. But I still don't envy the future historian's job. Is it not a strange commentary on our time that even the casualties in the present war cannot be estimated within several millions?

* * *

Big, shameless lies have their beginnings in mealy-mouthed evasion of the kind exhibited by Marco Rubio and others here. Seventy-six years on, Orwell would hang his head in despair.

London's burning

W Somerset Maugham said, "There is an impression abroad that everyone has it in him to write one book; but if by this is implied a good book the impression is false." Sixty years later, Christopher Hitchens put it more brutally: "Everyone has a book inside them, which is exactly where it should, I think, in most cases, remain."

In the last few years we've seen both statements proved many times over. Self-publishing and e-books have increased the number of titles being released each year from hundreds of thousands to many millions. It's a tidal wave of tat with just a few treasures in among the deluge, and those swept by so fast you could blink and miss them.

All the more reason, then, to rejoice when a writer of proven talent comes out with a new novel. And that's especially so when the novel is that writer's masterpiece, the one they've been honing for years, the work into which they've poured a lifetime of experience, craft and imagination.

Such a book is John Whitbourn's Babylondon. (Babylon and London, that is, as I'm sure you already realized.) How can I describe it in a way that will do justice to such a unique story? Imagine yourself in London in the summer of 1780. An angry rabble, enraged by laws intended to reduce discrimination, descend on the capital in an orgy of violence. A week of destruction and violence follow. These are the Gordon Riots. As one bystander put it as he watched public buildings go up in flames:

‘London offered on every side the picture of a city sacked and abandoned to a ferocious enemy.’

Yet this is unlike any modern populist howl of prejudice. Behind the scenes, malevolent forces are at work, exploiting the ignorant minds of the mob to bring about an infernal doom even more calamitous than a no-deal Brexit. From elsewhere in the multiverse comes a supernaturally competent, stylish and deliciously eccentric agent known as the Cavaliere. Imagine a refined, swordstick-wielding incarnation of the Doctor impeccably dressed for the century of lights, perhaps played by Tim Roth...



...with a touch of Marius Goring's performance as Conductor 71 in A Matter of Life and Death...



The Cavaliere soon gets himself an able companion to serve as his guide to this era, by the simple expedient of acquiring an orphan from the Foundling Hospital. (Since I'm doing the casting, Kate could be played by the young Billie Piper -- or Chloë Grace Moretz if she's up for attempting a Cockney accent.) Our two heroes will need all their wits and wiles, though, because ranged against them are a whole hierarchy of lethally adept opponents from this world and the planes beyond -- some of them armed with quantum weapons that even the Cavaliere has no defence against. ("This stuff shouldn't be here at all," warns the shadowy Guardsman as he equips his locally recruited minions.) And all this against the bloody backdrop of the riots as London is torn apart.

If I haven't piqued your interest by now then that's entirely my fault, because Babylondon is a modern classic that should appeal to every connoisseur of historical SF, multiverse adventure, and parallel worlds. John Whitbourn has been working on this novel since the late '90s and he's brought it to the quintessence of perfection. Grab your periwig and your poignard, and allons-y.

A whole heron's nest of untidy ambiguities!

When the waters became calm, Ys of the Ages, Ys the Beautiful, Ys of the Many Palaces, was sunk beneath the sea. In later times, when the light was right and the water clear, fishermen sometimes glimpsed the wonderful structures of marble, where nothing moved but schools of fish.

If you haven't read Jack Vance's Lyonesse trilogy then, really, what are you doing here? Vance was a huge influence on both fantasy fiction and fantasy roleplaying, the Lyonesse books are a delight worth returning to again and again, and in point of fact they'd make a great open-world gamebook in the Fabled Lands style.

I don't have the rights, so we're plumb out of luck as far as the gamebook goes, but Lawrence Whitaker of The Design Mechanism has just published a Lyonesse RPG based on Mythras, the current incarnation of the game formerly known as Runequest. If the video whets your appetite, you can buy it on DriveThruRPG. (Full disclosure: I was one of the writing team and penned the sections on Ys and the Ska. But I'd be recommending it anyway, because it's Vance.)

The new RPG offers an exhaustive (500-page) guide to the world, but what if Mythras/RQ isn't your beaker of the blushful? Once you're read the Lyonesse books you'll no doubt have your own take on how to run it. There was another set of roleplaying rules published in 1999 by Men in Cheese, If you want to focus on the activities of sorcerers and their associates, Lyonesse would be a great fit with Ars Magica, I'd love to see a Powered By The Apocalypse version, and you might even use Dragon Warriors. Whatever your favourite system, just dive in. It's a world that is guaranteed to catalyze your creativity.

The Complete Lyonesse

Suldrun's Garden

The Green Pearl

Madouc

Lyonesse RPG

Ella è quanto de ben pò far natura

Edizioni Librarsi have announced the third book in the Blood Sword series, L'Artiglio del Demone. And how about that cover art? I wish the books could have gone out with such magnificent cover paintings back in the day. It almost makes me want to write the whole saga up as a Jewelspider adventure -- and then I could finally cap it all with the finale it deserves. Well, once I've got the Jewelspider rules published, and Tetsubo, and Abraxas, and Λ, it'll be the very next thing on the list.

Sayings of the High One

Grim Jim Desborough gave Dragon Warriors a nice video review the other week. I'm not sharing it here out of immodesty (of course not) but because Jim accepted the geas of wearing the eyepatch of Bolverk Bor's-son, who is one of his household gods. (Mine too, actually, and that sort of thing is rare among atheist lefties like us.)

I've been finding Jim's YouTube games pretty useful while writing Jewelspider, as they're reminding me of staples of DW gaming that don't feature in our games much (the mystics' sense of premonition, for example - or indeed mystics themselves) but that the new rules should at least include nods to.

While we're talking of Legend, I should mention that there are two very tasty DW books available free on DriveThruRPG: Cadaver Draconis, which collects material that the Players Guide unfortunately didn't have room for, and The Nomad Khanates, a sourcebook for the Great Steppes. These are good hefty books written by DW authorities like Shaun Hately, Damian May, Wayne Imlach -- well, I won't list everyone here, they're on the credits page, but suffice to say you're all appreciated by me and Oliver. For anyone unfamiliar with the Khanates:

An expanse of temperate grasslands and scrub lies to the east of the New Selentine Empire. It has never been explored or mapped; its exact limits are unknown. Somewhere further east and south are the strange, tradition-steeped lands of Khitai and Yamato. More southerly are the rich countries of Zinj and Batubatan, and the Palace Under Heaven where the Emperor of the Nine Mountains holds court. In the south-west, the grasslands must abut the far fringes of Opalar. But a traveller wishing to visit any of these exotic places would take the seaward passage along the Gulf of Marazid, not travel across the grasslands. These wild plains are the home of nomad peoples as fierce and untamed as the landscape they inhabit.  

The nomads are horse and oxen herders who move continually as the seasons and the abundance of grass for the herd dictate. They obtain everything from their herd - the horses are steeds for war or hunting, cattle draw the tribe’s wagons. Both are a source of meat and clothing and bone utensils. Horn and sinew are used in the construction of the nomads’ composite bows, which in the hands of a skilled archer can rain arrows on their enemies at a range of over two hundred yards. 

The social organization of these people consists of extended tribe-alliances whose ruler is called a Khan. The balance of power shifts as tribes change allegiance and as incautious Khans are assassinated. At the time of writing, the principal power resides in Sitai Khan of the Oshkosa. Other khanates are the Katagai, the Gunguska, the Khanate of the Sweeping Vast, the Khanate of the Black Pavilion, and the Hunkunkai. 

One westerner is famous for his travels among these wild people. Niccolo of Wissenstein was sent in a party of explorers from the court of King Vorlest of Kurland, who charged them with discovering a safe land-route to Khitai. Niccolo quickly learned the nomads’ tongue and set about his task; trying to establish contact with the Khans and make a deal with them guaranteeing ‘safe conduct’ for Kurlish caravanserai. In this he was not successful, but he did produce a record of nomadic life which is quite unique. His visit to a nomad’s home occurs early in the account of his travels: 

"The clan are continually on the move, and for this purpose carry their homes with them. When the time comes to make camp, a family can set up one of these homes in under an hour. First a prepared lattice of willow hoops is raised, this being secured in the ground with heavy pegs. Large bolts of felt are wrapped onto this framework to form the walls of the home. The felt and the ropes used to lash the structure together are made from horsehair, and the clan’s herd animals provide oils to make the home proof against cold and rain. The finished home is a roughly circular tent which the steppe people call a gyur. ‘Invited into one such tent, I found the ulterior decorated with rugs and trinkets. The central part of the roof, above the fire, is left open as one also finds in the mead-halls of Mercania and Thuland. Despite this, I can attest that the home remains warm and comfortable even when the bitterest steppe wind is blowing outside. My own host, whose name was Shweymar, invited me to sit beside him on the brown rug occupying the northernmost third of the floor, opposite the entrance. This was a great honour, as the steppe people keep this area for the head of the household, his elders and guests of high status. Behind us were several idols depicting Shweymar’s household deities. In front of this area of high status, the floor is divided into two other sections. To the left of the doorway sit the women and children. The host’s sons and younger male guests sit on the right. Utensils for cooking and other household purposes are kept in the left-hand area while weapons are placed in a rack between the right-hand area and the host’s rug. I was to discover that this tradition of signifying status extends throughout the steppes, even to the homesteads of the citadels.Whether this is happenstance or real evidence that the tribes once belonged to a single unrecorded civilization – this question can never be answered."

Got any fond memories of Dragon Warriors games past or present? Share them in the comments. If we get a dozen, I'll chip in with one of my own from our DW playtesting days.

Don't listen to Hydra

It'd be a reckless gamer who'd dive back into face to face roleplaying right now. Whatever the Red Skull says, the coronavirus is not going to magically disappear. Fortunately there are plenty of online alternatives, and taking the glass-half-full view I quite like not having to travel to a game during London's rush hour or faff around cooking supper for a room full of hungry gamers.

Here are Scott Dorwood of The Good Friends of Jackson Elias and Joe Trier of How We Roll with a smorgasbord of suggestions for gaming over the internet. (I'll append my obligatory quibble, which is that HPL probably pronounced the "dh" in dhole as an eth. So, not like the Asian canid. But I realize it spoils a perfectly good pun, so I won't press the point.)

In our games we've stripped it all back to Discord with the Dice Maiden bot installed for the rolls. Discord supports video now, but we stick to audio because it stimulates the imagination. After a session's over my mental impression of the game-world lingers as vividly as real memories. If your games involve a lot of tactics and combat, though, you might be better off with one of the other options Scott and Joe discuss there.

One of their recommendations is ViewScream:

"Three to five players assume the roles of desperate people trapped in a world of high-tech horror. A typical game session lasts 60-90 minutes." 

We haven't had any problem with seven or more players at a time (audio-only seems to help) for games of three to four hours, but I've heard several people say that online gaming works better with shorter sessions and smaller groups, so I plan to try it out and report back here.

In the meantime, don't go drinking any bleach, will ya? Take vitamin D if you like (it won't hurt) but there's no evidence it has any effect against covid-19. As for hydroxychloroquine -- no, just no. Though if you buy into that stuff and you have a few hundred dollars to spare, why not pick up a USB stick (sic) which, as any fule kno, uses authentic quantum woo to "re-harmonize" 5G radio waves. Between Trump's twitterings and barmy internet medical myths, the coronavirus has some pretty stiff competition in its quest to wipe out humanity. Your best defences are reason and evidence. So stay alert -- to nonsense.

That's been our public health information broadcast for this week. Come back tomorrow when we're plunging into a time of superstition, plague, violence and apocalyptic fear. No, it's not another current affairs post -- I'm talking about Legend, the world of Dragon Warriors.