Sci-Fi with a Conscience?

What obligations does science fiction have?

This question occurred to me because of The Steampunk Bible. One of the essays contained therein was "Blowing Off Steam" by Catherynne M. Valente, and in it, she argued that a work must accurately portray the horrors of the Victorian era (unsafe factory conditions, terrifying societal change spurred on by technology) in order to be truly steampunk. "If you want Victoria in your coat pocket," she writes, "if you want the world that comes with her, all that possibility, all that terrible, arrogant, gorgeous technology, take it all, make it true, be honest and ruthless with it, or you're just gluing gears to your fingers and telling everyone you're a choo-choo train."

You can agree with her or not, but her objections to much of modern steampunk raise an important question. Steampunk might not exist without steam and children slaving away in dangerous factories, but by the same token, cyberpunk might not exist without futuristic sweatshops where people are paid pennies a day to make bionic implants. Pseudo-medieval fantasy can't exist without peasants and the feudal system. As we've known ever since Fritz Lang filmed Metropolis, Utopian societies generally require someone living in non-Utopian conditions to make them happen.

Is a writer of the fantastic under any obligation to portray this?

I've always disliked the idea that a writer "has" to write with a moral in mind- or that a writer "has" to do anything, for that matter. I don't think it's wrong to read or write escapist fiction, and to not want to be bothered by grim and dirty realities. I've also seen grittiness taken too far; one of my biggest problems with the Warhammer 40k universe is that the evils of all the factions are so exaggerated that it becomes hard for me to care about anyone winning at all. And I think we've all read enough preachy science fiction, or at least seen a bad episode of The Twilight Zone, to know how painful it can be trying to enjoy something that wants to lecture first, entertain second.

However, this doesn't mean I entirely disagree with the notion of sci-fi having a conscience. Harshly put as it was, Ms. Valente's point still stands; we can't fully appreciate the glamour of a setting unless we get a little bit of the grit. Any setting, whether historical or imaginary, can have the capacity for both horror and beauty, and the two often go hand in hand.

I don't think fiction has any obligations, but I do think that fiction is better when it is informed by the context in which it takes place. When the author knows what problems their characters will face in their day to day lives, and what problems go unseen by them on a regular basis, that provides for a much richer text. Discworld wouldn't be half as fun if the city of Ankh-Morpork wasn't a filthy mixture of medieval, Victorian, and modern urban blight, and the anachronistic blast that is Samurai Champloo wouldn't be as interesting to watch if one of the protagonists being an illiterate peasant never became an issue.

In short, I don't think you have to zero in on a society's problems in order to write a good story. But if you want to portray a rich and enveloping universe, you need to be aware that they exist.

Steampunk Ramblings

Another confession: I'm the sort of girl who wears bustle skirts and corsets in her everyday life- and judging from the internet, I'm not alone. Whether your interest is in neo-Victorian attire, old-fashioned pulp magazines, or retro-futuristic architecture, looking back to the past has become a popular "nerd" source of inspiration. Think of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and put the stress on the last word; most young nerds/hipsters/goths/whatever you want to call us are often less interested in faithful recreation than in taking bygone aesthetics and incorporating them into modern contexts. Perhaps the most famous form of this is the "steampunk" genre- a style of dress, literature, music and film that imagines a world somewhere between yesteryear and the distant future.

Source

To be less cryptic, "steampunk" is a subset of science fiction that imagines a Victorian era with futuristic technology (or sometimes a futuristic era with Victorian aesthetics and social conventions.) It was an offshoot of cyberpunk, a genre familiar to those who have read Snow Crash or watched The Matrix, but replaced the emphasis on computer power with an emphasis on steam power- a sky full of airships, coal-powered death rays, and brass goggles everywhere. The "punk" part of the name is somewhat misleading; it's a holdover from cyberpunk, rather than an indication that steampunk is about rebellion or grittiness (though it certainly can be.)

There are pitfalls of the genre, just as there are things about it I love. One of the most parodied aspects is a tendency to smother everything in gears, and it's never good when the story (or music, or gaming experience) takes second place to marveling at how cool the setting is. It has cliches and stereotypes, and outfits can be a real hassle to assemble, especially if you're no good at sewing.

Despite these problems, the steampunk genre holds a special place in my heart. I'm more glad than I can say that I live in an era of modern medicine and women's suffrage, but as an admitted romanticist, I can't help being drawn to a world of elegance and adventure, even one that never truly was. Looking to the past during visions of the future is more than understandable- it can be beautiful, creative, and lots of fun.

Interested? Try these...

Comics: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Honestly, I never liked this as much as I wanted to- I just couldn't stand what I felt it did to some of my favorite Victorian characters. But if you're more flexible regarding literature than I am, check out this much-loved spy thriller/dark adventure series, where secret agents from classic novels do battle to protect London from mad scientists, aliens, and more.

Novels: The Difference Engine pretty much started it all off, and The Diamond Age is a fun blurring of the boundaries between steampunk and cyberpunk. You can also go for romance novels with Soulless, and the other books in the Parasol Protectorate series.

Television: You can't talk about steampunk without mentioning Wild Wild West, where gentleman spies keep America safe with clever gadgets and dashing heroics. The campy film version bears almost no resemblance to the original, but is a guilty pleasure of mine.

Films: Disney's Treasure Planet goes the "future world with Victorian fashions" route, in an update of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel. You can also check out Back to the Future Part III- where else will you find a flying, time traveling train that runs on steam power?

Music: Rasputina, one of my favorite bands, uses electric cellos to make nearly unclassifiable rock songs with Victorian overtones. For a list of similar music, check out the Sepiachord website.

Roleplaying Games: If you liked Wild Wild West, give Deadlands a try- the dead are rising and sleeping monsters are awakening in the old west, and you're just a bunch of cowboys and scientists armed with gatling guns powered by the souls of the damned. If you prefer a European flavor to your steam, try Castle Falkenstein or Baron Munchausen; the former casts you as a Burroughs-esq pulp hero, and the latter...well, who the hell knows what the latter will cast you as.

Fashion: Gentlemen's Emporium is one of the best places on the web to get frock coats and frilly dresses, should you so choose. Clockwork Couture is a little inconsistent with their stock, but when they have good stuff, it's always beautiful.

Got any more recommendation? Feel I've completely misrepresented the genre? Let me know in the comments!

Looking for Love(craft) in all the Wrong Places

"Lovecraftian" is a common label to slap on horror games, movies, books and comics, and like many labels, it is simultaneously helpful and limiting. H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories about dark alien gods, expressing the terror he felt at the changing world and the intermixing of the foreign and the familiar. He created monsters that were at once aquatic and humanoid, masses of tentacles and mind-boggling angles, things that could drive a man mad to even contemplate. Lovecraftian horror is the fear that we are truly not alone in the universe; rather than inspiring religious devotion, Lovecraft used this feeling to suggest utter human insignificance.

Lovecraftian monsters such as Shoggoths, Deep Ones and even Great C'thlhu himself should be familiar to consumers of fantastical media. Whether in games (Call of C'thulhu, Trail of C'thulhu,) movies (The Dunwich Horror, Dagon) or in any of the many new stories set within the Lovecraft Mythos, new authors have worked to bring Lovecraft's visions to the modern age. Some of these products are quite good, but if I may offer my opinion, gamers and creators who want to truly tap into the Lovecraftian might want to venture off the path established by the man himself.

What do I mean by this? Well, C'thulhu and company were originally meant to be scary because they were strange and unfathomable. When you can buy plush toys of said monsters, that aura of the strange and unfathomable decreases significantly (not that I don't love some of those toys myself.) Lovecraft's stories were also full of rather dated (to put it kindly) anxieties that don't quite work for the modern horror afficianado; immigrants and their descendants have established that we're not going away any time soon, and tentacled monsters have become so commonplace in SF art that, far from boggling the mind, they inspire jokes about Japanese pornography.

There is still some terror and excitement to be had in traditional Lovecraftian fare, but if the above problems are too much for you, you can still enjoy media that take H.P.'s favorite concepts without using his specific creatures or stories. Consider Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In that television show, demons from other dimensions once ruled the earth, and their lines (and blood) mingled with those of humans to create vampires, humanoid abominations intent on reclaiming the Earth for their dark gods. That's almost a dead ringer for the plot of Shadow over Innsmouth, except that extraordinary humans such as Buffy and her friends are capable of fighting and defeating the monsters.

In his book Danse Macabre, Stephen King stated that he considered Alien to be, at heart, a supernatural Lovecraftian film. In this case, humans travel the stars and find the ancient gods rather than the other way around, but the end results are the same. Alien even shares the Freudian sexual terror at the heart of many Lovecraft stories, albiet with phallic and toothy rather than vaginal and squishy monsters. At the end of the first movie, heroine Ripley is in much the same position as the heroic boat captain of Call of C'thulhu- she has used her ship to save herself from the alien, but can there ever be a true victory over such a creature, or is she only delaying the inevitable?

Lovecraftian creatures don't even have to be malevolent to be creepy. The ghoulish humor of the film The Nightmare Before Christmas, the Addams Family television show, and the game Monsters and Other Childish Things relies on the idea of aberrant entities being merely curious about humanity, and driving people mad with what they consider harmless fun or even attempts to help. If that sounds like legends of the Fair Folk, you'd be right; remember that the word "eldritch" originally meant "elvish", and you'll see the routes of Lovecraft's aliens even in fairy tales.

Especially interesting is when you find Lovecraftian elements in stories that aren't meant to be horror-related at all. Oscar Wilde's short story The Birthday of the Infanta shares exactly the same plot twist as Lovecraft's The Outsider, only with a different pre-reveal mood. The Indiana Jones films show godly artifacts that bend and distort reality, best kept away from humanity's use for fear of the damage they could cause. Moreover, one of the quintessential American heroes has a backstory that, with only a few tweaks, could describe Dunwich's Wilbur Whateley.

The child of a dead species from a distant planet, he passes as human but is fundamentally not. His small town knew he was strange, but never guessed what he truly was. This alien boy eventually traveled to the frozen north, where, buried in the ice, he found the legacy of his parentage, and brought it back with him when he came back to the world of humanity. Human scientists can slow him down, but they will never truly be able to destroy him, or even comprehend what he is.

Superman is Earth's champion, for which we are very lucky. Like horror itself, the Lovecraftian can be found almost anywhere, and it only takes a little bit of reframing to bring it out.

Good, Evil, and the Players

Confession time- I have a hard time being evil in games. Whether in RPGs or video games, my characters tend towards the saintly, even if I'm trying to portray them as roguish and chaotic. This says things about my escapist fantasies, but not much about me as a person- it's easy to be heroic and self-sacrificing in a game, when there are no consequences that will carry over into the real world. On the other hand, it's also easy and fun for some players to act evil and dickish, knowing they aren't hurting any flesh and blood people.

Still, the question remains- why? Why is it so hard for me to hear the phrase "your alignment has shifted towards evil," whereas for other players it's not only easy but expected?

One thing to remember is that for most RPGs, it's easier to run a "good" campaign than an "evil" one. In a typical campaign (especially in Dungeons and Dragons,) the Game Master motivates the players with promises of treasure, experience points, and the chance to pull off impressive heroics. The first two things can still be offered to evil characters, but "evil" campaigns are notoriously hard to run; if players go too over the top, it's hard to take it seriously as more than a comedy game, while if they play a straight game of manipulation and coercion, some players and Game Masters will grow uncomfortable. There was even a book released to help Dungeons and Dragons games handle evil (whether or not it was the players doing it,) and the fan reaction to it was mixed, to say the very least.

Playing an evil character in a "good" campaign is even harder, though I've played in a game where two players pulled it off (their characters were greedy and callous but not interested in screwing over the rest of the party.) It also can come down to the Game Master; some go in with no expectations, some portray the world as full of puppies and babies to be protected, and some can get downright sadistic about beating the idealism out of more traditionally heroic characters. Experience on the part of the players also comes into it- if you've played a knight in shining armor a hundred times before, it can be fun to throw aside morality for a game or two.

I know some of what motivates me to play heroes is my love of old movies and my desire to emulate them. I want to be a traditional hero, the kind they'd write epics about. Maybe my character can get a little cynical or jaded, but I want them to always do the right thing in the end. What the right thing is may differ from character to character, but I want them to leave a positive change on their world.

I'd like to hear other opinions on this, though. If you like playing evil characters, what aspects do you like? If you like being a hero, are your reasons different than mine? I'd love to hear from you!

High Noon and What Came After

I find it interesting that so many movies feel the need to ‘respond’ to High Noon. Well, maybe interesting is the wrong word- more like baffling. I read about the attacks when it came out, calling the hero unmanly for showing fear and appearing to almost cry, and my reaction is a stunned cry of "But it’s High Noon! How can anyone hate High Noon?"

Apparently, some people did- or even if they liked it, felt the need to make a movie showing what should have happened. Rio Bravo and High Plains Drifter are both in some ways responses to the movie, though the responses are not quite the same. Rio Bravo is the response of a swaggering father saying "Son, you should be ashamed of yourself- you don’t need to rely on the townsfolk! And don’t show no fear, neither!" High Plains Drifteris the response of a troubled younger brother going "No man, what you oughtta do is go back there and kill every last one of those ungrateful sons of bitches!"

Funnily enough, I love all three of these movies. Rio Bravo is a delightful ensemble adventure, and the romance between John Wayne and Angie Dickinson is appealing (even if it is cribbed almost line for line from the director’s earlier movie, To Have and Have Not.) High Plains Drifter is a banquet of the bizarre, an epic, nihilistic horror movie masquerading as a western. I don’t even mind the rape scene- it certainly isn’t the most evil thing Clint Eastwood does over the course of the movie, which acknowledges that all those mysterious men with no names are scary for a damn good reason.

In the middle sits little old High Noon, an allegory for the Red Scare or Korea or urbanization or whatever us modern viewers like to attribute to it. It would be irritated by Rio Bravo’s response and horrified by High Plains Drifter, and would generally try to stay out of the conversation.

Why is it this movie provokes such strong reactions? There are many controversial movies and many ideas to be rebelled against, but why does the simple story of a man abandoned who sticks to his principles simply because it’s something he has to do (while being broken up inside that no one else seems to see it that way) upset people?

I don’t know. All I know is, while John Wayne looks on disgusted and Clint Eastwood paints the town red, tired and scared old Gary Cooper must stand by himself.

For High Noon, it’s a rather fitting position.

The Gentleman Vampire

First, a disclaimer- this is not a Twilight review. Whether you love the books or hate them, you can already find a hundred online reviews that bear out your opinion. I would, however, like to talk about some cultural notions about vampires its criticism has brought up.

Some say that vampires should never be romantic or attractive, that they're monsters and should be portrayed as such. Others say that vampirism has always been about sex, and that it makes perfect sense to use them in romance novels. The former often argue that romantic vampires aren't "real" vampires, if such a thing exists. Beast or lover, predator or protector- which is it?

As you've probably guessed, the answer is complicated. The idea of the gentleman vampire has always been a strange one, but its roots go back far beyond Twilight. Let's take a look, shall we?

Picture a year without a summer, a young doctor cooped up with a bunch of temperamental poets and their female companions, all of them thinking up ghost stories to relieve their boredom. One of the female companions writes a story about a tragic monster, which she titles Frankenstein. The doctor looks across the room at Lord Byron, then writes a story about a Byronic monster, which he titles The Vampyre. It's not a very good story, and rumors will persist that he plagiarized it from Byron, but it becomes quite popular, and the image it presents of a handsome, seductive vampire will forever change how people think of the creature.

More vampire stories are written as the years go by. An Irishman writes a breathtakingly beautiful novella about a vampire named Carmilla and her romantic obsession with an innocent young girl. The amusingly titled Varney the Vampire: Or the Feast of Blood will also be published, showing a vampire who hates his condition and commits suicide by volcano. And then, the same year that a German doctor coins the term psychoanalysis, another Irishman writes Dracula and changes everything.

The title character is not a romantic, but he is a gentleman in the truest sense of the word- a man with wealth and a title. He enjoys beautiful women, but doesn't much care about their consent (his attack on Mina is written almost explicitly as a rape scene); he feeds on his peasants and their helpless children, literally sucking the lifeblood of the working class. He is everything evil and corrupt about the old world, and it takes enlightened science, American cowboys, and the "new woman" to destroy him.

When the movies came, Dracula came with them. When Max Shreck played him, he was a dried up corpse, his fingernails still growing, who spread plague and could barely pass for human. When Bela Lugosi played him, he was an off-putting but strangely fascinating foreigner whose eyes and voice hypnotized the unsuspecting. When Christopher Lee played him, it was the sixties, and Dracula was a suave British creature out to lower everyone's necklines and break up respectable relationships. When Gary Oldman played him, his relationship with Mina had gone from one of rapist and survivor to one of true love.

Somewhere along the line, the meaning of the word "gentleman" changed- it became something anyone could be, so long as they held the door for ladies and drank expensive wine. What once meant you trained as a soldier and were better than the lower classes now meant you were polite and good looking. Being pursued by a gentleman vampire didn't seem like such a bad thing after all.

Anne Rice popularized the conception of vampires as brooding and misunderstood, and while not every vampire author has followed suite, they have all had to respond to her. Buffy the Vampire Slayer had vampire love interests, but separated the times when they were romantic from the times when they were vampiric. Now we have Twilight, with a pro-abstinence gentleman vampire; many teenage girls swooned, and many nasty things were said on the internet about the intelligence of females.

With all that said and done, where does that leave us? Is the gentleman vampire the only way to go, and has the vampire in general been thoroughly domesticated?

Of course not. If you want bestial and ugly vampires, there are writers and directors who agree with you (Guillermo del Toro wrote a book with that in mind, and from what I hear it's quite good.) I don't think we should give up on the gentleman vampire, though; after all, the Victorians sanitizing stories about fairies hasn't stopped the Fair Folk from being used to chilling effect in modern fiction.

Maybe we need to go back to Dracula and Carmilla to understand it. Think of someone wealthier and more powerful than you, who still wants what little you have- your loved ones, your body, your blood. Think of a relic of the past that refuses to die, dragging bloody tradition into the civilized world. Think of something devouring you while dressed in fine clothes, all because they hunger and will never be sated- and as a lord or lady, they have every right to do so.

I don't know about you, but I think that sounds pretty damn scary.

But Why Would You Play That?

Many people have their own personal definitions of what a roleplaying game should be. To some it's improv theater, to other's it's an exercise in storytelling; some say it's art, and some say it's just a chance to bash a goblin in the face and take his stuff. Whatever desires and expectations you have of games, though, one thing is for sure: you want to have fun.

Right?

This would seem a simple question, until you take into account the sort of experiences some games produce. Gamers can decide to imagine themselves as Polish child soldiers during World War Two, or as helpless innocents battling the personifications of child abuse, or as chain-smoking teenage runaways. It's not just the indie games that offer these opportunities; look no farther than Vampire: The Requiem for characters often full of self-loathing and misery, or Call of Cthulhu for sessions that nearly always end in death and madness.

At this point, many non-gamers (and some actual gamers) are tempted to ask "But why would you play that?"

Aren't roleplaying games supposed to be about escapism? Why would you want to spend your free time indulging in someone else's misery? Above all, why wouldn't you want to have fun?

I've asked these questions before, both of other people and myself. And I suppose the answer must be that the word "fun" is something very hard to pin down. Sometimes people enjoy having bad things happen to their characters in and of itself (Call of Cthulhu is infamous for the fatalistic glee it inspires, with players taking bets as to whose character will hold out the longest.) Some people feel that rare happy endings are even more precious because of how hard they are to earn, and that it means more for a frightened child to conquer the darkness than a six foot armor-clad warrior. Some people find painful experiences cathartic, and some enjoy exploring characters in situations good or bad.

If these things sound strange to you, think of another medium that's supposed to be fun: movies.

Why should people watch gritty dramas or tragedies when there are escapist popcorn flicks aplenty? It could be for any of the reasons I've already mentioned, or it could be because art doesn't have to be warm and fuzzy to make us feel satisfied. The Manchurian Candidate, one of my favorite movies of all time, is nothing if not bleak, but I'm always so wrapped up in its world that it took my boyfriend to point out to me how depressing it was.

Are roleplaying games art? I'd say they can be, but that's a discussion for another time. Suffice it to say that they can provide moving experiences in the hands of good players and a good DM no matter what system you use. And to some, moving experiences aren't always bright and sunny ones.

Let me make one thing clear: just because more 'serious' art can provide deep experiences doesn't mean that other art is inferior. I hate movies where people die of slow, lingering diseases, and I'll probably never play Grey Ranks. I love a good action movie, and I love an escapist dragon-bashing dungeon crawl. Ideally, I like my games to have the best of both worlds; escapist fun and a deep story. That isn't always achievable, but it's a nice goal to set.

If my rambling has any sort of a point, it's this: every group has it's own desired light-to-dark ratio for maximum fun (if fun is even the desired product- some have said it's not.) If other people's ratios are different than ours, it may confuse us. But it shouldn't surprise us.