found_drama

The “classic” sci-fi time waster is not just restricted to colonizing distant suns and/or flying around blowing up shit.  No.  Sometimes it involves flying to distant suns that are already colonized, geting out of your spaceship and then blowing up shit.  And after all, isn’t that — the epic space opera, anchored on some Byzantine galaxy-spanning empire — what makes science fiction so much fun?

And if that’s the case, then wouldn’t that make Paragon Software’s two games in the MegaTraveller franchise among the best, most “classic” sci-fi games ever made?

Kind of?  Sort of?  Maybe sometimes?

Well, MegaTraveller 2 sure was fun.  And it rounds out our “top 4″ classic sci-fi time wasters…

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In the previous two installments of this series, we discussed two “classic” science fiction games from the PC world: Sierra On-Line’s Outpost and Microprose’s Lightspeed.  A theme common to both of those games is a sense of isolation — you’re cut off from the rest of humankind and you’ll have to live by your wits (and a little luck) if you’ve any hope for survival.  Both of these games also share a sense of grim responsibility.  That “hope for survival” we were just talking about?  That’s the survival of the entire human species, pal.

How’s that for escapism?

Certainly not all science fiction games are like this.  Realism?  Adherence to the laws of physics?  Doomsday scenarios where only you can stop our extinction?  Who needs to be worried by all of that petty nonsense when you can strap yourself into a modified Centurion-class heavy sloop¹ and rip through the sector with the haughty derring-do that only a pirate privateer possesses?

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1. I admit it: I made up the “heavy sloop” part.[↩]

In the first post of this series, I gave a quick introduction to the point of those reminiscent rambling.  I’m waxing nostalgic about some older PC science fiction games that I used to play and giving a little thought to what they might be like if they were made more recently.  In the last installment, we discussed Sierra On-Line’s colony-building Outpost.  This time, we go back a bit further in time to Microprose’s Lightspeed.

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A little while ago, during the drive home from Maine, I was struck by some odd reminiscence for a few classic (nee “old”) science fiction games I used to play on the computer.  By classic, I don’t necessarily mean that they were best sellers¹ or even particularly good games².  No, by “classic”, I mean only that these were games that I played ”back in the day”³ – sometimes ad nauseum — with a great deal of enjoyment.

As the drive continued and the reminiscing went on, I made up my mind to do a series here on F_D — a kind of “top 4″ of these classic sci-fi time-wasters.  I’m going to take a look at four “old favorites”, make a few remarks on what made them great (or at least fun), and then discuss a little about their replayability and how they might be different if they’d been made in the past year or so.

I’ll start with Outpost.

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1. Though a few of them were, and some were even award-winners.[↩]
2. Though that’s a subjective argument we won’t even begin to broach here.[↩]
3. Though “back in the day” ranges here from “the days of DOS and 5¼ diskettes” to “among the first CD-ROM games I played”.[↩]

After reading The Algebraist, I was going to swear off Iain M. Banks for the rest of ‘08. But, Ginnie recommended it so highly that I felt it was worth bumping up the list.

On the GoodReads.com scale, Look to Windward gets: ★★★¹ Read the rest of this entry »

1. For those nit-picking over the rating: it was close to 4-stars for me. If I could, I would have given it ★★★½. I found the story a little slow to start and Banks’ style a bit exaggerated. I’m not sure if the novel would have worked as well without the narrative being constructed the way it was but sometimes I found the prose got in the way of the story. (On the other hand, the behemothaur sections were perfect.)[↩]

In Gun, With Occasional Music, Jonathan Lethem gives us science fiction’s worthy successor to Raymond Chandler.  Though this is the easy take-home message from nearly every quoted newspaper columnist, book jacket blurb, and miscellaneous reviewer — they also all happen to be right. Even a cursory familiarity with Chandler’s pulp noir will ring through with startling clarity to readers of this novel. The cadence of the narrative, the hard-boiled dialogue, the archetypal characters… Lethem’s Conrad Metcalf is a well-executed Philip Marlowe cover song with just a little bit of record scratching thrown into the background for texture.

On the other hand, those same columnist quotes, blurbs, and reviewers all seem to liken Lethem to Philip K. Dick. Personally: not seeing it. It’s a bit of a stretch, some optimistic name-dropping to match up Lethem’s mystery/noir heritage with some similarly classic science fiction antecedent. The ubiquitous drug use? Sure, okay — that’s a bit Dickian. A Möbius fold of reality unraveling around the narrator in some palpable and thoroughly eldritch fashion? Not so much. More than PKD, the scenes in this novel played out in my imagination as fearfully symmetrical to Cronenberg’s take on Burroughs‘ Naked Lunch — substitute Jim Henson-esque “evolved” animals for Mugwumps but otherwise that’s it, right down to Peter Weller as Conrad Metcalf.

Or maybe Punk’s review has got it down:

It’s Blade Runner meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Where was I? Oh right…

A part of me desires to do a chapter-by-chapter deconstruction of the text, to get all scholarly about it and run the blockade of Chandler’s lineage here. I want to look for the hidden significance of the doctors as urologists, to get semiotic on names like “Catherine Teleprompter” and “Danny Phoneblum”. But instead I’ll just give a positive nod. It’s a fun, noirish scifi romp with all the right moves and delivers slightly better than expectations.

★★★★☆

A version of this review originally appeared on GoodReads.com.

Mentioned here previously, 365 Tomorrows has become a favorite daily stop on my internet rounds for a little fiction.

Since it’s flash fiction that they have there, it’s good for a quick dose of something new.  Roughly 600 words and you’ve gotten yourself a refreshing fix of scifi.

Admittedly, it can be hit or miss.  But I’ve managed to find a few favorite tales there.  They have a talented group of staff writers and publish a surprising number of high-quality reader submissions.  Many of my favorites are reader submissions, actually.

Definitely worth checking out if you haven’t already.  You’ll probably spend ten minutes per day there, as well.

As with many “Year’s Best” type anthologies (regardless of genre), it is difficult to evaluate Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction (24th Annual Collection) as if it were a whole. Unlike a themed collection (e.g., Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse), you cannot easily ask how each story is helping to advance or otherwise round-out the speculation or evaluation of that given theme. But that’s OK; that’s not why we pick up and read a collection like this. And it’s a hazard we’re willing — nay: happy — to take on.

That said, the rating for the collection here is a computed average of my ratings on the individual stories themselves. Out to four decimal places, the 24th Annual Collection scores: 3.3929 Read the rest of this entry »

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