L’esprit d’escalier

I guess it was sort of inevitable that I’d end up a gamer.  When I was little, my older, cooler, drinking-age cousins were partial to Crown Royal.  When my parents threw a party, the twins would arrive with their bottle of whiskey, and I’d ask them if I could have the bag it came in.  Back then, I didn’t even know what I’d do with it, just that it held some kind of mysterious potential, and as soon as I figured out what to put in there, the magic would happen.

It wasn’t until years later, when I was in college, that I understood precisely what those bags were for.

That’s when I met Greg and was invited to sit in on a few gaming sessions with his group.  Someone pulled out a Crown Royal bag full of dice.

Finally, I understood what those velvety purple bags were truly destined to hold.  Not whiskey, but dice.

When *cough*-edyteen years later** Gameplaywright announced they’d be publishing a book about gamers and their dice, I knew I’d have to have it.

Last week, I finally got my grimy little paws on The Bones: Us and Our Dice.  And lo, it is awesome.  If you’ll pardon my clumsy attempt at a review, I’m going to ramble a bit about it here.

There’s a little something for every gamer geek in The Bones. Want a history of dice and ancient games?  It’s there.  Prefer the same in comic form?  John Kovalic of Dork Tower delivers, and shows us how little our relationships with the dice have changed over the millennia.  In every article and essay, I found myself nodding and grinning along in the spirit of shared experience (as Will Hindmarch says in his introduction, “Welcome home, nerd.”)

I read the interview with GamesByEmail’s  Scott Nesin on the train ride home, and within five minutes of walking in the door, had the video of his Dice-O-Matic up so I could see it in action.  

In his essay “The Unrollable,” Pat Harrigan puts voice to all the anxieties I’ve had as a GM, and makes me feel like maybe I was doing it right, after all, when it came to my relationship with dice.  I was never a very dice-heavy GM because, well, my dice hated me. Remind me to tell you the story of how I had to suddenly pull the hidden villain out of the shadows several sessions early because a player’s lucky (really lucky.  Like, a handful of d10s coming up 10s lucky) roll killed off his right-hand man mid-dramatic escape arrrrgh.

But I’m not bitter.

Geekery abounds in the pages of The Bones. The contributors’ tales about the games and gamers in their lives make you feel like you’re sitting around at a gathering of roleplayers, swapping stories about those unforgettable moments of badass.  But these men and women have worked behind-the-scenes, too, developing some of the games we’ve loved, and working in several aspects of the game industry.  

The Bones is about more than just the clatter of dice on the table and that time you really needed a 20 and the polyhedral gods smiled down upon you (or turned their angled, carved-ivory faces away).  The essayists explore deeper questions, too — how dice reflect the randomness of life, how we might know, rationally, that there’s a statistical element to the rolls, but we go through our luck-drawing rituals anyway, and why we do those things.

Orders for the limited hardcover edition are open through the end of this week.  After that, orders for The Bones will be for the paperback edition.  Hie thee to Gameplaywright and order it. It’ll have you digging into your own Crown Royal bag and tossing out some rolls.

**I just did the math and realized that soon, I’ll have been gaming for more years than I haven’t.  I know, I know, some of you are well past that point.  What can I say?  I came to it later than a lot of other fellow geeks.

Let me start with this:  I loved the original Stargate. I saw it in theatres (thus beginning my crush on James Spader).  I bought it when it came out on VHS — something I rarely do.  I’ll spend far more money than I ought to on books without batting an eyelash, but buy a movie?  That’s a rarity.  So much did I enjoy the movie that when they released the special edition on DVD, I acquired that, too.

When Stargate: SG-1 started airing on Showtime, I devoured the first few seasons, even though I wasn’t sure about Michael Shanks taking over the part of Daniel (don’t worry, I warmed to him right quick.)

I lost touch with it after a while.  Something shifted, not with the show but with me, though I couldn’t tell you what it was precisely.  My guess is that it started airing on a different night or time.  It first aired in July of 1997, which was the first summer Greg and I were dating.   It was also that summer that I started gaming with Greg and his friends.  After the bookstore closed, we’d all gather and save the world from Technocs and Nephandi, and I was notoriously bad about setting the VCR to record.

So, y’know, I know I’ve missed a ton of story.  I knew SGU was coming, because the awesome John Scalzi was brought on as a creative consultant and has talked it up on his blog.   Greg watched the pilot before I did, and to demonstrate just how much story I’ve missed, when he started talking about the characters encoding nine chevrons I asked if he was sure of that.  Since we all know from the movie that the Stargate takes seven symbols to create a wormhole.

Yes, he told me, but we’ve learned it can take eight symbols, too.  I boggled.

That’s how behind I am on my Stargate lore.

So I’ve queued up the Stargate Universe pilot on Hulu and watched it in bits and pieces over the last week or two and finally finished it today.

I really dug it.

It’s darker so far than SG-1 was in those first few seasons, but I’m fine with that.  I’m a fan of dark.  The pilot does very well with catching newcomers to the story (and lapsed viewers) up to speed without infodumping all over us.

Gamer geek, Eli, is a perfect choice for a guide:  we follow his introduction to the Stargate program and learn the things we need to know right along with him.  It’s a nice way to avoid excessive exposition.  He asks a question, someone gives him the nutshell-sized answer, and it’s just enough.  Late in the pilot, for example, Dr. Rush (who we’ll come back to in a minute) mentions that the Ancients who built the Stargates and the ship they’ve found themselves trapped on had discovered “ascension.”  Eli, of course, has no idea what he’s talking about.  Rush lays down in about three sentences, even though I’m guessing its reveal must have been the plot point of at least one SG-1 arc.

Dr. Rush is, so far, my favorite character.  Shut up, it’s not just the accent.  I get the sense he’s going to be a bit Baltar-like, though with less  selfishness (or at least, not manifesting in the same way.)  I believed his speech to Chloe begging for her trust more than I ever would have believed it coming from the mouth of Gaius Baltar.  Is he manipulative?  Oh, I’m pretty sure he is, and I know I might be buying into exactly what the writers want me to, but during that plea, I was convinced that he meant every word he said.

There were some bits that felt a bit cookie-cutter for me, but I was engaged enough in the story that I’ll trust the writers to challenge those perceptions before long.  Eli’s a perfect example:  we meet him playing a video game and solving a puzzle he’s been working at in the game for two months.  He’s pudgy, which I’m unsure whether to cheer on (“Hey look!  Not everyone on TV has to have perfect abs to be a likeable character!”) or groan about (“LOL gamers are fat! He probably survives on Cheetos and Mountain Dew har har har”).  So far, they’ve played up his geekiness as awkward and a bit naive, but he’s not a complete dumbass.  I think he’s going to prove one to be of the characters that keeps the others (Dr. Rush, the soldiers) grounded and reminds them that they’re human beings before they’re scientists or military men.

Most of the characters they’ve focused on so far are male, which I’m not terribly happy about, but I’m also willing to give the writers a bit more time on that, too.  I’m hoping that Chloe Armstrong and Tamara Johansen play bigger roles in upcoming episdoes.  It seems to be where they’re heading with Chloe, at least, and since Tamara’s the only medic they have, she’s going to be needed a lot more before the season’s out.

I won’t go so far as to say it’s my new BSG; that’s going to take a lot to top.  However, I admit that I was a bit pouty when my lunch hour ended.  I wanted to go straight into the second episode.  This has potential.

I know, I know, I promised it a while back.  Apologies!

Let’s start with a little backstory on how I found the book:  someone, somewhere, linked to a story on Patrick Rothfuss’ blog about saving a duck family.  I read the post and gleed, and from there clicked around his site.  He had an excerpt from The Name of the Wind up, and I read it.

And lo, I said to myself, “I must read this book.”

I bought it, and it sat at the top of my to-be-read pile.  And sat, and sat, and sat.  Not because I didn’t want to read it — quite the contrary!  Because I wanted to be able to sit down and read it without interruption.  Work-reading tends to take priority, and while we have some stellar things coming out, I don’t always have a lot of time to read from other lists.  I feel vaguely guilty when I take a break from our stuff.  Notable exceptions are, say, a new George RR Martin title, or other things equally as big on the “oh god if I don’t read this someone’ll spoil it for me” list.

So, The Name of the Wind sat on my pile for several months, until we stole away to Aruba.  Even then, I didn’t get to start it until the plane ride home (look, I brought a pile with me.)

But I read it! And it was good!

(I’m a lazy reviewer if I leave it at that, aren’t I?)

It’s a frame story, which is interesting — the majority of the book is Kvothe dictating his own adventures to a man named Chronicler, who wants to set down his tale.  The deal is, Chronicler has to give him three days to tell it, and has to set it down exactly as the legend-turned-innkeeper spins it.  The first day of the tale takes us up through his fifteenth year, or thereabouts.  Funny thing is, as much as I enjoyed reading about Kvothe’s childhood — the worldbuilding is excellent, and the rules of magic are complex — with every interlude that brought us back to the present, I found myself wanting to know what’s happening now. Kvothe’s present-day companions are great fun.  I’m intrigued by Bast, and very much hoping that his part in Kvothe’s past is recounted in the second book.

There were times in Kvothe’s narrative where the tale meandered a bit — late in the book, there’s an encounter with a draccus (big, dragon-like lizard) that felt like it went on for too long — even though I understand most of what felt long-winded to me was indeed setting up for something that would be important later on.  I wasn’t nearly as in love with Denna as Kvothe was.  She is the love-interest who seems to come and go from young Kvothe’s life like the wind he’s trying so hard to name, but I just couldn’t find it in me to be as enchanted by her as Kvothe was.  Reuben made a good point, though, when we were discussing it — this is his first love.  He’s only fifteen.  So what seems unappealing to us is of course a much bigger deal to him.

Still, I’m hoping if there’s more of Denna in the second book, that she’ll reveal some of her secrets and flesh out a bit.

Aside from Denna, though, the secondary characters reeled me in, from Kvothe’s companions at the University to the mysterious and deadly Chandrian, Rothfuss has a great eye for his supporting cast.  Especially Bast.  Have I mentioned him yet?

All in all, if you’re looking for good new fantasy to immerse yourself in while you’re waiting for the next Martin or Lynch or Abercrombie, give The Name of the Wind a try.

I went away for a few days.  You may or may not have missed me.

I spent a little under a week in Aruba, most of the time with a book in my hand.  It was glorious — sitting on the beach, waves crashing nearby, sun shining down, turning page after page.  Or, when I decided I’d been baking enough for the day, moving to a shadier spot, on the balcony of our room, or closer to the bar/pool area, claiming a lounge chair where the daystar’s rays couldn’t scorch me.

When packing the slew of books, I had some tough decisions to make.  See, the stack o’things to be read is ever-growing.  It’s hard to select just a few of those to come with me on a trip, since I have no idea what I’ll be in the mood for after finishing one book and getting ready to move on to another.

For example, I seem to be on a fantasy kick, but the subgenres’ll get me every time.  I’ve read a lot of … what are the kids calling it these days?  Scoundrel-lit?  Thief-lit?  Rogue-lit?  Call it what you will, I’ve found myself spending time with very many wonderful bastards these last few months — Scott Lynch’s and Joe Abercrombie’s in particular.

But I wouldn’t want to fill my carry-on with that sort of thing, only to find myself on the beach, closing the covers of one bastard novel and suddenly not ready for another just yet.  OR finding that one of the books I’d brought with me in that vein was so good that I can’t even read anything remotely like it for my next book.   That’s happened before, too.  The last book that left me stunned and stung was A Feast for Crows. I don’t think I went anywhere near fantasy for a month after that.  The one before it, I believe was The Historian. No vampire novels for a bit.  Before that, probably The Time-Traveler’s Wife — which left me so shaken and breathless that three days passed before I could seriously start another book.

Also, there needed to be a mix of how challenging the books were.  You can read all heavy novels, sure.  There are times I’ve gone long stretches doing only that, or the opposite, reading a sequence of books that didn’t require very much thought at all.  But again, why stick myself with all works of great denseness and complexity, to find myself wanting something light and no bookstores to be found?

And what about old vs. new?  While the to-be-read pile isn’t dwindling, there are always new shinies in stores omgrightnow.

So, with that in mind, I selected four books to come with, and added a fifth at the last moment.  Adding the fifth was actually a very smart move, it turned out.

The list:

Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

Iron Angel by Alan Campbell

The Warrior-Prophet by R. Scott Bakker

The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

The first three I bought in one fell swoop the Monday before we left.  I’d wandered the sf/f shelves, scanning the authors and titles, thinking “Nope, nope, nope, dunwanna, nope…” most of the way. It was one of those trips where I knew there were books there I wanted to read, authors I’ve been meaning to try, but nothing called to me.   Seemed I was working from the end of the alphabet backwards, though, and as I was starting to despair, I hit the Cs and saw Iron Angel. I can’t explain my draw to it.  Weird thing for angels as characters, I suppose, that I’ve never been able to really trace.  I read the back; it seemed interesting.  The cover art was neat.  The first sentence passed muster.  Then there was the blurb — nice things said by Scott Lynch, of the Gentlemen Bastard series.

Thus, it seeded the pile.

I found nothing in horror, and drifted over to the YA section, to see what might be there.  Life As We Knew It had come highly recommended from coworkers and booksellers alike.  Added to the pile immediately.  Then Uglies. I’ve been hearing plenty of good things about it for a long while now.  The author was on a few panels I attended at Worldcon 2004, and I liked him.  Good, okay, three books, take me home.

At home, The Warrior-Prophet was never in question.  It’s one of those books I need long stretches to dedicate to reading it, and here were six days of long stretches.  Just as we were leaving, I feared that those four might not be enough, or that I might suddenly decide I wasn’t in the mood for one of them.  So, The Name of the Wind was rescued from the top of the pile.  I stood a long while in front of my bookshelves, trying to figure out if anything else wanted to come with, if anything demanded a reread, or if a last minute genre craving might strike.  Nothing else jumped out, though, so five it was.

For the most part, I think I made some pretty good choices.  In the order they were read, here’s what I thought:

Life As We Knew It

The premise: an asteroid knocks the moon out of its orbit, pushing it closer to the Earth.  The aftermath unfolds in the pages of a high school girl’s diary.

I was drawn in pretty quickly, since the event happens just a few days after the book opens.  There are tsunamis (the book is set in rural Pennsylvania, out of the water’s reach), volcanoes, food and gas shortages, and a very long winter.  Overall, it was a good book.  My problem with it, as a matter of fact, had nothing to do with the writing or even, really, the story.  I’d say Pfeffer pretty well captured what a sixteen-year-old would be going through when her world’s coming to an end.  I’d absolutely recommend it to someone looking for a good YA book.

So what’s my gripe?  Not enough.  Not in the sense of wanting to know more about those particular characters — the Evans’ story was very complete.  I wanted to know what was going on in the rest of the world — what other natural disasters were occuring? How were people dealing with them?  There was food and gas and electricity in some places; you know this by the end of the book.  How did they get back on their feet?  How would they be rebuilding?  There’s a companion novel, The Dead and the Gone, that might address some of this.  It’s set in New York City, so the characters might be a little more connected to worldwide events than the first book’s narrator was.

Again, this is nothing at all to do with the books and everything to do with my fascination with What Happens When the World Ends.  It’s why I love The Stand so much, why I always end up rereading it.  The brief-lived Jericho handled it well.  Battlestar Galactica. Swan Song.

Would it work in a YA novel?  Sure it would.  But it wasn’t an element that made it into this one on the scale I’d've liked.  We did get a glimpse into some of it, the frantic rush to stock up on food and supplies in the days following, the way no one around town talked about how much food/fuel/clothing they had stored, the idea of who was Family and who was Not.  It’s there, on a small scale.  It simply left me curious as to the larger.

Then came The Warrior-Prophet. I’d read the first book, The Darkness That Comes Before, a while back.  Easy enough to slip back into the world and travel with Achamian, Esmenet, Kellhus and the Holy War on the journey to Shimeh.  I won’t say too much, for fear of spoiling, but I’ll be picking up the third book soon.

After that, I didn’t so much need a break from the heavy as I wanted to give The Warrior-Prophet time to fade a bit before moving on to more sweeping fantasy.  (Though, yes, you could say the Bakker isn’t fantasy in the same subgenre as the Rothfuss or the Campbell, but I still needed something to cleanse the palate, if you will.)

So, Uglies. Setup: when you turn sixteen, you get an operation that makes you pretty.  Your face becomes symmetrical, your eyes widened, lips made full, everything that biology says makes people look at you and want to protect you, be nice to you, like you.  The main character is almost sixteen, awaiting her operation, when she meets a girl who has decided not to go through with it.

Verdict: pretty good.  I’ll most likely be picking up the sequel, Pretties. The worldbuilding’s neat, the characters believable.  My only real gripe is that, early on, the message about what we consider beautiful and why was a little heavy-handed.  But again, a good, quick read for young adults.

And then it was almost time to go home.  I was going to start in on Iron Angel, but I’d missed one important bit on the back of the book:  it’s a follow-up.  So, looks like I need to go off in search of Scar Night before I can read this one.

Which meant it was time for The Name of the Wind. I bought it after someone, somewhere, linked to one of his blog entries.  From there, I checked out the rest of the site, including an excerpt from his debut novel.  I was sold from the first few lines and picked up the book that afternoon.

Then got distracted by other things.

So, I started it while we were waiting for the ride to the airport, and after a day of flying, I’m about halfway through.  I’m reserving judgment still.  The writing is excellent; the story has me hooked.  There’s one element to the tale-telling I’m not sure how to take just yet, though, so until I’ve finished, the jury’s staying out.  But so far, very good stuff.  From what I’ve read so far, I can see why his fans would be clamoring for him to hurry up and finish the next book.

Now I’m home, out of the sun, back to responsibility in the morning and the to-be-read pile growing once more.

Help me add to it!  What’s on your to-be-read pile?

Okay. We have far, far too long until BSG’s endgame begins. Nothing new (from what I understand) until 2009. Which means… let the speculation begin!

If you haven’t seen the most recent episode, “Revelations,” DO NOT CLICK THE MORE BUTTON.

Because, darlin’-pretties, there will be many spoilers after you (insert Hybrid-voice here)… Jump!

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The 2008 Hugo nominees are up. I am horribly remiss in not having read the novels that made the list (but I will be picking up the Chabon and the Scalzi at some point, I promise.)

However, I have seen four of the five nominees in another category:

Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form

Battlestar Galactica “Razor” written by Michael Taylor, directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá and Wayne Rose (Sci Fi Channel) (televised version, not DVD)
Dr. Who “Blink” written by Stephen Moffat, directed by Hettie Macdonald (BBC)
Dr. Who “Human Nature” / “Family of Blood” written by Paul Cornell, directed by Charles Palmer (BBC)
Star Trek New Voyages “World Enough and Time” written by Michael Reaves & Marc Scott Zicree, directed by Marc Scott Zicree (Cawley Entertainment Co. and The Magic Time Co.)
Torchwood “Captain Jack Harkness” written by Catherine Tregenna, directed by Ashley Way (BBC Wales)

The only one I know nothing about is the Star Trek.

Now, were I a member of SFWA and had a ballot to cast, I’d have a damned hard choice before me. “Razor,” honestly, didn’t impress me. So, that’s out.

And, as much as I like the talented Cap’n Jack, and as good as that episode was, it still pales in comparison to the two Doctor Who nominees.

“Blink” was brilliant in many ways. There’s very little of the Doctor and Martha in it (boo for the former, hooray for the latter). It’s Sally Sparrow’s story, and her mystery to solve. Some of my favorite lines of the season are in there.* And, of course, there’s the way the audience is itself a factor of the world. (Note: I can’t take credit for catching this, and sadly, I can’t find the post to link to from Making Light where I first saw it discussed. It was either a blog post or a particle, and linked to another blog, whose title also escapes me. If anyone finds it, I’m happy to add it in.)

The genius is this: the Weeping Angels have one weakness. They can’t move when they’re being observed. So, as soon as someone is looking at them, they turn to stone. How many scenes, though, do we see an angel when Sally is walking away? As she leaves the house for the very first time, just before the opening credits roll, they’re in all the windows, silent statues watching her go.

If Sally’s not keeping them from catching her and sending her back in time… who is?

We are.

Here I will pause, in case your head is doing the same splodey thing mine did when I read that.

Okay, better?

“Blink” is masterfully paced. The writers as a whole do amazing things with characterization – figure that most of the episodes, you’re never going to see the supporting cast ever again. And yet, they manage to flesh everyone out so well, you’d swear they’ve been there for three seasons themselves. In this one, you get to love minor characters who are only there for a few minutes – Kathy, Billy Shipton.

Were “Blink” the only nominee from Doctor Who, I’d vote for it in a heartbeat. But then there’s the two-parter, “Human Nature”/”Family of Blood.” You could argue that this, too, is a nearly-Doctorless pair. Even though we have two hours of David Tennant, he’s not himself. All traces of the Doctor are gone, except for sketches and stories in John Smith’s Journal of Impossible Things. There’s plenty of annoying Martha bits (guess what, Martha? The Doctor loves Rose, and John Smith loves Joan Redfern, but neither will ever love you. HA.)

You get a glimpse of what might-have-been – a quiet, simple life with Joan. Having children, growing old, something he never got to even try with Rose. There’s this horrible feeling of loss, when he has to choose – the Doctor, or John Smith. What makes it worse is that Joan understands it all so much better than he does.

All season long, when Martha would do her puppy-dog why-don’t-you-love-me face at him, I’d yell, “Because you’re not ROSE.” at the screen. It probably drove Greg a bit crazy. Joan’s not Rose, either, but I’d have been okay with it if she’d accepted his (The Doctor’s, that is, not John Smith’s) offer to come with them in the TARDIS.

But Joan’s far wiser than I am. The man she was falling for died with the opening of the pocketwatch. The Doctor might look like him, might wear the same skin, but they’re nothing alike. She’d be travelling at the side of a man she didn’t love, one who was a constant reminder of the man she did.**

I teared up over the loss of a man who never existed.

I’ll be happy if either episode wins the Hugo, but I don’t envy the voters who have to pick between them.

*”It was raining when we met.”/”It’s the same rain.” and “The angels have the phonebox!” (which I still need to get on a tee-shirt.)
**Now that I think about it, there’s an interesting contrast in this. Joan has to deal with the man she loved changing into someone else – same body, different personalities. Rose, after the Regeneration, also has to deal with the man she loves changing into someone else – different body, same person.

Before I continue the home improvement tale of woe, I will diverge into pop culture for a moment.

We watched Battlestar Galactica: Razor last week. I know at least one person peeking here hasn’t seen it yet, so…

Only clicky if you’ve seen it or don’t care about spoilers.

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