I've been waffling back and forth on whether or not to write this column ever since I saw WALL-E two weeks ago. That here it is, two weeks later, and I'm still hearing a specific criticism leveled at the movie that is just plain factually wrong, that two weeks later some people are deeply angry at this movie for something that isn't actually on the screen and I keep running into this people, has tipped me off of the fence on this one. This journal entry is aimed at people who (a) haven't seen the movie yet, and (b) have read multiple reviews of it, and (c) are, based on the reviews, so angry that they're not going to see the movie. It may also be of some interest to some of you who did see the movie, completely misunderstood what you saw, and are angry at a movie only exists in your head, that isn't the movie that was up on the screen.

For what it's worth, this isn't the first time I've seen this problem. The main reason that one of my all-time favorite movies, Pleasantville, didn't make more money than it did is that they all showed up expecting one movie (a movie adaptation of "Hi, Honey, I'm Home!"), saw another (a morally complex metaphor about whether or not we'd be better off with more innocence or if we're better off with "the knowledge of good and evil," and what if we could choose?), and didn't switch gears fast enough. The same thing happened to me with 300; I went expecting one movie (a Hollywood-ized super-hero version of the battle of Thermopylae), saw another (a live action version of Heavy Metal), and almost didn't switch gears fast enough to enjoy it. Although I haven't gotten out to see it yet, I gather that the same problem has happened to most critics and audiences who saw Hancock. They showed up expecting a comic romp about a drunken bum with super powers, had it turn into an elaborate metaphysical debate over which you'd choose, to have the power to help thousands of people, or to be happy, if you had to choose, and didn't switch gears fast enough, either. And so it is with WALL-E, because nearly every hostile review of WALL-E I've read says the same thing. They all loved the first one third of the movie, but they all complain that there's a major plot twist after that that ruins the whole movie for them. Some of them have gotten quite angry about it. And just as with Pleasantville, 300, and Hancock, I insist that what they're objecting to is a movie that they imagined, that they projected their own neuroses onto, not the one that Pixar made and is showing.

( And out of deference to my UK readers, for whom it comes out on Friday I'm told, I'll spoiler-cut the rest. )

As you can probably tell from some of the things I've linked to lately, I've been reading Massively.com's group blog to keep up with what's going on in the massively-multiplayer online game industry this year. The other day I was struck by a comment they had about Funcom's new MMO, Age of Conan: Hyborean Adventures. It was down for a longer than usual maintenance period because of a major patch going live, and what the AoC fans at Massively were suggesting was that this would be a good time for bored or frustrated AoC subscribers to go and read the actual original Conan stories and novels by Robert Howard, saying, in effect, "Once you get past all of the racism and sexism and bigotry, they're quite good." Not long thereafter, this remark acquired a new poignancy when I saw a report on a panel discussion Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski did at Emerald City Comic Con where among his big news revelations was that he was developing a three-movie deal with Cocoon director Ron Howard to film the entire Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith. In comments about this I saw on the web, the consensus about the original series was, as I've said myself, once you get past all the sexism and racism and bigotry, they're kind of interesting, in a classic sort of way. (They're also almost completely unfilmable, certainly not in as little as 6 to 8 hours. I have no idea what JMS is thinking.) And, well, of course all my long-time readers know that I'm an H.P. Lovecraft otaku, despite Lovecraft's oft-commented-upon (if somewhat exaggerated) ... wait for it ... yes, racism and bigotry. (Not so much sexism; hardly any women appear in Lovecraft's fiction. And what makes the accusation of racism and bigotry a little bit unfair is that truthfully, Lovecraft isn't a whole lot less scared of white people than he is of black, brown, yellow, red, or multi-racial ones.)

So where am I going with this? Well, I think Lovecraft is very readable. I tell people who don't want to read the Lensman books that they don't have to, but I enjoyed them. I found the Conan stuff that people pushed off on me completely and totally unreadable, for reasons only in the most indirect ways related to the sexism, bigotry, and racism. Now I will readily grant that I haven't read all of them. I read maybe half a dozen short stories, and attempted one of the full length novels. But from the sample I read, here's my impression of how all Conan the Cimmerian stories go:

A big, muscular white man walks or rides into town. As soon as he gets there, the local panty-waisted intellectuals, degenerate negroes, shiftless Semites, or simpering women (that being all that live there) come running up and say, "Run away, big-shouldered white man! There's an awful thing near here that's going to kill us all and then kill everybody in the world, and there's nothing anybody can do about it!" The big-shouldered white man looks contemptuously at them and asks, "Did you even try hitting it with a big piece of metal?" At that point, the stories diverge. In half of the stories, they say, "No, we never thought of that," and the big white guy says, "Well, no, of course you didn't; you're panty-waisted intellectuals or degenerate negroes or shiftless Semites or simpering women." In the other half, they say, "We tried it, and it didn't work!," and the big white guy says, "Well, of course it didn't work when you tried it, you're panty-waisted intellectuals or degenerate negroes or shiftless Semites or simpering women." Either way, he then walks over to the evil thing and hits it with a piece of metal. It hits him back, which hurts, but that's okay, because no evil thing can kill a big white man. So the big white man keeps hitting the evil thing with his piece of metal until the evil thing is dead. Then the big white man says, "Solved problem," pauses long enough to snear at all of the panty-waisted intellectuals and degenerate negroes and shiftless Semites and simpering women of the world, and then rides or walks away.

My biggest problem with the Conan stories wasn't their racism, sexism, and bigotry. It was that once you got past all of that to the actual problem that Conan had to solve and what he did about it, it was never once a problem that couldn't be solved by hitting it with a piece of metal over and over again until it falls down. And you know what? No problem that can be solved by hitting it with a piece of metal over and over again until it falls down is all that interesting to me. Those are the easy problems. Those are the boring problems.

The Lensman books aren't a whole lot better; the problem is always, "oh, no, behind that evil conspiracy we just defeated, there was an even bigger evil conspiracy!" And the ultimate solution, at the end of each story arc, is always "make bigger and bigger weapons to shoot at the leaders of that conspiracy!" (Really, really ridiculously bigger weapons, by the end of the series.) Nor is there ever any mystery for the readers to figure out; the real ultimate evil of the series is revealed to the readers at the very beginning of the series. But there is at least this to hold your attention: the getting to the point where they know what to target with their Ridiculously Big Guns is complicated enough, and dramatic enough, to hold some of your attention, as you watch to see what it's going to take for the good guys to figure out what the next layer of the conspiracy is, and watch them argue tactics with each other, and watch them struggle with various temptations. Although even then, the last of those three is rendered childishly moot by the beginning of the series, too, when we're told that the Lensmen (of all species) are the result of a covert eugenic breeding program by secretive good-guy aliens aimed at creating a few families per species where the men are completely incorruptible. (Feel free to roll your eyes at this point.)

No, what makes the Lovecraft stories worth reading for me, worth it enough to look past all the side-swipes at foul-breathed Mediterraneans and degenerate negroes and sub-human tri-racial isolates and hopelessly inbred hillbillies and perverted rich white guys is two things, either one of which would be at least a little bit interesting. One is the way in which Lovecraft completely sidesteps the question of "defeating the awful evil," by showing that a substantial number of the evils in this world are just plain not defeatable. You can maybe trick them into not attacking yet, you can maybe escape for a while, you can maybe hope they'll take their time and only destroy a few of us every so often, but in Lovecraft's fiction, for the forseeable future the only "solution" to the ultimate evils was going to be not "how do we destroy them" but "how do we live with them?" That's a more interesting question to me. The other, more interesting aspect of Lovecraft's fiction is that all of his more interesting main characters are people who are being confronted with evidence of something that they have been told their whole lives can't possibly be true. You don't read a Lovecraft story to find out how is this character going to kill the monster, you read it to find out how much evidence is it going to take before this person realizes there is a monster, what excuses are they going to come up with that seem to them more plausible than believing in monsters, and what's it going to do to them inside when they finally do have to change their minds, or will they in fact just plain not figure it out in time, because it really is that obvious to them that the monster can't be real?

Take the Arkham University college professors of (for example) Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror" and drop them into the Lensman universe, and once they get caught up on the tech, they will deduce the identities of the evil aliens (and of their manipulative good-alien allies) in at most a couple of weeks, prod the good-guy aliens into finding a weakness they hadn't thought of in the bad-guy aliens, and save several wars' worth of lives (in at least the short term) by finding some way to bottle the ultimate evil aliens up for another couple of thousand years. Drop them into Hyborea, and they'll take a week or less to research all available lore on the nearest big bad, devise a combination of spells and weapons to contain it, and push it off for at least several generations.

Take Kimball Kinnison and Virgil Sams of the Lensman series and drop them into a Lovecraft story, and it will take them uncomfortably long to figure out that there are ultimate cosmic evils behind the ordinary monsters. But in at most a month or two after that, they'll have converted and recruited most of the Deep Ones, befriended and recruited most of the shoggoths, contacted and made allies out of the Fungi from Yuggoth, and from a combination of Cthulhoid, Yuggothian, Yithian, and Elder Race technology come up with a way to destroy Cthulhu and shield the Earth from Yog Sotthoth and Azathoth and so forth until the highly evolved children of the next generation lead an inter-species galactic patrol to destroy the elder gods once and for all. Drop them into Hyborea, and the primitive technology will frustrate the heck out of them ... for about a year or two, since, being Doc Smith heroes, it's not all that hard for them to uplift at least one of the Hyborean nations to 22nd century tech in that amount of time, kill all the minor monsters and evil sorcerors with blaster pistols, and then from there on, see above for how they'd deal with the bigger threats.

Drop Conan the Barbarian into a Lovecraft story, and he'll make short work of any nearby Deep Ones or night gaunts or spawn of Shub'Niggurath. And immediately thereafter get completely steamrollered by even a single shoggoth, let alone any of the elder gods, because if it can't be defeated by hitting it with a piece of metal over and over again, his ability to stand there and keep swinging ain't worth squat. Drop him into the Lensman stories, even if you give him a Lens (which you can't, because Conan is anything but incorruptible) he's way too dumb to figure out any of what's going on; at best, he becomes a minor character, like the various ax-wielding heavy-worlder semi-disposable space marines in some of the ship-to-ship battles. Sorry, I don't care how emotionally he broods or how lavishly his muscles are described or how garishly the various simpering women, degenerate negroes, and panty-waisted intellectuals around him are described; Conan just doesn't do (let alone think, let alone say) anything interesting enough for me to read about him for very long.

OK, let me get a long list of caveats out of the way first, reasons why I shouldn't care about an announcement I saw today. First of all, I promised myself a long time ago not to get excited about vaporware any more. Nowhere is this more true than in computer gaming, where oft's the slip twixt the cup and the lip. (Duke Nukem Forever, anyone?) Furthermore, this particular announcement makes a promise that three or four well-funded (and a couple of less well funded) companies have tried to deliver on before, and failed; there exist solid technical and financial reasons why what they're proposing to do may not even be feasible. And finally, the announcement is missing some very very important details ... like the names of anybody involved in the actual creative side of it. So yeah, if what I needed was some cold water to dash all over any potential enthusiasm over this particular announcement, I've got buckets and buckets of cold water standing by.

I can't help myself, though. I had a nerdgasm: "Sci Fi Channel creating hybrid TV series and MMO" (James Egan, Massively.com, 6/2/08, based partially on Geoff Boucher, "Sci Fi Channel is game to join the virtual world," LA Times, 6/2/08). The announcement? A half-dozen wealthy companies have volunteered to put up at least 30 million dollars towards the simultaneous development of an original science fiction TV series for the SciFi channel and an MMO set in the same universe at the same time as the series; player characters will appear in the background of some episodes, and player characters' cumulative actions will have some kind of an effect on the how the storyline of the show plays out.

Holy frelling cats.

There are a ton of reasons why this may not work. We know nothing about the story, other than it's science fiction and set on Earth about 80 to 100 years from now. We know nothing about who's writing it, who's directing it, who's acting in it. We know nothing about the creative team behind the online game, either. $30 million sounds like a lot, but it's about enough to develop one half season of an SF TV show, or one very crappy half-done MMO; the actual budget to do both of those things well might well be ten times that, and nobody has said where any additional money for this is going to come from. Once the pilot episode is done, your average TV episode is done in about two weeks, maybe a month tops for a show that runs short 10 to 12 episode seasons; one "episode" of even the best-funded MMOs takes companies with maximum experience in the industry about three to five months to produce. And, as I hinted at the beginning, the ground is littered with the corpses of promises made by various MMO game developers that player actions would guide the storyline from episode to episode; there are really good reasons, if nothing else related to that minimum three to five month lag between player actions and seeing the results in the game world, why this never works. And even by vaporware standards, this is pretty vaporous vaporware, with a forecast earliest possible release date of two years from now.

Oh, and never forget: this is the Internet. There exist at least two or three large cliques of dozens of people each who exist specifically to grief any person or any company that invests any serious money in the Internet for the purposes of commerce or art, in order to make their very important political and artistic point, namely "lol internet." Consider the recent brouhaha between Funcom, makers of the new Age of Conan MMO that's been in the news lately. You didn't hear? Like all MMOs, there's an extraordinarily ill defined rule against "grief play," against playing the game in such a way as to deliberately keep other people from having fun or to intentionally try to make them quit the game. There is no industry standard definition of how to recognize "grief play," though, except via the intent of the griefer, which means that as long as the griefer doesn't outright say that they're griefing, they can usually lawyer their way out of it. As happened just the other day, when someone complained to Funcom that they accidentally offended some member of the Something Awful Goon Squad, who (according to the complainer) brought all 60 members of Goonheim, all of them suspiciously high level for how little time the game has been out, to slaughter this one low-level character, and then "camp" his corpse in shifts to guarantee that he can't actually continue playing at all today, or for however long the Goons decide it will take to prove their point ... whatever that ill-defined "point" may actually be. One of Funcom's game masters showed up to politely ask the Goons to keep it down to "only" 15 to 1, so they wouldn't be accused of grief play. The Goons pushed back, demanding Funcom show there where in the rules it says that 60 people can't camp one corpse for a week, if they want, and Funcom backed down. (See Girdox, "Hordes of Goonheim beats [sic] AoC," Goonheim.com, 5/30/08.) So what happens to this when the swarms on Something Awful, Fark, and 4Chan find out that if they make themselves ubiquitous enough and obnoxious enough they can personally wreck an umpty-million-dollar TV show?

But, good gorram, I can't help hoping and wishing this will work. This isn't something that customers have been clamoring for. This is several somethings that many thousands, maybe in the low millions of customers, all solidly neglected by the current market in both TV and game SF, have been clamoring for. Near-future SF, science fiction of actual predictions about a near-term forseeable future instead of hand-waved over-used cliché worlds and tech. And an MMO where the the players are actually involved in the storyline in ways that other players can see, a world where we're more than supporting roles and spectators as the great changes happen in the game world.

I was expecting a firestorm over Sunday morning's piece. I was a little bit proud of it even before Patrick Nielsen-Hayden and Arthur Hlavety promoted it and David Brin (!!!) showed up to praise it; I put a little bit of work into this one. And I knew that there is no more reliable path to Internet notoriety than mocking the libertarians, who are famously thin-skinned; libertarianism is legendarily one of those "third rail" topics on the Internet, the ultimate sacred cow. If you don't take criticism (and hate screeds) gracefully, mock the libertarians (and especially the "Objectivists") at your peril. (Non-LiveJournal.com readers: I apologize for the occasional lengthy delays unscreening comments; I will say, in my defense, that it was a holiday weekend and I was busy much of that time.)

But the piece really only started as two independent bits of mental fanfic. Yes, fanfic. Sure, I despise Ayn Rand's philosophy. But I'm not a whole lot crazier about Ernest Callenbach's, and I love Ecotopia. I'm generally a fan of political SF that puts some thought into alternate ways the world might be arranged, whether dystopian or utopian. I think Anthem may actually be the best dystopian novel ever written. And even Atlas Shrugged, for all its didacticism, flawed political theory, and utter failure to predict the present, I find better than John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, which even shares Rand's horrific recommendation for saving the world: mass die-off. And Zanzibar won the Hugo, for crying out loud. Similarly, Anthem makes most of the same points that Orwell made in 1984. But it makes them in a more plausible way, in a more chilling way, with more compelling language, and in a substantially more concise way.

And, well, when I read almost any novel I like, the book goes on in my head beyond what the author wrote. I think about what I would have done differently than the main characters. I think about what comes afterwards for the characters and their world. If the novel doesn't explicitly say how the world it's set in came about, I think about that, too. It was largely by coincidence that I noticed that the real likely outcome of Atlas Shrugged lined up astonishingly closely with the facts as stated in Anthem. Yes, I know that Anthem was written first. Yes, I know that Ayn Rand's personal vision of how the world of Anthem would come to be would be by steady expansion of communism, liberalism, environmentalism, and political correctness, not as a reaction against techno-libertarian utopians. But by the time I was reading Ayn Rand, anybody with eyes in his head could see that actual communism was in full-fledged retreat everywhere in the world, including in the so-called Communist bloc countries themselves. Heinlein's 1950 prophesy that by the year 2000, the the Soviet Union would be capitalist and democratic, but that they'd still be calling themselves communist, turned out to be more nearly true than Rand's irrational fear that communism would conquer the world. No, by the 1980s, right-wing pseudo-libertarian corporate fascism, sold under the bogus rubric of "the free market" (which is anything but) and "deregulation" (which turned out to be a code word for "legislation by corporations only") was doing an amazing job of discrediting the very idea of free market entrepreneurial capitalism all over the world; by the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000, or if not then, then certainly when the US did to Iraq what Germany did to Poland and Czechoslovakia in the name of "freedom," the idea that the world might sweep in some kind of pious moralistic and anti-capitalist dictatorship in reaction to libertarian rhetoric, that idea was uncomfortably feasible. Hence: "Shrug Harder."

But even while I was thinking about this, other events conspired to cause me to rethink a literally sacred cliché in American politics: "All government is by the consent of the governed." It's an oversimplification of John Locke's hugely influential 1689 2nd Treatise on Government, and where the traditional American interpretation goes far beyond what Locke was saying is this: Locke was arguing that in an ideal society, governmental legitimacy would depend upon the mechanisms of democratic consent, rather than monarchical fiat or other imposition of force. But American thinkers and teachers are more likely to argue it not as a utopian ideal but as a law of nature: not that all government ought to be by the consent of the governed, but that it is always within the power of the governed to withdraw their consent, overthrow a government they no longer consent to, and (in Jefferson's famous words, from the American Declaration of Independence) "to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." And, indeed, examples abound, both good and bad, from the French Revolution to both Russian Revolutions to the Iranian Revolution to the Philippine Revolution to the Polish Solidarity uprising to the Ukrainian Orange Revolution, all of them incidents when the people withdrew their consent and government fell, for better or for worse.

So be it. But the thought's been growing on me, for a while now, that not everybody's consent is weighted evenly, nor can it be. There will always be people whose consent to be governed is more important than yours or mine, because they have a lot more power to withdraw their consent than you or I ever will. Coups d'etat are, after all, still the most common method by which governmental executives change around the world; anybody who commands an army's loyalty has the power to withdraw the army's consent to be governed by the current government. The Kamalist Democracy model pioneered by Mustafa Kamal Ataturk even institutionalizes this, as the people of Turkey have come to rely upon as a protection against religious sectarianism and the people of Pakistan and Egypt have come to regret. In the US, we institutionalized a long list of measures to prevent this, from the explicit depolitization of the military officer class to intense indoctrination of all American citizens to resist military coup to the intentional cultivation of inter-service rivalries. But even here in the US, there's another group that's even more able than the army to withdraw their consent and bring down the state, or more or less so. And they're the very ones that the first democracy, Athens under the constitution of the divinely-inspired Solon, went to so much trouble to disarm: the wealthy. If nothing else, the very first democracy had to explicitly recognize that as long as wealthy individuals can hire their own mercenary armies, then if those mercenary armies ever become bigger or more dangerous than the people's own army, then the consent of the people or of the people's elected government or the people's army becomes irrelevant. And this did in fact turn out to be no small part of how democracy died in Athens.

It's never come to that in America, although we've had one rather famous brush with it, when wealthy financiers tried to finance their own coup d'etat against Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the infamous Business Plot. America's institutional safeguards, and the Commander General of the Marine Corps' personal integrity, kept it from going that far. Nonetheless, by no later than the early 1980s, what wealthy financiers and corporate CEOs did to America, and what they've continued doing since then regardless of which party has ruled the White House or Congress, despite pleas to their conscience and extensive taxpayer-funded bribes to change their minds, can only be reasonably described as virtually all of the owners of American industrial capital withdrawing their consent to be governed by the United States federal government. Overthrowing that government having turned out to be impractical, even after a multi-decade propaganda campaign, they have done what the John Galts of the world can not be stopped from doing: they looted the country of every capital asset that wasn't nailed down and shipped it overseas, preferring to have their actual business operations "governed" in third-world hellholes from Mexico to Thailand where the laws were more to their liking.

I find it absolutely worth reminding my fellow liberal progressives that unless you can, like the divinely-inspired Solon, persuade the wealthy to consent to your laws, it doesn't do you any good to write them. It is entirely within their power to withdraw their consent to be governed, to liquidate every asset they own in this country (roughly 90% of it, I remind you) and send it overseas. That failure to continue to persuade the wealthy that the taxes they were paying and the regulations they were enduring were what protected their profit margins from unprofitable races to the bottom, to persuade them that campaign finance reform and other anti-corruption methods were what protected their own businesses and their own fortunes from the depredations of their fellow rich, that failure deserves to be writ large as the great failure of the Johnson, Nixon, and Carter administrations, and of the Democratic political thinkers of the 1970s.

I don't know how many of you realize that Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand's science fiction classic, is actually only book 1 of a trilogy? Hardly anybody knows this, because she never got around to writing the missing middle volume. She wrote book 1 in the series. She wrote book 3 in the series, but didn't explicitly label it a sequel to Atlas Shrugged, she and her agent marketed it as a stand-alone volume. She never got around to writing the middle volume that bridges the two. It's probably because she found it too depressing, the way that Heinlein never got around to writing The Stone Pillow, the missing volume in the Future History series that comes between "All You Zombies" and "If This Goes On."

Atlas Shrugged, for those of you who never read it, can be summarized entirely fairly as follows. Unknown to our viewpoint characters at first, an inventor named John Galt has invented a "free energy" machine, a motor that runs on ambient static electricity and the Earth's own inertia and puts out enough electricity in a fairly small unit to power almost anything, including vehicles, force field generators, energy weapons, even an invisibility cloak if you use a big enough unit. He invented this while working at a company where his contract gave them rights to stuff he invented on the clock, like most professional engineers and inventors, but he assumed that as the inventor, he was entitled to all of the profits from this fabulous new invention. The company's management and other employees, though, saw just how much resentment would happen if one company owned the monopoly on an invention this valuable, and started making plans for how to invest some of the profits into charitable ventures, so they wouldn't get the whole thing taken away from them via eminent domain. John Galt, outraged that anybody would even suggest that he or the company he worked for owed anything to the nation that provided his education, protected him from infectious disease outbreaks, protected him from Communist invasion, built the roads that got him to work each day, provided the police that kept him safe, and provided the court system that protected his property rights at all, sabotaged the Galt Engine, so nobody could have it.

Then he went further and, in a fit of offended pique, promised to "stop the motor of the world," to kill 90% or so of Earth's population by intentionally wrecking the economy. Which he then did. How? By finding every other competent engineer or manager in the US and persuading them to be just as selfish as him, just as unwilling to pay back or protect their country; he declared a covert "strike of the mind," as he called it. He hid them all in a secretive compound in the Rocky Mountains, protected by force field and invisibility cloak, and waited for the US economy to collapse, which, obligingly, it did -- because John Galt had carefully sabotaged the bridges and railroads that made it possible for fuel and seeds to make it from the coastal cities to inland farms, and make it possible for food grown on inland farms to make it to the coastal cities. And as chaos was breaking out, he and his fellow inventors hijacked every radio transmitter in the US to broadcast his manifesto: You all deserve to die, for asking us to pay you back even one nickel, because we are all so selfish we don't consider any of the things you all paid for out of your taxes and that you did with your labor to have been at all helpful to us as entirely self-sufficient brilliant inventors and managers. So die.

And that's where the series is interrupted. But from where the third book picks up, and by applying a little common sense, we can outline the main plot points, if not the characterizations, from the untitled middle volume, the one I'm whimsically calling Atlas Shrugged 2: Shrug Harder. When the previous book ran out, America was winding down to what was clearly going to be the last harvest, ever, and the Strikers were planning for the day that they, as the only people possessing any high tech or any capability of mass production of food or anything else, would ride out of their hidden Colorado fortress as humanity's saviors. They were pledging to themselves to build a new world based, as John Galt's manifesto had promised all Americans, on the virtue of selfishness. They assumed that a grateful (or at least desperately needy) and vastly reduced in number population would welcome them as liberators, chastened and having learned their lesson. Except that we know from the third book that that's not what happened, and anybody who knows human nature should have been able to predict that.

Outside the valley, the conversion to local subsistence farming and the work of scavenging the dead cities for any usable metal would have been rough. No time or energy would have been available to save even minimal technology. We're looking at a collapse all the way back to (at best) early iron age levels, maybe even all the way back to the bronze age, and nobody will even have time to teach the next generation to read and write. But one thing very clearly did happen, in every survivor's village, and became world-wide policy as soon as even minimal travel and communication made it possible for the chiefs of the scattered villages of survivors began to reunite society into any kind of a civilization, and that is a fierce determination to make sure that the next generation remembered who had done this to them, and why they had done it. They would have educated their children to remember the names and descriptions of every one of the hated Strikers who had personally murdered four and a half billion people for a political point. And they would have educated their children that one idea, one idea in the Strikers' twisted minds, had lead to those four and a half billion deaths, the greatest act of genocide in human history: selfishness. How far did they go to eradicate selfishness? They went so far as to eradicate the first person pronoun from the language.

Because she died without telling anyone, it's not entirely clear how Shrug Harder would have ended. We know that at some point, at least one of the Strikers does leave Galt Valley. He built a high-tech home, stuffed it with a library and all the wonders of the Strikers' science, and then (apparently) set out to make contact with the nearest survivors' village, assuming that they'd worship him as a god for his technological superiority, assuming they'd cheerfully feed him and provide him with anything he wanted for the products of his labor. And, rather obviously, they did what anybody would do: they executed him for crimes against humanity. His technological redoubt was never found. Did other Strikers meet the same fate, or are they all holed up in Galt Valley still? We'll never know. But that brings us to the book that would clearly have been relabeled once the trilogy was complete ... Atlas Shrugged 3: Anthem.

Anthem is actually the best book of the three. And it's a credit to Rand that she realized just how monstrous the real results of the Strike would be. Many, many so-called Objectivists and Libertarians, who only read the first book, thought they were supposed to cheer for the Strikers, believed the Strikers' personal delusion that the Strike, and the resulting mass genocide, would usher in a techno-libertarian paradise on earth. No, in Anthem we get a view of John Galt's Earth from the viewpoint of someone who grew up in the next generation, never having known a technological world, knowing only a world in which selfishness is labeled the ultimate sin. The massive die-off from John Galt's strike has resulted in the rise of the most vicious and backwards and cruelly unfair totalitarian regime in human history. And our nameless hero slowly has it dawn on him that the ruling council is so afraid of selfishness that they're retarding any attempt to restore human technological civilization, no matter how miserable and stunted low-tech life is, until they figure out some way to integrate technological progress into their civilization without anybody being able to claim credit for it. Which cannot possibly work.

Our nameless hero, having found working light bulbs and a working electrical system in the ruins of the city his farming town is built over, even offers to forgo personal credit for the discovery, offers to accept no credit for it at all. But their paranoia and terror that he's a prospective future Striker pushes them to hound him to the point where in desperation he and his girlfriend flee the city into the uninhabited wasteland ... where they find the technological trove, and the library, left behind by the unnamed Striker at the end of Shrug Harder. He and his now wife settle down to raise children, to use the subsistence farming skills they learned from their own civilization to sustain them, to gather any other stragglers who escape the cities, and to stay out of sight until they find a way to overthrow the horribly dictatorial Councils that rule the world and lead it to a saner middle ground, one that (presumably) knows to watch out for civilization-wreckers like John Galt but that also knows that giving personal credit is a prerequisite for technological advance. It is, if not an entirely happy ending, a hopeful one.

---

Oh, except for one thing. I made up the whole bit about the second book. I don't think Ayn Rand was aware enough of the limitations of her philosophy for her to realize that the communo-primitivist dictatorship of Anthem, not a techno-libertarian utopia, would be the inevitable outcome of a genocide of almost the entire human race by techno-libertarians. Oops. Never mind, then. Sorry!

When you're retired, like I am, you can do something stupid like set out to watch 50 hours of television in a week. Specifically, last week, when the SciFi channel celebrated the season opener for the last season of their Battlestar Galactica remake by rerunning every single episode of BSG seasons 1-3 back to back, 10 hours a day. People have been on me like white on rice to watch this show, telling me it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Even Joss Whedon, in an interview recently, called it the best science fiction TV series ever, and this from a man who's made some pretty impressive science fiction himself. I'd tried catching up a couple of times, including watching the beginning-of-season marathons the last two years. But yeah, now I'm caught up. Or more or less caught up, anyway; I did sleep in a couple of mornings and missed a few episodes, at least two of which I hadn't already seen. But still, pretty much caught up.

I've discovered that I can't help it: I like the following 8 minute capsule summary, "What the Frak is Going on with BSG?", that SciFi also put together to promote the new season, better than I liked the episodes themselves.



Having seen almost all of it, I get what all of you, including Joss Whedon, like about the series. It's serious science fiction, science fiction that takes philosophy and politics and war and ideas in general completely seriously, treats the various subjects it raises thoughtfully in a way that's mostly gone out of style in television and film science fiction. And on the other hand, I know that one of the reasons I avoided this series is a deep and abiding prejudice of mine against remakes, especially remakes of 70s and 80s TV. So knowing that I had that prejudice, and assured by nearly everybody that I wasn't giving it a fair shot, I bent over backwards to try to give it a fair shot. But no. I acknowledge its strengths, but it's got two crippling problems that I just can't get past.

It gives me crippling headaches when I watch it. Literally a crippling problem; I went through a fair amount of naproxen trying to squint at this show to even tell what was going on. It wasn't the shaky-cam, which was well within my tolerances, although I think that was over-used. No, it's that it's not just serious science fiction, it's Serious Film. And like nearly all directors since Oliver Stone, the makers of this series signal that it's a Serious Film by costuming everybody in shades of gray, painting every prop gray, putting them on a gray set, and turning almost all of the lights off. (Apparently just as "real" in games is brown, "serious" in film is bluish-gray.) I found myself longing for the dream and daydream and prophesy and fantasy scenes, because those were the only scenes where they turned the lights on. I found myself attracted to Caprica Six, not because she's some hot babe, but because she's practically the only person in the entire series who isn't wearing gray.

I hate almost all the characters. And that's a deal breaker for me, with any book or movie or series. If some time in the first 20 to 30 minutes, I don't see at least one character that I generally like, one character that's basically a decent person trying to do the right thing, I get massively turned off. For one thing, it's unrealistic. I agree with Heinlein's famous "What I Believe" column from decades ago that if we lived in a world where as high a percentage of the people in it were venal, corrupt, and selfish as the people who are portrayed in "realistic" fiction, there wouldn't be an intact building, an edible meal, or a single working tool or device. I'm sick of, literally sick of, literally sick in my belly and choking on, the cynicism that so much of the press and the media have been smothering us with over the course of my lifetime. I hated it when Harlan Ellison introduced it to written science fiction in the "New Wafe SF" movement in the 70s, and I hate it in this show, too. OK, Lee "Apollo" Adama is a legitimate hero, but he doesn't get nearly enough screen time. Helo's not a bad person, either, and neither is "good Boomer." But again, we're talking minor characters who make brief or sporadic appearances. No, the show's main viewpoint characters are Admiral Bill Adama who's a morally compromised worn-out chronic depressive, Colonel Tigh who's not merely alcoholic but batshit insane, President Roslin who's a corrupt religious fanatic, and Gaius Baltar who's the most famously selfish man in human history, not to mention possessed of the worst impulse control problem in history. Oh, and the Cylons themselves, who are even more religiously fanatic than Roslin and even more batshit insane than Tigh. By and large, I'm not crazy about giving this much of my time and attention to people who are this irredeemably unpleasant to each other.

*shrug*

Different strokes for different folks, I guess. If it's your thing, enjoy it. Me? I'm looking forward to two entirely different SciFi presentations: Sunday evening's "Jason and the Argonauts" (can't find a link) and next Saturday evening's "Odysseus: Voyage to the Underworld" (which I'll have to tape and watch later, I'm busy Saturday night).

In January, I was catching back up on my childhood-favorite science fiction TV series, UFO. At the same time, I was trying to overlook the painful character class designs and unpleasant gameplay of the newest science fiction massively multiplayer online game, Tabula Rasa. Also around the same time I was catching a fair number of Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis reruns as they came up on TV, to catch up. And catching episode 415 of SG:A, "Outcast," called my attention to something that's been bothering me for years, off and on, even when it comes up in the context of science fiction that I really like. Ever since I thought of this a couple of weeks ago, when I realized what the three examples had in common, it's been nagging at me to write about it.

But first, I needed a reality check. So on Saturday morning at Conflation, I walked into the free-breakfast buffet at the hotel and loudly asked, "Is there a military historian in the house?" A science fiction convention's not a bad place to ask that. I didn't find one right away, but just as I was winding down a conversation with a couple of other history buffs whose interests don't overlap mine, getting their feedback, David from Belleville walked up. So I did get to ask my question of a real military history fanatic: "Has any nation, in the history of the Earth, ever been attacked in a full-scale ongoing military invasion by another country, has any nation in all of human history ever been in an actual war, and tried to keep this fact a secret from the populace?"

To my chagrin, David was able to think up one, when the priest/kings of Angkor Wat were conquered by the ancestors of today's Vietnamese and not only chose to surrender rather than mobilize the population to fight, but didn't reveal to the populace that they'd been conquered by foreigners until the foreigners were able to consolidate their hold on the whole country. But even he admitted it was a special case. He and my other historian buddies were able to cite a handful of other cases where countries have faced military attacks below the threshold of all-out war or full-scale invasion and withheld this information from their own public, usually because they still hoped to avert a war and didn't want the public outrage to push them into one yet. But I'm not sure that either of these special cases invalidates my general point, and that's that an awful lot of science fiction seems to think that Earth could fight an all-out war with technologically superior extra-terrestrials while keeping this a secret from the general public. Or even that the government would want to.

Once any government has ever committed to actually fighting a war, worrying about panicking the population has been the last thing on their minds. On the contrary, every government that has ever gone to war has gone to at least some effort to panic its citizens at least a little, even those living the farthest from the battle front. No, really, if you think about it, the idea of a "secret war" is powerfully silly; who wouldn't want to mobilize every available ounce of civilian effort, and every available resource, to actually winning? And if your side was capable of winning without mobilizing all of its people and all of its resources, why would the other side risk a war with you?

And I just don't see it even working, if they tried. Governments are notoriously bad at keeping secrets, no matter how high the stakes. Even counting all of the countries involved, only about 20 people knew about the Iran/Contra operation, the Reagan administration's trade of anti-tank weaponry to Iranian Hezbollah to buy back the embassy hostages, in a series of elaborate deals that actually made a profit, then illegally diverting that profit to right-wing death squads in Nicaragua where Reagan was trying to intervene in their civil war despite a flat congressional ban. What they were doing was highly illegal, the stakes were as high as they could ever be, the number of people in on the secret was low, and the actual operation took only a couple of weeks or months. Other than the President himself, almost everybody involved was an intelligence community veteran who ought to have been long-practiced at keeping secrets. And despite having all that going for it, the basic outline of the operation broke in the independent press before the operation itself was over, the mainstream media had most of the story within a year or two, and we knew every single operational detail within 5 years.

No, sorry, I'm just not buying it. As Ben Franklin himself said, "Three can keep a secret if two are dead." We were talking this over in the con suite at one point and somebody pointed out that it would have taken over a thousand welders to build the Prometheus, and that was five years ago. But it's only this year that anybody outside of Stargate Command (and its foreign counterparts) has heard rumors about the last several interstellar wars that Earth fought in? Where did so many science fiction writers and their fans, especially recent ones, come up with this so-widespread conviction that Earth could fight an entire extraterrestrial war without anybody back home knowing?

It may seem odd to the rest of you that I'm willing to overlook a functionally infinite number of mathematical and/or scientific impossibilities while choking on this particular gnat-sized detail, but it's not a gnat-sized detail for me. It cuts to the heart of why I read or watch science fiction. Ever since John W. Campbell showed us the way back in 1939, science fiction has never been primarily about the futuristic science. It's been about how people live with the futuristic science, about telling human stories about realistic human beings who live in a world that's different from our own. How are they different, how are they still the same as us, what are their lives like? How does changing the world change their joys and their tragedies, and their laws and their customs, and their hopes and their fears? I will forgive almost any technical or theoretical glitch in a science fiction story; people who don't act like people would really act, and societies that don't change in ways that seem plausible (or don't even change at all, as I've complained about the Harry Potter universe, and as I'm now complaining about the Stargate universe) comes very close to spoiling the whole thing for me.

Many of my friends know that I've been mildly obsessed, for quite some time now, with a one-season TV show whose network lost faith in it and yanked the plug before any of the important questions got answered, one with a talented international cast and a very unique look, with beautiful costuming and art direction unlike any other science fiction that's been put on the screen, big screen or little screen. What, you thought I meant Firefly? Nah. I liked that, thought it was great, am glad I saw it all, and I showed it to a lot of you, yes. But now that it's largely all wrapped up, by a sequel that I admit (in hindsight) was almost as poorly made as V: The Final Battle, I'm pretty much done with it. No, I have a much older one-season-wonder SF TV show obsession, one I only just managed to catch up with completely, one that I think is going to last much longer for me: Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's 1969/70 ITV series UFO.

I've had the complete UFO tv series on my Amazon wishlist ever since they came out with it, The Complete UFO Megaset. But the list price used to be much higher, and used copies harder to find; I only finally got a copy of my own during the Christmas season, and only a couple of weeks ago did phierma and cos_x and I finish watching them all in sequence. I literally hadn't seen any of these since the local PBS affiliate briefly ran the series late evenings when I was still a kid back in the mid 1970s, so I was a little nervous about whether or not it would hold up. To my pleasant surprise, seeing it now 30+ years later and as an adult, it holds up even better than I remembered. When you compare it to what our other choices were circa 1969, say the famously awful third season of the original Star Trek, it's nothing less than amazing. But even if you aren't willing to cut it some slack for the fact that TV production values have gotten higher, that TV writers have gotten better at writing convincing dialog, that some TV directors have learned many new tricks since 1969 for affordable ways to make really compelling film, I think this series still has the potential to hook you, for a reason that ought to be near and dear to the heart of any science fiction fan: it asks a really interesting question, and takes the answers to that question very seriously.

The premise is that, just as we remember history, there have been UFO sightings since the mid 1940s, and historical records of everything from unexplained fireballs to "chariots of the gods" that could be UFO sightings back prior to that. But the series starts with some events set in 1969, when a small UFO lands in a heavily wooded northern English park of some kind, and the space-suited pilot gets out and kills two of three picnickers with a strange rifle and kidnaps the third, leaving without a trace ... except for one. For the first time, one of the victims of a UFO attack had been running a home movie camera all through the beginning of the attack, and the alien(s) didn't find it. His film fell into the hands of NATO intelligence, and now NATO has to answer the question "now what do we do?" We have one verified attack by extra-terrestrials on Earth. One tiny attack, yes, but who knows how many attacks go on every year and we don't know, since the UFOs seem to be completely undetectable and the aliens pretty good about sweeping up evidence? So two USAF officers assigned to NATO in England, one of them an ex-astronaut, set out to convince the UN Security Council, in secret sessions, that this could be the reconnaissance phase of a much larger invasion to come. If it is, we're completely outclassed. So our first priority has to be coming up with some way to detect and intercept incoming alien craft, no matter how much it costs. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, despite another alien attack suspiciously targeted at those two officers, they manage to convince ambassadors for all the permanent security council members to commit to just that: a ten-year plan to fund everything it would take to detect and intercept incoming UFOs.

They set up a plausible cover story, one that turned out to be useful in its own regard. To keep the space program from imploding, they faked up evidence of highly valuable mineral resources on the moon, some of which turned out to actually exist. With an investment bubble in space going, the UN's members agreed to accept and fund an International Astrophysical Commission to keep space demilitarized and to intervene whenever various countries' space ventures conflict with each other, including a small military arm called SHADO. Everybody knows it exists, and years after the space bubble burst many people question whether or not the UN should still be in the space "business," whether the IAC and SHADO are worth their multi-billion-dollar budgets. But like any UN agency, it's got bureaucratic momentum on its side.

So everybody in all the worlds' major militaries knows about SHADO, and know they have to cooperate with it, even when they know that for security reasons and diplomatic reasons they'll never be told exactly which country or company any SHADO operation is aimed at or why. Any journalist who covers the UN beat or the space business beat knows that SHADO exists, suspects it's a bureaucratic boondoggle, and might spend some of their time digging to find where all that money goes, having no more luck investigating the fraud and graft they suspect is the explanation for that huge budget than most journalists have investigating fraud and graft at the UN level, and only the most hard-core paranoids think that that's particularly suspicious. The few corporations that are still doing business beyond earth orbit know that they have to take orders from SHADO as the price of doing business, and are openly grateful that SHADO really mostly doesn't care what they're doing as long as it's civilian and stays well away from SHADO's spacecraft and its Moonbase. (And if anybody does get too close, SHADO also has and will use a drug that erases the last 12 to 18 hours' worth of short-term memories. Unless the person has the potential to fill an important job for which SHADO needs to hire right now.)

After that brief intro set contemporarily in 1969, the rest of the series was set 10 years in the future, starting in 1980, when SHADO finally developed a breakthrough technology involving faster-than-light detection gear that lets them see nearly all UFOs as they enter the solar system in time to intercept them more than half of them before they reach Earth, even though their budget only barely stretched as far as three single-missile moon-based interceptor spacecraft. They catch nearly all of the remainder with a small fleet of (extremely cool-looking) covert submarine aircraft carriers spread across the north Atlantic and the north Pacific. So now, after ten years and billions of dollars, they can finally document just how much danger Earth has been in all this time. And how much of a threat are the aliens? They send one to three ships, every one to four months. Each of those ships kills and/or kidnaps two to three people, apparently for medical and/or scientific purposes. Over the course of the first roughly year of the program, the size of the "invasion" never wavers. And now SHADO has an even bigger problem, one that almost no other SF TV series has thought to address: would the world's governments still think it was worth untold billions of dollars a year and the risk of however many lives on a still-risky space program to prevent maybe a dozen deaths a year? Do we actually have to care that we're being invaded? Or would we be better off spending that money to help people who got burned in the space investment bubble, not to mention all the people who didn't even get that much benefit out of it?

The series asks an even more interesting question than that, too, and this is the one that I was referring to at the beginning of this. All of SHADO, counting their direct civilian supervisor at the UN, amounts to fewer than a thousand people, probably no more than a couple of hundred. They're the only ones who know that Earth is under attack. As part of their ongoing cover story, SHADO has manipulated public opinion to convince the public that the very idea of an inter-stellar invasion force is pathologically silly. So none of those couple of hundred people can tell anybody else where they work for a living, what they do for a living, or why what they're doing matters ... not even when some of them end up dead. Not their friends, not their neighbors, not their own families. OK, we've seen this before. But what Gerry and Sylvia Anderson did better than anybody else, I think, it show you what working at a place like that for 10 years does to you, what kind of weird insular and incestuous culture develops under those conditions, what a hothouse it turns into when the only people you can really talk to are a couple of hundred co-workers. A couple of hundred co-workers who are constantly computer monitored by a spooky and unpopular top-notch Soviet bloc psychiatrist with his computerized psych exams, looking for any sign that you're going to lose it and/or that you'll become a security risk. A place where they can not possibly simply fire you, and where nobody has yet had the guts to find out what Commander Straker would do if you tried to quit. Three or four of the best episodes have no actual alien attacks in them; the whole drama of those three episodes relates to the rather more intense human drama of working at a place like SHADO.

Which is, of course, part of what doomed the show, since what ITV was clearly looking for, when they gave Gerry Anderson the money for his first ever live-action TV show, was "Thunderbirds versus the Flying Saucers." There turns out to be another historical quirk that worked against them: Kirk Kerkorian, the notorious first of the corporate raiders to specialize in taking over profitable companies and looting them of all assets not nailed down for himself and his friends before leaving those companies bankrupt and walking away from their debts, aquired the film studio where UFO was being shot and shut it down in mid season. By the time they got back up to speed at a new studio, they'd lost a third of their actors, including the number two guy and the number one woman on the series. The episodes that come after that break look just as good, and some of them are even a little better written, and they wrap up some of the questions asked early in the series. But sadly, the loss of some of their best actors did the series no favors.

If you've never seen this one, track it down. No, 1980 didn't turn out exactly the way the Andersons thought it would. They did better than most, showing a world where most of the upper middle class and above have car phones, a world where the Cold War is still going on but has reached a level of detente where nobody worries about it much any more, a world where a lot of professional people think the problems of race and gender discrimination have been solved but are then surprised that even some of the most successful black and female officers and business people don't agree. You can let yourself get distracted by the fact that actual 1980 fashion wasn't nearly as glamorous as Sylvia Anderson's designs, by the fact that the tech looks wrong, and by the chronic problem of so much SF TV of just not even caring about the physics of interstellar war and outer space dogfighting. (Particularly in British SF TV, outer space is a remarkably tiny place.) If you look past that, if you simply accept that a world that didn't give up on space travel in the early 1970s might have actually looked more glamorous than the world we got, and look at the series the way I do at this remove, as an alternate history piece? I'd stack it up against any SF ever filmed. Ever. I wish more people knew it well.

(Note to any new readers: If you subscribed to this blog because of my writings on race and politics, it's worth pointing out that only about half of what I write is about politics and I only write about issues related to race a couple of times a year. Barring some unforeseen major news story breaking, I'm probably going to be writing about science fiction for at least a couple of entries, and after that, who knows? Decide whether or not to keep reading my journal accordingly. Or, failing that, there are separate bookmarks with associated RSS feeds for each of the tags in my tag cloud.)

Well, the February election day has come and gone, Mardi Gras has come and gone, Valentine's Day is upon us, and everybody in science fiction fandom here in St. Louis knows what that means. It means it's time for the annual drama about Conflation.

I'm bowing out.

I'm not bowing out of Conflation. I'm bowing out of the drama about Conflation.

You can Google up everything I've written about Conflation by searching for the keywords "conflation site:bradhicks.livejournal.com", but to summarize for anybody totally new: Conflation, which was originally called Czarkon, was one of the first three science fiction conventions to invent a new convention format, the "adult-oriented relaxa-con." From the mid 1980s through (more or less) the late 1990s, it thrived as a convention for people who read science fiction, and for members of associated nerdy fandoms and subcultures, to mingle, preen, and flirt in a clothes-mostly-optional environment. Then, about six or so years ago, the convention's owners decided it needed to be toned down, and rebranded it as a "kid-free science-fiction convention." This year marks the apex of that movement, as they picked a theme for this year's con based on a broadcast-network TV show from several years ago, and as they finished the purge of the last of the remaining adult-oriented programming from the event schedule. Even as late as last year, the guests of honor were a minor (but talented!) TV star with a reputation for partying hard and the host of the Polyamory Weekly podcast; this year's guest of honor is a reality-TV game show winner.

There are many, many people in St. Louis who stopped going to Conflation a long time ago, because they don't like the idea of any kind of sexy fun, or even talk apparently, in a semi-public venue. It makes them uncomfortable. Near the top of the list of reasons we've been given for the format change was to lure those people back. Me, I don't see them coming back as long as the event keeps the Conflation name. There are probably roughly the same number of people, very nearly including myself, who stopped coming to Conflation over the last five or six years because they see it as completely pointless to make a small local general science fiction convention kid free if you're going to wage an all-out war on anything that goes beyond the subtlest of hints of adults-only orientation. No, seriously: what's the point of an age restriction, at this point? I don't get that part at all. If they're going to make it into a replacement for the long-lamented spring regional convention NameThatCon, what's the point of keeping the Conflation name and the age restriction? I don't get it. At all. It feels to me like they've chosen a solution that gives them the problems of both a general SF convention and of an adult-oriented relaxa-con without any of the advantages of either.

But you know what? After all these years, I have finally matured enough to admit that it's not my convention.

Yes, I have a lot of tenure at this event, more than several of the current organizers. Yes, I once (once) loaned them a ton of money without which there wouldn't still be a Conflation, without which they would have gone out of business almost a decade ago. But I'm not on the committee, nor do I suspect I would be welcome. They don't even, in general, ask me to volunteer for anything any more. I'm not one of the con co-chairs, nor am I all that close to either of them. I have no ownership rights in the con at all. So what kind of con I wish Conflation still was is completely irrelevant. It's just plain not up to me. And I finally accept that.

That didn't come easy to me. I can have a good time at a small local general-purpose science fiction convention. I'm going this Friday, and I expect to have a great time talking with and socializing with a lot of wonderful people that I don't see nearly often enough. Any opportunity to spend an inexpensive time hanging out with a hundred or so science fiction fans is probably something that I'm up for, any time. But it will never be as good a time as I had back when St. Louis still had an adult-oriented science fiction relaxa-con for me to look forward to. It's not easy for me to admit that a really good time, something I looked forward to all year every year, is over for good. It took me, well, every bit of five years to reach the point where I can admit that it's gone for good, and to appreciate Conflation for what the organizers now want it to be, not what I still wish it was. But I think I've finally reached that point. If the owners of Conflation don't want it to be an adult-oriented relaxa-con, it's not up to use to tell us they have to host one. If those of us who miss having an adult-oriented science fiction relaxa-con to go to in the St. Louis area miss it that badly, it's up to us to found one.

(Don't frickin' tempt me. No, really, don't frickin' tempt me. I tried to get alienne to talk me out of this a few weeks ago, and she's spent the whole time since then trying to talk me into it. The practical and logistical hurdles to starting up a convention from scratch are huge, and I'm far from equipped to deal with all of them. Yes, I'd love to do it. Yes, I am of the opinion that my experience at running the Infamous Brad Parties for which this blog is named would scale up well, that I could handle actually running such a con. Yes, I'm powerfully tempted, because I miss Czarkon and the old Conflation as much as anybody else in this world. This doesn't make it any less of a bad idea.)

(Logistical details: Unless I get up unusually early on Friday, I will probably get there around 9 or so Friday evening. Given that the hotel is an $8 cab ride from my place, I'd be insane to get a room. That means no, I'm not hosting a room party this year; nothing even vaguely related to the theme that I could come up with interested me enough to spend the money or the effort. That means I'll probably sleep in Saturday and be back at the con some time late Saturday afternoon. I will almost certainly not be there on Sunday. I'm not bringing anything that doesn't fit in my pockets, and I'm probably not costuming for it, or at most, not much. I didn't even bother to get the tux dry-cleaned in time. Hope to see you there.)

Yesterday, I wrote at painstaking length about why Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa sucks. Or, to be precise, I wrote at substantial and vituperative length about the parts of it that I think suck, almost all of which things it unimaginatively copied from earlier MMOs, things that I've seen done better. Plus, as it turns out, one whole new reason to hate it, namely a level of displayed contempt for its paying customers never before seen in the industry. So after all of that, it must have left you baffled, trying to imagine why I wrapped up by saying that I voluntarily paid full price for it and am going to pay $14.95 a month for it for as long as it lasts, even if (as I predict) this is "less than one year." But before I can explain that, first, I have to explain three things.

First: It's SF. One of which I mentioned in passing yesterday: despite Phil Foglio's famous observation roughly a quarter-century ago that (in gaming terms) there is no difference between science fiction and fantasy, I keep wishing devoutly for a science fiction MMO to play, a science fiction world to spend my spare time in instead of the same generic fantasy world that almost every MMO in the history of the industry has used. I prefer science fiction to fantasy in general, but my reasons go deeper than that. For one thing, it really is the same old world, only barely redressed. Different campaign settings, but the basic rules, races, character classes, economy, jargon, and setting have not changed since Gary Gygax wrote it all up as "Chainmail: Fantasy Supplement" way the hell back in 1971. See, here's the thing about that: I started playing Dungeons and Dragons in 1978. I could not possibly be more bored with the D&D universe, and could not be forced at gunpoint to play in one more D&D campaign, online or pen-and-paper, period. I got sick and tired of the D&D universe before half of you were born.

Nor does it improve my opinion of almost every MMO that one of the aspects of D&D they all rip off is that they are almost all, with so few exceptions as to be hardly note-worthy, set in a thinly redressed early medieval northern Europe. That is not merely a profoundly uninteresting time period for me, it's one I find actively unpleasant to be exposed to. (The real reason I dropped out of the SCA after too many years is that, after a certain amount of time, no amount of dressing up in funny clothes, getting drunk, and singing silly songs can make up for my sheer loathing for the idea of wanting to live in the 8th or 9th century.) So for the love of the Gods and all holy things, I pray almost daily for some 3D MMO universe that isn't set in some variation on the European dark ages. It's taken me years to come to terms with the fact that so many of you can only imagine a magical universe being set back then, to get it pounded through my head that since that's when all the fairy tales are set, that's what you all think of as the last magical time in human history. OK, OK. But if we have to play a fantasy game, can we just once in a rare while play in a world in which magic continued into the early industrial age, like Girl Genius? Or one in which it continued into the 1960s, like Lord Darcy? Or into the present, like Borderlands and War for the Oaks? Or into the far future, like Warhammer 40k?

Second: I hate getting personally shot at. That's a strange thing to say for someone who plays MMOs, but it's true: I pick my character class based on my ability to stay out of stabbity-stabbity range of rude people and nasty things that want to poke holes in me, at least as much as possible. That means one of two things, almost without exceptions: summoner, or sniper. Now, never ever ever in MMO history has any game done a summoner class as well as the Mastermind character class in City of Villains. That's one of the things that keeps me going, and that makes it so hard for me to consider going back over to the hero side of that game. But I've played a ton of MMOs, and no MMO, not even City of Whatever, not even my previous high-water mark for sniper action Neocron, has ever put snipers into the game so well. If you're going to send my character out to blow the enemy away, I can think of no better way to do it than with a really good rifle, a scope, a tall place to hide, a willingness to evacuate when the enemy figures out where am I, and a spot of patience. Heck, back when I was playing paintball, that's even how I played that. And even before getting to the specialty character class Sniper in Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa, just with Firearms level 5 and an ordinary hunting rifle, I was having the time of my life blowing enemies away before they even knew where I was. More on that in a second. Because before I can give you any more about the good parts of RGTR, I can tell my personal stories with it a lot easier if I first explain a bit of the game's story, what the game's about.

Third: Here's their story. And I warn you, it's a bit of a cliché, itself, even beyond the requirements of the MMO genre. Don't judge it too harshly for being a cliché here, though. Focus groups and user surveys have made it clear that one of the things that keeps drawing people to the D&D ripoff games is that all they have to know is their character's species and character class and they instantly know everything they really need to know to get started. They know who they are, they know why they're there, they know who the enemy are, they know (well enough) why they have to kill the enemy, and they know how to act and how to talk while they're doing it. That's important in a roleplaying game, especially an online one. One of the things that really held back Anarchy Online is that, to understand who your character is and why you fight, you really do need to read an entire separately-published 330 page novel, game designer Ragnar Tørnquist's Prophet Without Honor. Which is, oddly enough, a very good book, but not one anybody other than AO purists has ever even heard of. City of Heroes suffers from some of the same problem on a lesser scale. Sure, it benefits from the fact that superheroes and supervillains need very little explanation, but to actually play in character and understand what's going on around you in that universe, you almost have to have read two whole separately-published novels' worth of backstory, or at the very least the roughly 30 or so page summary that's on the website. Most players just don't want to do that; they want to jump right in and play the game -- and yet still not feel lost and confused while they're doing it. So when I tell you up-front that the backstory all too closely resembles a dumbed-down version of Babylon 5 by way of Stargate the TV series, you may cringe, but sadly, it's an economic reality of the industry that it can't be too clever and still sell at all. So, to get things started, here's the cinematic trailer that you see when you launch the game, and that they use to advertise it:



Basically, before our race evolved sentience (and a few others), the only and original sentient race in our galaxy were a species called the Eloh. They set out to uplift other species as they evolved sentience, to teach them a skill we call Logos that would let them use the power of their minds to control the world and to control technology in powerful but environmentally friendly ways. But one faction of the Eloh, the Neph, have turned to evil, recruited an entire army that we call the Bane (mostly made up of an insectoid species called the Thrax) and are using them to exterminate the rest of the Eloh, and every member of the other three species that the Eloh intervened in: the Foreans, the Brann, and us. We only found out about this in time for our government to use Eloh technology to evacuate everybody the Foreans would take to the Forean homeworld before Earth got hit by a Bane shardship and rendered mostly uninhabitable, and probably mostly uninhabited. And the Foreans were only taking those who could help them fight their own fight against the Bane, soldiers and the Logos-receptive. There are in-game hints that maybe some people on Earth are still fighting, and we may go back to help them in some later expansion to the game, but for now we have to assume that the various military officers and recruits, and psi-sensitives, who evacuated to Foreas are all there is left of the human race, and that that few of us, unfortunately, is too many for the Bane. Join the Allied Free Sentients and fight, or the whole human race dies. (Yeah, I know. Elohim versus nephilim, how original. Bear with me here.)

Aside: One thing Richard Garriott and I have in common. Oh, and one more thing about the game world that will simplify my explanations to come: it will also help if you understand that Richard Garriott was born in 1961, and like me, he obviously grew up on a steady diet of murky, poorly lit, grubby, and morally ambiguous (at best) movies about the Vietnam War. It may be dressed up in microcircuitry, self-repairing armor, computers, heads-up-displays, anti-grav, and the occasional energy weapon, but the combat tactics of RGTR are pure Vietnam War. So are the characterizations and the combat psychology of the war, too. If you had any doubt of that, it goes away when you get to the main base for the human side, Foreas Base in Concordia Divide, and hear the loudspeaker system making sardonic announcements that are pure homage to that Vietnam-era classic TV show, the most popular TV show of his childhood and mine, M*A*S*H. (For example, "Attention, all personnel. Due to conditions beyond our control, we regret to announce that lunch is now being served.")

So, having explained all that, here's what's so cool about RGTR: It feels vividly, intensely real. The graphics are good. The character models range from okay to mostly good enough. The weapons tech and combat physics are very good. The sound effects are very, very good, far better than City of Heroes (which really only knows four noises: smack, bang, whoosh, and the grating of fingernails on a chalkboard). But what kept taking me into the game, that kept immersing me in it even against my will the whole time I was playing, was two things. First of all, the incredibly good use of 3D sound (this game begs to be played with headphones on and with a good 3D-capable sound card) makes the chaos of a Vietnam-like warzone really vivid. But even more than the sounds of the fighting, it's the amazingly good voice acting, something I've been begging for in MMOs since the genre began. I haven't heard voice acting this good, or sound effects this good either for that matter, since a "little" game called Starcraft. And I don't make that comparison lightly. In fact, I'll go further than that. Blizzard keeps saying over and over again that, no matter how much demand there is out there, they are probably never going to make World of Starcraft, a Starcraft MMO. And every time they say that, the world's vast Starcraft fan base, that vast majority of us who consider Starcraft to be the Casablanca of computer games, groan. Well, guess what? This game deserves to be called World of Starcraft. OK, the Eloh aren't the Protoss, and the Thrax aren't quite the Zerg, for all that comparisons to both could be fairly made. But boy, do you really end up feeling like you're surrounded by Terran Marines in this game!

Three examples, two short, one longer. The first short example: Very early, within minutes if you skip the tutorial, you get sent to a place the Foreans called Lower Eloh Creek. In an attempt to cut off Terran supply lines, the Thrax have airlifted in a ton of troops to a creek near Aria Das, one of the main drop-ship landing points. They were too badly surrounded to last long, but they held the ground well enough for their engineers to dig in, setting up fortifications, some kind of mineral extraction biotech facilities that keep self-repairing, and more importantly a series of bunkers for snipers that are uncomfortably close to Aria Das. You get sent in to help the troops on the front line clear the snipers out of that bunker. This is no small feat, not least of which because the determined Bane keep helicoptering in more Thrax troops, dropping fire teams wherever they can find a clear spot on the battlefield. Fortunately for you, there are also a ton of non-player-character Terran soldiers there, too, to help you. And as you're creeping along Eloh Creek, looking for a good spot to sneak up the bank on the Bane side to clear those bunkers, the air above you is constantly full of bullets and beams going both directions, and both banks echo with the angry shouts and pained yells of fighting men and women from both sides. And rotten game mechanics or not, I couldn't help feeling like I was really there. Honestly, the intensity of it and the realism of it can't be conveyed until you've played it with headphones on, even if you've seen gameplay demo video.

By the way, does it make me a bad person that I think it's endearing that the Terran forces already have an insulting ethnic name for the Thrax? They call every Thrax soldier "Crusty," and now, so do I.

The longer story: It's a bit later in my career, level 16ish, right after Ranger training and my first set of Stealth armor. About halfway between Foreas Base and Bane Forward Command, there's a bowl-shaped valley that's been fought over so long that no green thing lives there. One of the things that's disquieting our troops is a rumor that some humans have defected to the Bane. Fortunately, one of the research scientists in the area has read reports from us grunts about the Bane using cybernetic implants to reanimate Forean corpses, both as disposable ground troops and for psychological advantage like this. She wants proof, so she sends me to that spot on the front line, where at least a couple of times a day a popular sergeant shows up for the Bane, constantly coming back no matter how much worse for wear. This is that valley, as seen from a shallow creek bed that leads there from the Western Trenches waypoint:

( LJ-cut for image size, but seeing them will save me a ton of text description. )

That guy in the foreground of both pictures? That's me, Infamousbrad Hickson. (The last name "Hicks" was taken. As were "Brad" and "Bradley," more's the pity.) That tiny little figure in the center of the 2nd picture? That's a Thrax Infantry PFC who is about to have a really bad day. My armor gives me enough stealth, and that rocky outcropping gives me enough cover, that almost nobody on the valley floor can see me up there. I bring the gun up, check the targeting reticle in my HUD: about 60 yards, perfect for the lightning rifle I'm using. Breath, Aim, Slack, Shoot: 3 shots in, and the Thrax's personal force field is shredded, as is most of the Thrax. By the time Crusty has figured out where the shots are coming from, he has just barely enough time to fire one wild shot at me, mostly blocked by that rocky outcropping and way outside of his optimum firing range, or to run for cover, none of which is close enough to do him any good, before that 4th shot blows him to wherever dead Thrax go. If he even manages to hit, what gets past the cover of that rocky outcropping will be easily absorbed by my armor. Odds are, even other Thrax nearby won't see where the shot came from. So I move to another part of the top of the hill, pick another spot with a clear sight line to any solitary Thrax or small Thrax fire team trying to move up the valley. Periodically the Bane send in automated air cover to clear the valley floor. But it flies below my hilltop, and isn't looking up. So I switch the rifle from lightning to EMP. Breath, Aim, Slack, Shoot: six or 8 rounds later, while it's still struggling to find me, then climb above me, and before it can return fire, boom, one dead robot aircraft. Unfortunately for me, reanimated human soldiers' corpses (including eventually the guy I'm looking for) do appear on various spots along the hill, near enough to the top to see through my stealth. And are right on top of me. No problem: throw the rifle over my shoulder with my left hand, grab the pistol on my hip with my right hand, and blaze away. When the corpse falls, sneak down to where it is, pry the reanimation chip out of it, sneak back up to the top. And the whole time, keep my ears open for the random mortar shots that one or both sides periodically drop onto the hilltop. (As the old saying goes, "Incoming artillery has the right of way.") I'm having so much fun that I'm almost disappointed when one of the zombies does turn out to be Rotting Sal and it's time to go report in. But over the next couple of days, I come back a couple of more times to make Crusty's life miserable.

(Game mechanics note, about the mention of "cover" above: one of the things that RGTR does very, very well is factor in cover. The game instantly calculates what percentage of the target is visible to the shooter, and applies that percentage as a damage modifier. Sure, an accuracy modifier would be more realistic, but the randomness of that would make it a lot more frustrating to the players. It also gives substantial accuracy bonuses and damage bonuses for kneeling to steady the weapon, and for taking roughly a second to sight in before pulling the trigger the first time. I'm not going to say that there's never a time for spray-and-pray, suppressive fire, or blazing away from the hip. But if you have the forethought and skill to plan your shots like a sniper, it really pays off. However, the AI really is amazingly smart by computer-game standards, and NPCs will scramble for cover, or circle around to flank you to deny you cover.)

Third story: I'm at the hydroelectric plant in Concordia Divide, talking to an officer there. The hydro plant comes under frequent attack by anywhere from a half-dozen to a dozen or so Bane at a time, usually no problem for the NPCs and turrets at all three force-field protected gates. But suddenly the siren goes off that tells me that one of the forcefields is down. I look up, and at the far end of the works from where I'm at sure enough the forcefield on that gate is down, and what looks remarkably like All The Bane In The World are pouring through. (This happens periodically, at least once a day or so.) Now, escape is an option for me. There's a teleporter pad 10 yards to my left, and another gate out onto the battlefield 5 yards behind me. But I also see at least two other player characters rushing toward the fight, and by good luck this happens to also be one of the times that the AFS are airlifting in NPC relief troops. So instead, I drop down behind a piece of equipment, about 50 or 60 yards from the far gate, and start sighting in. Standing head and shoulders above the other Bane is a Kael Private, a giant gorilla kind of thing, massively heavily armored and insanely deadly in hand to hand combat. I know it's going to make trouble for the troops at the gate, not a few of whom are using kinetic-kill rounds that are completely useless against a Kael. So I switch the rifle to laser, Breath, Aim, Slack, Shoot -- four shots later I hear cheering from the far side of the hydro plant as the Kael falls over. By this time, a Thrax Technician has deployed a Shield Drone, and now all of the Thrax down there are immune to most incoming fire. But I flip the rifle over to EMP again, sight in on the Shield Drone: 3 shots later, the battle tide turns in the AFS's favor again. Now, by now the Thrax have figured out that an awful lot of their troubles are coming from the far side of the plant, and I have a rough couple of minutes of sniper duels between me and a couple of Lightbender Private stealth snipers, picking them off as they try to find some place down there to flank me from and get in good shots. But we won. And the whole time, I felt like I really was there, in the middle of an immense army on an alien world, turning the tide for the human side, to the audible gratitude of my own side, against overwhelming odds, and won.

In conclusion? So here's the thing. When the 3-day free trial was over, I was determined to write a very negative review of this incredibly frustrating, horribly arrogant, and painfully unoriginal game and never look back. But those moments stuck with me, those moments where the insanely good over-the-top phenomenal quality voice acting and combat mechanics kept taking me there. And when push came to shove, even if it weren't a science fiction MMO in a field that needs more SF MMOs, I will pay good money for a game that's that vividly and intensely, and almost even exhaustingly, real.