New D&D blog post: magic and tech

Some people say that fantasy worlds with magic wouldn't develop technology.

I say that's dumb.

Ex Machina and a personal revelation about worldbuilding

I watched Ex Machina tonight. It was extremely well put together and had great characters and moments, but I didn't really like it. I couldn't put my finger on why until I had a sort of mini-epiphany and learned something about myself. (I've had a few of these in the last couple of years, maybe I'll write more about them).

Spoiler alert, this post isn't actually really about Ex Machina, so don't expect a review.

I've been aware for quite some time that I prefer fiction with an element of the fantastic - something you don't see in the real world. Most often that means science fiction, but also some absurdist comedy (like Airplane, Police Squad, or Hot Fuzz). I was never really drawn to fantasy, though. There are a couple of exceptions - I can't not like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - but as a general rule, not too into fantasy.

A lot of fantasy strikes me as generic. The same magic, the same medieval Europe style, the same creatures, the same elves and dwarves and orcs. It's the main reason I didn't like Dragon Age: Origins - a third of it felt generic, and half felt like it was trying to put its own spin on standard fantasy but not going far enough.

Stay with me, I promise this is going somewhere.

Despite having little interest in fantasy, I love D&D. Not the pre-built adventures and worlds, though - I make my own. I love coming up with or mashing together ideas, building a world, and exploring the implications and consequences of the setting.

So now we're getting around to it. Ex Machina has an excellent story and characters, but it has no worldbuilding. We get in-depth character studies, revealing personalities and motivations and emotions, but it's all set in the real world, and we don't get to see the implications or consequences of the events and decisions. And I think that's what bugs me. I love clever, original worlds, and I love examining the philosophies and differences and choices that emerge from these unique places and situations. That's why, the only times I have used pre-existing D&D settings, I tinker with them and change things to put a new spin on the world and see what happens.

Long and meandering story short, that's why I didn't love Ex Machina.

Lockstep

Apparently I'm on a sci-fi book binge all of a sudden. I blame birthday gifts.

Second book is Karl Schroeder's Lockstep. I love the worlbuilding, but the actual story has a lot of bits that come off as "generic young adult dystopia".

The core world idea is that there are about 70,000 starless planets between Earth and Alpha Centauri that run on a lockstep cycle. The entire population hibernates for (on some planets) thirty years, then wakes up for a month to do normal life things, then hibernates again. This allows decades for robots to harvest, manufacture, and from the humans' perspective, you go to sleep for a night and suddenly you have thirty years worth of resources to trade or spend. 

There's also the idea of stowaways or pirates or just regular people who are exploiting or not participating in the lockstep cycle - they either don't hibernate, or deliberately offset their pace. To people who don't hibernate, they're living normal lives, while locksteppers seem to age at a thirtieth (or less) of the normal rate.

That's all awesome. Fantastic ideas. Something I've never seen before, but is also a great, logical way for a huge non-lightspeed space empire to function.

The problem is when the book gets bogged down in stock-standard YA dystopia tropes, the big one being the cartoonishly evil corporate monopoly empire opposed by the pure-hearted poor folks.

But that's just a trick! The book only makes me think it's generic YA dystopia early on because the main character, Toby, has been thrown into a world he doesn't understand and everyone's trying to find a way to explain fourteen thousand years of civilization in a way that won't blow up his brain. So the story turns out to be much more interesting than I initially expected in my moments of eye-rolling.

That said, the romance subplot does feel a little shoehorned. But more importantly, I'm a little disappointed that the lockstep concept wasn't as fully explored as I would have liked. There are some ideas that are touched on but not expanded, such as the idea of differently-paced locksteps raiding each other, non-locksteps raiding locksteps, and entire civilizations growing and dying in the span of what feels like a few years to the locksteppers.

So now I'm totally thinking I'll steal the lockstep civilization idea for a D&D game. If I want to go with a fantasy setting, then it can be a difficult, restricted spell or ritual instead of tech-based. Gonna have to put some thought into this.

The Andromeda Strain

Finally read Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain for the first time today on the bus back to Toronto. Blazed though it in three hours since the science was pretty easy for me to pick up due to a combination of a couple of years of university-level science classes and the book having been written in the late sixties.

So, overall, pretty great. I especially liked the "spoilers" the book kept feeding me - the science team tries something, and the book explains the error in judgment they just made and ominously calls it a big mistake.

Spoilers ahead.

Personal blag

I've been running Post-Launch Reviews and D4sign for a while now. Every so often I have some thought or another that I want to write down, and never do because I don't really have a good place to do it. 

Well THIS ENDS TODAY!

So this is just gonna be random stuff. Thoughts on books or movies, links to my other blog posts, maybe photos. I don't know. Things. We'll see.