Pulp Sci-Fi Technology

Star Wars (and to a lesser extent Star Trek) are products of their respective eras in regard to the futuristic technology then portray (or don't feature), but both are also probably beholden to their pulp antecedents and the imagine (and failures of imagination) of the authors that wrote them.

While I won't claim to have made an exhaustive study, here are some things I've noticed about the technology of the retro-future, supplemented by things noticed by Marcus L. Rowland in his excellent Forgotten Futures rpg Planets of Peril based on the works of Stanley Weinbaum, and by GURPS Ultratech 2.

• Radium: Radium seems almost sort of unobtanium in a lot of old stories, an is imbued with uses and properties it doesn't really possess in real life. This goes along with...
• Radiation: Various sorts of radiation (or even sometimes a vaguer property called "vibration" of matter or energy) can do almost magical things. This continues in science fiction, of course, but by the Atomic Age the language used to describe it much less mystical.
• Mechanical not Electronic: One can hardly fault writers of the 20s-40s for not including many (or often any) computers in their works, beyond the occasional mechanical brain, but it's interesting how even the electrical devices appear sparingly, outside of things like visiplates/visiphones (visual communication devices). Some more planetary romance leaning authors like Leigh Brackett, tend to describe virtually none of this sort of technology. This has implications we might not think of: Edmond Hamilton's stories for instance have no jail cells with coded keypads or even simply push button keypads like Star Trek. All his futuristic locks seem to require a hand held "vibratory key."
• Planet and ship based: Artificial satellites and space stations are very rare. In fact, I don't think I've read a story written before the 50s that had them.
• Acquired not Synthesized: Many more breakthrough materials or pharmaceuticals are harvested from alien worlds that made in the laboratory. Even breakthrough laboratory discovers often require some exotic "natural" material.
• Solitary Inventor: Great scientific leaps from space travel to super-weapons are typically the province of single geniuses or experimenters, not teams of government or industry-funded scientists. First space travel is almost always mentioned as a work of a sort of Wright Brothers instead of a NASA.
• Atomic Energy: Everything is atomic powered it seems like.
• No TV: I'm sure there are stories that make reference to something like television as an entertainment medium, but it appears in very few stories. 

Wednesday Comics: DC, June 1981 (wk 1 pt 2)

My goal: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! This week, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands around March 5, 1981.

Justice League of America #191: As established in previous issues, Zatanna is losing her powers, so she calls on the Atom or help. Why he was the guy to call, I don't know, but let's just go with it. Suddenly though, all the members of the JLA begin to experience the loss of power. The culprit is Amazo, reactivated against his will by the Key, who's stealing the Leagues energies for his own use and to cure the Key of his freakish dwarf body state. In the end, Zatanna shows compassion and cures the Key with some of her magic. She reveals to the Atom her power loss wasn't caused by the Key and is apparently permanent. 

Not a bad issue, but it leaves me with the impression the whole "Zatanna is losing her powers" bit was all just a means by which Conway could reduce her powers, perhaps because he buys into the whole "magic is too powerful because it can do anything" idea that shows up in comics fandom and writers from time to time.

New Teen Titans #8: This is a Claremontian :each character does their own thing and deals with their own stuff" slice of life sort of issue. Starfire starts modeling jeans with Donna Troy as her photographer, and we meet Donna's beau, Terry. Cyborg meets some kids with prosthetics at the park and plays ball them. It's all pretty well-paced and well-done. With this sort of story, I can see how New Teen Titans developed the reputation it did for being different and better than a lot of comics in its era. This sort of thing is common place now, and it devolved into soap opera at best and treading water at worst in X-men from late era Claremont on. But this is 1981 not '91, and it feels fairly fresh. 

Secrets of Haunted House #37: The cover story by Wessler, von Eeden and Smith has a tipi-dwelling (in the modern day) Native American shaman using magic to turn the tables on an unscrupulous developer bent on murder. A bit better is the story by Charlie Seegar and Barretto/Colletta where a conman charms an old widow but not her adopted daughter. In the end, he discovers his bride is really a pet canary transformed into the semblance of the demonic young girl's deceased caregiver. The girl transforms the conman into a bird, too, so he can be with his new wife forever. In a "weird western" tale by Kashdan and Estrada, a frontier doctor removes a bullet from the arm of a young man, only to find it's silver, and he's saved the life of a werewolf.  

In the Mister E story by Rozakis and Spiegle, Kelly returns to the Old Country to help out her aunt who has been thrown in a psychiatric hospital. Mister E mysteriously shows up there, too. It's a good thing, because Kelly's aunt isn't mentally ill, she's being menaced by a leprechaun. Mister E threatens the little guy into leaving her alone.

Superman #360: Yet another story with another group of aliens that we will never see again making an attack on Superman in some indirect way. In this case, making Clark Kent forget he and Superman are the same person. How long has it been since we've have a bona fide super-villain in this title? Either the writers or editorial think Supes' rogues gallery is played, which may be a defensible point, but they seldom replace it with anything worthwhile. I feel like Action is the better of the Superman titles at this time, though neither are spectacular.

The backup is by Rozakis and Saviuk/Colletta is a World of Krypton story. WoK stories have a sort of charm because they tend to accentuate what a crazy place Krypton was. In this story a boy and his father find an odd stone in a river that gives off energy. Unfortunately, it's getting this energy from the sun, absorbing all the sunlight in the day and releasing energy at night. It's destroying Krypton's ecosystem and the Kryptonians don't know how to stop it, until the kid that found it just feeds it to a metal-eater beast in the forest.

Tales of the Green Lantern Corps #2: "Defeat" is an apt title for this Empire Strikes Back installment of the limited series that sees the Guardians defeated by Nekron and the Corps, despite doing well against Krona's troops, defeated by the Maltusian himself. Hal Jordan is the last to fall, but it all seems pretty hopeless. The Barr plot and Wein script seems much more modern than a lot of stuff from this era. The realm of Nekron is reached through a fleshy hole or necrotic lesion in the universe. Staton's design or Nekron is kind of modern, too.

Weird War Tales #100: The main event of this issue is the Creature Commandos getting a little War That Time Forgot action, courtesy of Barr and Hall/Ordway. It's an action-packed tale that reveals the some total of Hall's knowledge of dinosaurs likely comes from King Kong (1933). Their orange and magenta hides probably don't help verisimilitude either. Anyway, in the end, the Creature Commandos act to stop the U.S. military from exploiting the dinos like they've been exploited. 

There's a silly one-pager by Snyder and von Eeden/Breeding where a solider cracks under pressure, only to be revealed to be an actor on a set. The last story is a pretty good one by John David Warner and Vic Catan Jr. In feudal Japan, two scavengers are robbing the dead on battlefields which earns them the ire of Death and a samurai army of living dead. They are pressed into service, but manage to make it out alive. No sooner do they promise not to meddle in the affairs of the Spirit Realms again than they are planning to hock stolen demon masks. 

Wonder Woman #280: I was wondering where Conway was going with the cult storyline, but apparently he was going to appearances by Klarion, Witch-Boy and the Demon, so I'm satisfied with that. Klarion is behind the cult, to what purpose we don't yet know, but clearly he wasn't giving the head of the Delphi Group use of his legs again out of a sense of altruism. Wonder Woman, who realizes she's out of her depth after fighting a demon, gets help from Mother Juju. She refers the Amazon Princess to Jason Blood, but it's the Demon who's eager to take on the forces of darkness. 

In the backup, Huntress has her showdown with Lionmane. The Huntress triumphs in the end, and we learn she had a score to settle since Lionmane had given her mother, Catwoman, a severe beating years ago. While all this is going on, the Huntress's love interest falls victim to the Joker.

World's Finest Comics #269: This issue is pretty good. Conway and Buckler/McLaughlin have Batman buried alive by a crook, and Superman and Robin must race against time to save him--or to show up after he saved himself, because he's Batman. Batman's escape is well done, but Superman's power gets a bit diminished to make the story work. Haney and von Eeden/Breeding have Oliver Queen chasing down a lead about drug smugglers on a fictional Caribbean island, and Green Arrow becomes involved after saving an attractive woman (obviously very attractive, Arrow keeps talking and thinking about it for several pages) from a crook. It turns out the woman's ploy to save her brother is a con, but GA was never fooled. Rozakis, Saviuk and Rodriguez deliver the best segment so far in this Hawkman/Hawkgirl arc, as the winged wonders return to Thanagar so Shayera can save Katar from the bite of a mutant insect in the not very good early parts of this story. The Shazam! family segment by Bridwell and Newton/Adkins has Captain Marvel Jr. defeating Sabbac. 

The Red Tornado story is probably the issue's low point, but even that isn't so low. RT is looking for a tool he needs to repair himself so he doesn't fall apart and winds up saving the owner of an electronic store who is being held captive by Marxist terrorists led by Madame Redclaw (who must have inspired the DCAU villain Red Claw). Conway has this goofy thing of having the terrorists make Communist revolutionary sort of statements, only to have them immediately shown to be wrong. 

A Game I Would Like to Have Seen

Logan's Run may have come out a bit too early for an rpg tie-in, but it seems like the sort of thing FASA would have got a hold of if anybody did.

I think the setting has a lot of rpg potential, particularly as developed in the TV series.

Weird Revisited: The Life Aquatic

This post first appeared in 2011...

A merman and his landwoman bride.  Grand Lludd, 5825.

In the waters west of Ibernia, ship passengers occasionally glimpse and wonder at light in the depths. These are the lights Undersea, municipality of the mer-folk. Part of the empire of Grand Lludd, the citizens of Undersea have never been Her Preserved Majesty’s most loyal servants. Only the threat of submarine bombardment has stifled open rebellion at times. Still, in these hard years following the Great War, land and sea need each other too much for such squabbles.

The mer-folk are not to be confused with mermaids, despite similarity in names. Those half-fish creatures (and wholly nonhuman, whatever their appearance) are more akin to faerie. Mer-folk look, for the most part, like surface humans except for a slight bluish tint to their skin, eyes a little larger than usual, webbed hands, and a slight tendency to barrel-chestedness--though its common for portrayals of them in art to exaggerate their inhumanness. So little apparent difference for beings naturally inhabiting great depths and pressures hint at the subtle magics that have been used to adapt them to a submarine life. Scientists suggest this points to them being an engineered race, perhaps derived from Meropian stock. Mer-folk find this whole line of speculation dull, and are largely unconcerned with their own origins.

Perhaps its this lack of curiosity, among other traits, that has led to the common Lluddish stereotype of Mer-folk as thickwitted. They're also held to quick-tempered and lascivious (a judgement perhaps derived from their indifferent attitude toward clothing--at least in the seas). Mer-folk don’t drink (at least not in their usual habitat) but their men tend to enjoy licking certain sea slugs for an intoxicant effect, and singing (it can be called that) gurgling, warbling shanties, while their women perform suggestive, water ballet-like dances.

Though they are limited in the areas of metallurgy, chemcal, and alchemical sciences, the mer-folk are not utter primitives.  They use magic to shape stone for buildings, and have either used animal husbandry or magic to enhance the abilities of sea creatures for their use.  The lantern jellyfish sometimes seen in aquariums are best known example. 

On land, mer-folk must wear something like reverse diving suits--pressurized suits filled with water--unless they have access to magic aid. They're able to breath air, but the exertion quickly tires them and it's uncomfortable for more than a half-hour or so. Their skin quickly dries out in air, as well.  The use of heavy suits isn't as cumbersome as it might seem as mer-folk are stronger than a surface human of comparable size.

There are some mer-folk enclaves in the New World. The largest of these are in New Lludd, there mer-folk are involved in fishing, and the Southron coast where they engage in sponge harvesting, as well.

Constraints & Creativity

Occasionally, after I do a post on science fiction limited only to the Solar System or single country settings or the like, I get somebody commenting that seems too small or too limiting a space for them. In a similar vein, I feel like settings or games that provide a lot of options for PCs are lauded whereas limiting options for characters is viewed in a negative light.

People are free to like what they like, of course, but I don't agree with these complaints for the most part. Every setting or game excludes as many things (or more) as it includes in how it defines itself. Even kitchen sink or gonzo settings have parameters and boundaries. Game systems themselves constrain with their rules. 

There is obviously some give and take here. A GM who wants to run a D&D setting with more than the usual restrictions on options should communicate that and probably the reasons for it before hand, but armed with that knowledge, players ought to trying to make up characters that would fit the setting and negotiating with the GM regarding parameters. Honestly, I feel like I've had just as much fun playing a well-defined pregen than making up my own character, at least for short-run games.

I'm hardly the first to note this, but it seems to me constraint can stimulate creativity. It's true on the player side, but I think it's also true on the GM/setting creation side. With an large number of worlds to play with, it should be a trivial matter coming up with interesting planets, but the Star Wars franchise seems to have a tough time showing us anything but the same three or four biomes over and over. And most of those are are one biome: deserts, but perhaps that's a different problem. I don't think Star Wars is the only franchise that lets quantity substitute for quality. It's easy to do.

But If you've got a smaller number of worlds like a solar system, you've got to make every one count, and you might well use each one to it's fullest. Maybe they aren't all single biome planets, but even if they are, you would tend to have them have different sorts of jungle or different sorts of deserts to get the most out of it. All of that is creativity you would never have been forced to exercise if you had a bunch of planets to spare.

Maybe its just me. Try it for yourself, by self-imposing some constraints you wouldn't normal give yourself in worldbuilding or adventure design and see how it turns out.

Wednesday Comics: DC, June 1981 (wk 1 pt 1)

I'm reading DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! I'm a couple of days later than my usual Wednesday post, but I'm looking at the comics at newsstands on the week of  March 5, 1981. 

Batman #336: After Wolfman's lackluster al Ghul arc, Rozakis/Thomas bring us a much better done-in-one story with Garcia-Lopez art to sweeten the deal. The obscure 60s villain, the Monarch of Menace, has convinced various C-grade Gotham criminals (several other minor characters from over the years) that he has captured Batman and they should pay him to keep the Caped Crusader locked up. Batman, as we know, has only been out of the country, and now that he's back he starts taking these mooks down, including the Monarch. This reminded me a bit of Mike Barr/Alan Davis run on Detective after Crisis, which I liked a lot.

DC Comics Presents #34: The Superman/Marvel Family team-up continues, and in true Roy Thomas fashion we even get obscure Marvel family members like Uncle Marvel and Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. No Hilly-billy Marvel, though. Buckler/Giordano might not be the go-to team for the Marvel Family, but they make it work. The team-up of Mxyzptlk, Mr. Mind, and King Kull  have managed to take out the wizard Shazam and make King Kull more powerful than all the Marvels and Superman, but their alliance crumbles when the other two have more bloodthirsty aims than Mxy, and being villains, they tend to want to insult each other rather than compromise. A fun issue. Better than the first part.

Flash #298: The storyline with Barry's parents continues from last issue. You know what? Infantino's art of this era is made a lot better by Bob Smith's inks. Central City is being plagued by periods when everything is drained of color. Flash suspects the Rainbow Raider may be responsible, but he's in prison painting away. Shade shows up from Earth-Two to ask for the Flash's help. He reveals that every time Central City goes black and white Keystone City gets much more colorful. The story ends with Rainbow Raider gloating in his thoughts regarding his coming triumph. Also, this issue features two truly creepy panels of Barry's dad grinning like a maniac, and in the second of these he's holding up Flash's costume and saying he knows just how many days the Flash has to live.

The Firestorm backup has him still fighting Multiplex, but since Ronnie was unconscious when Firestorm was formed, Stein is in charge and things don't go so well. Firestorm is captured, but he manages to escape and manipulates power cables to drain Multiplex, causing him to recombine.

Ghosts #101: We get extra Dr. 13 this month to make up for the lack last month, and I have give it to Kupperberg and Bender: it's better than a gladiator's ghost. Thirteen is recovering in the hospital after the events of #99 (which I don't remember him being injured, but ok. The caption says he got there last issue, but he wasn't even in last issue!). Turns out the hospital appears to be haunted by the ghost of a Haitian contractor that died during construction, but of course, Thirteen doesn't believe it. He and an orderly who gives his name as "Mad Dog" are on the case! It involves a Haitian voodoo cabal using a drug to fake heart attacks and make people appear dead, only in the case of this contractor he fell off the roof and actually died. At a crucial moment, his ghost may have save Mad Dog and Thirteen, but of course, Thirteen is unconvinced.

In the last story by Kashdan and Landgraf/Colletta, thieves shoot down a plane with a bazooka to steal the payroll it was carrying. They hide the loot in a cave, but then one of them gets greedy and murders the other. He's chased by the ghost of his former partner until he runs into some cultist types in robes. They force him to participate in a séance where his victim's spirit reveals his guilt. Then they declare him evil incarnate like them and demand he stay. Later a group is taking a guided tour of the Cave of the Cult of Darkness (sure, I guess that could happen.) where the cult supposedly hid out "100 years ago" and is perplexed by an additional skeleton at the cult's table wearing modern clothes.

G.I. Combat #230: The Haunted Tank stories this issue may be worse than usual. One has Kanigher making his already problematic romanticism worse with a story about a battle of "brave banners" where a German tank commander flying the Nazi flag goes up against the Haunted Tank and its stars and bars. The other yarn is actually not bad, it's just completely ridiculous. The crew leaves the European Theater on a special mission to South East Asia where they join up with some Chinese fighters. They wind up having to use a gunboat like an improvised tank, rolling it along a track of logs and--well, I think that's enough on that, really. Read it yourself if you want more.

The O.S.S. story opens with the replacement of a German officer with a duplicate having gone off successfully. The only problem is the O.S.S. has sent an assassin to kill that officer, and he won't know about the switch! Before the assassin can strike, the real officer escapes. The assassin faces the man and his doppelgänger, not knowing which is which. The French agent saves himself by saying a Hebrew prayer for the dead. The Women At War segment by Laurie and Vicatan has a nurse thrown off a torpedoed troop ship pulling some soldiers into a raft, fighting off a shark attack, then diving to throw a grenade into a Japanese sub's torpedo tube. In a story by Newman and Matucenio, an Italian American G.I. gets to visit the village where he was born and help them fight off the Germans. It's interesting  that the period these war comics stories tend to take place in obscures the fact Italy was an Axis power. They aren't necessarily inaccurate in their portrayal, necessarily, but reading them you  just never know. Kashdan and Henson round out the issue with a short, goofy story about a entomologically obsessed G.I. whose obsession saves his sergeant's life.

Jonah Hex #48: Hex and his bride are really making a go of the farm life and have just gotten in their corn crop in for market, but Hex is careless with a still-burning cigarillo. The crop and their barn go up in flames. In order to get the money they need to pay their mortgage, Hex returns to bounty hunting, but lies to Mei Ling about what he is going to do. Her anger at him is preempted by her finding out she is pregnant. Their disagreements forestalled once again, they vow to make it work.

In the backup, we get Bat Lash by Wein and Spiegle, and it's a nice little story. Bat Lash wins the deed to a social club in New Orleans in a crooked (though he doesn't know it) poker game on a riverboat headed down the Mississippi. The man who had tried to fix the game to win that deed sends men to kill Bat to get it. He outsmarts them, but the lady dealer from the poker game suggests a romantic interlude which Bat Lash is quite willing to indulge in--right before she steals the deed and pushes him off the boat.

A Decade of Weird Adventures

I realized this past weekend that I had missed Weird Adventures' tenth anniversary on December 15, 2021. We are also not too far away from the twelfth anniversary of my introduction of the City on my blog on April 18, 2010.

Blogging about that setting was where my blog really took off, to the extend that it did. While Strange Stars eventually proved to be the more popular setting, at least in terms of sales, I've always felt like Weird Adventures was the more unique setting. While Bloodshadows had been around since 1994 with a combination of high fantasy and noir,  I think Weird Adventures works I bit differently, drawing form not just surface level noir or pulp conceits, but a whole host of early to mid-20th Century pop cultural material. Weird Adventures could sort of do Cast A Deadly Spell, but it's just as much Thimble Theater and Wellman's Silver John stories and American folk- and fakelore--plus whatever period pop cultural ephemera I came across at the moment.

In the past few years, I've been recycling some older posts on my blog, but I've mostly been avoiding Weird Adventures posts because the book exists and an index linked from the blog main page. I think I will start revisiting some of my favorite posts from that series, though, particularly ones with material that didn't make it into the book.