My “I Read This” List for 2019

I finished reading 47 books this year. That’s only a little under my annual average, but it feels padded by a few children’s books, some zines and a few essays. Not reflected in this list is the time I spent reading parts of a couple large books I have been making slow progress in and haven’t finished. I’ll get them finished eventually. One of my goals for the year was to read more books by women. I have 18 on my list, which isn’t even half, but it is more than last year. My top five of the year, in no particular order, are:

Barbara Hambly – The Silicon Mage – This is part two of the series. I read the first one years ago and finally read the other two. The thing I liked most about this book was the writing about two of the secondary characters. She is a noblewoman who secretly trained to be a warrior before her arranged marriage to the land’s second most prominent noble. He’s a mage-born with almost no power so he had to settle for being a body guard to wizards. The are united by their longing for some other life impossible for them to have. It struck me as better exploration of character then I usually read in fantasy books. Also, the main plot of the book about a wizard trying to use computers to gain immortality is pretty cool too.

Patricia McMillan – Marina and Lee – I read a bunch of books over the last two years about the events surrounding Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. This wasn’t the absolute best one, but I love how McMillan explored the story through interviews with Marina Oswald about her life with this infamous man. I particularly liked the chapters about life in the Soviet Union. Whatever else may have been going on, McMillan presents a strong through-line which explains Lee’s defection, his haphazard activism, and his violence all the way through his death.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale - Art Speigelman – This is a classic for a reason. What Speigelman was able to do to tell both his father’s story of life in Poland during the Holocaust and to explore his own relationship with his father is stunning. And he’s done it all with little pictures of mice and cats! This is comics at its best.

Rachel Carson – Silent Spring – Another classic long on my list. It makes it on the best list for it’s importance and legacy. It’s odd to read it now because many of the points she makes about the dangers of untargeted spraying via airplane and “bio-accumulation” of toxins are things I’ve known about since grade school. But that’s the whole point. This is the book which first popularized the idea that more chemicals may not always be better. Carson’s writing is why twenty years later I grew up reading about these ideas in Ranger Rick and Boy’s Life magazines.

A Primate's Memoir – Robert M. Sapolsky – This was one of the most emotional and affecting books I have ever read. Sapolsky is a scientist who has measured stress hormones in baboons as a way to study the impact on humans from the stresses of our social systems. This is not a book of his research, but a memoir of his experiences in East Africa as a younger man. The way he writes about visiting villages, climbing mountains, seeing his baboons roll through the generations is incredible. He made me feel the wonder and horror of the things he saw in a way which I rarely get from travel writing and non-fiction. A triumph of words.

Honorable mentions for this year are Into the Wyrd and Wild, written and (mostly) drawn by Charles Ferguson-Avery. I’d say nice things about this creepy forest supplement to roleplaying games even if I didn’t know him. I also finished book twelve of The History of Middle-earth. It’s been at least 18 years of my life getting through that series (savoring it, not struggling), and now I have that feather in my cap.

The 2019 List:
A+Plus #1-5 - Kevin Siembieda & Alex Marciniszyn, eds. [comics]
Rachel Held Evans - A Year of Biblical Womanhood
JK Rowling - The Tales of Beedle the Bard
Heroic Dark - Dustin DePenning [RPG]
Lee Harvey Oswald as I Knew Him - George de Mohrenschildt
Sarah Elisabeth Orr - Beautiful and Terrible: Women and Power in Early Science Fiction
Barbara Hambly - The Silicon Mage
Hiroko Yoda & Matt Alt - Ninja Attack!
Priscilla McMillan - Marina and Lee
Caitlín R Kiernan - To Charles Fort, With Love
Into the Wyrd and Wild - Charles Ferguson-Avery [RPG]
Ellen Gunderson Traylor - Noah
Maus: A Survivor's Tale - Art Speigelman [comics]
MetalShark Bro - Walter Ostlie, Bob Frantz and Kevin Cuffe, Chas! Pangburn [comics]
Manjane Satrapi – Persepolis [comics]
Microscope - Ben Robbins [RPG]
Umbrella Academy, Vol 1: Apocalypse Suite - Gerard Way & Gabriel Bá [comics]
Rachel Carson - Silent Spring
The Peoples of Middle Earth (HoME XII) - JRR Tolkien
Summerland: Revised and Expanded Edition - Greg Saunders [RPG]
Gail Simone & Brian Bendis - Birds of Prey (1999-2004) #56-61 [comics]
Barbara Hambly - Dog Wizard
TaoLand #1-5 - Jeff Amano [comics]
TaoLand Adventures #1-2 - Jeff Amano [comics]
The World of the Dark Crystal - Brian Froud & JJ Llewellyn
Kids on Bikes - Jon Gilmour & Doug Levandowski [RPG]
Copernicus Jones: Robot Detective #9 - Matt D Wilson, Kevin Warren & Josh Krach [comics]
Sarah Vowell - Assassination Vacation
Cathriona Tobin & Simon Rogers, eds. - Seven Wonders: A Story Games Anthology [RPG]
Barbarella - Jean-Claude Forest, adapted by Kelly Sue DeConnick [comics]
Tales from the Bully Pulpit - Benito Cereno, Graeme MacDonald, Ron Riley & Chad Manion [comics]
A Primate's Memoir - Robert M Sapolsky
Making History: Three One-Session RPGs - Tristan Zimmerman [RPG]
Horrorism #1 - Brendan Carrion
Roquia Hussain - "Sultana's Dream"
Eve Titus - Basil of Baker Street
The Articles of Confederation (1777)
Oh, the Thinks You Can Think - Dr. Seuss
The King's Stilts - Dr. Seuss
The Cat's Quizzer - Dr. Seuss
I Can Lick 30 Tigers Today - Dr. Seuss
Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? - Dr. Seuss
Karen Armstrong - Mohammad: Prophet for Our Time
The Constitution of the United States of America (1787)
The Jewish Bible Quarterly Vol. XXX:3 July-September 2002
Sharon Stiteler - Disapproving Rabbits
Dark Places & Demogorgons – Eric Bloat & Josh Palmer [RPG]

Best of The History of Middle-earth, part 2

This is part two of my count-down of my favorite materials from The History of Middle-earth, the twelve-volume series of drafts, alternate versions and supplemental essays produced by J. R. R. Tolkien about his fantasy world over the course of his life. See part one here.

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V: The Lost Road and Other Writings, Part Three: The Etymologies

This is a essentially a dictionary of every root for the two main versions of Elvish Tolkien created, as they existed just before he began writing The Lord of the Rings, circa 1937. Here is single entry:

ÁLAK- rushing. *álākō rush, rushing flight, wild wind: N alag, rushing, impetuous; alagos storm of wind. Cf. Ancalagon dragon-name [NAK]. Related to LAK.

*alk-wā swan: Q alqa; T alpa; ON alf; Ilk. alch; Dan. ealc. Cf. Alqalonde Swan-road or Swan-haven, city of the Teleri [LOD].

Now, it goes on like this for 65 pages! For those who don’t know anything about the Tolkien canon this is complete gibberish, but like any technical writing, it’s full of information for those who already know. In Noldorin the word for a wind took on the implication of rash action. They named a dragon that! There’s more information about dragons at the root NAK. There are cognate words for “swan” in Qenya, Old Noldorin and Telerin (the languages of the three types of “high” elves), as well as in Ilkorian (eventually to develop into Sindarin) and Danian (spoken by the Green elves).

On one level it is completely ridiculous to make such an exhaustive word list for a set of made up languages. Even move so, because the completed word list quickly became opposite as Tolkien revised the language relationships and rejected the idea of Noldorin as a separate language. As a technical tool for studying Tolkien’s elvish languages, The Etymologies is, sadly, a useless (or at least deeply flawed) document. It represents a single moment in time. The crystallization of the creator’s thoughts into one glorious complete whole before the next moment’s thoughts made it obsolete. This is, in many ways, the story of all the History of Middle-earth documents. So many of them represent searing moments of creativity when Tolkien put everything in is head down in one place. Usually, he moved on to other ideas before he even finished and even when he did finish, he almost always immediately began revisions. His stories where never complete because his world was always changing in his mind. But then, on another level, this is what I love about it. I love to experience these rare moments when he did complete a work, even if he later changed most of it. I appreciate the vicarious joy of creation which must have driven him to just get it all down in some form.

I like to visit The Etymologies and wander through the myths, seeing the tenuous links between dragon names and city names. The implied stories in cross-cultural word play. The story of the world is there in the notes behind the words. It’s a fascinating document. I have even used it to pull together names for characters in roleplaying games. One of my characters had a suit of armor named Alagos, because of The Etymologies.

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III: The Lays of Beleriand, Part Three: The Lay of Leithian

The story of Lúthien and Beren is one of the two “big” stories in The Silmarillion, so it’s no surprise it’s a story Tolkien told several times. I already have one on this list, but The Lay of Leithian deserves the higher spot for its sheer ambition. Over six years in the late ‘20s into the ‘30s he managed to write over 4000 lines of rhyming couplets, telling about 80 percent of the story. Thusly:

But Thingol looked on Lúthien.
“Fairest of Elves! Unhappy Men,
children of little lords and kings
mortal and frail, these fading things,
shall they then look with love on thee?”
his heart within him thought. “I see
they ring,” he said, “O mighty man!
But to win the child of Melian
a father’s deeds shall not avail,
nor thy proud words at which I quail.
A treasure dear I too desire,
but rocks and steel and Morgoth’s fire
from all the power of Elfinesse
do keep the jewel I would possess.
Yet bonds like these I hear thee say
affright thee not. Now go thy way!
Bring me one shinning Silmaril
from Morgoth’s crown, then if she will,
may Lúthien set her hand in thine;
then shalt thou have this jewel of mine.”

It has all the same beats as any over version of the tale, but told in this very particular way. Like all long-form verse, it takes a little bit to get into the flow of it, but once you do, it’s fascinating for being one of the most detailed versions of the story. To me, that’s one of the great things about reading through the HoME books. Works like this poem have blown apart, for me, the authority of the published Silmarillion. That’s not “the real story” and this is some weird verse version of it. No, this is one version of a story which exists in many forms, just as the edited and pasted-together prose version in The Silmarillion is another version of that same story. Reading this, aside from its inherit qualities, contributes to an overall impression that the heroic stories of Tolkien’s First Age really are timeless tales “of old” because they have been told and retold in so many ways. Knowing full well all the versions are by Tolkien himself doesn’t really diminish that impression. At least, not for me.

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VII: The Treason of Isengard, V: Bilbo’s Song at Rivendell: Errantry and Eärendillinwë

I am unsure why this poem speaks to me so much. I think it is more the process of transformation which is revealed in this chapter. Tolkien wrote a quirky poem in the 1930s about a typical Nineteenth Century fairy riding a grasshopper and wooing a butterfly. The poem was developed and published as “Errantry” in a magazine in 1933. Later, during the writing of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien revisited the poem and over several drafts transformed the basic structure into a narrative description of the mariner Eärendil and his final journey into the West to summon the help of the Valar in the final days of the First Age. Many of these iterations are given in full in the book.

To me, this transformation illustrates perfectly part of what Tolkien imagined he was doing. Silly songs about fae dancing in the moonlight which he had grown up with were just the pale and half-forgotten memories of heroic deeds in ancient days. He recast the rhyme “Hey-Diddle-Diddle” as an old Hobbit song, which in turn referred back to the man in the moon from the elvish creation myth. In transforming his own poem “Errantry” into Bilbo’s “Eärendillinwë” – good enough to receive a hearing before the elves of Rivendell – Tolkien is again revealing to us the deeper “truth” behind the “diminished” fairy stories we still tell.

It’s very “meta,” in the modern parlance. He didn’t make it explicit in anything I have read, but it seems Tolkien knew perfectly well what he was doing. This chapter contains excerpts of Tolkien’s writings to others about the link between the poems. In the introduction to a 1962 collection where “Errantry” was republished, he supposed Bilbo must have written the “silly” version earlier before he moved to Rivendell. The chapter ends with some fascinating behind-the-scenes information about the poem. The multiple drafts, the statements of the author, the commentary of the editor to put it all in sequence; together, this is the History series at its best.

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IV: The Shaping of Middle-earth, II: The Earliest ‘Silmarillion’

Tolkien’s natural working method was iterative. He would begin a text, abandoned it, start over creating a more detailed version of the same material, abandon that as well, start over again but with a different voice (perhaps changing from an annal style to a narrative from). The result of this method is many stories get told many times, in various ways, and in various levels of detail. The meeting of Beren and Lúthien, for example, is one of the most-told tales, even making it into The Lord of the Rings. By contrast, some stories were almost never retold – the siege of Gondolin comes to mind. This is why this selection from the late '20s, which Tolkien called “Sketch of the mythology with especial reference to the ‘Children of Húrin’”, is so valuable. It is a continuous narrative of everything from the moment the Valar entered the newly-made world, through the battles of the First Age. This document is not for poetry or clever names or descriptions of throne rooms, it is focused on the big events – who fought whom over what and the outcome. It’s the only time Tolkien wrote the whole thing down. It’s about 30 pages, a mere sketch indeed! But the whole story is there! We get Melkor’s betrayal, the Kinslaying, the building of Nargothrond and Gondolin, the recovery of one Silmaril, the destruction of each elvish refuge, the birth of Elrond, the mission of Eärendil, and the Last Battle. Then we get hints of what will happen in the future when the world will finally be healed from all Melkor’s damage.

It’s a breathless read. It moves. There is such a wide scope to the mythology in Tolkien’s mind, and it’s all there for the reader to see. The way in which legacies and resonances play out over the generations and the ages are clearly on display. This complete mythology would have been amazing to read. That is the bittersweet flip side of so many of the these drafts and preparatory materials. He never managed to set this whole saga down again. He told most of it in various parts, but as he left it and as it was assembled into The Silmarillion, it is difficult or impossible for most people to get a sense of the whole thing. This “sketch” is a complete, focused version and it’s from the author’s hand as well. So go read it!

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IX: Sauron Defeated, Part Two: The Norton Club Papers

My affection for The Norton Club Papers stems from the fact this unfinished work combines most of what I like about the other selections on this “best of” list. The work is, at once, a “meta” joke about Tolkien’s own life and obsessions, it is presented as one of the many “layers” of myth-retelling which Tolkien built into the back-story of how his ancient stories were transmitted down to today, it sits on the boarder between fantasy and “weird fiction”, and its unfinished nature allows me to imagine the shape of what the finished version could have been.

To describe it simply, Papers is the minutes of a literary club at Oxford college. The members are described, their jovial banter is recorded, and their compositions are read into the record. Then one of their number named Lowdham begins to share the ancient language he hears in his dreams. This leads Lowdham and Jeremy, another member of the club, to travel up and down the west coast of Ireland hoping they can “get” a little more of this language which seems to come to them from the sea. Then in waking dreams, they witness the final days of Númenor.

I love both what Papers is and what it is trying to be. Its ambition and execution as a work of fiction is impressive. I think I like it even more to take it as one of Tolkien’s most honestly personal works. He wrote what there is of it in a rush over Christmas break 1945, so it is remarkably consistent in tone and depth. I enjoy that he was able to indulge his penchant for writing dialogue of fussy English people (the over-long early versions of his forward Concerning Hobbits come to mind). This is explicitly drawn from his experience with his own literary club because the first page of the manuscript suggests the Norton Club was modeling itself on The Inklings of old. He writes about what it is like to hang out with other English professors and challenge each other to impossible games like “let’s guess what the language of Atlantis must have been.” We get to be the fly on the wall. I love that through his various characters Tolkien points out his own real influences; various characters make reference to Atlantis, Avalon, St. Brendon and even Lewis’s Numinor as a way to seat Númenor into its literary context. I love the visions Lowdham has and tries to describe to his friends. He tells them of seeing the dome of a particular building at their college at night with a cloud behind it and inexplicably knowing it looked the same at the great temple in the capitol of Númenor after Sauron had initiated human sacrifice as part of worshiping the darkness. To me, this is Tolkien writing of his own experience of having these sort of “knowing” visions which he is trying to capture and understand through his writing. I love that the Papers are dated in the late eighties, meaning Tolkien was essentially imagining people in the future looking back on him and his peers. Everything about the work is odd and oddly personal in a uniquely great way. It is so like and yet also so unlike his other writings. If only he had finished it...

That does it! My ten favorites, ranked. If you have read The Lord of the Rings and crave some more Tolkien, my first recommendation is The Unfinished Tales of Middle-earth and Númenor. If you still want some more Tolkien after that, then come dive into depths of The History of Middle-earth series. You may find this link to What’s in the History of Middle-earth? helpful in finding your own favorite selections. Thank you for reading.

Nerd Level Up

After a good many years of reading one chapter at a time, here and there between other books, and really taking the time to saver them, earlier this year I have finished all twelve volumes of the History of Middle Earth series. This is a collection of most of J.R.R. Tolkien’s previously unpublished manuscripts which relate to Middle Earth, each with detailed notes from his son, literary executor, and fellow Anglo-Saxon professor; Christopher Tolkien. The books were, for me at least, almost always enjoyable to read. Not only do they contain more, or alternate versions of, stories about Hobbits, Elves, “Atlantis” and even tweed-wearing professors, they are full of the younger Tolkien’s personal reflections. He remembers when and where the family moved to align the dates of scraps of material written on the backs of envelopes. He recounts his trials puzzling out his father’s handwriting in decades-old notebooks. He even admits to mistakes he made in assembling The Silmarillion for publication in the 1970s. This is all value added. I get the sense, though he never admits it in the text, this was an important project for Christopher Tolkien precisely because, in a way, he got to go back and live with his father again in such a personal way.

I’d like to say everything was amazing, but it wasn’t. How could it be? A bunch of the material is incomplete or rejected or deemed to not fit into what had already gone before. Even so, there’s a lot I liked. Here are the bottom five of my top ten materials from all twelve volumes.

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VIII: The War of the Ring, Part Three: Minas Tirith, XII: The Last Debate

Volumes VI, VII, VIII and part of IX contain the draft versions of The Lord of the Rings. I do like reading the early versions of the tale where Bilbo’s cousin Bingo meets Trotter, a very well-travelled hobbit, in Bree. Mostly, the draft texts are a curiosity, but some contain interesting details which ended up getting cut. At one stage of writing, there was a scene after the Battle of Pelennore Fields where Gimli, Legolas, Merry and Pippin catch each other up on what happened on their different roads. The story about the Paths of Dead was later moved to its final place in the chapter The Passing of the Grey Company and was shaved down in the process. In the draft version of the chapter, Gimli tells, very briefly, about how they found the body of Baldor son of Brego, one of the early kings of Rohan along the way. He died beside a door he couldn’t open. There isn’t much more said, but Gimli calls it a sight he cannot forget. I feel the same way. For some reason, there’s a deep tragedy in the idea of this person lost in the dark and unable to open a door. Where does the door even lead? Who else was with him? Why did he want to enter the Paths in the first place? So many questions spiral out from these few lines and no answers are given. We are left to fill in the details. It’s classic spooky storytelling. Let the reader think of something, it’ll be worse than whatever the writer could says. There are a lot of moments like this in Tolkien generally, but even more so in the unfinished and draft versions. I think it is where Tolkien is at his best, giving us just enough to feel like there is a bigger world here. It’s the illusion of other vistas behind the vistas.

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X: Morgoth’s Ring, Part Four, Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth

Most of the material in volumes IX, X and XI is from after LotR was written when Tolkien returned to the stories of the First Age. There is an early period before LotR was actually published when he still hoped to have the First Age tales published with The Lord of Rings. There is also a later period after publication when he was still trying to bring all the tales of the First Age into a publishable form and also to make the world consistent with what was now canon in the published text. For example, he tried to re-write the creation myth to account for modern astronomy which, he felt, demanded a round earth from the beginning of the story, rather then a flat world later made round. He also wrote an essay trying to describe, for himself at least, how the Elves actually died and if Glorfindel of Rivendell really could be Glorfindel of Gondolin.

From this same later period comes Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, which translates to The Debate of Finrod and Andreth. This work is set up as a discussion between the Noldo King Finrod Felagund and Andreth, a Wise-woman of the human House of Bëor. She was the great aunt of Beren One-hand. They discuss the different ways they, as the two kinds of Children of Illuvatar, live and die. Athrabeth is, first of all, a very different view of what happened in the First Age – the other tales are mostly heroic tales of battles, magic and daring do. It’s refreshing, in a holistic, medieval way, to think the same guy who died frighting a werewolf in a pit for dude bro honor also had this reasoned discussion with another mature scholar. The Noldor are always supposed to be the “wise” elves as well as the heroic ones, so it’s nice to have a dialogue of that sharing of wisdom.

Aside from being a cool thing to add to the canon, I find Athrabeth fascinating because it puts ideas Tolkien had written about elvish life cycles in other places into the mouth of an elf. Finrod tells Andreth about hröar and fëa, which roughly mean Body and Spirit. These terms, and the concepts Finrod talks about, don’t really show up elsewhere. Similarly, Andreth tells him lore which shows up nowhere else. In ancient times humans met and fell under the power of a horrible being she has come to understand was Morgoth (Sauron’s boss and the original Dark Lord, for those who don’t know). This is, to me, more of Tolkien putting his Catholic faith into his fiction.

What I found so interesting about it, however, is Andreth presents this information as a great shame and something she can barely discuss. Since it shows up no where else, is it really such an important idea for Tolkien that his fantasy humans also had a -capital F- Fall? I get the feeling from reading the Athrabeth, as well as what Tolkien wrote to friends in his letters, that is was an important part of his thinking, at least in later years. His was retelling Christian theology and so a Fall, a period of tension between good and evil, a final battle, and the ultimate removal of humans from the created world are all there; just but recast in fantasy terms. It’s not always so clear when Samwise is reciting Bilbo’s silly song about trolls, but it’s very clear in some other these other works what Tolkien was doing.

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V: The Lost Road and Other Writings, Part One: The Fall of Númenor and The Lost Road, III: The Lost Road

Tolkien was haunted by a tale he could never rightly tell. He tired several times and in different ways to tell the story of the fall of Númenor. Aragorn is descended from the Númenorians and some of his family history is told in The Lord of the Rings. There is the annalistic list Tolkien prepared of the rulers of Númenor for inclusion in the Appendices to LotR. Then, there is The Lost Road. Legend says Tolkien and his writing buddy, C. S. Lewis, challenged each other to write a tale of travel. Lewis was to write of “travel in space” and he produced the novel Out of the Silent Planet, and went on to expand it into a trilogy. Tolkien was to write of “travel in time” and he began to write The Lost Road, which progressed no further than a first draft of sketches and some connected poetry. Like so many of his other abandoned stories, the parts of The Lost Road which exist hint at a powerful finished work about family legacy and human tragedy writ over thousands of years.

In brief, The Lost Road begins in the modern era with a son and father beside the ocean. The son feels a strange pull to go to sea, almost like it is a memory of the past. The father admits he felt it too as a young man. This scene repeats again and again, each time going deeper into history. According to the story, fathers and sons have always stood on the beaches of England, looked out over the Atlantic, and thought they really belonged “out there somewhere.” This leads all the way back in time to Tolkien’s Second Age of the Sun when humans really did live on a huge island, Númenor, in the middle of The Great Sea. Then the tale begins to tell of the beginning of the end of Númenor’s age of bliss and the political machinations and betrayals which led to its destruction by the gods.

I like most of the ideas The Lost Road plays around with. I actually like the sentimentality of using generations of father-son conversations to bring the reader into the story. Tolkien was someone who loved his children very much. Many of his stories emerged from ones he told his children and his letters to his son while his son was in uniform during the Second World War positively gush with affection and worry. There is not so much familial love on display in his major published works, but it was clearly part of who he was. I like seeing him write these intimate scenes for this story. I enjoy that the idea of “racial memory” or “generational longing” is how a fantasy writer and linguist would tell a story of “time travel.” He certainly wouldn’t write about a time machine, as any Tolkien fan should know. I have experienced false nostalgia from reading particularly moving descriptions of the past, but the longing to be someplace you have never been is not something I have felt spontaneously. It seems Tolkien himself did feel that way and he tried to work through those feelings, in part, with this story. He explored this in more depth in another abandoned story I will discuss later in this countdown.

Should I mention how the whole Númenor is remembered as Atlantis aspect of the story and the Númenorians being a “blessed” and “better sort” of people is problematic? Maybe I should.

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XI: The War of the Jewels, Part Three: The Wanderings of Húrin and Other Writings Not Forming Part of the Quenta Silmarillion, I: The Wanderings of Húrin

This is a prime example of an unnecessary text. I’m sure that’s why material from it was not incorporated into The Silmarillion. It’s a remarkably complete text, though, so that suggests it was important to Tolkien. Or it could be he just got a wild hare to write it and dashed it off all at once.

Húrin was a human warrior, one of the lords of the Edain, who allied with the Elves against Morgoth. He was also the father of Túrin and Niënor whom Morgoth cursed and whose downfall has a prominent place in The Silmarillion. The doom brought upon the brother and sister is technically Morgoth’s torment of Húrin whom he captured, chained to a seat on a fortress, and cursed with supernatural sight so he could watch the tragedy of his children’s lives unfold. Then, to rub salt in the wound, after his children were dead, Morgoth released Húrin and sent him to do what he willed. What he did, as told in The Wanderings of Húrin is go get revenge on the Folk of Brethil. Túrin had lived and fought for this forest-dwelling people for many years, but they would not assist him in his final battle with the dragon Glaurung. He essentially attempts to shame them for not being braver, but he doesn’t really want to inspire them, he wants to incite them to revolt against their hereditary lord. This he does and the fight effectively ruins Brethil and another stable land holding the line against Morgoth is ruined. It’s a tragedy in all respects. Húrin oversteps decency out of anger, the lord of Brethil oversteps decency in response out of fear, with the Folk of Brethil caught in the middle; genuinely remorseful they let Túrin be killed and genuinely torn about whom to follow.

This is a classic Tolkienesque conflict of ancient rights and personal motives. To me, the central scene is one in which Húrin speaks to a moot gathered at Doom-rock (it reminded me of the scene at a natural stone amphitheater early in Richard Adams’ Shardik, even though that was written later). This is where Húrin gives the speech which upsets the Brethil society. It is similar to Tolkien’s other “mental contest” scenes, such as Gandalf breaking Grima’s hold on Théoden or Aragorn talking to the Mouth. It also has something of Marc Antony speaking over Caesar’s body in Shakespeare. It’s very much about the power in words and working one’s will through words almost like magic.

It’s all well-developed, mature storytelling. Tolkien had it in him. He didn’t write many scenes like this, but he could write them. Wanderings is what’s good about Tolkien on display. Then again, it’s his weakness as a writer too, because this fully-realized story fragment doesn’t connect to much of anything. It’s way too detailed to be included in the annals of the First Age, but it’s not given a proper beginning or ending, so it can’t be called a proper short story. It’s a very striking couple chapters orphaned from an novel which was never written.

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II: The Book of Lost Tales Part 2, Part One: The Tale of Tinúviel

The first two volumes of the History of Middle Earth, unsurprisingly, contain the earliest versions of what eventually became The Silmarillion, begun while Tolkien was convalescing from a bout of flu during the First World War. In 1917 he first wrote the story which eventually developed into a touchstone for his life: The Tale of Lúthien and Beren.

What amazes me most about all the Lost Tales versions of the stories is how similar they are, in broad strokes, from the first to the tales as later written. At the same time, the details and the tone of the stories are so different, they are hardly the same stories at all. The Tale of Tinúviel is emblematic. In short, Beren wishes to win Tinúviel’s hand from her stern father Tinwë and so they go off together, make friends with a great hound named Huan, fight an evil prince, take on Melko himself to claim a Silmaril only to have Beren’s hand bitten off by a giant wolf named Karkaras, which Beren and Tinwë eventually slay to recover the jewel. These fundamentals of the story did not change over 60 years of development! It’s remarkable. These stories arose almost fully formed from some deep, very personal place, it seems, and just stuck around with Tolkien forever.

But the tone is so different. Firstly, the language is full of constructions to sound “old timey” like “surely, my thane” and “then did she lave her hand.” Then Tinúviel’s magic is totally fairy tale. She sings a song of all the longest and tallest things to make her hair grow long enough so she can weave it into a rope to escape from the tree top house where she was being kept. Lastly, while telling the story is part of the point, Tolkien can’t help but make it something of a just so story along the way. The tale contains the line, “Wherefore it is that there is hatred between the Elves and all cats even now.” Yes, that evil prince I mentioned is a large black cat called Tevildo Prince of Cats and he menaces first Beren (by making him hunt rat-sized mice) and then Tinúviel. That’s where Huan, the great hound, comes in and he chases Tevildo off. If this part of the story sounds familiar too, it’s because through various mutations, Tevildo eventually becomes Sauron who, in the form of a werewolf, fights with Huan and loses.

I love this version of the story. It’s so goofy and charming, which was clearly what Tolkien was originally going for. The valor, dignity, and complex relationships between fate and heroism he later explored with the same First Age stories just isn’t here. These are “simply” new fairy stories in the vein of the ones Tolkien had read as a child.

I’ve got five more to talk about next time!

The Books I Read in 2018

I tend to read between 40 to 50 books a year. I know this empirically, because since 2006 I have kept a record of every novel, comic book, role playing game rules book and non-fiction book I have read. I’ve reviewed some of them here, but I don’t think I’ve put my full list up before. It’s below. Before that, I want to say a brief word about my favorite five books of the year.

Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-1943
This is an art book with very little text. It is essentially the senior project of artists David Leventhal and Gerry Trudeau who were looking at how to make images do more narrative work than just illustrating a text. Leventhal has already reached his mature form with his soft focus photographs of toys which create images of the Eastern Front which seem real. Along with the text by Trudeau the book is, as it is titled, a graphic chronicle of that phase of the war. This was on my want-to-read list for a long time and I enjoyed the impression it created of seeing dramatic moments of history recreated. I have more thoughts about this one and some images in an earlier post.

Lacuna Part I. The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City (Second Attempt)
I also previously talked about this role playing game by Jared A. Sorensen. I got to play this game for a second time at NerdLouvia earlier this month and two of my players were there specifically to play this odd dreamscape crime solving game. It remains unlike any other RPG I have ever read and I look forward to playing it again and getting better at bringing all the weirdness this game has to offer to the table.

Soldier of Sidon
This is the third book in what became a trilogy. I was wary of if because this book was written almost 20 years after the second book in the series. There is a little bit of disconnect in style, how could there not be after two decades? That said, it’s not much of a disconnect. I also may like this one the best of the three books. It’s more intimate and personal and I enjoyed that this year. I have long said Gene Wolfe is one of my favorite writers, largely because one of his early books immersed me in a way which has rarely happened to me. In this series, Latro is a Roman mercenary from when the Greeks were ascendant who, because of an injury, cannot make new long term memories – and also sees the gods. The text is Latro’s journal written day by day about whatever has just happened. It’s a great set-up for storytelling. This adventure follows Latro as he sails up the Nile. Since I wrote a NaNoWriMo about ancient Egypt a couple years back, I was fascinated to read all the fictional Egypt stuff. It also felt a bit like a self-indulgent closure for the character, but since I like Latro, and had just read two other books about him, I was happy to get this closer examination of this character. I recommend all three books in Wolfe’s Soldier series.

Pictures of the Pain
I’ve read a few books about the JFK assassination this year. This one is my favorite so far. It’s an attempt by Richard Trask, a professional archivist, to put every photograph and film strip into print. That in itself is fascinating, especially for the many photographs by the journalists who were in the presidential motorcade. Not only are their photographs objectively better than the famous amateur photos because their greater training and better equipment, they were also able to capture all the moments of the immediate aftermath of the assassination because they were right there with their cameras ready. More interesting than the photos for me, however, was Trask’s collection of the biographies of the photographers, details about their cameras and the state of the news industry at the time. Why was Zapruter filming that day? What kind of camera was Nix using? How does an image wire service work when it’s still the age of wet chemical film? Trask answers all these questions.

Rock Candy Mountain #1-8
I don’t read a ton of comics, but this series written and drawn by Kyle Starks with color by Chris Schweizer and design by Dylan Todd is the best one I have read this year. It is the story of a hobo who is searching for the fabled rock candy mountain, which is essentially hobo heaven. There’s a lot of fist fighting and a significant about of magic weirdness. It’s so engaging and thoroughly interesting – at least to me – I am nothing but pleased I read it. It’s just good comics.

For honorable mentions, I read several things I’ve been meaning to read for a long time; Frankenstein, Jim Henson's Tale of Sand, My Friend Dahmer, and old comics like Samurai Penguin, Cutey Bunny and Magnus Robot Fighter. I also completed all the Conan and Sherlock Holmes stories, which feels like something of an accomplishment. I also read a collection of Jon Ronson’s journalism called Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries which I enjoyed.

Books I Finished in 2018
-The Voice Out of the Whirlwind: The Book of Job - Ralph E Hone, ed.
-Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronical, 1941-1943 - David Leventhal & Gerry Trudeau
-Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud
-Soldier of Arete - Gene Wolfe
-Stories of Soldiers and Civilians - Ambrose Bierce
-The Gospel of Wealth - Andrew Carnegie
-The Coldest City - Antony Johnston & Sam Hart
-House Made of Dawn - N Scott Momaday
-The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen - James Wallis [RPG]
-The Wood Beyond the World - William Morris [LibriVox]
-They Killed Our President: 63 Reasons to Believe There Was a Conspiracy to Assassinate JFK - Jessie Ventura [JFK]
-Unfamiliar Fishes - Sarah Vowell
-Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries - Jon Ronson
-Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth - Reza Aslan
-Dead Lands: Reloaded Player's Guide: Explorer's Edition - Shane Lacy Hensley & BD Flory [RPG]
-Lacuna Part I. The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City (Second Attempt) - Jared A Sorensen [RPG]
-The Bible
-Wonder Woman: The Golden Age Omnibus Volume 1 - William Moulton Marston, HG Peter, et. al.
-Dead Lands: Reloaded Marshal's Handbook: Explorer's Edition - Shane Lacy Hensley [RPG]
-Samurai Penguin #1-7 - Dan Vado, et. al.
-This Side of Paradise - F Scott Fitzgerald
-Imperial Earth - Arthur C Clarke
-Russ Manning's Magnus, Robot Fighter, Volume 3 - Russ Manning, et. al.
-Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot - Bill O'Reilly & Martin Dugard [JFK]
-The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle -Army Surplus Komikz Featuring Cutey Bunny #1-2 - Joshua Quagmire
-Jim Henson's Tale of Sand - Jim Henson & Jerry Juhl as realized by Ramón Pérez
-Dance Night - Dawn Powell
-Soldier of Sidon - Gene Wolfe
-The Secret History of Wonder Woman - Jill Lepore
-The Book of Mormon
-Prometheus: Fire and Stone - Omega - Kelly Sue DeConnick & Agustin Alessio
-Twelve Ordinary Men - John MacArthur
-American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond - E Howard Hunt [JFK]
-The Postman Always Rings Twice - James M Cain
-They Shoot Horses, Don't They? - Horace McCoy
-The Bloody Crown of Conan - Robert E Howard
-The Satanic Bible - Anton LaVey
-Thieves Like Us - Edward Anderson
-11/22/63 - Stephen King [JFK]
-Native Drums #1-6 - Chuck Paschall & Vince Riley
-Revolutionaries: Join, or Die [RPG]
-Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
-"The Shadow of the Vulture" - Robert E Howard
-My Friend Dahmer - Derf Backderf
-The Last Battle - CS Lewis
-The American Revolution: First-Person Accounts by the Men Who Shaped Our Nation - TJ Stiles, ed.
-Pictures of the Pain - Richard Trask [JFK]
-The Letters of JRR Tolkien - Humphery Carpenter, ed.
-The Evolution of Physics - Albert Einstein & Leopold Infeld
-The Island of Doctor Moreau - HG Wells
-Drawings from the Gulag - Danzig Baldaev
-The Screwtape Letters - CS Lewis
-Copernicus Jones: Robot Detective #1-8 - Matt D Wilson, Kevin Warren, et. al.
-Dracula the Unconquered #1-4 - Chris Simms, Steve Downer & Josh Krach
-Yo Mate a Kennedy - Manuel Vázquez Montalbán [JFK]
-Rock Candy Mountain #1-8 – Kyle Starks, Chris Schweizer & Dylan Todd

Overview: CAPERS by Craig Campbell

Another project I was involved with has reached print. CAPERS is “a super-powered game of gangsters in the Roaring Twenties.” The game first came to my attention almost a year ago when the creator released a preview version to IGDN members. I don’t tend to get too excited about super heroes, but with my head deeply enmeshed in the 1920s and the whole interwar period because of Wild Skies, I decided to see what someone else had done with that time period. All the Jazz Age stuff seemed pretty accurate. Good. Like AMP: Year One before it, I found CAPERS isn’t about super heroes in the comic book sense at all, but about super-powered people. I can get onboard with that. Then reading through the rules, I was fully convinced by the mechanisms. The game uses playing cards for resolution. I ran the sample adventure for my game group. I backed the project on Kickstarter. I met the creator at a convention; turns out he’s a great guy. To cement my involvement with the game, I ended up writing a small amount of content for the game. I even wrote my own adventure and ran it for a local open gaming event. CAPERS is a game that has convinced me to play along at every step. Now that the book is out, I want to talk about it.

The CAPERS book is 163 full-color pages packed with theme. Craig, (I’ll just go ahead and call the designer Craig because we’ve become friendly since we met in person) has done a great job to hit all the notes right to immerse players in that past age. The use of cards for resolution, the appearance of poker chips on the character sheets, Art Deco stylings throughout the book, and choice of a few key game terms like Moxie (a currency players expend to push situations in their favor), to a glossary of ‘20s slang all conspire to put players in the world of the setting. Put on some jazz music, play on a felt topped table and you are there. The book itself is well-printed and there are a ton of extras – don’t have any in hand myself yet, but CAPERS themed playing cards, Moxie cards, maps, GM screen, and adventures are all available. Lots of stuff for you if you like physical bits at your table.

I want to talk about the art quickly. It is all by Beth Varni. She has done a good job with the period look. Full color means all the art is digitally painted so it all pops on the page. Something I also appreciate is the choice to display counterfactual diversity. Not that there weren’t women and African Americans in the U.S. in the 1920s, just that they don’t show up in most of the images of the time. Varni’s art shows people of all sorts doing all sorts of things. Black casino owners, women with tommy guns, female Federal agents, Hispanic and Asian names and faces… It’s great to see this kind of inclusion. It isn’t just the art, either. Gender and ethnic diversity is built into all the NPCs. Well done, NerdBurger.

At the center of gameplay is a straightforward card-based mechanism. The Game Master sets a Target Score for whatever Checks players attempt (average is 8). The player then draws from their personal deck of standard playing cards trying to draw a card which meets or exceeds the TS. Jack-Ace serve as 11-14. Players may draw a number of cards equal to the applicable Trait. For example, if a character with 3 Agility wants to do a backflip (TS 10), they have three chances (called Card Count) to draw a card which is ten or higher, with the ability to stay at any time. A lot of nuance comes into the system around this core card draw system. Skills and spending Moxie add to Card Count, the suit of the card the player stays on can add a Boon or Complication, jokers are either very good or very bad, plus a few other things. In practice I have found a lot of tension comes in when a player is looking at a success with a Complication and wondering if they should draw again knowing they could just a likely draw a success with a Boon or end up with a total failure. It is a great system, which is both easy to learn and fast-playing at the table. I believe Craig even put the rule set out under a creative commons license as CAPERS CORE, so it’s out there for anyone to use.

The other things in the game are a primer on 1920s culture and bootlegging gangs, a section of powers (which work the same as other Checks) with 25 minor and 15 major powers which includes Cold Beam, Flight, Goo Generation, Probability Manipulation, Super Strength and Weather Manipulation, extensive setting information for gangster hot spots like Atlantic City, Chicago and New York City; with ten other cities profiled as well (my contribution was to write four of these cities, including my current hometown of Louisville, KY), some ideas for playing in alternate worlds like Capek’s Earth, the Flipside and Omega Earth, plus extensive indexes so you can find just about whatever you are looking for. It’s a great book, very well-produced, and it’s a great game. I recommend it to anyone who likes either the 1920s or super-powers and to anyone looking for a lighter to middle-weight game (similar to Savage Worlds in complexity) which offers a pleasing alternative to dice-based systems.

If CAPERS doesn’t seem like your thing, NerdBurger is raising funds now for a GM-less horror-comedy game called Die Laughing in which players create a very bad and very deadly horror movie. Check that out too.

Cimmerian Thoughts

I was first exposed to Conan via the Arnold Schwarzenegger films of the 1980s and to “sword and sorcery” stories more generally via the many films and comics trying in cash in on Conan fervor. I still quite like The Beastmaster, Krull, and even The Scorpion King. Though I knew the character most of my life, I had never read any of the original Conan stories by Robert E. Howard. Fortunately, there is a three volume set put out by Del Rey in 2003-2005 which collects all the original stories along with drafts, synopses of unfinished stories, essays and notes. In 2016 I set myself the goal of reading one of these collections a year and this year I completed the third volume. It seems apt I should make some comment on what I’ve read. This won’t be an organized review of the volumes or the stories, just a smattering of my thoughts.

Firstly, the Del Rey collections I read are quite good, both in physical production and content. I respect the editorial choice to present Howard’s original works as accurately as possible. Part of the Conan legend is the stories have been edited by other hands over the decades of reprints, so going back to the stories as first printed in Weird Tales or even to Howard’s typescripts makes sure this addition has the authentic 1930s experience. Also included are drafts of complete and never-finished stories so you can see a bit of Howard’s working method and which ideas he never brought to fruition. An essay about the Hyborian Age by Howard is in the first volume and each volume has part of Hyborian Genesis by Patrice Louinet, a long essay which places all the stories in the context of Howard’s working life. I even found the notes about typescripts and the little word corrections which were made for the edition interesting. The volumes are all richly illustrated as well. The whole package creates something very much like the pulp magazines where the Conan stories originally appeared.

One thing I found amazing considering the long life of the character is pop culture is how little time Howard spent writing Conan stories. The character first appeared in 1932 and the last story was written in 1936, the year of Howard’s death. Even by 1934 he already casting around for other types of characters to write and beginning to repeat himself with the Conan stories. Lin Carter observed in Imaginary Worlds that it’s hard to write something new in the sword and sorcery genre because there just isn’t that much to say about muscled sword-wielders Howard didn’t already cover.

I don’t feel much needs to be said about the influence of H.P. Lovecraft on Robert E. Howard. It’s very obvious if you know what to look for. They were playing with a very similar deck of cards in regards to racial prejudice and ideal northern European heritage. They also have the same tricks for making terror: darkness, ancient ruins, pale-skinned monsters, large beings from somewhere “beyond” earth.

Howard’s Hyborian Age has been praised for its economy of storytelling. He doesn’t need to explain the politics and geography of a country if he can just use what a reader already knows. It works. When Conan leaves Vendhya, rides up into the Himelias, over the Zhaibar Pass and on into Afghulistan – this is all geography I know. Similarly, Stygia in the south with its pyramids and great river can really only be one place. The problem is, of course, the horrible stereotyping of the people involved. In “Beyond the Black River,” for example, a group called the Picts are thinly disguised Native Americans, right down to the trope of lighting their arrows on fire as they attack “settlers” in a wooden stockade. They are consistently described in dehumanizing terms and called savages. The veil of fiction seems so thin over Howard’s feelings about real people it made that story hard to finish. The only thing worse is the way Howard describes people from his sub-Saharan analogs. The “product of his time” argument could come in here, but I don’t think it’s good enough. Several tales in the Conan canon can be consigned to the proverbial dust bin.

Howard’s treatment of women is more complex. On one hand, there is hardly a story without a woman who ends up naked at some point. The nakedness is usually easy titillation of the (presumably straight, male) reader or present to increase the sense of defenselessness of the female character. Despite frequent scenes of peril, actual violence against women in the stories is rare. When it is present, it most often takes the form of women torturing other women. I have read about this aspect of “resolved peril” being an important cathartic function of adventure stories, but I’m not sure I can say much else about it. The impression I have of women in Howard’s Conan stories is they exist to be the basis of chivalric deeds. Women are constantly saved from their peril by men, usually by Conan. Howard, a famous “momma’s boy,” seems to put women on a pedestal in that way. I think it’s an expression of the idea women can only be saints or sluts. Most of the women in Conan stories are described as small and pale and soft and innocent. Oddly he almost never uses words like “hug” or “kiss.” Conan crushes women to him and crushes their lips with his. It’s odd and seems reductive. Though, Louinet makes mention of women who read Conan as a romantic hero.

Yet, while waifs which need saving from stone alters are common in the Conan tales, there are exceptions. In “Queen of the Black Coast,” Conan falls in with the pirate captain Bêlit who is shown as capable of hunting her own treasure and commanding her own troops (though she does also end up naked). Valeria is another capable fighter, an assassin of the Red Brotherhood, who shares and adventure with Conan in the story “Red Nails.” In the only Conan novel, Hour of the Dragon, he meets Zelata who possesses many magic powers. She is described as an old woman, but is treated respectfully by both the text and by Conan. Devi Yasmina of Vendhya, whom Conan kidnaps in “The People of the Black Circle,” has perhaps the best treatment. After the story’s climatic battle with a shape-changing wizard, when Conan has rescued Yasmina, they look down from the mountain and see their respective followers in different valleys and they essentially challenge each other to meet again on the battlefield at the head of their armies. There is a respect, albeit begrudging, for each other’s position as leaders which has developed during the tale.

Though the stories contain many of the same elements over and over (waifs, giant snakes, Conan’s cat-like movements, hacking off of heads), Conan himself does change. From his first appearance in “The Phoenix on the Sword,” Howard presents Conan as a barbarian who has become a king. That eventual outcome is there in the mind of any reader who follows the character from there. When Conan wins and then looses a fortune, which happens frequently, he commonly laughs it off. In the early story “The Tower of the Elephant,” Conan climbs into a tower to steal something he can turn into booze and the company of women. He doesn’t seem like the sort of man to end up tied to the responsibilities of a kingdom. I think this leads to one of Howard’s main messages. Many people have identified the theme of barbarism against civilization in the Conan stories. It’s not subtext; Conan often states his disdain for politicians and merchants who dissemble and play games with others. Allied with this idea is that Conan often emerges as an excellent leader. Men trust him both because he will wade into battle beside them, and also because he doesn’t lie or cheat them. Conan is often the only honest broker among the “civilized” men he deals with. The later stories written often deal with this idea of Conan as a leader. He begins as the captain of a queen’s guard in “A Which Shall Be Born,” and in “The Black Stranger” Conan unites rival factions of pirates in a fight against Pictish raiders. Conan as leader is taken to it’s logical extreme in the novel The Hour of the Dragon which is about a temporary usurpation of King Conan’s throne in Aquilonia by a necromantic conspiracy.

Perhaps an even better example of the power of Conan’s leadership occurs in “Beyond the Black River.” I mentioned before how that story is a gloss on America’s “how the West was won” theme. Conan learns of a planned invasion of Picts into the recently settled edges of “civilization” and he proceeds to take charge of the defense of the frontier. An important section of the story does not feature Conan, but a party of men fighting as hard as they can because they know Conan is right when he says they must hold the crossroads or the “settlers” sleeping in their homes will be overwhelmed and killed. The story highlights something Howard wanted to say about the way a strong leader inspires people to be strong. There is something very American about Howard’s ideas about how civilization weakens men and so they must be led by men who are still barbarians from the frontier. I can’t help but think it is Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Hypothesis turned into fiction. Howard was from Texas, after all, a state which takes great pride in its frontier history. I also can’t help but think about the rhetoric of the 2016 American presidential election. Howard’s themes of in-groups and out-groups and the ideal simplicity of heroic action are still themes societies deal with. Just as Lovecraft is famous for turning his racial prejudices into effective stories of psychological terror, I think Howard turned very similar fears into effective stories about the clash of vigorous individuality with anesthetizing conformity.

That seems like a cue for my summation. I find the Conan stories, by and large, to be effective. And I enjoy them. I enjoy their visions of strange places tinged with mystery and magic and I enjoy their action. I tend to like the pulp fiction of the ‘20s and ‘30s. For me, so many pulp stories turn on the idea “knowledge means action.” Conan never stops to ponder implications or political ramifications; he learns something and then he acts. There’s an appeal to larger-than-life characters who can change their circumstances with their own efforts, especially to someone who doesn’t always feel that able to change things. Taking in all the problematic elements of the stories, along with those “good” bits I like, helps me continue to approach an understanding of how thorough the hegemony of maleness and whiteness was at that time. Escapist fiction is fine in moderation, but now is time to get back to living in this real, messy, beautiful world.

Cover art for The Bloody Crown of Conan by Gary Gianni. Weird Tales covers featuring Conan used in this post by Margaret Brundage. Read more about her here.

A Review: Lacuna by Jared Sorensen

Lacuna Part I. The Creation of the Mystery and the Girl from Blue City is an experimental roleplaying game...and you’re part of the experiment, whether you realize it or not.

This is how Lacuna begins and the “experimental” nature of the game is soon born out by everything from the character sheets to the page layout. It is the strangest role playing game I have yet come across. Not only is the setting bizarre and deliberately obscure, the production of the book compliments this with blacked out lines of text and double printing which gets worse as the book goes on. I have seen other game books present themselves as if they are agent handbooks from within the setting, but this one really captures the confusion and bewilderment which the setting also conveys.

More about the setting, but not too much because it’s in part about that secret of the Lacuna. There is a lot to say about the setting – but I don’t want to say too much because the game is set up to progressively discover the setting through play. I often think of movies when I think of role playing settings and this one strikes me as sharing elements with The Matrix, Men in Black and Inception. The player characters are agents who use drugs and dreaming to enter the strange world of Blue City where they chase down Hostile Personalities and banish them to the Lacuna with the assistance of their tenuous connection to Control. The City is seemingly infinite, always night, and full of Personalities who go about their business; appearing and disappearing as in fog. I feel playing into all the obvious noir elements of the setting is best.

In addition to the setting, I am also intrigued by the mechanisms of Lacuna. The central resolution mechanism is rolling D6 equal to attributes, usually two to four, hoping to roll eleven or more. After every roll, succeed or fail, the result is added to your character’s heart’s Beats Per Minute. Characters enter Blue City with their PBM at their Resting Heart Rate. After a few rolls, BPM gets up to Target Heart Rate and while in the target range, you can roll as many D6 as you want. As many as you want. This almost guarantees success on your roll, but your result still adds to your BPM. Once you push yourself beyond your Maximum Heart Rate, failing a roll will cause damage in the form of reduced attributes.

I have only played Lacuna in the form of a one shot. I’m not sure how all the mystery and the feeling of bewilderment would be sustained over a longer term. It would be a challenge for the GM to deal out the secrets slowly and for the players to acclimate to each new threshold of discovery. There’s plenty of stuff this brief review doesn’t mention just because I want you to discover it all for yourself. Reading the game is an experience in itself so it’s worth reading even if you never play it. It is fun to play, though, so I highly recommended you play it. Lacuna is a unique game and very affordable; get it and read it and try out this experiment in role playing for yourself.

Sherlock's Restless World

In 2012 I made it a goal to read the all Sherlock Holmes stories. I have now finished reading the four novels and 54 stories and I want to mark the occasion by saying something about them. This will not be a comprehensive review. That has already been done, and I am sure done better then I ever could. Other than the obvious things about the stories being influential on the crime drama, I really only have one observation. I kept noticing throughout the stories the way they seem to paper over a deep discomfort with the global aspect of the British Empire. As much as the Holmes stories are set so squarely in London in particular, and in Britain more generally, I can’t help but notice the source of the “adventure” in almost every case comes from without.

In the very first story, A Study in Scarlet, it is bad blood between some Americans which has led to a murder in London. There is a similar undertone of “foreigners are the trouble” in so many other stories. In “The Yellow Face” and “The Greek Interpretor” social issues of American and Greek immigrants respectively create mystery in England. The main antagonist in “The Speckled Band” was driven somewhat mad by service in India and in “The Solitary Cyclist” it was South Africa where the antagonist learned to be a brute. “A Scandal in Bohemia”, “The Naval Treaty”, “The Six Napoleons”, and “The Creeping Man” all turn on criminals, or unsavory characters from Europe making trouble in England. Less problematic, but still focused on the dangers of the world, are “The Blanched Soldier” about a tropical disease and “The Lion’s Mane” which is – almost comically – about an animal which isn’t usually found in England. Those are the ones which spring to my mind. I am sure there are other examples and probably counter-examples as well.

Problems come from outside. I don’t know nearly enough about the issues involved to know why this undercurrent exists. Is there an anti-Imperialist or anti-capitalist strain in Doyle’s politics which led him to publish stories showing the dark side of men who got rich in the colonies? Was Watson, as a wounded war veteran, framing Holmes’ exploits in terms of reveling the emotional damage of the Empire upon its citizens? Was Holmes himself simply a Englishman’s Englishman who took cases which seemed to smack of foreign interference? I can’t even be sure why the stories constantly return to the theme. Is it pro-Imperialist by suggesting Italians and Greeks can’t run their own affairs. It is anti-Imperialist by suggesting trying to conquer Asia will corrupt the average Englishman.

Whatever it means, it’s such a consistent theme, it can’t be in the stories by accident. Or can it? I am reminded of a series from the British Museum I heard about the same time I started reading the Holmes oeuvre: Shakespeare’s Restless World. Using objects like John Dee’s “magic” mirror, an oyster fork and a map of the world, the podcast identified the ways in which the rapid cultural, economic and scientific changes brought on by the European age of exploration found their way into Shakespeare’s work. It should come as no surprise Caesar bestrides the “narrow” world or that Prospero’s island refuge is hinted to be in the Americas. The New World and the horizons global navigation opened were on everyone’s mind. No one could avoid thinking about the implications. I think something similar going on with the Sherlock Holmes stories. Soldiers coming back from India with friendships they can’t really explain to society, people making fortunes and enemies in South Africa, the newest in scientific research leading to new poisons – all of these show up in the Sherlock stories and they all can be seen as expressions of another round of new horizons which British colonization projects and the increasing speed and ease of global travel were putting in the minds of Londoners.

I can’t help but think also think about Brexit and the America First rhetoric of my own country. Globalism has been upsetting since the 1590s, at least. I guess there is no reason I should expect it to be different today. I often say I like to look at how British culture has dealt both with empire and loss of empire because I live in country which has had its own time in the sun and is experiencing its own loss of global significance. Are there similar expressions in current American culture? Maybe Rouge One: A Star Wars Story, Black Panther, Crazy Rich Asians, and the conversations surrounding them are an expression of Hollywood’s Restless World?

A Review: The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen by James Wallis

Tell us, Baron, the story of...

...How you circumnavigated the world without leaving your house.
...How a portrait of Henry VIII saved you from being attacked by lions.
...Why every fifth child born in Brussels is named after you.
...How you became the first man to descend Mount Blanc, before any man had climbed it.

This is certainly not a traditional roleplaying game. In fact, I would say it is barely a roleplaying game at all. Yet, Baron Munchausen is one of the most enjoyable roleplaying game books I have ever read. In this “paperless” age of digital game books, I plan to add the “dead tree format” of this book to my shelf.

At its core, it is a very simple game. It is really a story-telling activity in which players interrupt each other to comic result. Less briefly; players take the role of nobility, telling of their adventures at a tavern or house party. The character creation process is limited to developing a noble name and title. The process of play is for four or more players to take a turn telling a five-minute story of their own entirely truthful adventures during the Eighteenth Century. Each tale must attempt to out-do the previous tale and begins with a prompt like those given above, asked by the nobleperson on the teller’s left. Both the game and the roleplay aspects come in during each tale as each player has a purse of tokens equal to the number of total players. Each player is allowed to interrupt each teller once by offering them a token and asking for clarification about an element of the tale, pointing out an inconsistency, asserting the story may have happened differently, or otherwise trying to trip up the storyteller with comic or challenging suggestions. The current tale-teller may simply accept the token and the addition and work this new detail into their tale; or they may add their own coin to the stake and offer an insult to the interrupter to put them in their place. Likewise, the interrupter may take the stake and accept their rebuke; or add a third coin to the stake, offer their own insult and insist the teller acknowledge their original suggestion. This back-and-forth may continue until one player exhausts their purse and must admit their error. If they are still unwilling, a duel may be initiated (decided by best of three rounds of rock-paper-scissor) with the loser forced to submit and take the stake. If, during the insults and raising, either insults the other’s noble rank, proud parentage or outright calls them a liar, a duel may begin immediately. When each tale concludes the teller prompts the player on their right to tell the next tale. When all tales have been told, players each pass their entire purse (converting it to a bounty) to the person whose tale was the most extraordinary. Thus the winner of round is the player with the largest bounty, and now being flush with cash as well as honor, is compelled to “buy the next round” and offers the prompt for the first tale of the next round.

In the book, these rules are summarized in two pages and there are eight pages of sample prompts. However, what makes the book a joy is the comic style in which it is written. James Wallis, who is a veteran game designer, has channelled the spirit of the original Baron Munchausen material. It is presented as a dictation by the Baron himself to various members of the Wallis family line and as such is filled with the Baron’s own stories of himself, his opinions, and numerous digressions from the through line of actually explaining the game. The book also presents a number of variations on the game, from one in which interrupting means the interrupter becomes the teller with the object being to be the first actually finish your story, to a variation for younger players, to a whole list of suggested genre implementations of the game such as cavemen, vampires and supervillains.

I have played this game twice and as is true of anything dependent on social interactions it flows better if players are willing to submit to the premise of the game. Those with better comic timing, more inventive or quick-thinking minds and larger vocabularies of “old timey” words will be more likely to tell the most extraordinary stories, but it is not a guarantee of success. It seems the best moments come out of the unexpected way a teller incorporates their interaction with the interrupter. In one game the winner did not know the rest of the players as well and his story took on a hyperbolic nature while the rest of us relied more on our shared history. In the other game the winner had been called a liar, escalated the interruption to a duel, but then lost and so chose to completely capitulate and when back through their story renouncing each aspect and telling how what really happened was far less impressive. This idiosyncratic interpretation of the standard rules was singularly comical and so unexpected it won the round.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen is not a game for everyone and certainly not for anyone all the time. It is not the sort of game to play a campaign with, or even to play very often. However, as a pallet cleanser between other games or as a one-off event at a game night or convention, this is a great option. Whether you ever play it or not, it is worth a read as a light piece of pseudo-historical comic writing. I enjoyed it very much.

A Review: Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-1943

5 of 5 stars.

For a while one of my “grail books” has been David Levinthal and Garry Trudeau’s Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-1943. When I walked into a bookstore recently and spotted it on an endcap from across the room, I had to buy it. It is a reprint copy, but I am not a collector looking for first printings; I just want to look at the art.

I first encountered David Levinthal’s work as an art student. His work focuses on toys or models shot with dramatic light and in soft focus to create a kind of emotional verisimilitude. I once saw an exhibition of his Modern Romance series and I smile whenever I see his work on the covers of Sarah Vowell’s books. Garry Trudeau is well known as a cartoonist. I was interested to see what these two cooked up together about the Second World War.

The collaboration is described by Trudeau in the beginning of the book. He was trying to find the right historic photographs to illustrate a fictional story we wanted to tell about a Russian solder on the Eastern Front. Levinthal was working on a series of photos capturing the lifelike horrors of war without necessarily making realistic looking photos. They combined their efforts and rather than using real photos to illustrate a fictional story, they manufactured photos to illustrate the real history. There are real quotes and a few real photographs to round out the project. It becomes, as the title says, a graphic chronicle of the Eastern Front.

One thing that has stuck with me is Trudeau calling what they made a “paper movie”. It is such an odd phrase to read today when comics have triumphed as a medium and “graphic novels” can be of any genre and regularly make it onto bestsellers lists. I suppose in the mid-seventies when they were working on Hitler Moves East the concept of a “graphic novel” didn’t really exist. That was even before the “serious” comics revival of the mid eighties. Even though Trudeau went on to make comics himself, he couldn’t have called this project comics, it was a more serious work than than name implied.

As a long time comics reader and someone who loves “sequential art storytelling”, I think Hitler Moves East works. There are Trudeau’s words to tell you what happened at each stage of Operation Barbarossa and the selection of ephemera such as identification cards and propaganda posters lend their own authenticity. Then there are Levinthal’s washed out, or grainy, or almost over-exposed photographs of figures dashing through train yards, or hunkered in pill boxes, or laying cold and still in the snow. Much of the narrative impact is conveyed by the photos. The whole is surprisingly effective in giving the reader a hint of the ravages of war. It is a book one does not read so much as experience. That is what art does.

Just to be clear, though it has a similar name to another book about the Eastern Front, it does not share that book’s apologetics of the Wehrmacht.

A Review: Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane

3 of 5 stars.

When reading about the Kennedy assassination, the idea of conspiracy and cover-up are always waiting in the wings even if the author doesn’t mention it. I figure it is best to go ahead and embrace that fact. As part of my reading, I what to read the best evidence from those who disagree with the official story. The first stop has to be Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment. It appeared the year after the Warren Commission Report and proceeds from the supposition that any truth the Commission uncovered was not in the Report itself, but in the 26 volumes of recorded testimonies and statements made to the Commission’s legal team. Lane’s book, if nothing else, is a source for some of these extended interviews which offer readers a wider sample of what people said to the Commission. This quote from near the end of the book serves as a good abstract of Rush to Judgment:

“The Commission reviewed the testimony of 552 witnesses. Some of the testimony was inconsistent with other testimony, in sum or in part, and it was necessary for the Commission to evolve a standard for assessing it. I believe that it did so: testimony compatible with the theory of Oswald as the lone assassin was accepted, even when incredible, while incompatible testimony, no matter how creditable, was rejected.” p. 395

Mark Lane was hired by the Oswald family to represent Lee Oswald’s interests to the Warren Commission. Since there could not be a true trial owing to Oswald being dead, Lane acted as his defense attorney to the extent the Commission allowed. Having seen the sausage get made, so to speak, after the Commission issued its Report, Lane felt it was his duty to point out how far from “beyond a reasonable doubt” the Commission had actually proved its case. Lane points out time and again how key witnesses for the Commission would not have survived cross-examination. Witnesses frequently changed their stories and sometimes were led by Commissioner questions and other times all-but admitted to being coached by lawyers for the Commission. He also quotes numerous ways in which the Dallas police and Federal government representatives gave statements to the press which would have hindered a fair trial.

Lane attacks virtually every element of the Commission’s conclusions. Playing the defense attorney, Lane seeks to show the bullets which hit Kennedy weren’t fired from behind. They weren’t fired by Oswald. They weren’t fired by the rifle found on the sixth floor of the building where Oswald worked. The rifle found didn’t belong to Oswald. Lane does not present alternative evidence, he is only trying to poke holes in the Commission’s arguments using evidence collected by the Dallas police and Federal investigators which the Commission didn’t quote in its Report. If Lane has a coherent alternate theory about what happened in this book it seems to be there was a shooter of some sort on the sixth floor, but also another behind the fence at the top of the infamous knoll. Neither of these two shooters was Oswald, who was out front of the building at the time.

Sometimes Lane mounts an effective defense, other times less so. Take a couple short examples. He is pretty convincing when describing how the rifle tests, supposedly performed under similar conditions to the day of the assassination, were actually from a different height and a different distance than from the Depository window to presidential limo. “Could Oswald have made the shots?” has always been a pretty important question so maybe it is important to know the shot wasn’t actually repeated by the Commission. A weaker point by Lane is the medical report which estimated a 60 degree angle of entry for the wound in Kennedy’s back proves the shot came from too high up to have come from sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. I read that and have to ask what is more likely; the medical report is wrong about the angle or a shot was fired from some imaginary sniper’s nest high enough above the street that a 60 degree angle was created? I must conclude, as the Commission did, that the medical report was inaccurate on this point.

Lane does his best work throwing question on exactly what happened (and when) that led to the death of Dallas police patrolman J. D. Tippit in the Oak Cliff neighborhood. The Commission’s reconstructed escape route from downtown is shown by Lane to go well beyond what can actually be proven. From the unfair police line ups where Oswald was picked as the man seen fleeing the scene of Tippit’s murder, to the conflicting witness statements in the bus and taxi Oswald supposedly rode to the fact two types of bullets were found in Tippit’s body; there are holes in a narrative the Commission simply papered over with heavy-handed lines like, “Nevertheless, the Commission has concluded...”

“Perhaps the Commission thought that if Oswald spent a single moment unaccounted for between the assassination and the time of his arrest, it would be unable to deal effectively with those rumors, current at the time, of Oswald’s participation in a conspiracy. Its criteria for investigating and accepting evidence were related less to the intrinsic value of the information, I believe, than to its paramount need to allay fears of conspiracy.” p. 175

I think Lane’s assessment of the Commission’s goal to “allay fears” is spot on. The Warren Commission Report presents a complete narrative of what happened on 22-24 November 1963 and comes as close to answering the question “why?” as they can, considering Oswald was killed. To reach this clear narrative, they left out some of the details. In essence, they sought the “best fit” line of evidence through a lot of conflicting testimony. Lane spends this book pointing out that not all the data points are on the “best fit” line. While some of these points are interesting in their own right, it doesn’t really change the overall narrative. There will always be data which isn’t on the line. That alone doesn’t mean the Commission’s conclusions are wrong. To take one example Lane mentions over and over again. After the shots were fired many people converged on the area of the parking lot behind the fence at the top of the knoll. Many witnesses thought the shots came from this direction. Many others said they moved to or looked toward the area because others were already doing so. Lane assigns great importance to these initial reactions. My question, though, is what evidence was found there? No shell casings. No discarded rifle. No reports of people running from the scene. The knoll is a data point not on the line.

While Mark Lane’s book failed to convince me the official story is wrong, it did its job is raising questions about the Report and the bias of the Commission. I think Lane’s biggest success is in pointing to the evidence of how hard the Federal government and, even more so, the Dallas police worked to minimize their own failings as relates to the assassination. They should have done a better job to protect the president (and later Oswald) and they could have; they just didn’t because of their own assumptions and some gross miscommunication. I don’t think Lane has uncovered evidence of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy, but it is interesting to see how much the Dallas police were working to save face by altering or omitting testimony and pushing time lines as much as possible and how much the Commission let them do so. To the extent there is a cover-up it is all in the mishandling of the evidence and witnesses after the event. That leads back to where this review started, the Commission couldn’t have proven its case in court, but for better or for worse, it never had to.

The last word will go to Lane himself, because I basically agree with him on this point. From page 207; “If historians are required to conjecture as to the meaning of the altered transcript,” or any of the other things which don’t quite add up, “the responsibility for such speculation must rest with the Commission.”

A Review: The Warren Commission Report

4 of 5 stars.
For the last few years I have always been reading a series of books on a set theme in the background while I read other books. I read about a dozen books about the sinking of HMS Titanic and the destruction of Pompeii in the past. Now I have begun a series about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I read Profiles in Courage which is by Kennedy, but I didn’t have much to say about it. I have just finished the report of the official investigation into the assassination: The Warren Commission Report. A text-only copy (with frequent OCR processing errors) is readily available.

How can one really even review this report? It is the text of the official explanation so I have heard most of the story before. If you happen never to have heard the official story before, it goes like this: President Kennedy died of a single gunshot wound to the back of his head. This shot and (only) two others were made by a single shooter from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. That shooter was Lee Harvey Oswald. The bullet fragments in the presidential limousine were fired by the gun found on the sixth floor. That gun was bought by, shipped to and photographed with Oswald months before the assassination. No evidence of material, logistical or planning assistance of any kind from any source was uncovered. Jack Rudy killed Oswald two days later for his own reasons and had no previous connection to Oswald or any other conspiracy. I didn’t find any unreasonable leaps in logic or gaping holes in the Commission’s theories given the information presented. Re-examinations of the case usually start here. All alternate theories must be mounted in opposition to this body of collected information.

What a massive body of information the Report is, too! It is 888 pages including footnotes and is based on what must be thousand of pages of sworn testimony and depositions by eye-witnesses, experts, government officials, and family members and acquaintances of Oswald and Rudy. Since I watch a lot of non-fiction crime shows I am familiar with fingerprint evidence, microscopic comparisons of firing pins and bullets, and question document examination. All of these were used to match the evidence to Oswald. All of these lines of evidence are explained in detail for people who in 1964 had seen fewer episodes of Forensic Files than I have. A bullet matched to a gun, matched to a suspect, who was seen in the area before, during and after the assassination is strong evidence. Plenty of people have been convicted of murder on less. Though, to be fair, and the Report itself points this out, since Oswald was dead by that time the Commission was not bringing evidence to criminal trial so not all of the evidence gathered quite rises to that high level of proof. Case closed!

Unless all the evidence is manufactured, of course... In many ways, reading this report in the 2017, after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, after the Watergate scandal, after the Iran-Contra affair, after actual impeachment hearings against a sitting president and that whole “we were wrong about WMD” misadventure it becomes impossible not to think of the possibility the Commission was lied to. The Report makes constant mention of whom the information reported comes from. About half of the information is “according to the FBI” or “according to the Secret Service” or “according to the Dallas Police” or (even!) “according to the Soviet Union’s embassy in Mexico City.” Are these really trustworthy sources of information?! Maybe in 1964 they were. The Commission certainly had faith in the reports and records turned over to them by other government agencies. As the biographies of the commission members make clear, some of them were literally born in the Nineteenth Century! There was criticism of the trusting nature of the Commission even at the time. Overall, it seems that was a simpler age and there is something beautifully old-fashioned about the Report and its tone of assurance.

Speaking of beauty, the part of the Report I find most striking is the domestic portrait it paints of Lee Oswald and his Russian wife, Marina. (Since her family was from Minsk, she’s probably Belarusian, but these intra-USSR distinctions were not the concern of the Cold War-era Commission.) After concluding Oswald was the assassin, a large part of the report and a very long appendix (Appendix 13) deals with all the minutia of his life. Perhaps the Commission was intending to encourage disdainful pity, but to me, he comes across as very nearly sympathetic. He never really succeeded at anything in his life and he ended up bitter about it. Born into humble circumstances and never able to rise above them, he was a loner and a constant reader who had big ideas he was never able to put legs under. I see something of myself in that biography. He became disillusioned of the American system, but after living in the USSR, he learned that wasn’t really any better. The only positive he took from Minsk was his marriage to Marina. They seem to have come to care for each other, but initially they both married to spite previous partners. I want to know much more about Marina. She is a major source of the Commission’s information on Lee, but she is not the focus of their investigation. After the Oswalds came to the US, Lee seems to have been searching for some way to make a big splash and become important in the political scene in the way young people often do. He was 24 at the time. He bought a gun. Missed a shot at a right-wing ex-general. He tried to start a pro-Cuba group and found no support. He tried to go to Cuba and they didn’t want him. Then he read on a certain Monday the President would be passing below his office window that Friday. He never got the advice Holden Caulfield did about living for a cause rather looking for a way to die for it. To me, that’s just another tragic part of what is an American tragedy on almost every level.