A Review: The History of Archaeology by John Romer

3/5 stars.
I grew up with John Romer's history programs back in the days when you could actually learn something on The Learning Channel. This is first book of Romer's I have read. As part of my on-going series, I wanted to see how the (re)discovery of Pompeii fit into his narrative of the development of archaeology as a science. The books is subtitled; “Great Excavations of the World.” I hoped it would be a chronological, example by example look at how archaeological techniques and knowledge were developed. The book is organized more topically and focuses mostly on the Nineteenth Century. It was an enjoyable read, but I don't know that it was all that informative and certainly not a very important work in the field. It felt very much like the companion book to a television show, which of course, it is.

The broad topics Romer covers are: Hey! There's old Stuff in the Ground. Hey! There's treasure in the Ground. Stuff in the Ground Proves the Truth of Literature. Which Culture is Really the Oldest? Stuff in the Ground Proves the Rightness of My Politics. In each of these categories, Romer gives ten to fifteen examples of the development of knowledge or, more commonly, competing interpretations of the same information. This back-and-forth, vignette approach gives an over-all impression of the professionalization of archaeology and the contributions the field has made to human knowledge. This “general impression” result of the book is not exactly a bad thing, but I hoped the text would be more precise. Combined with Romer's very personal writing style, most of the book ends up being an assortment of report about what John Romer thinks about various things, not a coherent, supported presentation of history. For me, that holds the book back.

Many familiar figures are covered; Elgin in Greece, Belzoni in Egypt, Schliemann in Turkey, Petrie in Greece, Evans in Crete and Carter in Egypt. The book also introduced me to others I didn't know; Pitt Rivers (who invented methods of diagramming a site's layers which are still used today), Auguste Mariette (who championed keeping Egypt's history in Egypt), John Stevens and Frederick Catherwood (who followed local guides into the jungle to make the first detailed reports of “lost” Maya cities), and James Breasted who (secured massive corporate sponsorship to conduct extensive surveys of Middle-Eastern sites).

So, what does this book have to say about Pompeii? There are three short sections at the beginning which use Herculaneum and Pompeii as jumping-off points to the themes of the book. In 1980, the docks at Herculaneum where excavated which revealed the actual people who had fled from the volcano is 79 CE. The most striking image being the skeleton of a slave woman clutching the child of her wealthy owners. The interest in the people and the echoes of the society in which they lived was the primary motivation of the excavation. How far from where archaeology started. Back in 1736 when excavations first began in earnest, Herculaneum was just a source of decorations. No one considered what could be learned about Roman life from the remains. Even after Pompeii was uncovered and scholars could see the reality of the world described in the surviving Roman literature they treated Pompeii as more of a blank slate onto which they painted their impressions of the past than as a new source of information. Romer doesn't quite make it explicit, but it seems to me his book is an explanation of how we got from Herculaneum in 1736 to Herculaneum in 1980.

A Review: Pompeii by Roger C. Carrington

4/5 stars.
The next in my continuing series of books about Pompeii is the aptly named Pompeii by Roger Carrington. I got my copy from AbeBooks. The book was published in 1936 which places it squarely between the Nineteenth Century stuff I have read previously and the recent works I have yet to read. Unlike reading a digital copy, it was a constant joy to hold this eighty year old in my hands. The text is full of figures, mostly the plans of houses and temples, and there is a series of photographs at the end as well as a fold-out map of the extent of the excavations as Carrington knew them.

There was much to love in this short book. For the first time (among the books I've read) Carrington gives a full account of the re-discovery of the town. Actually, he starts with the rediscovery of Herculaneum, which was a working-class town around the bay from Pompeii, buried by the same 79 CE eruption. An attempt to sink a well in 1709 turned up sculpture instead. Workmen had tunneled down into the town's theater. For over 100 years, the theater and surrounding buildings were treated like a sculpture mine. I cannot help but think of the Pejite engine mine in Nausicaä. Excavations in Pompeii itself began in 1748, where the layers of ash and lava were thinner, but not until 1860 was systematic archaeological methodology begun.

The emergence of archeology as a science is what most informs Carrington's account. Gell gave a description of the ancient city itself. Bulwer-Lytton used it as a setting for a drama. Carrington takes a ground-up look at the life of the city. He uses facts like which buildings were in use when and how certain items were found stored to tract the changing culture of ancient Campania. Greek, Etruscan, Samnite and Roman influences are all tracked in turn through changing floor plans of country villas and the diverse materials used to build and rebuild city homes. Carrington discusses what can be known about politics in the city from the slogans found painted on Pompeii's walls and what can be known about religion from which temples were most recently renovated. I love archaeological accounts where the author says, “we know that because we found this.” Pompeii is full of that kind of information.

The weakness of Carrington's book is that his account is one largely of institutions. It is an account of merchant guilds, classes of workers, religious cults and political parties. There is little mention of individuals, despite many known names from the city. As I have mentioned before, I have long associated Pompeii with the plaster casts made from the impressions left by those caught up in the disaster. Carrington does mention these plaster casts, but only in passing in the appendix on visiting Pompeii. I suppose this is because the text focuses more on the life of the city than its death. Even so, it seems to me the actual remains of the actual people would be a great way to focus on the fact the city was full of people. Perhaps it was not “proper” in 1936 for a classicist to speak casually about the dead.

I enjoyed reading this book and I learned about the culture of the city. What more could I want?

Wild Skies Character Primer Updated

As I discussed previously, Wild Skies: Europa Tempest has been my major on-going project for almost a year now. Brandon and I are happy to show off some of the progress we have made on the project. The Character Primer 1.2 is now available! The document contains everything needed to create a Wild Skies character; information about the nine attributes, all forty animal types and dozens of animal abilities, twenty career choices, rules for the Moral Compass and ten different party affiliations. This is not the complete game. Histories of various nations, vehicles, equipment, combat mechanics and full skill descriptions are not included. Still, the Primer should provide a taste of the theme and the kind of game we are making. Do have a look if you are at all interested in an alternate history, anthropomorphic, diesel-punk, pulp adventure role-playing game. If you still want to get in on the creation of this game, contact us. Keep watching the horizon, because more is on the way. Thanks.

Crafting Alternate History

Since our Kickstarter for Wild Skies: Europa Tempest was successful back in October last year, Brandon and I have been working on the book. Most of the rules have been at last ironed out (more on that in time) and it is time to turn back to our setting and get it all fleshed out. That is what I have been mainly working on for the last two weeks. It has been great! I love crafting alternate history. From the beginning our jumping-off point was always, “What if the First World War never ended?” With that as the basis it's been my job to turn that core idea into a description of the dozen or so years since the 11 November 1918 date we are familiar with from real history.

We are well aware we are not the first to offer an answer to the question, “What if the First World War never ended?” Harry Turtledove, Michael Moorcock and the makers of Tannhäuser, among many others, have all been over this terrain before. Throughout these last two weeks, I have been thinking a lot about one of my literary heroes; Lawrence Watt-Evans. He once wrote he's never been into writing historical fiction because he's always troubled by the why. Why that particular divergence point in human history? Why that particular version of events from the infinitely many possible versions? My answer can only be; we wanted to create something broadly familiar, but unlike other story worlds we have seen before. We started with a few assumptions about our setting. The first being the on-going war led to revolutions in all the major participants. From there, we assume Bolsheviks would not win the revolution in Russia (at least not outright) and fascists would win a revolution in France. We didn't want Germany to be the Third Reich ten years ahead of time. We did want Britain to lean Orwellian. The United States never entered the Great War.

Excepting those basic assumptions I have been digging through histories of the era and looking at events which followed the Armistice to find little incidents and factoids both to justify and to inform our setting. In our previous projects Brandon and I have both taken echoes of real cultural fragments and recast them in new ways within our fictional settings. Working backward through the list above we take the pro-Wilson 1916 campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war,” and just say he did. Not even the sinking of Lusitania brought American troops to Europe, thus everything which follows is different. We have a lot of ideas for America, but they will not be the focus of Europa Tempest.

The countries of Europe have been our biggest focus. As I said, I'm very happy with the way things have come together. Churchill, famous for his role in WWII, was also in the government during WWI. He fell from power over how the war had been fought. Now take that to the extreme. If the whole government of 1918 is replaced because no one in the country is happy about how the war has turned out you become able to posit the kind of drastic changes Orwell envisioned thirty years early. With Germany we have focused more on a return to pre-war war fever than moving forward to the Nazi bugbear. Kaiser Wilhelm II left at the end of the War. In our setting he has returned to power as an bit of an older and wiser figure. He's not as eager for war in our 1930s setting as he was in 1914. He's the voice of reason now trying to keep in line the newer generation eager for war. It's this reuse in a different form of all the part of history you may have heard of that really gets us excited as creators.

Our inspiration for our other main countries comes less from inversions of specific people and more from ideologies. The basic inspiration for a fascist France comes right out of the Second World War period. I read a few books looking at the tensions within the Third Republic and the origins of the Vichy regime. To make the story very short, the same kind of militant nationalism which became fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany existed in France as well. It is not hard to imagine a cadre of young fascists forming in France during the war and not much harder to imagine an opportunity for them to seize power in the aftermath of the war. Speaking of cadres seizing power, in Russia we have declared the civil war following the October Revolution is still on-going even into the 1930s. Reds and Whites and many other factions are still trying to work out who will win. Our vision of Russia is perhaps the least possible because we haven't pushed anything which helped the Whites or which hurt the Reds. We just want it this way.

I haven't explained much about the setting, I know. This was only supposed to be the briefest mention of some of the bits of the story I've been working on recently. If anything mentioned here does interest you, please have a look at the Kickstarter page. This project is funded and moving along and you can still jump on by contacting us there. Until next time.

A Review: Lovecraft: A Look Behind the “Cthulhu Mythos” by Lin Carter

4/5 stars.
I am by no means a connoisseur of H. P. Lovecraft. I've read maybe a dozen of his stories. I don't particularly care for Lovecraft's ponderous writing style either. There is also the inescapable problem of his xenophobia. All that said, however, there is something interesting and worth reading in Lovecraft's stories. To be overly brief, he posits a universe of immeasurable vastness in both time and space and populates this universe with beings for whom humanity is below notice. The terror in Lovecraft is that humankind is irrelevant. Almost all his characters are assuaging that terror in some way; they embrace madness or deny the truth they have glimpsed or seek relevance by allying with the more powerful beings. These human responses to fear are what make Lovecraft's stories interesting to me because humans still struggle, over 100 years after Lovecraft began writing, to make meaning for themselves in a universe we know to be even larger and even more impersonal than he described.

Lin Carter was a fantasy and science fiction writer who also worked as an editor in those genres. He also wrote three non-fiction studies of fantasy fiction and its origins. This is the second in the series. They aren't exactly scholarly studies, but Carter was clearly very well-read and he knew what he was talking about. He also has the distinction to be among the first to examine the fantasy genre as it was first emerging so his comments form an interesting time capsule of sorts. The first “A Look Behind” book took on Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings in 1969 just after the publication of the first paperback edition had made Tolkien a household name. Though I like Lovecraft less than Tolkien this follow-up book by Carter from 1972 was a much better read. Carter knew many of the people involved in the story of Lovecraft's failure to flourish in his own time and in his long, slow rise to posthumous popularity. Carter essentially says because of his professional and personal relationships he was in a unique position to actually take a look behind the origins of the “Cthuhlu Mythos.” Those connections show through in the book. Carter himself met Lord Dunsany, who had been one of Lovecraft's major early influences. He exchanged letters with Lovecraft's ex-wife to get her insight. Carter even had his own Mythos stories published by August Derleth, Lovecraft's main literary successor. These sorts of near-overlaps with Lovecraft give Carter a certainly unique and seemingly well-informed perspective. Carter writes with clarity and authority and the book is very readable.

Carter follows both Lovecraft's biography and his career. I found all of this information interesting because I knew so little of it already. Yet, Lovecraft: A Look Behind this is not really a biography nor is it a deep investigation into the themes of Lovecraft's oeuvre. Carter focuses on the fifteen stories he identifies as connected to each other in the “shared universe” of the Cthuhlu Mythos. He gives dates of composition and tells where and how each story came to be published. Carter sometimes relates anecdotes connected to the tales taken from Lovecraft's enormous correspondence or related directly to Carter by people who knew Lovecraft. This is the main point of the book. It traces how one chance mention on one early story was built upon again and again in later stories to create the cosmos-spanning Mythos. The only real weakness of the book is the tendency of some of these sections to read as simplistic lists following the format: “Then Lovecraft wrote X story, which introduced Y tome of lore and Z elder god.”

In large part the tale of Lovecraft's work is a tale of two publishers. First, the pulp magazine Weird Tales, which seemed to be the first and only magazine Lovecraft considered submitting his work to. A rejection from Weird Tales (often for length or for the simple fact he usually submitted single-spaced, hand-written pages!) usually meant a finished story remains unpublished until after Lovecraft's death. Lovecraft accepted Weird Tales' tiny paychecks and never looked for work elsewhere even as other magazines with wider circulations and better pay rates entered the market. Lovecraft's inability or unwillingness to turn his ideas to profit led to a life of poverty which in turn contributed to his early death from ill health. This also means many of Lovecraft's stories are no longer under copyright because Weird Tales eventually folded and the rights passed to the public domain. After Lovecraft died one of the many literary friends Lovecraft had cultivated from the Weird Tales circle committed to putting Lovecraft's work into hardcover form. This was August Derleth and he launched Arkham House, named for one of Lovecraft's fictional towns. Derleth became a successful publisher as well as an accomplished writer and his goal of collecting all Lovecraft's stories and keeping them all in print was accomplished. Lovecraft's stories have always been both held up as worth reading and easy to access so they continue to be a source of inspiration.

Something I didn't expect is that Lovecraft's large circle of fellow writers considered creating the Mythos as something of a game. The vast number of old books containing forbidden knowledge strains creditably from a certain point of view. How can so many rare and dangerous books be in so many collections without becoming just another part of the standard body of human knowledge? But that logistical complaint comes from the modern era looking back. For the original members of the Lovecraft circle, inventing a new half-mad scholar with yet another collection of arcane formulas referencing some formerly unknown semi-deity was like telling a good joke. They competed with each other, turning each other's names and hometowns into data points in the shadowy background of the shared fictional world they all created. The Mythos was always open-ended. New people were always able to add to it and so many have over the last century. Unfortunately, many people don't seem to have realized the joke part of the whole operation. Robert Bloch told Carter when Lovecraft died he didn't have the heart to tell any more of the jokes because the person they were for wouldn't be able to enjoy them. Somehow it warms my heart to know the man who has become nearly synonymous with dark and horrible and wrote about earth-shaking and mind-shattering beings from the stars was really just having a laugh with his friends.

I did not really learn anything more about the Cthulhu Mythos than I already knew from the dozen or so Lovecraft stories I've read and from what I've picked up via cultural osmosis. However, I did learn quite a bit about Lovecraft and the constellation of writers surrounding him. I've added a bunch of names to my reading list. There's a lot of works about Lovecraft out there these days, but this still serves as a great introduction. I think after Lovecraft: A Look Behind am ready for one of the more substantial Lovecraft biographies out there.

Here is Carter's list of Lovecraft's “Cthulhu Mythos” stories with links to them all on Wikisource. Go read all them yourself, if you haven't already.
1. "The Nameless City" (1938)
2. ”The Hound” (1924)
3. "The Festival" (1925)
4. "The Call of Cthulhu" (1928)
5. "The Dunwich Horror" (1929)
6. "The Whisperer in Darkness" (1931)
7. The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1936)
8. "At the Mountains of Madness" (1936)
9. "The Dreams in the Witch House" (1933)
10. "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1937)
11. "The Shadow out of Time" (1936)
12. "The Haunter of the Dark" (1936)
13. History and Chronology of the 'Necronomicon' (1936)
14. Fungi from Yuggoth (1941)
15. “The Challenge from Beyond” (1935) – written with A. Merrit, C. L. Moore, Robert E. Howard and Frank Belknap Long.

A Review: The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain

3/5 stars.
I don't remember how I learned Mark Twain covered a visit to Pompeii in this travelogue. I generally enjoy reading old travelogues because they describe a world which doesn't quite exist anymore. To me, it is akin reading about a fantasy world. There is also an historical interest because the author inevitably talks much about his or her own sentiments and ideas. Thus the modern reader learns something not only about the place the writer visited, but also something about where the author is from. All that being said; “Mark Twain goes to Pompeii” seemed like something I should read in my series of books about Pompeii.

First off, there is very little about Pompeii in this book. The book covers a five month cruise all around the Mediterranean, so the buried city only forms part of one chapter (XXXI). About the only thing of note he mentions (revealing something of what was commonly known at the time) is when he thought about visiting a buried city, he imagined it as still buried and exploring it by torchlight after climbing down into the mine-like excavation. He was surprised to see it was all uncovered and open to they sky. I find this odd. Twain makes frequent mention of the guidebooks to European and Near Eastern travel the “Innocents” he traveled with had to hand for their journey. How had he missed the fact the city had been completely uncovered even though he knows of the upright soldier mentioned by Gell? Twain writes:

We never read of Pompeii but we think of that soldier; we can not write of Pompeii without the natural impulse to grant to him the mention he so well deserves.

Apparently, we still cannot.

Beyond the single chapter for which I read it, the book was just alright. The pleasure cruise Twain went on took place in 1867 and many of the chapters were sent home as newspaper reports. The book is a reworked version of these newspaper pieces together with many illustrations and Twain's fuller reflection upon the events of the trip. There are many incidents which strain credulity, but this is hardly surprising from a man who is remembered as a satirist. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of Venice (XXII), his night time visit to the Acropolis of Athens (XXXII), his luncheon with Tsar Alexander II in Yalta (XXXVII) and I liked the perspective he brought to his horseback ride through Syria and the Holy Land (XLII - LVI). There were also moments, most strikingly in Chapter XVIII, where Twain wonders off into memories of his childhood and youth. I want to know more about the person he describes in those fleeting moments. I have added Twain's autobiography to my reading list.

These enjoyable moments are scattered throughout a large book full of a lot of bad-mouthing of everything. He lampoons his American shipmates and himself, but he gives his worst to just about every else. He goes on about how the Old Masters weren't so great. He points out how nation after nation is run down and reliving old glories. He describes the French and insufferable, the Italians as beggars, the Turks as barely human, the Syrians as dirty and on and on. The American newspaper audience of the late 1860s seems to have had quite the taste for this sort of ruthless dismissal of the Old World, but I do not.

I am at a loss to guess how much of what is in this book is the real Mark Twain and how much was what he felt he needed to say for the papers. (I am aware there is some irony in asking what is real when talking about a man who created a fictional persona for himself.) This book was written early in his career when he showed promise as a writer, but before he became famous. Hints of the biting social criticism he later became known for are evident in this book, but he doesn't yet seem to know how he wants to wield his voice. Again, I want to read more of Twain to see how that development occurred.
In his conclusion, Twain says this:

It would be well if such an excursion could be gotten up every year and the system regularly inaugurated. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

I couldn't agree more.

AMPed Up!

Another project of mine has come to fruition. Third Eye Games has just published United Human Front: Affiliation Guide for AMP Year Two for its AMP: Year One game line. In the game, AMP stands for Accelerated Mutant Potential. When the game first came out I wasn't too interested because I'm not a huge superhero fan. I miss-understood things. AMP is not a superhero game, it's a super-powers game. Maybe it's not that big a difference, but it's an important one. AMP has plenty of “faster than a speeding bullet” without a lot of spandex costumes. When Eloy asked me to write for the game and I actually read the book I liked how dark it was. AMP is full of 1990s-era Marvel-style angst; “they hate us, yet we are dedicated to saving them from themselves.” It's also full of government distrust, secret machinations and downright nastiness which seem to have been pulled from the headlines of recent years. A good setting for a game.

I was asked to write a guidebook for members of the United Human Front. These are the people doing the hating of the AMPs. Explicitly. At first I was not excited. No one wants to be stuck writing about the one-dimensional “bad guys.” Well, I didn't anyway. I took it as a writing challenge, how can I make the anti-mutant faction in a mutation-based super-powers game into something which seems positive? How can I make the UHF a viable option for players picking their character's affiliation? How can I make this faction into something more than a stereotype?

I decided to focus on two things. Conspiracy theories and the kind of anti-government domestic terrorism America saw in the 1990s. McVeigh, Kaczynski, Koresh; they all came from within American culture. That part of the culture hasn't gone away, either. There are even more conspiracies afoot than ever these days. I tried to present the UHF members as thinking people (maybe thinking too much). They have looked at all the evidence and come to their own conclusions. Two members don't have to agree on what AMPs really are, or who created them in the first place to agree they are a potential threat to decent folk everywhere. AMPs are people who can turn into fire or smash rocks with their hands and who are drawn to fight with each other whenever they meet. That's dangerous! The United Human Front is circling the wagons and defending what they know. It's a noble position, in a way. I've also put out the idea not everyone who looks down their nose at an AMP is actually a member of the official UHF organization. This lets GMs use human antagonists claiming UHF affiliation who aren't actually acting by the more careful and deliberate means of the UHF hierarchy. Since the game establishes the UHF was founded by a geneticist, I played up that element too. The UHF top tier people know AMPs are different on a genetic level. It's not technically wrong to say they aren't human. Maybe the man on the street uses it as a cover for racism and fearmongering, but not all members of UHF take the same lessons from the founder's genetic tests.

I've tried to weave the idea of conflicting views of reality into the adventure which forms part of the Affiliation Guide. I have crafted stories as a GM for my weekly game group and I tried to write part of a choose-your-own adventure one time, so I didn't think an RPG adventure would be hard to write. I was wrong. I've not written an RPG adventure for publication before and I found it difficult to present a story where the players were forced to question their own definitions of human and mutant. My first attempt was roughly twice as long as it was supposed to be! I had trouble creating characters players were supposed to care about. I had trouble accounting for everything a group of players might do. I wanted to have multiple paths so different UHF groups with different visions of what it means to be “defenders of humanity” could enjoy the adventure. Ultimately a lot of the branching pathways had to come out to bring the thing down to size. The manuscript I delivered has been polished to a nice gleam by Eloy and the rest of his team. It can only improve when the creators of the game give it a once-over, right? I love seeing ideas I labored on over my keyboard turn into pages with proper layouts and illustrations. Well done, Third Eye Games!

If you want to check it out, the United Human Front Affiliation Guide is available now.
If you want to get started with the AMP game, check out AMP: Year One.
You can also back the Kickstarter for the latest book in the series; AMP: Year Three.