I’ve been kept busy lately by some work-related stuff, along with the seven or eight distinct illnessess that have all apparently taken up residence in my digestive system simultaenously and started battling for supremacy, but I’m back in action.  Look for new reviews both here and at BSCreview very soon.

Here’s some very good news, via SF Crowsnest: Solaris Books has found a buyer.  It was announced a few months ago that their parent company, the Black Library, was going to start focusing solely on its primary purpose as the fiction-publishing arm of Games Workshop.   Solaris’ new owner is British game developer Rebellion Developments.  Rebellion has experience with publishing, through creating their own SF/Fantasy/Horror imprint Abaddon Books and by acquiring seminal weekly comics anthology 2000 AD and RPG/tabletop game company Mongoose Publishing.  2000 AD is the source of Judge Dredd, among other things, and Mongoose is the publisher of the current edition of the legendary Traveller and the new RPG based on David Drake’s Hammers Slammers stories, so presumably the new guys in charge know their way around the SF field.

(Though their greatest accolade may be this line from the Rebellion Developments Wikipedia page:  “Their first known title was Alien Vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar, which was considered one of the few good games for that console.”  Seldom has a single sentence been so coldly factual and hilariously brutal at the same.  Poor Jaguar.  I guess the world just wasn’t ready for your 64 bits of processing power and godawful controllers.)

I’ve really come to like Solaris over the past year or so, and it’s through Solaris that I’ve discovered a number of authors, such as Andy Remic, Eric Brown, and Jeffrey Thomas.  I’m very happy to see it will continue.

Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died earlier this month at the age of 61.  A lot of things I said when Gary Gygax died are fitting here as well.

I know far more about Dungeons and Dragons than is reasonable for someone who has never actually played it, save through computer game adaptations like Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment. Tabletop roleplaying games aren’t my thing; I’m too shy and too uncomfortable in groups for it. (Yes, that’s right: I’m too nerdy to play Dungeons and Dragons. God have mercy on me.) As far as I can recall, my first exposure to role-playing games was in the mid to late 80’s, when I would hang out with some older kids on my block who played it.

Arneson’s legacy first seriously touched my life in 1989 or 1990, though I wouldn’t realize it until years later. I was a video game fan, and Nintendo Power magazine was advertising a promotion in which every subscription came with a free copy of a game called Dragon Warrior. (This was when they still insisted on calling games “GamePaks,” which stuck me as very silly even at the age of nine.) I’m not sure how it made financial sense to give away a $40 game to sell $15 magazine subscriptions, but apparently it did. I didn’t know what Dragon Warrior was, but my greedy, calculating young heart couldn’t say no to a deal like that. I mailed in my $15, and a few weeks later the game and my first issue of the magazine arrived.

I had never played anything like it before. Fighting enemies was turn-based. Everything seemed to revolve around numbers- character stats, enemy stats, weapon and armor attributes, calculating what to spend your scarce money on to give you a better chance of surviving. My friends were alternately baffled and bored to tears by it.

It was the greatest game I had ever played.

I had (and have) problems with fine motor control. I liked video games, but I was all but hopeless at most of them. Suddenly, there was a game that did not require reflexes and dexterity I didn’t have, and actually favored my preference for strategy and careful planning. A short while later, I discovered the first Final Fantasy for the NES as well, and I realized I had found my gaming niche. RPGs and strategy games have been my video games of choice ever since.

That first Dragon Warrior seems a bit creaky now, of course. The combat was very simplistic, and the story was scarcely more involved than Super Mario Brothers. But when I was a little kid, it was magic. That game opened up whole imaginative worlds for me, and did so in a time when the real world was not at all a good place.

Dragon Warrior was largely based on previous computer role-playing games like Wizardry and Ultima, which were based on still older games, which were based on the original tabletop Dungeons and Dragons. So, there’s a direct line of descent from Dave Arneson to many of my favorite games today, and I owe him a great deal. Rest in peace.

My video games column at Diverse Nerd Association continues.  My September 19th column has stuff on the possible Mass Effect movie, Warhammer Online, Uwe Boll, and what is almost certainly the first time anyone has brought up John McLaughlin and the Mahavishnu Orchestra while discussing Xbox Live.  The September 26th column has Crysis Warhead, the forthcoming Max Payne movie, Spore, and more.  You know, it’s not just any column that manages to work in USA Up All Night, municipal zoning laws, and the phrases “godlike post-singularity machine intelligences” and “pagan blood sacrifice” in the space of less than 500 words.

My new games column is up at Diverse Nerd Association.  It’s got stuff on Fallout 3, Spore, the martial arts skills of Maximilien Robespierre, Shin Megami Tensei, Metallica, giant hallucinatory spiders, and more.  I should warn that the column gets a little bluer than usual.  Nevertheless, if you read only one video game news column containing the phrase “Vladimir Lenin’s fearsome Flaming Dragon Kick” this year, make it this one.

My new column at Diverse Nerd Association is up, with coverage of recent video gaming news, Sean Williams’ Star Wars tie-in novel, the perils of translation software, and wanton substance abuse.  Enjoy.

At Grasping for the Wind, I participated in the latest Ask the Bloggers on the issue of maps in books.

And, finally V&C&U Buckell-o-thon 2008 comes to a triumphant close with part 2 of my interview with Tobias Buckell at Crucial Taunt.

Over at Diverse Nerd Association, my latest game news column is up.  I’ve also got a post on their blog about the awesomeness that is the Bionic Commando Japanese Singing Trailer.

My newest column at Diverse Nerd Association is now up.  If nothing else, I can probably claim the distinction of being the only person ever to write a column on video games with references to Nazis, The Wizard of Oz, late Republican Rome, and the movie Candyman within a few paragraphs of each other.

Hey, I never said it was a good distinction.

The Diverse Nerd Association is up and in full swing now, and my first weekly news column is now up.  It’s a great site site if you like video games, comics, or anime- and my column will probably throw in some science fiction here and there, too.  I hope you’ll have a look.

At last week’s Mind Meld at SF Signal, the question asked was:

What are the best examples of SF/F worldbuilding?

This is a question I like to think about, since I think worldbuilding- and especially the process of extrapolating how this or that technology or social change would affect the world- is one of the core virtues of science fiction that distinguishes it from more conventional fiction. People always say- or chant- “All fiction is about people,” and in a trivial sense that’s true, but it’s often less true in science fiction than in other genres. A science fiction story certainly can be about people (that is, the psychology of specific individuals, or some alleged truth about the “human condition”), but it doesn’t have to be, and that’s one of its strengths.

(This, I think, lies at the core of why science fiction is held to be inferior to “literature:” it rejects mainstream culture’s privileging of emotion and socialization over other human faculties, such as reason. Most people- and, what’s more important, most opinion-shapers in this area – are primarily socially/emotionally/people oriented, and people often consider subjects outside their own field of interest and/or competence is to be inferior or unworthy. It’s also a common human tendency to find people who aren’t like you to be some mixture of baffling, pitiful, and repulsive, and so disdain for the stereotypical nerd spills over onto the interests and pastimes of the stereotypical nerd. There are other factors, but I think this is the heart of it.)

But I digress. So, what are some of my favorites?

The Oikumene and worlds beyond of Jack Vance’s Demon Princes series (The Star King, The Killing Machine, The Palace of Love, The Face, The Book of Dreams, currently available in two omnibus collections) is the first thing that comes to mind. There are so many interesting locations, and there are few who can make places come alive like Vance: Dar Sai and it’s bizarre mating customs and strange sports (someone ought to get a real hadual league going), the cruel and morbid people of Sarkovy, the diverse worlds of the vast Rigel Concourse, and many more. Vance is also the unsurpassed master of the fictional epigraph as world-building device.

The old BattleTech universe was tremendously detailed and interesting, especially if you have some of the old House sourcebooks that came out in 80s. It’s actually pretty remarkable how much background material they created for a tabletop war game, and I love that sort of thing. Granted, there’s no real reason anyone needs to know what the legal status of Lutheranism is in the Rasalhague District of the Draconis Combine in order to adjudicate battles between giant robots, but it’s fun to have information like that if you like to immerse yourself.

Poul Anderson’s Orion Shall Rise is a good one, and my favorite post-apocalyptic setting. There’s lots of interesting stuff – Skyholm, a pre-war aerostat whose inhabitants rule parts of Western Europe, the well-intentioned but oppressive Maurai nation that rules the Pacific, the near-anarchic and rapidly industrializing Northwest Union, held together by its Lodges. There are lots of little things that made it feel more real to me- for instance, the fact that the nuclear war that shattered civilization centuries ago is called different things (the Doom, the Judgment, etc.) in different cultures, or how pre-Doom religions have evolved in subtly different ways in different parts of the world.

I love the setting for John C. Wright’s Golden Age trilogy, the Golden Oecumene. I can’t really do justice to it, because it’s it probably more densely packed with ideas than just about anything I’ve ever read; I sometimes felt as if every page had enough imagination to support whole novels. It also manages the feat- a difficult one, I’ve argued- of being an exciting story within a utopian society, without even the expedient of venturing into some hostile realm outside the utopia being portrayed. I love Iain M. Banks’ Culture books, for instance, but the Culture itself is really the least interesting thing about the books it appears in. Not so the Oecumene.

I’ve become increasingly fond of Neal Asher’s Polity universe. My favorite location in it is probably the world of Spatterjay from his book The Skinner, with its relentlessly nasty ecosystem. Spatterjay has some interesting social speculation, too: The bite of the Spatterjay leech transmits a virus that gradually changes the human body, making the host stronger, tougher, and faster-healing until he is almost unkillable. The human settlers thus have a rather casual attitude towards violence- they have prize-fights where disemboweling someone is merely the equivalent of a boxing TKO. He’ll be fine, just stuff his intestines back in and let him walk it off…

Finally, Larry Niven’s Known Space deserves a mention. I love the juxtaposition of hard science fiction elements with the more implausible or even outrageous concepts Niven comes up with. On the one hand, you’ve got carefully thought out use of reaction drives, slower-than-light travel and civilizations, and other hard SF staples. Even the more fanciful elements are dealt with rigorously- momentum is conserved when you’re sent through a teleporter, for instance. On the other hand… A billion years ago, telepathic aliens crushed a slave revolt with a massive telepathic transmission that killed all sapient life in the galaxy! Human adults are actually just the adolescent form of a race of hyperintelligent genocidal aliens from the galactic core! Luck is genetic, and you can selectively breed for it to create nigh-invulnerable people! It’s sort of like going to a really interesting physics lecture and then taking LSD halfway through, but without those pesky dissociative fugue states and giant spider attacks.

Any thoughts? Any favorites of your own to nominate?

For anybody who likes video games, I’ve got an article about the recent E3 show up at the newly relaunched Diverse Nerd Association. If you only read one video game column that has a joke based on the poetry of Wilfred Owen this year, make it this one.

The Association itself is a project I’m rather excited about. I discovered it when site founder and fellow Illinoisian Lecester Reed advertised for writers on Craigslist, and I think it’s a great idea with a lot of potential. The site doesn’t have all its sections running yet, but what’s up so far looks very good. If you’re into games, anime, comics, and the like, I’d urge you to have a look.