Books 19 - 21

[subplotkudzu]

19) The Mote in God's Eye (Reread): Niven and Pournell's book was calling to me for some reason, so I plowed through it last weekend. Since my first real exposure to Traveller was well after the last time i had read this I had not realized how much of the Traveller imperium was cribbed from this book. That's not a bad thing - it's a good book - but it that thought made me pull down....

20) GURPS Traveller: I have a copy of this that materialized out of the aerther some years ago. I would swear it was ladegard s' but he tells me he still has his. I had at best flipped through it before, and now that I was looking at it the setting's origins as a melange of SF settings - the imperium and Alderson drive from Mote, the ancients/forerunners from the Known Space, Psychohistory from the Foundation books and so on, (though as a melange, where's the spice?) which makes it hard for me to take the setting seriously. On the whole it ends up feeling like the Forgotten Realms, where you cross the border from the happy middle youman dalelands into the 500-700 AD Arabian Nights country and turn north into the Vikings. It all makes me less likely to run something in the setting.

21) Girl Genius Volumes 1-6 (reread) This showed a lot of instances of foreshadowing that I had missed last time around, show just how well the Foglio's have this plotted. What saddens me is how surprised I remain about how well they have it plotted, because most comics stories SHOULD BE plotted this well. But since they so often aren't we accept it, and then get thrilled when we find out that someone has planned more than 2 issues in advance.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Traveller struck me as indebted to Andre Norton's Solar Queen novels, or perhaps Poul Anderson's van Rijn and David Falkayn stories. Not so much the Free Traders in Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, who were more ancestral to the merchanters in C. J. Cherryh's future history. . . .

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Hrm. If you're agreeing and pointing out other swipes in the setting, then yeah, there's clearly yet more in there. We'll put the Solar Queen novels to the west of the Arabain Nights setting, just north of the Aztecs.

If you're making a subtle reference to how all SF is in a constant conversation with itself, drawing on and borrowing from its predecessors with each new book, I can see that point too. The problem with Traveller is not that it draws on other SF, but that it draws on all of it at once to construct a setting that can be all things to all people.

I think one thing that draws me to V&V over other classic supers games is the lack of such a default omni-world: the rulebook suggests that you base the characters on yourselves and set your adventures in a nearby city, and then gives a single page of advice on other times and settings you might also try. Everyone got to make their own, which were, in my experience, more interesting then the X% Marvel, 100-X% DC fusion that is Champions. Much like the original Black Box Traveller didn't have a setting at all, so everyone had their "In My Traveller Universe". So if I did run Traveller, it would be in something very much not like the Imperium.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I acquired the three black books early on, and never actually made much use of them, so I didn't follow the development of Traveller. Then I ran into people who played in the published Traveller universe, and I was thinking, "Traveller universe? What Traveller universe?" And it always struck me as sort of weirdly synthetic, same as the Champions universe. I mean, I'm all for making up universes, but when you write a set of rules for the rough consensus of a genre, and then make up a universe where all those rules apply . . . well, the flavor's not very compelling.