Distractions – Page 59 – Ammo for your Dreams

Thomas Disch is dead

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date July 07, 2008

I was puzzled when I ran across a comment about him on William Gibson’s blog, but with further refreshing of the feed reader I learned that Thomas M. Disch commited suicide July 4th.

Darn.

I actually met Thomas Disch in the late 80’s. The US cultural attache(?) in Israel happened to be a Science Fiction enthusiast, and he organized a small convention – two days of academic-type panels at Beit HaSofer, with a single movie screening as the US Embassy as an extra event. The big attraction of the convention, however, were two American SF authors as special guests: Harlan Ellison and Thomas Disch. Lots of people showed up on the first day, eager to see the fabled Harlan Ellison speak. We were all dissappointed and annoyed to learn upon arrival that Ellison had cancelled his visit due to illness. Some people left upon hearing the news.

But the guest that we did have, Tom Disch, was marvelous. Witty, charming, friendly and gracious, enthusiastic and intelligently critical about SF. He did all the events both he and Harlan were scheduled to do, and was great fun to hear. I recall when a moderator asked him how he would translate the experience of his visit to Israel into his work, he responded that the wonderful thing about being a Science Fiction writer is that you don’t have to write about your personal experience. The average American novel, he said, was usually a dreary thing about coming of age, reconcilling with your father, shooting your first deer… and the glory of being an SF writer is that you can write about something else entirely than mundane existence.

I recall first encountering Brian McHale at that conference (the coolest lecturer Tel-Aviv University ever had), and Emanuel Lottem and Aharon Hauptman, and Deena Shunra (Ben Kiki in those days), who volunteered to start a fanzine and suggested having an Israeli SF Award in the form of a Dish (in honor of). Lots of proto-Israeli fandom, still lacking the spark of Freidman and Internet to get ignite it. But Tom Disch was the best thing there, I think.

I had him sign my copy of Medea (which he confirmed was already signed by Ellison, and which this year I got signed by Larry Niven), and (out of guilt for having read nothing of his stuff), I read his story in that collection, which was very strange and rather wonderful.

Meeting your heroes can be a let-down; they rarely surprise you for the better, because you know too much about them already. But some of the best meetings I’ve had as a fan with authors were with those I knew and cared little for before: You meet this guy whose name you’d heard of but whose work you’d not really investigated, and he (or she) turns out to be this brilliant person. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by meeting Ian Watson and R.A. Salvatore, for example. Thomas Disch was probably the first and most striking of those pleasant surprises.

Tags obit, thomas disch

Blather

Peter Watts on being a Fundementalist

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date July 01, 2008
1 Comment on Peter Watts on being a Fundementalist

Peter Watts on being unable to accept any evidence as proof of the existance of god:

…all of that, appearing in the face of such astronomically-massive odds, would still have to be weighed against the likelihood of the alternative.

What are the odds that I’m a brain in a tank or a computer simulation, and some bored undergrad is fucking with my sensory inputs? Pretty damn low. What are the odds that an entire physical multiverse was created by means unknown by an omnipotent omniscient sentient entity that exists eternally, without any cause or creator of its own?

Lower. Way lower.

Tags atheism

Roleplaying

roleplaying and writing craft

Post author By Dotan Dimet
Post date July 01, 2008
1 Comment on roleplaying and writing craft

Both Vered and Israel take me to task about my previous post, saying that real reality is just as fabricated as game reality. Israel at least acknowledges that roleplaying games foreground this constructed nature. I still think that physical reality actually has something objective underlying all the interpretations and flawed impressions. I also think (and this is perhaps closer to Sheppard’s points) that there’s something both exciting and disturbing in translating the artifact of “soft” improvised storytelling performance to “hard” textual narrative, and in feeding the more concrete but further removed account back into the primary experience of play.

Anyway, here’s another essay that touches on the relationship between writing and roleplaying games. In response to the Clarkesworld article about the influence of roleplaying games on modern fantasy writers, Marie Brennan, a fantasy novelist who’s an actual roleplayer (her site links to the site of the campaign she ran, complete with session recaps, some of them far more partial than others – although nothing as succinct as some of ours), writes about how RPGs have made her a better writer. This in a bit of a contrast to the Clarkesworld thing, where most of the writers interviewed seem to say that roleplaying games let them exercise their imaginations a bit, but they’d all much rather focus their creative energies on fiction: Brennan actually talks about how roleplaying can change the way you think about story and character and plot.

By coincidence, I was trying to articulate my dissatisfaction with Asaf Ashery’s Waiting in the Wings, aka סימנטוב to us Hebrew readers (beyond the usual “bastard wrote a novel and I didn’t” joy every original Israeli fantasy work inspires). I can say it feels as if a second act is missing, that fortune tellers using New Age blather as plot-device constructing technobabble really doesn’t excite me, etc. I can also use roleplaying advice terminology and say that the main character gets de-protagonized by the writer’s pet NPCs, i.e, powerful secondary characters hand her big chunks of the plot’s resolution through no effort of her own.

It was the countess who turned me on to thinking of fiction in roleplaying terms; by looking at the characters and action of a book as though they were the result of some imaginary gaming group’s actual play, you can rationalize the flaws in the fiction – and highlight them for either entertainment or critical analysis. For instance (and I know this is a trivial example), that strong witch queen character with a fascinating background that shows up in the begining of Phillip Pulman’s Subtle Knife and then vanishes for most of the book, except for a small and pointless scene later on? The countess pegged her nicely as a guest-NPC played by Greif. That may evoke a smile (well, if you’ve had the pleasure of gaming with the relevant party), but it also highlights a character that ends up a as a gaudy distraction to the reader.

Tags asaf ashery, marie brennan, simantov, writing

Roleplaying

Lying about Reality

Malcolm Sheppard’s has a somewhat confusing rant about Actual Play reports and how they present very distorted, partial and lacking images of what really happens in roleplaying sessions. Social interactions and story elements that were prominent in the session vanish from the report, and other aspects get a skewed focus in the retelling. In the comments Fred Hicks throws out the term Story Later, which I think is Forge-terminology for the phenomenon by which the “this happened, and then this happened” of the session inspires a wholy fictional narrative that is created only in the retelling of the events. Sheppard’s complaints are more complicated than that, but Fred’s point struck a chord with me in light of our own games.

I’ve been running roleplaying campaigns for the same folk for years, and I scrupulously avoid the juvenile[1] activity of plotting or planning anything before the campaign starts and before the game happens – what they call on the internet forums “prep”. This means that I rely very heavily on the background generated during play, and for years my group has canonicalized all past story through the simple device of a recap at the beginning of each session, when I summarize the events of the previous session(s) and we all refresh our memories of what’s going on. In the past year, since Israel’s tenure as GM, we’ve started using wikis alot to record the events of past sessions and details of various NPCs and plot points. But since we are lazy and not very diligent, our online recaps often contain vast gaps and sometimes whole fabrications created by a careless recapper to fill in the gap between the events that he does remember. And whenever a single person recaps in the wiki (we used to do it as a group in the beginning of each session, but it really consumes time), he will create this partial and skewed version of the events which can disagree violently with what actually happened in game or with how other players remember things happening.

I’m not saying that recapping or wikis are bad; I think they just make us confront how the issues Malcolm raises with AP aren’t confined to people trying to show others on Internet forums what D&D 4E or their latest Indie sweetheart game is like — they occur in every ongoing roleplaying game when players sit down and remind themselves what reality looked like last time they played in it. Every roleplaying game is an ongoing story being told and re-told by a bunch of unreliable narrators.

[1] – I say prep is “juvenile” because it is a classic adolescent lonely fun activity.