Tales From Failed Anatomies, Dennis Detwiler
The stories in this collection are all pretty solid. There are moments where I think the bleakness gets laid on too thick and I felt myself giving it a bit of an eye-roll and an “okay, boomer” in those moments (the opening and ending stories get hurt by this), but on the whole it's just a solid read of desperate people in way over their head, as DG ought to be.
It is interesting to read DG's canon fiction as an old SCP-head who fundamentally disagrees with the core premise of DG’s canon: Regardless of the circumstances, I think that eventually, inevitably, people will come to understand the basics of the Weird Shit. Sure, we don’t know why the statue shits blood and snaps your neck if you blink, but we know that it shits blood and snaps your neck if you blink. We can work with that. That’s enough to plan around. Limited understanding is safer than no understanding, and eventually, inevitably, you will end up with limited understanding.
DG’s dedication to maintaining the true Lovecraftian “the unnatural is always malicious and dangerous and can never be understood (please ignore the parts where I explain it)” is simultaneously DG’s biggest strength and weakness. When it hits it fucking hits, but it more or less only hits the same note. It’s a thematic cul-de-sac and if you spin your wheels there for too long you start to go “yeah, yeah, sure, deep ones; you can cut the theatrics mate, they’re just fish people.” There are even a couple moments where the stories come close to going "they're weird and looked fucked up, but they are ultimately people for good and for ill", and then backs down from that, which is disappointing.
Strange Authorities, John Scott Tynes
DNF 4%
Dropped this one shortly after Fairfield showed up. That guy oozes “SCP author avatar character circa 2010” and I got my fill of that character type in 2010.
(That is, the archetype of "character who is super good at Doing the Thing and totally the coolest that has been put into an otherwise serious story where that sort of cartoonish antics should result in some natural consequences, but the consequences never actually emerge because they're a cartoon character and thus can be as big of a dangerous asshole as they want regardless of how little sense that makes in-universe.")
Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon
I don’t know if I’d rather have a long conversation with Stapledon over lunch, or punch him in the nose. Last and First Men is a book of expansive, grand ideas suffused with some of the dumbest bullshit I have ever seen put to page. It’s stuffed with kludgy, overwrought prose; the science is questionable at best; Stapledon repeatedly wastes time on the boring shit and then skips over the interesting parts. It takes a third of the book to get to the bonkers transhumanism that you’re promised by the back cover blurb.
The opening chapters on the First Men (that is, humans as we are now) is laughably and myopically focused on national character as the driver of history (this will be a recurring theme: Stapledon fully subscribes to the idea of civilizations possessing an ineffable spirit that dictates their fortune and character and it is so god damn tedious to read), and further myopically limits itself to a future that goes no farther than Europe, China, and the States. History, apparently, does not happen elsewhere in the world. And while he touches on the economic factors driving the major conflicts of the era, he keeps returning to the well of “one relatively minor international incident triggers a catastrophic war” - which makes sense coming off the heel of WW1 but come on man, we all know that Ferdinand’s assassination was just the excuse. I could see it happening once, but it is a repeated trend over and over and over again in a way that's tiresome instead of thematically meaningful.
There are moments where Stapledon is scarily prescient - a single paragraph describing how America’s early dominance in mass media led to the subsequent mass export of the worst parts of American culture to the rest of the world, or describing how the fervor of Soviet communism was ground down by the entropic millstone of time - but these are glimmers in a sea of being either comedically or exhaustingly off the mark.
When we do at last get to the bonkers transhumanism (a full third of the way through the book), it becomes a lot more fun, but you really REALLY get to see the limitations of scientific knowledge in 1930. Sometimes it’s fun, but a lot of the plot developments hinge on stuff that is just flat up nonsense. There is a very of-that-time condescension suffusing the entire exercise, like an obligatory part of science in 1930 was just total disdain for the things studied.
The first handful of transhuman species (2 through 5) have solid concepts and plenty of neat stuff to swipe, but as the book progresses Stapledon's enthusiasm seems to flag, as he will gloss over millions of years and multiple descendant species with little or no detail at all despite introducing a fascinating premise (the bulk of the terraformed Neptunian biosphere being derived from humans is mentioned in passing and never explored, despite encompassing species 9-17). And, of course, there is always the obligatory disdain for those human species who are not quote-unquote civilized enough for Stapledon to consider them worthwhile.
Ultimately it’s a frustrating book, but it’s a frustrating book with vision. And it is officially public domain in the United States as of January 1st next year, so there’s nothing stopping anyone from making a better version.
(Also, in a perfect example of science surpassing projections, the book has humans discover antimatter power millions of years before rocketry.)
The Cruel Empire of Tsan-Chan, Christian Read
This is almost entirely a setting book, so I’m going to judge it as such instead of a dedicated game book. The included NPCs, adventure hooks, and one gameplay mechanic are perfunctory and not very interesting to me.
Tsan-Chan is a prime showcase of why, for all my love of Delta Green, I don’t give a shit about Call of Cthulhu: when handed a pristine blank canvas and an enormous box of Legos, the CoC impulse is to reach down and cut your own hamstrings to prevent you from doing anything remotely interesting or novel.
Now, I don’t think this is the author’s fault: I think they did an admirable job at expanding a single-line throwaway in Shadow Out of Time into an entire setting. The core elements - “there’s a big horrible fascist empire filled with deranged demigod nobles, with a stadium-size mutant empress who communes with the powers beyond, at constant war with the Deep Ones and the zoanthropes who had their sapience blasted out of their brains by Cthulhu’s waking” - that’s good! Like legitimately good as a baseline, and that baseline quality is probably why there haven’t been any large explorations of Tsan-Chan written since it was published (or at least I haven’t found any beyond an occasional blogpost or shotgun scenario).
But since this was part of Chaosium’s Miskatonic University Monograph series (a predecessor to the DM’s Guild and later Miskatonic Repository), it comes with the shackles of the Call of Cthulhu rpg branding.
In Tsan-Chan, we’re told that the empire worships Hastur. That’s it. They worship Hastur because Hastur doesn’t like Cthulhu. Does this meaningfully impact their culture at all? No. Does this bring in any material from The King in Yellow? No. Is Carcosa even mentioned? No. Does it reveal anything new about Hastur or provide any novel interpretation? No and no. You could cut him out entirely, or replace him with Gorthomax the Skull-Fucker and lose nothing.
So it continues with most of its other Mythos and Mythos-adjacent elements; mentioned in passing, connected in a way to make you go “oh that could be a cool connection, I guess” (mentions of Zothique being a prime example), but never expounded. The only new territory is with the Empire itself, all the other elements remained locked in IP amber.
A minimal attempt to avoid the implicit Yellow Peril is made, but I don’t think it’s particularly successful - if you’re going to go “it’s not actually China, it’s just located there”, have a bit more cultural stuff to differentiate it (like maybe don’t have the main philosophy be ‘The Way’).
Perhaps more successful is when the book gives a little nuance to the ordinary inhabitants of the empire: they aren’t all mindless drones in an impervious fascist machine, but it’s done in this whiplash way where it will humanize them in one section ("they're ordinary people who live in a perpetual state of extreme trauma") and jump back to “yeah they’re all basically insane” in the next. There’s repeated mention about revolutionary cells working away in the background, but they’re not detailed to any extent and are couched in “oh but if they actually succeeded wouldn’t the empire be at the mercy of its enemies?” - technically, yeah, but that also would mean that the Empire is providing an accurate assessment of its adversaries (a practice wholly unsupported by historical precedent). I wish there was more about these cells, because that is where the fun RPG material would live.
(DG cell getting shunted forward in time by the yithians to disrupt specific operations in the empire? Yes fucking please.)
The pieces are here to make something cool, the author just needed the freedom to actually make that cool thing. DG’s interpretation of Bast in God’s Teeth or the King in Yellow in Impossible Landscapes are best-in-genre precisely because there’s a willingness to push boundaries beyond what’s come before both from the writers and the editors (though this is unevenly distributed).
CoC has been doing the same damn thing for seven editions and 40 years and that’s somehow more depressing than D&D’s infinite recursion.
Spelling and grammatical errors are very common throughout, as well.
Avatars, Inc (Various)
DNF 5%
This one’s an anthology, so while I feel somewhat bad about tossing it after the first story (S.L. Huang’s Just Add Oil), I don’t feel that bad because Just Add Oil isn’t a good introduction, or really that great of a story in general. It’s a prime example of Tor house style, ‘new adult', squeecore, whatever string of phonemes describes this mode. Floaty, toothless first person present, treading a sentimental footpath so worn down it’s become a prison. Simplistic tropes, well-behaved and beige. It's a floppy-necked stuffed animal that's put in none of the work.
The collection was published March 13, 2020, which means the stories were written in the waning days of the Before Time, which explains why this story even entertains the idea that the US would even consider sending aid to protestors in Hong Kong and why the initial example we have of remote-operated android body is “going to visit grandma” instead of “they immediately hooked it up to the Torment Nexus”: desperate liberal optimism.
[Aside: S.L Huang has shown up twice before in this series; both stories were duds, and one of them was an "oh won't someone show some sympathy to the poor war criminal with family troubles?" story.]
Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo European, Adams & Mallory
After months of reading academic papers on the subject, it’s refreshing to read something that’s more descriptive and less theoretical. Mallory and Adams are focused on “here’s the evidence, here’s what we can reconstruct based on that, we’re not going to start making our own hypotheses”. It’s a very good way of making a book comprehensible to non-insane people, though it does mean that most of the book is lists of words (but if you’re reading it in the first place you are probably a fan of lists of words).
Compared to most other reconstructions I have seen, Mallory and Adams play things very skeptical and very conservative, which ultimately works in their favor. They call out questionable or tenuous cognates, they notate when words are geographically limited, point out the weak points in the theories about potential homelands and religious practices, and base their reconstruction on what can conclusively be proven instead of what reconstructioneers believe should be there.
There are also some surprisingly good jokes.
Highly Complex Syllable Structure, Shelece Easterday
Proving once again that I am immensely fun at parties, this is a linguistic survey to determine what the hell ‘highly complex syllable structure’ even is, and what traits are most commonly associated with it. It’s very academic and very inside baseball, but if I ever decided I wanted to sketch out Aklo, this would be my first source.
What Lies Beneath, Chris Scaffidi
A choose-your-own adventure dungeoncrawl novel with dice. Technically it’s a solo gamebook, but since it appears that I’m now adding RPG-related material to these posts it goes here.
You wake up in a dungeon, with amnesia and a fucked-up arm covered in lesions and leathery tumors. From there you have to get out. The RPG mechanics are simple - your class determines your starting stats, & health, and occasionally some other factors. Each room gives you a series of choices to make, and you progress step by step. Get far enough along and you can reach a checkpoint, where you are encouraged to take a photo of your character sheet at that moment to reference if you die and reload later. When you die, unspent XP will carry over to your next character, allowing you to start with some improved stats.
There are three types of dice rolls in the game, to go with the three stats. Strength checks involve rolling dice = to your stat and trying to beat the target number, Wisdom checks involve forming a line of dice and using X number of moves / modifications to re-arrange them into sequence, and Dexterity checks involve trying to hit but not topple a 2-die tower from X distance away (helpfully marked out on your character sheet.
While I like the idea in principle, I’m less enthused in practice. It works fine when you’re sat down at your desk with physical dice, but makes it much more difficult to handle if not impossible when on the bus or using your phone. There is an alternative method for dex rolls that doesn’t use the dice tower, and one could probably just get away with applying the strength check rules for everything, but I feel like the latter of these solutions might upset the intended balance (since a difficulty 3 STR check is way easier to accomplish than a difficulty 3 DEX check)
Regardless, it is still a lot of fun and I want to read more game books like this. I’ve done two full runs and died horribly twice, and I’ve only seen a fraction of what the book contains. I’d play it a lot more if it had the public transit option, but so it goes I suppose.
Architect of Worlds, Jon Zeigler
A worldbuilding supplement for solar-system generation. Complex enough that I had to install a scientific calculator on my phone to handle the equations, but oddly meditative when you get into the flow. It’s more or less a solo RPG, since I wouldn’t call it useful as a game tool. Requires a whole lot of scratch paper and a very well-organized table of results (since you will refer back to them constantly), which makes it pretty unwieldy in the later stages.
I did end up working through the entire thing for a randomly-generated system, which netted me a red dwarf with a handful of tidally-locked venusian worlds, one barren mercurial, and a large water-world that did manage to evolve simple multicellular life down in the abyssal vents. The system works, but it ends when you have finished the broadest-scale details of the planet as a whole - life is a minimal focus, and human interaction none at all. If you want to actually use it as anything besides a novelty, you're going to need other resource.
Red Nails, R.E. Howard
Decided to try reading Conan again, and this time it worked. This story slaps. It’s all-pulp orange juice. There’s a lady with a sword! Conan fights a dinosaur! There’s some period-and-genre appropriate psychosexual content that someone smarter than me could write a very good essay on! It's not nearly as racist as it could have been!
Monstrome, Arnold Kemp
It's a testament to how fucking good Arnold is at writing rpg stuff that his unfinished draft document runs laps around basically every other monster book on the market. Every entry is dense with suggestions for tactics, modifications, encounters, behaviors, everything you could possibly want out of a monster. Even the lore presents connective tissue you can chain together into something interesting. Where Monster Overhaul was "here's good useable generalist material about a bunch of monsters", Monstrum is its "here's some extremely in-depth material about a few monsters".
The Epiphany of Gliese 581, Fernando Borretti
A brief, snappy, dreamlike sci-fi story in the vein and scale of Orion’s Arm or House of Suns. There’s not much of a plot, characters are brief wisps of personality, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s evocative imagery, big ideas, and Vibes. Each chapter broken up into sub-sections, which are in turn built of paragraphs of only a few sentences each. It almost borders on poetry.
Etidorhpa (again), John Uri Lloyd
DNF (again) 52%
I, a known and certified fool, tried to give this one a second shot. For a brief moment it looked like I had fallen prey to dramatic irony, stopping my first attempt just pages before something happened, but the follow up to that momentary glimmer of something happening was many long pages of nothing fucking happening.
There is no plot. There are no characters beyond mouthpieces for interminable back and forth exposition. There is a monotonous procession of One Weird Thing to the next but no interaction, or explanation, or variance. It’s just the encounter for this area. Most of the time it’s not even an encounter, it’s just a novel bit of landscape.
Not even the zany pseudoscience is fun, because it manages to be both unbearably long and interrupted by even longer and more unbearable interstitials explaining about how water can move higher than its source. Yes, that's interstitials plural. We spend FOUR CHAPTERS on middle-school science experiments, completely divorced from the already-tenuous plot.
Occasional interesting moments or striking images (aided by the art) exist, but are insufficient.
