Spontaneous ∂erivation

I’ve been ill, but I still received my order of the entire Commands & Colors: Ancients series. Dang, it’s a lot. Lots and lots of wooden blocks to put stickers on; I was able to do a bunch while I was too sick to do anything else, like thinking, and am now a champion of putting the stickers on straight 90% of the time.

For those who don’t know, Commands & Colors (C&C) is a series of elegant war games by Richard Borg¹. Some grognards² consider this series rather too simplistic, kind of a “gateway war game” to us noobs. But I like the system, because C&C non-epic games end in half an hour, instead of four. (Even C&C “epic” games, which are huge, take a quarter of the time for a similarly sized war game in most other systems.)

C&C has been implemented in multiple periods and even fantasy:

• Battle Cry is the oldest published one, featuring the Civil War, and actually published by Hasbro³. It has little plastic pieces, actually quite nicely molded. Of C&C games, it’s the simplest.⁴ Unfortunately, expansions were never produced, and it’s out of print.

• Memoir ‘44 (published by Days of Wonder) is the second oldest published one, but still in print. It features World War II, has a zillion expansions, nicely molded plastic pieces, and now many scenarios—as well as a pretty neat campaign system. Of the C&C games, this is the next step up in complexity from Battle Cry, but more polished. As a result, I’d say it’s the best C&C game for the casual player.

• After the success of Memoir ‘44 came the publication of C&C: Ancients (GMT Games), and it’s actually somewhat recent (within the last three years). It has quite a few major expansions, and is the most complex in terms of unit types and rules, yet still simpler than many traditional war game systems. Has wooden blocks with stickers you must apply yourself, but the end effect is actually very neat and easy to deal with, in terms of storage and setting up the starting position. And now it also has a huge number of scenarios.

• And the newest C&C game is BattleLore (first published by Days of Wonder, then handed over to Fantasy Flight Games). This is the fantasy version of C&C, and has really nice plastic figures. It also has what’s called Lore, which is basically like adding Magic: The Gathering style effects to C&C, and is the most wild and, to me, fun, when played with Lore (although many more staid gamers prefer to play without Lore). Unlike other C&C games, BattleLore allows players to set-up/draft a detailed war council (which affects what kind of Lore you can play), and there are quite a few expansions, but they don’t cover as much ground as Memoir ‘44 or Ancients (but it’s got dragons, and that must count for something).

  I like really it, but there’s a lot of potential (more races than just dwarves, goblins, and European men) that may never get realized, because producing the plastic pieces is really, really expensive (especially these days). If all the expansions that Richard Borg is thinking of implementing ever get produced, it may even take over Ancients in terms of number of units. In way, while BattleLore is wild and fun, right now its present feels more restrictive than its siblings (except for Battle Cry, which is dead).

  I don’t mind the smaller number of official scenarios for BattleLore; much of it is about drafting, and so far it’s the only C&C game that’s additionally allowed for special drafting when building armies on the spot.

I fell head over heels in love with Ancients and its expansions when visiting friends the last couple years, so getting the entire Ancients series all was my way of being happy this year as I won’t get to visit them. (Still cheaper than flight seats, too.)

I played a couple games today and yesterday by myself (because I am still sick, and work is such that I end up unable to reach gaming groups consistently, even the tiny one on the island itself), the first two scenarios in the base game: The Battle of Akragas (406 BC) and a skirmish at the Crimissos River (341 BC). They were quite fun, even by myself (and a good way to practice so that next year I will not get my ass completely whupped).

First off, let me say that one of the reasons I love C&C games is that every historical scenario comes with a paragraph or two of its history, and what went wrong or right. And how stupid or smart generals/officers were. Sometimes they were extremely stupid, to the point where I realized that the epic stupidity that Sir Pratchett wrote in Jingo actually did exist. Ye gods.

Crimissos River is rather interesting; because the Carthaganian dude, Hasdrubal⁵, was a complete dumbass. In history, he never sent scouts while trying to ford his army through a river, so he didn’t know there were a bunch of Syracusan troops about to ambush them on the other side. It was epic dumb on the level of Lord Rust, and the outnumbered, though badass, Sacred Band got slaughtered and it was very sad, especially as the flub wasn’t their fault.

In the game, even though the Carthaganian side had more units, most of them were stuck on the other side of the river, just like in history. Most of them were the good units, too. (One Carthaganian chariot sucks against five units of heavy foot units). And just like last year, I still couldn’t get them across the river in time before one wing or the other of the Syracusan army descended upon dumbass Hasdrubal and the poor Sacred Band. The Sacred Band were a pretty scary special unit, actually, and almost got all of the necessary victory flags⁶ by themselves.

And then they ran into the last of the Syracusan heavy foot and died horribly. Almost everybody else was still stuck on the other side of the damn river, and anybody on the side of the river with the Syracusans got slaughtered. Last year, and tonight, I said, “You goddamned idiot, Hasdrubal, why couldn’t you have sent scouts so my game would be more balanced,” although to be fair the scenario is surprisingly balanced (fewer Syracusan troops that would have been slaughtered… had the units across the river been able to get into battle).

Afterwards, I had the thought I always have when playing historical war games, like C&C and others, which is: these were real people, and they really did get sent off to die. Here’s the historical paragraph and everything. Here are the dumbasses who got real people killed, and the smart guys who, well, still got people killed, but fewer of them, usually. Here are the little wooden blocks or plastic figurines that sometimes represent the historical unit realistically, depending on the scenario.

D-day at Normandy Beach (an epic scenario) in Memoir ‘44 is horribly hard to the Allies, too. Bloody as hell, like the real history, and winning as the Allies in that scenario is such a thin margin that I’m surprised we managed it (of course, that may have had something to do with sending many many many people to die instead of merely many). I can never play Memoir ‘44 and not feel incredibly sad, even though it’s technically a good way to remember the awful battles so that people remember that they happened, and maybe won’t let them happen again (or… not). It’s too recent, somehow. Ancients I can deal with because these are long-dead people, almost the stuff of legend, even down to the little green foot units that get killed so easily when going up against just about every other unit. BattleLore is easiest to deal with, of course, because the people there are all made up, unless you go with the historical scenarios, like Agincourt, in which case… they weren’t.

Everything is helped out by the fact that, of most war game systems, C&C is the most abstract. If it weren’t for all the historical paragraphs, you might not feel very much when your warrior units charge and come to naught in the river. Darn you, Richard Borg, for Doing the Research.

What amuses me most is how a few of the scenarios in Ancients are surprisingly similar a few of the scenarios in Memoir ‘44… which means that people made the same dumbass mistakes in 300BC as in the mid 20th century (although to be somewhat fair, the one in Memoir ‘44 had a bridge. Which still didn’t help that much). It’s enough to make one double facepalm. Admittedly, I myself have also got to stop being dumb at tactics, since I still lose in scenarios when I’m Hannibal ferchrissakes, but people like Hasdrubal sure didn’t help.

So, I still haven’t bought Memoir ‘44, even though I think I would enjoy its mechanics, its aliveness in terms of expansions and scenarios and campaigns, its greater simplicity, its far better components. But desperately marching little stickered wooden blocks into cavalry is bad enough.

1. Not to be confused with Richard Berg, who could have made Fandom Wank several times over if it had been around during his… more controversial days. [↩]
2. War game geeks. Serious geeks. [↩]
3. The big toy players are not, typically, into publishing non-party, non-classic games, so this was an extra special occasion. [↩]
4. Though that’s not the same as boring or lacking in strategy. Definitely, definitely, not. [↩]
5. Whichever one of him fought this battle. There were several dudes of this level named Hasdrubal. [↩]
6. One killed unit earns you a victory flag; this particular scenario is played to five flags. [↩]

Terry Pratchett’s Unseen Academicals is about the parallel development of football (soccer, to Americans) in the alternate and funnier reality that is the Discworld; yet as always, there’s much more swimming in the depths of his Monty Python-esque stories. Humorous but thoughtful, Unseen Academicals combines early Pratchett at his lightest (Pyramids, Moving Pictures, Guards! Guards!) with late Pratchett at his heaviest (Monstrous Regiment, Night Watch, Thud!), resulting in an easy read with a heavy afterthought.

[Oh Terry Pratchett, when will you ever be easy to review?]

Previously we covered the science fiction and fantasy novels on the Locus 2008 Reading List; next up are the first novels and Young Adult novels (both SF and fantasy).

Note: if a Young Adult novel was also the first published novel for the author, it’s usually placed in the first novel category instead. But sometimes it’s not (such as Tender Morsels).

Yes, it would have been simpler to just have Fantasy/Science Fiction, except for all the ones that are between (like An Evil Guest), but then we wouldn’t have recognition of first novels or Y.A. Or something. I don’t know.

I think it would have been better to tag novels as first, Y.A, and/or SF/F, and then list the lot by author last name.

Anyways! Moving on.

First Novels

Young Adult

After this point in the reading list, the books available to read on the Kindle—or indeed, electronically anywhere else—becomes thin on the ground. Out of the next 60 books on the list, equivalent to 4 sections worth of books, (up until “Non-Fiction”), only 10 are available for purchase in the Kindle store or Webscriptions.

So next week we’ll bring you those books plus anything we can scrape up in non-fiction and novellas.

1. From New on Kindle in October-November. [↩]
2. a la Le Guin’s Lavinia, also honored on the reading list for 2008. [↩]
3. From New on Kindle in October. [↩]
4. Which I just realized is also a play on “The Lost Colony,” and Roanoke is a significant word in both the story and history. Ha. [↩]

Hogfather
by Terry Pratchett
Kindle Edition • Paperback • Hardcover

Many people remember Neil Gaiman as the mythopoeic author, but that’s a well that Terry Pratchett also dabbles in from time to time. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Hogfather, an exploration of the myth of Santa Claus through the veil of medieval-SF fantasy Discworld.

The Discworld version of Santa Claus is the Hogfather, a jolly old man who retains more close ties to his roots than real world adults might be comfortable with¹, for this man has both a belly like a bowl full of jelly, but also tusks and dark eyes. Regardless, he brings children toys every year in a sled pulled by six boars.

And someone has murdered the fat man. And the world is going to end.

What better time for Susan Sto Helit, the granddaughter of Discworld superstar Death, to step in?

S∂’s full 2008 Advent Calendar.

1. I don’t think real world children would have a problem. Remember the Brothers Grim. [↩]

Barack Obama, the new President-Elect of the United States, has chosen Rahm Emanuel as his White House Chief of Staff.

This is a new one to some people, for Rahm Emanuel is, as they say, intense. In some ways he’s the opposite of the cool and serene Barack Obama—Emanuel can be, and often has been, loudly-and-in-your-face confrontational. There’s the following cute story, recapped in Rolling Stones “The Enforcer”:

And there’s the story of how, the night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the president’s enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting “Dead! . . . Dead! . . . Dead!” and plunging the knife into the table after every name. “When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape,” one campaign veteran recalls. “It was like something out of The Godfather. But that’s Rahm for you.”

O horrors! Obama has chosen a real S.O.B. as his White House Chief of Staff! Love and peace is doomed already in the presidency!

Not. This is actually a pretty sensible choice by Obama, because while Emanuel is undoubtedly hot-tempered, he uses that temper constructively. That’s one laser-focused staff member of pure unmediated anger most people on the Hill do not want to get in the way of. In other words, sometimes you need a bastard. And the position of White House Chief of Staff is one of them.

In many ways, Rahm Emanuel reminds me of Samuel Vimes of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.¹ He’s extremely direct, street-smart (or, rather, Hill-smart) and cunning, and sometimes described as being as tenuous as an attack dog. If he had to choose between being carried to work and walking, he’d choose walking. People can choose to see him as merely a thug—but they’d be making one of the biggest mistakes of their political careers. He is combative, argumentative, and tells the truth often enough to be unfashionable. He’s managed to recruit and organize more than 30 members of his own kind. He won’t sugar-coat anything for anybody, not even his own boss. Sometimes he wakes up and hates himself, though I suspect to others he under-reports this.

That’s actually both of them I’m describing. Although in Sam Vimes’ case it was an axe and he didn’t use nearly that many words to express what he felt.² Some might argue that Sam Vimes is actually a much easier man to work with, but that’s because Vimes is a point of view in most of the books he’s in. With notable exceptions like The Truth and Monstrous Regiment, where we see him from the outside—and that is a bastard.

Of course the thought crossed my mind: does Emanuel play Vimes to Obama’s… Vetinari?

Actually, that’s an interesting question to consider. I’ll leave others to play with the meaning of Vetinari’s coat of arms, but Obama certainly fits the Vetinari mold in some ways: calm when everyone else is losing their heads, the eerily smooth running of a revolutionary ground game, a high level of discipline, even a certain sparseness in the way he eats—unlike many candidates, he never gained the “campaign 15″.³ But instead of wielding fear as his method for getting people to cooperate, Obama wields a fearfully high level of charisma, somewhere around Carrot levels.⁴

Obama is also a much more rounded personality; he has a family he truly loves, and a wife he cares for deeply.⁵ Vetinari has neither and remains cold and distant at all times. Still, this is the kind of delicious irony that Pratchett loves to introduce in his characters, and if he ever gets around to covering more of Vetinari’s incidental background, I suspect there would be something as surprising.

So: it’s not really Obama and Emanuel up there.⁶ It’s Vetinari and Vimes, a relationship that goes beyond “good cop, bad cop” and into Machiavellian territory. In other words: it’s just good politics.

West Wing Note: Josh Lyman is based on Rahm Emanuel. In fact, once Emanuel got to watch The West Wing for some episodes and realized this, he called his younger brother, a Hollywood talent agent, and said, “Hey, I finally saw the show, and you know what? I like that guy better than I like you.”

I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from the Rolling Stones article:

“We get into this stupid argument every four years: centrists vs. leftists,” [Emanuel] says. “That is not the argument today. It is change vs. status quo. In 1992, Bill Clinton was a change agent — he won. In 1994, Newt Gingrich was a change agent — he won. In 1996, Bill Clinton was a change agent to Dole and Gingrich — he won. In 1998, Democrats represented a change from the Republican drive for impeachment — they won. In 2000, George Bush was a credible change agent. In 2002, Democrats failed to convey change — and they lost. I want to be about change and reform to the Republican status quo.”

Addendum: And here’s Newsweek’s “Inside Obama’s Pick for White House Chief of Staff. From Senator Lindsey Graham, one of McCain’s close friends:

“When we hit a rough spot, he always looked for a path forward. I consider Rahm to be a friend and colleague. He’s tough but fair. Honest, direct, and candid. These qualities will serve President-elect Obama well.”

Addendum: From Noam Scheiber at The Stump’s “Rahm was the Only Choice, Not Just the Right Choice”, Emanuel shares with Vimes a down-to-earth quality:

And, having successfully run the DCCC, the House Democrats’ campaign arm, he knows how to harness the power of voters in every corner of the country

This last point is especially key (though, again, not enough on its own). As we point out in our introduction to the power list, Obama has built the most powerful and sophisticated grassroots infrastructure of any presidential candidate in history. Not only would it be a shame not to exploit it to enact Obama’s policy agenda. Given the potential opposition to something like healthcare reform, it’s hard to see how it gets passed without using that infrastructure. .

Addendum: From Smith & Harris at Politico’s “Emanuel pick sends powerful signal”, with a description that sounds much like a certain modern Stoneface Vimes:

“He’s from the Lombardi wing of the party — he’s a guy who wants to win at any cost and will do whatever it takes,” said John Lapp, a former top Emanuel aide at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Lapp called Emanuel “the best possible pick — a perfectionist and fighter who loves the president[-elect] like a brother.”

If so, he’s a sibling who long ago showed he knows how to talk back in the family. As a longtime aide to Bill Clinton, Emanuel was known for his willingness to talk bluntly to colleagues from the president on down.

1. I call science-fiction on Discworld’s genre. [↩]
2. Feet of Clay. [↩]
3. According to Newsweek’s “The Long Siege”, “Reporters joked that if he ate a single bite of burger or pancake once the doors of his dark-tinted SUV closed, they’d eat their BlackBerrys.” [↩]
4. You know, maybe this is more of a Vimes/Carrot dynamic were Carrot to inherit Vetinari’s position. [↩]
5. He gave her veto power on whether he entered and stayed in the race. She told him he’d have to quit smoking. And he did. [↩]
6. Okay, it is. Bear with me. I’m having a Blogging Moment^TM. [↩]

Yes, it is! And it’s a book review! Of a Terry Pratchett book! With footnotes!¹

This is the first time I’ve ever written a review of a certain… quality. I’m familiar with doing short reviews, the kind that go on a blog and enthuse! when you’re trying to blog up a storm. They’re fun but they can be a little shallow, even if you enthuse! for 400 words.

Most bloggers do that. I’ve seen reviews at 20 words. That’s fine and all, but it’s not the kind of review I can exactly put up at Tor.com. While it is a blog, it’s also a blog for a company, so technically I’m now a professional blogger.

So now I need to add in more context and craft and themes, y’know, go into significant detail about why the book is great² without going into full plot synopsis, which is about the worst thing you can do in a review. It’s boring as hell. I banged my head against the wall a good long time³ before I managed to get something out that encompassed the first two but ditched the last.

I’m actually proud that I didn’t need an editor to tell me that. Although I did wander over to Miss Snark’s to see what she had to say about good book reviews. She’s very to the point. I love her. Good old Miss Snark.⁴

In the informal world of blogging, people may ask why the hell would you do that?

I write to be read. Which means I try to reach. Even in my short reviews I always try to cover a little craft, a little context, blah blah, but I’ve always been lazy on them compared to my other posts because reviews are much harder for me. Much harder.

In other words, Twittering on the Global Frequency wasn’t unusual, and is the kind of post that usually gets my blog Stumbled. I’m good at that kind of thing, except when I over-reach (after all, that’s why I’m not writing about meta-blogging anymore). In other words, I’m good at writing about and learning about blogging; I suck at reading for comprehension. I have to read books twice before I can write even a short review with context.⁵

Fortunately, Tor.com gets me reaching. It’s not strictly a pay thing; if I’m writing for pay, I want to write something I’m proud of and that people will look at and say, woah, that chick deserves to be on Tor.com. I come into the game with zero credits, so I must earn some.

And all this gives you guys decent reviews and decent articles. I could actually reel back my dedication to the blog articles over there. I could just blast out my post about vampires: the demon lovers right now, with nothing fancy but stark and direct words. That would be enough.

But I can’t do that. It’s not me. I didn’t even do that on my own blog for the stuff that I knew I could hitch up in quality, and when you wander off and write things like this for free⁶, you are a sick person.

I write to be read. It’s not about gaining audience any way I can. It’s about gaining an audience that wants to read my words. And for me, that’s been very clearly about quality; for others, it can be humor or philosophy or whatnot instead. There are useful things to learn from social media when it gets applied to your blog; that is definitely one of them.

1. Those were really fun to do. I can see why he does them. You can add deeper asides that don’t interrupt the flow of the article/review/narrative/whatever. Like a discussion of Small Gods. Or this one. [↩]
2. Or, you know, not. Hopefully I’ll keep running into great books to blog. [↩]
3. Which is why, mine editors, you did not see a Thursday post. And might not see a post this Thursday, even though mining the values of Tuesdays and especially Thursdays is something that my blogger mind is strongly attuned to, as waves of the ocean might to oysters. Or… something. [↩]
4. I never did figure out who she was. Doubt I ever will. [↩]
5. As you can imagine, this slows me down somewhat when it comes to learning to write via reading, but I think that reading is the most important part of learning to write. After all, it’s reading and digesting that got me into the position to actually blog about certain topics well. So many people ignore this in favor of getting words out, which if you’re starving is fine, but if you’re not writing for your supper, like me, it’s kind of silly. [↩]
6. Not even ads. Do you know what HTML for Dummies would have netted me on a blog that paid decently per ad view? I could have paid my mortgage for one month. [↩]

Including some early ones I completely missed.

This post may be updated through the day if new stuff appears. Sometimes it’s a complete surprise!

Notable stars: Tobias S. Buckell, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett.

Also: P.C. Cast’s vampyre finishing school.

Updates: 2:19AM PST

Over at his inestimable Whatever, John Scalzi has been reposting some of his old posts from up to a decade ago.

One of them, from December 2, 2005: How to Tell SF from F. That’s the “reprint” version in 2008; for a comparison of comment threads, here’s the original 2005 edition.

My contribution to the 2008 thread was this:

It’s actually a bit amusing to read the later Pratchett books, which actually seem to fall under medieval science fiction, just with trolls and dwarves as, essentially, alien races that live alongside the humans. Their cultures are real and don’t come from magic stuff apart from what appears in science fiction (i.e., trolls as creatures made from rocks. SF has silicon critters. Whatever).

There is magic, but nowadays it’s treated more or less as different physics, in a scientific way. And there are things like dimension bending and time travel, and usually they just happen—but there’s SF where such things just happen too. I don’t really see where waving hands about tachyons makes much of a difference versus a world where the same phenomenon is understood as magic.

In other words, Discworld is science fiction.

And because this is a blog about Kindle ebooks, here’s a list of Discworld books that underline this point. (All Discworld books are available on Kindle, by the way.)

Some of these themes are repeated in other books to smaller extent; those books are not included here.

The Science Fiction of Discworld

Note: Not in chronological order.

And also, not to make too a fine point of it: Nation is almost here! Yes it is! You can pre-order the Kindle book too!

Nation by Terry Pratchett

Buy: 9.99

Available for Pre-order.

Auto-delivered to the Kindle on September 30th.