7 December 2025 Science Fiction

 7 December 2025: Science Fiction

    I love science fiction. Love it. I didn't read too much of it as a kid. I read Dune in high school (I think I read it twice) but I can't remember any others. Ray Bradbury, which is really more fantasy than sci-fi. H.G. Wells, maybe Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Other than that, not much. For whatever reason, in 1991 when I was a senior in college, I decided I wanted to get into some science fiction, but I wasn't sure where to start. I was a big Dan Simmons fan at the time--horror being my main jam in those days--so I picked up his (then) new novel Hyperion and had my mind thoroughly, utterly, completely blown. Hyperion remains one of my favorite books of all time, not just because I found the story and the concepts incredible, but because of the experience I had while reading it: sublime. Transcendent. Consciousness expanding. It was remarkable.

    After that, sci-fi was on the menu. I read some of the classics--Foundation, Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, maybe a few others and enjoyed them all, but I was still more into fantasy and horror. I met the science fiction author Samuel Delaney, whose writing I find unreadable, but who was a kind man, and generous with his advice about what to read as a newbie to the genre. I discovered William Gibson and Neuromancer, and sort of fell in love with Molly Millions. 

    It wasn't until 1996, when I was living on Diego Garcia while in the Navy that I truly hit my sci-fi stride. We had a small but mighty library on the island, and for some strange reason, there was an incredible selection of science fiction books available. I'll never know how the books got there, and kept being replenished, but the choices were remarkable, and I read them voraciously. I'm talking a novel a day voraciously. I did the deepest of deep-dives and read science fiction until my eyes bled. I discovered John Wyndam and read his major works (The Midwich Cuckoos, Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes), for example. There was a series called Science Fiction Masterworks, and I read a bunch of those. David Brin, Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Brian Aldiss, Jerry Pournelle, Philip K. Dick. David Weber introduced me to military science fiction, which lead me to Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Hadelman's The Forever War. I read Ursala LeGuin's gentle science fiction (The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness), C.S. Lewis's theologically infused Space Trilogy, and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. John Scalzi! Jack Campbell! Becky Chambers! Octavia Butler! The many, many, many anthologies put together by Gardner Dozois. I read science fiction like a starving man entering into an all-you-can-eat buffet. It was, and is, awesome. 

    But what I've never done is run a science fiction TTRPG. We dabbled a little in Gamma World back in high school, and played a good amount of FASA Star Trek (and more recently, the Modiphius version). I had Star Frontiers, and maybe even Traveller, but I never played either. So all of this is a long way of saying, I am thinking pretty hard about running a science fiction game. I'm a little burnt out on fantasy, and I'm never running Call of Cthulhu again (love the game. Sick of playing it). Me brudder and I recently considered Troll Lord Games' Amazing Adventures, but found it a bit too pulpy for our tastes, I just bought the entire M-Space collection from from Frostbyte Games, which is for BRP, so we'll see how that goes. Once I finish my rough-draft of The Runes, I'm heading out into the vasty deeps of space.