Appendix T
Unless one considers charts, tables, and mathematical formulas to be “illustrations,” the original edition of GDW’s science fiction roleplaying game Traveller (1977) contains only one piece of genuine artwork: namely, the portrait to the right. That portrait, by an uncredited artist, depicts Alexander Lascelles Jamison, the example character whose career is detailed in the first volume of the classic SF RPG. Like all Traveller characters, before he starts seeking his fortune among the stars, Jamison has already had a career, in this case in the merchant service, where he mustered out with his own ship and the rank of captain.
Looking at that portrait, I found myself remembering a quote from “Margin of Profit,” a story by the late Poul Anderson, first published in the September 1956 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. That story, too, depicts an interstellar merchant captain:
He was a huge man, two meters in height and broad enough to match. A triple chin and swag belly did not make him appear soft. Rings glittered on hairy fingers and bracelets on tawny wrists, under snuff-soiled lace. Small black eyes, set close to a great hook nose under a sloping forehead, peered with laser intensity.
Anderson’s merchant is, of course, Nicholas Van Rijn, president of the Solar Spice & Liquors Company, and one of the more famous characters from the period between the end of the Golden Age of Science Fiction and the rise of the New Wave.
Of the many useful terms suggested by John Clute in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, perhaps the most useful is the idea of ‘thinning.’ Clute sees certain archetypal patterns frequently recurring in fantastic fiction and thinning’s a part of that. It is the lessening that afflicts threatened fantasylands, a type of diminishment. It’s the fading of magic, the passing of the great old order. Sometimes, eventually, the greatness of the past is restored, though perhaps in a different form.
