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Vintage Treasures: The Awful Green Things From Outer Space

Vintage Treasures: The Awful Green Things From Outer Space

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The Awful Green Things From Outer SpaceI keep promising myself I’m going to stop obsessing about games that have been out of print for decades.

Clearly, I’m a man of little character. Let’s not dwell on that. Let’s dwell instead on one of the great mini-games of all time, Tom Wham’s The Awful Green Things From Outer Space.

First, a bit of history to support that claim. The Awful Green Things From Outer Space originally appeared as an insert in Dragon Magazine #28 (published in 1979). That’s pretty great.

Great enough to be reprinted as a full-fledged standalone game by Dungeons and Dragons publisher TSR in 1980, anyway. In 1988, Steve Jackson Games, publishers of GURPS, acquired the rights and revived Awful Green Things as a pocket game, alongside other mini-games like Ogre, GEV, Car Wars, and Illuminati.

Even in august company like that, Awful Green Things stood out for its gonzo humor and original design. I was going to paraphrase the text on the back, but there’s really no way to distill it. Here it is in its entirety:

The crew of the exploration ship Znutar just wanted to cruise around the Galaxy, discovering strange new worlds and playing pool. But then their ship was invaded by the Awful Green Things. And suddenly they were fighting for their lives!

In this wacky two-player game, one person takes the part of the Awful Green Things. Every turn the monsters multiply and grow… especially if they can eat somebody! The other player commands the crew, frantically trying weapon after weapon in hopes of defeating . . . The Awful Green Things from Outer Space!

The pocket edition consisted of a resealable box about the size of a paperback, 137 full-color counters (and a ziplock bag to keep ’em in), 24 pages of rules; and a 12″ x 21″ color map. The game was copiously illustrated by creator Tom Wham and Beverly Hale. My copy doesn’t have a price tag, but I think it was around 8 bucks. You can buy an updated, boxed edition from Steve Jackson Games for $24.99, but the pocket edition is still the one to get if you can find it.

Get Out of the Dungeon with Monsters! Monsters!

Get Out of the Dungeon with Monsters! Monsters!

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monsters-monsters-smallSome 35 years ago, I read an article in The Space Gamer on an unusual little game called Monsters! Monsters!

I’m not even sure I’d played D&D when I first read about Monsters! Monsters! I was introduced to fantasy gaming by Metagaming, and specifically their brilliant mini-games Ogre, Melee, and Wizard, all designed by Steve Jackson.

Orge everyone knows about — if you didn’t play the game at the lunch table in high school when it was first released in 1977, then you’re probably aware of last year’s Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly a million dollars for a massive 14-pound Designer’s Edition.

I doubt every copy of Ogre in the world in 1977 totalled 14 pounds. I think Ogre may have the unique distinction of being the simplest and most spare SF game ever created, and now it’s also the largest.

Anyway, it was Melee and Wizard that first taught me all about role playing. I rolled my first attack dice in a school cafeteria in 1978 (I missed). The rules were simple, the miniatures were made of paper, but the magic was exactly as advertised. I carried those games in my back pocket for years, and my friends and I were die-hard Metagaming fans long before we stepped into our first dungeon.

Metagaming’s house organ was the magazine The Space Gamer, where they advertised upcoming releases, chatted about the industry, and generally talked up their games. It was there I first learned of the wider world of role playing, and where I discovered an odd little game called Monsters! Monsters! that they released in 1976.

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Vintage Treasures: An Earth Man on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley

Vintage Treasures: An Earth Man on Venus by Ralph Milne Farley

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An Earth Man on VenusRalph Milne Farley was a pen name for Roger Sherman Hoar, a state senator and assistant Attorney General for the state of Massachusetts. Why a state senator wouldn’t proudly lay claim to a novel featuring a man and woman in underwear on the cover is beyond me, but some people just humbly shy away from fame, I guess.

Or maybe it’s the antennae growing out of her head. It’s hard to be sure.

Whatever the case, An Earthman on Venus was originally published (as The Radio Man) in that grand old lady of the pulps, Argosy, in 1924. It was immediately popular, and reprinted many times, starting in Famous Fantastic Mysteries (1939) and then in hardcover from Fantasy Publishing in 1948.

The version of interest to us is the 1950 Avon paperback, pictured at left. Primarily because it’s a prime early example of underwear chic, but also because it was the first true mass market edition.

Legendary editor Donald A. Wollheim — who would later found DAW Books — was at the helm at Avon at the time, and he had an eye for pulp fiction that would play well in paperback. While he was at Avon, he made A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, and C. S. Lewis’s Silent Planet space trilogy available in mass market for the first time, bringing those authors — and many others — a wide audience.

The Radio Man isn’t particularly well-remembered today, but it’s an important part of the history of our genre nonetheless. Not just because of it has giant ants and antenna girls on the cover… well, mostly that. But it was also one of the first sword-and-planet adventures, and it was successful enough to spawn no less than seven sequels over the next three decades, starting with The Radio Beasts (1925) and including The Radio Planet (1926), The Radio Flyers (1929), The Radio Menace (1930), The Radio Gun-Runners (1930), The Radio War (1932) and The Radio Minds of Mars (1955).

Now I don’t know about you, but I thought the sequel was invented with The Godfather, Part II. Evidence that fantasy writers were doing that kind of thing half a century before Francis Ford Coppola thought of it fills me with pride. And a powerful compulsion to buy blue lingerie for Alice, but let’s not get in to that.

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Vintage Treasures: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard

Vintage Treasures: The People of the Black Circle by Robert E. Howard

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people-of-the-black-circleI may have more books by Robert E. Howard in my collection than any other writer.

I’m not certain, as I haven’t counted, and if you allow anthologies then he’ll be beaten out handily by folks like Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. But the venerable Mr. Howard occupies more than two shelves in my library, which is astounding for someone who died at the age of thirty.

I came to Howard early. The first story I read by REH was “Pigeons from Hell,” which Charles Saunders mentioned in a speech he gave to the Ottawa Science Fiction Society in 1981, the year his groundbreaking Imaro was released. “Horror doesn’t usually scare me,” he told us. “‘Pigeons From Hell’ scared me.”

I think the second REH tale I read was the Solomon Kane tale “Skulls in the Stars,” which I enjoyed even more. (I wrote about the two Bantam Solomon Kane collections, Skulls in the Stars and The Hills of the Dead, last year.)

But I wasn’t a Conan fan. Most of it was prejudice — in those days, all those novels with barbarians on the cover were considered the lowest form of fantasy, and I generally snubbed them. Oddly, I don’t think I even associated Conan with Robert E. Howard.

I surreptitiously tried a Conan book in my early teens, a collection of tales mostly by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, if I remember correctly. Didn’t impress me. That was all I needed to confirm that I was better than this stuff and return to reading books of quality, like Perry Rhodan and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators.

All that began to change with The People of the Black Circle, a Christmas gift from my brother Michael.

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Vintage Bits: Sword of Aragon

Vintage Bits: Sword of Aragon

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Sword of AragonI’m a huge fan of computer games, and especially role playing games. Perhaps the thing I enjoy most about them is they’re so clearly descended from the hobby I loved as a teen — desktop role playing and Dungeons and Dragons, itself a direct descendent of Sword & Sorcery as written by Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Roger Zelazny, and Fritz Leiber.

The things I cherished as a young man have grown up and conquered Western Civilization. The only thing that could be better would be if the Spider-Man and Avengers comics I zealously collected forty years ago suddenly spawned billion-dollar media properties — but come on, what are the chances of that?

But back to computer games. This isn’t going to be a computer-games-aren’t-as-great-as-they-used-to-be diatribe. The fact is, modern computer games are fabulous. I can sit on my couch for hours and be thoroughly entertained watching my son play games like Arkham City, Heavy Rain, Borderlands and Enslaved. These are truly immersive experiences, with captivating plots, great characters, and outstanding pacing.

Still, you’ll notice that I didn’t say I played these games. No, my enjoyment these days is pretty much limited to watching Drew play.

I don’t game much any more. That’s not because the games suck; it’s because I grew up with a very different kind of gaming experience, and the games I want to play just aren’t made any more.

I’m not asking for the industry to roll back 20 years. What I really want to do is play all those great old games once more — something that is sadly impossible, unless I can find a way to get my old IBM 286 machine to boot up again.

What games are those? Old school dungeon-crawls, like Wizardry, Pool of Radiance, Dungeon Master, and Dragon Wars. Science Fiction RPGs like Starflight and BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception. Adventure games like The Lurking Horror and The Secret of Monkey Island. And tactical wargames like MechCommander.

And especially the brilliant blend of wargaming, role playing, and adventure gaming that is the underrated classic Sword of Aragon, one of the finest fantasy games ever made.

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The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1961: A Retro-Review

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1961: A Retro-Review

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Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction July 1961Now to an early ’60s issue of F&SF. This one has an Ed Emshwiller cover, illustrating Brian Aldiss’s “Undergrowth.” It is billed as an “All-Star Issue,” which I find curious, as several of the writers are what I would call “Little-Known.”  I’ll get into that a bit later.

The features: No interior illustrations, of course. There is of course Isaac Asimov’s Science article, “Recipe for a Planet,” which goes into great detail on the components of the Earth.

There is a Books column by Alfred Bester. He discusses a couple of Dover editions of Jules Verne, as well as a film about him (The Fabulous World of Jules Verne). He treats Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell (with approval, expressed in no detail, and accompanied by a recommendation for Lucky Jim, “the funniest first novel since Pickwick Papers” [(Which later first novel might be added? A Confederacy of Dunces?]). He follows with three reviews of short story collections, by Knight, Nourse, and Pohl.

That tells us something, doesn’t it? How likely would  a review column today be to cover not a single current novel, but three collections?

And I suppose Feghoots can be called a feature, too. This issue features number XLI in “Grendel Briarton’s” series. I have enjoyed my share of Feghoots over time, but this one is awful, and not in a good way, concerning intelligent gnus. Really, one thinks, surely Mills (or whoever was editing F&SF at any particular time) could have rejected the really bad Feghoots. Bretnor had to know better. (“Grendel Briarton” was a pseudonym, and an acronym, for Reginald Bretnor.)

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Vintage Treasures: Chaosium’s Thieves’ World

Vintage Treasures: Chaosium’s Thieves’ World

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Thieve's World Chaosium-smallThere was a time when shared-world fantasy was brand new, and taking the genre by storm. That time was 1979, and the man at the helm was Robert Lynn Asprin, a midlist novelist who had never edited anything before in his life.

Robert Lynn Asprin was the guest of honor at one of the first science fiction conventions I ever attended, Maplecon 2 in Ottawa in 1979. He was a spirited and self-deprecating guest, telling stories of Joe Haldeman and Poul Anderson gently correcting his spelling and grammar (“These are the people I’m supposed to be editing?!”) as he midwifed the birth of what would become one of the most successful fantasy franchises of the 20th Century: Thieves’ World, the Ace paperback anthology that triggered an explosion in shared world fantasy over the next two decades. Thieves’ World eventually encompassed thirteen collections and over half a dozen original novels, published between 1979 and 2004.

It wasn’t the only new trend to emerge at the end of the 70s in fantasy fiction — in fact, it wasn’t even the biggest. The influence of Dungeons and Dragons was cresting at the same time, and with the publication of Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first DragonLance novel, in 1984, the two genres finally collided, and neither would ever be the same again.

As fantasy fiction and gaming gradually blended throughout the 80s, it didn’t just mean that bookstores were flooded with gaming novels. Gaming stores likewise were invaded with a new generation of book-inspired titles, from Iron Crown’s Middle Earth Role Playing to Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, and TSR’s Conan and Lankhmar properties, just to name a few.

These two juggernauts of 20th Century fantasy, Thieves World and role playing, came together in 1981 with the release of the Thieves’ World boxed set from Chaosium, a singular accomplishment that has been called the “Rosetta Stone of early roleplaying.”

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Michael Moorcock’s Von Bek: A Review

Michael Moorcock’s Von Bek: A Review

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Von BekNo matter what your opinion of Michael Moorcock, you can’t deny that he’s a versatile writer; from the pulpy adventures of Dorian Hawkmoon to the sophisticated high literature of Mother London, this man seems capable of writing anything, and Von Bek, a collection of three stories that focus around the family of the same name and their quest for the Grail, is proof.

This is especially true of the first book: The Warhound and the World’s Pain, which focuses on Ulrich Von-Bek. Here you’ll encounter the same Gothic tones and deep melancholy of the Elric books, the gung-ho adventure of Hawkmoon alongside another healthy dose of Moorcock’s boundless imagination. It is at once questioning and original, daring and clever; unafraid to show the ravages of war, but still enjoyable as simple, leave-your-brain-at-the-door adventure.

A hard to attain but perfect combination. In this tale Lucifer, wanting to redeem himself in the eyes of God, enlists Ulrich Von Bek to retrieve the Holy Grail, or, as he calls it, the ’cure to the worlds pain.’

All throughout this venture, he is hindered by Klosterheim, who has been ordered to prevent him from finding the Grail. Klosterheim’s arrogant nature, intolerable ignorance, and prejudice make him an apt and contemptible rival for our charismatic anti-hero.

I say anti-hero because Von Bek, much like Elric, is a far-cry from Conan or Aragorn in that, rather than having an immovable viewpoint on morals, Von Bek, at least at the beginning, has none. The fact that he only accepts the tangible and takes destruction in his stride makes him a compelling companion, and makes his quest — which surrounds religion and metaphysics — all the more apt, and therefore all the more interesting.

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Sleeps With Monsters on Martha Wells’ The Element of Fire

Sleeps With Monsters on Martha Wells’ The Element of Fire

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The Element of FireMartha Wells’s first novel, The Element of Fire, was published twenty years ago this July. It marked the debut of a major new fantasy writer.

The Element of Fire is a standalone novel set in the country of Ile-Rien, the setting for her Nebula-nominated The Death of the Necromancer (1998) and the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy. Martha’s three contributions to Black Gate featuring her heroes Giliead & Ilias —  “Reflections,” “Holy Places,” and “Houses of the Dead” — helped put the magazine on the map. They are part of her Ile-Rien stories, and fill in some of the gaps between the novels.

Over at Tor.com, Liz Bourke kicks off an extended examination of Martha’s novels with a look at The Element of Fire:

It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read… and as a debut novel it is singularly accomplished.

The court of Ile-Rien, around which the action of The Element of Fire centers itself, is a complicated place. King Roland, recently come to his majority, is a weak ruler, warped by the abuse of his years-dead father. The court’s real power remains the Dowager Queen, Ravenna…

Wells’ deftness of characterization is delicate, precise and astute. An outside attack doesn’t lead to all the court’s factions banding together under capable leadership: rather it intensifies the amount of politicking and the coming-to-fruition of treasonous plots…. Wells has a fantastic touch for conjuring personality in all of her work…

I think it a fantastic book. In its honor, the next few installments of Sleeps With Monsters will focus on a selection of Martha Wells’ other works: the Fall of Ile-Rien trilogy and Wheel of the Infinite, at least, and possibly a surprise or two as well.

The Element of Fire was published in July 1993 by Tor Books. It is 413 pages in hardcover. Read Liz Bourke’s complete review here, and get the scoop on Martha’s  latest novel, Emilie and the Hollow World, here.

Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1951: A Retro-Review

Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1951: A Retro-Review

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Galaxy Science Fiction January 1951-smallGalaxy Science Fiction’s fourth issue was published for January, 1951.  Now with 50% more illustrations, Galaxy was rolling along, ready to offer the best fiction on the market.

“Tyrann” by Isaac Asimov – This is the first part of a three-part serial of Asimov’s novel.  It was later reprinted under the title: The Stars, Like Dust.  Biron Farrill is a young nobleman visiting Earth when someone tries to kill him with a radiation bomb.  An acquaintance of Biron’s tells him that there’s a plot underway by the Tyranni.  The Tyranni, who control the galaxy by oppressing the various world leaders, killed Biron’s father and are now coming after him.

Biron flees to Rhodia in hopes of finding refuge under their leader, Hinrik V.  The Tyranni track Biron’s movement, allowing him to reach Rhodia in order to test Hinrik’s loyalty.  Soon after his arrival, however, Hinrik’s daughter and cousin confide in Biron that they are not loyal to the Tyranni and that the three of them must find a way to escape the planet without alerting the Tyranni.

I love this story so far.  The characters are great, especially Hinrik’s cousin who shows two personalities – one is a public façade in order to keep his work secretive.  Plus, their ships jump to hyperspace!

Asimov didn’t coin the term hyperspace, but he was one of its early adopters, and the way the jump is described will resonate well with Star Wars fans.  By the way, if FTL (Faster Than Light-speed) travel was good enough for Asimov and Galaxy, why is it shunned by some editors today?

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