Review: Tiger Chair

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Tiger Chair

The recent Tiger Chair is the Max Brooks short story of the Chinese invasion of the American West Coast. Told in the form of a letter back home from a Chinese, it mentions how all the high-tech contraptions that were supposed to win were countered by know-how.

I’ll be blunt, this is not a good story. It’s told entirely through less-than-ideal exposition, and is loaded with both references that are bound to age like antimatter (mentioning some minor celebrity controversy from four years before this post that a normal person like the narrator would almost certainly not even know about) and older ones (there’s a ton of Iraq War lingo that makes me think at least part of this was originally written back in the 2000s).

But the real problem (at least for a military nerd like myself) is that Brooks’ Pentagon Reformerism is on every page. Obvious from as early as the Zombie Survival Guide (where he praised the AK and scorned the M16), this goes from “there are counters to high-tech contraptions” to “they make high-tech contraptions useless”. This is hammered home in a hamfisted manner continually.

Don’t get this.

What’s In A Space Warship Name

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(That I’m interested in this topic just as I’ve gotten into Starmada is just a coincidence, I swear.)

Atomic Rockets is a great site for semi-realistic spacecraft design. However, one of their contributors was adamant about not transplanting ship names wholesale from maritime ones, as has happened many times before. Is this a sensible avoidance of tropes or just hipsterism for the sake of being different?

I feel it depends on the setting and tone. IE Warhammer 40k and its broadside space cathedrals and obvious Age of Sail symbolism can adopt naval terminology just fine. But there are understandable reasons to avoid the ‘superdreadnought’.

Names I think could make the cut:

  • Battleship. Pretty self-explanatory.
  • Carrier for anything carrying smaller craft. Also pretty self-explanatory.
  • Gunship/gunboat. I think this has already passed one test in that plenty of real aircraft are called gunships, and an added bonus of being a good literal description for many designs. (IE, big weapon on a spinal mount the rest of the ship is built around).

Cruiser, Destroyer, and Frigate are already a mess and have been for decades if not longer. These smaller ships are probably the best to make up your own terminology for (ie “Dragonship”).

A Thousand Words: Some Kind of Monster

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Some Kind of Monster

One of the best musical documentaries of all time, Some Kind of Monster covers Metallica in the early 2000s during the making of the St. Anger album. Given a surprising amount of access, including their arguments and therapy sessions (seriously), the filmmakers put together a tour de force. At times it’s like a ‘real’ Spinal Tap in its ridiculousness, but at other times it’s earnest.

Besides being a well made film, there’s a couple factors that help this along. The first is that it ultimately has a ‘happy’ ending: The band managed to overcome their difference, reunite, finish the album, and get a replacement bass player who has remained with them since. The second is that with hindsight it’s at just the right time. The band members are clearly past their absolute height and have grown with families and responsibilities. Yet at the same time, they aren’t in the pathetic, irrelevant “Fat Elvis” phase that every aging rocker inevitably falls into.

I think the best and most poignant part of the film comes when the album is finally done and the band members talk about the strange mixed feelings they have. As I’d just finished A Period of Cheating when I saw the movie, I understood completely that feeling.

Anyway, even if you don’t like Metallica (I’m not exactly a fan), this is a great film to watch.

Review: Vacuum Diagrams

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Vacuum Diagrams

Stephen Baxter’s Vacuum Diagrams is a series of linked stories intended to tell the Xeelee from cradle to grave. I mentioned before that like Harry Turtledove, his writing style is a lot more suited for that. And like Turtledove, this is still uneven. There’s attempts at coherent arcs, including a later one where primitive humans have to escape their stone age prison the Xeelee built for them (it makes sense in context), but those really don’t work so well.

Others are basically just “here is a thing. Here is a description of a thing. Here is a character who exists as a camera to show you the thing.” Baxter has managed a sense of wonder and splendor a lot better. Here the scope is so big that it feels tiny. Going billions of light years to a megastructure/portal is done so often that it feels like running an errand (and I’m talking about the human characters, not the aliens).

Some of this has been retconned by later books, although “retcon” isn’t really the best word when time travel exists in universe. Either way, this is not one of Baxter’s biggest hits.

Weird Wargaming AAR: Starmada Star Wars/40k

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So inspired by the Star Wars vs. Warhammer 40k web serial, I made crossover fleet lists for Starmada. Then using Tabletop Simulator for a convenient hex map and making some quick counters in its editor, I ran a small fleet engagement of four Imperial frigates vs. five Republic ones.

The fleet lists are still subject to major revision but suffice to say the Star Wars side is about accuracy and fighters and the 40k one about brute power and durability. In this case brute force won out as the Imperium destroyed four Republic vessels for the loss of only one of their own.

Review: Xeelee Vengeance

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Xeelee: Vengeance

I wanted to like Stephen Baxter’s Xeelee: Vengeance, a tale of time travel, Clarketech, and the most alien aliens that ever aliened.

Unfortunately, this book has one problem. One central problem that is common to all extreme setting-first stories. One central problem that it does absolutely nothing to try and fix: Namely it’s mostly exposition about worldbuilding and speculative physics and whatever. So we get a ton of detail on this futuristic Earth (and Baxter’s other stories), the aliens (and Baxters other stories), every little quirk and thingy (and Baxter’s other stories) and even… Baxter’s other stories. The problem is that if you’ve read a decent amount of the other stories, none of the twists or mysteries work.

When we finally get to the showdown between protagonist Michael Poole and the time-warped Xeelee nightfighter, the book has already dragged on forever and even that drags on forever as well. It’s conceptually interesting but the execution is just terrible. Like “have a detour of padding to reference the John Carter of Mars books” terrible.

Thing is, as an eager worldbuilder myself, I can understand why Baxter did what he did. But as a reader it becomes hard to like it. You have to balance, and this was intentionally unbalanced.

Review: Starmada

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Starmada 30th Anniversary Edition

I was looking for something to scratch my spaceship wargaming itch. A set of generalist rules that you could apply to basically any setting and have a semi-reasonable approximation of things. Enter Starmada. Now its newest 30th anniversary edition, it lets you build and battle on the tabletop whatever ships you can imagine.

Naturally as a generalist set it lacks specific gimmicks, with anything offensive having to be translated into weapon qualities (ie a big area blast would be “proximity”, and a powerful kinetic cannon shell would be “crushing”) and anything defensive being translated to either “screens” (roll above X or the attack fails) or “shields” (takes a hit before anything else). You get the idea.

It requires some imagination. But if you have imagination and a willingness to abstract, well let me just say that even my initial crude playtesting sessions had me beaming bright. Want to play as a cumbersome pure brute force fleet going against an agile but brittle rapier? This lets you do all that and then some.

Review: The War of Return

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The War of Return

A very timely book, Einat Wilf and Adi Schwartz’s The War of Return is a look at the Israel-Palestinian conflict. That the two support a two-state solution and a return of Israel to pre-1967 borders makes it all the more credible. Trying to go and see why the Palestinians have been more intractable than even the other Arab states, they come to a “temporary UN program”.

I knew about the legitimate beefs the Palestinians have with Israel (yes they exist), and how the other Arab nations have used them entirely as political props and tools for decades without wanting to care for them. Yet the key in the lock they’ve explained is the UNRWA, which ended up becoming both a local government (seriously) with an international fig leaf and something that fanned the fires by using the term “refugee” in a way completely different than what everyone else, including the rest of the UN, uses.

(Short oversimplified version: The UNHCR which handles refugees literally everywhere, has a narrow definition and formal apoliticality. Once someone is settled, they aren’t a “refugee” anymore. So WRT Syria, if they’re settled they’re no longer a refugee. Be it in Turkey, Germany, the UAE, Ireland, America, or Bangladesh, that’s that. Also, whether they were pro-or-anti-Assad is irrelevant in that case. In contrast, the UNRWA has effectively made every single Palestinian family into a dynasty of “refugees”.)

It’s hard not to read this book and think that just a bit of negotiation here and a settlement there can still work (or could even before the current war). This makes it a sad but excellent and true story.