The Overman Culture
Edmund Cooper, 1971

The set-up for this one is quite intriguing. It follows the life of the main character, Michael Faraday, from childhood to his early twenties; he lives in London with his parents against the backdrop of World War II. At least, that’s what he originally thinks. However, we the readers immediately know something’s off, as it’s noted that Michael’s mother likes listening to the Beatles on the radio, or they go see movies that star Dustin Hoffman or Jane Fonda, or the fact that Winston Churchill is sometimes seen strolling in the streets of the city with the queen – Victoria. And at school they play games and engage in arts and crafts but never learn to read and write. Early on, though, Michael suspects something is wrong. One thing that he and his two best school friends, Ernest Rutherford and Emily Bronte, notice is that certain kids at school don’t seem bleed when they get cut. By the time they reach adolescence, they and a few other kids like them form a little group that begins to investigate the world they live in – they eventually learn the truth, and it’s quite overwhelming.
Not a bad story, all in all; I liked it more than the other book by Cooper (A Far Sunset) that I reviewed on the preceding page. There is, however, an aspect of the conclusion that has really troubling implications, esp. if it was intentional on the author's part (I can’t really go into without spoiling the hell of the plot, though).

Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe by David Maraniss


Jim Thorpe has been a hero of mine since I read a biography of him aimed at children when I was a kid.  Given that that was almost certainly in the mid 70s, I have to assume that it was an incredibly white-washed biography.  But that didn't change the fact that I was mesmerized by the idea of this native American coming out of obscurity to become the world's greatest athlete.  And it wasn't just the title that comes with winning the decathlon (it didn't at the time).  Thorpe was, quite simply, the greatest athlete of his and almost certainly of all modern time.  He didn't just win the decathlon and the pentathlon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics.  He also performed respectably (though he didn't medal) in the long jump and the high jump.  He was unquestionably the greatest American football player of the early game, both collegiate and professional.  He was a respectable professional baseball player who was ill-used by his managers (mostly John McGraw) or he may have ended up being better.  He won ballroom dancing competitions and was, reportedly, a better than average basketball player.  

So when I saw that I could get an ARC of this book on Netgalley I jumped on it.  And man am I glad I did.  I was familiar with David Maraniss by name, though I've not yet read his bios of Vince Lombardi or Roberto Clemente.   After this book, I absolutely will.  Not only does Maraniss give us and excellent and comprehensive bio of Thorpe, he also works to strip away a lot of the myths that come with being "The World's Greatest Athlete."  Thorpe's life was half-mythical while he was still alive and those myths grew and perpetuated after his death.  Marnaiss also gives us the context necessary to understand Thorpe's life within the time period in which he lived.  I've seen some complaints about the book having "too much detail" or going in to tangents about the politics of the day.  But you simply cannot understand Thorpe's life or career without the background of times that shaped him.  Thorpe was born in 1887 in what was then still the Indian Terrtory.  That was the same year that the Dawes Act (The General Allotment Act) was passed, which had an enormous effect on every single Native American in the U.S., including Thorpe.  His education was a product of the Indian boarding school system, which was set up to systematically destroy the students very identities as Indians.  And while it was that system that allowed Thorpe to show that he could excel at sports, you have to understand it in order to understand the Carlisle School and, by extension the man.  

And Thorpe was a man.  Greatest Athlete or not, he was flawed as we all are.  Maraniss does an excellent job of avoiding making this a hagiography.  It's well known that Thorpe's life was frequently effected by alcohol.  The author does a good job of showing this...but also of showing that the myth of Thorpe as the "drunken Indian" is largely that, a myth.  Thorpe was a binge drinker.  Going significant time without ill effect from booze before going on a bender that would cause problems.  He shows that Thorpe was struggled in his relationships with his three wives and with his children, but with the necessary context that much of that struggle was as a result of Thorpe being absent for long periods trying to hustle up money.  And, ultimately, that was Thorpe's biggest failing.  He was simply unable to handle money.  He was far too giving, readily giving money to anyone who needed it to the detriment of himself and far too trusting of others who would use his fame and fail to come through with the green in the end.  

I really appreciated the context that Maraniss put in to the controversy surrounding the stripping of Thorpe's Olympic medals. He was absolutely fed to the wolves by Pop Warner and the administration at Carlisle, who very clearly knew he had played minor league baseball for money.  They absolutely knew it because almost every other college athlete did the same thing.  It was simply a fact of life.  It was also enlightening to look at what the "ideal of the amateur athlete" was at the time.  Because, essentially, you were supposed to be a white male of the leisure class in order to be a "true amateur."  The classism exuded by the likes of James E. Sullivan (head of the Amateur Athletic Union) and Avery Brundage (a teammate of Thorpe's who later was head of the U.S. Olympic Committee, President of the IOC and a massive Nazi sympathizer) was palpable and chilling.  

Ultimately this is a great biography of one of the greatest athletes of all time.  A man who should have because of the circumstances of his birth been on the very fringes of society, but ascended to incredible heights of fame.  A man who represented the U.S., when he wasn't even a citizen of the country (nor were teammate and fellow Carlisle student Lewis Tewanima or teammate Duke Kahanamoku).  And yet, nothing in the book changed my mind.  For all his flaws, Jim Thorpe had just as many, probably more, positive attributes.  And he remains a hero.  And he will always be, in my opinion, the World's Greatest Athlete of all time.  

Who's the cover artist on that Mystery Men book?

Divine Misfortune by A. Lee Martinez

This is the second book by Martinez that I've read (I never got around to reviewing Monster because I was just too busy).  His work kept being recommended to me based on my reading of the likes of Christopher Moore, Jasper Fforde, Robert Rankin and Tom Holt.  Of those folks, I'd say that Martinez most resembles Holt at his best (Holt at his worst isn't very great).  So it's good, but not great humorous fantasy.  

In this one the premise is that the Gods are real and interact with the humans who decide which God they want to worship.  All of this is regulated by the Bureau of Divine Affairs.  Teri and Phil had never felt the need for a God, but after being passed up for promotion and a few other incidents decide maybe they need a little help in life.  They decide on Lucky, a raccoon-headed minor prosperity God.  And thigs seem to be looking up for them.  Unfortunately Lucky is in a couple of long-term feuds, one with a Goddess of Love that he gilted and one with an unreformed God of Destruction.  And that spells trouble for Teri and Phil.  

A fun little comic fantasy that really does feel like the better work of Tom Holt.  So far I haven't found Martinez to be on par with Moore, Fforde or Rankin, but he's fun and well worth a read. 

Prince of Wolves (being the first book in the Pathfinder Tales series) by DaveGross



Pathfinder was an offshoot of the D&D game developed by Paizo publishing when Wizards of the Coast released the 4th edition of the game, one that harkened back to the revised 3rd edition rules. I wasn't that fond of it. However, the setting for the Pathfinder game, a world called Golarion, was a carryover for when Paizo produced adventure paths for the D&D game (something they continued to do once they had switched to their own game), and that setting I quite liked parts of. Paizo Publishing had gotten into book publishing with their Planet Stories line, reprinting a lot of classic pulp fantasy and sci-fi in (or related to) the planetary romance genre, and in 2010 began publishing a line of fantasy novels set in the world of Golarion to supplement (or replace eventually) the Planet Stories line. Prince of Wolves was the first of these. 2010 was time I was on hiatus form comics and wasn't buying much new prose fiction either, so I never picked these up or read them. I wasn't familiar with Dave Gross, but two of his beta readers whom he thanks in the acknowledgements were old acquaintances of Mrs. MRP and I whom we played D&D with during the couple of years they lived in the Dayton area and kept in touch with through the convention circuit afterwards (and may even be possible that Gross is one of the many people we met through them that were a mass of faces and unassociated names at conventions but I don't rightly recollect as there were a lot of people we met and rolled dice with during those years that failed to register in my memory as individuals rather than a part of a crowd.

The book itself is pretty standard fantasy fare, well written, but nothing to stand out. If you like fantasy novels (especially those part of series for game worlds) you'll likely enjoy this. If that's not your jam, I wouldn't recommend it. It has two protagonists, a scholar (called Pathfinders in the setting) a half elf named Varian Jeggare, and his agent/bodyguard, a tiefling tough named Radovan (tieflings are hellspawn and Radovan is pretty much a riff on Hellboy in a fantasy setting the way he is portrayed, complete with a secret royal heritage and a seeming curse, and with street tough thug attitude and dialogue). The plot is pretty standard game fantasy stuff-a hidden treasure vault, an ancient tome, werewolves, sword play and spells, secret societies and a group of folks modelled after Romani tropes. What was a little different was some of the thematic explorations about history, accepted popular history vs. contradictory oral traditions, what will happen if primary sources are found that will contradict the accepted history, what should a society of explorers for hidden or forgotten knowledge do with such recovered sources, what conflicts would arise to gain possession and control of such volumes and having the ability to control the dissemination of such knowledge or prevent it. If that stuff had been a larger part of the book, I would have liked it a bit more, but that stuff was limited, secondary to the main fantasy adventure plot and left in the background as a tantalizing but ultimately unfulfilled idea of what could have been but wasn't properly explored. The book ended up being about the quest to recover the knowledge and ended before it could really get into what the consequences were of recovering that kind of knowledge and the conflicts it that would emerge because of it. That book I would have been far more interested in reading (but that's the former historian in me, not the fan of fantasy adventure, speaking). As a fantasy adventure, it was standard entertaining fare, kind of a literary bag of chips, good tasting but unfulfilling junk food, rather than a literary meal that left you fully satisfied and nourished. But sometimes, you just want some chips.

-M

3.5 and Pathfinder are way too crunchy, the rules are primary and can interfere with storytelling, it lends itself way too much to min/maxing, powergaming and a style of play where the character sheet is like a pull down menu, if it's not something listed on the character sheet and that the character is good at, it's never something most players will ever consider doing making game play predictable and boring. Floating modifiers* in combat slow down gameplay and make combat a grind to get through, which when combined with the above predictability tend to suck all life out of the combat and make it a slog, and since combat is such a large part of the game, whole sessions can be a slog. Balanced builds and abilities between PCs and monsters seems like a nice notion on paper, but in actual play and design it is a terrible element of the game. The average lifespan of a monster is 3-6 rounds so 90% of those elements will never come up in play, and having to determine how many ranks in Animal Handling a skeleton that is going to die in 2 rounds is an utter waste of time. Having all those feat trees and ranks for each individual skills makes levelling up a character take way too long and often leads to players mapping out every choice the character will make from level 1-20 which separates story from character development completely. What a character experiences has no impact on how the character develops, the player will make the same choices whether the character spent the level fighting aboleth in a deep underground lake or fighting mountain giants in an artcic environment (this also ties back to the crunchiness leading to min/maxing and power gaming-there are mechanical choices that must be made to have a character function at optimal capacity and sing all the floating modifiers in their favor or minimize their negative impact regardless of what the character actually experiences in the narrative of the story.

A good DM and player group can minimize these aspects for sure, but they are inherent in the design of the game because of the math behind the design and the game theory elements baked into the game's design.

4th edition was a very well designed game that addressed a lot of those things, it's problem was that the designer forgot to bake in a lot of the elements that makes D&D feel like D&D (and that's not those 3.5 style mechanics and game theory elements).

For me, 5E took the few things about 3.5 that worked really well and came to be baked in elements of D&D, and distilled those elements into a stew of core D&D concepts that works really well creating a foundation of mechanics that is simply, adaptable, and allows for DMs or play groups to kitbash it by adding or subtracting elements easily to customize it into something that fits their style of play.



*In combat every round, a player has to add up all the bonuses that change from round to round and figure out which stack and which don't (am I flanking this round add +2, do I have high ground add another +2, wait do those two stack or not, does the +2 I get form bull's strength stack or did the spell expire? Does the target have cover, do I need to subtract -2 for quarter cover, -4 for half cover, -8 for 3/4 cover, if I could move 3 squares and attack I could ignore cover but lose flanking and then I lose the rest of my movement, oh wait it's foggy so that obscures vision and is -2 but wait that's only for ranged attacks I am attacking in melee, oh wait the enemy wizard has blur cast I need to subtract 4 to the roll, of now let me do the math for all those modifiers to figure out what I need to add or subtract, oh wait I forgot feat A gives me _2, Feat B allows me to disregard cover in xyz situations, and Feat C allows me to add +4 in pqr situations, oh yeah, my magic sword is +2, but +4 in twilight, is it twilight, I need to ask the DM, do any of those apply? And do those stack with my other modifiers...and then they roll the die and if it's a typical gamer, by that time he forgot the sum of all those floating modifiers and have to recalculate it all to figure out what to add to the die roll, while the DM then has to do that with all the floating mods that apply to the target's AC, then the DM has to do that for each monster attacking even if their stats are all the same because the situational modifiers may vary while the players have to go through that mental gymnastics for their AC for each attack. All that to get a "14 that misses, who's next? Or 17 that hits, roll damage and figure out all the mods that might affect damage (3 minutes later) I did 7 damage. Ok well let's look, oh yeah this thing had damage reduction 5 to type A damage, reduction to to type B damage and reduction 20 to type C damage, what kind of damage did you do? Oh type C, of you did no damage. Ok who's next, make sure you account for all the modifiers and take your turn...what, oh you had Feat D that allows you to ignore damage resistance in situations stu, ok, but none of those situations apply so it's still no damage. Did the next player start figuring out what they are going to do...


And I am only slightly exaggerating for effect.

If you want to continue the discussion or have more questions, ask me over in the Eye of the Beholder thread and we can explore things further.

-M