A short review of every post-apocalyptic novel I've ever read.

The other day I was thinking about post-apocalyptic novels, and how many of them I'd read. So I sat down and created a list of as many of them that I've read that I could think of. Then I decided to write a review for them all. Here is that list. I hope people find it interesting. If you think there are any novels that I might have missed, please ask in the comments and I'll add them! And if you think I'm wrong about any of these reviews, let me know, I love arguing about books :-).

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The Greats

These are my favorite post-apocalyptic novels. They are not quite in order of very best to best, but rather in the order in which I want to talk about them.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.

This is, in my mind, the single greatest story about the apocalypse ever written. It's told in three long stories, each following a monk from the same Catholic monestary after the world has all but ended due to nuclear war. The Church is one of the only institutions that wants to keep scientific knowledge alive. Each story follows a different monk, and showcases a struggle they go through to keep some knowledge alive. There are post-apocalyptic politics, strange meldings of Jewish and Catholic mysticism, and one of the most "real" post-apocalyptic worlds you'll read about.

Wittgenstein's Mistress by David Markson

This is a strange, experimental novel. It's narrated by a woman who is the last woman on Earth for unknown reasons. Having no one to talk to, she goes slowly mad. The book takes the form of her highly literate but definitely crazy first-person ramblings. It's a meditation on how our relationships make us who we are, on art and literature, on loss, on what it is to be human. I highly recommend it to anyone with the stomach for postmodern and/or experimental novels.

Soft Apocalypse by Will McIntosh

Nearly perfect. Rather than ending with a bang, Will McIntosh (an academic sociologist) shows how the world could slowly turn apocalyptic. Throw in a dash of climate change, a pinch of economic slowdown, and enough time, and before you know it former members of the middle class are wandering the countryside while the richest people live in hyper-futurist enclaves. It's a punk rock story about the world ending with a whimper, following one young man as he tries to make a living and find love in this strange new world. To me, the best insight of the novel was that no matter how bad and strange things get, people are versatile enough to just think of the "now" as normal, as long as change happens slowly enough.

Dark Eden by Chris Beckett

This is one of those places where I've interpreted "post-apocalypse" broadly. Set on a wandering planet, a world of forever night, after a space ship crash-lands, it tells the tale of the 500 or so 5th generation descendents of the two people on the space ship. They have formed a small tribal community which is pushing against the natural resource limits of the small warm forrest that the live in. While the main character's plot is at times predictable, the setting is incredible and the story of a matriarchal tribe tearing itself apart and becoming a patriarchy was fascinating.

1491 by Charles Mann

"Isn't that non-fiction?" I hear you say. Yes it is. 1491 is a wonderful history book about what the Americas were like before Columbus "discovered" them. One of the most striking elements of the book is how our conception of Indians as "nomadic tribal hunter-gatherers" was not actually true: they were largely civilized, agricultural, stationary polities, even in North America, until Europeans brought diseases that ravaged the native communities in advance of the Europeans themselves. It's estimated that somewhere in the range of 50% to 90% natives died before Europeans even saw them, so in truth the "nomadic hunter-gatherers" lifestyle had more in common with the folks on _The Walking Dead_ than they did with their parents' or grandparents' lifestyles.

Blindness by Jose Saramago

Oh boy, this novel. Blindness is perhaps the most depraved thing I've ever read, which is exactly what it's trying to be. In a small town, people start going blind. First one or two, and soon hundreds of people at a time. The blind are rounded up and put in prison to try to quarantine them. Within days, as more and more people (even outside of the prisons) go blind, society completely breaks down and a brute sort of anarchy reigns supreme. The animal in man is brought out. Rape, murder, and torture become everyday activities. The story is told through the eyes of a woman who doesn't go blind but follows her husband to prison anyway, and who bears witness to the depths that humanity falls to as soon as society ceases to hold power over us. A terrifying novel.

The War Against the Chtorr by David Gerrold

So War Agains the Chtorr is what happens when you cross Soft Apocalypse with Blindness and add plenty of man-eating wormlike aliens and a gonzo, heavy metal attitude. I read this still-unfinished series 15 years ago, and just re-read them, and they hold up just as well. An alien ecology is infesting an Earth reeling from losing 1/2 the population due to massive plagues, and it's up to elite teams of scientist/soldiers to figure out what the fuck is going on. While it sounds like old school scifi fun and games, the books delve into a lot of philosophy and cover a lot of the same ground that _Blindness_ does, asking where our humanity lies and whether we can still keep it as the world around us goes to shit, and the answer probably isn't what we want to hear.

10:04 by Ben Lerner

What is contemporary lit-fic written by a Brooklyn hipster poet doing on this list? Being one of the best-written stories about the modern apocalypse we're currently going through as a species, that's what. A large part of the book is about New York City after hurricanes Irene and Sandy, the reeling feelings we all had after these super-storms straight out of a scifi novel put the city on hold for days and weeks. The sense of "anything is normal while it's happening" comes through strongly. It's also beautifully written and includes some of the best writing on art that I've ever read.

Stand Still. Stay Silent. by Minna Sundberg

A beautifully drawn and lovingly written science fantasy story about a world where the only survivors from a harrowing world-wide plague are small groups of people living in Scandinavia. It's a forever-winter world of the arctic crossed with pagan folk wizards. It's both twee and heavy metal at the same time. Definitely the best web comic I've ever read, up there with the best comics, period.

The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin

A man beats his son to death, and a woman comes home to find his body. Across the world, a powerful mage sick of the enslavement of other mages creates a super-volcano which splits the world's only continent in two. Years before, a young girl is taken from her family to be taught how to wield her power which lets her cause and dampen earthquakes, and another young mage is sent on a month-long mission with a senior mage with whom her mage's society tells her she must procreate, against both their will. These are the four stories that start The Fifth Season, a story of the end of society in a world-ending cataclysm. In a genre which loves its "plucky female protagonists", the lead female character is a human instead of a caricature, a loving mother with revenge in her heart, seeking her husband and remaining daughter across an ash-blown landscape as society reels in the aftermath of the worst earthquake in recorded history. I just finished this novel and loved it so much. I am afraid I don't have many intelligent things to say about it because it's so fresh, but read it read it read it. You'll be glad you did and angry that the next book in the trilogy is not out yet.

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The Good

These are all post-apocalyptic novels that I think are worth reading. None of them is a favorite of the genre, but neither do any of them hold fatal flaws that keep me from recommending them. Alphabetical order by last name.

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

I enjoyed this book, but find I have very little to say about it. The worldbuilding was fantastic if a bit heavy handed, and the story was totally engrossing. I've never really had any desire to pick up the sequels. A solid SF novel written by a literary author, although she does fall into the traps that literary authors tend to when writing SF.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

I don't normally think of this novel as a "post-apocalyptic" story, but as I was compiling this list it became apparent that it actually contains three apocalypses: the first, and the most moving to me, is the death of the Martians themselves, followed by the nuclear war on Earth and the desolation on Mars after. The first apocalypse is, to me, the best explored. "—And the Moon be Still as Bright" + "The Settlers" combined makes one of my favorite short stories of all time, the story of a man who realizes he is complicit in the genocide of a native race and who can't take that realization. The Martian Chronicles is one of the few novels on this list to have internalized the lessons that 1491 teaches: that apocalypse has already happened on this planet, it's just that we don't know it because we were the cause. Other stories set on Mars after most people have gone back to Earth are also good, especially "There Will Come Soft Rains" which is perhaps one of the best stories ever written to feature no characters at all.

The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

The main story in this novel is about an evangelical priest who goes on a missionary trip to a strange new planet. It's a weird book, one that I 100% loved. One of the sub-plots is that the wife of the main character is left on Earth, and he and she can only communicate through faster-than-light emails to one another. As he has a wonderful if strange time on the planet proselytizing to his alien flock, climate change and political unrest get worse and worse back home, leading to some of the emails from her being harrowing stories of her times in a post-apocalyptic world which seemed normal just weeks or months ago (harkening to the themes in Soft Apocalypse). This book is amazing for so many reasons, and only doesn't make the "greats" because it's only the email stories within the story that contain post-apocalyptic elements.

Afterlife by Simon Funk

This is a free, online novel (of which there are several on this list). A man wakes up in a strange world where people are happy and never sick, but from which they can't leave. He dreams of a past life where he was a computer researcher. As time goes on, he realizes that these dreams are more than just nightmares, and that the Earth he knows is long gone, replaced by (spoiler alert!) self-replicating machines which cover the face of the Earth, doing inscrutable tasks—machines which as an AI researcher he laid the foundation for. Really fascinating novel, definitely worth reading.

The Gone-Away World by Nick Harkaway

I loved this book, as weird as it was. 1/3rd kung-fu coming of age story, 1/3rd corporate thriller, 1/3rd military apocalypse novel. Harkaway writes an incredibly fast, tight, and entertaining plot, but the speed and entertainment don't hide a lack of intellectualism. Instead, you get great ideas on every page. Great read and lots of fun.

Fine Structure by Sam Hughes

Ultra-dimensional beings fighting to the death take out Earth as a casualty of their conflict. This is the story of what that looks like from our lowly 4-dimensional sight. Strange scientific experiments, super-heros being born stronger and stronger each year, and a series of dystopias and apocalypses. Fun, smart book which was written as a serialized novel and is available for free online.

A Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin

The 4th of GRRM's A Song of Ice and Fire novels. It takes place after wars have ravaged the countryside of Westeros, and many of the chapters involve the fallout that the average person of this world deals with as a result of the wars that up until now you've only seen through the eyes of the nobles who caused them. While an interesting book from that perspective, it's the weakest of the ASoIaF novels over-all, and would be in the "meh" category if this were just a ranking of Martin's fantasy novels.

Cloud Atlas & The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

These are two very different novels, except each contains one story set in the same post-apocalyptic world (a setting which Mitchell has also visited in some short stories). These books are absolutely wonderful, and deserve to be read. They are only not in the "great" category because the so little of them actually focuses on the post-apocalyptic setting. But seriously, read Cloud Atlas, an experimental postmodern novel which follows six stories in six genres and has some of the best prose work you'll see this side of Nabokov.

Apocalypsopolis by Ran Prieur

I liked this novel, but you could tell the author lost interest part-way through, and the story just sort of trails off rather than ending well. It's in some ways an experiment by the author to write a story of the apocalypse, rather than a post-apocalyptic story, and as he said: that's really hard to do well. However, the novel gets definite points for trying, for having some really creative ideas, and for having some awesome weird Native American shadowlands chapters. Plus, it's free online so the price is right.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

I loved this novel, but based on feedback from my book club, it was a polarizing one. The moon explodes and we realize we have only 3 years before the shards rain hellfire down on Earth, so the whole Earth pitches in building structures in space and sending people up. After the Earth dies, the several hundred people in space slowly whittle themselves down to fewer and fewer due to accidents and politics gone crazy. I really enjoyed the near-future hard science of getting everyone into space and the politics that played out amongst the spacers.

Tales of the Dying Earth by Jack Vance

Fantasy stories sent on a far-future Earth where technology is so advanced that it's actually become magic. These are fantastic adventure stories which don't get nearly enough love amongst genre fans. Vance's prose is astounding and the world he built, of techno-wizards and rogues, is a blast to read about.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

What is easily one of the great 20th Century American novels contained some definitely apocalyptic elements. A "concavity" where Northern New England used to sit where giant babies and herds of feral hamsters run wild. Wheelchair-bound French-Canadian assassins. And a video so wildly entertaining, that anyone who watches it loses all will to do anything else. The novel is dense and rich and rewarding, and Wallace cares about his characters like no other novelist has. It's only here instead of in the "greats" because it's light in terms of being a post-apocalyptic novel.

The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams

Another free internet novel about AI run amok, although one in which the AI is all-loving, all-caring and still causes the apocalypse. It's short and fun to read (although _really_ gruesome at points), so rather than review it I'm just going to say that you ought to read it, it's fun and totally worth the price.

The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

Another far-future, Dying Earth book. This, instead of being short stories, is four novels which form a single narrative (not unlike The Lord of the Rings trilogy). The Earth is falling apart under the weight of its own history, and a torturer is kicked out of his guild for showing compassion to a woman under his "care". This book is one of the densest I've ever read, full of puzzles and unreliable narrators. You really have to read between the lines to get what's going on. I had the strange sensation of actively disliking the books while I read all 1000 pages of their intensely dense prose, but loved it in hindsight.

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The Meh

Some of these are books I love but which have fatal flaws. Some of them are good books, but not very good post-apocalypse tales. And some of them are awful and shouldn't be read. Happily, I've already figured out which is which for you. Although be forewarned, some of these reviews are not going to be very popular. In alphabetical order by last name.

Nightfall by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg

A novelization of Asimov's wonderful short story by Silverberg. It adds a lot of new content to the end, after the stars come out, which when I read it in high school wasn't all that gripping and created somewhat of an anti-climax after the great reveal that ends the original story. I haven't read it in 15+ years, and am unlikely to again.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

I found the world just too unbelievable here. I have no problem with fantasy or mystical settings, but this was presented as straight SF inside the novel itself. The conceit of "energy is expensive, so we'll use human and animal energy and store it in springs" just doesn't make any sense: it's more expensive for animals to create energy than for an engine to do so, even out of the same fuel. In addition, the plot meandered too much and the only sympathetic character was killed off early on. I know it won the Hugo, but I just didn't like this one.

Nod by Adrian Barnes

A cheap knock-off of Blindness. I wanted this to be so much better than it actually was, as the conceit ("suddenly no one can sleep") was so good. The insomnia, the waking dreams, the slow insanity that not sleeping causes. Such ripe territory to explore! But it just didn't come through, instead going over the same ground that Blindness did while being less well written and less well thought through.

The Painted Man & The Desert Spear by Peter V. Brett

I enjoyed The Painted Man well enough, until a graphic and unnecessary rape scene was directly followed by the raped character working out her emotions by having graphic and unnecessary sex with the protagonist. Just a little too close to "wank fantasy" territory for my tastes, and one that is pretty sexist at that. Then The Desert Spear just wasn't as well written or interesting as The Painted Man, so I gave up on the series. I really wanted to love it though, as the setting was great: every night, demons come out of the Earth itself and so humanity only survives huddled in small villages and cities with anti-demon wards painted around them. Really great fantasy setting and world-building but really disappointing characters and story. Happily. The Fifth Season ended up being everything that I wanted The Painted Man to be, and so much more.

World War Z by Max Brooks

I'm pretty so-so on zombies. I love a good b-movie zombie film, but whenever they get taken too seriously I start to yawn and lose interest. Some of the stories here were good, some of them were so-so, but too many of them were just boring. In addition, I'd hoped to see some of the characters show up in multiple stories so you'd see how they changed over time, and that never happened—even with the world changing so much, the characters were all remarkably flat. I know this isn't a character-driven novel, but that's just not something that I enjoy.

The Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher

I read these as a kid and loved them. I have almost no memory of them now, and doubt I'll ever bother reading them again. But hey, I said "every book" and some I'm leaving this shitty review here goddamn it.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

Meh. Politicians make kids fight for... reasons? A "strong female protagonist" with no agency, a badass fighter who doesn't actually do any fighting and whose only meaningful choice is which boy she likes (spoiler alert, she doesn't make up her mind). Not my cup of tea.

Wool by Hugh Howey

This is a novel fully based on a twist ending, a twist which was telegraphed from the very beginning and wasn't very well executed even then. Also, the setting is totally unoriginal, why do people harp on about how original it was? Fine Structure lampooned the setting and came up with the same twist, and was published years earlier, and is 100x better writing. Read that instead. Also, Howey is a misogynistic douchebag who treats people horribly. I don't understand why these novels are popular.

Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

Another novel I know I read and just don't remember at all. Aliens destroy Earth with kinetic weapons, I think? That was pretty bad-ass. And some people fight back and stuff? I don't know, but The Mote in God's Eye by the same authors was fucking phenomenal so this can't be all that bad right? That's my review, "I don't remember it but it can't be all that bad, right?"

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

Yup, I read this whole thing. All 800 pages, 60 of which were a single fucking monologue. That monologue took me almost a week to read, it was so boring. Honestly, I really enjoyed some parts of the novel and Rand had a knack for straw-manning people in a way that really made you hate them, but even in high school I found her philosophy repugnant (still do!) and the novel has too many flaws to be worth reading as literature.

Endymion & Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons

These read like bad fan-fiction of the Hyperion novels, which is strange since they were written by the same author.

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

I love Vonnegut, and I used to love this novel, but the truth is that it suffers from a number of internal inconsistencies that take me out of the story. In addition, while Bokononism seemed profound to 15-year-old angry atheist me, to 30-year-old Buddhist me it's a little... trite as far as philosophies go. Slaughterhouse 5 is still amazing though.

The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells

I'm pretty sure I read this one too. I know I listened to the radio play on tape as a kid, because my grandfather would send me a bunch of old scifi radio plays every year. I loved that shit, Dimension X especially. You can find a bunch of them, including Dimension X, on Archive.org these days. They're a treat to listen to. But I don't actually remember much about this novel that isn't filter through the radio play and the two different movie adaptations that I've seen, so this final review is going to be a little bit anti-climactic.

Play Report: Amazonian Rivercrawl

My first session of my more-or-less open table Amazon exploration LotFP game was this weekend. Seven friends from college came from out of town to play. We had a blast, spending about 4 hours on Friday night playing and another 12 hours on Saturday. When we game, we game seriously.

Dungeon: The First Foray
For Friday's session, I had them generate completely random characters using +Ramanan S's Random LotFP Character Generator, and then sent them through a version of +Dyson Logos's Ruins of the Gorgon that was reskinned for the Amazon Rainforest setting. They ended up forcing one of the hostile native men that they encountered in the ruins outside to poke around the first few rooms of the dungeon with them. He had the wherewithal to escape the moment they turned their backs, but the party didn't get out of the dungeon until a giant capybara felled one of them. The surviving characters soon packed up and left, but not before digging through the capybaras' disgusting nests to pick up some silver trinkets, and then hauling out one of the beautiful ceramic statues in the entry room while under the watch of a ceramic fresco of a harpy eagle with a woman's head tearing apart a man's body under her talons.

The next day, all my players were available and we began running through the actual rivercrawl. I took a hint from +Zzarchov Kowolski's Thulian Echos and placed the dungeon from the night before on the map of the river, and gave the players vague directions on how to get there. They'd encountered one of the last party back in town, who gave them their map and some warnings about hostile natives, giant rodents, and valuable statues. The players then got to start the exploration of the tributary they've been assigned to map and conquer for the Spanish crown by the Viceroy of the Maranon, the one-eyed conquistador Francisco de Orellana.

The players choose to go back to the dungeon from the night before to try to loot more of it. Being as this was the main adventure and for them was going to be a one shot, they were playing 2nd level characters and each had a 1st level NPC retainer (whose gear was chosen by running through +Jeff Russell's Gears and Careers Secret Santicore entry). They had a riverboat they'd pooled up to buy, as well as a number of oarsmen, dogs, horses, and personal retainers. This was as I'd hoped, and the amount of loot they had mimicked the conquistador expeditions of the early 16th century—as did the losses they would later suffer.

Crawling the River: Social Encounters
The first day on their way to the probable location of the dungeon, they had to scare off an otter that was trying to gather food from their stores. The next day they saw a pink river dolphin shapeshift into a native and join what looked to be a festival at a particularly large river village. They made landfall and contact with the natives in order to discover more about the shapeshifting dolphin, but were distracted by the excitement of their first native contact going so well that they were invited to join in with the festivities. Since this was a festival, I gave them the chance to give away their possessions as gifts in return for gaining their worth in SP back as XP, then had them save verses Poison or roll on +Jeff Rients' Carousing Table.

The next morning they woke up hung over, closer to level 3, and with a Magic User beaten up and naked, and a Native Guide madly in love with a local Indian girl. A few of their oarsmen had gone native (failed morale checks), but four of the natives, young cocky men, wanted to come explore and adventure with these crazy white people (successful morale checks).

It was only then that they remembered about the dolphin that had brought them there in the first place, just in time to hear the commotion caused when one of the women in the village found out that she was unexpectedly about to give birth even though she had only had a one night stand with a stranger the night before. Turns out those dolphins don't necessarily have the best intentions. (This outcome I DnDified from an actual Amazonian myth about the river dolphins.) The party made the mistake of admitting that they'd known about the dolphin's presence without telling anyone, and were asked to leave under less pleasant terms than expected.

The Bobs

They then continued up the river with their new native hirelings (who they called "the Bobs"). They did some exploring, and came across another small hostile native village who drove them off, then to a final friendly native village near the dungeon. This village was cold but not hostile, and gave them reports of strange black magic that had happened up the river, and promised to convert to Christianity if the party could resolve it.

The Jungle and the Dungeon, Again
So into the forest they trudged, dogs, retainers, and Bobs in tow. On the way, a jaguar and a poorly-aimed crossbow shot managed to take down one of the party's henchmen. Once they got to the dungeon, they left the Bobs, a retainer, and one of the dogs up top, fought off the dungeon's guardian tree which had regrown since the last party's foray under ground, and descended below the forest's floor.

Below, they found the remaining ceramic statues re-arranged, and the entrance to part of the dungeon they'd cleared before now blocked off. An Open Doors check catastrophically failed thanks to my helping houserules and one of the fighters sprained a wrist, so they went the other direction to explore new parts.

They found a storeroom with more smaller ceramic statues, and then came across a party of warrior women with feathered bodies and taloned feet who tried to drive out the invading party. While the carnivorous Harpy Eagle Women had won a surprise round, some earlier smart thinking on the part of the Magic User—blocking off a door with an unseen servant that was not being used—managed to prevent too much damage from happening.

In the resulting combat (which, quite frankly, took much too long because of my own poor handling of combat with such a large party—lessons learned for future sessions), another henchman died and some of the PCs were taken out of combat with spells or taken down in HP, but they eventually got the upper hand of the five harpy eagle women due to good tactics and overwhelming numbers. At one point an expended Magic User brought a set of hand puppets into play, and it actually did the party good.

The party was supremely disappointed to find out that the dreadful black magic harpy eagle women were defending nothing more than the dungeon's fresh water supply, so went back to loot the dungeon they'd explored so far. They set up guards on all the doors and had the remaining party (+ the Bobs) ferry the statues out. They made easy work of all the wandering monsters the commotion brought to them.

Back to Civilization: Dealing with Consequences

On their way back to the boat with all their loot (statues made of glazed ceramic which were more beautiful than any ceramic work they knew of in Europe), they encountered a golden lion tamarind. Another of the party's Magic Users cast darkness on its eyes—a spell he hadn't used in the big fight for some reason—and the party managed to capture the creature. The spectacle of the characters running around chasing a monkey was one of the funniest things the Bobs had ever seen.

They made it back to the last village that afternoon, and after some negotiating and giving a gift of one of the statues, the village agreed to be converted. They spent the night there after erecting a large cross in the middle of the village (an actual tactic of the Spanish missionaries when converting native populations).

They traveled downriver quickly, making it to the Bobs' village before nightfall. They gave each of the Bobs a small looted statue as a parting gift. The Bobs' tale of adventure was the talk of the town, and their favorite part was recounting the party running around in circles trying to capture a blinded monkey.

The next day, the village made a gift of one of the finest bows that the party had ever seen, and they left having established excellent diplomatic ties with one of the larger villages on the lower reaches of the river. On the way back down the river, one of the specialists (a gnarled old Greek sailor who doesn't speak any Spanish, the only non-Spaniard European in the party) spent the whole time trying to teach the monkey pickpocketing skills.

The party made it back to town quickly, and sold off their loot for a pretty penny. They declined to sell the monkey, hoping instead of fetch a better price by finding a female of the species and selling them together as a mating pair. The Greek sailor specialist, who had stolen some extra loot when others weren't looking and had made full use of the carousing rules, managed to just level up to level 3, and after that succeeded in teaching the monkey just enough pickpocketing skills for it to be dangerous.

Conclusion: What Does it all Mean?
We left our adventure there, as it was nearly 10pm and time to meet some other friends for drinks. Overall, the adventure had been a lot of fun. The players all told me they enjoyed the exploration and social encounters more than the dungeon, and in the future they will likely seek out more exploration. Part of that was probably my own fault for letting the combat drag as much as I did, and in the future I'm going to be more limiting of who can go into dungeons and who can participate in combats, while still allowing the players to have a large party that is necessary for jungle-based overland scenarios to work out.

One thing that I was quite pleased with was the way that the game mechanics came together. Gaining silver and gold through adventuring is the only way to level up in +James Raggi's Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and it encourages the players to be greedy in a way that puts them in the conquistador mindset much better than any storygame rules could, I believe. Multiple times out of game they discussed wanting to play the game in a way that was not exploitative or overtly colonialist. They wanted to do first contact right. Even so, they were willing to exploit the natives the characters encountered both directly and indirectly, even as the players discussed openly the discomfort they felt with those actions. It was interesting to me to see the players' moral guilt at the actions of their characters, even while they enacted Raggi's principles of Heavy Metal DnD. It was exactly the kind of game I wanted to run.

The average Spanish explorer of the new world was someone out for dangerous work in order to gain lands, a name of themselves, and most importantly a fortune. Gonzalo Pizarro and Francisco de Orellana's quest into the Andes that led to them discovering the Amazon river started as a search for cinnamon trees, whose spice would have made Pizarro a rich man. His older brother Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca was predicated on extracting as much of the gold form the civilization as he could, and in return for those riches the Spanish crown granted him governorship over the Peruvian province that conquest created. The conquistadors were truly the original murderhobos: they went to people's homes, killed and enslaved their men, and took their things.

In some ways, this makes it the ideal setting for an open-world DnD game. It is the age of exploration and adventure, and some of the stories of the Spanish conquest of the new world are more DnD than DnD is. (For instance: A group of four Spaniards lead by Cabeza de Vaca were shipwrecked in Florida in 1527 and trudged their way across N. America to the Pacific over the next eight years, the first Europeans to do so. They started out occasionally enslaved by and escaping various tribes, but by the end of their journey were known as shamans and messiahs amongst the native populations.)

It also makes running a game of DnD in this setting problematic, but in a way that is hopefully useful and good. In DnD, every player is accountable to only themselves. Their choices are completely their own and are not constrained by the rules. No player has to try to level up, and even further no player has to try to harm others, enslave natives, take what isn't theirs, etc., even if they are trying to level up. While the characters did bad things, and did so at only the conscious urging of their players, it's useful and good to be able to ask why they did.

When a group whose players are variously Christian, atheist, Buddhist, and Jewish; are male and female; are progressive, conservative, and libertarian; are white, black, and even Native American; when that group still opts in-game to exploit native characters, all because its in their best interest in-game due to the structures of that game, it hints at the importance of structure and ideology in our day to day lives.

This is why a work of art's being problematic can be a good thing, and should not be a reason for us to shun that art. It gives us a somewhat safe space to actually examine what makes it problematic, how it got to be that way. It can fully be enjoyed as art, analyzed as a piece of ideology, and used to better understand the world, all at the same time. That said, I do think that one can have badwrong reactions to art. The moral discomfort my players felt was good—an enjoyment of those same character actions, an unwillingness to admit that they were wrong or to further analyze the inputs that went into making those decisions, would all be terrible reactions to the problematic work we created together.

Anyway, this is all a longwinded way of saying that the game went very well, and I'm very much looking forward to running more in this setting, with these and other players. Anyone who wants to play in person or on G+ should get in touch—I hope to get to the point where the rivercrawl is a living open table, a sort of New World West Marches.

Leaps, bounds, and falls.

Strong AI never shows up. It turns out it’s just too hard to code human-like cognition from scratch. By the same token, it’s nearly impossible to build any sort of mind uploading system due to the complexity of the system of nerves, impulses, chemicals, and abstract networks that form the human mind, nor does information uploading or “jacking in” ever work effectively.

Luckily, none of this matters. The human body can be augmented with machinery, and the human mind can augment machinery. Robotic armor is produced that works in a perfect feedback loop with muscle impulses to magnify human strength and constitution. High-bandwidth connections and user interface technology allow people to pilot unmanned robots (drones, spiders, trucks, subs, and more) in dangerous territories. People wear holographic glasses that provide an always-persistent heads-up display or any other visual overlay. Electrodes buried under the skin report data on orientation, time, or even alerts—these eventually become imperceptible as sensations as the mind correlates the data, leading to perfect senses of direction, duration, and even subvocal communication.

Masses of rat stem cells stimulated to become neurons are connected to small electrodes and let to form their own networks around them. They interpret the data fed to them, respond, and are conditioned. Mindgoo takes over the most menial and repetitive of tasks using its robot fingers.

Much of the menial yet skilled work is done from home, remotely, through large-screen visual displays and suits that sense movement and can give feedback. Workers communicate over audio link from miles away as they drive dump trucks, fly planes, and perform surgeries.

Augmentation becomes a way of life. Virtual and real are no longer seen as a dichotomy. Everything has a computer on board, everything is connected wirelessly. Mindgoo not only controls physical processes, but also abstract ones over the web. It mines financial data for patterns and organizes warehouse deliveries to be more efficient. People no longer tie their identities most closely to their bodies, but rather to the web of information that constantly surounds them. They can throw their awareness across the world or into abstract spaces.

Some countries clamp down on this, and new technofascist states pop up, using this connection to exert top-down control of their populace. Other areas completely decentralize, forming ad-hoc networks of information and resources. The technofascist states ruthlessly expand in order to secure resources, but the computing load placed on the network of mindgoo and augmented overlords who control the whole mess becomes too much as the network grows too complicated. It is not external democracy but internal technological limits that sends asunder the newest wave of totalitarianism as its networks fragment and violently collapse inwards against their most powerful nodes.

As the human mind becomes more abstract and less aware of the physical world, its physical footprint doesn’t shrink. People are still just as large and made of meat. So are the cows that feed them. Computers are still constructed of silicon and gold. And oil and coal plants still power them while spewing carbon into the sky. Storms become worse and worse on the coasts. The weather inland varies between scorching hot in the summer to freezing cold in the winter. Food production stagnates as the weather makes farming less efficient by percentage points a year while the ocean slowly is drained of readily edible fish.

Space exploration continues mostly through robots, both classical and goo’d. Some genetically modified humans fly pilot swarms of ships, each sitting weightless in a central hub as they direct their eye’d tendrils to mine asteroids and dump resources to Earth orbit. The networks of drones, computers, and goo are each headed by one solitary human, her awareness spread throughout the system.

Energy, minerals, and metals are abundant, but food is a dwindling resource as the ecosystems on the Earth are overtaxed, malnourished, and wasted. Humanity has lost all pretense of thinking the physical world is somehow more real than any of the others it has created for itself. The Earth slowly chokes itself until a tipping point is reached where first food becomes expensive, then largely unavailable, then the electricity becomes scarce. Humanity is unaccustomed to living without its overlays and instant communication, and many people violently unplugged from the maelstrom go mad, unable to handle the banality of being but a single, fleshy human being. A runaway positive feedback loop then consumes the whole system as the humans it so depends on no longer have the resources and skills they need to be physically self-sufficient.

It is the poorest countries which see the least change. In the deep Amazon, the last uncontacted tribe continues its business as it has for the past tens of millennia. Steppe hordes rain south on a China whose populace has grown weak and unfocused after the collapse of technofascism. African villages subsisting on farming find their cheap text devices no longer feed them information, and so they throw them away and do not think back. Meanwhile, the so-called self-sufficient distributed networks that were once the United States violently collapse as during one rolling brown-out just enough vital network nodes are brought offline than power stations loose their connections to their workers, Mindgoo looses its human interpreters, and soon 90% of the networks are without power and never coming back online, sending a shockwave through the developed world as it realizes that their delicate import-export economies are going to collapse themselves within a year.

In the distributed Americas, uncoordinated mass suicides take place as connected abstract beings realize that they will forever be trapped in one single body and find it an existence worse than death. In France a coordinated mass suicide takes place as the country pulls its own network’s plug. Many people spend their last days enjoying their monuments, cathedrals, and countrysides before settling in for bed without the will to rise in the morning.

Five years later and the world has reverted to barbarism. Many are dead, there is no government beyond that of the strong and resourceful, and all but the most analog of technologies are beyond the understanding of most to fix or even use. Tribesmen view their days pre-collapse as a sort of dream state, a collection of disjointed images, sounds, and sensations from senses they no longer posses. Meaning can be gleaned from some memories, but not from others. Existence is no longer a shimmering haze of glitz and information, but just what surrounds them: a bleak landscape of tribal warfare over scant food, rarely potable water, and deteriorating technology. Another ten years and the weakest tribes are scattered and assimilated. The time before is referred to in sacred tones, its images and lessons framed by a religious worship of the omniscient beings that all men once were. The few networked, technological compounds designed to survive just such a mess do, but without the worldweb they are a faint echo of humanity’s former glory, living monuments to a time gone by.

The asteroid miners survive on. Long used to radio relay communication and the black of space, they use their stored libraries and self-repairing fabricant shops to build more drones, ships, and germinated people. As the centuries drag on, they engineer their physical, formerly human component to be smaller and smaller, a jar of bone and fat to preserve a human brain. They build fusion engines and rockets. They grow and plug in multiple human components to each other, children to mothers, so that even as one dies another can take over. These immortal ship-beings work on a long time scale, and eventually in their move towards the ort cloud engineer out all their strictly human components, opting instead for the cool efficiency of goo. They engineer out their own consciousness to play the long game, building ecological systems out of themselves from the minerals they find at the edge of the solar system.

On the Earth, the planet becomes more hostile to human inhabitants each decade as the feedback loops of weather system, permanently changed by humanity’s presence, fall into new equilibria. Over much of the globe tribes become smaller and disappear. The last technological enclaves fail after a collapse that has lasted longer than even the most pessimistic had bet on. The polynesian islands become the last retreat of a humanity which survives by brute force alone, moving from island to island while taking from the sea all they can. Their culture remembers little of humanity’s past, and the fallen wonders they sometimes come upon are explained as being artifacts from when the gods roamed the Earth.

Light of a Thousand Suns; or, By Sacrifice Will You Procreate!

Link: Light of a Thousand Suns; or, By Sacrifice Will You Procreate!

A visual essay composed using Backspaces.

At the very center of the city is the water park.

At the very center of the city is the water park. For three acres trees explode in green leaves. Vines hang like clotheslines above, and underneath flow streams through the dark ground. In the center of the park is a lake deep enough to wade in where children go to play as young couples stretch out along its banks, shaded by the trees.

They say that if you walk far enough away from the city, you can find a water park that is as big as the whole world. That pools so large you cannot see across them exist beyond where trees grow in the millions and water falls from the sky as does sand.

When I was a child my gramp told me his childhood memory of when a storm, wet instead of dry, blotted out the sun. Thunderous and grey, it passed overhead instead of enveloping the city in its whirling mass, and then let forth a flurry of water hurling through the dark air over our orange walls, pounding against the beaten sandy paths, streaming through kitchens and roads and ruts, filling the city with its presence, soaking into the dry essence of where we live to mix and form gunk and froth and quags. Residents were forced inside, then upstairs, then to roofs, which then fell in and apart as the water ate away at them. Men plunged to their deaths, families were buried under gelatinous chunks of their home. Upon its passing, my grandfather ran up and down streets that had run away in huge gouges and ripples that now settled in their sinuous deformation. All day the city stank, and it took weeks and months to restore order and function. “Rain is hell,” his voice rasped. “Do not wish for rain.”

But I do. I wish for cold aqueous sheets to clean my skin. I wish for my mouth to ever taste sweet and my throat never to parch. I wish for verdure and erosion and decay.

Soon I will leave the city and its sharp shade to venture under the sun parked permanently in apex. I will walk until even its oppressive force begins to wane, to where it sits off-kilter in the pale blue plane above us. I will arrive in the afternoon lands of forrest and creek. I do not know if my ancestors will be there to greet me as the bibahb preaches, as he also preaches that the only way to arrive in heaven is through death.

I cannot believe that.