BRIEF SYNOPSIS: The forces of Heaven and Hell collide as a disgraced exorcist-paladin seeks redemption, to save his former lover, and to stop his demonically aligned twin sister from unleashing the forces of Hell in a world next door.

MY RATING:

MY REVIEW:

PROS: Very strong characterization and interactions between the principal characters; bonus points for a memorable villainess that breaks stereotypes.

CONS: World building is sketchy at best; the final act feels perfunctory.

BOTTOM LINE: A memorable debut with promise.

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Ever since the Sudden Mutation Event, people have been able to fly. Phase through walls. Read minds. Shoot bolts of energy from their fingertips. Walk into dreams.

As members of the elite Heightened Crime Investigation Unit, you and your fellow detectives solve crimes involving the city’s mutant community. When a mutant power is used to kill, you catch the case. When it’s a mutant victim in the chalk outline, you get the call. And when it comes time for a fight, you deploy your own extraordinary abilities to even the odds.

With new human capacity has come new science. Your squad brings forensic science to bear on the solution of mutant crimes. Need to know if a suspect is the victim of mind control or dream observation? Perform an EMAT protocol to detect the telltale signs of external influence. Was your victim killed by a light blast? Use Energy Residue Analysis to match the unique wound pattern to the murderer, as surely as ballistic science links a bullet to a gun.

Does your crime scene yield trace evidence of two separate powers? Use your trusty copy of the Quade Diagram, the infallible map of genetic relationships between mutant powers, to tell if one suspect could have used both-or if you have two perps on your hands.

If chases, interrogations and mutant battles weren’t enough to handle, you also serve as a bridge between the authorities and your mutant brethren. To successfully close cases, you must navigate the difficult new politics of post-mutation society, and deal with your own personal issues and mutation-caused defects.

Welcome back to Roll Perception Plus Awareness, a column meant to introduce SF Signal readers to the world of roleplaying games. This time out, we’re going to look at a game and a system from the prolific people at Pelgrane Press: their Gumshoe investigative system, and a specific iteration of it: Mutant City Blues, as designed by Robin D. Laws.

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Erin Hoffman was born in San Diego and now lives with her husband, two parrots, and two dogs in northern California. She started an online writing group at age 15, and at 18 started as an assistant game designer for Simutronics on DragonRealms. Her other game credits include Shadowbane: The Lost Kingdom, GoPets: Vacation Island, Kung Fu Panda World, and FrontierVille. She also serves on the International Game Developers Association’s board of directors, writes for the award-winning online magazine The Escapist, and has had fiction and poetry in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Electric Velocipede, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and more. In 2004 her blog on game industry quality of life, “ea_spouse”, was covered by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and LA Times, and is now referenced in numerous game history and corporate history studies.

Erin’s first novel, Sword of Fire and Sea, was just published by Pyr.

SF SIGNAL: That’s quite an Curriculum Vitae you have, Erin. I notice that you started off in your teenage years with writing, and then went into the world of game design. Now, with Sword of Fire and Sea, you have returned to writing. What brought you back to the printed word?

ERIN HOFFMAN: Well, I never really left! It’s a classic case of eight(?)-years-to-overnight-success. Writing has always been what I’ve done with “free” time (I always liked it better than television), and I sold my first short story at seventeen. I got my first rejection letter from Marion Zimmer Bradley when I was fifteen, and went to the Odyssey Fantasy Writers Workshop in 2005. It was really after Odyssey that I became a lot more strategic about my writing, but the first part of Sword of Fire and Sea was drafted in 2003-2004.

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Something’s wrong with the world and I don’t know what it is.

It used to be better, of course it did. In the golden age of legend, when there was enough to eat and enough hope, when there was one nation under god and people could lift their eyes and see beyond the horizon, beyond the day. Children were born happy and grew up rich.

Now that’s not what we’ve got. Now we’ve got this. Hardholders stand against the screaming elements and all comers, keeping safe as many as they can. Angels and savvyheads run constant battle against there’s not enough and bullets fly and everything breaks. Hocuses gather people around them, and are they protectors, saviors, visionaries, or just wishful thinkers? Choppers, gunluggers and battlebabes carve out what they can and defend it with blood and bullets. Drivers and operators search and scavenge, looking for that opportunity, that one perfect chance. Skinners remember beauty, or invent beauty anew, cup it in their hands and whisper come and see, and don’t worry now about what it will cost you. And brainers, oh, brainers see what none of the rest of us will: the world’s psychic maelstrom, the terrible desperation and hate pressing in at the edge of all perception, it is the world now.

And you, who are you? This is what we’ve got, yes. What are you going to make of it?

Welcome back to Roll Perception Plus Awareness, a column meant to introduce SF Signal readers to the world of roleplaying games. We’ve talked about some of the heavyweights of roleplaying, the ones that you have most likely seen or even played yourself. This time out, we’re going to head on into the world of small press “Indie” games with the latest game from D Vincent Baker: Apocalypse World!

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MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: The forces of good clash with a evil undead tyrant. This time, however, we see this classic tale from the perspective of a group of evil humanoids in the tyrant’s employ.

MY REVIEW

PROS: The author takes advantage of the unusual perspective to give us a side of the conflict infrequently seen in fantasy novels; good use of meta-textual humor; good characterization.

CONS: Sometimes we get too much “tell” rather than “show” on some aspects of the plot and characters: Point of view is also somewhat inconsistent given the premise; ending is somewhat anticlimactic.

BOTTOM LINE: Get ready to root for the bad guys to win the day. If they don’t kill each other first, that is.

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[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Please let us know!]

Big Dumb Objects. Large scale science fiction things that themselves are a character or at least a tangible and inescapable feature of the novel or story. They are part of the fabric of science fiction ranging from E.E. Doc Smith to Peter F Hamilton. So the question for the panelists this week is:

Here’s what they said…

I don’t like the classic BDO’s: the Ringworld from Ringworld and the Rama from Rendezvous With Rama. It may have something to do with the fact that I thought the stories were dull, but I just found them, well, too dumb. Some people found the objects, they wandered around a little bit, then they gave up and left. Not much sense of wonder for me I’m afraid.

The BDO’s that actually generate that required sense of wonder for me are a bit more intelligent. I particularily like stuff from Iain M. Banks Culture universe, like the layered world from Matter or the Culture Orbitals (although I’m not sure they really qualify as BDO’s because they have a very clever mind at their core?)

My favourite BDO however is not fiction at all, despite featuring heavily in Science Fiction: it’s the Universe. Our Universe. It’s a big object and it’s mostly empty, and therefore dumb, inert, silent. It’s mysterious, we’ve spend lifetimes trying to figure it out and will spend lifetimes more. And yet amidst the emptiness we’ve found fantastic things: nebula, super nova, glorious looking galaxies. It’s endless. It’s amazing. We’re living in a BDO!

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MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: A ship captain finds that the repayment of an old debt of his family’s leads to intrigue and adventure revolving around high elemental magic, temple intrigue, Gryphons, Goddesses, and more.

MY REVIEW:

PROS: Concentrated, distilled high magic universe; Andovar is a rich secondary world replete with adventure and a variety of interesting characters to populate it.

CONS: Too brisk of a book; pacing undermines a world readers might otherwise be interested in; some key things aren’t explained enough.

BOTTOM LINE: Both a modern and old-school high fantasy novel that only scratches the surface of a diverse and interesting world.

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Welcome back to Roll Perception Plus Awareness, my column on introducing role playing games to you, the SF Signal reader. This week, I am going to tackle a game based on a media property and the underlying mechanics behind the system. I am going to talk about the award winning Dresden Files Role Playing Game (DFRPG), and the system behind it, FATE.

The Dresden Files novel series likely needs little introduction to you, the readers of SF Signal. With over twelve books in the series thus far, Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy series about the only wizard in the Chicago phone book is extremely popular and is a tentpole of the urban fantasy sub genre. The Dresden Files universe is a complex, complicated hidden world, with wizards, vampires, faerie and more (including a mundane mobster with “connections”) which just out of sight to most mortals lends a rich environment for Harry, his allies, counterparts, and his enemies, to exist in. It is little wonder that such an environment would be one that many would want to set a roleplaying game in. In addition, Jim has strong connections to the roleplaying community. For example, I have role-played with his agent, Jennifer Jackson, and she herself co-ran a yearly gaming convention in the Boston area for a number of years.

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MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: A top-notch assassin with unusual powers in the city of Othir finds himself unexpectedly drawn into a web of intrigue when his latest job turns out to be a set-up.

MY REVIEW

PROS: Evocative Post-Empire setting; well-drawn protagonist; strong S&S action.

CONS: Relationship between the protagonist and primary female character feels just a bit artificial.

BOTTOM LINE: A shining beacon of the new crop of Sword and Sorcery novels.

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[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Please let us know!]

An overwhelming number of fantasy and science fiction novels borrow from the same Western European cultural tropes, images and ideas. From the Hobbit to A Game of Thrones, a lot of novels and stories do not look beyond some overused cultures and civilizations as inspirations or even settings.

Our question for this week’s fearless panelists:

Here’s what they said…

Almost all of them are under-used and almost none of them are utterly ignored. And there are reasons for both of those things to be true. Most fantasy and science fiction is less in conversation with real history and culture than it is with other fantasy and science fiction literature, so there winds up being a feedback loop in which fantasy is about faux-medieval quasi-Europe because it’s all in the shadow of Tolkien (rather than because of some particular virtue of faux-medieval quasi-Europe). And at the same time, genre writers try new things and reach for the unfamiliar in a way that encourages experimentation with non-standard cultures. Barry Hughart’s The Bridge of Birds, Ian McDonald’s River of Gods, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, Aliette de Bodard’s Obsidian and Blood books, and Who Fears Death? by Nnedi Okorafor all come to mind. All of them are bringing something to the table that broadens that conversation within the genre, but none of them have yet brought that so much into the mainstream that their settings have become standard.

If I got to pick what cultures and civilizations got more stage time in our genres, I’d like to see more of India, especially in the era of the East India Company. I think having a fantasy set in a similar place and time would open up some really interesting possibilities. I’d also like to see more use of eastern Europe and Russia of the kind that Ekaterina Sedilla and Catherynne Valente have been doing.

More than particular civilizations and cultures, though, I’d be very interested in seeing more stories set in contexts of poverty. Class is the third rail of American culture, and when I see what noir does with rural poverty in something like Winter’s Bone, it makes me interested in seeing something similar in other genres.

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MY RATING:

BRIEF SYNOPSIS: Golden Reflections is a collection of long stories based around the world of the novel The Mask of the Sun, by the late Fred Saberhagen. The short novel itself starts off the collection, followed by the novellas/novelettes.

MY REVIEW:

PROS: Original novel still holds up, interesting variations on theme in the stories. The Novelette/Novella form really shines in this book.

CONS: The stories do not cohesively hold together in a single narrative universe.

BOTTOM LINE: A classic work of time and timeline travel gets more than a fresh coat of paint being paired with excellent ancillary works.

The original novel is a favorite of mine, and I was curious as how the book would hold up, having not re-read it in many years. I was also extremely interested in seeing how other writers would tackle the world presented in the novel.

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[Do you have an idea for a future Mind Meld? Please let us know!]

While past Nobel laureates like Doris Lessing certainly approve of and are connected with the Fantasy and Science Fiction genre in at least a peripheral way, no unabashed genre writer has ever won the prize.

Our question for this week’s fearless panelists:

Here’s what they said…

I’m a firm believer that it’s a greater honor to be nominated than to win, because there are usually better reasons to quibble about the winner than the nominees. Therefore, my first thoughts on nominees, in no special order: Jane Yolen, Ursula LeGuin, Samuel R. Delany, John Crowley, and Gene Wolfe. If she was still alive, I would include Diana Wynne Jones.

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Welcome back to Roll Perception Plus Awareness, a column about the world of role playing games. Two installments ago, I mentioned that the end of Dungeons and Dragons version 3.5 led to a reboot of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise into its 4th edition. This time, I will take a look at the other major game to come out of the end of D&D version 3.5…a game that isn’t D&D at all, but aspires to carry on the 3.5 tradition: Pathfinder.

As I mentioned in the aforementioned column, the Open Gaming License offered by Wizards of the Coast for 3rd Edition Dungeons and Dragons led to a proliferation of d20 products and RPG companies seeking to tap into that market. Among those companies was a company called Paizo.

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Steven Brust is the author of over two dozen novels, including most recently, Tiassa, the latest of the Vlad Taltos novels set in his fantasy world of Dragaera. He also recently wrote the short story “The Desecrator“, also set in the world of Dragaera, available on Tor.com and elsewhere.

Steven was extremely kind enough to meet me and talk about himself, his writing, and a wide range of topics. Here are brief glimpses into some of the things we talked about.

Steven: I like a good argument, something that stretches my brain…Panels where you just give information are boring. Panels where actual conflict occurs are where learning happens for me.

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Welcome back to Roll Perception Plus Awareness. Although I tantalizingly promised last time to talk about the alternative to Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition that some have embraced, a tweet from Kate Sherrod, and a video pointed in my direction by SF Signal’s own John DeNardo has convinced me to go back to some basics. Today I am going to talk about the Ecology of the Gaming Table.

What do I mean by Ecology of the Gaming Table? Let’s unpack the title. It refers to a series of articles that originated in the early days of Dragon Magazine. The series of articles that began woth “Ecology of the…” were articles in the D&D oriented magazine that brought a view to the various monsters that populate the game world that went far beyond the hit points and other statistics you might find in a Monster Manual. The tone of these articles ranged from chatty conversations to serious speculation about the life of these monsters, and how a Dungeon Master could use these to make a richer dungeon and game world. They were a favorite of mine, and the online edition of the magazine oriented to 4th Edition continues that tradition.

Here in this column, I am going to talk about the roles of players and game masters. Being immersed in the world of roleplaying and roleplaying games so thoroughly, I assumed that everyone had a good idea of what players and game masters do. I’ve come to the conclusion that this is a bad assumption.

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MY RATING:

MY REVIEW

PROS: Strong attention to historical detail; Interesting reworking of familiar myths and tropes.

CONS: The third person omniscient POV of the book doesn’t always work; a key change in a character is told, and not shown.

VERDICT: An uncompromising, extremely dark historical epic with a patina of fantasy that suits its target audience well.

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MY RATING:

THE SKINNY: Six stories that show the sociological changes wrought by a mysterious genetic mutation.

PROS: The format allows Gilman to deftly display society’s reactions over time in a crisp fashion. Extremely potent writing.

CONS: I would have liked more explicit linking of stories; I found it difficult, scientifically, to buy the premise.

VERDICT: A slender volume that takes readers through a slow motion genetic apocalypse.

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Welcome back to Roll Perception Plus Awareness, my column to introduce the world of modern roleplaying games to you. On this outing, I am going to tell you about the 800 pound Gorilla of roleplaying games–Dungeons and Dragons. In the specific, the latest “4th Edition”.

If you, gentle reader, have played any roleplaying game, I would lay odds that it was probably a version of Dungeons and Dragons. From its origins in the 1970′s as a fantasy adjunct to a wargame, and through the 1980′s, Dungeons and Dragons became the most recognized roleplaying game on the market. You may even remember the short lived cartoon series from the 80′s as well. You may have tried to forget the movie in the 1990′s. I suspect Jeremy Irons is still trying to.

To understand 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons in context, let me begin with a little more history…

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MY RATING:

PROS: A rich new world with unique geography and inhabitants.

CONS: “Fish out of water” plot feels a bit familiar; a major plot twist in the narrative is not set up well.

VERDICT: A starring light of the fantasy genre recaptures her mojo by going in a new direction.

It would be days and days of travel before he could get back to more familiar territory. Once there, he had no idea. But there were plenty of groundling cities he hadn’t been hounded out of yet.

Then the wind changed, and Moon froze.

The Fell were still here.

He pushed to his feet, tasting the air. No, it wasn’t his imagination. He snarled under his breath. This day just keeps getting worse.

For those in the genre, Martha Wells is probably best known for her Nebula nominated novel The Death of the Necromancer. That novel, like several others she has written, were set in Ile-Rien, a secondary world that felt much like Western Europe at various stages in history, ranging from the Medieval to Edwardian eras. Now, with The Cloud Roads, Martha Wells tries something new — a full blown secondary world with no obvious connection to Earth whatsoever.

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Roll Perception Plus Awareness is a new column by Paul Weimer designed to introduce modern Role Playing Games to the readers of SF Signal.

Many readers, perhaps like you, remember Dungeons and Dragons. You may remember the 1980′s cartoon, or the movie in the 1990′s, or even played it yourself back in the day, in someone’ s basement, perhaps at a high school or college club, or in the back of a local, small FLGS–Friendly Local Gaming Store.

Sure, the craze and phenomenon of D&D has passed its high water mark in public consciousness, but roleplaying games have evolved and changed and adapted since the days of rolling up clerics, fighters and thieves to explore dungeons. Roleplaying games today range from White Wolf’s big lines of Vampires, Werewolves and more, to independent small press “story games” that both narrow the focus and expand the boundaries of roleplaying. Heck, there are games out there that don’t require a dungeon master at all! And, lest you worry, Dungeons and Dragons itself still persists in its divisive and controversial Fourth Edition.

The first and pertinent question you may ask is, why should you, SF Signal reader, care at all about roleplaying games? You may not have picked up a twenty sided die in fifteen years, or may never have, and may have little propensity (or time!) to do so. Even so, there are good reasons, as a connoisseur of fantasy and science fiction, for you to pay attention to roleplaying games.

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