This is a book-length Hugo finalist published on the author’s website here.
Johnson discusses classic SF writers’ work and how these have influenced games and gaming. He includes interviews, and a chapter on “Adventure Romance in 1934, 1946, 1978, 1988, and 2014.” He challenges assertions that this literature has failed to stand up and should be replaced on the reading shelf by more modern works. His thesis is in support of reading Golden Age adventure SF, not only as the basis for current work, but also because of its intrinsic quality. In support of this, he provides sales rankings for pioneers like Asimov, Bradbury, Heinlein and Clarke, compared to highly popular current authors.
This is well written, well organized, well supported with examples and includes an exhaustive survey of Golden Age SF as it relates to gaming. The topic may be of limited interest to people outside the gaming community, but it’s a worthwhile read for the SF history. Four stars.
Lela E. Buis 
May 23, 2016 @ 11:22:31
May 23, 2016 @ 17:43:09
Reading the TorCom review of Red Nails through a lens of Third Wave Feminism was a reminder of what a cult of rampant stupidity that is. For the life of them they can’t figure out that 8 decades later their best feminist writers aren’t a fraction of the artist Howard was. That’s going to happen when you promote and congratulate art based on skin and sex; there’s really nothing there. The average Howard story is better than the average 15 stories that have won Nebulas the last 3 years. If feminists possessed any self-awareness that would be considered a disgrace and a scandal, but supremacists just want themselves on the podium, not work. But just keep analyzing the prose of Octavia Butler and Le Guin rather than Howard and see what it gets you. Good stuff is where you find it. Whether you like that fact or not is beside the point. Just take it and run with it. Maybe you’ll be lucky enough to have someone discussing your awful story 8 decades later. Who remembers the intersectional award-winning racial and sexual revenge stories of Sofia Samatar and Vylar Kaftan even now except as clunky laugh tracks?
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May 23, 2016 @ 19:49:38
This is an excellent piece and well worth reading.
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May 24, 2016 @ 11:37:56
If sales equalled quality, we’d all try to write like books like the DaVinci Code: tiny chapters, villains James Bond would laugh at, and a wooden style of writing. I’ve read a lot of Howard (still do) and I’ve read a lot of Le Guin. There is no doubt as to who is the better writer, or what type of writer I’d rather be, if I had the chops.
Besides, why argue? The golden age seems to have resurrected itself and won the day. Movies (which are the new books, I’m told) are awash in superheroes, monsters, giant robots, and badly written villains. In 3D, the biceps and square jaws jump off the screen at you.
I once thought that Robert E. Howard, Asimov, and Lovecraft, et al., were the best writers on earth. Then I read Ray Bradbury, and realized that having a great storyr wasn’t enough to be a great writer. Bradbury’s prose was wonderful and terrifying at the same time. It transported you. Then I read Le Guin, and was blown away by both her stories and the way she told them.
Junk food is junk food, whether it’s in a wrapper or between book covers. We all buy it (I really want a kit-kat bar now!) but that is not a vindication of it’s quality.
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May 24, 2016 @ 18:38:14
“He patted the thing he wore on his belt, a metal object like a deformed penis, and looked patronizingly at the unarmed woman. She gave the phallic object, which she knew was a weapon, a cold glance.” – The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. Le Guin
Never in their lives would Howard, Bradbury, Vance or Heinlein have written such brutally stupid prose. The truth is that when Le Guin has been thrown back onto her skills purely as an SFF writer without the feminist social justice/literati smoke and mirrors thrown up as a screen, she has been an abject failure. With the possible exception of Orson Scott Card, Le Guin is the most overrated writer in SFF history. It is no coincidence her greatest acclaim has come from outside the genre since that mainstream has never accepted SFF on its own terms. The mainstream has never celebrated Poul Anderson or Jack Vance. They don’t even know who the hell they are.
Neither is it a coincidence Le Guin’s feminist non-fiction maunderings more uncritically accepted within SFF than ever since the battle against the white cishetero patriarchy is no longer even considered a subject for debate; it is simply a fact. When you see a mid-list author like Octavia Butler elevated in status to having symposiums held in her name you just know art has walked out the door. That is not literature but a racial/sexual cult, and a supremacist one at that.
The Golden Age has not resurrected itself and won the day, since a story like the WW II-era The Weapon Shops is still too subtle for mainstream audiences and films like Ex Machina still the sad exception rather than the rule.
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May 24, 2016 @ 22:04:58
I liked the Golden Age stuff when I was a kid. I was totally addicted to Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example. I’d have to be about 125 years old to have been a contemporary, so it was already seriously period fiction when I was reading it. The perennial popularity of Tarzan (coming again this summer) is a signal of how the man’s stories speak to people. There are archetypes there that last. There were plenty of other people writing then who fell into obscurity, but I think Johnson is right that the people who have lasted have something special.
In general, Le Guin’s prose holds up too, I think. She had a lot more heat when she was young, that she seems to have lost in her most recent work. It’s about the archetypes.
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May 25, 2016 @ 17:53:30
I loved LeGuin as a kid, but I was eventually forced to admit that her stuff after the early 70s just wasn’t that good. Tehanu was boring, The Other Wind was meh, and The Telling was downright awful. Even her early Hainish stuff (first three novels), which I did really enjoy, lost a lot of their luster once I’d discovered Vance’s Gaean reach stories.
I’ve even re-evaluated the Sci-fi channel Earthsea mini-series in the last couple years: if the whole thing was a multi-million dollar project to troll LeGuin and her fans by intentionally getting every significant and symbolic detail wrong, well, as they say, topkek.
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May 24, 2016 @ 23:57:10
I swear to God, I don’t know why I bother. One line from Le Guin you don’t like, and yet you ignore the whole of Howard? I loved the character of Conan, but everything he said sounded like it had been written by Shakespeare after a head injury. Compare that to The Lathe of Heaven, or even the rest of The Dispossessed.
Then you claim Poul Anderson and Jack Vance have never been celebrated? Yes, except for the many articles written, comparisons made, and praises that have been sung over the years. And who are these mainstream people who ignore them?
Feminism isn’t a conspiracy against you, Mr. May, it’s half the human race saying, ‘Hey, we want half the stuff. Hand it over.’
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May 25, 2016 @ 06:37:19
The idea gay radical feminism represents the will of half the human race is a bald-faced lie. It is tantamount to saying the KKK is all whites and so if one opposes either insane supremacist ideology one is essentially an anti-humanist opposing all whites or women. Please don’t insult my intelligence by thinking you can so easily demonize me or anyone else who opposes this mentally ill philosophy.
“…who are these mainstream who ignore them?” is Orwellian gibbberish. Must I list all the mainstream publications who’ve never mentioned Vance or Anderson? I’ve a better idea: observe the simple reality that in the mainstream press, Le Guin was celebrated while Vance and Anderson received statistical zero attention.
This is the end of “Queen of the Black Coast” (1934) by Robert E. Howard:
“Again dawn tinged the ocean. A redder glow lit the river mouth. Conan of Cimmeria leaned on his great sword upon the white beach, watching the Tigress swinging out on her last voyage. There was no light in his eyes that contemplated the glassy swells. Out of the rolling blue wastes all glory and wonder had gone. A fierce revulsion shook him as he gazed at the green surges that deepened into purple hazes of mystery.
“Belit had been of the sea; she had lent it splendor and allure. Without her it rolled a barren, dreary and desolate waste from pole to pole. She belonged to the sea; to its everlasting mystery he returned her. He could do no more. For himself, its glittering blue splendor was more repellent than the leafy fronds which rustled and whispered behind him of vast mysterious wilds beyond them, and into which he must plunge.
“No hand was at the sweep of the Tigress, no oars drove her through the green water. But a clean tanging wind bellied her silken sail, and as a wild swan cleaves the sky to her nest, she sped seaward, flames mounting higher and higher from her deck to lick at the mast and envelop the figure that lay lapped in scarlet on the shining pyre.
“So passed the Queen of the Black Coast, and leaning on his red-stained sword, Conan stood silently until the red glow had faded far out in the blue hazes and dawn splashed its rose and gold over the ocean.”
If that’s a head injury I’ll take it over Le Guin any day. In fact, where is Le Guin’s great body of work? It doesn’t even exist. You’re confusing sober with serious. Howard was a serious writer. Le Guin was a sober writer, and literati like to confuse the two by pretending something like The Age of Innocence actually resides on some higher plain of artistry than something written by Clark Ashton Smith – by default. That ghettoization of SFF – encouraged by writers like Le Guin – is imaginary. The real ghetto is in the minds of people who can’t grasp good stuff is where you find it, not where it is supposed to be. Both Smith and Howard were far better artists than Le Guin, a woman not only embarrassed for her own genre but for all white men on Earth.
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May 25, 2016 @ 18:41:14
I love “Queen of the Black Coast” but “People of the Black Circle” is his best IMO. I don’t just regard it as his best short story I think it can stand with any short story. Either of those should be made into a movie. For something non-Conan read his Solomon Kane or Bran Mak Morn. Worms of the Earth will give you nightmares and The Dark Man is nearly perfect when Turlough goes berserk. Howard understood human emotion in a way that you just so rarely find anymore.
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May 25, 2016 @ 19:57:08
KENTON stood there, half in stupor seeing less the room than swift
fleeting pictures of that last battle. A bell struck three times.
Three o’clock! Of course…this was a world of time…not like the world
of the ship…
The ship!
He staggered over to the shining mystery that had given him everything
he had desired of life–and at the end had taken everything away.
Sharane!
There she lay…on the ivory deck…close to the rowers’ pit…a
gleaming toy, a jeweled puppet with hilt of tiny dagger in breast…
Sharane who had held for him all joy, all sweetnesses, all desirable
delicious things.
The headless manikin so close to her–
Klaneth!
He looked upon the black deck–why, where were all the dead? There on
the rubber platform lay only three puppets, one with yellow hair and
battered armor. Sigurd and the two warrior maids who had fought beside
him! But where were the soldiers they had slain?
And there beyond the headless body of the black priest…was Gigi! Gigi
with his great arms a-sprawl and his dwarf legs doubled under him! His
dead–they too were gone!
Gigi! Kenton’s hand left Sharane, caressed him.
An agony bit deep into his side. It brought him to his knees. He thrust
down his hand and clutched a feathered shaft. The arrow! Suddenly he
knew that life was ebbing fast.
Beneath the other hand he felt the ship tremble. He stared at it,
bewildered. In that brief moment of agony its bow had vanished, melted
away–and with it the rosy cabin!
The ship lurched. As cabin had gone, so went the ivory deck almost up to
the rowers’ pit and with it–Gigi!
“Sharane!” he sobbed and gripped the puppet tight. “Beloved!”
The ship crumbled to within an inch of where the toy lay.
“Sharane!” wailed Kenton–and above him the servants wakened to that
heartbroken cry and came hurrying to his door.
He threw the last of his strength into his fingers, wrenched at the
toy…it was loose…in his hand…he raised it to his lips…
And now where the ship had been was nothing but the oblong base of pearl-crested, lapis lazuli waves!
He knew what that meant. Down into the depths of the strange sea of that
other world had gone the bireme, dragging with it as it went the Ship of
Ishtar. As fared the symbol, so must fare the ship–and as the ship
fared, so must fare the symbol. And had so fared!
There was a hammering at the door, and cries. He gave them no heed.
“Sharane!” they heard him cry, but now with voice that sang with joy.
Kenton fell forward, the toy woman at his lips, gripped tight in
stiffening hand.
The base of little waves dissolved. Where ship and it had been something
stirred and took form–a shadowy great bird with silver wings and breast
and feet and bill of scarlet. It arose. It hovered over Kenton.
A dove of Ishtar.
It hovered–and was gone.
In crashed the door; the servants clustered at the threshold, peering
into the darkened room.
“Mr. John!” quavered old Jevins. There was no answer.
“There’s something there–on the floor! Turn on the light!” whispered
one.
The electrics gleamed upon a body stretched face down upon a
bloodstained rug; a body in cut and torn mail dyed crimson; in its side
the shaft of a black arrow; on one strong arm a wide bracelet of gold.
Back from that body they shrank, looking at each other with fearful
wondering eyes.
One bolder than the others advanced, turned the still form over.
Kenton’s dead face smiled up at them, peace upon it and a great
happiness.
“Mr. John!” wept old Jevins, and kneeling lifted the head in his arms.
“What’s he got in his hand?” whispered a servant. The hand was at
Kenton’s lips, clenched. They pried open the stubborn fingers.
But Kenton’s hand was–
Empty!
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May 25, 2016 @ 21:44:47
Well, Johnson seems to have hit on a popular topic. 🙂
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May 26, 2016 @ 10:39:19
“Is Rachel Swirsky promoting a new book or something?”
LOL
She’s promoting something old as something new. In places where there was no respect for ideas like due process or equal protection “bullies” and “oppression” mysteriously came from only one single biological group. They used to call it “Nazism,” now they call it Third Wave Feminism and by extension “progressivism,” “diversity” and “social justice.”
That’s how you mainstream hate speech into the public arena, and these people are emulating the Masters… the Master Race. If the Nazis had an avenging DNA Dino it would kill Jews and Poles rather than today’s updated version which sniffs out straight white males. I laugh at the idea these social justice cretins are anti-group defamation or racial profiling. They are the sole ideological source of group defamation in 100 years of SFF.
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May 26, 2016 @ 13:03:56
What I was wondering about is her constant presence in the File770 pixel scroll the last week or so. It looks like promotion, but I couldn’t figure out what the deal was. I’ve got it figured now, though. Mike has cut the snarky comments about the Puppies in the run up to the Hugo vote, but he’s trying to support Swirsky. The Hugo packet is imminent. Tingle’s gay porn has gotten a lot of attention, but there’s another bombshell hiding in there. Tabo and Harris’ parody “If You Were an Award My Love” is a direct attack on Swirsky’s “If You Were A Dinosaur My Love.” This will be distributed to about 10K Hugo voters very soon, exposing Swirsky’s Nebula Award to a lot of uncomfortable scrutiny. She’s likely in a panic and trying to get some positive publicity out ahead of the storm.
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May 26, 2016 @ 14:25:48
I thought it was funny how quickly their hackles went up like hedgehogs defending the brood. Glyer was not amused. For all the powers of imagination Swirsky grants to herself, I’d like to see her imagine a society with equal protection, due process and where our commonalities as humans are stressed instead of divisions ruthlessly exploited by cultish people who are self-evidently mentally ill. You will never see that type of literature from her, not as long as she lives. She is too attached to her precious.
I am still stunned by this cult. No human being in their right mind goes onto Twitter daily and for years talking smack about a race or sex. It still boggles my mind how quickly these people overwhelmed that old core of SFF.
Swirsky is panicking. She realizes no one but the true faithful are buying her nonsense about anti-bullying. Given the overall context, you have to have your head in the sand to not understand that story is a direct attack using typical third wave doctrine that men, whites and heterosexuals comprise an underclass of humans lacking in spirituality and humanity. I bet money I could come up with 10,000 quotes from this SFF community attacking people on no other basis than being white, male and heterosexual.
That story is no one-off; we’ve had entire revenge anthologies like Long Hidden and We See a Different Frontier arranged around the concept of racial-sexual revenge on white men. It is in every respect what one might expect of a Nazi literature with a mere change of targets. There is no goal except to taint every member of a group with bizarre theories like white privilege and rape culture which leaves every member of the group as somehow complicit in historic and ongoing acts of immorality. I have no sympathy for Swirsky – none; no more than a black person has for the KKK.
As for Tingle, these cretins have taken the bait and are now pushing him themselves. I told you social justice types don’t understand satire.
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May 26, 2016 @ 17:04:04
Well, I have a lot of sympathy for Swirsky–I’d hate to be in that position. She has the advantage of the award, but I don’t know that she can be blamed for the popular taste. I’ve been complaining here about the tendency to vote in the most sentimental candidate over thought pieces and hard SF. The Nebulas did a little bit better this year, but the finalist list was still stuffed with tear-jerkers. There’s a clear perception that’s what will win.
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May 26, 2016 @ 18:45:12
Here’s the headlines the DNA Dino can’t see (from The Other McCain blog)
“NY Times Transgender Columnist Was Accused by Wife of Rape and Abuse
Gay Australian Rugby Player Arrested by FBI, Sought Sex With 6-Year-Old Boy
Australian Gay-Marriage Crusader Was Fugitive Wanted on Kiddie Porn Charge
Gay Pedophile Elementary School Teacher Sentenced to 40 Years in Florida Prison
Gay Pedophiles Used ‘Multiple Fake Female Personas’ in Child Porn Ring
Famous Gay Rights Activist Now Also Famous for Child Pornography Habits
Two Gay Men Used Russian Surrogate Mother to Create Boy for Sex Abuse Ring”
Any fool can distort the world to make it fit their views and then smear it onto an entire group. These are human failings, commonly known as “crimes,” but if people like Swirsky want to make them the exclusive domain of straight white males, then someone can make it the exclusive domain of LGBTPoC. You cannot have that argument two ways. Now just imagine I wrote a story about a white-hetero-male avenging raptor that targeted transgender PoC pedophiles. I doubt if I’d squeeze many Nebulas out of it. More importantly, no one in SFF has ever written such trash. For that tidal wave of garbage, you need only look at our social justice crowd, who nevertheless claim the exact opposite moral high ground.
Io9 will write stories called “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’?” but never “When Will Blacks Stop Robbing Convenience Stores?” Why shouldn’t I then write “When Will Transgender Stop Writing Racist Articles?” These people have no principles whatsoever, and people are tired of their hypocrisy.
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May 26, 2016 @ 21:36:27
I’m working on a piece about white tribalism. You might like the idea.
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May 27, 2016 @ 04:06:53
The only white tribe I know of is the one social justice clods have made up out of thin air. Glyer’s barking mad commenters alone in the last 24 hours have been going on about white privilege this and white cis het that. Reading that stuff is like being a fly on the wall of a lunatic asylum. The problem is those people really believe that stuff and so of course they’re going to act on it to right the balance in the universe with anti-white discrimination by way of awards voting or just segregated awards, review policies, rooms, anthologies, etc. That’s how you come to Orwell’s mad world where a movement that specifically postures as anti-KKK acts just like the KKK. For some reason those people never consider the ideological source of these race libels or how they mysteriously always peg whites in the headlights and no other group in the phony PoC vs. white race war they’ve ginned up. These people have no concept of Las Vegas odds or the the many amazing coincidences of Third Wave Feminism where the only institutional segregation is practiced by themselves.
So of course, as I’ve said many times, when you target whites that’s whose going to push back. So what happens then? White tribalism confirmed. That’s the same confirmation process the KKK and neo-Nazis use. Scalzi took the angry response to his white privilege post as confirmation he was correct. How do people get that dumb? If I run around using the n-word do I use the general public response as confirmation mostly only blacks are angry? Does Scalzi believe it would be Armenians leading that counter-charge?
All of that would be blisteringly obvious to any child but SocJus are “special” types, prone to seeing massive collusion by millions of people where none exists and ignoring their own obvious collusion to racially and sexually denigrate people. The Jewish Anti-Defamation League didn’t appear out of thin air but as a response to concerted ideological attacks against Jews. John Scalzi and his herd of genre-destroyers are well on their way to creating an enemy which never previously existed. Keep calling a man a dog and he will start barking.
And while the Filers are arguing about implied threats in the voting packet, they seem to have missed newly elected SFWA Director at Large Justina Ireland on May 20 promising to beat any white woman who used a sentence starting with the word “girl” in it to her face. If SocJus didn’t have double standards they’d have none at all. If a white guy did that he’d be kicked out of the SFWA so fast his head would spin. My advice is to not look Justina Ireland directly in the eyes at the next Nebula Awards Weekend, a woman whose Twitter feed in yet another amazing coincidence is dedicated to anti-white bigotry.
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May 27, 2016 @ 11:23:01
Oh, dear. POC use the word ‘girl’ all the time.
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May 27, 2016 @ 13:09:35
May 27, 2016 @ 19:17:15
Yeah, well… don’t do it around Justina Ireland or it’s lights out.
These people are incredibly disturbing to me. Even the relatively innocuous commenters at 770 talk so casually about the assumed inferiority of men, whites and heterosexuals as clueless oppressors that at this point it just part of the background noise; they don’t even seem to notice they do it. It is disturbing that people who are so complacent about their highly educated and informed opinions could talk about straight white males the way Nazis talked about Jews without a hint of self-awareness. These people have swallowed lesbian liberation ideology hook, line and sinker, an ideology which is as hateful as any I’ve seen in America in my lifetime. It is all the more frightening when you consider how uncritically its basic tenets are accepted in increasingly mainstream venues as “social justice.”
When did the concept of what constitutes group libel become so fuzzy? By yet another amazing coincidence this cult is stuffed with, it was at the time they started selling the lie gays can’t be heterophobes, women sexists and “PoC” racists. It’s becoming self-evident the tradition of SFF’s principled pleas and warnings by voices like Orwell, Bradbury, Serling, Feldstein and Roddenberry was a complete waste of time. That was its own background noise back when and when it comes to this now truly sick community that is as gone as gone can be. Every women’s and gender studies program in America is little more than a Nazi bund, and that goes for the SFWA too. Their Orwellian uses of words like “inclusive,” “hate speech” and “harassment” are an insane disgrace.
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