Saturn's Children

I just finished reading Saturn’s Children, and enjoyed it quite a lot — Charlie Stross manages to nail the late Heinlein voice quite thoroughly, and although some of the late Heinlein books are vilified in some quarters, I liked quite a lot of them. Here Stross is clearly going after Friday.

There’s quite a lot of Heinlein’s children around these days; not just stuff like the recent Variable Star posthumous collaboration, but also stuff like Scalzi’s “Old Man’s War” books (the latest of which, Zoe’s Tale, I haven’t read yet), and of course the outright homages than John Varley has been writing ever since Steel Beach.

Now, Charlie dedicates Saturn’s Children to both Heinlein and Asimov, and it made me wonder — who is writing the Asimov homages? I mean, aside from a few of Cory Doctorow’s short stories (thinking here of “I, Rowboat,” one of my favorites of his shorts, though of course “I,Robot”, also in that book, is a more direct homage), it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of folks who consciously work in this mode. Charlie is after exploring Asimovian ideas, just in Heinleinian dress, but you don’t see Asimovian dress these days.

I grew up reading them both. I fact, I make the claim to having read everything of Heinlein’s — yes, even Take Back Your Government and Tramp Royale, every short story, everything; and every scrap of Asimov fiction, even all the Lucky Starr books and all the Black Widowers (though I think I may prefer The Union Club Mysteries), even Murder at the ABA (reading all the non-fiction being unattainable).

To me, they have always represented two poles of SF. Is the Asimovian style simply more dated, or is it that the other influences of Heinlein, such as his politics and quotability, have made him more prominent in an Internet-based world and culture?

BTW, Charlie swears to me that few people get the terrible terrible pun about the chicken. Keep an eye out, and don’t be drinking something when you reach the page with the chibi dwarf ninja attack.

The book's cover

Gosh, i am behind on reporting stuff. Anyway.Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds is out.

It’ssort of my book, because I have a chapter in it. But it isn’t really mine. it’s more Erik Bethke’s and Erin Hoffman’s. And really, my chapter is just another reprinting of the Avatar Rights piece, which at this point is in a lot of books.

As you may or may not know, they’ve been spearheading a project called Better EULA which tackles the issues of user rights in virtual worlds (there’s a blog too). I am on a panel with them about it at AGDC in a couple of weeks.

Once upon a time, there was an acronym we used for certain sorts of virtual worlds. We called them PSW’s, for “persistent state world.”

Most virtual worlds today don’t actually have persistent state. Oh, your characters do, but not the world. In fact, the ability to affect the world has fallen dramatically since the days of Meridian 59 and Ultima Online. M59 featured shifting political balance, and UO had full world state persistence. If someone killed Bob the baker, he was gone. If you dropped something on the ground, it stayed there until it rusted away (or more likely, someone came along and grabbed it — and that someone was just as likely to be a monster as it was a player).

It took half an hour to 45 minutes to save all of the world state in UO, by the way. Which meant rollbacks to your character if the server crashed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quick dragon sketch

Was noodling around with a dragon to add to a Metaplace world I was fiddling with, and sketched this. Then I ran it thru a few Photoshop filters. Been a long time since I put a doodle up on the blog, so here it is.

This was done first with Adobe Sketchbook Pro on my tablet, using “pencils” “airbrush” and “paintbrush.” Then I brought it into Photoshop and filtered one layer with charcoal, another with craquelure, and blended the two together with around a 60% opacity. For comparison, the dragon’s head used to look like this.

His wings don’t line up. Oh well.

If my comments caused any harm or hurt to the hard working Americans who play Dungeons & Dragons, I apologize. This campaign is committed to increasing the strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma scores of every American.

Ben Smith’s Blog: Goldfarb keeps experience points - Politico.com.

Just Leap In is yet another browser-embedded 3d environment using a plugin. This space is certainly getting crowded. Read the rest of this entry »

I actually did this a while ago, but finally posted it up somewhere.

November from Raph Koster on Vimeo.

Thanks to Ben Medler, who supplied an audio recording, I was able to concoct a video that shows the slides and videos I showed in synch with the audio. It’s a little over an hour long.

As usual, there were some places I misspoke (that is what happens when you don’t use notes at all!) so I superimposed errata directly on the video as captions.

Read the rest of this entry »

No, not KOTOR. McDonald’s, the world I predicted at Sandbox would be bigger than WoW.

Today McDonald’s announced that the movie would be featured in its physical Happy Meals, which feature special codes to unlock content in the virtual world. It seemed inevitable that the physical Happy Meal promotions would get virtual tie-ins, and, just as in the real world, you’ll  find Star Wars characters in your virtual Happy Meal for a limited time only.

Through September 10, users can play in a new space-themed area, complete a Jedi quest with Yoda, and unlock six exclusive Jedi characters with codes from the meal. It looks like the space station and Republic gunship haven’t arrived yet, though.

“In the Sandbox with Raph Koster” is IndieCade’s take on the talk. It’s interesting to see it getting a different slant from Ben Medler’s — part of what happens when you deliberately give a diffuse talk, I suppose!