What Gives?

I don’t understand it.  Why did I spring for Catalyst’s $60 photo album but find myself balking at $3 for Leviathans?  Obviously this price is far too low.  And Eclipse Phase is a Creative Commons product?  Meaning what, it’s free?  The laws of Economics have been repealed and nobody told me.

Canst Thou Draw Out With a Hook?

Some movement on the Leviathans blog, now linked in the margin.

Watch the Skies!

I’m enjoying Flashman and the Mountain of Light now that the plot has moved at last from sex to violence.  The author has found a terrific formula for his sword-and-pistol Romance: the less Flashman enjoys his predicaments, the more I do.  Imagine if Tintin’s adventures had all happened to Captain Haddock instead.  Why haven’t these books been put to film?

Reading a Victorian adventure naturally brings to mind that queer new(ish) trend, the VSF, profiled recently in the New York Times [so you know it's on the way out--remember ska?].  I arrived at Sky Galleons of Mars late, and never shed a tear for the sunset of the British Empire; still, the romance of the setting is undeniable.  Who could argue with a giant heliograph orbiting Mars?  You could see it at night from Earth, signaling home!

Another late arriver (arriviste?) to the setting is Catalyst Game Labs, with their yet-unveiled Leviathans offering. Leviathans was a good name for a floating battleship game; the false etymology given by the “levi-” as in levitation is perfect.  We can predict that Leviathans will become the repository for Romance at Catalyst, now that BattleTech has been updated to match the current zeitgeist.

I’ve been thinking about the Watchmen comic a bit lately.  It too is nostalgic, set a New York City of glass-bottled milk, evening papers, and Zeppelins.  But also futuristic, full of electric cars and geodesic domes–as though it were set in the 1985 imagined in 1960.  The themes are maintained to perfection throughout: imagine how disconcerting it would be to see a Peace Symbol or an McDonald’s or a Walkman anywhere in the frames.  Those are artifacts of our world, and would seem an unnatural intrusion into theirs.

To the degree that the BattleTech setting has ceased to be a future as imagined in the mid-80’s, it has become less Romantic. The cyborgs and germ warfare don’t bother me nearly as much as do the blogs and computer viruses.  It was inevitable that if our favorite pastime were to survive it would change; stasis is death, after all.  But we ought to lament the passing of the old all the same.