[REVIEW] The GURPS Space Atlas Series
Oct. 18th, 2005 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldWhen I was a decade younger I collected all four books--1, 2, 3 and 4--in GURPS' Space Atlas series. Each book containing a collection of pregenerated worlds for use with GURPS Space or most any other space-based RPG system, these worlds organized into sectors (a single sector for the first three books, the linked Phoenix and Saga sectors in Space Atlas 4, a couple dozen worlds per sector), they excited me. These books, it seemed to me, did an interesting and more than competent job of describing fragments of a far-future interstellar society. Space Atlas 2, my first acquisition, described a sector entirely dominated by corporate governments, while Space Atlas 3 depicted a recently-formed interstellar confederacy of worlds settled by generation starships, Space Atlas 1 showed a generic long-settled backwater sector and Space Atlas 4 showed one sector locked into a cold war between two interstellar states and this sector's anarchic hinterland. These, it seemed to me, were impressive images of the future indeed.
I've since grown up. As much as I'd like, I can't find any grounds to disagree with RPG.net's reviews (Space Atlas 1, Space Atlas 2, Space Atlas 3, Space Atlas 4). Apart from the plethora of simple proofreading mistakes--contradictions between the planetary guide and the accompanying text, mainly--the various titles in the Space Atlas series don't do a very good job of communicating the sense of a realistic interstellar community. How can underpopulated worlds compete for influence with worlds home to tens or hundreds of times as many people? How can an entire sector adopt a single form of government? How can worlds orbiting dim red dwarves not be tidelocked? How can B supergiants have planets at all?
This feeds, as it naturally must, into the question of how interesting these books and their settings are. Perhaps I'm a jaded early 21st century boy, trying despite myself to remain a devotee of science fiction in the broadest sense, but as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pompe noted elsewhere, how can a field of literature that prises itself on its fidelity to nature miss out entirely on what worlds, and planetary systems, and human societies, actually are like? A certain amount of implausibility I can take, but pass this limit and you'll lose me completely.
I've since grown up. As much as I'd like, I can't find any grounds to disagree with RPG.net's reviews (Space Atlas 1, Space Atlas 2, Space Atlas 3, Space Atlas 4). Apart from the plethora of simple proofreading mistakes--contradictions between the planetary guide and the accompanying text, mainly--the various titles in the Space Atlas series don't do a very good job of communicating the sense of a realistic interstellar community. How can underpopulated worlds compete for influence with worlds home to tens or hundreds of times as many people? How can an entire sector adopt a single form of government? How can worlds orbiting dim red dwarves not be tidelocked? How can B supergiants have planets at all?
This feeds, as it naturally must, into the question of how interesting these books and their settings are. Perhaps I'm a jaded early 21st century boy, trying despite myself to remain a devotee of science fiction in the broadest sense, but as
pompe noted elsewhere, how can a field of literature that prises itself on its fidelity to nature miss out entirely on what worlds, and planetary systems, and human societies, actually are like? A certain amount of implausibility I can take, but pass this limit and you'll lose me completely.
