A Bit More Detail

There's a few posts you might be interested in this evening.

• 80 Beats' Andrew Moseman makes the point that when sorting out carbon dioxide emissions by nation, the carbon dioxide emitted by a country (like China) that manufactures goods for another country might not only be the responsibility of the manufacturing nation.


• Bad Astronomy maps the colours of different classes of stars onto the colour codes of HTML.


• Centauri Dreams examines estimates about the number of habitable planets and the latest experimental proof of the theory of relativity.


• Charlie Stross announces the publication fo the first edition of The Laundry, a roleplaying game setup based on his wonderful "Laundry Files" stories. ("Cthulhu and hackers and bureaucracy, oh my!")


• The Dragon's Tales reports on a research project examining the arsenic-laced sediments of Califonia's Mono Lake to see if arsenic-using lifeforms which might have evolved entirely independently from our won life might exist.


• Edward Lucas reports on Russia's recent recognition that the Katyn massacre was committed by Soviets and its implications for Russia's foreign policy.


• Far Outliers blogs about the disdain that migrants from the Netherlands felt for the native Eurasians in the Dutch East Indies.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis points out that some maps--like ones which use the same colour to show central Mexico and marginal California in New Spain--can be very misleading and examines the autonomous Australian tax shelter island of Norfolk Island.


• Joe. My. God. notes the happy news that Constance Mcmillen, the young teenager whose desire to bring her girlfriend to prom led the school board to cancel prom altogether, is fully supported by her parents. Family values.


• Marginal Revolution points out that a country doesn't have to be an export superpower to be like Germany, that it just has to run its economic responsibly (hints re: Greece et al).


• Norman Geras writes about how ill-thoguht tactical alliance by Iran's left with religious radicals in the days of the revolution led to the Islamic Republic's horrors.


• Spacing Toronto's Sean Marshall writes about Bogotá's surprisingly efficient system of public mass transit.


• Window on Eurasia blogs about the case for dismantling Russia's Soviet-era science cities and Belarusian citizenship in an East Slavic cultural space.

In the past few days, I've seen at least a dozen posts in relation to the death of Gary Gygax, some mere notes, others fairly extended commemorations of the man and his work.

I wonder. What does it say of me, given the interests of my friends in person and online and my own inclinations, that I'd never heard mention of the man's name before? (I'm certain that fact will surprise at least one person.)

Until recently, one of the biggest flaws in the history of the vast, sprawlling Traveller roleplaying game universe lay in the unlikely nature of Terra's introduction to galactic society. In the late 2090s, an American deep-space exploration ship using the newly-developed faster-than-light jump drive travelled to Barnard's Star. There, to the immense surprise of everyone back on Earth, the Americans encountered an outpost of the Ziru Sirka, a vast and ancient empire of ten thousand planetary systems dominated by the Vilani, a verifiably human culture that had developed since prehistory on the distant world of Vland and had developed to the point that, as a RPGnet reviewer notes, were "setting up interstellar colonies at the same time earth's civilizations were running around building the ancient pyramids." In the two centuries after Terran-Vilani contact, Traveller canon has it that the Terrans not only managed to united to form the Terran Confederation, but that this Confederation managed to conquer the Ziru Sirka. This success seems a bit much for a single planet pitted against ten thousand, even excluding the fact that, at the moment of first contact, Terra was rather more backwards than any of the major worlds of the Ziru Sirka. I like my world, I really do, but on its face this history is just a bit too rah-rah Terracentric.

Fortunately, good writers have been able to give this unlikely outcome a reasonably plausible history. Ziegler outlined this series of events in his GURPS Traveller: Rim of Fire, the Traveller sourcebook detailing the sector of inhabited space around Earth. Now, joining with Drye and Wiseman, we have the GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars to give a much fuller description of this history that has the added virtue of being plausible. The structure of the Ziru Sirka and the nature of Vilani society is described in detail for perhaps the first time, for instance. It turns out that the failure of the Vilani to conquer Terra in the First Interstellar War can be explained by Vilani conservatism, by a principled devotion to a constantly regulated steady-state empire that simply couldn't adjust quickly enough to the threat posed by the dynamic Terrans. The easy assimilation of Terra's early conquests is explained by the presence of the kimashargur, a dissident Vilani culture resentful of its lost independence and eager to ally with its Terran liberators. The apparent unity of Terran civilization under the Confederation is explained, in the chapter devoted to the Terrans, to be a mere façade covering great power alliances and nationalist resentments. Going on from this needed clarifications, Interstellar Wars goes on to provide all the information that anyone could want for a complete set of adventures in this milieu. Known space is described in detail, for instance, though I'm bit disappointed that, as the book's Wikipedia entry suggests, hints of a map showing all of known space circa the mid-22nd century weren't followed up. Systems are provided for the generation of trade routes and subsectors of space, descriptions and blueprints of spacecraft given, and adventure seeds provided.

In the space of Interstellar Wars' 240 pages, the authors manage to create an impressively complete and reasonably plausible near-future science fiction setting, capable of standing separately from the Traveller canon on its own merits. I rather like this book, and see no reason why other people interested in settings like this one would disagree.