The Barsoom Project

"Fantasy, it fills my mind
To leave this place before my time
Release myself from earthly care
My dream may be - your night-mare"

 

Blue Oyster Cult - Take Me Away

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"'Soap operas in Hell' Bowles mused. 'The mind boggles.'"

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One of Science Fiction's unique charms has always been laughing at outdated futurism, be it Verne's moon cannon, The Jetsons' flying cars (which still somehow got stuck in traffic) or any depiction of space-age thinkatrons as gargantuan beeping calculators with no memory storage or graphics.

If I hadn't heard of the Dream Park books, it's apparently because I don't LARP. (I don't even ARP.) (though I occasionally urp) They tell of industrially staged roleplaying scenarios with post-Disney advanced animatronics and holograms and professional NPC acting on gigantic sets. It's actually an interesting take on material which would normally be relegated to cyberpunky virtual reality. Nevertheless the supposed verisimilitude of such methods does strain credulity at times, and in the internet age we do seem to be moving in the virtual direction instead of a holodeck. I also have a bigger core gripe: having spent my whole life wishing I were a mad scientist author (and achieving only one of those qualities) I resent seeing the superior breed of published writers demean themselves by the interests of their lessers (like myself) or by acknowledging readers as participants. Which is to say I know nothing about Barnes but Niven shouldn't be writing about RPGs. He inhabits higher realms of purer thought.

(Please don't spoil my abnegation by reminding me how many fans of original flavor Star Trek wound up writing for or acting in TNG - or how many professionals in general prove themselves inferior to their audience.)

Which of course doesn't mean I won't bitch out said superior breed at every opportunity. Being a worthless nitpicking bastard makes me no less of a nitpicking bastard. ("so naturalists observe, a flea" etc.) As I remarked about The Integral Trees and Niven's other collaboration The Mote in God's Eye, the characters here take a while to differentiate. The core few only gained personalities for me at the paija fight. Some never do even by the last chapters when you find yourself wondering "which red shirt was that again?" Also, this may just be my prejudice against humans, human interaction and the performing arts, but there's something inherently creepy about GMs and technicians directly manipulating a game's participants' emotional reactions and metabolisms, treating them like clay to be molded, implicitly talking down to the audience even as you pretend to include them. The action scenes run into constant difficulty maintaining dramatic tension even as we must acknowledge the play-acting and ridiculous storytelling conventions, and the supposedly interweaving real and imaginary action tend to just alternate without melding.

Still, plotting and wordsmithing aside, for being printed in 1989 The Barsoom Project has aged remarkably well. Its main claim to fame (along with the rest of the Dream Park series, presumably) is partly foreseeing, partly inventing LARPing at a time when even tabletop RPGs were still a quite narrow niche, though the Society for Creative Anachronism gets more credit in that.

It also comments on pro wrestling fakeness just as the jokes about it were starting to hit mainstream.

It predates Kim Stanley Robinson's space elevator on Mars idea by three years.

Continued muslim terrorism turned out to be a depressingly safe bet into the future.

It dives into Eskimo lore in a way few wannabe multiculturalists have done since, somehow didactic without sounding too preachy.

They even managed to nail the obesity crisis, of all things, with "fat ripper" games cranking up the inherent exercise of live action, mixed with cheesy earth magic life lessons about healthy diet. Nothing like a toothy monster or marauding horde to get those legs pumpin'.

And sure, it ladles on a few too many pop-culture references, and plays up quick-fix psychological revelations, and the foreshadowing's a bit blunt, and too many digressions fail to acquire any plot relevance (though, weirdly, the gratuitous romance kinda works for once with the heroine's psychosis) but it nevertheless grows more engaging as you read. Geekiness is engagement by definition, and it's hard not to cheer along with the techies so devoted to making magic happen, or the pudgy foam axe brigade celebrating their boss battles, or maimed, steadfast Sedna welcoming her strange liberators. A book like this can easily come across as exploitative. Instead I found the whole mess oddly charming.

Or at least it gave me another glimpse into some of the non-electronic gamer crowd's reference pool.

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P.S.: I know it's a minor point, but I also can't forgive them for failing to call skinny Kevin a "hunger artist" when the fatties resent him. Come on, 300+ pages of mind screw and not a single Kafka reference?