See You to the Door, Space Cowboy

"A knight without armor in a savage land"

Have Gun - Will Travel theme song

 

Nothing much has come of any of the four? five? amateur MMO projects which sprang up in the wake of City of Heroes' closing, partly for the MMO genre collapsing and the reveal of fan-run CoH servers, but also because 'make Paragon City great again' never amounted to much of a business plan or creative direction in the first place. Even when straining for a bit of originality, Ship of Heroes for instance came up with "The new Superhero Sci-Fi MMORPG with Magic"* which... I suppose just about covers it? All of it? Maybe throw in some elves, killer clowns and xenomorphs and start intoning "tha voyd" just to top off the old pop culture grab-bag. After all, superhero comics have a long tradition of repackaging even longer traditions, slapping a cape on everything, be it Atlanteans, witches, Norse gods, extraterrestrials, and selling it to ten-year-old boys as a "new" copyrighted crime-fighter. A less defined genre there never was. But then, popular entertainment has always suffered from knockoffs given a perfunctory spackle to fit the ignorant masses' latest fad.

 

(Exemplifying the gratuitous, look over the past century's accumulation and stop me if you've seen this movie scene, comic page or book cover:

Back to a wall, squaring his broad shoulders, hefting his weapon, the hero leans his head toward a corner behind which approaches a menacing figure, at his other arm the requisite plucky yet palpitating damsel legitimizing his violence. He might be a cowboy, a noir detective, a barbarian, a space-man in a bubble helmet. His glorious tool of socially-acceptable carnage may be a sword, a pistol, a laser phaser blaster; the enemy a robot, mobster, desperado or dragon-goblin-zombie-pirate. Whatever.)

 

Of course, we can't really blame 'the-kids-these-days' for such superficiality, as I rather pointedly had to admit to myself a year or two ago when I finally decided to try reading one of 'Science' Fiction's most famous reference points, the Lensman books. I could barely struggle three quarters through Triplanetary before deciding I didn't really need to find out whether the hero gets the girl. Now, alright, lest I sound too unfair to E.E. Smith, maybe I should have started with Galactic Patrol (the real earliest story) instead of the officially less scientific prequel about space wizards gallivanting about entire galaxies for bajillions of years, conveniently locked in their own version of medieval stasis in perpetuity. I'll also admit I was instantly put off by the heavy emphasis on telepathy (especially as heroic) which made the novel's other events appear rather irrelevant. But the point remains that Smith's space opera could only count as more scientific by comparison with the truly absurd pugilism of the Barsoom books or other planetary romances preceding the 1930s. Lensman often gets cited for the dramatic escalation in destructive power the good guys and bad guys hurl at each other, but after a bit of Triplanetary I began to suspect this was motivated more by Smith's failure to maintain perspective or think through any ramifications of the poweroverwhelming space-stuff he wanted to hurl back and forth and merely jumping to the next and next cozily familiar scene of grimly determined heroes delving dark dungeons on solo missions to foil dastardly plots. Then more explosions.

How Robert A. Heinlein could apparently idolize Smith was beyond me until I realized the latter author made good on his predecessor's babbling by dragging the superman routine back to reality with scientific learning and practical applications. The Heinlein story most slavishly copying Smith's style (aside from a couple gun nut superspy novels) would have to be the ludicrous early effort Lost Legacy, with its emphasis on brain magic conveniently bypassing rational thought and the same breakneck rush through grandiose yet unanalyzed plot points. Of course, it doesn't help that by the time Smith re-tooled his early '30s serials into a supposed novel series it was ~1950, and a lot of James Bond -like early Cold War rhetoric was seeping into what may have already been heavily colored by the Red Scare of the early 20th century. It's hard not to read the supposedly physical villains being beaten by more 'spiritual' heroes as a jab at godless Bolsheviks' rapid industrialization. (Overcompensatingly insecure at that.)

 

But whatever else it is, it's poor Science F.

 

A fabulist as an "honest liar" must be judged partly on the parsimony of his fabulism. A good one will openly and honestly ask the audience to suspend disbelief for the necessary amount of phlebotinum to drive a plot. A bad one will counterfeit all aspects of a story, gratuitously, whether from incompetence or intellectual laziness or for pandering to the audience's more primitive emotional responses, and will demand you swallow the whole mess despite its incoherence. For comparison, try a novel I've mentioned before, H.G. Wells' First Men in the Moon. It required a phlebotinum, an invented material which blocks gravity, to get its dynamic duo to said moon. Once there they meet a race which proves mostly benign, except that in acting toward their own security the selenites find it necessary to play the antagonist. Now switch back to Lensman with its angels vs. devils dichotomy following no natural motivations, its ever-growing slag-pile of technologies and superpowers, its Siegfried braving various dragon lairs to prove his superiority. At least 13th-century peasants marveling at Robyn Hode's marksmanship weren't pretending to have just invented bows and arrows.

 

Yes, it's an author's job to be unrealistic to some extent (otherwise you could just watch C-SPAN for fun) but the whole point of the super-normal is how it interacts with the normal. Otherwise you rapidly hit Robert Sheckley's Panzaism, where the weirdness grows mundane. You're spinning the elfemism treadmill, substituting superficial specialness for itself. A space cowboy with a laser pistol and a personal rocketship becomes just another cowboy on a horse with a pistol. Limiting such tech excuses makes for a better Spike. Conversely, it's one thing to have a cowboy call himself Paladin to deliberately evoke worlds and ideals past or imagined and question their congruity with brutal reality. It would've been quite another to fill the Wild West with plate armor and swordfights in the name of round tables.

 

Note, not only is such excess unbelievable but also unwieldy. It violates Poe's one effect, Chekov's gun and conservation of detail in general. The two problems can be encountered separately. Poe himself, despite being a solidly Romantic writer, channeled a great deal of fascination with (for the time, cutting-edge) forensic science into his Auguste Dupin stories. Here's one of the more extreme examples from Marie Roget:

"Now the human body, in general, is neither much lighter nor much  heavier than the water of the Seine; that is to say, the specific gravity of the human body, in its natural condition, is about equal to the bulk of fresh water which it displaces. The bodies of fat and fleshy persons, with small bones, and of women generally, are lighter than those of the lean and large-boned, and of men; and the specific gravity of the water of a river is somewhat influenced by the presence of the tide from sea."

No space cowboys here. That is a solidly realistic argument relevant to the story's plot and setting. However, the fact it drones on for three pages demonstrates that authors can always get lost in the weeds, especially when trying to provide background information. (To me, an even worse offender was Melville's wealth of sailing vessel minutiae in Moby-Dick.)

 

Now just imagine how much worse it would be if he were describing an imaginary magical property of an imaginary species in an imaginary fluid. The Florgles float in the Grimble unless it be the season when the mome raths outgrabe. That's what substituting a laser for a pistol does.

 

Sadly, the vast bulk of audiences will in fact demand meaningless detail precisely so that it can be ignored in favor of the same old limbic pay-offs, so they can pretend to engage with storytelling while merely seeking yet another fix of "hero punches villain; saves world" to the point the setting can be forgotten altogether. But as this has run on long enough, I'll get to The Dying Earth in a couple of weeks. (Then perhaps tear into Clarke's third law.)

 

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* Y'know, there's this old story called The Argonauts. It's public domain and everything. Superheroes on a ship. There for the taking. Just sayin', unoriginality need not be so wholly undignified.