Crop Circles

"It's the nexus of the crisis
And the origin of storms
Just the place to hopelessly
Encounter time and then came me"

 

Blue Oyster Cult - Astronomy

 

 

It's election day here in the U.S. so please let's talk about literally anything else!

 

Umm, let's see... Vagrus!

This random event hit my comitatus in one of the newer expansion zones. Random weirdness is no original idea. Passing a few skill checks is nothing new. And yet it stood out for contextualizing the event's sensory experience within the game world's larger themes. You spend your time traversing hot deserts. (Spit sizzles.) You move from town to town. (The mirage offers you false hope of a fortress.) You eke out a desperate living in a world rendered nearly lifeless by Calamity. (Its runaway effects render your surroundings colorless, even more bleak.) You obsess over making good time. (Your slogged footing becomes uncertain.)

 

This largely defines good interactive writing from other media: bringing events and descriptions back around to the player's own decision-making and concerns. In fact it helps to re-ground a strange occurrence in the mundane. Children playing at a Halloween game portrayed in that old Simpsons episode can get caught up in the sensory familiarity of touching wet spaghetti while imagining a fantastic witch.

 

It got me thinking of a frequent theme of first contact stories, humanity's bafflement at the truly alien. Skipping the seminal Glos Pana and others, consider two very similar modern classics.

 

Algis Budrys' Rogue Moon stands out among SF for its unusual devotion to character analysis and the even more unusual skill with which it's pulled off (SciFiers boasting a higher likelihood to be dilettantes from outside the literary guild) but much of that effort verges into derailment of the overall plot. The love triangle, a frequent culprit in such hijackings, especially feels like it could've wrapped up ten pages faster and still gotten across its point of derived personal meaning or attachment. Moreover, the means of exploring the alien labyrinth seem needlessly convoluted, mixing teleportation, telepathy, cancer, astronauts and moon bases, the old clone identity crisis, the cold war, all to proportionally little narrative payoff. On the other hand, it seems to deliberately avoid integrating the Lovecraftian element of human incapacity, insufficiency and insignificance before such a wondrous discovery, so perhaps inevitably, the element of wonder itself is allowed to fizzle out toward the end. Yeah, yeah, there's a multidimensional alien labyrinth on the dark side of the moon. Big whoop.

 

So maybe it's no surprise that a decade later Rogue Moon's relevance was displaced by the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic with its more tangible, grittier visitation Zones explored without much need for lengthy preambles by a bunch-a dudes walking around. Lengthy vacillation on the proper mindset of a hardened explorer is spaced out more satisfyingly without relegating the alien anomaly itself to an endnote as Rogue Moon did. More importantly it doesn't busy itself constructing towering archetypes of human ideals when the intrusion of a post-human influence would logically begin altering humanity itself. Perhaps the pettiness and childishness of the best of monkey ambitions is our species' sole retreat before such reiterated superiority.

 

This is a frequent pitfall for fantasy fiction, especially the more speculative variety, balancing wonder and tangibility, especially when the latter comes in the form of "relatable" characters. The Integral Trees' sequel, The Smoke Ring, threads its plot through the coming-of-age story of one particular character. Where the original leapt too loosely from character to character and bombarded the reader with too many new concepts and action sequences, the sequel spends too long visualizing Rather jetting about or listening to the new clan dickering over property rights. Had all these elements simply been interspersed better over the length of both installments' narrative, the whole mess would've been far more legible.

 

Fahrenheit 451 returned to the topic of knowledge and the attention economy right up the the ending scene of the walking books. Dune returned to the sensory experience of the desert right up to the final sandstorm. The Lord of the Rings moved past the wonder of elves and dwarves to human concerns when focusing the action toward climax, but did not fail to call back to those earlier wonders with the invocation of Elbereth or the divine license implied by the eagles' flight. All writing can suffer from a loss of focus, but it is especially important for stories placing one in novel environments or concepts to call the reader's attention back to points of contact with that brave new world. The mad and mundane must interlock.