Starship
Page 26
I recently handed in a book to Meisha Merlin, set—where else?—in the Birthright Universe.
And when it came time to suggest a series of books to Lou Anders for the new Pyr line of science fiction, I don't think I ever considered any ideas or stories that weren't set in the Birthright Universe.
I've gotten so much of my career from the Birthright Universe that I wish I could remember the name of that turkey we walked out of all those years ago so I could write the producers and thank them.
The most heavily populated (by both stars and inhabitants) section of the Birthright Universe is always referred to by its political identity, which evolves from Republic to Democracy to Oligarchy to Monarchy. It encompasses millions of inhabited and habitable worlds. Earth is too small and too far out of the mainstream of galactic commerce to remain Man's capital world, and within a couple of thousand years the capital has been moved lock, stock, and barrel halfway across the galaxy to Deluros VIII, a huge world with about ten times Earth's surface and near-identical atmosphere and gravity. By the middle of the Democracy, perhaps four thousand years from now, the entire planet is covered by one huge sprawling city. By the time of the Oligarchy, even Deluros VIII isn't big enough for our billions of empire-running bureaucrats, and Deluros VI, another large world, is broken up into forty-eight planetoids, each housing a major department of the government (with four planetoids given over entirely to the military).
Earth itself is way out in the boonies, on the Spiral Arm. I don't believe I've set more than parts of a couple of stories on the Arm.
At the outer edge of the galaxy is the Rim, where worlds are spread out and underpopulated. There's so little of value or military interest on the Rim that one ship, such as the Theodore Roosevelt, can patrol a couple of hundred worlds by itself. In later eras, the Rim will be dominated by feuding warlords, but it's so far away from the center of things that the governments, for the most part, just ignore it.
Then there are the Inner and Outer Frontiers. The Outer Frontier is that vast but sparsely populated area between the outer edge of the Republic/Democracy/Oligarchy/Monarchy and the Rim. The Inner Frontier is that somewhat smaller (but still huge) area between the inner reaches of the Republic/etc. and the black hole at the core of the galaxy.
It's on the Inner Frontier that I've chosen to set more than half of my novels. Years ago the brilliant writer R. A. Lafferty wrote, “Will there be a mythology of the future, they used to ask, after all has become science? Will high deeds be told in epic, or only in computer code?” I decided that I'd like to spend at least a part of my career trying to create those myths of the future, and it seems to me that myths, with their bigger-than-life characters and colorful settings, work best on frontiers where there aren't too many people around to chronicle them accurately, or too many authority figures around to prevent them from playing out to their inevitable conclusions. So I arbitrarily decided that the Inner Frontier was where my myths would take place, and I populated it with people bearing names like Catastrophe Baker, the Widowmaker, the Cyborg de Milo, the ageless Forever Kid, and the like. It not only allows me to tell my heroic (and sometimes antiheroic) myths, but lets me tell more realistic stories occurring at the very same time a few thousand light-years away in the Republic or Democracy or whatever happens to exist at that moment.
Over the years I've fleshed out the galaxy. There are the star clusters—the Albion Cluster, the Quinellus Cluster, a few others. There are the individual worlds, some important enough to appear as the title of a book, such as Walpurgis III, some reappearing throughout the time periods and stories, such as Deluros VIII, Antares III, Binder X, Keepsake, Spica II, and some others, and hundreds (maybe thousands by now) of worlds (and races, now that I think about it) mentioned once and never again.
Then there are, if not the bad guys, at least what I think of as the Disloyal Opposition. Some, like the Sett Empire, get into one war with humanity and that's the end of it. Some, like the Canphor Twins (Canphor VI and Canphor VII), have been a thorn in Man's side for the better part of ten millennia. Some, like Lodin XI, vary almost daily in their loyalties depending on the political situation.
I've been building this universe, politically and geographically, for a quarter of a century now, and with each passing book and story it feels a little more real to me. Give me another thirty years and I'll probably believe every word I've written about it.
Players
Two
The Board
Any flat surface
The Pieces
Twenty roughly similar tokens (coins, pebbles, candies, etc.)
Setup
The twenty tokens, called Floats, are arranged on the flat surface in 4 rows of 5. The complete set of Floats is called the Known Universe.
Play
On a player's turn, he or she moves two Floats in opposite directions either horizontally or vertically. Players alternate orientations, so if Player 1 moves Floats horizontally, Player 2 must move Floats vertically. Players may move Floats toward each other or away from each other.
Examples of initial move:
Illegal Moves
Players may not move both Floats just played by the previous player, though players may combine one of the two Floats just moved with another Float.
The moves must also not separate any Float(s) from the Known Universe. All Floats must be connected, at least diagonally. So a move from this:
to this:
would be illegal because the bottom Float is no longer a part of the Known Universe.
Penalties
Should a player decide he cannot move two Floats in the required orientation, he may switch orientations to that of the other player. As a penalty to the switching player, the nonswitching player moves only one Float instead of the normally required two.
(Example: Player 1 moves two Floats horizontally and Player 2 cannot move two Floats vertically, so Player 2 switches and moves his Floats horizontally as well. Player 1 is required to move his Floats vertically now, but only has to move one Float up or down instead of the normally required two.)
Should a player be unable to move two Floats in any orientation (without using an illegal move described above), that player must remove a Float from the Known Universe. This Float is now Lost and the player must keep a pile of all of his Lost Floats. The removal of the Lost Float must not separate or divide any remaining Float from the Known Universe.
Object
Bilsang ends when only one Float remains in the Known Universe. The player with the fewest Lost Floats in his pile at the end is the winner.
Strategy
A veteran bilsang player will know how to use his own penalties to his advantage, to switch orientation when it is advantageous—instead of only when required—and to wisely choose which Floats he removes as Lost.
* * *
Alex Wilson (www.alexwilson.com) is a writer and actor from northern Ohio, now living in Carrboro, North Carolina. He has published RPG materials in Dragon Magazine and fiction in Asimov's, and runs the audiobook project Telltale Weekly.
Deep in the reaches of the outer rim, two space stations shared a wary truce across a narrow band of space barely 140,000 miles wide. Toprench Station and Tri-Yangton Station had been at war for hundreds of years over the strip of space known as the Ori Channel, one of the few places on the Rim where thousands of freighters passed each cycle—owing to the delicate gravitational balance needed between neighboring systems.
Over the years of truce, the laser-gunnery engineers developed a game utilizing the ten barrels of the blast cannons (set to single mode, of course). As each gunnery engineer came on shift, his prime duty was to ensure the proper operation of his cannon. Each shift, the gunny tested and retested each barrel in single mode to ensure continuance should the wary truce end abruptly. He did this by cycling through the prismatic colors on the barrels (when light passes through a prism it can be separated into its component parts) following the ages-old cipher of ROY G BIV—Red
, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet. The other job he (or she, for many of the best engineers were female) had was to keep an eye (and scanners) on the cannons of the other station, in case the truce came to an abrupt halt during his shift. Each station cycled through its test patterns on all ten barrels, watching as the other station did the very same thing.
The only variety in the position was the test pattern, since each barrel could be set to any color with the addition of white (combination of all colors), black (the absence of all colors), and ultraviolet (which could not be perceived by the human eyes of the opposing station, but could be read on the scanners), giving each barrel a maximum of ten settings. These barrels were set in a circle, and each barrel had to be tested on each setting, and those barrels that failed any one of the settings would be immediately replaced—thereby ensuring the integrity of the blast cannon. Soon, a game developed as each engineer watched the opposing engineer cycle through the prismatic patterns, testing settings on each barrel. At the beginning of his (or her) shift, the engineer would devise a test sequence. He would write this sequence down. The opposing gunnery engineer had two goals: to “Capture” the ultraviolet position—guessing which of the ten barrels would hold the most important (and most lethal) setting—and guessing the setting arrangement of all nine other barrels. The engineer who completed both of these objectives in the fewest “moves” would win.
The game took a long time to play; often the engineers were on twelve-hour٭ shifts. The game progressed with each engineer devising his or her test pattern, then trying to guess the other gunny's test pattern (the actual pattern never being run, since most times all combinations were run through each of the barrels). One of the barrels was always set to black (or off, since it was often being replaced), one white (or all), one would be ultraviolet (death), and the other barrels would be some combination of ROY G BIV—all colors being used, and none being used twice.
The game came to be called Toprench, since after many years of winning (and cheating٭) Toprench Station won the game the most times and after discovering the opposing engineers' patterns were able to end the truce and blow Tri-Yangton Station to the Abilene Cluster.
Object of the Game
1: To “Capture” the gold piece in the correct position
2: To guess the pattern of the opposing player's pieces.
Materials
Each player will need 20 multicolored pieces: 2 each of Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet, Black, White, and Gold.
The Board
Can be premade, drawn, designed, or software. Can be set in a line or a circle. You need a place to “hide” your design.
Ten Slots arranged in a circle or a line.
| | | | | | | | | |
An indicator square in the center (circle) or beside the ten slots.
To Start the Game
Each Player sets a Pattern. Frex:
GN | O | Y | V | I | BU | GD | BK | W | R |
This pattern is hidden from the opposing player.
One player begins by setting the other pieces out in a pattern as a guess. Any number of pieces can be set out at a time, or all pieces can be set out.
FREX: Guess 1
GD | | | | | | | | | |
The first player indicates the number of CORRECT guesses in the box to the side. In this example it would be zero.
Play switches to the second player, with the first player setting a guess. The same procedure is followed. When a guess is correct, the guessing player leaves the piece(s) in the correct position and only changes those pieces he/she feels are not correct.
When the Gold piece is guessed, the defending player must say “Gold” and the game is half won. Toprench can be played in the short term by just guessing where the Gold piece is in the opposing player's design.
Winning the Game
Toprench is won when the same player captures the Gold piece and correctly guesses the pattern of the other player's barrels. If one objective is met by one player and the other objective is met by the other, then the game is a draw and another game begins with both players setting a new design.
* * *
Mike Nelson is the Director of Technology for a public school district on the Navajo Reservation. He has a wife and three kids and has no other professional publishing credits, although he is forever hopeful.
* * *
Deborah Oakes is an aerospace engineer, a lifetime science fiction fan, and the secretary/treasurer of the venerable Cincinnati Fantasy Group.
Locus, the trade journal of science fiction, keeps a list of the winners of major science fiction awards on its Web page. Mike Resnick is currently fourth in the all-time standings, ahead of Isaac Asimov, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert A. Heinlein.
Mike was born on March 5, 1942. He sold his first article in 1957, his first short story in 1959, and his first book in 1962.
He attended the University of Chicago from 1959 through 1961, won three letters on the fencing team, and met and married Carol. Their daughter, Laura, was born in 1962, and has since become a writer herself, winning two awards for her romance novels and the 1993 Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer.
Mike and Carol discovered science fiction fandom in 1962, attended their first Worldcon in 1963, and fifty sf books into his career, Mike still considers himself a fan and frequently contributes articles to fanzines. He and Carol appeared in five Worldcon masquerades in the 1970s in costumes that she created, and they won four of them.
Mike labored anonymously but profitably from 1964 through 1976, selling more than two hundred novels, three hundred short stories, and two thousand articles, almost all of them under pseudonyms, most of them in the “adult” field. He edited seven different tabloid newspapers and a pair of men's magazines, as well.
In 1968 Mike and Carol became serious breeders and exhibitors of collies, a pursuit they continued through 1981. (Mike is still an AKC-licensed collie judge.) During that time they bred and/or exhibited twenty-seven champion collies, and they were the country's leading breeders and exhibitors during various years along the way.
This led them to purchase the Briarwood Pet Motel in Cincinnati in 1976. It was the country's second-largest luxury boarding and grooming establishment, and they worked full-time at it for the next few years. By 1980 the kennel was being run by a staff of twenty-one, and Mike was free to return to his first love, science fiction, albeit at a far slower pace than his previous writing. They sold the kennel in 1993.
Mike's first novel in this “second career” was The Soul Eater, which was followed shortly by Birthright: The Book of Man, Walpurgis III, the four-book Tales of the Galactic Midway series, The Branch, the four-book Tales of the Velvet Comet series, and Adventures, all from Signet. His breakthrough novel was the international best-seller Santiago, published by Tor in 1986. Tor has since published Stalking the Unicorn, The Dark Lady, Ivory, Second Contact, Paradise, Purgatory, Inferno, the Double Bwana/Bully!, and the collection Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun? His most recent Tor releases were A Miracle of Rare Design, A Hunger in the Soul, The Outpost, and the The Return of Santiago.
Even at his reduced rate, Mike is too prolific for one publisher, and in the 1990s Ace published Soothsayer, Oracle, and Prophet, Questar published Lucifer Jones, Bantam brought out the Locus best-selling trilogy of The Widowmaker, The Widowmaker Reborn, and The Widowmaker Unleashed, and Del Rey published Kirinyaga: A Fable of Utopia and Lara Croft, Tomb Raider: The Amulet of Power. His current releases include A Gathering of Widowmakers for Meisha Merlin, Dragon America for Phobos, and Lady with an Alien for Watson-Guptill.
Beginning with Shaggy B.E.M. Stories in 1988, Mike has also become an anthology editor (and was nominated for a Best Editor Hugo in 1994 and 1995). His list of anthologies in print and in press totals more than forty, and includes Alternate Presidents, Alternate Kennedys, Sherlock Holmes in Orbit, By Any Other Fame, Dinosaur Fantastic, and Christmas Ghos
ts, plus the recent Stars, coedited with superstar singer Janis Ian.
Mike has always supported the “specialty press,” and he has numerous books and collections out in limited editions from such diverse publishers as Phantasia Press, Axolotl Press, Misfit Press, Pulphouse Publishing, Wildside Press, Dark Regions Press, NESFA Press, WSFA Press, Obscura Press, Farthest Star, and others. He recently agreed to become the science fiction editor for BenBella Books.
Mike was never interested in writing short stories early in his career, producing only seven between 1976 and 1986. Then something clicked, and he has written and sold more than 175 stories since 1986, and now spends more time on short fiction than on novels. The writing that has brought him the most acclaim thus far in his career is the Kirinyaga series, which, with sixty-seven major and minor awards and nominations to date, is the most honored series of stories in the history of science fiction.
He also began writing short nonfiction as well. He sold a four-part series, “Forgotten Treasures,” to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, was a regular columnist for Speculations (“Ask Bwana”) for twelve years, currently appears in every issue of the SFWA Bulletin (“The Resnick/Malzberg Dialogues”), and wrote a biweekly column for the late, lamented GalaxyOnline.com.
Carol has always been Mike's uncredited collaborator on his science fiction, but in the past few years they have sold two movie scripts—Santiago and The Widowmaker, both based on Mike's books—and Carol is listed as his collaborator on those.