Thursday 7 January 2021

Something Matters

(When I posted about Bad Times, I should have added that colder weather was approaching as if in a pathetic fallacy! But it cannot be the Fimbulwinter because the underlying trend is toward global warming which still needs to be addressed.)

If a story is to be told, then something must matter to someone.

In "The Saturn Game," role playing games matter to some central characters.

In "Wings of Victory," it matters where the inhabitants of a newly discovered terrestroid planets are and, in particular, whether the large flyers are intelligent.

In "The Problem of Pain," it matters how someone dies and, beyond that, what God is like.

In "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," it matters whether Jim Ching becomes a spaceman and, as one step on the way to this goal, how he satisfies the immediate demands of his counselor.

In "Margin of Profit," it matters whether Nicholas van Rijn makes a profit and also how he does it. Some means are morally unacceptable to van Rijn but not to everyone which, eventually, will be a problem in the Polesotechnic League.

The practical problems are decisively solved; the psychological and philosophical problems less so.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And I hope you will read Robert Zubrin's book THE CASE FOR SPACE, mot only because of his arguments advocating a REAL space program, but because what he says about environmental problems makes more sense than what I've seen almost anywhere else.

I know role playing games fascinates many, but I've never got "into" them. Not that easy for me to pretend to be other than what I really am.

And I've expressed my disagreements with Ythrian views.

If enough people in Old Nick's "way of life" had shared his sense of ethics, then the Polesotechnic League would not have been mortally wounded in MIRKHEIM.

Ad astra! Sean