Isaac Asimov and the character of Sherlock Holmes

 Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space was published in 1985 and I’m pretty sure my brother found it around that time and introduced it to me. It is an anthology of Sherlock Holmes science fiction stories and it was edited by Isaac Asimov, as well as Martin Greenberg and Charles Waugh. Of course, Isaac Asimov’s name is the one that is the biggest on the cover.

From what I can tell, this is one of the earliest examples of a fantastical collection of Sherlock Holmes fiction. Lord knows, you won’t have a problem finding a whole bunch of them now.

I decided to go back and reread the book for the first time in my adult life. And it was not the experience I was expecting. Yes, I couldn’t remember reading some of the stories whatsoever. Yes, some of them weren’t as good as I remembered. But they were still pretty decent on a whole.

But here was the surprise. All of the stories in the book were reprints and, reading the book with more awareness, I realized how much the book tapped into other series. In fact, the book had introduced me to a number of different authors.

When I first read it, I fully realized that the book included a story from Paul Anderson and Gordon Dickson’s Hoka series and Assimov’s own Black Widowers. I’ve gone on to read both of those series. I honestly find the Hoka series pretty one note but the Black Widowers are a lot of fun.

However, I had forgotten there is a story from Fred Saberhagen’s Beserker series, which would have been the first time I would have read anything from that series. I learned that there was a story from the Brigadier Ffellowes series. (Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space is the only place I remember ever heard of that series so I have no idea if it’s any good)

What I found most fascinating is that the book contains two of Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton stories. Which are, in many ways, Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen thirty years older. Including the first of Farmer’s two Ralph Von Wau Wau stories. (Spider Robinson would go onto use the character more often and, frankly, better to the point that I feel he’s now really a Robinson character.) 

Really, the Wold Newton family setting actually serves as a model for the anthology as a whole. Because so many of the stories aren’t Sherlock Holmes stories as much as they are meta commentary about Sherlock Holmes. Which makes the book honestly far more interesting than if it was just Sherlock Holmes in Outer Space.

Taken as pieces, Sherlock Holmes Through Time and Space is an amusing series of yarns. Taken as a whole, it’s an interesting exploration of the character.

I remember when I just went for free PnP

I recently posted some suggestions for folks who were looking to get into Print and Play. Every few years. It’s something I feel like doing. This time, I noticed that all my recommendations were for published games. You know, the ones you have to pay for the files.

When I first started making suggestions, my earliest recommendations were for free files. Heck, when I first started looking at Print and Play in general, it was free files all the way.

I know that part of the change is me. At this point, PnP has been my gaming focus for years. I don’t spend as much time on the quirkier end of the PnP world, which can be a fascinating place.

And I do feel there are still solid free files out there. Micropul is over twenty years old at this point and I think it’s still solid. I hold that  30 Rails is a great R&W experience that you could sketch on a piece of paper if you didn’t have access to a printer. I am also sure there’s a lot of recent stuff I’ve missed.

However, the PnP market place has also changed. Most of the companies I follow didn’t exist when I first started looking at PnPs. It feels like design contests (a fine place to look for free files) have become more of a real stepping stone to publishing. (I mean, the dream was always there)

I am sure there are many factors that has led to this change. Better desktop publishing. Greater bandwidth. The Covid lockdown creating greater demand. And I’m sure there have been changes on both sides, designers and consumers. The audience for PnP has clearly grown.

I’m going to say we live in a great time for Print and Play.

Giving my permission not to make the most difficult setting the baseline

During a recent play test on Button Shy’s play testing forum, I was bummed because I hadn’t gotten around to doing play throughs on the highest level of difficulty. Then, when other players had a conversation on that very topic, someone wrote that trying to beat a game on the hardest level wasn’t a requirement and that many people don’t bother to do that.

Which should be very obvious but that profoundly struck me. That the highest level of difficulty shouldn’t be considered the baseline.

On the one hand, I think that it is important to try and improve yourself and to challenge yourself. That’s how we grow and get better. On the other hand, frustrating yourself isn’t a  great idea. And I’m playing games for fun and relaxation. Intentionally playing a game that doesn’t do shouldn’t be _my_ baseline.

And there are games I regularly play on the lower difficulty levels. Aqueducts, which I play on a regular basis, I usually play at the beginner, 3x3 level. The highest level, 4x4, actually seems to require the cards to come out in the right order to win, with almost no margin of error.

And I sometimes feel guilty about playing at lower levels. But the forum has made me realize that’s silly. Yes, a challenge is a good thing but chilling out is a good thing. They are different rewards.

Treating the highest level of difficulty as the baseline is like arguing true art has to be angsty or edgy or incomprehensible. It’s creating a barrier not for some kind of standards but for gatekeeping.

Jack Kirby’s Challengers of the Unknown was just plain bonkers

 DC The New Frontier inspired me to look at the collected Challengers of the Unknown by Jack Kirby. Which would be the first dozen stories of the Challengers.

The basic idea of the Challengers of the Unknown is that four men, all experts in their fields, survive a horrific plane crash virtually unscathed. Deciding that they are all living on borrowed time, they decide to band together to, um, do incredibly risky stuff.

I’m not actually joking when I say that Jack Kirby wrote about suicide pact disguised as an adventure team. That said, it was firmly established that they were altruistic with the first story establishing that, if they made a profit, a chunk of it went to charity.

If the Challengers of the Unknown are remembered for anything these days, it’s as dry-run for the Fantastic Four (which, honestly, doesn’t seem unreasonable) However, after Kirby left DC and the Challengers to change the world as we know it with Stan over at Marvel, DC kept publishing the Challengers for another ten years. Which is hardly what I’d call a flop, although none of the many efforts at reviving it have pulled it off.

I’ll also say that if the Challengers were a beta for the Fantastic Four, the later is a strong improvement on the concept on every level. Each of the Fantastic Four, from the get go, is not only visually distinct but distinct in characterization. You won’t mix up the Thing and the Invisible Woman. Meanwhile, I sometimes struggle to figure out which Challenger is which in some panels. (And the dialogue seems to have the same problem!) While I know they got more distinct as time went on, they initially read pretty much the same guy with different hair.

Having said that, the Kirby issues are still quite a wild ride. Aliens, giant monsters, ancient artifacts, this is Kirby with no brakes.   It’s also a fascinating part of a watershed event in comic publishing. They aren’t quite superheroes. They don’t have super powers or secret identities. They barely have costumes. But they take the idea of the giant monster comics from the fifties, where some random scientist saves the day and make it an ongoing concern. They take the secret agent adventure stories that were getting written at the time and added a new level of the fantastic.

The Challengers of the Unknown aren’t quite Silver Age superheroes but they share so many of the building blocks of what was to come.

I find the Challengers to be an odd mix. On the one hand, I find the characters to be rather bland. And the concept of four white guys who are implicitly very rich (or else how could they be doing all this?) doing crazy, death defying stuff because they feel like it is kind of entitled.

On the other hand, it’s a  pack of madmen who are out to save the world. While not a one of them is normal, they are still ‘regular’ people going way out of their depth by their own choice to make a difference.

My April Gaming

 April was not a strong gaming month for me. Lots of different life stuff took priority. However, I did learn a few games and I’m happy with what I learned. 

I learned:

Junk Drawer

Just Deserts

Chateau 

When I realized that I wasn’t finding the time or space to learn any new games, I turned to Board Game Arena and learned Just Desserts and Junk Drawer. Then I made the time to learn Chateau.

Board Game Arena isn’t a resource that I use all the time. Not like BSW which I spent hours upon hours at back in the day. But there are times when it’s a space I find really handy.

As I’ve written about before, I’d looked at a prototype of Just Desserts ages ago so actually playing it was good. I found it weak as a game proper but still a fun experience.

As for the other two games, both took a core mechanic that I have seen literally dozens of times (putting shapes on grids) and did something interesting with it. I definitely will keep playing both Junk Drawer and Chateau.

There have been months when I have learned more than three games. However, all three of these games were rewarding.

My April PnP

 April was a month that didn’t have much gaming time, let alone Print and Play projects. I still got some things on the craft table, though.

I made:

Battle for the Carolinas

Golf! (2019 Solitaire Contest)

Chateau (low art - rest of the maps)

Battle for the Carolinas was my ‘big’ build for the month. Frankly, I had untrimmed laminated sheets of the cards so all I had to do was trim them. (I keep a folders of such sheets handy because I can’t learn or play everything at once)

It’s not the first copy of the game I’ve made but I like how it’s sort of a game about time line management. And this copy has already gotten put in my travel bag.

The build that has the biggest impact on my gaming was printing and laminating the rest of the maps of Chateau. What can I say? I like playing it. I’m actually thinking of making a second set half-size so I can play them on my miniature clipboard.

I made Golf!, a simplified, one-page version of Par Out Golf (which is already an super simple game) so I could have a game that I could literally play when I am too tired to keep my eyes open.

Frankly, I have a feeling that I will be glad to have my stash of untrimmed sheets for May, which also looks like it will be busy with life stuff.

What if Maigret was in an Agatha Christie novel

 I have continued on my journey of Simenon's Maigret with a book that has been published as Maigret and the Yellow Dog, The Yellow Dog and probably other names on top of that. It was one of the earlier books but many of the elements that define Maigret for me were already starting to gel.

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Maigret is called to Concarneau where one of the upper class was non-fatally shot. He has to figure out what is going on as more violent crimes, non-fatal and fatal pile up. Oh and there’s a yellow dog wandering around the town that no one’s seen before.

My impression from the back over was that this was going to be a busman’s hobby. Maigret goes on vacation so of course there’s a murder. Blame Jessica Fletcher for my thinking that. No, Maigret was dealing with another assignment and gets pulled in because he’s the closest superintendent. I like that Maigret is a professional.

This is the first Maigret novel I’ve read that felt a little like an Agatha Christie work. A rural setting. A small number of suspects, although to his credit, when Maigret gives a summary two thirds of the way through, he explicitly states it could always be someone they know nothing about. It really is a who-done-it. And Maigret even pulls a Poirot and gathers all the suspects to explain it all at the end.

With all that said, Maigret doesn't methodically gather together clues like puzzle pieces. He observes people and figures out what makes them tick. He gets into people’s heads. When he knows who you are, he knows what you’ve done. I continue to find that the world of Maigret is one of around-the-size-of-life characters.

And Simenon does not fail to be compelling. In Piotr the Latvian, the first Maigret book, I felt there were some pulpy elements. In Yellow Dog, which wasn’t written long after, those are gone. The story is grounded in believable human nature.

I am still very much of a novice in the ways of  Maigret. I don’t think I can consider myself a proper Maigret reader until I’ve read at least ten books and bingeing the series will burn me out on it. (I’ll still probably read at least that many this year) I’m also still depending on ‘best of’ lists to decide what to read next, although I am amused that some of these lists have no crossovers. 

The Yellow Dog showed up in more than one list, though, and I can appreciate why.