In another thread, which is about genre in RPGs (Lessons from a TV series bible. #2: genre), I mentioned that Saving Sinjin Edda played more like a hard-boiled mystery than like typical genre sci fi (which it did for structural reasons). @whswhs commented as follows:
Leaving aside the question of how much typical genre sci fi actually consists of stock plots and situations crudely transplanted into space or to another planet, I’m going to take this as a jumping-off point to describe the adventure Saving Sinjin Edda more fully, discuss its speculative content, and revisit some of the things I wrote back in the thread The Nature of Flat Black — 5 things it isn’t.
Back in 1953 Isaac Asimov wrote an essay that was published in Modern Science Fiction and that was titled “Social Science Fiction”. In that essay he argued that all science fiction stories boil down to either (1) gadget stories, (2) adventure stories, or (3) social science fiction, which can be sketched respectively as follows:
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Man invents automobile, holds a lecture about it.
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Man invents automobile, gets into a car chase.
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Man invents automobile, gets stuck in traffic.
It is important to note, regarding Asimov’s category of SF adventure stories, that “Man invents gadget, gets into a car chase” is not the same. That’s just a stock adventure plot with a sciencey-sounding Mcguffin. What makes the car chase SF in Asimov’s example is that the invention of the automobile is what makes the car chase possible.
In justice to Asimov, I’m going to note that he did get better. The essay “Social Science Fiction” is not collected in Asimov on Science Fiction. A year after writing that essay he went on to write The Caves of Steel to prove to John W Campbell that it is possible to write an SF mystery story that is structurally a mystery and that could not be reverse transplanted into a contemporary or historical setting.
My defence of Saving Sinjin Edda, and of adventures in Flat Black in general, against a possible charge of being merely stock Westerns, detective stories, romances, or Graustarkian adventures that are transposed to another planet, is not going to be that they are hard SF idea stories in which the point of the story is to reveal a scientific idea in a surprising but retrospectively inevitable way (old Asimov’s type 1 and 3 SF stories) nor that they are type 2 SF stories in which the action hinges on using the new gadget for a purpose that no element of a stock setting would suffice. (I have run some adventures in Flat Balck that were like that, but Saving Sinjin Edda isn’t one of those.) My defence is going to be that most adventures that I have run in Flat Black, including this one, may be thrillers, hard-boiled mysteries, capers, action adventures, police procedurals, and even cozies, both in their structure and in terms of the pay-off that they deliver in their denouements, but that they have not been simply transplanted to another planet or into space, and could not be transplanted back, because each of them belongs in and is inseparable from a science-fiction setting.
Okay. First, let’s talk about amber. Amber is a fossilised resin from trees. But most trees’ resin doesn’t fossilise, it rots. Even if they resist bacterial attack, almost all kinds of tree resin decompose in the ground rather than spontaneously polymerising. In all the history of life on land, only a few types of trees have produced resin that will fossilise as amber. It’s altogether possible that very few of the planets occupied by people in Flat Black would have had any species in them that produced amber. Deposits of native amber in Flat Black might well be unknown. And the Terran biomes established by terraforming are are most 830 years old, which is far too recent for natural amber to have formed. Little amber seems likely to have been exported from Earth in that Age of Emigration, and all the amber on Earth would have been destroyed when Earth was. So by 606 ADT amber would be priceless: so rare and precious that the few articles existing all belonged in museums, and no market exists to establish a usual price.
In Saving Sinjin Edda all the scheming and skulduggery turned out to be about establishing ownership of a deposit of native amber on the planet Sparta, the only known deposit of amber in the known universe. If you accept geology as s science and bio-terraformation as an SF concept then that makes the amber on Sparta a science-fiction idea. But since the amber is only a mcguffin — something with no function in the plot except that the characters want to seize it — the SFnality of that idea doesn’t make the story an SF story. Scientific ideas about the formation of amber and the bio-terraformation of alien planets didn’t make any difference to the course of events in the adventure.
But the society on Sparta did.
In the colony Sparta (in Flat Black) there is a peculiar household structure and an extreme difference between the gender roles assigned to women and to men. Women live in matrilineal “communes” that own tracts of land and draw their incomes from plantations, commercial real estate, mines and so forth. A settled way of life in the ancient mansion of one’s kin, accumulating substance, is considered feminine and proper to women. Boys are ejected from their mothers’ homes and communes between the ages of eight and thirteen, and they are recruited or adopted into occupational “unions” that amount to guilds or workforces (e.g. the crew of a large ship are usually a union). Men draw their subsistence from skilled trades, from the sea, and at very worst from labour. It is considered effeminate for a man or union of men to own land, or to occupy a permanent structure on land, and on the contrary properly masculine to live in a vehicle and follow an itinerant way of life, subsisting by a skilled trade or profession, or at least in trade.
One part of Sparta is the Cumaean Steppe, and expansive continental grassland too dry to support plantation agriculture (at least, until a vast investment irrigates it) and therefore not yet settled by women. Part of the steppe is grazed as a common range by drovers’ unions, who follow their herds of grazing beasts along traditional itineraries, but who would consider it an affront to their masculinity to be accused of owning the land that they roam over. The city of Kiddervik is a major river port serving the western end of the Cumaean Steppe. Each of the dovers’ unions of that vast area brings its herd in to Kiddervik once per local year to be delivered of its accumulated products, and there they are loaded onto river boats to be taken to populous, agricultural parts. Important bits of land around Kiddervik, including the shambles, the wharf, and a lot of commercial real estate, belong to the Glenguile Commune, which has been wealthy for centuries and occupies a huge and rambling palace there.
Sinjin Edda was an arrogant, ambitious, and unscrupulous woman from Beleriand, a much wealthier planet. She came to Sparta to look for some trove of historical documents that she might acquire or at least scan for the interstellar College of Archivists, and thus gain enough prestige to be elected a fellow of the College. She befriended and seduced a member of a high lineage in Glenguile Commune and thus inveigled her way into an invitation to stay in Glenguile Palace. There she found (a) an archive of illuminated personal diaries that the commune had accumulated over centuries, and (b) a ceremonial hall of considerable size panelled with amber. Possessed by avarice, she searched the archive to find some account of where the precious substance had been obtained. She found that it had been mined out on the edge of the steppe, in a valley in the foothills called “Koyamaki”.The location was not described well enough to find it, but it was noted as being in the range traversed by, and containing a ceremonial site for, the Budini union. Sinjin checked some schedules, and fond that she had little time to prepare before the Budini returned to Kiddervik. She rushed off to the spaceport to arrange for (a) some earthmoving equipment and air delivery to her beacon, when she activated a beacon, and (b) a workforce of women from off-planet. But she left in such haste that her dupe in the Glenguile commune mistook it for a breakup and abandonment. The Glenguile clan were affronted, and when she returned would not allow her to stay with them any longer. Sinjin therefore disguised herself as a man, applied to join the Budini, accomanied them on their nomad wanderings, seduced the tanist of the union and started to undermine the captain, and tried to pressure them into taking her to their sacred site at Koyamaki. Her plan then was to activate her beacon, fly in her off-world workers, declare them to constitute a commune and own the land, strip-mine the amber deposit, create an interstellar market for natural amber and become fabulously wealthy.
Unfortunately for her all this was so hurried that she stopped updating her backups with the local office of the College of Archivists, but left her desk computer behind with her heavier luggage at Glenguile Palace. The local accessor of the College tried to do a welfare check, got the brush-off from the Glenguiles, lodged a missing-person report, got a brush-off from the local ~police at Kiddervik, and supposed that the Glenguiles must be covering something up. Sinjin had a rescue policy paid up, so the College of Archivists hired the PCs to find out what happened to her, rescue her if possible, and recover her body if necessary.
So the PCs — who were off-worlders — went to Sparta and travelled to Kiddervik, where they came up against the problem that as men they were not allowed into Glenguile Palace, except for business in some peripheral receiving-rooms, not to stay in the hotel for women in which Sinjin had stayed before and after her time in the Palace. Glenguile stonewalled their investigations, and turned out to have surrounded their palace with hired security (because they feared an attempt to steal their amber room, not that the PCs knew that). Nevertheless, it was possible by investigations in the town of Kiddervik to discover that Sinjin had been seen in company with the tanist of the Budini Union just before they left town. The Budini had a very unsavoury reputation, and following them would be tricky, besides which Glenguile sent the cops around to see the PCs out of town. The PCs being ingenious would overcome some problem or other and find a way to find the Budini and Sinjin, and when they showed up to “rescue” her her nefarious plan would be revealed.
The situation there, the opportunity that Sinjin Edda saw, and the complicated decipherable things she had to do to set up her scheme were dictated by the social and legal peculiarities of Sparta, and produced the situation that she was in when the PCs came to find her. Those peculiarities also created obstacles, subsidiary conflicts, and areas of secrecy that the PCs had to work around, resolve, and investigate, those evasions, conflicts, and investigations constituting the course of the adventure. In short, the situation of the adventure and most of its incident could not have occurred (without substantial changes) in any contemporary or historical setting. It is not a stock mystery story arbitrarily transplanted to another planet, but rather one that could only take place where it did, in a science fiction setting.
This brings us back to a few of the things that I wrote before that Flat Black is not. It’s not hard SF in any of the three senses that are current, one of which is a term of approval for SF purists. But on the other hand, it isn’t space opera either. Not in the sense of being grandiose adventure set in space. But not in Forrest J Ackerman’s original sense either. It’s not for stock stories and clichéd adventure, in which the SF setting is pure stage-dressing, in which the spaceship could just as well be a stage-coach or a horse, the blaster a six-shooter, the aliens Injuns. Though Flat Black adventures should be adventures first and foremost, they ought really to be adventures in which the distinctive physical and cultural background of the exotic alien planet makes a big difference. Not stock adventure that could be re-skinned to be set anywhere, but adventures so rooted in the oddities of their own exotic worlds that they could not be set anywhere else.