The following article was written by Cassidy Frazee.

When people think of powered armor, they usually think of the sort of suits I wrote about in my previous article—the sort you slip on like a pair of comfy jeans right before you head into Meag-Tokyo to kick serious boomer butt. That stuff is good and well if you are involved in an operation that requires you get up-close and personal with the enemy, but sometimes the solder in question needs something more to get the job done. Just because you’re wearing a device that should allow you to walk into any town and lay waste to thousands without ever working up sweat, that doesn’t mean that you won’t find themselves in a situation where they wished they had a little more firepower.

This is where it helps if you have the pink slips to a mecha.

When one hears the word “mecha”, usually the first thing that comes to mind is a girl wearing an extremely tight uniform and in possession of a couple of large eyes. There’s a good reason for that: mecha are, these days, very much a Japanese product—though it’s likely not what you think. Mecha is a derivative of the Japanese abbreviation “meka”, used for the English word “mechanical”. In Japanese, anything mechanical—cars, planes, guns, computers, toasters—is meka, and therefore a mecha. The boomers from Bubblegum Crisis are mecha, as are the replicants from Blade Runner, as are the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. Then again, that Nissan that the boomer crushed while trying to get away from Priss is also a mecha, so . . . Where’s my giant city-crushing anthropomorphic walking tank?

What you’re looking for are “robots”, or as they are called in Japanese, “robotto”. (I’ll say it for you: Domo Arigato.) When you see something the size of a building with a pilot riding in either the head or the torso, what you are looking at is a robot—and if it’s a really big robot, then it becomes a super robot (or, in Japanese, “supra robotto”), and that’s what you’re riding off in to do battle with the aliens from Planet X.

For the sake of keeping things straight, we’ll refer to all these giant robots as mecha—until the point where I don’t, but that’s my problem. Onward.

Though Jules Verne first wrote about a steam powered elephant mecha in La Maison à Vapeur (The Steam House, which was about traveling through India in a house pulled along by the aforementioned elephant), the real grandparents of mecha were the Martian fighting machines of War of the Worlds. Able to travel quickly, well armored, and outfitted with weapons and terraforming equipment (if you’re from Mars and you’re making Earth more like your home planet, isn’t that called areiforming?), were it not for those nasty viruses that the Martians, with all their observation, never figured out, the Martian mecha would have made short order of the population of Earth, and the old gray blobs would never know of a world where John Carter was having his fun with a red woman who laid eggs.

Science fiction would have to wait a while before true mecha came into the world once more, however. The first of the “giant robots” stories was Tetsujin 28-go, first released in 1956. The story—which translates as Iron Man #28—was about a young boy who had a remote controlled robot that had been developed by his father as a Japanese “superwepon” that would save the county near the end of World War II. However, he dies of a heart attack, so the three-story tall robot is given to his ten year old son—as they say today, seems legit. This also became the first anime mecha series, the first of the four series released in 1963, and was later brought to the U.S. under the name Gigantor.

What about the manga we ride around in, though, Cassie? I’m glad you asked. The first to show up were, once again, brought to us by the Japanese in the manga Mazinger Z. Written by Go Nagai—the creator of that other kind of fighting robot, Cutie Honey—Mazinger Z first appeared in serialized form in October 1972, and ran until August 1973. It also became the first mecha TV series, showing ninety-two episodes from 1972 to 1974. This is what many would call the true mecha: a gigantic humanoid machine that had one or more pilots seated inside, making it walk, run, fly, and of course, fight.

It wouldn’t be long before there were combiner mecha (Getter Robo from 1974 was the first here, with three mecha jets coming together to created the titular robo), and those that could transform from one form to another, with Super Dimensional Fortress Macross being the first here, having mecha that could go from jets to walking jets to fighting robots, and a gigantic spaceship that could turn into your worst anthropomorphic nightmare—but with a love triangle, lovable aliens, and Chinese idol singers who save the world!

Since then we’ve had mecha galore. We’ve seen them small (the Amplified Mobility Platform, or AMP, from Avatar), medium sized (All Terrain Scout Transports, aka “Chicken Walkers”—not approved by Baba Yaga, by the way—from Star Wars), big (YF-19 from Super Dimensional Fortress Macross), bigger (Gunbuster from Gunbuster), tremendous (the fighting machines of Robot Jox), humongous (Evangelion Units from Neon Genesis Evangelion), gigantic (Jaegers from the upcoming Pacific Rim, which can only end in tears when you have GLaDOS for your operating system), and the ridiculously over-sized (the 1.2 kilometer long SDF-1 from Super Dimensional Fortress Macross).

Mecha have even spilled over into board and role playing games. BattleDroids begat BattleTech, which begat Mechwarrior, which begat thousands of pages of game supplements, tech readouts, and novels. Mekton and Mekton-Z brought anime-style mecha to the role playing front, with construction rules that made it possible to build just about any kind of mecha imaginable. (First edition rules were also rife with anime-style craziness, aka errors—one which allowed you to take no damage from a nuclear blast happening only twenty meters away.) And Jovian Chronicals allows one some anime-style super robot fighting within a seemingly western-style Solar System.

So, where are the giant mecha of our life time now? Well . . .

Part of the problem is that old nemesis, power. When you’re trying to power a twenty foot tall human-shaped device that may need to protect its pilot, or crew, from a hostile environment, then you’re gonna need more than a credit card and a stop at the local fuel station to keep things going. A mecha will need to not only power the arms and legs, but life support, computers, possibly gyros, a number of targeting systems, even sensors to monitor the local environment.

The units in Neon Genesis Evangelion were powered by an outside source; they were often seen moving about in a limited fashion with a gigantic power cord sticking out of the torso. The moment they unplugged so they could move around, the mecha had enough power to run for five minutes—so your battle would be over quickly, one way or another. The mecha of BattleTech—or “Battlemechs”, if you will—used fusion reactors to power everything. While they never seemed to be without a lack of power, they made up for this by dumping tons of heat everywhere—including the cockpit in the head, which was akin to sitting in a sauna where you run the risk of being killed by a laser or missile. While the excess heat could lead to a variety of issues with targeting and mobility, it played no part in allowing an enemy to lock onto your ‘mech using an IR targeting system, which didn’t seem to exist in this universe. (I’ll spare you the conversation I had with a GM on how it was impossible to hide an eighty ton ‘mech in a grove of woods at night if it was pumping out tens of megawatts of heat.)

But even if you had a power source that could keep your mecha going for hours, if not days, at a time, you could never build such a monstrosity, and that’s because of the square-cube law. It’s because of math that we can’t have nice mecha.

The language behind the square-cube law is right to the point:

When an object undergoes a proportional increase in size, its new volume is proportional to the cube of the multiplier and its new surface area is proportional to the square of the multiplier.

What does this mean? Let’s put it in science fiction terms we can all understand—

Say you have a Japanese girlfriend, and you’re both really into the giant girl thing. Now, in her current state, she’s five foot tall, and weighs an even one hundred pounds. But one day you finally invent that Super Fantastic Grow Ray you’ve been working on for years, and after giving her a quick kiss, you blast her, and she starts to grow to her new height of ten feet.

However, math—in the form of the square-cube law—comes into effect. She’s doubled in size: groovy. But her surface area, aka her skin, has quadrupled (the square of the multiplier, 2 x 2 = 4), and her volume—as well as her weight—has increased by eight times (the cube of the multiplier, 2 x 2 x 2 = 8).

What you now have is a ten foot tall Japanese girlfriend whose leg bones have quadrupled in size, but are no longer designed to support eight hundred pounds of kawaii. Assuming she’s still on her feet, she’ll take one step and probably snap both legs, and break more bones when she slams into the floor.

And that’s what happens when you double her height. Imagine tripling her height, or quadrupling it, or turning her into the Incredible Screaming Fifty Foot Schoolgirl? Here’s the math on that last: you make her 5 foot x 10 = 50 feet tall, so her surface area—and bones—become 10 x 10 = 100 times greater, while her weight becomes 10 x 10 x 10 = 1000 x 100 pounds = 100,000 pounds, or 50 tons. Needless to say, every bone in her body is going to snap, and she’s going to turn into fifty tons of . . . well, something that ain’t gonna look that great in a schoolgirl’s uniform, let me tell you.

Keep in mind that pretty much everything in a mecha is going to have to be scaled upwards to match the mecha frame, so the weight goes up on all that stuff, and even if you can build your fifty foot ‘mech—like the ones I used to pretend my character was piloting in BattleTech—the chances are very good that it’s going to come to pieces the moment you try to walk. There simply isn’t a material in production today that would ever allow us to build a fifty foot mecha, let alone the monster mecha we’ll soon see slugging it out with Kaiju in Pacific Rim. (Based upon the blueprints I’ve seen, each Jaeger is 84 meters, or 273 feet, tall, and are piloted by two people in motion-capture suits. Now we know why they were mining unobtainium on Pandora.)

As with most things in science fiction, it may be some time before we see anything close to the mecha used in Avatar and The Matrix Revolutions. But will we ever see anything like Johnny Sokko and his Flying Robot? It depends on who wants to make the head.

But before I could put finger to keyboard on this idea of twin ocean planets, I was surprised to learn that NASA’s Kepler observatory had beaten me too it, discovering a pair of twin water worlds in exactly the configuration I had in mind.

Now, I know that art imitates life, and that science fiction has a tendency to preempt scientific discoveries, but I was surprised by just how quickly Kepler has gazumped me on this one. I only wish I’d written the planet profiles sooner.

The two recently discovered planets – Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f – orbit a star slightly smaller than the sun and have been described as two of the most likely locations for life beyond the solar system so far discovered. Both are thought to be covered by vast oceans, but it is not yet known whether they have a rocky sea floor beneath.

The Kepler-62 planetary system contains at least 5 planets, our twin water worlds being the fourth and fifth planets from the star. Kepler-62e sits comfortably within the star’s “habitable zone” making it nice and warm. Its counterpart, Kepler-62f, orbits at the outer edge of the habitable zone and is therefor much colder. In fact, Kepler-62f would require a greenhouse effect in its atmosphere to prevent its ocean from freezing; without this atmospheric blanket the planet would likely have a frozen surface like that of the Galilean moon Europa.

These twin water worlds aren’t exactly as I had imagined for my two watery colony worlds; both are larger than the Earth and have been classified as “super-Earths” (the smallest, “e”, being 61% larger than the Earth). That might cause a slight gravity problem for potential maritime colonists.

It is also too soon to tell if the atmospheres of these worlds would be breathable to us humans. In fact, the composition of their atmospheres would likely depend on whether or not life exists their oceans. There seems to be a lot of guess work involved in this kind of planetary discovery, but all indicators are that conditions on both worlds are likely to be conducive to some kind of life, if not human life.

Could the twin ocean worlds of the Kepler-62 system become future colonies of mankind? Are these real-life manifestations of the hot and cold life-bearing planets of my imagination? It’s too early to tell, but I’m sure we’ll all be keeping a curious eye on this very interesting planetary system, which lies 1,200 light years from our own.

If you want to learn more about these planets and other potentially habitable worlds, I recommend you check out the Habitable Exoplanets Catalog on the website of the Planetary Habitability Labratory (University of Puerto Rico).

Now, before I begin what I promise will be a reasonably short rant, I probably should say that Star Citizen is shaping up to be a pretty impressive game, by all accounts. I’ve been following the development of this new RPG for a while now, and I’m more than a little excited by what I’ve seen so far. The game aims to be a galactic scale RPG with limitless potential. It’s somewhat akin to Eve Online only with less button-pushing and more “hell yeah”. The man behind the project, Chris Roberts, has previously delivered such hit titles as Wing Commander and Freelancer, and his long overdue return to the gaming world (after a short stint as a film producer) should be enough to pique the interest of any science fiction fan with a graphics card. Roberts is putting all his eggs into this one, and he seems convinced that Star Citizen, not Wing Commander, will emerge as his magnum opus. Here’s wishing him success.

As great as Star Citizen looks, there is one thing that has irked me about the universe in which the game is set, and that’s the naming of an extra-terrestrial planet as “Terra”. This is a mistake that I would urge all science fiction writers to avoid. In fact, I personally think that the name “Terra” in any context has become grossly overused. Here’s why:

“Terra” is the Latin word for “Earth”. It can also be translated as “land” or “world”.

Straight away, you can see the problem with using an old name for our own planet to christen an entirely new planet; it’s going to cause a lot of confusion at the post office, especially when you consider that many modern languages still use the words “terra”, “terre”, and “tierre”. Further confusion arises from the fact that the word “terrestrial” is still frequently used in reference to the Earth, and that many science fiction writers use the word “Terran” to refer either to people from Earth specifically or to Humanity in general). It’s also a bit lame and incredibly unimaginative. Any science fiction setting should be interesting enough to have its own interesting name, and any science fiction writer worth his salt should be able to think one up.

“Terra” means “Earth”. It just does, okay? You wouldn’t call a knife a spoon, so don’t call an alien world Terra.

Now, if you want to refer to the Earth as “Terra” for whatever reason, that’s fine. Writers have been doing that since, well, Roman times obviously. However, I would ask you to consider whether the term has now been overused to the point of cliche. I think it has, but I know a lot of you will disagree. It’s been hanging around the sci-fi genre like a bad smell for decades now, and it has been used in every two-bit space opera and military sci-fi game since the phrase “Earthling” went out of style.

Even Chris Roberts himself referred to humanity as the “Terran Confederation” in his Wing Commander series, making it doubly odd that his latest game has Terra as a colony of the United Earth Empire.

I do think it’s plausible that at some point in the future those of us who live on Earth might begin to refer to ourselves as “Terrans”, especially as a way of distinguishing ourselves from the communities we eventually plant on other worlds, although some more creative derogatory terms will probably arise when that finally happens (“Earther” being one of the least creative suggestions out there), however I just don’t think “Terra” is ever likely to catch on. “Earth” has stuck, and it’s a good name (sure it also means “soil”, but in some languages “terra” does too), I don’t see us going back to the Roman name anytime soon, just as I don’t see us going back to calling Russia “Hyperborea”.

Another name that we should probably discuss here is “Terra Nova”. No prizes for guessing what it means.

Now, whether you agree or disagree that Terra has crossed over into the realm of cliche, you surely have to agree that Terra Nova crossed that border a long time ago – so long in fact that it is now a fully-fledged citizen and has been working as Stephenie Meyer’s gardener for the past ten years. There have been countless fictional planets to bear this name over the years, including some in extremely popular franchises such as Star Trek and Mass Effect. There have been TV shows, games, and movies with the same name. There are even lots of real places here on Earth 1 that have adopted them name, not to mention the Canadian naval ship.

Surely it’s become obvious by now that when we finally discover another habitable world we are not going to give it a better name than “New [sodding] Earth”. In fact, if the astronomy people take a Facebook poll, which I’m almost certain they will, we’ll probably end up calling it something even stupider like “Fluff-world”, “Kitteh”, or “Googleboob”.

The same goes for “Terra Prime” – it’s just never going to happen.

So, in summary, if you are thinking of calling a planet “Terra Nova”, just don’t, and if you’re thinking of calling a planet “Terra”, you’d better make damn sure it’s the one you’re living on.

For more info about Star Citizen, visit robertsspaceindustries.com

The following article was written by Cassidy Frazee.

When it comes to guilty pleasure in science fiction movies, Starship Troopers is one of my favorites. Partially because it’s a goofy movie that shows us what the world would have been like had the Nazis won the war (the director’s words, not mine), partially because it’s so damn tongue-in-cheek that said cheek nearly has a hole bored through it, partially because you get to see Oberführer—I mean, Sky Marshal Neil Patric Harris blown away a bug like he’s wiping his feet at the door, partially because everyone acts like they were being paid to overact more than Micheal Ironsides, and partially because director Paul Verhoeven brought his insane game to the screen, and spent hours running about the set, screaming and yelling, pretending to be the actors’ CGI adversaries, going so far (as one friend told me) as to run along a ridge line screaming in Dutch-accented English, “I’m ur burg, shoot me, shoot!”

Yes, there were things about the movie I didn’t like. Carmine and Johnny were both white as hell, Carl didn’t die, the Rodger Young didn’t get to sing its song, the bugs were a lot dumber than they were in the novel and didn’t have technology—and the Mobile Infantry wasn’t.  (There’s also a point in there where Dizzy didn’t die in the first chapter, and also became a woman, but that was all good.) Oh, sure, they had boats that took them places, and they had guns, but if you wanna be Mobile Infantry you need one thing and one thing only to get the job done: Your powered armor.

Like many other things in science fiction, powered armor has been around for a while. Armored spacesuits were first written about in E. E. Smith’s Galactic Patrol, published in 1937, but it wasn’t until Children of the Lens, published in 1947, that a character used powered armor to fight the Big Bads. Of course, in 1959 Robert Heinlein published Starship Troopers, and powered armor became something every sci-fi geek knew about.

But it wasn’t all science fiction. Early on NASA knew there would be problems with soft spacesuits and what would happen if they developed a tear in space. While being exposed to vacuum was bad, they were more worried about the decompression sickness that would affect the astronaut even if they managed to get their suit patched and the hole sealed. They knew that if they hardened the suit they wouldn’t have to worry about nasty tears, but hard suits have a tendency to wear out the person inside rather quickly, so they looked at the possibility of attaching a powered exoskeleton to the suit—much as Constantin Lent did in patent number 3034131, filed on August 7, 1956, showing a Mobile Space Suit designed to help the aviator of the future move in an environment where air in the suit made it difficult to move.

The real thing never came to be, mostly because the technology wasn’t there (more on that in a bit). As for science fiction—all thing are possible, don’t you know?

Bob Heinlein’s Starship Troopers was originally published in the October and November, 1959, issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in serial form under the title Starship Soldier. Originally Starship Troopers was written as a juvenile novel, but publishing house Scribner took a look at the manuscript, likely thought, “What the hell?”, and sent Heinlein his rejection slip. This made Heinlein abandon Scribner and stop writing juvenile fiction for them, and began writing far more adult works. (Another point of interest is that Heinlein stopped work on Stranger in a Strange Land to write Troopers. At that point he’d been working on Stranger for over ten years, and after Stranger was published it became his first real foray into science fiction with adult themes.)

The MI of Troopers were encased in armored spacesuit that they could live in for weeks, and they were giving enough firepower that a squad could eliminate an entire city if they so desired. They could drop in from space (who needs ferry boats when you have your own reentry capsule!), flip over cars and jump a mile using a combination of their their own strength and some booster rockets, and bring to bear any number of weapon systems, including flamethrowers, machine guns, heavy grenade and rocket launchers, and yes, a few low yield kiloton-sized nukes. A deadly lot, these people.

The MI weren’t completely impervious to damage, though. In the novel, Dizzy Flores get killed during an attack on “The Skinnies,” an alien species that was getting a little too cozy with their friends on Klendathu, and the MI were ordered to attack these tall, skinny humanoids (hence the name) and give them a “demonstration of power”. Dizzy gets hit by some heavy firepower, and his slowly cooling body is used to show that the MI Never Leave a Man Behind. During the first attack on Klendathu, the MI get their butts kicked bad, in part due to the Bugs being a lot tougher than was thought, as well as being a lot smarter. Not only did the Book Bugs have weapons—which included big nukes that they didn’t mind setting off just to give the MI a bad day—but in the later chapters it was indicated the Warrior Caste had begun using their own form of powered armor, which would make for some great action if anyone ever decided to do things right with this story. (Maybe the re-image will do this, but I’m not holding my breath.)

Since Starship Troopers, power armor has become sort of the “go to” future weapon that can be fun for the whole family. It’s shown up in literature (Armor, The Forever War, which some have called the “Anti-Starship Troopers”, The Hydrogen Sonata), comics (Iron Man, Doctor Doom’s suit, Batman when he needed to beat up something big and bad), movies (Iron Man again, the third Starship Troopers movie), video games (Halo, Metroid), and tabletop games (Warhammer 40k, Cyberpunk, which had rules to build your own powered armor—and I did), and lastly, anime, where I’ll just leave their Bubblegum Crisis hardsuits lying about . . .

Powered armor has been so written about that there is a huge section at TVTropes devoted to the genre. Some of what they describe is Man Powered Suits, some are Mecha Big and Small, but it’s all the same: put a guy (or a gal; yes, Priss, I’m looking at you) in a suit and they are capable of wonderful things— Or are they? ‘Cause as is the case with many things in science fiction, powered armor is great for story telling, not so much when it comes to real life.

The first problem one encounters when building powered armor is, well, power. Without the arc reactor, Tony Stark is just a lot of target waiting for the barrage (though odds are good Tony will have a snoot-full and not feel the attack); without that little plutonium pack at the base of the suit’s spine, William Mandella is just another grunt all dressed up with nowhere to go and an inability to fight. Any suit that not only gives you super strength but can protect you from heat, from cold, from vacuum, from water, and still allow you to jump a mile, take a cannon shot and shrug it off, and possibly fly off at supersonic speeds is gonna consume a lot of energy. And, as The Forever War pointed out, it’ll give off a lot of heat, particularly when you’re standing on some ball of ice a hundred AU from your primary—in which case you just target their heat blooms and nuke them from orbit.

Most examples of real powered armor—or should we call it what it really is, a “Man Amplification Unit”? Yeah, we should . . . When building a true powered amplification unit, said units either run off an external power source, or they use power cells that run for a couple of hours before being drained. This might be okay when you’re using an exoskeleton around the loading bay, but imagine the look on Ripley’s face when she’s about the lay the smack down on the Alien Queen and the flashing “Low on Power” light starts flashing. Not a good place to be, let me tell you—and that situation is even worse if you’re surrounded by Bugs and your suit’s power systems are telling you you’re five minutes from being screwed bad.

Another problem that has been encountered is weight. The first real powered amplification unit was called Hardiman, which was developed by General Electrics in 1965. It was designed to allow someone to strap in and pick up huge weights using a 25 to 1 amplification ratio—in other words, picked up twenty-five pounds with the suit would feel to the user as if they were picking up something that weighed one pound. With the force feedback system built into the suit, the user would actually feel the weight and have no problems manipulating it. While it could life seven hundred and fifty pounds with easy, it weighed fifteen hundred pounds, and could only move at a top speed of two and a half miles per hour.

Hardiman had another problem in that one couldn’t use the whole unit. Whenever there was an attempt to use the entire apparatus, the Hardiman would start off with violent, uncontrollable motions that were never fixed, and which meant GE wouldn’t allow the system to be tested with a person. A similar issue was discovered by NASA when they were testing the AX-5 Hard Shell Space Suit. It’s difficult for a powered exoskeleton to match the ball-and-socket joints of the human body, and one of the problems encountered is trying to keep various portions of a suit from going outside the limits of, say, a person’s shoulder. One might decide to reach for something over their head, and the suit bends the arm up and back until the shoulder dislocates—not a good time for the wearer, particularly if they’re in space when this happens.

In real life development will continue to come up with some version of a powered exoskeleton, more than likely for use in the military. As such, powered armor will likely remain a mainstay of science fiction writing, because it allows people to be placed in combat situations where they face incredible odd against an implacable force, and it allows those combat situations to take place on words in vacuum broiling under a gigantic white sun, or on a super-Earth with a thick, poisonous atmosphere, or in an urban environment where leaping over tall building in a single bound is the order of the day.

Power armor will remain a mainstay of science fiction because people want to read about people, not about machines controlled by operators in exo-mocap suits a thousand kilometers away. Drama requires people on the spot, and readers want to see hot girls in powered suits slugging it out with crazy AI monsters, not the same women punching buttons between sip of their iced coffee. Then again, maybe what we need to do to get those same people into the action is take the suit and think bigger—a lot bigger.

The following story idea was sent to us by avid SciFi Ideas contributor Alfonso Posadas Jr. Alfonso writes…

This idea came to me while reading a plot summary of The Host.

Basically it’s an alien invasion as the title implies, but mostly a subversion for several reasons. For one, the aliens didn’t choose Earth to colonize, they had no other choice since they could not find a planet that is habitable for them and their starship could not travel any further. Secondly, despite their technological superiority the aliens are not equipped nor capable of a full-scale invasion of a single country, let alone an entire planet that hilariously outnumbers them.

However, they do find that they are able to inhabit a human body in a way that does not harm either of them and actually benefits both, though this is discovered purely by accident. Not only can both survive in their respective environments, but they also gain psionic abilities that neither could attain on their own. This allows telepathic attributes such as a resonance of knowledge where skills can be shared among a group, but the individual will have to train and study in using that skill or else it will fade from their mind.

The summary of the story begins when two privileged kids decide to harass the homeless simply because they have nothing better to do with their time. This is where their luck runs sour as these vagrants are actually possessed by the aliens and the kids are defeated very easily. However, seeing that they have a chance at infiltrating the upper class through the kids, the aliens offer up a choice of either becoming a host to one of them or finding themselves recovering from a coma with missing memories. One of the kids asks why they don’t force them to be hosts and one of the possessed homeless answers that a willing host has an exponentially greater chance of a successful fusion than one who is unwilling and would result in the death of both.

The two kids then become new hosts and must adapt to their new life as hosts to an alien species, which is not easy since even though they are willing hosts, the sudden appearance of two independent minds in one body blurs the distinction between the human and alien and takes time for the boundaries for settle. Even then there is no guarantee that there would be transplantation of personalities between the two parties.

The kids also learn of their new pisonic abilities and begin training themselves to use them. One of the kids is more daring while the other is more reserved and cautious, which brings the former into trouble with the latter, who is stuck cleaning up the mess.

And that’s all I’ve got at the moment.

The following science fiction story idea was sent to us by writer and SciFi Ideas fan Jay Brown.

In the somewhat near future an asteroid that the world’s scientific community were certain posed no threat to Earth suddenly changes course and heads straight for our planet. The asteroid isn’t a world destroyer in size but will certainly have a huge impact on the area within which it lands. The world rushes to figure out a way to deflect or destroy the hulking space rock but cannot come up with anything practical in the short time frame they are up against. The best idea the world can come up with is to calculate where the asteroid will hit and evacuate the area as soon and as fast as possible to avoid any loss of life, the aftermath is to be dealt with on an as and when basis.

The impact zone is calculated as being within the borders of Columbia on the outskirts of the dense jungle regions. The UN and the Colombian authorities rush to clear the area of any civilians and the military are put on standby along with clean up crews and scientific investigators including some from NASA.

The asteroid hits and destroys a wide area of delicate jungle and some of it’s neighboring villages and towns. When the dust settles and the area is deemed secure the science teams are sent in with military escorts to be followed by the clean up teams. When the science teams arrive at the impact zone they are met with utter devastation, large portions of the jungle are completely destroyed, a few hours into the science teams investigations strange goings on begin to occur, some of the soldiers become spooked and swear that they have watched gutted areas of the jungle grown back in just minutes. It’s like nothing they have seen before. The science team at first ignore their claims but when the area around them begins to sprout strange and unfamiliar plants right before their eyes they soon start to realize they were wrong to shun them. The rapid growth begins to spread faster and faster without any signs of stopping, the soldiers and the science team are consumed and suffocated within the twisting vines.

One member of the science team escapes with his life and warns the authorities. He/she works out that the asteroid must have been contaminated with alien spores from a distant planet, upon impact the spores were released into the atmosphere and quickly began to grow at an extreme rate. The spores are of an unknown plant species not of this world and act like an invasive species, consuming and taking over any area they come into contact with.

The invasive species begins to spread like wildfire across the entire country and eventually the South America region, it becomes quickly apparent that the invading plants will consume everything, even urbanized areas. As it grows the plant life ejects more spores creating more growth. The spores are carried over the seas and across borders and seem to be able to survive the most hostile of environments.

The invading plant life begins to suck up the worlds sunlight and oxygen in a reverse to Earth plant life. The world is slowly being suffocated to death by an unstoppable “Green Scourge”. Humanity must find a way to stop the growth and save the planet.

The story can be told from a number of angles including the surviving science team member who has to work out a plan to stop the spores spread, a trapped drug smuggler who was in the impact area at the time the asteroid hit and is slowly becoming trapped int the jungle, a NASA official on a mission to to save the world or an unlikely hero with an idea that no one will listen to but is the only solution. A number of characters can be dropped into this concept and I’d be excited to hear of any other ideas for a protagonist.

You can read Jay’s blog at http://caffeineandink.blogspot.co.uk/

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This month’s featured story was written by SciFi Ideas administrator Mark Ball.

See You on Rovana

“I will see you on Rovana,” I had heard him say.

That was the last thing I had heard before the upload began. It was the last thing I remembered. I had rolled the words around in my head, repeating them to myself as the scanner went to work. I always try my hardest to cling on to those last few words, that last moment of memory, just to make sure that nothing was missing when I emerged on the other side of the gate. Not that I’d remember if it were.

And then, just for an instant, I had thought of home. The thought had pushed itself forward just nanoseconds before the upload terminated, sparing me the memory of my own death. Well, the death of one body at least. I used to think about that quite a lot, wondering what it was like to be that other discarded me, how that last second of existence would feel, but I’d been through so many transfers now that it didn’t seem to matter. Still, it’s better to give the poor guy something nice to go out on, so now, instead of worrying, I think of home.


“Download complete. Welcome to Rovana.”

His voice was the same, but my new body was not. Unable to locate my lungs, I found myself in a brief moment of panic, my new muscles convulsing and an anxious synapse looking for air in all the wrong places. Eventually, as my consciousness found new nerves and connected itself to new tissues, the body found what it needed and I was able to regain some small amount of composure. Gills – I’d never had gills before.

“I shall give you a moment to prepare yourself before I proceed with the briefing.” His voice was synthetic and mono-tonal, but somehow he found a way to make it sound mocking and jovial. I half expected him to chuckle at my discomfort, although I knew him better than that. “The atmosphere of this planet is quite unusual,” he reasoned as I gasped greedily through the slits in my neck, “but you should find this bioform to be sufficient enough to function here. It’s a rather ingenious adaptation of the physiology inherent to the local species,” he mused, proud of his own accomplishment. “They are rather fascinating creatures, actually…”

I attempted to produce a sarcastic barb, hoping to discourage him from sharing a lengthy scientific analysis, but without lungs my new mouth wasn’t up to the task.

“As a species they’re entirely mute,” he continued. “They communicate only through a simple gestural language. Compared to some species I can think of, their silence is quite refreshing. I had thought of introducing you to the concept,” there was that attempt at whimsy again, “but I decided it might be counterproductive,” and his usual concern with efficiency. “Try your vocalizer.”

I found the device buried in my throat and the knowledge required to operate it pre-loaded into by new brain. “You seem to enjoy introducing me to these new experiences,” I griped. The voice was metallic; not at all what I had expected. He’d been able to make his own synthetic voice sound almost entirely natural. Of course, he’d had eight centuries to perfect his own systems. This body had been engineered somewhat more hastily.

“Enjoyment has nothing to do with it, my boy. Since you refuse to embrace a life of scientific inquiry, experience is the only way you are able to learn.”

Finding my feet, and finding my curiously webbed fingers, I disconnected various cables and tubes from my body and stepped away from the gate. The thick atmosphere was a hindrance to my movement, but it didn’t take me long to acclimatise. I’d once flown in the atmosphere of a gas giant, I could cope with a little liquid methane.

In the chamber before me, the Monarch took the same form as he had on Gessik – the form he took on all the worlds under his omnipresent control. Unlike myself, he didn’t need to transfer his consciousness in order to travel, and he preferred not to alter his biology to the varying conditions that existed throughout his domain. ‘Uniformity is the basic constituent of order’, he had once told me, and uniform and ordered he was; the same form, the same voice, the same intelligence, existing simultaneously on over a thousand worlds. Each with the same intentions and ideals. Each in constant communication with one and other, sharing thoughts and ideas over vast distances. It was in this way that he had become immortal, and in this way that he had become as close to omniscient as any being could be. And it was through his uniformity, careful attention, and endless thirst for knowledge that the galaxy had been brought to order too.

Up close and personal with one of his countless appendages, the Monarch was somewhat less impressive than his grand complexity would seem to suggest. Encased in perspex and suspended in an entirely different liquid to the one in which I stood, most of his natural body had long since been stripped away, leaving only the tissues essential to cognition. Augmented with new technologies as they emerged, cloned and replicated a thousand times over, and reproduced when each unit succumbed to the eventual degradation of age, he was the legacy of a scientist who died centuries ago, but who lived on through the genius of his own creation.

More machine than creature, his central biological components were little more than aesthetic focal points for his many throne-rooms – the jars in which they bathed his oddly modest thrones.

“Now, are you ready to proceed with the briefing?”

Ask anyone else in the galaxy, even his enemies, and they would tell you that the Monarch was the embodiment of patience. It was the result of his vast and timeless nature. I’d become convinced that the characteristic sarcasm in his voice was something only I could detect, else it was reserved only for my company.

“I’m ready,” I responded, shaking the discomfort out of my tightly fitted new skin. “The sooner this situation can be resolved, the better it will be for all of us.”

“Indeed.” Small lights beneath his tank flashed red and green as the mechanism around him spoke. “I received an uplink from myself on Aquaeli 4 this morning. It seems the rebel faction there will soon control the entire surface of the planet.”

“Already?” I gasped. “This is getting out of hand.”

“Aquaeli 4 is a small outpost. This minor setback should not impact too greatly on our overall strategy.” He didn’t seem at all concerned, but if he was, he wasn’t about to let it show.

“Even so, I should proceed to the rendezvous point as soon as possible. Have the representatives arrived yet?”

The lights beneath his tank paused for a moment, and for the first time I sensed a small amount of hesitation in him. “That is something I need to discuss with you.”

Discuss? Surely we’d discussed this enough already. Now was the time for action. But as his great intelligence contemplated the fate of countless worlds, I knew that if the Monarch had something to say, it would be wise for me to listen.

“The negotiations have already failed, my boy.”

“Failed? They haven’t even begun.” At first, I couldn’t understand how it was possible, but as the Monarch explained more, the realization dawned.

“Three days ago, in fact. You delivered our terms to the rebels here on Rovana, but I’m afraid to report that your mission did not have a successful outcome.”

And there I had it. “I’m a copy?”

“An imprecise description given the circumstances, but adequate.”

I’m not sure why that should make me uncomfortable; travelling the way I do, I’ve always been a copy – a copy of a copy, in fact – but somehow this was different. “Did I…” I told myself that it didn’t matter, not really. “Did I die?”

“No, I don’t believe so.” That was the Monarch’s way of saying that he didn’t know, something that was unsettlingly rare, although as a scientist he had never been afraid to make such an admission. “It has been some time since your last communiqué, and reliable intelligence is difficult to come by on this world, but all reports indicate that you have elected to side with the rebels against me.”

“I…” I couldn’t find the words to respond. I couldn’t even entertain the thought of it being true. The very idea of defection went against everything I knew. My loyalty to the monarch had never been in doubt.

“You might say that you betrayed me.” The Monarch did not sound angry at all, and he remained typically unconcerned. Thinking several steps ahead, he had already taken measures to ensure that the situation be resolved.

“That’s absurd!” I yelped in self-defence.

“Nevertheless, it appears to be true.”

Hearing the Monarch’s composure and trusting that vengeance was not in his nature, I calmed myself. “How do you wish to proceed?” I asked.

“You will correct the issue,” he replied plainly. “I’m sending you to meet with your former self.” The way he spoke assured me that I was now the legitimate version of myself in his eyes.

This predicament was becoming more than a little confusing, but the Monarch had educated me well enough to reason through it. “You realize,” I challenged, “that whatever gave the original version of myself cause to defect, whatever type of coercion the rebels used, will likely have the same impact on me too.” It was a strange thing to consider, but if it had happened once it would surely happen again.

“I have considered this eventuality.” Of course he had. “That is why I have taken the liberty of insuring against it.

Nervously, I scratched my right elbow – a tenancy I have found common in most vertebrate species. What did he mean?

“Some slight modifications to ensure that your existing priorities remain.”

Realizing the confidence I had placed in him, giving him full custody over my body and mind, the meaning of his words suddenly became startlingly clear. “You changed me?” The voice synthesizer in my throat screeched, unable to convey the level of anger and insult I felt.

“A small alteration to your psyche,” the Monarch admitted. “It should be sufficient to ensure your continued loyalty.”

I closed my eyes and rapidly searched my mind, my memory, for evidence of what he had done. Everything was in place, nothing missing and nothing new. Or so it seemed to me. How could I tell if anything had changed, I could see a synthetic memory and recognize it as one of my own. I could skip past a treasured memory without noticing that it had gone. Admiring his intelligence and great wisdom as I did, I knew that he could do it without leaving any clues.

‘I will see you on Rovana. I will see you on Rovana. I will see you on Rovana.‘ I rolled the words through my head for a second time, inspecting the last moments before my alteration and reawakening, but there was nothing new to recognise there, of course. There was nothing missing either, it was all there, even that last second recollection of home.

“You do trust me do you not?” The Monarch asked, trying his best to emulate sympathy.

Trust him? How could I trust him after what he had done? After he had shown so little regard for my intimate person. And yet, how could I not? Trust is all I had ever had for him – trust, love, loyalty and respect.

I attempted to blow out a sigh, forgetting once again the absence of my lungs. Instead, my gill-slits opened for a moment and my vocalizer gave a long low hum. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps it was for the best. If the alteration he had made, whatever it might be, ensured that I remain loyal to him, that was surely all that mattered. The Monarch had always known was was best for the people of this galaxy, even if they sometimes disagreed, and he’d always known what was best for me. I couldn’t remember a single instance when his actions hadn’t been for the common good.

“Yes, father,” I said, opening my eyes once again. “Of course I trust you.”

The following article was written by Raymond Frazee.

Like it or not, various science fiction worlds are dangerous places. You’re either on the tail end of the end of the world, or you live in a dystrophic society where heading down to the corner store to get a six-pack of beer is aking to wandering the streets of Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, or aliens have once more invaded your home world looking for water . . . you get the point. It’s a hard, ‘ol world out there, Bunkie, and you need some protection.

Fortunately for you, science fiction not only has the answers, they got the weapons.

As long as there has been writing, there have been personal weapons of one kind or another—and science fiction is no different. Nomenclature may change, but it’s a cold, hard fact that right after someone discovered the first Martian, they tried to kill it before it killed us. (This is far truer than you can imagine. Not long after the serialization of War of the Worlds, an American named Garrett P. Serviss wrote Edison’s Conquest of Mars was serialized in the New York Journal. Serviss actually based his novel on a ripped-off and americanized version of Wells’ story called Fighters from Mars, which appeared in The Boston Evening Post, and was attributed to author “H. C. Wells”.)

A great deal of the terminology we use today comes from way back in the early days of The Golden Age. The “blaster” was first named in Nictzin Dyalhis’ When the Green War Started in 1925; “disintegrator ray” comes from the aforementioned Edison’s Conquest of Mars in 1898; “needler” was first used by E. E. “Doc” Smith in The Skylark of Valeron in 1934; and “stunner” comes from C. M. Kornbluth’s Fire-Power in 1944. And, lastly, Isaac Asimov wrote about “force-field blades” in his 1952 juvenile novel, David Star, Space Ranger, proving that sometimes you do need something besides a good blaster.

Since much early science fiction dealt with people in military roles in space, it only made sense that these people were going to carry firearms as well—to repel space pirates, don’t you know? It only made sense that if you were in the military, and you were in space, you were taking your rifles and pistols with you, and as the technology advanced, so would your firepower. Which is why it as the start of the science fiction story progressed, so did the weapons, until you had people walking around with the equivalent of a small atom bomb on their hips. (More on that later.)

(It’s not just in science fiction that weapons have made their way into space. Early American astronauts used to pack a machete in their survival gear, just in case they came down in the middle of the jungle, and Russian spacecraft have always carried a pistol and ammunition to handle situations similar to the Voskhod 2 landing, which came down in the Upper Kama Upland hundreds of kilometers where it was suppose to land, and the two cosmonauts spent the night wondering if they might need to shoot a wolf or bear. Today one of the traditions of a Soyuz landing is to present the pistol to the capsule commander after a successful landing.)

Personal weapons can be categorized in one of three ways: slug throwers, energy, and exotic. Let’s start by looking at the first . . .

Everyone knows slug throwers; we’re talking pistols, rifles, shotguns, anything that can throw a hunk of metal—or lots of hunks of metal—at a person at high speeds. A lot of times you’ll see these in the hands of people from Earth going off to visit exotic, far away lands where various people and things are likely going to kill them. Stargate was one such story, where H&K MP5s were the submachine gun of choice, and even archeologist had access to a pistol; Aliens is another, though they’ve have been better off nuking the place from orbit. The novel Starship Troopers had some of the mechanized power armor fitted with conventional machine guns and grenade launchers, while the movie version showed the MI using a weapon that was built around both the Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic and Ruger AC556 automatic rifles, with an underslung Ithaca 37 pump action shotgun. The concept is simple, and works well in practice—though it seems, particularly with the last two mentioned stories, the enemy always takes a lickin’ and keeps on killing no matter how much ammo the good guys have.

The Colonial Forces of the “reimaged” Battlestar Galactica used slug throwers as well, all of which were built around familiar weapons. The standard sidearm was a dressed up Fabrique National Five-seveN, and the Galactica’s Marines use the Fabrique National P90, which would become, a million or so years later, the standard submachine gun of Stargate Command. The SA80 assault rifle was used by a number of forces, as well as the Heckler & Koch G36K, which gets used in a lot of television and movie science fiction because of its “futuristic” styling.

The biggest advantage of using slug thrower is their simplicity: fairly easy to maintain, usually rugged, and in the case of pistols carried by guys in tight pants, relatively cheap. Can you use them in vacuum though? Bullets are self-oxidizing, so they don’t need air to fire. Will they jam up because all the lubrication will boil off? There are people on both sides of that argument, with one side saying if you’re shooting off rounds in an airless environment for only a couple of minutes you don’t need to worry about lubrication, while others say you’re good for a couple of shots before everything turns to a horrible mess. I suppose this argument won’t be settled until we have a shootout on the surface of the Moon.

To be able to use a slug thrower in vacuum, though, the trigger guard will need to be modified to allow it to be fired while wearing gloves. Given the current state of spacesuits, it might be a while before we have to worry about which side of the need lube/don’t need lube argument is correct.

There’s also the question of recoil putting the shooter into a horrible spin from which they won’t recover soon. A standard pistol likely won’t impart more than a few degrees of rotation to a fifty kilogram person in zero gee, and it’s likely if they aren’t braced to begin, they’ll throw themselves into a spin just trying to get the pistol into position.

Which brings us to the question of what happens when you whip out a pistol and begin firing away while inside your spacecraft—just what would happen? Well, that depends. First, lets look at the sort of science fiction spacecraft where one may need to throw down and open fire:

Take a look at this corridor from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not bad, right? Cool, clean, lots of clear line of sight. It also helps that you’ve got artificial gravity so you can lean into a wall, brace yourself, and get off a clean shot. I mean, every spaceship should be this nice.

With that out of the way, we will now stare into the maw of cold reality:

As Bob Heinlein might say, there isn’t enough room on the ISS to swing a dead cat, much less start blasting away with a Beretta 92F. The biggest problem with working spacecraft is that they look less like the Enterprise and more like the U-505, and while this will likely improve as we proceed into the future, there is still the very good likelihood that they’ll look more like the inside of a submarine and less like the main cabin of a 767.

Look at what you have: you miss the woman in the middle of the picture (Anousheh Ansari, the first Iranian into space who visited the ISS in September, 2006) and you’re left with so many other targets. Hit a computer monitor, or one of the many cameras, or fans, or filters—or the walls. On a working spacecraft everything is suppose to be working, and if you hit one, then you are probably going to have . . . trouble.

Let us address one other thing that most science fiction seems to forget in the effort to bring us some action. A shot from a Beretta 92F will be about 150 decibels; 130 decibels is considered painful for the majority of people. Cracking off a few rounds at an open range probably won’t be much of a problem, but in a tin can like the ISS—you didn’t need your hearing anyway, did you?

So remember, you shoot in here, you hit my keyboard, I’m gonna be real mad!

And if I want to look at something a tad more science fictiony:

Lots of panels, lot of things to mess up, lots of windows. Lots of people with weapons. What could go wrong?

Maybe it would be better if you go with energy weapons . . .

Energy weapons were sort of like manna from heaven for science fiction stories. They never needed reloading, just a quick charge back at the ship when you were through burning down bad guys. They seemed to possess nearly unlimited shots, and you could do anything with those shots. Need to burn off a lock? Energy weapon. Need to cut a whole in a wall? Energy weapon. Need to kill everyone in a room with one sweep? Energy weapon. Need to disintegrate your better half? Energy weapon.

Energy weapons were, in some settings, the Swiss Army Knife of storytelling—I’m looking at you, Star Trek. A lot of this was due to not knowing what was possible, or what might happen if you extrapolate current technology into the future. It’s sort of how we got phasers: the hand weapon of choice for the original Star Trek was going to be the laser, then Gene Roddenberry realized that within a very short time someone would discover that his lasers wouldn’t ever do what the real ones do, so erase the “L”, pencil in “Ph”, and there you have it—the weapon of the future!

Are energy weapons out of the question? No, not really. It’s just that they won’t be something you can carry in a breakaway holster on your leg that you can use the next time you want to start an argument about who drew first. A few current designs indicate a weapon that may look a bit like a camera, with an aperture large enough to focus the beam. They will require a lot of juice to run as well, and under certain situations those battery packs could become somewhat dangerous to the user: one calculation I saw estimated that a laser pistol that carried a fifty shot pack with a power rating of five kilojoules a shot is pretty much the same as carrying around a small grenade. And should someone get lucky and hit your weapon’s battery pack—well, you didn’t need whatever extremity was holding your pistol at the time, did you?

You’ll also need to consider that these weapons will need to vent heat—five kilojoules a shot does some serious cooking after a while. While the beam from your weapon may be invisible, anyone with an IR setup will see your weapon’s exhaust heat pretty well, and if you happen to be outside your space ship when all the shooting starts, a set of IR goggles will be your best friend when you want to find the person shooting at you.

But, now, if we want to talk power, I give you the phaser—

As already mentioned, the phaser came about because there was concern that lasers on Star Trek would be seen as impossible. So the name was changed and we have the weapon we all know and love.

The original phasers had the following settings: Stun, Heat, Disrupt, Dematerialize, and Overload; Kill was added later because someone might need a body if they wanted to collect a bounty. Stun and Heat are pretty easy to figure out, and we saw both used quite a lot. Kill—enough said. Disrupt and Dematerialize—well, now, Disrupt would likely short out someone’s nervous system enough that they’re going to die. Dematerialize is another word for “disintegrate,” and we also saw this happen a lot of Star Trek, and it happened without the walled of a room catching fire or the air heating up to the level of a super sauna. Sure, it could be argued that bonds holding the atoms together were “broken down”, just as the Zat’nik’tel did on Stargate SG-1, but all that mass turning to energy has to go somewhere, and that somewhere didn’t result in a big boom—we can probably thank Q for changing the laws of the universe for us in those instances.

We can actually take a guess at how much energy a Type-1 Phaser from the Original Series held, because they were used to repower a shuttlecraft in the episode, The Galileo Seven. I’ll let Walter Chung from the Project Rho website explain:

In the original Star Trek episode The Galileo Seven, Mr. Scott drains the energy out of a bunch of phaser pistols into the engines of the shuttlecraft. Doing some pointless calculations based on a very unscientific script we can hazard a guess at the energy content of a phaser pistol.

Some website I found claimed that a shuttlecraft was 17 metric tons. Assume that each crewmember is 68 kilos (150 pounds), this adds another 476 kilos for the seven crewmembers. The shuttle doesn’t quite make orbit. As an upper limit, to make orbit would require a deltaV of around 8 km/s. Plugging this into the equation for kinetic energy gives us an energy requirement of about 5.6e11 joules. There appears to be six phaser pistols drained, so each phaser contains 5.6e11 / 6 = 9.3e10 joules.

How much is 9.3e10 joules? Well, it is 9.3e10 * 2.7778e-7 = 26,000 kilowatt-hours or 9.3e10 / 4,500,000 = 21,000 kilograms of TNT. Well, let’s face it, it takes lots of energy to vaporize a human being with one zap.

So there you have it: everyone issued a standard phaser aboard the starship Enterprise was pretty much walking around with the equivalent of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki on their hip. And you thought being a redshirt was dangerous before getting a weapon.

But lets forget phaser and talk about particle beam weapons, ‘cause they gotta be better, right? There are some people who feel they aren’t, because the backscatter radiation from each shot is going to be of the ionizing kind, and that’s the bad kind of radiation, which means every time you fire your weapon—whether it be on Babylon 5 or while busting ghosts in New York City—you’re going to eventually kill yourself with all the lethal radiation you’re popping off. There are some, however, who disagree, who believe that you’re only going to run into that “Lethal Radiation Bad” problem with really big honking particle weapons. If you’d like to read a discussion on the matter, and you don’t mind two people throwing around math way above most of our pay grades, hop on over to the Atomic Rockets site and have a read.

So what constitutes an exotic weapon? Tasers for one, pulsed energy weapons that are meant to be non-lethal for another. Just about anything that DARPA is working on can likely be considered exotic. You want science fiction exotic, think of the Zorg’s ZF-1 from The Fifth Element; think of Logan’s Gun from Logan’s Run; think of The Lawgiver from Judge Dredd. Any kind of super weapon that does it all can be viewed as exotic, and most of these are pretty handwavium—

But you know that expression, “Old is New Again”? Think of the space ax. Think of a mace. Think of a bow and arrow. Go back and look at the ISS, think about how bad using a pistol in there would be, then think about using a ka-bar. Sure, hand-to-hand fighting in zero gee isn’t going to be a lot of fun, but it’s better than having some fool fire off a shotgun and take out the air scrubbers for the module you’re currently hiding.

In fact, while out driving this morning, I thought of something that could be used as a good exotic weapon. Carbon-carbon filament all around, no need for a trigger guard since it’s harmless without a bolt, small laser used for targeting. Uses a cartridge with ten bolts, each bolt about four hundred fifteen grains, estimated velocity ninety meters per second. Almost no recoil, the laser pointer you’re using is invisible until you paint your target, and the bolts will fly straight and not be affected by air resistance. Using the right bolt tips, you’ll penetrate several inches of thick material, and even if you don’t drill into the flesh of your target, you’ve a great chance of compromising their suit.

Better yet, go for the face plate. You can always get a new visor.

Acknowledged sources:

Atomic Rockets (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/)

Memory Alpha (http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Portal:Main)

The following game review was written by Raymond Frazee.

The tabletop RPG Eclipse Phase is published by its creators, Posthuman Studios.

What is it about Eclipse Phase that has me jonesing for this game? Is it dystopia enough? Hell yes. Is there enough future tech to choke a blue whale? Of course. Is the metaworld rich enough to make a person want to live there, even though it’s an extremely hostile alien environment from our current point of view? You know it.

But the real reason is far more simple: it’s a hell of a game. From the moment you turn the first page (does one actually turn the page of a PDF?) you are pulled into the environment like a hunk of flotsam sitting above an event horizon. It fills you up and makes you experience the unlimited scope of the adventures offered. It has you realizing that this isn’t a game, it’s a way of life . . . and that life ain’t necessarily gonna be pretty.

Already the accolades are in: Origins Award for Best RPG of the Year, 2010; Gold for Best Writing, Silver for Best Cover, Best Product, 2010 ENnie Awards. Sure, this isn’t the first time a game received a boat-load of accolades and then went on to crash and burn, but with the publication of the first major supplement (as of the time of this writing that was Sunward, of which I have a review) and Internet support from fans, it is likely that the world that is Eclipse Phase will be around for us to enjoy for a while.

What is this all about? The game postulates a world where humanity has been reduced to about half a billion people (from a total population of eight billion) ten years after The Fall, an event where Earth was laid barren by hyper-aware AIs (though the antimatter bomb dropped on Chicago by humans didn’t do the Midwest a hell of a lot of good; so much for keeping my ancestral home in Northwest Indiana intact) and the survivors were scattered throughout the Solar System and, in some instances, on other worlds, thanks to the discovery of the Pandora Gates, the wormhole transporters to other systems. Oh, yes, we’ve seen the sort of world before; watch enough Terminator movies and you start to think this is just another clichéd variation of the genre. But you’d be wrong, ‘cause this is one of the few times a game has made an effort to take the player and allowed them to become immersed in such a world—and then take it to the next level and make it something so much more.

(The game actually feels more like it was driven by John Varley’s Eight Worlds collection than some Terminator riff, though it’s hard to say if humans are being driven out of the solar system—yet. It’s something we’ll have to wait on and see if it happens.)

What of the game mechanics? The game is percentile-based, with one trying to make the under target. Targets are calculated based upon your skills, and then are changed when difficulties and modifiers are used to adjust the base. Rolling doubles results in a critical of some kind, meaning the gods (defiantly lower case) are smiling upon you, or the universe is going to show you just what a tiny, insignificance little spot you are. 00 is always going to be a critical success and 99 is always going to be a critical failure—proving, once more, that there is not much of a gap between being a great hero and a complete mutt.

Eclipse Phase also has an option to allow a character to flip a die roll—making say an 81 become an 18—but that requires some luck expenditure (known in the game as “Moxie”, obviously a nod to the fact that trans-humanity started at some point during the First Great American Depression) on the part of the player. Mechanics also allow the GM to take into consideration margins of success and failure, and making that roll by the skin of one’s pod butt not as good a thing as the player was hoping for.

Character creation reflects the futuristic feeling of the game, because one takes into consideration of both the mind and the body of the character as separate entities—because they are. Each character is “ trans-human”, laying beyond the definition of today’s humanity. (I should say “could lay”, as there are factions in this world where being a good ‘ol Human is not only enough for them, it’s the law.) The mind (or “ego” as it’s called) is what actually defines the individual in Eclipse Phase; the body (or “morph”) is transitory and can be changed as often as your underwear (or, in the case of some gamers, more often—ba-da-boom!). Where there is only one ego per character, there are many morphs, and those can be used as needed. When creating a character the player they also create the morph they are going to begin the game in, and this remains with them until they want something else—or maybe until it’s destroyed.  But losing the body doesn’t mean you’re dead . . .

As one person told me, “This is the game with a reset switch”. One can die in this game many times, and yet never die. People back up their egos constantly, so even if you get tossed out an airlock and are never seen again, one could then get your latest back up, “resleeve it” (download your ego into a morph) and let you return to your life. Sure, you might have a gap in your mind from the point of your last back up to your death; then again, you might not want to remember all that happened to you over the last few weeks, so no great loss. Death actually becomes something of an inconvenience, and in a world where it looks like immortality is a reality, it seems like you need to work extra hard to reach the point where you check out for good. Because seeing how you will probably check out more than a few times in the game, that last is a very good thing. This last part brings up some interesting bookkeeping points: if a player is a bit negligent in keeping their ego backed up, and they have gone some weeks or even months between getting the ego put on the Seagate, then when they die and are resleeved they are likely to lose not only a lot of experience, they might also lose character advancement. GMs should remember to have their players makes copies of their characters and hand them over, date stamped, so when they finally take the big dive the GM can give them that sly smile before giving them their last ego. Not that a GM would ever do that deliberately . . .

To say the Eclipse Phase universe is dangerous is an understatement. Humanity is in a fragmented state of existence all over the Solar System. There are different political systems, different economic systems, different cooperative powers. Beyond that remains various individual threats: those who want even more radical change, those who want to stop evolution, those who desire an end to all restrictions, those who’d like to end it all. Behind all this are the guardians who work to ensure that the events leading to The Fall and the near death of humanity are never allowed to happen again. So, given all this, drama and conflict are inevitable, and you need to know what side you’re on. Though the question is more like: how the hell can you ever know?

This is the next step beyond the cyber movement of science fiction writers of the 1980’s and early 90’s. The “metal is better” meme has been altered and moved way the hell beyond that primitive concept: now, bio and nanotech are used to make a body as perfect, or useful, as possible. Anthropomorphism isn’t always the norm anymore: you need to work in null-gee, then resleeve into an Octomorph (think of a big, almost human-sized octopus); you need to get around a Luna city quickly, then resleeve into a Neo-Avian and take wing; need to do some work on Mars, then get your butt sleeved into a Ruster or a Flexbot and head out into the desert. Anyone can have a better body: all ya gotta do it build it.  (And before anyone asks; yes, there are morphs designed for combat known as furies. They are designed to kick ass and take names—with a caveat. I’ll let the game lay it out: “To offset tendencies for unruliness and macho behavior patterns, furies feature gene sequences promoting pack mentalities and cooperation, and they tend to be biologically female.” And a good GM will make you toe that line.)

People are wired directly into the Mesh (the “Internet” of this era) and are able to access information with nothing but a thought. It is such a common aspect of life that people are ridiculed openly if it seems like they are spending way too much time accessing the next witty quip to leave their mouth; if you can’t at least look as if you’re coming up with your ideas naturally, then what good is having a brain? A lot of information is there for the taking, only requiring the will to get it or having your muse (a personal AI helper program that is with your ego from birth) find it—but can you understand what you’ve found? One can also be inundated with data, fogged by augmented reality data taking up too many of your visual receptors. Your brain can be hacked. Your can be infected with a virus that could, on one hand, give you psi abilities—or, on the other hand, turn you into an alien freakazoid that needs to be put down with a tac nuke. The ego is software; don’t be afraid to re-write it.

Money isn’t a driving force in the game; getting goods and paying for services in a society where making something means throwing some raw materials in the nanofabricator and waiting for the goods to come out sometimes requires more than having a fat wallet (if there were such things as wallets in game). Rep is everything—it’s how you maintain your lifestyle, it’s how you call in favors—it’s how you get that sweet new morph you need in order to pull off your next gig. Cash is for the losers in the Jovian system and those in the Inner System still clinging to the old-world economy—the new economy means being a productive member in any of the social network to which you belong and using it to leverage your life. (Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong does not count, Hero! Now where’s my fracking pizza?)  Sure, you can burn your rep to get some bigger, chiller toys, but what’s that saying: “In Space, no one can rebuild your bridge once it’s toast”? Even more than in Night City, rep is everything. Lose too much and start looking for a menial job to call life.

Travel isn’t that big of a deal these days. Need to get to Venus from the Moon? Egocast your mind into a new morph at your destination. Slowboats are for losers. The only time you take a boat anywhere is if you’re in a cluster and you need to go station-to-station. Anything over ten million kilometers and you ride the light wave. Sure, there’s always the possibility that your signal might get ‘jacked and you’ll end up in VR storage, or downloaded into a synthmorph, but the odds are astronomical: a hell of a lot lower than the possibility that one of your many enemies finding out you’re taking a ship to Mars and deciding to send a copy of his ego to take over the computer on your vessel and fly the damn thing into Phobos at thirty kps (assuming it isn’t shot down long before it reaches Phobos, but hey, same result in the end, right?). The real travel is to the stars through the Pandora Gates.  What’s on the other side? Each world is pretty much a secret, and a lot of people would tell you all about it if they ever came back alive.

 Religion is dead, or at least morphed beyond a historical recognition. Gender roles are irrelevant in a world where changing ones form is easier than getting a new ID. Relationships are unusual when immortality looms large and the ability to be just about anyone is the norm. Living is always gonna be strange when you might call home a rock under the enormous sun, or on a cliffside on Mars, or a frozen ice cube a billion kilometers from where your ancestors first learned to walk.

This game is the cyberpunk concept flipped on its head and cranked to eleven. At least in the old cyberpunk world you only had to worry about being killed once: in the world of Eclipse Phase you can be killed dozens of times before the first adventure is over. There are hundreds of conspiracies, evil corporations galore, dozens of different socio-economic cultures, shadow organizations hell bent on furthering their own agendas, alien viruses and their ET overlords, and sane and crazy AIs fighting for the soul of humanity. It is as perfect a world as one is ever going to find in any RPG. It is a world where gray is the predominate color, where fighting for the right side may not be the same as the correct side, where it helps if you fully embrace your inner Tyler Durden. It’s a game that hasn’t come along in a very long time, and it made be a while before we sees the likes of this richness again.

Eclipse Phase is the game you should be playing right now!

Article written by Raymond Frazee. You can read Raymond’s blog at wideawakebutdreaming.wordpress.com

The Diaspora tabletop role-playing game is available from VSCA Publishing (authors: Brad Murray, C.W Marshall, Tim Dyke, Bryan Kerr).

The following game review was written by Raymond Frazee.

Finding a game with its roots in hard science fiction is a little like trying to bridle a unicorn. You can read all the early Heinlein and Clark you want and geek out on that retro-technical von Braun space stuff as hard as you like, but at the end of the day, if you game in space, your ship is gonna be laid out like Serenity, you’re probably going to get around using a space drive like the one used by the Enterprise, and if you wanna shoot it out with another ship you’re probably going to launch fighters and then close to point-blank range and fire broadsides like in Star Wars. Yeah, it all looks very pretty and fantastic—and doesn’t look the least bit like what would really happen out in the Black.

So if you want to game “hard sci-fi” what are you to do? You get Diaspora.

Diaspora is a different sort of beast, far more than your average space opera game. For one, you know right up front that the authors have spent a lot of time at the gaming table, mostly playing Traveler, and they have a great grasp of the genre. Two, they know what they like about gaming in a universe where “reality” is, for the most part, king. And three, they knew enough about systems to take a very good one that will get the players into the game in ways they never thought possible.

Diaspora uses the Fate system. Fate is used by Spirit of the Century as well and the recent The Dresden Files game. Fate is a unique 4dF system, using four “Fudge” dice (d6 in nature), with each die having a value of 2 “+”s, 2 “-“s and 2 blanks, creating values from +4 to -4. (If you do not have these dice 1-2 can be used for “+”, 3-4 for blank and 5-6 for “-“. One can also buy a computer dice roller that handles Fudge, like PrecisRoller. There is also iFudge, which is free and has its own die roller. Better yet, go to www.fudgery.net and use their interactive dice roller.) Fate uses a difficulty “Ladder” to show the complexity of a task, and this ranges from a +8 for Legendary to -2 for Terrible. One merely rolls the dice, adds their skill and checks the result again the ladder (or an opposing roll) to see the outcome.

The creation process for Diaspora is extremely interactive between the GM and the players, and is performed with everyone present. Rather than go through lots of stuffy tables so you can figure out build points, however, each player goes through a five-step process of taking their character from when they grew up on whatever hell hole of a planet they called home to where they currently are prior to the start of the game. You write up a paragraph or two about these times in your life—and tell everyone else at the table about it—and pick two Aspects that reflect the character at that point in their life. Aspects are nothing more than phrases about the person that can be used throughout the game to assist in getting tasks done if needed. For example, if at a period in the character’s life they’re always in trouble, “Always on the Lam” is a great Aspect; “Staying ahead of the Law” is even better. An interesting part of this process is that two of the periods in your character’s life involve two other player characters, so by the time the game starts there’s none of this, “You’re in a bar—“ nonsense to bring the party together.

After this come the skills and the stunts. Skills are listed in a pyramid form, with five skills at the first level, four at the next, and you kept moving down until the fifth and last, when you get your one hot stuff skill. With the exception of one skill none may be taken more than once, and the skills taken at each level should reflect what was going on in a character’s life at that time in their life. (Needless to say if your character spent all their time working at a mushroom farm on Big Muddy in their early life you might had a difficult time convincing the GM—as well as the other players; remember, this is all happening in the open—that they picked up Demolitions as a skill.)

Stunts are the things that players pick up for their characters that give them a bit of an “edge” when it comes to living the fast and dangerous life of every player character. Each character gets three Stunts, and there are four types of Stunts one can pick for their character: Military Grade, Have a Thing, Skill Substitution and Alter a Track (relating to one of the condition tracks for each character). There is also room for creating a special Stunt for a character, assuming the player and the GM can work out the details.

Stunts are applied to skills which allows additions or changes to them. For example, Military Grade Stunts allow someone with a skill to now have access to military grade items; having a Thing means you… have a thing that’s going to come in handy at some point. Because of the way Stunts are defined they can also be part of an Aspect, or even the Aspect itself. (Once again, this is worked out with the player and GM, and maybe other players. And this Stunt/Aspect should fit with something the character is doing at a certain point in their development.)

Players and the GM also develop something else together: the clusters in which the character live. Clusters represent the worlds and various settings in which the PCs will act, and putting these locations together is an interactive function of the game. In most space RPGs, planets tend to look a lot like the forests outside Vancouver or Vasquez Rocks (funny how that happens), but in Diaspora alien worlds can be just that: alien. And since the players are responsible for creating the clusters (it is suggested that each player build one or two planets using tables found in the game), if your characters should happen to find their ship in a solar systems filled with small, airless, mineral rich planets broiling under a huge red sun, you only have yourself to blame.

Now we get to where the “hard” in “hard sci-fi” comes into play in this game: spaceships. With the exception of the “slipstream drive” that allows one to travel from cluster to cluster within the game (think of the Alderson Drive jump points in The Mote in God’s Eye), handwavium is completely dispelled as far as ship design goes. Ships tend to be large and bulky and comprised mostly of engines and fuel. There are no handy gravity generators and inertial dampers; you get gravity when you are thrusting, and if you have no way of generating your own gravity, you float when they are off. To get from Point A to Point B you thrust to the mid-point of your trip, turn off your engines, flip over, and start thrusting to slow down—which means takes days or weeks to go anywhere. Oh, and these ships have wings: not because they can fly down to a planet’s surface like a shuttle (these are true spaceships, mind you), but because they need a way to get rid of heat.

Now for a quick aside: please visit Project Rho and enjoy the writings of Winchell D. Chung. Mr. Chung has gone to great lengths to explain space flight from the scientific point of view, and lays out how, when we actually get to the point where we are flying from planet to planet, it will likely happen. Yes, there is a lot of math found here, but the math is good for you. And, yes, if you are looking for supporting evidence that despite what science say we will one day build ships that will allow us to make the Kessel Run in twelve parses, you will be sadly disappointed. On the other hand, if you are looking for supporting documentation that fits perfectly with the craft found in Diaspora, you won’t go wrong. I cannot stress visiting this site; if you game, or if you are simply interested in the science behind the conquest of space, this will end up becoming your own private Idaho. If nothing else, you will find out what Discovery from 2001 was supposed to look like, wings and all. You will also learn why stealth in space is impossible.

And lastly there is combat: person, space, social and platoon. Personal is as personal does; you and another get in each other’s faces and throw down. Space combat is handled very simply, but be warned: you are not going to find yourself hopping into a “space fighter” and zipping off to attack space pirates. More than likely you will try to out maneuver your opponent and remove yourself from their sphere of influence, while hoping you get off enough quick attacks from your weapons to disable them before they disable you. (This is where those wings I mentioned become a huge liability. Attacking those means attacking another ship’s ability to dissipate heat, this is a fantastic way to disable them, because if NPCs—or players—can’t get rid of the heat being generated by your vessel, your crew cooks.) Social combat is anything that involves situations with no clear-cut means of resolution—and this does not mean whipping out a pistol and blowing someone away, but rather, at times, the fine art of negotiation, debate, and sometimes seduction. And platoon combat is the art of large-scale combat. Be it three or thirty people, if you need to solve a problem that involves a great deal of heavy firepower, it’s here.

Actually, I lied: here is the lastly, and it’s a very good lastly, because it deals with the economy of Fate Points, and how they not only affect your character but game play. Every character gets 5 Fate Points—the same goes for space ships—while the GM has Fate Points to burn. A player (or GM) can use them to not only change outcomes of interactions, but force changes to the story and create in-game effects. A player can burn a Fate Point to get something they want (“My character is really good at Holding His Breath, so getting down fifty meters of corridor filled with knockout gas is not a problem”). At the same time the GM can try and give Fate Points to players to get an effect they want if they feel it’s warranted (“Sure you can, but that gas is a bit caustic, so you’re going to take a little damage”). Note that a player never has to accept whatever Fate the GM is trying to sell, but at the same time the GM can make things difficult for a player whenever they try to change Fate. It’s all give and take, buying and selling, and when the game gets going it’s possible to get as free-wheeling and involved as the players and GM would like.

And that’s the greatest thing about Diaspora: it’s not simply a case of the GM telling a story and the players following along. The game is designed to be a very interactive adventure, one where the players are as much the storytellers as the GM. The guiding principal of the game is “Say Yes or Roll the Dice”; in other words, the GM goes with an idea a player is selling, or sets the difficulty and has the player roll. It’s okay for the GM to say, “Yes, but—“ if they like, but coming right out and saying “No, you can’t do that” isn’t what the game is about. Find a way to give the player what they want while keeping true to the spirit of the game. Make Fate play a part in how the story is told.

Diaspora is a fantastic game. It dares go places that others don’t. It has the gritty feel of a trip to the outlands, the sort of retro space feel that harkens back to 50’s B-movies. Not everyone is going to like the idea of crawling about in space to get from one system to another and visiting hell holes not fit for man nor beast. But if you love adventure, and you love the storytelling aspect of role playing, Diaspora is for you. If nothing else, you may discover Fate isn’t as cruel a mistress as she’s made out.

The Diaspora tabletop role-playing game is available from VSCA Publishing (authors: Brad Murray, C.W Marshall, Tim Dyke, Bryan Kerr).