Recently, on my personal youtube channel (it's great, if you enjoy what I do here but wish it was somehow even more half-assed), I speculated on what it means to "like" something. You know the score - how something can be notably well-made, admirably virtuous, or fill a niche you've been desperately craving, but you still don't like it, or the opposite, where something is grotesque, detestable, roughly made, or completely unnecessary and yet, despite yourself, you do like it. That's a weird phenomenon. And my conclusion, as half-assed as it was, was that pleasure and pain were transitory experiences, meaningful only to the degree that they are intermittent and contingent, but that "liking something" was a sustainable state of being. If you "like something" it's because you recognize in it a potential to sort of . . . be in your life. That it's something that is neither diminished by repetition nor a distraction in its absence (which is what separates "liking something" from addiction.)
It was a kind of a silly thing to speculate about, but it shed some useful light on an issue that I've been dealing with for a while - that I can be a total curmudgeon about things I claim to enjoy. It's a pattern I fall into. I spent most of my time with Eberron complaining that it wasn't 19th century enough, my general take on Planescape is "Planescape is bad," and I've repeatedly and unreservedly said that Mage: the Ascension should not exist. And those three of my favorite games. Seriously.
I worry that it makes me look like an unpleasable grump. "Oh, John just likes complaining about things, how . . . ordinary." But I don't think that's it. Or, at least, I hope that's not it, and I'm willing to latch on to any alternative to get me out of this jam, no matter how much sophistry it requires. What I think is going on is that the games I enjoy are those which provide a sustainable provocation of curiosity. The displeasure I feel when Planescape leans on the alignment system or fails to contemplate the scope of infinity, that's just an intermittent sensation, quickly brushed aside and vastly outweighed by the satisfaction I derive from imagining what the setting would look like if those issues were mitigated.
It's an instructive distinction to make, because it also helps me understand something about the games I don't like. Such as Mage: the Awakening. Now, if we were to get into some ill-advised flame war about the relative merits of various versions of White Wolf's Mage, I would gladly stipulate that Awakening is superior. I say "Mage: the Ascension shouldn't exist," but I don't think that about Mage: the Awakening. Not only is it permissible for Awakening to exist, I think it's good that it does. The world is a better place because White Wolf made Mage: the Awakening, which is not at all a sentiment that I would extend to Ascension. (Look, I don't know what to say. It shouldn't exist. It arguably makes the world a worse place by existing. And if you experience it, it will most likely make you a worse person as a consequence, at least temporarily. But it's great. I love it.)
However, despite Mage: the Awakening being the superior game, the part that causes me the most displeasure - its overall Gnosticism - is the best thing about it. "Mage: the Awakening without the Gnosticism" is a ridiculous thing to want, and it wouldn't make the game better (and yes, yes, I know I've asked for exactly that on multiple occasions, and I do believe that it would be a game genuinely more in line with my preferences, but this latest round of self-reflection has convinced me that my preferences, in this case and this case only, are hopelessly pedestrian). It would make the game less interesting, less unique. I can't really have a sustainable relationship with Mage: the Awakening because sometimes it causes me pain and sometimes it gives me pleasure, but it only rarely provokes my curiosity. I don't really care what it might look like if my issues were somehow addressed.
Which brings us, at last to Transhuman Space. All of the above conversation was completely necessary because it clarifies my relationship to this setting - it's right on the line. Everything that is more interesting (to me) than Transhuman Space, I enjoy, and everything that is less interesting (to me), I don't enjoy. And as far as Transhuman Space itself is concerned . . . eh, it's about 50-50.
To an almost ludicrous degree of precision. If the final book I'd read for the line was Under Pressure, my retrospective for the series would be "It's fascinating, in its own way, but on the balance I have to call it [weak]." But since my final book is actually Toxic Memes (James Cascio with "additional material and contributions" from a dozen people), my final opinion is that Transhuman Space is fascinating . . . in it's own way.
I have no idea what to make of it, but it's probably a relevant data point that Mr Cascio is the author of Broken Dreams, the other major book that stops the setting from being hopelessly neoliberal. Toxic Memes is not quite as challenging as Broken Dreams, but I think that largely boils down to subject matter. This book is about ideas that exist inside the Transhuman Space universe, and it always engages with those ideas as ideas, so when we consider Toxic Memes as a tabletop roleplaying resource, it's kind of fuzzy about which parts are pop culture ephemera that can serve as background setting texture, which parts are major ideological and technological conflicts that can serve as campaign themes, and which parts are fringe ideas that can serve as inspiration for one-off adventures.
The most interesting use of the book would probably be to lean into this fuzziness and depict a world in the throes of "the democratization of the meme" where "a cognitive arms race" has ensured that "even reality is considered contingent." And it's a use that's held back only by Transhuman Space's stubborn refusal to be cyberpunk. This is the first book in the series to actually understand the internet, but it's still a setting that refuses to make sci-fi 2100 an absolute dumpster fire.
This is a world where you can pay $5000 for access to ParadigmMaker 2.1, consumer software that uses advanced AI modelling of human cognition to allow the users to craft unnaturally persuasive advertising campaigns, but operates on the assumption that countermeasures have kept pace and so the result is a world where memetics technology largely cancels itself out. It tells us that memetics is limited "most notably by the presence of other memeticists able to identify nascent memes and engineer their own memetic campaigns to stop or reshape them." But it doesn't really show us much of the times or places where "other memeticists" are not available.
So there's good stuff here. An advertising campaign backfires because the meme engineers screwed up and now there's a "58% likelihood that consumers will purchase Happy Cola for sexual or laundry uses." There's a subculture called "Epistopunks" that we sadly learn very little about. There was a weird mad-scientist guy who released a nanovirus to make about a thousand random European goths into pseudo-vampires and "at least some of them would appreciate the gesture," leading to a situation where "European authorities are about to track down, arrest, and forcibly cure the remaining viral vampires before their numbers grow."
But instead of putting these things in a world that has completely lost the plot, where "some two-bit fraud [can] buy some software and build himself up as the next coming of Osiris" is the ground state of existence, Toxic Memes takes the stance that conspiracy theories are fragile because widespread access to information means that it's easy to find the evidence to debunk them. Our real world is probably a hundred years behind Transhuman Space in terms of meme technology, and . . . Donald Trump is the fucking US President.
This is a book that has good ideas. Good insights. But it needs more audacity. Great apes are extinct in the wild and Exogenesis and GenTech Pacifica both released a version of the Erotopus ("a pleasure variant" of the uplifted octopus) and the setting still needs more audacity.
That's why I have to put Transhuman Space right on the line. Sometimes, I think about the more audacious version of the setting and it inspires me to speculate and sometimes I have the same thought and it inspires me to play Eclipse Phase. And now that I've read every book in the series, I'm forced to accept that I'll never get a decisive resolution that pushes me one way or the other. I feel pleasure at its highs (such as the bulk of Toxic Memes) and displeasure at its lows (such as its delicate treatment of the Green Duncanites) and I can't decide whether my ambivalence is sustainable or unsustainable.
Such is life, I guess. Join me in another 20 years, after I restart my blog from scratch and look back at the setting with 40 years of hindsight.
Ukss Contribution: ParadigmMaker 2.1. It's such a ghastly idea, that somehow perfectly encapsulates the banality of evil. Ukss doesn't have software per se, but I think I can find a corner of the setting where I might give "commercially available mind control" the sci-fi horror treatment it deserves.
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