The Cambias Digression

Notes and thoughts on everything from what I had for breakfast to the fate of the Universe.

  • Sandbox or Quest? Yes.

    The style of a game campaign mirrors the fictional genres it is based on. The original Dungeons & Dragons was inspired by two strands of fantasy. The first was the fantasy adventures of Robert E. Howard, Jack Vance, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Fritz Leiber — tales of roguish wanderers more or less stumbling across situations…

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  • Congratulations Dragon Award Winners!

    For several years now I've been telling everyone who'll listen that the major awards for science fiction and fantasy were in danger of becoming too obscure. The Nebulas are selected by the membership of SFWA, but don't get much publicity because (sadly) the organization isn't well-known outside the fraternity of SF professionals. The Hugo Award…

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  • Greetings, Fellow Cyborgs!

    I write science fiction, and one enduring trope of science fiction is the idea of combining humans and machines — "cyborgs," to use the term popularized in the 1960s. The notion is far older, going back to Neil R. Jones's "Professor Jameson" stories, if not to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man That Was Used Up."…

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  • The Joy of Research

    My name is Jim, and I'm addicted to doing research. There. I've said it and I'm not sorry, either. When I'm cured of this addiction just put me in the ground because I'm done. How bad is my research addiction? Let me tell you my shame. For a while I played an online game called…

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  • Nostalgie du Geek: My First Dungeons and Dragons Game

    I've been playing roleplaying games for 39 years now. A friend showed me his copy of the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set in the summer 1977 and I was hooked right away. I believe I got my first set for my birthday that Fall. Given that it saw the publication of D&D and the global…

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  • MidAmeriCon II, Day 4!

    Sunday was a light day for me, and for everyone else as the con wound down. Lots of people standing in hotel lobbies having conversations while holding suitcases. My only event on the 21st was a panel on "How To Start A Writing Group" which went extremely well. I was the moderator, and my panelists…

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  • MidAmeriCon II, Day 3!

    Saturday was a light-schedule day for me. I had a swim and a reasonably-priced breakfast at the Silver Spoon Diner across the street from my hotel, then went to the convention center to do a reading. I read two stories, "Parsifal (Prix Fixe)" which ran originally in F&SF, and "A Right Jolly Old . .…

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  • MidAmeriCon II, Day 2!

    I got up early and had a swim in the hotel pool and a substantial breakfast (the breakfast menu at the Kansas City Marriott Downtown is an exact duplicate of the breakfast menu at the Boston Westin Waterfront hotel, which implies they both buy from the same food-supply company). Then off to the convention center…

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  • MidAmeriCon II, Day 1!

    You may wonder why I refer to Thursday, August 18th as Day 1 of the convention, when there were several events on Wednesday the 17th. To answer that I must refer you to Southwest Airlines, which decided to cancel my Wednesday morning flight so that I didn't arrive in Kansas City until Thursday. So for…

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  • A Political Paradox

    In most of the United States, if your vote matters, then it doesn't matter. Huh? Let me explain. We're all familiar with the increasingly polarized nature of our national politics. More and more, the country is divided into "Red" and "Blue" states. I happen to live in one of the Bluest of the Blue States:…

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The Worldbuilding Index