Monday 6 December 1999

Pic of the day: "Fantastic worlds" add on for Civilization 2. Still recommended for the playful reader, though it's not the very newest out there.

I'm on my second game of the Civ2 scenarion "Mars now!" from the scenario and expansion CD "Fantastic Worlds". I regard the Mars scenario as head and shoulders best, but that could be because I sort of like Mars. When I was a kid, I assumed that by 2000 there would be people there. Explorers at least, if not quite a full fledged base yet. Well, I still haven't heard from the Mars Polar Lander that was suppose to touch down a few days ago. Good thing there were no people on board...

Playing the scenario again (this time as the French) I noticed a bit more. For instance the Militarism government (the Mars equivalent of fundamentalism) is available much earlier than in the standard Civ2 game. It seems that the whole science is really changed, as well as all units and city improvements. It is really like getting a whole new strategy game. This shows the genius of the guys who made Civ2 in the first place.

I came across an old floppy yesterday. It turned out to contain 14 chapters of fantasy story I wrote in December 1995. It's in New Norwegian, so there's not much sense in putting it on the Net. (Anyway, it's in Write format and only half finished.) Still, it was nice to see it again. I vaguely remembered the story, but I laughed out loud many times as I read it. I seem to have had a great sense of humor four years ago. Or it could be that it is after all easier for me to write in my native language.

The story was based on the now well tested literary device of having a main character from our world be magickally transferred to an alternate reality filled with magic and stuff. In this case he is sort of summoned by a young quartergoddess in trouble, and neither she nor anyone else have any idea how to get him back. This is fairly representative for the whole story. Powerful but haphazard magic abounds, thanks to the plethora of minor deities that populate that world.

I made a point out of the fact that the "gods" there are not God in any world religion sense, but "magic supermen". Somewhat on the scale of Odin, Zevs and the gang. They are still nothing but amazing to the random human, of course. And not too infrequently, this admiration leads to the birth of demigods, who then lead to quartergods and such. These are still doing the odd bit of magic, though it is sort of random how much and what is inherited in each case. The typical demigod lives for a few centuries, and reaches some plateu in their powers.

As for the "gods", they supposedly live for millenia. Indeed, there are no hints that they can die from natural causes, because to qualify for this august group you have to have some pretty good magical control over matter and energy, including your own body. Given this, and the fact that they breed, what keeps a world from getting overpopulated by minor deities? Of course I have given this some thought, too! :)

There is of course the occasional divine war or some such, in which a more powerful deity crushes a less powerful, or more likely, the gods gang up on a deity gone rogue. Others are presumably too ambitious, and in their experiments to harness even more power they go boom. But the big ones, the steadily and ever growing senior gods, they don't go boom. They just fade away. Presumably they get less and less interested in the petty affairs of mortals, the fickleness of worship and the simple pleasures of human or demigod company. As they grow up, their horizons expand and they no longer bother about staking a claim to some part of a small lukewarm planet. They start to get interests elsewhere, and pay less attention. Perhaps they start taking leaves of absence. They may endorse a descentant or a former servant to take care of public relations and trivial matters. And one day the old deity has been gone for so long that people just stick with the new and forget about the old, who fades into the mists of myth ...

Isn't that sort of cute? In old Earth mythologies, various deities had their own planet ... among them the above mentioned Mars, which was supposed to belong to the god of war. In my fantasy world, established gods may actually move on to more challenging planets, perhaps in other star systems, leaving Earth be as a playground for new generations.

Of course there are other forms of fantasy worlds than the two examples I've mentioned above. Many people visit pre-made fantasy worlds in the form of novels or films. Not to mention the ever popular "soap operas" on television. And how many haven't created their own little fantasy worlds in their own head? From the invisible friends of small kids to the less than decent fantasies of most teenagers. The human fantasy permeates our lives. Oh, it would be quite possible to function without fantasy, on cold truth alone. But such a human - and they may exist, for all I know - would have a big problem understanding other people and what makes us tick.

When I was young, much younger than today, I saw the world in black and white: Truth and lies. Fantasy was lies, and as such evil. Today I am not so sure. I think fantasy is the basic skill of combining dream and reality while still being aware which is which. While I acknowledge the risk of turning my back on the real world, I also think there are benefits of keeping an open and childlike mind. Sometimes I am reminded of a line from one of my all time favorite comic books, "Solar, man of the atom": We fail to imagine and we are punished with reality.

Have a good reality, all and one.