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[bryant]

I promised the Lensman series, and thus the Lensman series will be mashed. Onwards, stalwart companions!

If you haven’t read the Lensman books, you should. They are a fundamental part of science fiction history; get past the sexism and you’ll find a surprisingly liberal — even radical — set of ideals. Particularly in Children of the Lens. You’ll also find big explosions, and everyone likes big explosions.

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Comments

[tayefeth.livejournal.com]

Sadly for my enlightenment, sexism generally causes me to throw books against walls, no matter which gender is favored.

[xiombarg.livejournal.com]

The sexism is suprisingly light. It's more like Smith doesn't understand women, so sexism creeps in because he doesn't know any better. And he tries to fix it later.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Is the fact that the totalitarian enemy is drug-addicted part of the Lensman source material? Because it might be more colorful to have the freedom-loving pirates be the drug users.

[bryant]

Alas, it is. I badly wanted to make the pirates drug-users; it's more honest to the source material. But the struggle for Civilization in the Lensman books is in large part the struggle against the drug trade. It's so integral to the books that I couldn't break away from it.

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

Yeah, its a huge theme in the books.

Which means the William S Burroughs pirates are just right out.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

I figured. Never actually read Lensman, though I have read some other Doc Smith space opera. "Skylark of Space", I think?

Maybe there could be good drugs and bad drugs?

A Burroughsian game would be a good time.

[bryant]

You've seen Over the Edge, right?

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah. I guess I meant to type "a Burroughsian pirate game" (which Jeremiah has threatened before). Not that you couldn't have pirates in OtE.

[bryant]

Yeah, and there's the always popular "move Al Amarja to another time" game. (Popular in the relative sense, that is.) So you could do Monique D'Aubainne, pirate queen...

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

Nice. I also like (was it Ken Hite's idea?) the "William S. Burroughs' John Carter Drug-Lord of Mars" mashup.

Hey: I was trying to think up an original riff on either the Jungle Lord or Great White Hunter archetype for Brant's game tonight. Maybe I'll be William S Burroughs' Tarzan. Has this been done, I wonder?

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

ps. "Has this been done?" was a joke.

I may still do the character, though.

[xiombarg.livejournal.com]

Interesting. You emphasized the struggle beetween tyranny and freedom, while I emphasized the general fact that the Lensmen cannot be corrupted.

[robotnik.livejournal.com]

That's come to be perhaps my favorite part of the Monday Mashups, even (perhaps especially) the many that I don't get around to contributing to: the elements of X that each Masher pulls out as "the essential X" or "what X is about". They vary considerably and always lead me to see X in a new light.

My other favorite part of the Mashups is how Bryant appears to be intimately familiar with every obscure game setting in existence.