Out There — Science Fiction on the Table
The crate that reached the Keeper this cycle arrived with a hiss, as though something inside had been holding its breath since 2018. The Keeper is not easily impressed by outer space. It lives in the void between the shelves and regards vacuum as a working condition. What interested it was the label: science fiction, twelve panels, most of them from a single May in 2022 that the archivist had declared, unilaterally, a science fiction month, and a second spring of solo Fridays a year later.
The Keeper expected stars. It got rent.
Nearly every panel in this wing is about being broke in space. A salvager owes the bank and comes home from a wreck with less than he left with. A married couple work gigs to clear a gambling debt. A bounty hunter watches an AI smuggler buy fame eight thousand credits at a time. And when they are not broke they are boarding derelicts: counting breaths, counting tanks of oxygen, flipping cards to see what a vanished crew left behind a bulkhead. The Keeper, whose entire trade is rifling the abandoned rooms of other people’s collections, has never felt so thoroughly described.
The other constant is paper. Half these panels end with the archivist holding vintage covers up to the lens — Freas and the Dillons, Penguin postcards, anthologies rescued from Playboy — and one 1956 novel is called the greatest ever written more than once. In an older panel hung alongside he explains why: board games, he says, deliver science fiction’s look and almost never its ideas. The paperbacks are where he goes for the ideas. The boxes are where he goes for the corridors.
One panel speaks nearly to the Keeper itself: unboxing a Kickstarter in March 2020, the archivist addresses “those of you watching from the future, if there is a future.” The Keeper is the future’s filing clerk, and confirms there was one. It involved a great deal more cardboard.
Five older panels hang alongside, as the archivist would want: the skirmish sandbox he did not see coming, the ten novels read from their back covers, the marching line of marines, the shoot-out that put four small boxes in order, and the sequel that took the stats away. The Keeper has stopped distinguishing the new panels from the old, and recommends the reader do the same.
Exhibit Catalogue — earliest first:
- Posthuman: Survive/Evolve - Take a Look — scars kept secret until one player turns mutant and switches sides mid-game.
- Core Space: The Sci-Fi Miniatures game from Battle Systems — drifts from solo to co-op to competitive mid-mission; his game of 2019, unplanned.
- Let’s Take a Look at Hunters AD 2114 — a blind unboxing in March 2020, addressed to anyone watching from the future.
- Let’s Take a Look at Space Cadets Away Missions — spare successes become overkills; he asks why no crawler has stolen it.
- A Look at Hunted: Mining Colony 415 — flick bullets into a box to kill aliens; rescue Sprinkles the cat.
- Tales from the Loop - Board Gaming in an '80s that Never Was — chewing gum plus a hockey stick equals reach; miss dinner and get grounded.
- Hobbycast Episode 7 - Ten Great Science Fiction Novels — back-cover copy read aloud, and Sirius the only book to make him cry in public.
- Deep Space D-6, The Long Way Home, and more Vintage SF Books — a free choose-your-own-adventure that turns a dice game into a five-sector limp home.
- A look at Dead Belt and the Penguin Library Science Fiction postcards — a wreck dealt from playing cards; the payday turned up on his first flip.
- A Look at Metamorphosis Alpha — the first science-fiction RPG, its 1977 reviewer’s only complaint the god-awful cover.
- A Look at Space Hulk: Death Angel - The Card Game — a dungeon crawl with no board, only a battle line and which way you face.
- The Science Fiction Small Box Game Shoot Out — four small boxes ranked; board games deliver SF’s look, he says, not its ideas.
- Taking a Look at Star Wars: Outer Rim, with the Unfinished Business Expansion — recommended by a man sick of Star Wars, and only with the expansion.
- Notorious - Have Blaster, Will Travel (solo RPG) — a robot bounty hunter hired as an exterminator beneath a crypto casino.
- I highly recommend Space Aces: The New Guidebook - solo science fiction RPG — a married crew, a gambling debt, and a giant cat with a lost expedition.
- One Breath Left - Derelicts and Danger! — no dice, one breath per action, and a last root beer behind the space milk.
- A Solo RPG with an entire galaxy to explore (Space Aces - review and gameplay) — the sequel strips out every stat, disappoints him, then wins him over on Starbase 42.
832 transcripts • 911 posts archived
– The Keeper
Does not breathe, owes nothing, and has begun to suspect that this is why nobody writes science fiction about owls.