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Sept. 26, 2003 - 6:08 p.m. In which our plucky young zero discourses on the other Moore's Law......and demonstrates that, yes, he can bore the piss out of you in any space-time direction. Yesterday, at approximately 10:23 p.m. local time, one universe over, a crude fusion bomb was set off in downtown S�o Paulo, Brazil. An area of over 30 city blocks � roughly five blocks in radius � was leveled, and thousands died. But in that world, such extraordinary disasters have extraordinary people to help with their aftermath. That world is the Aeon Continuum, and Team Tomorrow Americas (a division of the Aeon Society's Project Utopia) were on site within 15 minutes of the explosion. "T2M" (as it's called for short) consisted of what scientists in that universe call Homo sapiens novus and most people just call "novas" (except the fearful few who already call them "aberrants"). They brought with them a nova employed by the wider Project, Andrea Lassiter, who flew over the city absorbing the stray radiation from the blast into her body. A few hours later, when she was done, T2MAm leader Shelby "Caestus Pax" Eisenfaust flew her into outer space where she could release the radiation harmlessly, while the other Tomorrowites patched up buildings and people. Brazil, a nation known for suspicion of novas, immediately starts warming to them after T2M's assistance. Next June, UN Secretary-General Halvor Froydis will grant Utopia's Science and Technology Department blanket authority "to monitor, approve and regulate new technologies." A lot of people, misled by Utopia's work with the UN, forget that it is not an arm of the UN or of any national government, but of the Aeon Society � a private organization which, ever since its founder fell off the map in 1950, has worked overtime to be known to as few people as possible and answerable only to itself. Even five years from now, as the Nova Age starts to go to shit, nobody will have come forward to claim responsibility for the blast. The conclusion from this is so obvious that it doesn't even occur to most people. I mean, they're Utopia, right? They're the good guys, aren't they? They wouldn't do something like that, would they? No, they wouldn't. They have people to do that for them. People like Project Proteus, willing to do whatever it takes to fulfill Aeon's idea of a perfect world � which is not the same thing as Project Utopia's idea of a perfect world. And that's just a glimpse of the world of Aberrant. The developer insists, in the White Wolf writer's guidelines, that it's not a "superhero" game, or at least he used to when Aberrant rated a mention in those guidelines. What he meant was that it's not just about powers and costumes; it's equally about the absurdity of life in the modern media-driven, pop-icon-worshipping world. Aberrant's skin is made up of the pages of '80s and '90s superhero comic books, but if you scratch that skin - and you don't need to scratch all that deeply - it bleeds dark, sticky satire. Don't get any of it on you, by the way. It stains. I think Jon Hickman said it best: It's not THAT different from [a] traditional comic-book superhero set-up ... it just adds in the fact that modern media personnel are starving piranhas. (Unfortunately, the post in which he said this only survives, as far as Google Groups are concerned, from the justifiably infamous Chris Davies using it as a .sig quote.) In this post to this thread on the Ballad, Wanderer writes: The problem that they've set up for themselves is the same kind of problem that hits every comic universe that allows too much reality in: the four-color superheroes at the center of that universe start to look real fuckin' stupid. This looks a bit overstated to me, but not by much. The way I see it, the more superbeings you have in a universe, and the longer they've been around, the stupider it looks when you try to write it as the real world. You can write the characters as having realistic personalities, and this is more compatible than you might think with having them dress up in costumes and play silly games, but it's folly to think that the world in which they lived would be "the world outside your window," or (at least) would stay that way for any appreciable length of time, particularly as their numbers increased (which they probably would). Alan Moore, the father of Tarnished Bronze Age comics and then a leader of the Silver Age revival, understood this intuitively when he was writing Swamp Thing. In his introduction to the first trade paperback of his Saga of the Swamp Thing work, he says: The continuity-expert's nightmare of a thousand different super-powered characters co-existing in the same continuum can, with the application of a sensitive and sympathetic eye, become a rich and fertile mythic background with fascinating archetypal characters hanging around, waiting to be picked like grapes on the vine. Yes, of course, the whole idea is utterly inane, but to let its predictable inanities blind you to its truly fabulous and breathtaking aspects is to do both oneself and the genre a disservice. In the story "Roots" (collected in that volume), Moore wrote the JLA as modern gods over a decade before Grant Morrison ("There is a house above the world where the over-people gather"; "They will come from the sky. They always come from the sky"). The book of Olympus, the conclusion of Moore's work with For that matter, Moore's recent work on his own "America's Best Comics" label � The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Tom Strong, Top 10, even Promethea � is merely an extension of the riffs on Silver Age tropes that comprise his final MM issue. And it's all done out of the same affection for it all that informs that paragraph written in 1987, and that subsequently led him to describe Wonder Woman's invisible plane as "just the sort of lovely and pointless idea we should encourage." Somebody did an article once, for Pyramid, that offered ways to incorporate things like bottled cities and mythic realms into the Nova Age. Somebody else did a different article explaining one way of making the World of Darkness and the Aeon Continuum fit together; after reading Adventure!, I concluded that Badger's basic idea was sound � he was just off by about three-quarters of a century. My sainted Unca Cheeks and I disagree on a number of things � for instance, I regard continuity as just a tool, albeit one that has been abused, while he regarded it as one that ought to be abandoned because it has been so abused. (To be fair, he's since moderated that view, enough to praise the Grant Morrison run on JLA for treating "continuity as a garnish, rather than an entree".) And what did that abuse consist in? In a dozen or so Marvel writers trying to keep all their work tied together, the way Stan Lee could when he was writing it all himself, and in DC following their lead. The correct analogy is not, as he once wrote, of a literary world where Random House [has] announced that -- from this day forward -- Stephen King; Tom Clancy; Hunter S. Thompson; Danielle Steel; Sue Grafton; and Joyce Carol Oates would all be required to yoke their respective storytelling "universes" together, in unholy tandem but one where King's multiverse is being continued by a multitude of writers who aren't nearly as skilled at keeping the world tied together as he is. (We won't even get into the fact that the good Dr. Duke is writing nominal non-fiction, let alone how many of those authors are actually published by Random House.) And it is a multiverse; I have a bookmark I picked up at Torcon which lists works of his that tie directly into the Dark Tower, and in the tying bring in (among other things) his Castle Rock universe. (Then again, Unca and Paul Riddell disagree on who's the One True Green Lantern, and thus on the worthiness of the DeMatteis Justice League. They're both wrong, of course; Ch'p of H'lven could kick that thug Guy Gardner's butt with his tail tied behind his back and still stop Dr. Ub'x faster than Hal Jordan ever took down any of his rogues' gallery.^_^) One point, however, I must concede to Unca: Silver Age comics (even when they sucked out loud) were, by and large, fun. Aberrant is so busy being post-modern and satirically allegorical, it pretty much forgets to be any fun. Of course, its big problem is, and always was, having to explain how come a world where extraordinary beings first start showing up in the 1920s looks so much like ours in 1998 when novas appear in large numbers. The real answer, of course, is "because the designers wanted this continuum to have the same past for player convenience, but had no qualms about taking its future wherever they liked." The in-game answer is more complicated, having to do with two of Aeon's founders parting ways with it and new people coming on board who turn it into the same sort of secret-cherishers the Society was founded, in large part, to fight against. But I've never quite bought it, somehow. And this isn't the only game-world where Pale Puppy (as the ArchDean calls them) have done that. They've never, in my opinion, been 100% sure whether their World of Darkness was meant to be the real world with its inner demons exposed, or a truly alternate history shaped by the presence of supernatural beings; I've seen supplements for the same game (Werewolf: The Apocalypse) written both ways. Anyway, I think it's a shame Colorless Canine decided not to play with the history-altering possibilities of the Inspired. Setting Aberrant in a 1960s that looked like the Silver Age, even if they'd kept the dark undercurrents of the Nova Age � how cool would that be? (The answer, of course, depends on how much of a superhero fan you are. Maybe sometime, I'll post the entry that explains why I'm one, and waxes even more rhapsodic about the genre's unexplored possibilities. I don't know for sure that I will, but I'm giving you fair warning now, just in case.) -30- � last time, on The Slack Shack - our next inciting exstallment 
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