INTRODUCTION
by Piers Anthony
This is a game book based on my science fiction series, Bio of a Space Tyrant. If you have read one or more of these novels, it should help you, because you will understand the basic situation. However, you can still play the game if you have never heard of me or this series, because the rules will be explained to you in this volume. If you are impatient to get started, you can skip this introduction and get on with it. After all, you came here for wild adventure, not a dull essay.
But for those of you who are tolerant of essays, I have some background on the background. That is, the background of this game is my Space Tyrant series, but the series itself had its own background, which most of the readers of the novels don't know about. If you understand about this double background, it just might help you to make better decisions in the game. The person who made up the game probably hasn't bothered to read this essay, so you might even be able to outsmart her because you know something she doesn't. On the other hand, you might mess up even worse; I'm not making any promises here.
The project started when I went to the publisher and proposed to do a space opera series. Now, space opera is not an opera played in space, though a writer named Jack Vance once wrote a novel about that, entitled Space Opera. Rather, it is old-fashioned science fiction, just the way that Sword & Sorcery is old-fashioned fantasy. Space opera used to be full of fantastic adventure and spot lectures in science. It was a lot like horse opera, with the hero riding a spaceship instead of a horse, and blazing away with his blaster instead of a six-gun. As you might guess, a lot of it was pretty awful stuff. But I said to the publisher, with that modesty for which genre writers are known, "Suppose someone who really can write tries it?" Evidently 1 fooled the publisher, because I got a big contract for a series of five novels. The series has had terrible reviews and excellent sales, which is the way such things go; the reviewers never caught on to what you will learn here, but the readers had better judgment.
You may be used to fantasy, where you can use magic to do all sorts of things. I understand about that; I have been known to dabble in fantasy myself. But this is science fiction; here there is no magic, only science. However, it is advanced science, which may seem almost like magic at times. You have to understand its nature, or you will come to grief, just as you would today if you stuck your tongue in a lightbulb socket and turned on the power. Actually, that's not the best policy in this game, either; only dim bulbs do that. Maybe you stand by your right to stick your tongue anywhere you want, but it is better to keep a civil tongue in your head. If you understand the nature of electricity, you can use it to your advantage, and the same is true with the science here.
The setting is our Solar System, exactly as it is now. The time is about seven hundred years from now, and mankind has spread through the system, relieving the pressure of population expansion on Earth. All the planets have been colonized except Pluto, and most of the moons are inhabited, as well as a number of the planetoids in the Asteroid Belt. This has been accomplished by a single major scientific breakthrough: gravity shielding. Special lenses focus the streams of gravitons, which are the particles that convey the force of gravity. Think of it as you would light: you can use a magnifying glass to focus it to the burning point in a small area, while the region around that focus is shadowed. When gravity is similarly focused at the surface of a moon, it brings up the effective gravity to the level of what we feel at the surface of the Earth, one gee. Thus it is possible to build cities on Luna, Earth's moon, that have standard earth gravity, while the regions around them have even less than before. Since the cities are domed, to maintain the type and pressure of Earth's atmosphere, what's outside doesn't make much difference; the average person doesn't go out there.
The big planets pose another problem. They have too much gravity. But the same lenses handle this, too. Remember that depleted region around the gee focus? That is used to put a region in low gee, bringing it down to Earth norm. Ah, but even so there is a small problem, the four "gas giant" planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—don't have solid surfaces; their monstrous atmospheres simply keep compressing until they become metallic, and the pressure is thousands of bars. One bar is the pressure of the atmosphere of Earth's surface, and it really wouldn't be comfortable at a thousand bars, or even at only five or six bars. Their atmosphere isn't exactly what you'd care to breathe, either; there is almost no oxygen, and hardly any water vapor. So you can't just set up shop on Jupiter's surface.
However, the gee-shields solve this problem, too. First you put your city in a bubble—that is, a sphere that holds an Earth-type atmosphere at one bar. Then you float that city-bubble in the atmosphere where the pressure isn't too high, using gee-shielding to make it light enough. Because the gee-shield cuts off most of the effect of gravity, you need to spin the bubble to get your gee back by centrifugal force. Thus you are really standing horizontally inside a spinning bubble that is floating in the atmosphere of a gas giant. But to you it seems like normal ground and normal gravity, as long as you don't go too close to the center, where you might float, or try to jump too far, because you would seem to fall in a curve. This is because of the dynamics of a spinning habitat; even some well-respected hard-science writers don't seem to understand it. It can be downright dangerous to throw things, because the seeming curve could make you hit the wrong target. Remember that, when you're in the game; your life may depend on it!
So there are domes with gee-enhancement on the moons and small planets, and spinning bubbles floating around the big planets, and spinning bubbles in space. You might think this makes the Solar System crowded, but that is not the case; the space around the Sun is vast, and the different planets are light-minutes or even light-hours apart. That means you can't just pick up the phone and call your grandma on Neptune; you'd have to wait eight hours or more for her response, even with light speed transmission. If you receive a call from another planet, and there is no delay in transmission as you talk, beware; it is a faked-up call, probably by someone who means you no good. Think paranoid; that, too, may save your life,
But how do you travel? Chemical fuel is expensive, and gravity wells are deep. Well, you use the gee-shields here, too. You shield your spaceship from gravity, so that only its inertia has to be overcome. You can picture this by remembering the last time you were in a car that stalled. Did you get out and heave it onto your shoulders and carry it to the nearest service station? No, you simply pushed it along the highway. It was still a job, but a manageable one; all you had to overcome was its inertia, not its weight. A gee-shielded spaceship doesn't have to be lifted off a planet; it can simply be pushed. This makes interplanetary travel much easier. That doesn't mean that spaceships don't have engines; they use contra-terrene iron for propulsion, because iron can be handled magnetically. You wouldn't want to touch CT iron; your hand would immediately explode, its substance converting totally to energy. CT, or SeeTee, looks and acts exactly like normal matter, except for that one problem; be careful what you touch!
It is possible to travel in space without any propulsive engine, simply by shielding your little bubble-ship from the gee of one planet, while leaving it open to the gee of another. This is slow, but it works well enough when you are trying to travel from one of Jupiter's moons, such as Callisto, to Jupiter itself. This is analogous to sailboating, with gravity being the wind. Many poor people do travel that way, and you may too, when you're broke. Unfortunately there are many pirates abroad in the Jupiter ecliptic—that is, the plane of Jupiter's many moons—and they prey on such little bubbles, so most sail-bubbles never make it to their destination. About the only things the pirates respect are the guns of military vessels, and the mysterious QYV, whose couriers can be identified by marks in private regions of their bodies.
And this is the key to the real nature of this series. This entire situation is borrowed from the world of today, in perfect space-opera fashion, by no coincidence. Every planet and moon is analogous to a land mass of contemporary Earth. The planet Jupiter is the same as America, with the United States of Jupiter (the US of J) in the north, and Latin nations in the south. The moons equate to islands, such as Cuba and Hispaniola. Saturn is Asia, with the Union of Saturnine Republics (USR) in the north, and the People's Republic of Saturn, otherwise known as the Middle Kingdom, in the south. Uranus is Europe, and Neptune is Australia.
The politics of today's world are also reflected, Jupiter and Saturn have a cold war going. Indeed, the planets were colonized by the nations they resemble, and the people carried their cultures and rivalries out to the new worlds. North Jupiter hates Jupiter's moon Ganymede, whose revolutionary government turned communist and sought support from Saturn. Another moon (island), Callisto, is divided into two Hispanic nations. Of these two, Halfcal is very poor, with a corrupt government; its people take to space in unpowered bubbles, trying to reach the promised land of Jupiter, where it is supposed that everyone is rich. Actually Jupiter is sick of these Bubble People, and is apt to tow them back out to space again. This was the starting point of the Space Tyrant series. The first novel, Refugee, is based on the plight of the Vietnamese Boat People and the Haitian Boat People, who took to sea and were savaged by pirates, their men killed, their women raped, and their children abducted into slavery while the world ignored them. The second novel, Mercenary, took the U.S. military establishment as I experienced it, exaggerated the details, and translated it to space in similar fashion. The third, Politician, drew on the internal political situation of America. So if you have trouble keeping track of all the planets and moons and nations, just keep today's world in mind, and it should make more sense.
This is the situation into which you are about to trust your innocent little life. I'm glad it's you going there, and not me!
—Piers Anthony