Phil is a youtuber who mostly discusses various classics, such as plays by Euripides or novels by Mishima and Coetzee. I was therefore astonished when I recently discovered that my dieselpunk spy thriller The Ice War got a favorable review by him.
Spoiler alert: Phil reveals all major plot points in this review.
You can buy The Ice War as an ebook or a paperback at Amazon — link >>>
My assignment at the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency ended in late July; the Swedish corona infection rate has decreased steadily since May and the agency therefore wished to down-size its pandemic emergency organization. I was a civilian reserve officer, not an employee, so I was demobilized with one week’s notice.
As a sunny summer is upon us and schools are closed, I took two daughters on a road & ferry trip to the beautiful island of Gotland and to the port city of Gothenburg. A sorely needed time to wind down after five stressful months in the service of our country. Plenty of long walks in the company of close friends plus a few games of Terraforming Mars.
I also used my time to manage my ongoing projects, two games for Eloso and one short novel:
Expert Outreach: I have written plenty of text for this English post-apocalyptic RPG, describing the broken cosmos into which the intrepid adventurers venture. Mankind’s survival on a war-ravaged Earth is at stake and the remedies are to be found “out there”. But many competing sapient species dislike or hate us, so it’s a tough struggle. During June and July, I have had a few fruitful design discussions by email and F2F with the “usual suspects” Lennart Larsson, Jon Ljunggren, and Clarence Redd. Their critical input is essential to my designs. In earlier creativity updates, I have mentioned that I’m working on rules for exonics (paranormal powers); they are now a part of the Outreach rules. Also, Elin Blixt and I have had several sessions discussing what various xenos (i.e. alien species) should look like.
Swedish Call of Cthulhu: I am busy writing a short adventure taking place in the outskirts of Gothenburg in the 1920s (to be published as a PDF) and an article for the Fenix game magazine on a alternate Swedish setting.
Dusk and Dawn: I have been writing this English science fiction novel for some years. In-story, the protagonists have been struggling to accomplish a major undertaking. At the keyboard, I have struggled with how set up the final showdown. In July, I arrived at a plot finale that makes sense and also matches several fore-shadowing clues that I inserted in the story on day one. At last! Jubilation! However, four chapters remain to to be written — don’t hold your breath.
Traditionally, late December is a time for summarizing the past year and taking a look at what the next year might entail. Here in my blog I focus on my writing endeavors — what’s been accomplished in 2018 and what I hope work with in 2019.
2018: My Accomplishments
Q4 2018 was obviously a hectic time. When I look at the list above, I feel contented with what I achieved.
2019: My intentions
I don’t expect to complete all these projects during 2019, but if I get sunny weather with the wind in my back, and there is plenty of coffee in my thermos flask of holding, I might walk a part of my road. However, an ancient word of wisdom cautions us: Man supposes, God disposes.
Ten years ago, I served six months in the civilian police mission EUPOL in Kabul. I was press and public information officer. The mission was organized by the European Union and I was seconded by Sweden’s Folke Bernadotte Academy.
Returning to normality in Sweden afterwards wasn’t easy. Our counselor Adam advised me to write about my experiences in a literary medium. By writing about them as dieselpunk science fiction, I could more easily explore the essence of my experiences, how they changed me, and how I reinvented myself after coming home.
Now my two short-stories are available in one self-published paperback on Amazon — link >>>
The following excerpt is the beginning of “Dust”:
I will always associate Ariana with the smell of dust, dry as cinder. It is a land of few colors: brown soil, grey rock and green vegetation characterize the hills and valleys. What do the inhabitants really subsist on in this arid home of death? It took some time before I realized what the farmers cultivated and what their herds grazed. We will usually not eat what they grow, but they are able to eke out a meagre existence here.
The sole relief for my eyes was the blue sky, a brilliant shade that I had never seen back home. Occasionally puffy clouds would drift across it, adding white to the limited palette. The sunlight is so sharp that the human eye cannot determine its color; just dazzling, be it white, yellow, or pale orange. It is only at the brief sunrises and sunsets that you are able to look in the sun’s direction and then the disc is orange, casting pink and purple hues across the sky.
What do we do here, aliens in an unearthly land, hated by some, distrusted by most and appreciated by too few? Ariana had for decades been a place shunned by the powers-that-be, the home of fierce natives and devoid of anything that would attract the attention of outsiders. However, the game of power is played according to rules that often are hard to comprehend for common men.
Polar scene by Rob Watkins (click on picture for lager version)
When I wrote my dieselpunk spy adventure The Ice War (link >>> ) some years ago, I let the story have three protagonists: two people — spy Johnny Bornewald and mechanic Linda Connor — and one continent — Alba, an alternate-history substitute for Antarctica. Transportation across Alba’s icy wastes is mainly by juggernauts, huge diesel-electric vehicles that take people and supplies from one frozen location to another. This illustration by Rob Watkins captures quite well what a freight juggernaut of the Russian army looks like.
“Anders Blixt is a machine that turns coffee into role-playing games.”
This summer I have started working on a Patreon page. My intention is to create an interesting library with English and Swedish gaming articles (plus occasional fiction, and non-fiction) for my supporters’ enjoyment. I have accumulated a lot of unpublished “stuff” over my 35+ years as a professional game designer and writer, and I have ideas for plenty more. My three children are now adults or almost-adults, so I have more time for sitting at my laptop and turn coffee-fueled dreams into texts. And these days, there are publishing tools available that would have been science-fiction-ish at the time of the publication of my first paid article in 1980: “The Werewolf Disease” in Journal of Travellers’ Aid Society #5 .
I have no idea how many months it will take for me to put together an attractive collection, because many old texts exist only on paper and need to be scanned and processed. And I have no wish to launch my Patreon place too early and thereby make my supporters disappointed.
Therefore, my advice is: stay tuned to this blog.
Colonialism is a frequent backdrop to my stories, regardless whether I write dieselpunk or fantasy, stories or role-playing games. Since I have one foot in Europe and one in India, I have had the unusual experience of seeing that phenomenon from both sides. Some of the elders of my Indian clan, all of them sadly departed by now, participated in the liberation struggles in the 1930s and 1940s, whereas others served in the British Indian army and fought the Japanese. All had much to tell me and I cherish those memories. And here in Europe it is hard to avoid the “white man’s burden” narrative of colonialism; it appears in all kinds of popular culture.
So I write about characters from both sides of the fence and let them explain by themselves how they relate to an authoritarian colonial order − make no mistake about it: colonialism is getting a stranger’s fist punched in your face, even though the force of the blow may vary depending on what nation does the colonizing and when.
“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.” − From The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.
Scene from the US conquest of the Philippines circa 1900. Artist: Vasili Vereshchagin
Colonialism often gets soft-pedalled in steampunk. SM Stirling’s alt-history Indian Raj in Peshawar Lancers is an illustrating example: the author unsuccessfully strives for a Kipling-ish mood in a tall tale (featuring airships, evil cults, etc) in which romanticized British and French adventurers save a colonial regime, and incidentally its native subjects, from Russian machinations, while Indian nationalists appear as terrorists and Afghan tribesmen resemble pseudo-Orcs. Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine approaches the same issues in a less rose-tinted manner, for example by an unflattering portrayal of the English protagonists’ harsh attitudes toward First Nation Americans.
So this is the above-mentioned burden of colonized peoples: to be amusing sidekicks, expendable femmes fatales, and devious adversaries to white protagonists, or to be background witnesses to the plot-shaking actions of Americo-European heroes. It reminds me of Arthur Conan Doyle’s use of foreign characters in his fiction, for example devious or temperamental Italians and South Americans, or the predatorial savage in The Sign of Four. Such aliens are strange to behold and difficult to comprehend, thus becoming menacing outsiders to white insiders − them versus us, the psychological curse afflicting colonial settlements everywhere.
However, all is not gloom. In Steve Turnbull’s novellas about Anglo-Indian sleuth Maliha Anderson, Indians are full-fledged protagonists in his steampunk Raj and Ceylon. And I approach colonialism with a critical mindset in my dieselpunk novel The Ice War, in which, for example, Eurasian spy Johnny Bornewald faces widespread racism, and is at times able to exploit that sentiment, because those contemptuous Europeans presume that he is an ignorant yokel.
The first time you enter Tolkien’s Middle-earth by accompanying Frodo and his friends on their hazardous journeys, you are as unfamiliar with the lands of Middle-earth as they are and, hopefully, you get equally astonished. When JRR Tolkien in the 1930s set out as that world’s first intrepid explorer, he too made amazing discoveries all the time, as he explained in a letter twenty years afterwards.
In JRR Tolkien’s tales, there are a number of badass women. Galadriel is the mightiest person among the Free Peoples of the Third Age, and Éowyn pulls off a stunt that no man could do. And when we go back to the First Age, we encounter the toughest of them all: Lúthien. During her adventures with Beren she enters Sauron’s den of werewolves and then faces down Morgoth himself — the latter a feat that no Noldo prince or Adan warrior was ever able to match.
Here we see Lúthien and Húan go up against the werewolves of Tol-in-Gaurhoth. Artist: Randy Vargas. Click on the picture for a larger version.
After a long and tiresome hiatus, I have returned to the creative keyboard (unlike the mundane one at the office). Since last autumn, some beta-readers have given me a lot of constructive feedback on the Dusk and Dawn MS, a steam(ish)-punk adventure in the Patchwork World setting. So I have started doing a thorough revision, starting from chapter one. I will do a complete overhaul of the final third of the story after realizing what will be the “hero’s journey” for protagonist Fennec. I will insert an ancient human archetype in a science fiction context, emphasizing growth and responsibility. It feels so good to return to that alien multi-faceted world, the home of so many of my dreams.
The Dream Forge 