BRIEFLY NOTED: Non-Fiction That Could Be RPG Sourcebooks

Most people read fiction for the stories. But there’s a select group, you know who you are, who get as much or more joy from the “world building.” You might be in this group if you read Tolkien’s appendices to The Lord of the Rings, or if you enjoy idly illustrating (or generating) maps of imaginary kingdoms, or if you like coming up with your own stories that take place in the world of your favorite authors. There’s a whole category of people who read the manuals and source books for tabletop role-playing games, not because they intend to play them, but because they like luxuriating in the descriptions and imagining the alien worlds they portray.

What if I told you that you could have this experience in the real world as well? Our universe is fractally strange, and so are our societies. This is a post dedicated to works of non-fiction which, if you close your eyes or change the names, give the same imaginative thrill as the most daring speculative fiction.

— John

The real world is just a lot more complicated and interesting than anything even the best of us can pull out of thin air. Robert E. Howard knew it, and so did Tolkien, which is why they both drew so heavily on history — and why their works are so enduring and beloved. Really, just about any nonfiction book interesting enough to read to the end will contain the seed of at least one cool story, and probably many more. Patrick Stuart, for example, drew more than a dozen ideas from the late James C. Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed (which we reviewed here). Actually many of the other books we’ve reviewed could inspire: my vote would be for the samurai-bureaucrats from MITI and the Japanese Miracle or the “cult of the undead ancestor in your back yard” from The Ancient City, and the post-apocalyptic world imagined by The Knowledge would make a great setting. Alas, it’s probably cheating for me to point to Howard’s Conan stories (reviewed here) or The High Crusade, since they have already been gamified in an obscure little number called Dungeons & Dragons…

Anyway, I can’t count the number of times I’ve scribbled “player character!” or “this is a dungeon!” in the margins of a book; one day when I have time again I’ll have to track them all down. (Just for you, though, here’s a whole campaign idea in one man.) But even if you’re wedded to the sort of generic late medieval/early modern European setting that seems to dominate fantasy, you can make it more fun by knowing just a little about the way those societies actually worked. Hollywood and crummy novels have given people a lot of strange ideas about the past, but the problem isn’t that they make things inaccurate, it’s that they make them boring. Luckily, real history is the antidote.

I recognize that most people are not as interested in the practical details of everyday life as I am, but come on, every generic fantasy world has a king, right? So consider The Queen’s Bed: An Intimate History of Elizabeth’s Court, on how a royal court functions, and The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, on the functioning of a premodern security state. I promise it’s all a lot cooler than anything out of the Forgotten Realms.

Or you could just grab one of these books and start stealing things wholesale.

— Jane

• The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics, Edward H. Schafer (University of California Press, 1985).

This is a very strange book. Imagine if somebody told a history of our society by going through official records of items confiscated by customs agents at airports, and explaining what each one of them was and what it meant to us. That’s somewhat the vibe of this book, which attempts to paint an all-encompassing picture of China in the Tang Dynasty by going through official lists of tribute and gifts received (and frequently rejected) by the Imperial palace.

That description does not do this wonderful book justice, however, because Schafer uses every item, no matter how mundane, as a jumping off point for riotous and often fanciful tales that got preserved somewhere in the historical record. He takes practically the whole literary output of Medieval China, from dry economic statistics, to palace gossip, to tall-tales of Persian traders, to advertisements by courtesans, to boasts of Taoist alchemists, sticks it all in a blender, and recounts it with a totally straight face. The result is kaleidoscopic, like marinating in an alien society, except that it’s a society that really existed in our past.

Consider just the chapter on perfumes and aromatics. In a scant few pages he tells us about the Hainanese pirate who burned frankincense to give light for his parties, and about the Emperor who had officials scatter saffron on all the paths he was to tread. But then things get weirder: “it was reported that in Eastern Kalinga the dead had their mouths stuffed with gold and were cremated on a fire loaded with camphor,” and “the emperor Ching Tsung made a bizarre game of shooting his concubines with paper arrows containing powdered borneol and musk,” but also, “the Tang writers on drugs affirmed that if the genitals of a woman haunted by an incubus are fumigated with [gum guggul], it will quit her forever,” and, naturally, “great officers of the state were required to have a few cloves in their mouth when they addressed reports to the Son of Heaven.” But all of that is just a buildup to this:

The sovereigns of Later Tang had a fantastically expensive artificial garden laid out in one of the great royal halls. Mountains and hills were made of aloeswood, rivers and lakes of rose water and storax, trees of clove and an unidentified aromatic, walls and battlements of frankincense, buildings of rosewood and sanders, and carved human figures of sandalwood. The whole made a miniature city, over whose main gate was a signboard reading, ‘Nation of Magical Scents.’

And that’s just the chapter on perfume.

The reason this all works so well as a framing device is that the Men of Tang, like us, were irredeemable xenophiles. Part of that, no doubt, was a product of their mixed, part-steppe heritage. Indeed, at various points it was very fashionable in aristocratic Tang circles to eat, dress, and camp like a steppe nomad. But I think the greater part is that they, like us, had so much xeno to be philes about. The products of a thousand nations poured into their lands — caravans from “Rome” (what we would call Byzantium), heavy-laden argosies from India and Persia, and embassies from barbaric kingdoms and client states all made their way to the city of Perpetual Peace, there to make obeisance to the Son of Heaven, and to offer exotic tributes which diffused through the palace bureaucracy and thence out to a city of a million souls.

Eventually, their golden age came to an end, the caravans and argosies stopped arriving, and instead of ambassadors bearing tribute, messengers brought grim rumor of the bandit lords and rebel armies that would soon plunge China into an age of darkness. As the end approached, and the now-diminished lords of Tang huddled around the dying embers of their civilization, what do you think they told stories about? Yes, exactly. Foreign marvels. The exotic wares of a thousand kingdoms, which could no longer gratify the senses, now gratified their nostalgia. As the fire grew dimmer and the cold night drew closer, literary taste turned to exotic fantasy inspired by the “dead glittering world” that once had been.

— John

• An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, Ed Yong (Random House, 2022).

You live in a world of physical phenomena: surrounded by objects of all sorts, suffused by electromagnetic radiation, buffeted by waves of pressure propagating through the air and awash with tiny organic molecules that waft on it. Your senses are exquisitely attuned to perceive some of these things — certain frequencies of radiation become a beloved face, a mess of floating chemicals resolves into the scent of baking bread — but many others fall outside the narrow band of your perception. Without specialized equipment, you are quite literally blind to the ultraviolet or infrared and deaf to the ultrasonic cries of rodents or the infrasounds of elephants and whales. And forget about electric and magnetic fields; they’re so far outside our actual experience that we don’t even have a word for our inability to sense them.

Animals are attuned to a different spread of phenomena. Everyone knows that dogs are good at smelling (though just how good — good enough to detect a single fingerprint on a glass slide that has been left out on a rooftop for a week — is still a surprise). Fewer know about elephants, who can identify supposedly-odorless TNT and have been known to survive droughts by scenting out buried water and digging wells. Almost no one knows that the family of seabirds called tubenoses are able to navigate the trackless ocean by following diffuse plumes of the gas released when plankton are eaten by krill. And as for smell, so for sight: who knew that nearly all animals, including most non-primate mammals, can see well into the ultraviolet spectrum? (In fact, many flowers that look solid-colored to us actually have clear UV runways to guide their pollinators in for a landing.) And on and on, for more than three hundred gloriously diverse pages full of senses I’d never even thought of.

This book is a guide to the physical world and how animal senses perceive it, with plenty of fascinating descriptions of biomechanics and organic chemistry. More than that, though, it’s an invitation to imagine what it might be like if our senses worked differently. Borrowing a term from early 20th century Baltic German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll,¹ Yong describes the “sensory bubbles” of our Umwelt: like the blind men and the elephant, we have access to only a fraction of the available data, but it seems like the whole world.

We have pretty good noses and exceptionally sensitive fingertips, but the human Umwelt is dominated by sight. Not so for many other creatures, for whom touch or scent is more important — and it’s hard to overemphasize how differently other senses work. Light travels rapidly over great distances, but it can be easily blocked and it vanishes quickly and with little trace. Smells, on the other hand, seep and spread. A barrier impenetrable to sight poses no difficulty to scent; odorant molecules are so small they’re virtually impossible to entirely block, and they move around corners and through darkness as easily as they do in straight lines. But even more importantly, they linger. An Umwelt where scent reigns is one of layers, of history, of trails that slowly waft and dissolve over the course of hours or days. What would your relationship to time and space be if you came to the world nose-first?

And then make it even weirder: what if we could interpret the pressure waves of water moving between sand grains to find clams buried deeper than our probing fingers can reach, like way the the red knot can with its bill? What if we could feel the tiny air currents of an insect in flight, or the track the passage of a fish through water by the turbulence it leaves behind?

It’s difficult to imagine, and so we often don’t. After all, we have remarkable trouble wrapping our heads around other humans whose culture differs from our own; how much harder with something thoroughly alien? Maybe it’s no surprise that while the monsters we come up with may look different, they often act basically like “humans but” — human but larger, human but with big teeth and wings, human but with face tentacles and mind control. But they needn’t! Think of the (seemingly) simplest of additions, the ability to see in the dark. It adds tactical complications, sure, but it would do more than that: depending on how the dark-vision works, it can change nearly everything. Pit vipers use (you guessed it) specialized pits to “see” in infrared, but only at very low resolution and very close range. Cats and many other mammals have a reflective layer behind the retina that sends back light to be gathered a second time; in a reindeer, it grows and changes during the cold dark winter. Bats and dolphins “see” by echolocation. The golden mole finds mounds of dune grass amidst the sands of its desert home by listening for the ground-borne vibrations caused by the wind rustling the grass. Each one of these senses enables a creature to navigate a lightless environment much better than you can, but each also makes its world strange in ways you’d never think of — and which are therefore much more fun.

Just to whet your appetite for this book, I’ll leave you with a few animals.

Here’s the emerald jewel wasp:

The wasp — a beautiful inch-long creature with a metallic green body and orange thighs — is a parasite that raises its young on cockroaches. When a female finds a roach, she stings it twice — once in its midsection to temporarily paralyze its legs, and a second time in its brain. The second sting targets two specific clusters of neurons and delivers venom that nullifies the roach’s desire to move, turning it into a submissive zombie. In this state, the wasp can lead the roach to her lair by its antennae, like a human walking a dog. Once there, she lays an egg on it, providing her future larva with a docile source of fresh meat. This act of mind control depends on that second sting, which the wasp must deliver to exactly the right location. Just as a red knot has to find a clam hidden somewhere in the sand, an emerald jewel wasp has to find the roach’s brain hidden somewhere within a tangle of muscles and internal organs.

Fortunately for the wasp, her stinger is not only a drill, a venom injector, and an egg-laying tube but also a sense organ. Ram Gal and Frederic Libersat showed that its tip is covered in small bumps and pits that are sensitive to both smell and touch. With them, she can detect the distinctive feel of a roach’s brain. When Gal and Libersat removed the brain from a cockroach before offering the roach to some wasps, they repeatedly stung it, trying in vain to find the organ that was no longer there. If the missing brain was replaced with a pellet of the same consistency, the wasps stung it with the usual precision. If the replacement pellet was squishier than a typical brain, the wasps seemed confused and kept rooting around with their stingers. They knew what a brain should feel like.

And a whale:

The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.

Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. Those ancestral creatures probably had vanilla mammalian hearing. But as they adapted for an aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies. At the same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest Earth has ever seen. These changes are probably connected. The mysticetes achieved their huge size by evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill. Accelerating into a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a million calories in one gulp. But this strategy comes at a cost. Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over long distances. The same giant proportions that force them to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of other animals.

Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long distances. If they simply called when fed and stayed silent when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky individuals have found. A whale pod, Payne suggested, might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone but are actually together.

And the fire beetle, which already sounds like a D&D monster:

The fire-chasing Melanophila beetles…are drawn to heat. These black, half-inch-long insects have been found in what entomologist Earle Gorton Linsley described as “unbelievable numbers” in smelting plants, the kilns of cement factories, and the vats of hot syrup in sugar refineries. One summer, Linsley saw them swarming an outdoor barbecue where “large quantities of deer meat were being prepared.” In the 1940s, the insects would regularly bother football fans in Berkeley’s California Memorial Stadium “by alighting on the clothing or even biting the neck or hands,” Linsley wrote. It’s possible that “the beetles are attracted by the smoke from some twenty thousand (more or less) cigarettes which on still days sometimes hangs like a haze over the stadium.” These incidents are unfortunate for both species, because industrial plants, barbecues, and football stadiums are unhelpful distractions that waylay the beetles from their true targets: forest fires.

Arriving at a fire, the beetles have perhaps the most dramatic sex in the animal kingdom, mating as a forest burns around them. Later, the females lay their eggs on charred, cooled bark. When the wood-eating grubs hatch, they find an Eden. The trees they devour are too injured to defend against insect larvae feeding within them. The predators that might eat them are put off by the smoke and heat emitted from the embers and ashes. In peace, they thrive, mature, and eventually fly off in search of their own blazes. But forest fires are rare and unpredictable, and the beetles must have some means of detecting them from afar. Being active during the day, the beetles can’t spot distant flames in the way that nocturnal insects easily could. They can’t rely on seeing plumes of smoke since their eyes probably aren’t sharp enough to distinguish such plumes from clouds. And though their antennae can certainly detect the smell of scorched wood, such clues are heavily influenced by the direction of the wind. For them, the most reliable cue is heat.

The hit dice are up to you.

— Jane

• The Age of Em: Work, Love, and Life when Robots Rule the Earth, Robin Hanson (Oxford University Press, 2016).²

There’s a particular sub-genre of hard science fiction where the author changes exactly one thing about the world, and then spends an entire book working out the implications of that change in detail. The most familiar example of this is probably works of alternate history, where somebody takes another side of a great historic what-if and tries to imagine where it leads. But there are plenty of other examples too — the most extreme case being the author Greg Egan, whose stories frequently work by modifying one of the laws of physics, figuring out its macroscopic consequences, and then tracing that change’s reverberations through biology, psychology, and society.

I think this is the correct way to interpret Robin Hanson’s science fiction novel non-fiction bestseller The Age of Em. It starts by asking you to make one assumption: that progress in artificial intelligence stalls, while whole brain emulations (the “Ems” of the title) take off,³ and then it works out the consequences in meticulous detail. And I do mean meticulous, there are multiple pages spent on the precise geometry of the pipes that will move coolant around em cities. In fact one of the most fun things about this book is that it functions as a whirlwind tour of all the ways that physical constraints shape society. What Vaclav Smil does for the past, Robin Hanson does for one very specific and weird possible future. And Hanson is more than a match for Smil’s “autistic alien robot anthropologist” style, which means he creates a similarly unsettling parallax effect in the reader.

Actually, that is far from the most unsettling thing here. There’s a good chance that a world of brain emulations turns out to be the most nightmarish thing imaginable (this wonderfully subtle horror story is a good representative of that view). Since they can be copied, forked, and reset, a brain emulation makes the perfect slave. Imagine Groundhog Day, but set up by a malevolent demiurge to extract the most efficient possible labor from you, and with no escape. This is literally the world Hanson describes — a world containing a quadrillion emulated human consciousnesses, most of them drugged or psychically mutilated to be more productive, operating right at the Malthusian limit where the value of their labor just exceeds the cost required to keep them running.

And yet Hanson doesn’t seem especially bothered by this, he lays out this world in simple and direct language, not a shrill prophet of doom, just a matter of fact tour guide. That seems quite weird, until you go back and read these words in the introduction:

Like most of your kind, you probably feel superior to your ancestors… The problem is, the future will probably hold new kinds of people. Your descendants’ habits and attitudes are likely to differ from yours by as much as yours differ from your ancestors. If you understood just how different your ancestors were, you’d realize that you should expect your descendants to seem quite strange. Historical fiction misleads you, showing your ancestors as more modern than they were. Science fiction similarly misleads you about your descendants.

There’s a recurring theme in Hanson’s work, exemplified by his essay “This is the Dream Time,” that the far future will look like the distant past. His logic is disarmingly simple: our ancestors were fragmented and diverse because they had low population density and slow communications, and they lived on the knife’s edge of starvation. Our descendants too, will be fragmented and diverse, because they will have spread throughout the depths of space, and the speed of light is non-negotiable, and like our ancestors their sustenance will bump up against fundamental physical constraints.

In Hanson’s view, everything else stems from these brute physical realities: our culture, our patterns of life, even our deepest moral views, for: “New habits and attitudes results less than you think from moral progress, and more from people adapting to new situations.” And so it’s the present moment that’s anomalous: our wealth has temporarily outstripped our population, and our communications ability haas temporarily outstripped our ability to colonize the stars. We live in a time of myth and heroes and romantic individualism, there was nothing like it in the past, and there will be nothing like it in the future. Hanson thinks that our quadrillions of impoverished descendants, in the rare moments when they don’t need to work, will think and dream and fantasize about us and our era. Their religious myths and their soap operas will be about our time and our lives. Perhaps their RPG sourcebooks will be too.

— John

1. Live shot of me opening the Wikipedia page of an early 20th century Baltic German zoologist.

2. For a longer and more thorough review of this book, see Scott Alexander’s.

3. Admittedly this seems even less likely today than it did in 2016.