Back in 2012, as my interest in old-school D&D was returning and flourishing, I started a project to read all of Gary Gygax’s famous Appendix N. I came up with a detailed plan, researched and assembled a 100-book Appendix N reading list that included recommendations for those authors whose works Gary didn’t note by title (etc.), and committed to writing an in-depth blog post about each author/series/title as I worked through them all.
If you know me, or are a regular Yore reader, then you can guess the two sticky wickets:
- The scope and details of my plan
- Writing a Serious Business blog post every time I did some leisure reading
I lasted about a year.
The project fizzled out after posting about Zelazny’s amazing Chronicles of Amber in July of 2013. Like many of my other hobby projects, I went all-in rather than flying casual and it collapsed under its own weight. And hey, no harm done: I read lots of stuff I wouldn’t have read on my own without Appendix N, and thoroughly enjoyed spotting some of the foundations of the RPG hobby in these books.
When we moved to Seattle almost a decade ago, we donated over 800 books to the library, including all of my unread Appendix N books. In addition to just not having space for them in our new place, I’d also more or less stopped reading non-RPG books in print; my Kindle, with its backlight, adjustable font size, and vast library, was much more convenient. And again, no harm done: As a family, we love public libraries, and fiction seemed to have gone the way of other physical media for me.
…And then, just last night, the Appendix N bug returned.
Print isn’t dead
A few months prior, I forced myself to get reading glasses by buying a print book to read on a trip, rather than just loading it onto my Kindle, and all the pleasures of reading novels in print came flooding back. I finished that book (Gideon the Ninth, which is excellent) and started in on its sequel, and am delighted to find myself reading a mix of print and ebooks again.
Last night, my daughter and I were in Twice Sold Tales, an awesome used bookstore here in Seattle that’s home to numerous cats — and which has a great SF and fantasy selection. I started thinking about Appendix N, pulled up my 100-book version for inspiration, and spent a happy hour combing the shelves.
While I combed, I pondered.
I knew right off the bat that following my own plan from 2012 would be a mistake. It’s still a good plan, it’s just the wrong plan for me. I put a lot of thought into my recommendations for specific works, where to start, notes about recommendations Gary made which are actually in the middle of ongoing series, and the like. The bones are solid, but the evidence is solid, too: My attempt to read all of Appendix N collapsed under its own weight once, and surely will again if I go about it the same way.
So I settled on a simple starting point: From the store’s selection, find a couple books that looked interesting by Appendix N authors whose work I’d never read before — and abandon the notion that I “need” to read anything in Appendix N, or need to make exploring old SF and fantasy Serious Business in any way.
I chose Jack Williamson’s The Legion of Space and Fredric Brown’s Rogue in Space because they looked like a hoot. I started Rogue last night and — apart from, I’ll note, the protagonist’s homophobia — it’s fucking fantastic.
Check out this snippet from chapter two, introducing one of the book’s two main characters. Tell me this doesn’t sound like a player character:
Call him Crag; it was the name he was using and it will serve as well as any name. He was a smuggler and a thief and a killer. He’d been a spaceman once and had a metal hand to show for it. That, and a taste for exotic liquors and a strong aversion for work. […] He knew good from evil but cared not a grain of Martian Sand for either of them.
Rogue in Space
Is Rogue in Space the most representative sample of Brown’s work? I dunno, it’s just a neat book. Do I need to read more Brown? Only if I want to. Will I have “read Appendix N” if I sample every author but don’t consume their entire body of work? Yep!
So that’s the spirit in which I’m proceeding this time around: loosey-goosey, just like the Basement Game. I’m running an AD&D module for my Seattle group, I’m playing in my homebrewed setting, Godsbarrow, and I’m reading sci-fi from the 1950s. It’s grand!