I noticed just now that the new US edition of Iain M. Banks’ Use of Weapons is available and in stock, no longer just for preorder. It had been out-of-print for years in America, which was too bad, as I think it’s one of Banks’ best Culture novels. In fact, I remember reading somewhere that it was the first one he wrote, but the structure just didn’t work until Ken MacLeod suggested trying an experimental, interleaved alternating chronological/anti-chronological organization of the chapters that made it all come together. It’s a little confusing at first, but it makes the plot unfold perfectly.

Highly recommended.

Today (7/7) is Tanabata, the Star Festival, a celebration based on a legend out of China about the Weaver Princess (aka the star Vega), daughter of the King of Heaven, and a cowherd (aka the star Altair), who fell in love and were secretly married. The girl’s father got mad, of course, and as these things go in myth, he separated them in the sky, with the Milky Way river between them. If it’s a clear night tonight, they will be able to have their one conjugal visitation per year, but if it’s raining, then sucks to be them. Since this is often still the Rainy Season, they rarely get lucky, but this year should be a good one for getting it on in heaven, as the Rainy Season seems to have given up the ghost a little early this year, with a nice thunderstorm a couple nights ago.

This of course has nothing to do with utopia, but the Chinese mythology, the activities of gods and such, got me thinking of my favorite role-playing game, Exalted, which unlike almost every other fantasy RPG available, goes for an Asian feel rather than a Western European one, and not only that, does it well, which I think is unique among FRPGs.

But it certainly shares some characteristics with other FRPGs, and one of them is that it is set in a time long after the fall of a great Golden Age, one that everyone talks about and longs for and that your characters just might be able to reestablish. But again, while most FRPGs just have that as a vague background which is then almost totally ignored, the First Age looms large in the Exalted setting, because the characters are reincarnations of the great god-kings of that period–they are the ones who created that utopia…and are really the ones responsible for destroying it. Thus, the question of whether they should even try to reestablish it is a complex one; the game examines the question of whether utopia is such a good idea at all.

White Wolf recently published a super-keen box set called Dreams of the First Age, which is a two-book alternate campaign setting for playing in that utopia before it fell, back when your character was powerful enough to destroy cities without breaking a sweat. The set comes with a cloth map of Creation, which was a bit different in the First Age; a guidebook to the mega-city of Meru, capital of the Solar Deliberative; a battle wheel (apparently tossed in just for the hell of it); a book on the setting, and a book on the characters.

As usual, the books are fascinating reading–I haven’t had a chance to put together an Exalted game for, man, going on two years now, but I still buy the books and drop everything else to read them when they arrive in the mail. The glories of the First Age are awesome, as is the rot that will obviously result in its fall. The Solar Exalted have created utopia, but their madness grows with their age and power. The game blames this madness on a curse laid on them by their ancient enemies, but it serves as a metaphor for the inability of humans to handle godlike powers and immortality.

From my point of view, this is more than just a FRPG setting–it’s a utopia in the sense that Thomas More’s Utopia is one, and Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun is one, and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis is one. That is, it’s not a novel set in a utopia; it is a book that describes a utopia for our consideration. And comparing it to the classic utopias, I have to say that it’s one of the most fascinating and deep I’ve ever read. Like any utopia, it is a metaphor for our real world, questioning whether we’re on the right path, whether we couldn’t be doing it better–and whether it would be better for us NOT to try for utopia.

The only complaint I have about it is in the Characters book, which is about important figures in the setting and rules tweaks for making characters of the period. The complaint is that, when it lists the stats for important characters, it lists ALL of their Charms (magical abilities), which for a mature First Age Solar can run to 2 pages of close type. Why don’t they just say, "He has any Charm the GM wants him to have, but here are a dozen of the ones he favors"? Did the writers actually think it would be useful to list hundreds of Charms, almost every Charm available?

This is a weakness of the game itself, that as characters get powerful, even the players can forget what powers their characters have–and the GM is in a nightmare situation, trying to keep track of the powers of, say, a half-dozen powerful NPCs at once. Personally, I would solve it by saying they could only have a number of "ready" Charms equal to some multiple of their Essence characteristic, say Essence x 4–and Combos count as a single Charm, encouraging players to invent cool custom Combos.

Anyway, if I weren’t already planning to focus on utopias in the fiction of African-American writers for my dissertation, I would be all up for writing a big paper on utopia in Exalted.

Can we really call the USA a utopian experiment? Depends on your definition. If a utopia is heaven on Earth, then no, not really, because the Founders were too practical for that. But if a utopia can be called an attempt to create a radically different, vastly better society that attempts to increase happiness for the greatest number of people, then yes, definitely.

That’s not to say that the Founders achieved total success. They were, well, less-than-perfect men, what with slavery, and genocide of the aboriginal population, and treating women like property, and all that. But without that initial utopian dream, put into practice through grimy political compromise, how would the evolution of ideas of freedom and equality have occurred? By making the idea of democracy work, imperfectly at first and certainly still imperfect, they proved it was viable. If it had failed, as it did in France due to their reaching too high (resulting in the Reign of Terror, Napoleon, etc.), it could have discredited the whole notion of democracy as dangerously radical for decades or even centuries, just as the notion of communism is discredited today by the disaster that was the Soviet Union.

John Gray claims that utopia is a nightmare that is doomed to end "in a huge river of human blood," and what with the Khmer Rouge and North Korea and Stalin and so on, he has a lot of supporting evidence on his side. And I think he may be right, in the sense that trying to create a heaven on earth, right now, is going to end up badly. But without that utopian dream and the desire to experiment, how do we improve?

What it takes is a balance of dream and practicality, leavened with a good dose of human compassion. America, at any time, is home to hundreds of small-scale utopian experiments, and the vast majority of them, like hippie communes and Brook Farm, fail due to a lack of practicality. Some survive, like the Amish colonies, but in a way that will keep them limited in scope.

The compassion is needed to avoid the fate of many large-scale totalitarian utopias, such as North Korea. Even successful ones that survive for centuries, such as ancient Sparta, manage to be utopias only by building upon the misery of state-terrorized slaves and ideologically enslaved citizens. This is why that bit about the "pursuit of happiness" is so important.

So, while America is far from perfect and no utopia from most people’s points of view, it is in the constant process of becoming a utopia. That it will never reach that indefinable state is probably a good thing, on the whole, but the dream needs to be held onto in order to keep the process going. As long as we’re on the road to utopia, we’re being true to the spirit of America.

Happy 232nd birthday.