Surprisingly, EC Tubb also wrote some Space 1999 novels.  Man, I barely remember that show.

Quote from: jeff37923;1114726The Expanse, The Martian, Alien, Aliens, New Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5 (there were some fucked up slapdash Traveller sourcebooks put out by Mongoose for that), Space Cowboys, Deep Impact, Space Above & Beyond, Battle Angel Alita, Silent Running, and Space:1999 (for some definite 70s space opera). Those come immediately to mind.

The ship in Interstellar looked a helluva lot like a Traveller Lab Ship to me.

Classic Traveller said it was designed to let you play in any SF universe you wanted although if that was the idea, there are some very specific setting assumptions baked in (like the idea that there is a nobility, and how FTL works). I happen to love it but I'd be the first to admit it needs progressively more work to get it further away from the in-built assumptions.

Some of the SF mentioned up thread is getting well away from core Traveller assumptions. I love me some Alastair Reynolds but trying to use most versions of Traveller to play a game based around House of Suns, for ex., would require a lot of new work, if you were going to support the setting through rules rather than just handwaving it all.

I'll add Brian Stableford's Hooded Swan series from the 70s. The books are about a ship crew consisting of a pilot, an engineer and sundry hangers-on doing missions on various puzzle-planets, with the pilot basically forced into it to pay off a debt to his boss. How Traveller is that?

For TV, I would love to see a Blakes Seven sourcebook for Traveller.

Quote from: goblinslayer;1114736Surprisingly, EC Tubb also wrote some Space 1999 novels.  Man, I barely remember that show.

It was a show about a moon traveling to a different star system each week.

Quote from: ffilz;1114674Assuming the goal is to consider Marc Miller's inspirations, here's a good article:

https://calypso1577.blogspot.com/2014/02/text-foundations-of-traveller.html

Thank you!

I loved Space:1999 fan and I've run Traveller as Space:1999 and it fits great. Of course, you dance that weird line between leaning the campaign more toward Season 1 or Season 2 which are almost different shows.

Instead of Social Status, it becomes Social Skill. Things are really tense in Space:1999 and people freak the fuck out lots on the show, including the Commander with his notorious short temper. In some ways, SOC becomes like SAN, in that can your PC handle their poop when things are falling apart around them, or keep NPCs from becoming useless with fear?

Quote from: goblinslayer;1114736Surprisingly, EC Tubb also wrote some Space 1999 novels.  Man, I barely remember that show.

The intro was always awesome! I loved how you got a trailer for the episode each week.

[video=youtube;4SpX8bVEmJo]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SpX8bVEmJo&feature=emb_logo[/youtube]

This "Gerry Anderson Primer" video does a good job providing an overview.

[video=youtube;UyulQ2jloeM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyulQ2jloeM[/youtube]

There was going to be a remake/reboot called Space: 2099

But there IS a new "audio-movie" series on Soundcloud.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;1114802It was a show about a moon traveling to a different star system each week.

Here's the crazy thing. It works at the table great. In most Traveller games, the PCs move from system to system via their ship and the actual travel is hand-waived. In Space:1999, the moon mysteriously "jumps" to a new system.

In my campaign, the PCs learn that our Moon is host to an alien machine-being and the nuclear explosion accident has "spooked" the moon which now makes its way toward "home".

Space 1999 was just batshit crazy, almost completely nonsensical.  It was like Zardoz in space.  The 70s ness of it is just overwhelming, even for me.

While Edmond Hamilton's work was generally far more space opera than Traveller, his Star Wolf trilogy is very Traveller-ish and I suspect is the origin of the Vargr. It was also made into a Japanese TV show and imported into the US by Sandy Frank as Star Force: Fugitive Alien 1 & 2 where they were shown on MST3K. Despite the translation to Japanese and back, bad dubbing, and chopping up a season of a TV show into a 90 minute movie, they still make more sense than any given Space 1999 episode.

Serenity, or Firefly by Joss Whedon
Jerry Pournelle's Janissary Series
David Drake's Hammer's Slammers and RCN series. Literally Mercenary was written about this.
Philip K. Dick, VALIS and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
Gordon R. Dickson, Dorsai (Child Cycle series)
Fred Saberhagen's Beserker series
Andre Norton's Witchworld
Dragonriders of Pern, by Anne McCaffrey
Larry Niven's Ringworld and Known Space series.
Stargate & Stargate SG-1
Farscape
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Legend by Marie Lu
Doc Savage
A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Childhood's End and Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
The Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Leguin
The Forever War, by Joe Haldeman
The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
Dune, by Frank Herbert
The Stars my Destination by Alfred Bester
Foundation Series by Isaac Asimov (These stories are eighty year old now!)
The Space Merchants, by Frederik Pohl
I am Legend by Richard Matheson
Starman's Son 2250 AD, by Andre Norton
The Weapons Shop of Isher, by A.E. Van Vogt
Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement
Bring the Jubilee, by Ward Moore
Time and Again, by Clifford D. Simak (really one of my favorite sci-fi writers!)
The Languages of Pao, by Jack Vance
Ring Around the Sun, by Clifford D. Simak
The Black Cloud, by Fred Hoyle
Pilgrimage to Earth, by Robert Sheckley
Tales from Gavagan's Bar, by L Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt
Needle by Hal Clement
The City at the World's End, by Edmond Hamilton
Next of Kin, by Eric Frank Russell (Awesome Classic about being in the Scout Service!)
Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids, by Paul French (...actually Isaac Asimov)
Vulcan's Hammer, by Philip K. Dick
The Falling Torch, and Hard Landing, by Aldris Budrys
Islands in the Sky, by Arthur C. Clarke
Rogue Queen, by L Sprague De Camp
The Death of Grass, by John Christopher
The Lord of Light, by Roger Zelazny
The Big Time, by Fritz Leiber
Stand on Zanzibar, by John Brunner
Little Fuzzy, by H. Beam Piper
Behold the Man, by Michael Moorcock
Planet of the Apes, by Pierre Boule
The Drowned World, by J.G. Ballard
Nova, by Samuel R. Delaney
Storm over Warlock, by Andre Norton
The Masks of Time, as well as Hawksbill Station, by Robert Silverberg
The Blue World, by Jack Vance
Bug Jack Barron, by Norman Spinrad
Rocannon's World, by Ursula K. Le Guin (Phenomenal!)
Deathworld, by Harry Harrison (Another overlooked five-star sci-fi Classic!)
Ensign Flandry, and After Doomsday, by Poul Anderson
The Dark Light Years, by Brian Aldiss
Davy by Edgar Panborn
Past Master, by R.A. Lafferty
Gateway, by Frederik Pohl
Nine Princes in Amber, by Roger Zelazny
Riverworld, by Philip Jose Farmer
Inherit the Stars, by James P. Hogan
Titan, by John Varley (Another one of my personal favorites!)
The Faded Sun series by C.J. Cherryh
Dying of the Light, by George R.R. Martin
The Pastel City, by M. John Harrison
Logan's Run
334 by Thomas M. Disch (Strikingly Prescient!)
Down to a Sunless Sea, by David Graham
Midworld, by Alan Dean Foster
Juniper Time, by Kate Wilhelm
The Anubis Gate, by Tim Powers
The Snow Queen, by Joan D. Vinge
Dawn, by Octavia E. Butler
Downbelow Station, by C. J. Cherryh
Blood Music, by Greg Bear
The Citadel of the Autarch, by Gene Wolfe
Emergence, by David R. Palmer (Really a great book for understanding how super geniuses think!)
Radix, by A.A. Attanasio
The Inverted World, by Christopher Priest

Quote from: Dave R;1114698.

Starship Troopers was probably the source of Battle Dress in Traveller, and is also in the same broad category of exploring cultures and civilizations as Piper and Asimov.  It's increasingly an unpopular book lately; I think the dividing line is whether you read it as an exploration of a very different world, or the author's definitive statement of his own politics.  I read it as the former; acknowledging there's some of the author in it, the same author who wrote Moon a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land *can't* have meant Starship Troopers as a literal utopia.

An excellent post about the science fiction influences on traveler. Troopers is not "an exploration of a different world" exactly and it's certainly not "a definite statement of his own politics." it is book about coming of age and taking responsibility. It was intended for his juvenile publisher and he was basically addressing young men about their lives.
The setting and society, which has caused so much reaction ranging from frothing at the mouth and calling RAH a fascist to frothing at the mouth and saying "let's do that right now," was so important to him that he never returned to it in the rest of his long career.
That's just my opinion but his biographer, William Patterson, agreed with me.

Quote from: JeremyR;1114930Space 1999 was just batshit crazy, almost completely nonsensical.  It was like Zardoz in space.

I'd love to run Zardoz as a RPG! I've use the giant head repeatedly in Gamma World.  

Space 1999 was batshit crazy, but that's Season 2. Season 1 was much more cerebral and "hard-ish" scifi.

Quote from: Dave R;1114698Starship Troopers was probably the source of Battle Dress in Traveller, and is also in the same broad category of exploring cultures and civilizations as Piper and Asimov.  It's increasingly an unpopular book lately; I think the dividing line is whether you read it as an exploration of a very different world, or the author's definitive statement of his own politics.  I read it as the former; acknowledging there's some of the author in it, the same author who wrote Moon a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land *can't* have meant Starship Troopers as a literal utopia.

He Didn't.

Nothing at all. No sound, no pressure, no weight. Floating in darkness … free fall, maybe thirty miles up, above the effective atmosphere, falling weightlessly toward the surface of a planet you've never seen. But I'm not shaking now; it's the wait beforehand that wears. Once you unload, you can't get hurt -- because if anything goes wrong it will happen so fast that you'll buy it without noticing that you're dead, hardly.

Almost at once I felt the capsule twist and sway, then steady down so that my weight was on my back … weight that built up quickly until I was at my full weight (0.87 gee, we had been told) for that planet as the capsule reached terminal velocity for the thin upper atmosphere. A pilot who is a real artist (and the Captain was) will approach and brake so that your launching speed as you shoot out of the tube places you just dead in space relative to the rotational speed of the planet at that latitude. The loaded capsules are heavy; they punch through the high, thin winds of the upper atmosphere without being blown too far out of position -- but just the same a platoon is bound to disperse on the way down, lose some of the perfect formation in which it unloads. A sloppy pilot can make this still worse, scatter a strike group over so much terrain that it can't make rendezvous for retrieval, much less carry out its mission. An infantryman can fight only if somebody else delivers him to his zone; in a way I suppose pilots are just as essential as we are.

I could tell from the gentle way my capsule entered the atmosphere that the Captain had laid us down with as near zero lateral vector as you could ask for. I felt happy -- not only a tight formation when we hit and no time wasted, but also a pilot who puts you down properly is a pilot who is smart and precise on retrieval.

The outer shell burned away and sloughed off -- unevenly, for I tumbled. Then the rest of it went and I straightened out. The turbulence brakes of the second shell bit in and the ride got rough … and still rougher as they burned off one at a time and the second shell began to go to pieces. One of the things that helps a capsule trooper to live long enough to draw a pension is that the skins peeling off his capsule not only slow him down, they also fill the sky over the target area with so much junk that radar picks up reflections from dozens of targets for each man in the drop, any one of which could be a man, or a bomb, or anything. It's enough to give a ballistic computer nervous breakdowns -- and does.

To add to the fun your ship lays a series of dummy eggs in the seconds immediately following your drop, dummies that will fall faster because they don't slough. They get under you, explode, throw out "window," even operate as transponders, rocket sideways, and do other things to add to the confusion of your reception committee on the ground.

In the meantime your ship is locked firmly on the directional beacon of your platoon leader, ignoring the radar "noise" it has created and following you in, computing your impact for future use.


...That left me with nothing to worry about for twenty seconds, so I jumped up on the building nearest me, raised the launcher to my shoulder, found the target and pulled the first trigger to let the rocket have a look at its target -- pulled the second trigger and kissed it on its way, jumped back to the ground. "Second section, even numbers!" I called out … waited for the count in my mind and ordered, "Advance! "

And did so myself, hopping over the next row of buildings, and, while I was in the air, fanning the first row by the river front with a hand flamer. They seemed to be wood construction and it looked like time to start a good fire -- with luck, some of those warehouses would house oil products, or even explosives. As I hit, the Y-rack on my shoulders launched two small H.E. bombs a couple of hundred yards each way to my right and left flanks but I never saw what they did as just then my first rocket hit -- that unmistakable (if you've ever seen one) brilliance of an atomic explosion. It was just a peewee, of course, less than two kilotons nominal yield, with tamper and implosion squeeze to produce results from a less-than-critical mass -- but then who wants to be bunk mates with a cosmic catastrophe? It was enough to clean off that hilltop and make everybody in the city take shelter against fallout. Better still, any of the local yokels who happened to be outdoors and looking that way wouldn't be seeing anything else for a couple of hours -- meaning me. The flash hadn't dazzled me, nor would it dazzle any of us; our face bowls are heavily leaded, we wear snoopers over our eyes -- and we're trained to duck and take it on the armor if we do happen to be looking the wrong way.

So I merely blinked hard -- opened my eyes and stared straight at a local citizen just coming out of an opening in the building ahead of me. He looked at me, I looked at him, and he started to raise something -- a weapon, I suppose -- as Jelly called out, "Odd numbers! Advance! "

I didn't have time to fool with him: I was a good five hundred yards short of where I should have been by then. I still had the hand flamer in my left hand; I toasted him and jumped over the building he had been coming out of, as I started to count. A hand flamer is primarily for incendiary work but it is a good defensive anti-personnel weapon in tight quarters; you don't have to aim it much.

Between excitement and anxiety to catch up I jumped too high and too wide. It's always a temptation to get the most out of your jump gear -- but don't do it! It leaves you hanging in the air for seconds, a big fat target. The way to advance is to skim over each building as you come to it, barely clearing it, and taking full advantage of cover while you're down -- and never stay in one place more than a second or two, never give them time to target in on you. Be somewhere else, anywhere. Keep moving.


...But I didn't hear him, so I didn't answer. I heard him report to Jelly and I heard Jelly cuss. Now look, I wasn't bucking for a medal -- it's the assistant section leader's business to make pickup; he's the chaser, the last man in, expendable. The squad leaders have other work to do. As you've no doubt gathered by now the assistant section leader isn't necessary as long as the section leader is alive.

Right that moment I was feeling unusually expendable, almost expended, because I was hearing the sweetest sound in the universe, the beacon the retrieval boat would land on, sounding our recall. The beacon is a robot rocket, fired ahead of the retrieval boat, just a spike that buries itself in the ground and starts broadcasting that welcome, welcome music. The retrieval boat homes in on it automatically three minutes later and you had better be on hand, because the bus can't wait and there won't be another one along.

But you don't walk away on another cap trooper, not while there's a chance he's still alive -- not in Rasczak's Roughnecks. Not in any outfit of the Mobile Infantry. You try to make pickup.

I heard Jelly order: "Heads up, lads! Close to retrieval circle and interdict! On the bounce!"

And I heard the beacon's sweet voice: "--to the everlasting glory of the infantry, shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young!" and I wanted to head for it so bad I could taste it.

Instead I was headed the other way, closing on Ace's beacon and expending what I had left of bombs and fire pills and anything else that would weigh me down. "Ace! You got his beacon?"

"Yes. Go back, Useless!"

"I've got you by eye now. Where is he?"

"Right ahead of me, maybe quarter mile. Scram! He's my man."

I didn't answer; I simply cut left oblique to reach Ace about where he said Dizzy was.

And found Ace standing over him, a couple of skinnies flamed down and more running away. I lit beside him. "Let's get him out of his armor -- the boat'll be down any second!"

"He's too bad hurt!"

I looked and saw that it was true -- there was actually a hole in his armor and blood coming out. And I was stumped. To make a wounded pickup you get him out of his armor … then you simply pick him up in your arms -- no trouble in a powered suit -- and bounce away from there. A bare man weighs less than the ammo and stuff you've expended. "What'll we do?"

"We carry him," Ace said grimly. "Grab ahold the left side of his belt." He grabbed the right side, we manhandled Flores to his feet. "Lock on! Now … by the numbers, stand by to jump -- one--two! "

We jumped. Not far, not well. One man alone couldn't have gotten him off the ground; an armored suit is too heavy. But split it between two men and it can be done.

We jumped -- and we jumped -- and again, and again, with Ace calling it and both of us steadying and catching Dizzy on each grounding. His gyros seemed to be out.

We heard the beacon cut off as the retrieval boat landed on it -- I saw it land … and it was too far away. We heard the acting platoon sergeant call out: "In succession, prepare to embark!"

And Jelly called out, "Belay that order!"

We broke at last into the open and saw the boat standing on its tail, heard the ululation of its take-off warning -- saw the platoon still on the ground around it, in interdiction circle, crouching behind the shield they had formed.

Heard Jelly shout, "In succession, man the boat--move! "

And we were still too far away! I could see them peel off from the first squad, swarm into the boat as the interdiction circle tightened.

And a single figure broke out of the circle, came toward us at a speed possible only to a command suit.

Jelly caught us while we were in the air, grabbed Flores by his Y-rack and helped us lift.

Three jumps got us to the boat. Everybody else was inside but the door was still open. We got him in and closed it while the boat pilot screamed that we had made her miss rendezvous and now we had all bought it! Jelly paid no attention to her; we laid Flores down and lay down beside him. As the blast hit us Jelly was saying to himself, "All present, Lieutenant. Three men hurt -- but all present!"

I'll say this for Captain Deladrier: they don't make any better pilots. A rendezvous, boat to ship in orbit, is precisely calculated. I don't know how, but it is, and you don't change it. You can't.

Only she did. She saw in her scope that the boat had failed to blast on time; she braked back, picked up speed again -- and matched and took us in, just by eye and touch, no time to compute it. If the Almighty ever needs an assistant to keep the stars in their courses, I know where he can look.

Flores died on the way up.



This is a book about war, plain and simple. A war we didn't start, but we need to win, in order to survive. Certainly no Utopia...

Politicizing this story all happened with the original movie Directed by Paul Verhoeven. With Casper Van Dien, and Denise Richards, Dina Meyer, Jake Busey. With the movie humans in a fascist, militaristic future wage war with giant alien bugs.

The original written story featured a strong military emphasis, the government was authoritarian due to the stakes (The survival of the human race), however was not fascist. The key part of fascism not featured in the original story is the oppression of opposition by a dictator. The society in Starship Troopers is ruled by a government that is dominated, ...but certainly not fully controlled, by a military elite.

The lieutenant expects your name to shine

I disagree that the government was authoritarian, at least before they went on war footing. Juan's father was clear that the government didn't interfere with their lives and he wondered why his kid would want to bother with gaining the franchise.
And the controversy started long before the VerHoaxen movie. There were critics vomiting nonsense about it on one side and people proposing the system for adoption in their own countries the year the book came out. The depths of UseNet document this dispute for decades.

I think a lot of the time when people on the left use the word 'fascist,' they just mean something they don't like. The target doesn't necessarily have anything to do with fascism as a historical or pol-sci concept.

I'm no Heinlein expert but the idea of personal freedom and responsibility runs through the stuff of his that I've read. Freedom and responsibility for your actions. That doesn't tend to go down well with many on the left (but it's society's fault!)