Novella novella: SOLID GOLD ASTEROID

By 1994, FORBIDDEN LINES was on its last legs, and no new contracts were coming from TSR. I cast about for more work and found a company in Honesdale, Pennsylvania called West End Games. West End was founded in New York City in 1974, and named after the bar in which the founders met to organize the company. Like TSR, West End's original products were board war games. By 1984 they had come up with their first role playing game (RPG), Paranoia. Paranoia enjoyed a vogue through the early 1990s (I remember playing it back then), and is still around today. My tween-age children have played it recently. It's a deliberately annoying, comically bleak game about mostly stupid characters having to deal with conspiracies and hopeless bureaucracies battling each other for world supremacy--sort of like The Simpsons meet Brazil.

Shattered and Other Stories

(West End Games, 1994)

Cover art by Randy Hamblin

The back cover. 

In its day, West End Games licensed some pretty popular media franchises for gaming purposes, such as:

Star Wars

Ghostbusters

Indiana Jones

DC (Comics) Universe

Men in Black (as in the Will Smith films)

Necroscope

Species

Tales from the Crypt

 

Tank Girl

RPGs and tanks don't usually mix.

Hercules (i.e., the Kevin Sorbo TV show)

Xena 

That's a pretty heavy lineup. They also produced original RPGs in the fictional universes of Paranoia, Torg, the D6 System, Metabarons, Septimus, and Shatterzone. Where I connect with West End was with the last named. Shatterzone was a space-based RPG with strong cyberpunk overtones. I was a big cyberpunk fan in those days, and when I discovered West End was doing an anthology of original, Shatterzone oriented stories, I got in contact with editor Greg Farshtey about submitting a story. As I recall, he agreed to an outline I put together called "Solid Gold Asteroid." In 1993 I wrote a fairly substantial novella by that name which was published in January 1994 by West End in the book Shattered and Other Stories.

"Solid Gold Asteroid" (hereafter "SGA") is part 1960s space drama with definite cyberpunk touches. It describes the lives of a trio of blue collar types who operate a space tug. Their job is to move other things around: bigger ships, space junk, cargo pods, and at the beginning of the story, a 10 kilometer wide antenna called Dark Echo I. The tug is named Blount Instrument after its owner/pilot, Gary Blount. 

("Blount" is pronounced "blunt," by the way. Hence Blount Instrument.) 

The hard working Gary Blount.

(Horst Janson, from Murphy's War, 1971)

Gary's communications guy is named Phoebus McFee, and his engineer is Jan Zuva. While struggling to align the antenna, which is far too big for the little tug, McFee picks up a telemetry signal from deep space. A robot probe has been surveying asteroids in the Shatterzone, and accidentally comes across one heavily laced with gold. The Shatterzone is like a Sargasso Sea in space, full of asteroids, wrecked ships, deadly radiation, and desperate fringe types, pirates, et. al. Not a healthy place to linger. 

At first, a gold asteroid is not very interesting to Gary, Phoebus, and Jan. The cost of recovering even tons of gold would not be profitable in deep space. However, detail assay reveals most of the gold is isotope 200, which in the Shatterzone universe is very rare and highly valuable as engine shielding in FTL spacecraft. There's enough Gold 200 in the asteroid to make Gary & Co. filthy rich for the rest for their lives. Naturally they decide to grab the asteroid before a big mining conglomerate can. 

At a raffish station called Blue Tortuga (I had a theme going here), Blount Instrument docks to take on fuel for the long haul to the Shatterzone. Jan and Phoebus go in for R&R, and Phoebus gets rolled by Gary's former lover and sharp operator Lark Kazantsev. Lark learns of the SGA and wants it for herself. Gary tries to stop her, but a race develops to the Shatterzone. On the way Blount Instrument is stopped by a scruffy Fleet corvette, the Furious, commanded by the corrupt Emil Naschy.

Naschy wants his cut.

(Peter Bull from The African Queen, 1951)

Naschy cuts himself in on whatever Gary makes on the SGA. Considering the firepower Naschy commands, Gary has no choice but to agree. 

Gary & Co. find Lark's ship, Larkspur, has cracked up on an asteroid. She's the only survivor. Now we get a twist: Lark, Gary's old lover, is a dead ringer for Gary's engineer, Jan Zuva.

Lark Kazantsev (l); Jan Zuva, (r).

(Merle Oberon, 1911-1979)

They're not twins, or clones. Jan's not actually human, she's a synthetic person, a biosynth. After Lark dumped Gary, he indentured himself for two years to pay for a duplicate of his old girlfriend. Jan's looks are based entirely on Gary's memories, but once alive, she develops her own personality, habits, and tastes. Guess what? She doesn't like Gary very much either.

Gary puts Lark to work, and together the four of them find the SGA and line up to push it out of the Zone. The huge bulk proves too much for Blount Instrument, and the SGA gets away, plowing through the Shatterzone towards open space. Outside the Zone, Naschy's ship has been taken over by corporate security men, and he's forced to take the SGA back as corporate property. No payday for our guys, and no kickback for Naschy either.

Sounds like a downbeat ending, but there's another twist I will not reveal here . . . copies of Shattered can be found.

West End Games did not survive the 90s, filing for bankruptcy in 1998 despite its plethora of big name franchise games. It was a hard time for the gaming industry. TSR hit the rocks at pretty much the same time, being bought out by Wizards of the Coast in 1997. As the new century began, the franchises to Star Wars and other valuable properties were lost, and popular original games like Paranoia were sold off. By 2016 most of West End's remaining assets had been disposed of. Personally, I don't know what happened to the Shatterzone RPG. 

I never played Shatterzone as a game, but I enjoyed writing "Solid Gold Asteroid." It was a comfortable length, a novella rather than a short story. My earliest attempts at science fiction resulted in a series of related novellas ("Dread Nymph," "Camouflet," "A Star Called Wormwood," et. al.), and I have always found the form congenial. Later I would contribute a novella to a Dragonlance anthology (The Players of Gilean), "Enter, a Ghost." Other than anthologies, there is very little market for stories of this length. 

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America define a novella as being between 17,500 and 39,999 words in length. 40,000 and above is a novel; 7,500 to 17,500 is a novelette, and below 7,500 is a short story.

Novellas that appear on multiple best-of lists

Title	Author	Published	Reference
Animal Farm	George Orwell	1945	[15][16][18][19]
Billy Budd	Herman Melville	1924	[16][19]
Breakfast at Tiffany's	Truman Capote	1958	[15][16]
A Christmas Carol	Charles Dickens	1843	[15][16][18]
A Clockwork Orange	Anthony Burgess	1962	[15][17]
Ethan Frome	Edith Wharton	1911	[16][17]
Goodbye, Columbus	Philip Roth	1959	[17][19]
Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad	1899	[16][17][18][19]
I Am Legend	Richard Matheson	1954	[17][18]
The Metamorphosis	Franz Kafka	1915	[15][16][18][19]
Of Mice and Men	John Steinbeck	1937	[15][18]
The Old Man and the Sea	Ernest Hemingway	1952	[15][17][18][19]
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde	Robert Louis Stevenson	1886	[15][16]
The Stranger	Albert Camus	1942	[15][16][17]
The War of the Worlds	H. G. Wells	1898	[16][19]

(from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novella)
I haven't made the list yet.

The Shatterzone universe has a more adult feel to it than franchises like Star Wars or Buck Rogers. In practice this meant language and morality was more fluid (and adult) than in most space operas. The emphasis on biological and mechanistic interface shows the influence of cyberpunk ideas. "SGA" uses specialized slang and game terms (as required), which may be lost on a general reader at this late date, but that is a danger all SF faces. Trying to render 'future' slang is always problematic. I tend to minimize such terms in my own work. 

I forget who said it, but a wise writer has remarked that 'shit' will always be shit, no matter what you call it, so why make up a new term? Writer/editor Damon Knight also criticized superficial renaming of ordinary things in an SF story as the "Calling a rabbit a Smeep" fallacy. It's still a rabbit.

Next: A sample from "Solid Gold Asteroid."