Got all that? There will be a quiz later. How resistant is Tam Rosse? And how resourceful? To gain her full powers, the Priestess must lose her virginity - and the Plague is spread sexually. Tam Rosse needs her bioengineering skill.īut the Priestesses of Pallas are part of a fertility cult. Tam Rosse is himself being hunted by the virgin Priestess of Pallas, who emits the rho-pheromone. But to get it, he must fight “King” Brady, the only human aboard the ship, and the ship’s half-mad interface, the Lady Nii herself, Brady’s ally and lover. Escaping from prison, he finds the derelict greatship Lady Nii. Tam Rosse, rebel against the Terrans, has been bred for resistance to the Plague. The Terran Empire has quarantined the Asteroids. The Plague made its victims mindlessly loyal to anyone who gave off a tailored rho-pheromone. In particular, her story’s introduction is just way, way too dense, the sort of thing you can read five times over and still not make any sense of:įifty years ago, Nicholsun’s Plague devastated the Asteroids. By her own account “a science-fiction fan since the day she got the adult librarian to let her read The Day of the Triffids,” Sarah Smith approaches the genre without contempt, although she does evince a bit of that over-eagerness in her world-building which is so common when “literary” authors make the jump to science fiction. One does have to wonder, however, whether most of the academics who were virtually the only ones to play it got the reference.Īs the name would imply, King of Space is a science-fiction story. King of Space pays homage to Adventure and Zork. As such, it feels more approachable than was the Eastgate norm to those of us not steeped in the post-structuralist literary theory so many Storyspace works were crafted to illuminate. King of Space, by contrast, does have a story it wants to share with you, one which you can guide to some extent by making a series of clearly-delinated choices, much like in a Choose Your Own Adventure novel or a modern choice-based digital interactive fiction. Belying the name of the tool used to create them, those are mostly stateless word salads with little coherent plot or narrative drive. Given the game’s obscurity even in the days when those minimum system requirements would have been significant, I felt like an intrepid digital explorer, venturing into a realm few had ever visited before me, as I moved the files into a vintage-Mac emulator and began to play.įrom the moment that I first turned my attention to the Eastgate school, I had been particularly intrigued by King of Space among the more than forty works of hypertext which they published in their heyday because it lives at the opposite end of a continuum from afternoon, a story and the many similar Eastgate works created in Storyspace. I would need, the package helpfully informed me, 1 MB of memory and a hard disk in my Macintosh to run it. It arrived in a simple gray folio containing an instruction booklet and a hand-labelled, obviously hand-burned CD. I ordered King of Space directly from Eastgate some time ago, at the same time that I ordered Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story for my previous article on the literary movement Eastgate once attempted to foster. He therefore developed an engine from scratch for Smith’s project, running under HyperCard on the Macintosh he called it in various places “KingWriter” or “Hypergate.” Smith provided him with the text and the design, and he, with the occasional help of an artist named Matthew Mattingly and a composer named Michael Druzinsky, translated it to the computer. Smith, who had owned a home computer for ten years already and was a longtime devotee of the text adventures published by Infocom and others, agreed.Īt this early date, Bernstein hadn’t yet completed the acquisition of Storyspace, the hypertext-authoring system destined to be the bedrock technology of what I refer to as the Eastgate school. “Want to write me something?” Bernstein asked. The interesting if badly flawed hypertext novel King of Space was born in the late 1980s, when an English professor and aspiring novelist named Sarah Smith met Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems at a MacWorld show.
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