Cold War RPG Musings
"O fish, are you constant to the old covenant?" "Return, and we return. Keep faith, and so will we." - From Tim Powers' Declare , quoting A Thousand and One Nights Over the Christmas holidays I spent some time reading the first three of John Le Carré's novels: Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold . In the first two the protagonist is George Smiley, a spy about as far from James Bond as one can imagine. He's not a combat master, he's someone who thinks and knows an awful lot. I've heard this style of writing referred to as "stale beer" espionage novels. It is a world of blackmail, betrayal, and morally questionable actions. The Spy Who Came In From the Cold involves a series of betrayals and deceptions such that it is impossible to find a "hero". While such fiction is typically "mundane", it need not be so. For example, Tim Powers' Declare is a WW2/Cold War...