womzilla | Dungeons & Dragons and creativity unburdened by coherence

dhole has a very nice look back at his own Golden Age of Role-Playing (the Golden Age of RPGs is "the summer of your first campaign"), which was the release of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Second Edition in 1989. He mostly discusses the tangle of brilliance and idiocy which marked the early versions of D&D--and by early, remember, 2nd Edition was more than fifteen years after the original grey/white box release:

There was a naive enthusiasm in the earlier version which is lost in the more professional product, and some of those unworkable or unnecessary rules had a stroke of brilliance to them. It's possible that there's a writing related moral in there, somewhere.

This collides in my head with the fact that A. E. van Vogt was, for a couple of key years , the most popular writer in John W. Campbell's Astounding. In an venue which supposedly valorized reason and thoughtful extrapolation, van Vogt wrote stories which are layer upon layer of hallucinatory nonsense supercharged by wild and passionate invention. He is the diametric opposite of the cool, careful writing of Asimov or the coherent worldbuilding of Robert Heinlein's Future History (the two canonical works of Astounding). van Vogt is more in the tradition E. E. "Donutmaker" Smith, but he took Smith's sense of epic scale and freed it of even the thinnest constraints of logic--in fact, often being deliberately anti-logical. And even now--nearly fifty years after Damon Knight's epic demolition of van Vogt in "Cosmic Jerrybuilder"--van Vogt's place of honor in the field has survived in a way that most of his contemporaries' reputations have not. (Note that there have been two authorized van Vogt sequelae in the last couple of years. No one is doing that for Edmund Hamilton or Sprague de Camp or Elron Hoover, three other very popular contemporary writers.)

van Vogt and D&D are permanently linked in my mind by Gygax's appropriation of van Vogt's "Coeurl the Destroyer" in the form of the Displacer Beast in the Greyhawk supplement (1975). Lore Sjoberg said, "the idea of a six-legged panther with squid tentacles that looks like it's somewhere other than it really is [probably] originated ... as the result of blunt trauma". That sums up both early D&D and van Vogt so well.

For years, I've felt that anyone really wanting to understand science fiction needs to understand how van Vogt works. And I think that those two words from dhole's essay above--"naive enthusiasm"--are the key that unlocks the mystery.