Description:
Buy Greg Costikyan's book. This book, another book, any book that finds its way into print from the depths of this man's marvelously weird little noggin. Gamers should already know Costikyan well: ignoring his fingerprints on a score of other games, this top-shelf designer created the Star Wars RPG, 1984's classic Toon (with props to Warren Spector), the unbelievably wonderful Paranoia (regrettably, long out of print), and the guy still keeps up his chops with the likes of Violence: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed. In First Contract, Costikyan has resurrected an idea from some long-forgotten shoebox, a novella originally titled "Sales Reps from the Stars." A savvy CEO, a power-suit-wearing, proper Indian businessman by the name of Johnson Mukerjii, gets screwed by an alien invasion. The ETs want to do business, except we're the Aztecs and they're the Spaniards, and we can kiss our gold good-bye. But Mukerjii, after losing everything--his millions, his San Jose manse, his leggy wife--figures out how to beat the aliens at their own game in a characteristically Costikyan way: by producing exports in the form of cheesy, shoddily constructed spaceship beverage accoutrements: "Made in Japan," "Made in Taiwan," and now--I gestured grandly--"Made on Earth." Fans of imaginative fiction would do well to keep tabs on Costikyan. --Paul Hughes
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