Adrian Tchaikovsky's Blog, page 19

Nuns and Dragons.

And we're back. Something of a hiatus in which I'm drawing towards the end of my science fiction project, or at least the last 25% of it. This is still heavily under wraps, so heavily in fact that it may never see the sight of day. I like it, anyway. No idea if its appeal is sufficiently broad so as to extend to anyone else.

In the meantime, Fantasycon is rapidly approaching. I shall be taking up the moderator's chair for the first time ever (1) to tackle the question of reality in fantasy: how much is too much. That's, I think, 10-11am on the Saturday 28th. At 10.30pm the same day I have a reading slot. This will probably be a short story, possibly even one of the Shadows of the Apt stories to be published elsewhere than here, I'm still deciding.

Annoyingly, the launch of the Ancient Wonders anthology is on at 10am that same day, so I won't be able to make it, much to my chagrin. However I will be happy to sign copies of it, if people can track me down (hint: my reading's a good bet). Or, indeed, copies of pretty much anything else.

Other than that, it should be a good convention. Possibly not as newsworthy as last year's, let's hope.

I have another short story coming out in Fox Spirit's soon-t0-be-released Tales of the Nun and Dragon, a fun-looking anthology with the work of a lot of talented writers. This will be available in e-format from Amazon from this weekend on, and there will also be a limited edition paperback run, and print on demand books later available from Lulu.com as I understand. It's a nice-looking set of stories and the collection also comes illustrated by Kieran Walsh.

(1) Actually one probably doesn't take up a chair, unless it's a very unruly panel.

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New Tor post and new short story now out

This just in:

Another post has been diverted to the Tor site, so you can see my musings about what makes a hero a hero, and whether it always has to be an enormous sword here.

Also out is the anthology "Now I Lay Me Down To Reap" which includes not only my black comedy "Good Taste" but also my friend Bill Read's excellent story "The Fairies in the Wood". The Amazon link to purchase this collection is here and there looks to be a lot of other good stuff in it also.

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Rapid Roundup

Anyone wanting a signed copy of the Air War can find them at Forbidden Planet, Shaftesbury Avenue, where they had a fairly enormous amount of stock, and also at Waterstones, Leadenhall Market — with the latter, the whole series is on a Buy One, Get One Half Price deal, so it's a good place to make up any missing books in the series.

On the Tor UK site I discuss the real and ancient art of killing off characters here which is why there's only an abbreviated post on this site.

Also Tor news, of course, is that their e-books are now going to be entirely DRM free for your reading convenience. This is a bold move. It'll be interesting to see how it pans out.

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Signing the Air War

It looks as though I shall be in London on Friday 10th in order to complete in the Olympic book signing repechages (1). I will fill this post out with details as it's not clear whether or not I'll be doing a live signing on the day — if so it will be at the Waterstones around Trafalgar Square. I will, however, be signing stock for Forbidden Planet, and also for Waterstones at Leadenhall, so if you're after a signed copy, that's where to head.

It's likely I'll be doing something in Leeds later on as well.

(1) Seriously, I don't think I had ever heard this word until this weekend, and now you can't get away from it.

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The Big Reveal

Firstly, Edge Lit was a great weekend, and particularly thanks to my full house of workshop-goers (workshoppers? workshoplifters?) and the people who came to hear me and MD Lachlan read. All credit to Alex Davis and his team for organizing the event.

Secondly, however, it's New Contract Time! Specifically, and thanks to the tireless efforts of my agent, I have sealed a deal with Tor for another three books after War Master's Gate.

Needless to say, book the first will be The Seal of the Worm, the last book of the Shadows of the Apt Series (1). I've wittered on about this at various points during the writing process, but yes, this is it. Not the last cicada of summer for the Insect-kinden themselves, as they will get another outing at a later date, but certainly the end of the plot that was kicked into motion back when Stenwold Maker was spying out the gates of Myna with his telescope, with the Wasp Empire camped outside.

The second book of the series is something a bit different, a stand-alone (2) fantasy with a more historical bent — touches of the Napoleonic, American wars (both independence and civil) and a bit of Austen, all set in an original secondary world. This book will not be a kinden novel, but it will certainly pick up some of the themes that Shadows of the Apt has played with.

Finally, the last book of the contract sequence should kick off a completely new fantasy series with its own weirdness, in a new setting that I am currently researching in great detail (3).

More details on these two will follow over time (the second one is mostly missing a title at the moment, so once I have a handy monicker for it, I will be able to start talking in more detail.)

Release schedules are needless to say all pie in the sky at the moment, but it's possible that War Master's Gate and Seal of the Worm will follow at shorter intervals than the full year after The Air War (4) given that they've been completed, and I'd personally be happy to see a rolling 9 month release date.

There is also Super Secret Project Zeta, also known as something of a personal Science Fiction project, which I am currently kicking around, but as it's somewhat outside my normal comfort zone, I can't really make any warranty as to when or even if that might see the light of day. Or the cold, hard light of the stars, I guess. That's the sort of thing SF writers say, isn't it? Before they get in their space elevators to go down to their space basements or… well, anyway.

Also, as some side news, some more short stories turning up in an anthology near you:

"The Mouse Ran Down" has been accepted by Siren's Call Publications' Carnage: After the End Volume 2 (5). This is a rather bleak (6) story about messing about with time, and the direful consequences thereof. This is my second sale to Siren's Call as the Now I Lay Me Down To Reap anthology on the same page also has one of mine in it.

"Bones" has been accepted by Alchemy for The Alchemy Press Book of Ancient Wonders. Now, this one is a bit special. This will be my first Shadows of the Apt short story to be published outside of this site. More, although I hadn't really intended to go quite that far, there's rather a lot of backstory in "Bones" concerning the kinden and their world. One of the passing references in the books I get quizzed on is a chance reference Teornis makes in The Sea Watch to a ruined city full of monstrous bones out in the desert. Suffice to say, if that always bugged you and you wanted to know more, this is the story for you! The Ancient Wonders book should be debuting at Fantasycon this year — I should be there to sign stuff if you like.

(1) and if it's slipped your mind what that is, Robert Grant is very kindly re-reading the series for Tor here.

(2) or, if it's wildly successful, Book One of the Epic Ten Volume Series by… I jest, but I never wrote anything that didn't have a back door for emergency sequel access. It's the advantage of the ongoing living world school.

(3) I've bought some books from Amazon.

(4) Author copies of which I received today. I have joked about books being big enough to stun a bear before. All I'll say is, that bear's gonna wish it'd never been born.

(5) The confirmation said volume 2 — only one volume appears on the web page for upcoming submissions.

(6) Well, bleak's kind of in the brief for that one.

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To Boldly MMO

So, being as The Air War is out in 2–3 weeks and I'm doing Edge Lit next weekend (1) the time is obviously ripe to talk about game design in MMORPGs.

(1) With my first ever workshop, no less, about which I am bricking it.

Role-playing in computer games came up briefly as a tangent in my Thing That I Did at Durham recently, which got me thinking in more detail. Some background: I like MMOs. I like the idea of them, and in general I like the execution, but there is so much room to make a better gaming experience, especially if you're gonna add the RPG onto the end of the MMO.

World of Warcraft has sat on the big chair of MMORPGS (from now on just MMOs, lest I hit some sort of acronym event horizon) for a long time, and in general for good reason. For all that it gets made fun of or derided, it's a solid game that a large team of talented people spend a great deal of time tweaking and tuning and inventing new bits for. The great WoW adventure does appear to be slowing, however — the last big expansion felt underwhelming to me, and to many of the other people I play with, and there is a decidedly ambivalent feeling about the next one, which is mostly about pandas and Pokemon-style pet battles (2). Players of WoW have been wondering for a while what might unseat the crown prince of fetching 20 goblin ears, but the surprising news is that, well, nothing has. There have been plenty of challengers, and none have come close. Also, the brutal truth is that just about every one of those challengers has been WoW with maybe a single new mechanic, and so it's not surprising that the gaming world hasn't exactly been swept off its feet.

(2) You get to be a panda and fight mantis-men. No prizes for guessing that I would far, far rather it were the other way round.

There are basically some big problems with the WoW model (much of which model was, I think, inherited from earlier games like Everquest), but they're none of them insoluble, they just require someone to spend that colossal ton of cash that an MMO costs to make, and risk it on something new. MMOs seem to suffer more than most media from the "copy the winning method" school of design, and unfortunately copying the winning method is never going to net you better than 2nd place. Whilst everyone likes to flirt with the new guy, incumbents have a lot of momentum.

So: what are the big things about the WoW model that could stand a shaking up?

Red vs. Blue

I understand that the 2 opposed factions put the 'war' into Warcraft, but even in that came it comes across as weird, arbitrary and often game-breakingly illogical, especially as the factions cannot communicate in any common language, but the world is full of NPCs who can talk to both sides (3). It also means that when the designers add new races, they get slotted into one faction or the other without much logic. In fact the pandas will get to choose which one they eventually end up in, an innovation precisely 2 expansions too late. Anyway, the faction thing isn't universal (Lord of the Rings and Tera, for example, don't have it) but it's insidious — Aion, Rifts, Warhammer,  the new Star Wars and even Secret World (4) all do it. I understand that it streamlines PvP, but it's an immersion killer for a lot of players. OK, it just about works where you have a complete divide, like in heavy PvP focused games such as Warhammer, but in Rifts, for example, you have the not-Alliance and the not-Horde fighting the world's must stupidly pointless war, whilst under clear, present, obvious threat by an entire cosmos of invading evil. The real problem with this model is that the game assigns you an ideology. If you're Horde, you're going to do the Horde things, whether or not you personally like them or not — if you don't do them, then you'll have nothing to do, because them's the quests.  You're constantly railroaded into doing objectionable things. I'm reminded of the bit in the Tauren starting area where one guy sends you to kill the gnolls because they're killing all the animals, and the guy next to him sends you to kill an appalling buttload of animals for basically no reason. Don't want to do the quests? No xp for you! And sometimes no progression to later parts of the game.

(3) a major plot point of the WoW satire I did with Justina Robson in the anthology "What a Long, Strange Trip it's Been".

(4) The new modern day game, whose other great innovation is, wait for it, three factions! They have a green one!

Violence Solves Everything

This is a wider game issue to a certain extent, but it grates most in MMOs where you spend so much time with the one character (5). The problem here is obvious. Violence is easy. Not so much easy to commit, it's just easy to handle as a problem-solution model. You fight, pitting your abilities against his abilities in an incremental race to the bottom of the health bar. At the end of a fight he's dead, you're not, no loose ends and no uncertainty. This leads inevitably to the "fetch me 20 (bodyparts)" quests which are the horrible stodge that pads out MMOs. So what are the alternatives? Stealth, for example. I have fond memories of the single player game Thief, and I played Morrowind and Skyrim as a sneaker. Works fine for a single player game where you don't have to balance against other players. The problem with sneaking is that, as presented in games to date, it's an all or nothing thing — you win completely, or you're spotted and you've lost. In WoW there is a stealth class, but it is essentially actively penalised for sneaking rather than fighting its way (no dead monsters, no xp) and fighting is usually an intrinsic part of the stuff you have to do anyway. Diplomacy is another way of solving the same problems as fighting — talking, tricking, disguising, conning, even converting the bad guys to get what you want. Both stealth and social could actually be run in a manner quite similar to combat — with various skills used to actively oppose the other party's perception/suspicion or whatever, but it would be more complex to set up a game that way, whilst killing stuff is tried, tested and controllable. The dream ticket would be, say, some grand mission where sneakers, talkers and warriors all had their parts to play, like a Shadowrun scenario or a bank caper.

(5) It's also a genre problem, as was mentioned in a panel at Eastercon — there are heroes who don't come by that title over a mound of corpses, but they're in the minority.

Nothing you do matters

This is the big one, and it's sufficiently much of a problem that WoW, for example, has taken steps to blunt it somewhat. However, it's still there. Nothing you do as a PC matters. In fact in most parts of most games, there is this weird space/time correlation, where if you go back to an earlier area, you are effectively going back in time, and all the guys you killed will be back on their feet, and the peasants are complaining about the same stuff again despite the fact that you sorted all that out when you were there before. WoW and other games now use "phasing" meaning that some areas do change after you hit some milestones, but the problem is still endemic. The need to give you infinite stuff to do leads to constant repeatable quests for NPCs who apparently can't get enough of some very specific commodity, obtained from bad guys who never go extinct, ruled over by enormous boss monsters that spout the same defiant trash-talk every damn week just before you kill them, because, just as you come back to life when you die, so do they. Nothing changes, nothing progresses, you're trapped in a never-ending spiral of pointless carnage.

Eve Online at least dodges this one by having the universe player-led (6), and the recent Star Wars game made a very creditable attempt to make you feel as if you were important by giving you a class-based plot which, for a brief time, actually managed to inject some RP into the MMO — but this failed to survive to the midgame, sadly. My character in that was an imperial agent, and you spend the first planet undercover pretending to be a pirate, and it's really good fun. Then you hit the next planet or so, and whilst you're still supposed to be undercover as a rebel, simultaneously everyone on the planet is saying, "Hey! You're an Imperial Secret Agent! Go and fetch me 20 wookie ears!" somehow without blowing your cover. And outside your personal plot, well, no matter how thin you slice it, it's still baloney.

Another bad habit WoW particularly has is NPC-worship, especially as the game starts off quite lore-heavy after the various plain Warcraft strategy games. This feature turns up in many of the endgame boss fights — you fight your way to the Big Bad, you go through various stages of the fight, and then LO! a lore NPC turns up and spectacularly saves the day, and gets all the credit and the statues and the like (7). The players are marginalized from the game histories, cut out like Stalin's rejects, and of course it's because all the players have defeated all the threats to the world. Everyone's cabinet has the same trophies. Every game server is witness to the same humdrum triumphs.

In contrast, I am unavoidable reminded of the role-playing tour de force that was Skyrim which, with all the pampering luxury of the single player game, was perhaps the most satisfactory gaming experience I've ever had (or if it wasn't, then it was Morrowind). I remember thinking "I wish this was an MMO" because I wanted to share what was happening to me, and not just in a water-cooler sort of way. And although there is an Elder Scrolls MMO in the works, I don't really hold out much hope. What is good about the one is anathema to the other, unless they change the mould.

Is there any way to solve this one for an MMO? Some thoughts:

- Have player-specific quests. OK, the Skyrim Radiant random quest thing got old after a while, but instead of sending every player to the same place to kill the same bandit, generate a random target, and a random place — or trail of places.

- have player-specific plots. SW:TOR does this at the class level, which is still a whole lot better than most. On the general "there are only X many stories in the world" principle, however, as part of character generation you could set an aim — revenge, rescue, discovery, secret past, whatever, and the game could sporadically throw quests your way that related to that theme — so that maybe along with its +19 Endearing Sword of the Kazoo, that boss just dropped a letter giving you the last known location of your missing brother. and when you accomplished that one, you could choose a new motivation. Or something.

- have player-driven worlds. It should be possible for the mass of player action to determine the denouement of large scale events in the game. Let's say there are some warring factions in the world (not factions that players are locked into) — if more players help one than the other, that faction might advance, kill important NPCs, take new territory — in the simplest example I could think of. This would work as a device only if the players were free to choose — i.e. no Red vs Blue. Anyway, if the game had multiple servers, each server would develop its own history over time. If you were really daring you could experiment with an MMO arc of a fixed duration, a cycle of the world, a generation of its inhabitants, and at the end, everyone gets old and passes on to new characters in a world that has been shaped by the actions of their predecessors. But that's just crazy talk…

(6) although I have in my time mocked a friend who desperately had to log onto Eve to buy insurance for his starship. Insurance! In a game!

(7) Again see "The Indecipherables" from "What a Long Strange Trip it's Been.

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FP Small Press Expo

…went very well. Elbow room only, a good chance to meet authors and/or catch up with acquaintances. The new "Hauntings" anthology from Newcon seemed to do very well, and there was a sort of feeding-frenzy mass signing by the authors. Presses represented were Myrmidon, Snowbooks and Pandemonium as well as Newcon. At the same time, in a nearby Waterstones, Paul Cornell was interviewing Ben Aaronovitch, so a good day for the genre all round.

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Futures

Just a brief note to say that my story "21st Century Girl" is in the Futures section of this month's Nature magazine, and can also be read here. Enjoy.

Next stop Forbidden Planet 1pm onwards 30th June  for the small press expo.

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I'm doing what for Edge Lit?

This is something of a cautionary tale about agreeing to do things and then forgetting that you did. The Edge Lit (Derby Quad, 14th July) schedule has come together, and I'm pleased to announce that I will be:

10am Digital Workshop — running a workshop about world-building

2pm Meeting room — joint reading slot with MD Lachlan — I'll probably do a short story as, having done a few of these now, that seems to give a more satisfactory audience experience.

4pm Cinema 2 — Does fantasy need archetypes panel — this feels as though it's going to at least touch on the same ground as the elf panels from SFX and Alt Fiction, making this the popular topic for the year.

9pm Cinema 2 — The Influence of HP Lovecraft panel — provisional (I think I'm doing this, but I'm a late shoe-in, and it's not 100% certain yet).

You might's notice that first entry there, which rather threw me when I saw it. Yes, actually I did tell Alex I might be up for a workshop. And somewhat forgot about it after that, but yes! I shall be doing some sort of workshop. On world building. Indeed, yes. So, if you're going to be at Edge Lit in Derby, and want to at least get the chew the fat on the subject of fantasy writing in general and worlds in particular, this is a good chance. Max 15 places, and basically you let them know you're interested when you arrive and they'll slot you in. No extra charge. It'll be an adventure, for everyone concerned, possibly including the organisers.

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Snow White and the Huntsman — Right and Wrong Notes

Caution — spoilers ahead if you haven't seen the film.

I was a bit thrown when I saw the trailer for this, as it was apparently advertising an entirely different film whose full title was "Snow White and the Witch and the Wardrobe of the Rings of Thrones". Which was basically what we got, by way of Robin Hood, Joan of Arc and Willow.

Reviews have been all over. MovieBob from the Escapist's "Escape to the Movies", who I normally chime quite well with, did not much like it (1). I actually genuinely enjoyed it as a good fantasy movie definitely aiming for the same general targets as LOTR and the two earlier Narnia films, and hitting the mark far more often than not (2). Despite expectations, it managed to provide an interesting, often original and imaginative fantasy story despite the large number of tropes — and at the same time it took some fantasy stereotypes that have gotten very tired and actually breathed new life into them by the sheer authority of being a retelling of a fairy story — i.e. one of our main sources for the tropes. Hence, yes, the princess has a destiny, and the general state of the land is inherently linked to the character of the monarchy (3), and that sort of thing has been done to death in fantasy literature, but because of the particular story they were telling, and because they cranked the latter, especially, up to 11, it worked. Having the courage of your convictions and not trying to weasel your tropes in disguised as a Good Idea is sometimes the best way to make them work.

At the same time, the film also managed to tick most of the Snow White story boxes in an interesting and non-sentimental way. Most impressive in this respect were the dwarves. By the time they turn up you've pretty much forgotten that there are supposed to be dwarves in this story, and when they did loom (4) into view I was dreading the traditional ghastly comic turn that would ruin the tone and pace of the movie. The heavyweight casting, however, gives them a gravitas, pathos and depth that makes them one of the key elements of the film even thought they're not in it so much — and they reinforce the key themes just by being, as (magical creatures) their own health and wellbeing is intrinsically linked to the land, the crown, and therefore the plot. It's surprisingly elegantly done.

So yes, there was a certain amount of cliché. and a staggering case of foot-in-mouth for the henchman character, who at one point apparently skips a page ahead in the script to reveal his villainous plan before the princess is, in fact, in his clutches, but it was a good fantasy film. But.

One serious wrong note. Religion. I don't know if someone was trying to stave off the angry Christian Right crowd who muttered so much at Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, whilst passing by the door of the Narnia films because they'd painted a cross on it, but seriously: there is no sign of organized religion in Snow White. There is no sense that the film takes place in any way in the real world. No place names are bandied about. There are no churches that I can recall, nobody goes praying at the altars when the evil queen takes over. The Pope sends no Bulls to fantasyland to excommunicate her. However, there is a single (I think) mention of heaven and angels, which you could probably pass by as fairly generic. There is an entire conclave of doddering bishops in full regalia who get wheeled out for the coronation, but who have been kept the Lord knows where for the rest of the film because, as noted, nobody seems to be either religious or living in a land that has any structure of organized worship/doctrine/etc. Weirdest of all, however, when our Snow is in the slammer at the beginning, and in extremis, she prays. That, fine. OK. But she actually recites the entire Lord's Prayer, and it was a total immersion breaker. From a world building and writing perspective it felt shoehorned in (and why?) and completely wrong.

I'm not getting all Dawkins on yo' ass or anything like that, but it would be the same if someone turned up singing Yankie Doodle Dandy (5) or if Atilla the Hun turned up for a cameo (6). The Lord's Prayer is a culturally specific artifact that comes from a specific religious background that was otherwise entirely absent in the setting. It's inclusion, in full and with the film's complete, devoted attention, felt extremely weird and uncomfortable. Mind bogglingly, I have read one review which claims that this inclusion tells us the story takes place in Dark Ages Europe. If that was the intent, it's a very strong argument for "show don't tell".

(1) But then our tastes have been diverging recently. He absolutely slated The Hunger Games movie and, whilst I too was unenthusiastic about the shaky cam fight scenes and the way the plot carefully sheltered the heroes from any actual guilt as she went through the gladiatorial bloodfest, I felt the film I watched was far better than the film he watched, and I don't think Battle Royale comparisons are particularly helpful.

(2) And very ably assisted by James Newton Howard's soundtrack — a composer who should get more gigs.

(3) God help them if they have a revolution, that's all I'm saying.

(4) Or, you know, whatever.

(5) Unless they were referencing Mark Twain, I guess.

(6) Or, say, Santa Claus turning up in Narnia, because, seriously, WTF Lewis?

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