Max Gladstone's Blog, page 17

About the Craft Sequence and the Sequel to Three Parts Dead

In the eight months since Three Parts Dead hit stores, I’ve seen a lot of people wonder if the book was part of a series.  I’ve answered this question in readings and in person, but as I was reading through some material about Two Serpents Rise, and contemplating the Three Parts Dead paperback launch this next month, I realized I’d never discussed the issue on the blog before.  So!  Here we are.

Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise (and Five Eyes Break for that matter, plus the other book of which I just finished a first draft) all take place in the same universe, on the same planet, in the same timeline.  Characters, organizations, and universal properties (like the way the Craft works, or the soulstuff economy) in one book exist in every book.  Sometimes books will have a lot to do with one another, or have a direct causal connection.  Sometimes books will share very few characters, or be connected only by more-or-less continuous spacetime.

If I do my job right, a new reader should be able to read each book on its own, but readers who have read more books will understand more about the world and the context for the actions they describe.

Three Parts Dead and Two Serpents Rise, for example, take place in different cities at different points in time.  Two Serpents Rise (which Publishers Weekly really likes by the way, starred review, “Gladstone has outdone himself,” so that’s cool!) is set a short time before Three Parts Dead, in a city called Dresediel Lex, across the continent from Alt Coulumb.  There aren’t any characters obviously in common between the two books (though the King in Red, who killed Seril in the God Wars, is a central character in this story), but their plots are relevant to one another for reasons that will become clear in the third book and beyond.

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld is an obvious inspiration here.  I love the scope of the Disc, and the freedom Pratchett has within it to tell stories that mean something to him and his readers without having to squeeze characters into plots that don’t fit.  There can be more than one interesting event happening on a planet at any given moment, and these events don’t necessarily have anything to do with one another or with the same band of plucky heroes who always happen to be in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time.  I also love the feeling of writing in a shared universe, like Khazan in the old Fantasy Powers League where I used to write fic: stories sparking off in all directions, and occasionally reconnecting.  I guess you might say that I’m sharing the Craft Sequence with myself.  (Nobody ever accused writers of not being solipsists I guess.  I can only hope I’m as cool a solipsist as, Baccano! spoiler warning, Clare Stanfield.)

Currently, I’m using numbers in the titles to indicate where the books fall on the timeline relative to one another.  Two Serpents Rise is a bit before Three Parts Dead, but only a bit; Five Eyes Break (again, tentative title) is a few years after.  I’m planning to write a direct sequel to Three Parts Dead continuing the specific story of Tara and Abelard from the first book; some characters from both the first two books show up in the third.

As for overplot, arch-villains, and so forth, all I have to say is RAFO.

So that’s the major thing.  I still owe you folks detailed information about Two Serpents Rise—it’s coming, don’t worry.  I do have one question: I’ve been thinking about hosting this information, bio details on characters, and some other frequently asked questions, in its own section on the website.  What do you want to know more about?

DOMA Overturned, Prop 8 Sidestepped, and City Hall

I’m excited by the policy effect, but I’m knee-deep in editing and haven’t read the opinions yet, and anyway I’m not a legal scholar so you shouldn’t trust my opinion of law-logic.  The decision to sidestep the Prop 8 question by deciding that those bringing the appeal had no grounds to appeal seems like a nice example of the kind of quick and elegant dodge the Supreme Court has been performing in the face of political questions since Marbury v. Madison, which yes established judicial review as a concept in American law, but also very carefully backed away from exercising that power against an angry and popular President Jefferson in one of the most influential games of “my big brother kills people for the CIA and you better be glad he isn’t here right now” in history.

Also pretty wild to hear that the court overturned DOMA on equal protection grounds, which IIRC aren’t used often, and if this signals new comfort with that clause for the court, then cool, maybe we can stop leaning on the ever-overburdened interstate commerce clause.  And of course, there’s the VRA, which opinion I haven’t yet read, but the effect of which ruling makes this an odd week insofar as extensions and contractions of privilege and discrimination are concerned.  Lots to process here, but…

But well.  I read too many books, and I write too many words, and sometimes I get too caught up in arguments to feel the moment.

Friends of mine across the country are secure in their marriages, and in their right to marry, because of what happened today.  As are millions of people I’ve never met.

This is good.

And I’m listening to Vienna Teng:

 

Superman

I just spent all afternoon writing a prospectus for edits on the book I’m tentatively calling Five Eyes Break, which is the next book in the Craft Sequence after Two Serpents Rise.  I was going to take some time to discuss the Craft Sequence, my plans for it, Two Serpents Rise, and crazy worldbuilding, but that’s beyond me at this stage of typing-degeneration.  I’ll make it up to you on Monday, Internet, I promise.

Instead, let’s talk about Superman!  I still haven’t seen the movie, but Superman’s in the air.  I’ve never been as much of a Superman reader as I am a Bat-fan, but the character’s grown on me over the years—and outside of his continuity, he remains one of the most versatile and powerful symbols in comics.  Superman can be the standardbearer of undeconstructed Truth, Justice, and the American Way.  He can be an incarnation of Reaganist foreign interventionism.  He can be Jesus, or Jesus, or Jesus.  He can even be Stalin (sort of).

He is the ur-Superhero.  Eric Burns White has used Myth Criticism a couple times to describe Superman as the archetype superhero, the perfect iteration of the myth, from which all other superheroes are a deviation.  Here’s a good summary of the argument, though there are spoilers for Man of Steel near the end.  Superman is the Superhero; Batman is a superhero with a vengeance complex and an unhealthy fascination with terror.  Maybe those faults make Batman a more interesting character, but they don’t detract from the value of Superman.

My friend Dan and I were talking about Herculean labors the other day, and Dan raised the excellent point that Hercules, for all his position as the Strong Man of Greek Myth, solves his trials by being smart.  Each labor is designed to be impossible to accomplish with strength alone—the Augean Stables, for example, would take one man, no matter how strong, his entire life to clean out.  Hercules solves this by redirecting a river.  He couldn’t do that without his immense strength, sure, but immense strength alone wouldn’t solve the problem.

I propose a similar model for Superman stories.  The best of them aren’t “Superman hits Bad Guy faster than the speed of light, bad guy goes away,” they’re “Superman is placed in a position where it seems impossible to act in a Supermanly manner, and must figure out how to act and remain Superman anyway.”  The climax of Richard Donner’s first Superman movie (Lex Luthor’s two-missile dilemma) might be the simplest possible formulation of the Superman challenge.  Grant Morrison’s All Star Superman lives and breathes and is beautiful thanks to this type of challenge.  (And / but this sort of story also runs the risk of making Superman stories a little self-centered in their morality, which Alan Moore points out in his great Superman tale, Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?)

Anyway, that’s all.  No outrage here, just some pondering.  And, by god, if you read comics at all, read All Star Superman, and Alan Moore’s Superman stories—Alan Moore’s DC Universe collects many of his tales of the name-brand character, but his Supreme: The Story of the Year and even his Tom Strong books have lots and lots of Superman in them.

 

Three Parts Dead Trade Paperback Tour!

I’ve been off-blog busy for the last couple months—finishing a first draft of another book, working on short stories, fencing in tournaments, and pondering revisions to the third book in the Craft Sequence.

I’ll be bringing you up to speed on a lot of cool new developments over the next few days, but for now, I wanted to make sure you all knew that Three Parts Dead is due out in paperback late next month, and that I’ll be touring to celebrate!  Those of you who want a hardcover, buy now; those of you who want something you can throw in a beachbag, flock to bookstores on July 23.

The paperback features a slightly redesigned cover, with an enlarged version of Chris McGrath’s amazing cover art, and new quotes on the back from the glowing io9 review (!) and Felicia Day (!!).

(Um guys Felicia Day read my book!)

So, tour?  What does that look like?  Where will I be and when?  Read on, dear reader.

MAX’S WEST COAST AND BOISE SUMMER TOUR EXTRAVAGANZA!

San Diego Comic Con, July 19-21

I’ll rock out at San Diego Comic Con, and most likely participate in some programming, though we’re still working on final details.  More details to come on this one—we’re waiting for final info.  This is my first time to San Diego, and I have no idea what to expect beyond absurd over-the-top excess.  More details to come!

Powell’s Books, Portland OR, July 25, 7:30 PM

I’ll be reading some of Three Parts Dead, and maybe from new (as yet unreleased) material.  And answering questions.  Ask and ye shall receive.  If you dare!  Warning: answers not guaranteed to be comprehensible, or in a language hitherto known or comprehensible to humankind.  Probably will be, I just don’t want to make any promises.

University Bookstore, Seattle WA, July 26, 7 PM

More readings.  More questions.  Even less sanity!  It’s been a long time since I was last in Seattle, and I’m sort of impoverished when it comes to Seattle-themed reading material.  I guess part of Reamde’s set in the Seattle area; still, the strongest literary tie I have with the city is Terry Brooks’ A Knight of the Word, which is compelling, but probably left me with a warped image of Seattle, featuring more demon-muggings than occur in the actual city.  Dangers of urban fantasy tourism, I suppose.  Any suggestions?

Borderlands Books, San Francisco CA, July 27, 3 PM

I had a wonderful time on my last visit to Borderlands, and came away with a coffee mug and good memories.  Come for me, stay for the bookstore (which you really need to see this place to believe it, it’s so cool and pleasant and well-organized and if I lived in SF I would spend so much time and money there I probably wouldn’t have any left to spend anywhere else in San Francisco).  Or come for the bookstore and stay for me.  Works either way.

Hyde Park Books, Boise City ID, July 28, 3 PM

I’m very excited for this one—it’s the first signing I’ll give that will be attended by someone I’ve killed (in fiction, natch).  To make a long story short, one of the first novels I wrote (using 100,000 words as a cutoff here, for convenience’s sake—I wrote some stuff in the 100-page range as young as eight or so) was a giant fanfic for the Fantasy Powers League, an immense apocalyptic pastiche which doubled as a way to kill off a bunch of other people’s characters, with their consent of course.  And one of those dudes will be in the audience!  Hopefully he isn’t out for revenge.

Also, it’s likely that I’ll be doing some sort of workshop with the Boise Novel Orchard while I’m in town—again, more details as Evil Plans develop.

And that’s all I have time for this afternoon.  More details coming soon, especially about Two Serpents Rise—the next book in the Craft Sequence—and about the Craft Sequence as a whole.  Be well!

Signing at Mack Valley Con this Saturday!

If anyone’s in the Lowell Mass area tomorrow, looking for a way to beat the heat—I’ll be signing books at Mack Valley Con from 2pm to 6pm in the afternoon.  Come!  Talk about gods!  About demons!  About Mass Effect!  About Mikhail Bulgakov!  All these topics and many others are available for conversation!  Also there will be books for the autographing!

Details:

Lowell Elks Lodge

40 Old Ferry Rd

Lowell, Massachusetts 01854

2-6 pm

Be there or be rectangular.  (It’s too hot for square.)

 

Crisis on Question Mountain: Mass Effect 3′s Ending

The ending of Mass Effect 3, and of the entire Mass Effect series, broke the internet. I can’t call the ending ‘polarizing,’ because a polarized debate has two poles. Major gaming sites posted articles lambasting the ending, and protest groups formed to “Retake Mass Effect!” Elaborate strong misreadings of the ending were introduced to explain why Bioware was in fact engaged in an immense Inception game with players.

I finished the series for the first time a couple weeks ago, and I want to thank the folks at Bioware—if they’d set out to make a test case for endings and why they succeed or fail, I don’t think they could have done any better.

The Retake crowd, in addition to raising a number of continuity errors, claims that the ending reduces the setting’s complicated moral choices to a simple selection of A, B, or C, and that A, B, and C are mostly differentiated by the color of the explosion. Nothing is resolved, no questions are answered, and we’re left feeling hollow and betrayed.

On the other side stands Film Crit Hulk, a critic with deep appreciation for story, structure, formal experimentation, and fun. I’ve never yet been misled by a Film Crit Hulk article or recommendation. His long read on Mass Effect 3 identifies the Mass Effect series, up to and including ME3′s ending, as gaming’s Citizen Kane. That article nudged the ME series into my ‘to play’ column. I’m not generally a Wes Anderson fan but I loved Moonrise Kingdom, which I saw on his recommendation; I don’t generally sink 100+ hours into a franchise that looks an awful lot like a cover-based shooter, but the Hulk piqued my interest, and the further urging of forceful and brilliant friends sealed the deal.

In the article I linked above, the Hulk explains his love of the ending: how it resolves the series thematically and makes a powerful statement about the cyclical nature of history. To Hulk, even the similarity of the three ending cinematics is part of the text: we’re meant not to know what happens next, to stand on that alien planet with Joker and EDI and wonder what kind of strange new world our deeds have wrought. The point of inflection looks similar, but the futures look wildly different—and we’re left to wonder at that difference.

So, who’s right? The Retake crowd, or the Hulk?

Both, I think, though in different ways. (Yay, Synthesis Ending!)

(And here I put a cut, because I’m about to spoil ME3′s ending in detail, and offer minor spoilers for the ending of Hyperion and Season 4 of Babylon 5 to boot.  See you on the other side!)

Hulk’s right that, thematically and structurally, the ending works. ME3 elegantly resolves all the major conflicts in the series, one at a time: the game is all closure. We bring the krogan genophage plotline to an end; we participate in the resolution of the war between quarians and geth. We even learn the not-so-dark secret behind the asari façade of superiority. The way we resolve these conflicts drastically alters the direction we take into the final encounter, and that direction drastically alters the impact of that final encounter. The A, B, C choice is the culmination of all the choices your character has made previously in the game—in the end, the fate of the galaxy comes down to Shepard, as it has all along. The ending combines the series’ fascination with choice and its obsession with historical and narrative cycles. ME1 ends with the decision to save or destroy the Council. ME2 ends with the decision to save or destroy the Collector base—which decision, for the record, only changes the color of the ensuing explosion. And ME3 ends with the Star Child, and the A, B, or C option. Cycle after cycle, each terminated by a choice.

At the same time… Well. With all due respect to Hulk, and there’s a bunch of respect due, the guy is a wonderful writer and an insightful critic, the fact that so many people had problems with ME3′s ending indicates that something’s off no matter how perfect the ending looks on paper. To say otherwise, we run the risk of being that mad scientist in the collapsing tower screaming “But my calculations were perfect!” while our mindless cybernetic insect creations scuttle forth over the landscape, spraying acid spittle everywhere.

Sorry, analogy got away from me there. (As did the critters.) But! If the ending works on a thematic and structural level, and I agree with Hulk that it does, then the question becomes, why did many gamers rise up in fury? The answer I propose: that the problems people have with the ending arise from the final scene’s mechanics—that is, Mass Effect 3′s ending was the right ending, but that scene’s line-by-line writing and setup made it difficult for people who don’t naturally read for theme and structure (and most people don’t) to derive satisfaction from the thematic and structural resolution.

To put it another way: I think the house is tastefully built, and the living room well-furnished—only its walls are painted a bowel-shivering chartreuse.

(Yes, I am saying that the Retake crowd may be wrong about what’s actually wrong with the game. This happens all the time in editorial discussions: A first-pass impression that “there’s not enough X” often means there’s actually too much Y, or even too much X. “Mary’s motivation makes no sense” can mean John’s motivation doesn’t make sense. “You start this scene too early” sometimes means you start the scene too late, or this one scene should be two scenes, or that the scene isn’t even a scene. A friend of mine is a classical portrait painter, and every time I tell him something seems wrong with an elbow in one of his paintings, he’ll come back a week later and tell me the problem was actually the shadow on the model’s opposite shoulder. Awareness of a problem does not equal ability to diagnose and correct the problem—obviously, or else there’d be no doctors.)

This is where spoilers fall hard and heavy, so if you’re worried about that sort of thing, stop now.

Let me paint you a picture.

Shepard wakes at the end of time.

Her last memory: crawling across the floor of a control room in the Citadel space station. Almost made it, too. Built the superweapon to end the Reaper threat, found the secret power source known as the Catalyst—only nothing happened. So, bleeding, burned, broken, she crawled across the control room to try, one last time, to save the world.

She didn’t make it. Strained for the controls. Collapsed.

And she wakes, at the end of time.

She hasn’t been here before. She stands beneath the superweapon itself, in the vacuum of space, somehow alive. Above, a battle rages between the Reapers and the fleet she’s assembled to defeat them. Cruisers and destroyers spark like fireworks and fade, brilliance to cinder in seconds. Ships burn fast in space.

In front of her stands a child, translucent hologram, shining with starlight.

The child opens his mouth, and this is where everything goes a little wonky.

The child tells Shepard that it is both the Catalyst Shepard has been searching for—the secret ingredient for the superweapon—and the intelligence secretly animating the Citadel space station, and the guiding mind of the Reaper fleet.

This is a perfect time for us to meet a character who could explain (or fail to explain) the context of our actions—structurally and thematically, we’re golden. But this is a character the audience has never seen before, and we’re being asked to accept a great deal about him in the last few minutes of a game. On top of the three different identities thing, we’re forced to change our answers to two important story questions (Who do the Reapers work for, the answer for which was previously ‘Harbinger’, and What is the Citadel, which answer was previously “a Mass Relay”) in ways that don’t quite make sense given what we already know about the story world.

The Citadel, we know, is a Mass Relay (Stargate-like device to enable long-distance space travel). In the first game, a Reaper advance scout tried to take control of the Citadel in order to help the main Reaper fleet shortcut into the heart of the galaxy. If the Citadel were the guiding intellect of the Reapers, why was that necessary? In fact, in the first game we learned that the Citadel itself was hacked to keep it from obeying the Reapers’ commands. How would that even be possible if the Citadel is the guiding Reaper intelligence?

It’s possible to construct answers for these questions. Perhaps the child only lives on the Citadel when the Reapers control it. Perhaps it sleeps while the Reaper fleet sleeps. And perhaps the child isn’t just in the Citadel—it’s actually part of the entire Mass Relay network, which functions as a sort of quantum-entangled hypernetworked brain. But the part of the audience’s mind that would answer these questions is directed toward other, more immediate story questions. Those questions don’t go away, though, they’re just hidden, swept under the rug, raising the background level of confusion in the scene.

“Okay,” says the audience, “Reaper / Citadel / Catalyst child, I’m with you. Why are you trying to destroy all organic life in the galaxy?”

To which, the child’s answer: “I’m trying to save organic life from inevitable conflict with robots. Turns out the best way to do that is by archiving entire civilizations in the form of godlike insect-robots, with the individual members of those civilizations trapped for all eternity in a single scream of exquisite timeless agony.”

“Um,” says the audience.

“But at least they aren’t exterminated by robots!” says the child, helpfully.

Does this make sense? Sort of. I can imagine a “mad” neural network seeded with a very specific goal (‘find some way to stop organic life from being exterminated by robots’) that would come up with this sort of exceptionally inhumane, yet (in its mind) ‘efficient’ solution. After all, twisted immortal cyborgs are still part organic!

But questions remain: “Is robot conflict really inevitable? I just spent this entire game matchmaking between organic life forms and robots. My pilot’s dating a robot. I ended a three hundred year blood-and-oil feud between some robots and their masters back on Rannock.”

Shepard doesn’t ask any of these questions, instead opting to make a little noise about free will. The child, for his part, asserts the inevitability of robo-pocalypse. Again, we could answer these questions ourselves, again—perhaps any peace between organics and synthetics is doomed to be short-lived. Perhaps leaders like Shepard are less than one in a quadrillion. Certainly if Shepard hadn’t spent the last 120+ hours of gameplay trying to save the galaxy, these robots would still be firmly in the ‘Kill all humans’ camp. But we move on, full clip, to another operational question, leaving all this stuff unanswered.

Note that I’m not saying every raised question must be answered! But, sweeping these issues under the rug along with the earlier questions about the Catalyst, we start to see the lump in the center of our rug. We grope queasily for solid information.

“So how do I stop you?” Shepard asks.

And the child tells us: now that you’ve plugged in the superweapon, you have choices. You can do A, B, and C, all of which stop the Reapers from destroying all organic life in the galaxy. I’ll get to A, B, and C in a second, because a doozy of a question arises at this point.

Namely, Why should I believe anything this kid says?

The child is, self-professed, the Reaper Overmind. It’s spent the entire game trying to kill you, through various agents. It’s destroyed your planet. Its mind-controlled servants tried not ten minutes ago to mind-control and murder you, to stop you from activating the superweapon. It is 100% convinced of the rightness of its path. Never once gives a hint that it finds the ‘Reaping’ distasteful or regrettable. Lawful Terrifying alignment in a nutshell. And Shepard is about fifteen minutes away from dying from her injuries.

The kid could just have not manifested, waited for Shepard to die, mopped his holographic brow, and said, ‘whew, that was close! Back to the reaping!’ Yet he not only talks to Shepard, he tells her how to fire the superweapon—in fact, each option, A, B, or C, involves a non-intuitive action, every one of which looks like it might break the thing, kill her, or both. (For those following along at home: we shoot a vital-looking conduit filled with caustic gas, or grab two prongs of something that looks an awful lot like a charged capacitor, or jump into a beam of superheated plasma.)

One frustration I’ve read that Retakers have with the final scene comes from the fact that you the player can’t take an option other than those the child offers. We want to create our own future! I think this is sort of misplaced. Luke, at the end of the trench run, has a torpedo, knows (on some level) he’s about to kill a few million Imperial soldiers, and has to decide whether to fire or not. He doesn’t get to create another option just then.

But—he believes that shooting the torpedo will win the war. Because someone he trusts told him it would. Several someones, and they checked their work. He knows that he is making a meaningful decision based on reliable information.

We don’t have the same trust in the Reaper Overmind. Quite the opposite, in fact. It has every incentive to mess with our heads, and no incentive to tell the truth. And I think this is the reason people want another option: they feel the child is selling them a bill of goods.

Again, a question easily answered with half a line of exposition. The superweapon, in fact, is more of a clever hacking device—the child is being forced to tell us these things. Or the superweapon’s hack has already convinced the child it is wrong, and it needs our help to reprogram itself. I’m sure you, Dear Reader, could come up with an answer or two more. But none of these questions are answered, and so they go under Mount Rug with all the rest. By this point Mount Rug is more Mount than Rug, and our questions are spilling out from underneath. Bow before Mount Question!

And then, two final points of mechanical confusion. First: the superweapon can, depending on player choice, either: destroy the Reapers, control the Reapers, or make the Reapers irrelevant by creating a synthesis of organic and technological life. (I’ll get to that in a moment.) Imagine, if you can, a reason to build a device that does all three things. What engineer would, designing a weapon to destroy the Reapers, build in a remote control for them, not to mention a bonus function capable of rewriting all life in the galaxy? Or, say we’re going to control the Reapers—why build something that would blow them up, or do whatever synthesis does? Who drew up these plans? Can you imagine the dev meeting? “Basically we think our one-shot ultraweapon should do one of these three things, depending on the whims of the person who happens to be standing at the control panel.”

Not very compelling, right? But, fine: maybe the device was actually built to Control, but by sabotaging it you can Destroy the Reapers. Maybe the device was actually built for Synthesis, but can be jerry-rigged to Control or Destroy. Again, a half-line, but without that line, Question Mountain grows. Variables tangle and recombine in our heads. Do we know anything at all? Have we known anything since Shepard woke up on this strange space platform?

And then: Synthesis. Which, I mean. Speaking of questions.

The following quotes are verbatim from the child in the original ending. The Extended Cut doesn’t change much here.

“The chain reaction will combine all synthetic and organic life into a new framework. A new… DNA.”

Wait, what? DNA isn’t just a word, right, it’s a molecule that behaves in a specific way and actually about half the aliens in the setting have different ‘DNA’ from humans, and anyway machines don’t have DNA, and what exactly do you mean by chain reaction anyway coz there’s, you know, a lot of empty space in the galaxy which makes it hard for there to be a chain reaction with, well, okay, maybe you’re being metaphorical and I can dig it, let’s hear what else you have to say—

“Your organic energy, the essence of who and what you are, will be broken down and then dispersed.”

Huh? My ‘organic energy’? If we’re doing anything on a galactic scale we’re talking energy expenditures that dwarf anything Shepard could add. Even if she turned into 100% raw energy via antimatter annihilation, you’re not going to get close to that level. Plus, then you’d have, you know, energy, which is fungible and interconvertible with matter in the same way as any other energy because there’s only one kind unless we’re talking about dark energy which we’re not I think. But, oh, maybe, you’re talking about my soul, which would be great except we’ve seen no evidence in this game that such a thing exists, and in fact the entire setting’s gone out of its way to be monist and hard-SFnal, even to the point of saying “Telepathy is impossible” while making up weird quantum entanglement technobabble to explain telepathy. Mind control is explained as electromagnetic interference with the brain. So, okay, I guess souls are a thing now, is there an afterlife then? Is Thane there? Is Legion? Do robots have souls? Do organic and robotic souls behave differently? Question Mountain rises.

“The energy of the Crucible, released in this way, will alter the matrix of all organic life in the galaxy.”

MATRICES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY. GOOD NIGHT.

“Organics seek perfection through technology. Synthetics seek perfection through understanding. Organics will be perfected by integrating fully with synthetic technology. Synthetics, in turn, will finally have full understanding of organics. It is the ideal solution.”

….Actually that bit’s fine, though we’ve been here before: Shepard’s a decent chunk cybernetic, and every Biotic (magic user, sorta) in the game has cybernetic implants. Meanwhile, the synthetics who hang around organics for a while come to understand them more or less perfectly.

So we have a hilariously improbable device built to do something incomprehensible. And, again, we could buy it if we wanted to. There’s been equally silly technobabble throughout the series. But… well, by this point Question Mountain towers Everest-like over the conversation, our rug covering its utmost snowy peaks. There’s so much we want to know. We’re talking to someone whose existence, motives, and ethics are each gigantic question marks, inside a question mark device, the function of which is an immense question mark that raises fractal little question marks.

And yet, and yet, and yet… it’s thematically excellent. We choose between two untenable alternatives and the Better Way. Any path destroys the world, while promising a new life, a new chance, for those who remain. We have met the Man Behind the Curtain, alone, and he has asked us to choose the future.

Structurally, too, it works. The series starts with Shepard running and meeting her mentor, Anderson. The series ends with Shepard’s last conversation with Anderson, and, in the end, with Shepard running. We build a squad, a team, and we bid them farewell. We see those we’ve lost one last time before the end.

But Question Mountain looms. These issues, little and big, undercut our sense of closure. Most subsets of these problems we could ignore, or explain away in true grand No-Prize fashion. But all together, we’re left groping for a coherent narrative universe even as our eyes are supposed to be opened to the universe of possibilities.

And it’s not like it had to be this way. A slight redesign of the superweapon, and we have a device that requires an organic being, untainted by the Reapers, to die, in order to use it. Excellent safety measure. And, when used, its energies are entirely at the mercy of the person in the driver’s seat. She decides what happens next. A simple visual redesign eliminates most of the questions about the device, and goes a decent way toward resolving the Synthesis tangle.

With only one point of interface, it’s obvious what Shepard needs to do when she arrives in the final room. Use the superweapon. Walk into the light. She tries to get there. The Reapers manifest in front of her as a child—because they want a form to which she will be receptive, a form they can use to plead their case. Because she’s safe from them now, and can decide their fate. We’re no longer asking ourselves why we should trust the Reapers to tell us how to stop the Reapers. We know how to stop them, and we know what the child’s goals are—to present its view of the world and ask for our help, or at least our mercy.

Why are they afraid of us? Because when they’re in our galaxy all their energies and thought processes run through the Mass Relays, which in turn connect to the Citadel. Our superweapon has backdoored us into their brainstem. Which resolves our first questions about what the Catalyst is, and how it makes sense for the Citadel to be the Reapers’ heart.

The Reaping / archiving is as sensible or not as ever, but that doesn’t matter because you’re not asked to trust or like the child. You already know how to use the device. Its A, B, or C design doesn’t seem as weird when presented as, say, dialogue options appearing once you’re inside the device, or as Interrupts. (And wouldn’t that be cool? The sudden appearance of a Synthesis Interrupt at the last possible moment?)

And Synthesis, well… For that one I think have two paths: either we need radical conceptual clarification, or we just leave it as it is—a thematically appropriate, and symbolically beautiful, hot mess of a hard SF explanation for an event that should, and does, feel mystical and redemptive.

With about two thirds of the narrative questions rendered irrelevant, the remaining ambiguities feel more numinous than frustrating. In the end of Hyperion we don’t understand the Time Tombs or the Shrike, really—but we know enough about their world to understand that they make sense inside it. Midway through Babylon 5 season 4, we still have oodles of unanswered questions about Shadows and Vorlons, but we know the important stuff, so we can let the rest go.

This same principle extends to the rest of the ending. Maybe if we weren’t already so staggered, we’d be able to answer the question of “wouldn’t the Mass Relays blowing up destroy the galaxy” with a sensible observation like “you can blow up a nuclear bomb with c4 without detonating the nuke.” We could accept that Joker’s running away from the blast because, shit, giant explosion. Our squad members’ escape is harder, but maybe we could have swallowed that too. Because we were watching a story about sacrifice and rebirth, about cycles and the ending of cycles. Because Shepard died so we might live, so that we may be born again.

But the ME3 ending’s troubles with information release, I think, obscure its excellent thematics & structure. The ending accomplishes its most difficult goals, but falls down at tasks that, while less challenging, are so fundamental they are hard even to identify, let alone diagnose. It is, in short, brilliant, and flawed, and as a result, makes an excellent test case for the analysis of endings and what they mean.

At least, that’s my take. What’s yours?

How J Edgar Hoover and I Ruined the Ending of Mass Effect 3

Way way back in the mid-noughts, my roommates and I had our first encounter with J Edgar Hoover.  Context is king: we were hot-seat playing through a first-person horror game called Call of Cthulhu: The Dark Corners of the Earth.  A few years before, we’d played through Eternal Darkness, loved it, especially the endgame (“Protect… UNIVERSE!”).  The concept of another Lovecraftian horror game with a robust sanity system and immersive first-person perspective pushed almost all our buttons.

The game was fine, not great—the sanity system, while present, wasn’t as pervasive or hilarious a gameplay element as it had been in Eternal Darkness, where low sanity manifested as everything from hallucinations and evil laughter to skulls spouting Hamlet to, in a spur of wicked genius, the game actually convincing you that it was about to delete your save.  But CoC:TDCotE, say that five times fast, holds a treasured place in our collective psychology because of J. Edgar Hoover.

You see, Hoover’s a character in CoC:TDCotE.  Your principal quest-giver, actually!  And he’s a jerk.  One of the serious A-level jerk quest-givers in gaming.  Over the course of the game he keeps you in the dark, threatens you with incarceration, subjects you to electro-shock therapy, gets his goons to beat you up, and, once he’s strong-armed you into working with him, starts sending you, alone, into whole warehouses full of Cthulhu cultists while his buddies the US Army stand outside and wait for you to give them the all clear.  Seriously.  What a tool.

It got so bad that we started screaming at the screen whenever Hoover showed up.  “Why don’t you send in the Marines?”  “Why the f*** should I help you?”  “What are you even doing here?”  And at no point does your character ever say these things.  No, you play the silent stoic protagonist, bravely enduring governmental torment to save the world from Things Man Was Not Meant To Know.

After one particularly grievous offense, which went something like “Go wipe out that fortified cultist position with like 40 dudes and a bunch of shoggoths singlehandedly with your revolver, so I can send in this infantry regiment with their tanks to arrest everyone, and no you can’t have any extra ammo quit your whining,” well… I shot him.  Right in between the eyes.  Because I was frustrated, I shot him.  Because the game had never showed my character act logically around this jerkwad, I shot him.  To see what happened, I shot him.

And he didn’t die.

J. Edgar Hoover was immune to bullets.

If there is a Hell, I imagine one of its subcircles feels a lot like that: J. Edgar Hoover standing over your shoulder, commanding you to go forth and murder in his name or else he’ll shock your balls off again—and you have a gun, and no matter how many times you shoot him he just laughs and laughs.

Which we did, of course—Hoover the Immortal becoming a shibboleth among we few, we geeky few, we band of brothers—and ever since that day, whenever I find myself faced with a frustrating choice or situation or character in gameland, and I’m not in Skyrim, I pop a few rounds into their face without effect, and chuckle in memory of J. Edgar Hoover. 

Which brings me to last night, and my first playthrough of the ending of Mass Effect 3.  To make a long story short (spoiler warning if you haven’t played it already), there’s a conversation at the very end of the game with Exposition Hologram Child, who explains the world and then offers you a choice of how to resolve a particularly thorny issue.  It’s a frustrating choice for a bunch of reasons that I won’t talk about right now, because that’s a whole other blog post.  The fact that it’s frustrating isn’t bad—but it was getting on 1 AM, and I was feeling punchy, and, well, I had a gun.  And Exposition Hologram Child was staring at me, and when I hovered the cursor on him, I saw no health bars or enemy name, no indication this was a valid target at all.

“This one’s for J. Edgar,” I thought, and shot him.

And the universe died.

Enraged at my temerity, Exposition Hologram Child killed me, destroyed all life in the galaxy, and reduced my 100 hours or so of gameplay to a time capsule thousands of years in the future, mourning my mistakes and exhorting future generations to do better.

Roll end credits.

A tip of the hat to you, sir (or dame) Bioware. You half gave me a heart attack.  You might have put a health meter and enemy tag on Exposition Hologram Child as a warning, but beyond that, I cannot fault your actions.  You livened up my night.  You had an autosave that let me go back and actually make the choice I wanted to make, even if it did mean I had to sit through the Illusive Man cutscene again.

And you proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that J. Edgar Hoover is mightier than an intergalactic swarm of mecha-Cthulhus.

Outlining, GTD, Task Management

I’m no task management wonk—when it comes to GTD and other project management I do not belong in even the same vague ballpark as folks like Merlin Mann and David Allen.  I have, though, been known to adopt their methods in a vain attempt to stem my inevitable slide into writerly disorder.  I have no problems accomplishing my core goal, of generating new stories and books; the hard part comes in doing that while keeping up with the maintenance and career advancement tasks that, if I’m not careful, hide in the dark corners of my subconscious and reproduce like tribbles in heat.

Guess that metaphor got a little away from me, there.  Anyway!

So I have a to-do list and I capture as much as I can in it, and I check stuff off, and all that’s well and good except the system doesn’t work very well for long-form creative work, which leads to the to-do list not actually representing what I have to do on any given day, which is a bad idea in the Getting Things Done universe.  So, I’ve asked myself for a while how I could incorporate writing a novel into task management.  The obvious answer was to add ‘write for three hours’ to the list, but that barely qualifies as a task.  It’s not very specific, for one thing.  It’s hard to feel satisfied when you check it off.  Three hours of staring at a blinking cursor would theoretically qualify.

Last week, I had a revelation, which may seem totally common-sense to you, Dear Readers.  Trying to figure out the next steps of a project, I started at the end of the story and worked forward, ending up with a beat-by-beat outline.  There’s room for flexibility, but basically I know which scenes need to be done when.  Pretty common approach for me about a third into the project—no big deal there.  The cool part came when I realized I could slide all those scenes into my to-do list program, where I can move them around, prioritize, flag, and geek out to my heart’s content.  Also, because it’s a task list, there’s always room for more stuff.  Need a scene?  Add scenes!  Those beats don’t matter any more?  Delete away.

All of which is basically to say: I’m in the middle of a new novel, and may be boring for a while.  Though I’ll try to keep you posted!

 

Catching Up

Last week’s prep for the Newburyport Literary Festival left me a little frazzled to blog, but let’s bring y’all back up to speed!  The Literary Festival was a wild ride, in the Mr. Toad’s sense.  Lit Fests, it turns out, are quite different animals than cons.  I went the entire weekend without seeing a single ironic slogan t-shirt.  We had a very cool crowd—shoutouts to Jennifer Entwhistle, Nichole Bernier, Sarah J Henry, Pete and Denise, Maryanne O’Hara (Massachusetts Must Read 2013 buddies!) and bunches of other folk who endured my company with humor and aplomb.  Ethan Gisldorf and I delivered an excellent panel on fantasy as literary genre and as a way of life (ranging from D&D to video games to LARPS and the SCA), with an engaged audience and some great questions including the big one, which I’ll abbreviate to Wither Science Fiction, and which I will certainly try to answer in a detailed sense on this blog soon, because I think we’re all (or almost all) thinking about the differences between genres in the wrong way.

I meant to write that longer essay yesterday and today, of course, but what I thought was going to be a nice tight Craft Sequence-adjacent novella is growing before my eyes and beneath my fingertips into something longer… and awesome.  One of the funny things about being two novels ahead of the readership is that I’m really excited to be exploring the backstory of events my readers barely know about yet, making life miserable for the parents of characters only my beta readers know.  This produces a much more Long Game version of the Killer GM feeling.

And don’t worry, dear readers, I have had it out for you from the beginning.

Muahaha.

According to Wikipedia, I Exist

Just as it says on the tin.  I should not feel as excited about this as I do; after all this is the Free Encyclopedia Anyone Can Edit.  But the page has been up for a few days now and nobody’s deleted it for non-notability (though I may speak too soon!).  It’s very strange to be part of the world’s greatest linktrail where one can start reading about Chechnya and end up reading about Batman (via the Higgs Boson and Mary Kay Cosmetics).  And, for what it’s worth, I neither created the page myself, nor caused it to be created.  So that’s neat.

Also exciting: Fantasy Book Critic posted an excellent, glowing review of Three Parts Dead by Casey Blair.  It’s great in that it’s a good review, of course, but she also mentions a few aspects of Three Parts Dead of which I was particularly proud—the way that the resolution turns on (no spoilers really) confronting characters with things they believe they cannot do.  I gave a whole speech at Comic Con last year about this, and it’s really cool to see someone else pick up on it.

If you’re in or near Newburyport this Saturday, I’m on the Newburyport Literary Festival’s fantasy panel, along with the redoubtable Ethan Gilsdorf, Dr Livingston to the Geek World.  Drop by the Unitarian Universalist Church at 2:30 pm to hear us chat about all things fantasy.