Mark W. Bonnett's Blog, page 3

Nail the ending, or don't even bother starting...

[WARNING: Here be spoilers for Mass Effect 3. And Assassin's Creed 3. Oh, and the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary, as well.]

Hmm, now there's an interesting question. I was having a nice long conversation with someone today, all about why the ending of Mass Effect 3 was such a colossal bag of donkey doings, and said person asked a question about whether a bad ending can really ruin all the good stuff that came before, when the entire experience up to that point had been good.

My immediate was a big fat yes, but it raised a rather intriguing question: why? How come the ending has such enormous power over a story, and thus, how is it possible that a bad ending can ruin everything that's gone before?

Might it be something about how we, as humans, are hardwired that makes the ending of the story the single most important bit of the whole enterprise?
I hate to have to mention it again, since I already did a post about it ages ago, but the ending to Mass Effect 3 really does hammer home how important it is to nail the conclusion of the tale you've been weaving. Y'see, a common misconception about the backlash to that ending is that people were just angry that they didn't get their "sunshine and bunnies" happy ending, and that's just not true. Yes, happy endings are nice, but so are downer endings, and so are shocking endings, and so are bittersweet endings, on one condition: the ending must follow on logically from the narrative that's been building up to it, as a product of that narrative, so that the reader or the viewer or the player or whatever can say to themselves, "Nope, I can't think of any other way that story could have possibly ended."

Mass Effect 3 failed in that regard, which is why the ending is so loathed by those who don't like it; it stuck a massive disconnect in between it and the rest of the story, thus wasting the incredible potential the series had to be one of the greatest science fiction stories ever told.As it was, we had people coming up with theories (indoctrination theorists, I'm looking at you) to explain how the ending didn't really happen.

Yeah, not good, that.

And then, there's the ending to Assassin's Creed 3, although at least it made narrative sense. It was simply criminally short, and hampered by Ubisoft insisting on shoehorning an unnecessary sequel hook in there (rest assured, I won't be doing that with the Cynos Union books; there may well be an overall and overarching story arc, but I'll be damned if I'm ever going to end a book on a cliffhanger, 'cos I can't stand 'em), but it didn't fall apart under the weight of its own badly constructed horror.

While AC3 is a lesser offender, therefore, it still stands as an example of a bad ending, because it wasn't satisfying, emotionally or narratively, and the end result was that it soured the whole experience. Granted, it didn't retroactively destroy the entire multi-game narrative in the same way that ME3's ending did, but it felt weak. In the case of AC3, it made me not particularly bothered about playing an Assassin's Creed game in future.

In the case of ME3, it made me not want to play another Bioware game in future.

That, really, demonstrates the power of a story's ending. It's the most vital and crucial step in the process; the analogy I've seen is of the narrative being a bridge, and the crappy ending means that the bridge doesn't quite reach the far shore. In that case, the journey may well be nice, but your destination is still a cliff face, in a flaming wreck, followed by drowning. This would be unlikely to make you want to drive over the bridge again.

Assuming you survived the flaming wreck and the drowning, of course.

I'm not going to end this post on a downer, though, not when there's an obvious "sunshine and bunnies" ending I can strive for, here. Y'see, while it's true that a bad ending can turn a masterpiece into a train wreck, a truly great ending can erase any narrative slip-ups that went before.

And yes, I'm talking here about the ending to the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special, The Day Of The Doctor.

Now that was an ending that did things wonderfully, perfectly right. Sure, the preceding plot with the Zygons may have felt a bit shoehorned in, and Queen Elizabeth I may have been played by an actress who was just monumentally wrong for the part, but in the end, none of that mattered, because Steven Moffat absolutely nailed the ending.

All 13 incarnations of the Doctor. A teasing glimpse of Peter Capaldi as the next Doctor. Tom bloody Baker. The retcon that wasn't a retcon at all, but that changed everything we thought we knew about the series since 2005 (seriously, this bit was masterfully done). It was an ending that felt satisfying on every level (emotionally and logically and tonally, and all that guff) and that turned everything on its head so that we (and future writers) can look at the Whoniverse in new and exciting ways.

Or, like I said earlier, "Nope, I can't think of any other way that story could have possibly ended."

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Musings on my influences - HOW has Transformers endured for 30 years?

What I say next, I say completely without shame or irony: I love Transformers. I've always loved Transformers, ever since the age 6/7, and I honestly reckon that my love of the weird and the epic (seriously, that's a concrete part of my biography and everything) came from the opening of Transformers: The Movie, in 1986.

Y'know, where the first scene has a planet being eaten. Seeing something like that was bound to have a lasting effect on the brain of a 7 year old, and no mistake.

The thing is, though, that it wasn't just my prepubescent brain that Transformers had an effect on; it also somehow went on to become one of the most successful toy franchises in history, and is still going strong today, thirty years later. The big question, of course, is this: why? How did a toy franchise aimed at 7 year old boys manage that?
Well, to understand it, the first thing ye need to do is basically forget much of the media around Transformers. The G1 cartoon? Remove it from yer mind. Beast Wars? Forget about it for now. The Unicron Trilogy? Gone.

Bayformers? Yeah, definitely forget that one... 

No, what we need to do here is go right back to the original G1 toy bios, the ones on the boxes, next to the Tech Spec meter that you read through that little bit of red plastic.

Yeah, okay, at this point, I do also have to admit that the franchise's enduring popularity is because oh my god, they're cool toys that turn from vehicular and other thingies into big robot thingies with guns. 

So yes, the toys are awesome, but there's more to it than that...

Y'see, what has allowed them to endure, I reckon, is the central conflict told through the toy bios for Optimus Prime and Megatron, a central conflict that never even got a look-in throughout the G1 cartoon, and only really came into play properly in the recent TF: Prime cartoon and, more importantly, the utterly brilliant IDW Transformers comics.

These are the two I mean:

Optimus Prime - "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings." 

Megatron - "Peace through tyranny." 

Yeah, the whole saga of the Transformers is not a simple case of good versus evil, even though it gets flanderised down into being that all the damn time. Sure, other 80s toy franchises might have been all about the good and the evil (Thundercats springs immediately to mind, as does Action Force; yeah, I'm British, I refuse to call it G.I. Joe), but that ain't the case here; the saga of the Transformers is one built on ideology, specifically on two competing ideologies.

It's freedom versus control. Liberty versus authoritarianism.

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that one of the eternal conflicts that humanity keeps coming back to time and time again? I don't just mean in our fiction, either (although we do love that trope, as a species; it's something that is going to rear its head in the Cynos Union, one day), because it's something that crops up in the real world.

That is why Transformers has endured for thirty years. The central conflict was nailed, early on, as being something that's a core, central part of human existence, something that we grapple with, even today. In turn, that made the franchise, in a certain sense, timeless: as long as humans have that conflict, the Transformers will endure.

It's just that the franchise also has giant, planet-eating evil entities, and the coolest toys to ever roll off a production line kicking the slag out of each other.

Best of both worlds, really, which I suppose is kind of appropriate when ye think about it... 

The ever-expanding and growing Cynos Union Series is available to buy now! Subscribe for more news from the world (and brain) of Mark W. Bonnett!

Creativity - the bane of society, apparently

I'll be honest, I wibbled back and forth about writing this post, for a very simple reason: how does it actually apply to the whole business of being a writer? Does it fit the theme of this blog to actually talk about it?

Then, though, I had a realisation. By even asking myself that, was I not playing into the very phenomenon that the original source story was talking about? By avoiding writing this, was I not actually being averse to a bit of the ol' creativity myself?
Y'see, a good friend o' mine gave me an article to to have a look at, and the article in question sparked something off in my brain. I couldn't help but be intrigued by the idea presented in the original Slate article, that despite all their protestations to the contrary, human beings don't actually like creativity.

Humans can haz creativity allergies

Granted, the original source article is mostly about how corporate culture really doesn't like people who genuinely think outside the box (which doesn't really apply to me, since I'm self-employed; my corporate culture is 'get up, have a brew, maybe get dressed if I can be bothered, get work done while fighting a never-ending battle to keep the cat off the table'), but it got me thinking; might that aversion to genuine creativity be an engrained facet of human nature?

There was one bit of the article that really struck home for me, and it's the possibility that creativity could be discouraged while people are still in their school years, the idea that maybe, society educates the creativity out of them.

Insert obvious Pink Floyd quote here. You know the one...

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear: I'm not having a pop at teachers, here. Teaching's a hard job, one that I honestly don't think I could do; it's a tough, often thankless job, so they have my utmost respect. No, what I'm talking about here, right, is the educational system.

The source link does make a compelling case for the idea that what is rewarded in the classroom is not genuine creative thinking, but mediocrity and, more crucially, conformity. Is there more of a focus on standardised testing in schools, now? I don't know, I'm 36 and not a teacher, but I have to admit that it's a compelling argument. Creativity can never be eradicated, of course, since it may well be one of the things that helped humans evolve intelligence in the first place, but perhaps the educational system is training kids to be that bit more adverse to thinking differently to everyone else.

A Strange Tale

Okay, now I can tie it in to my journey through the life of being a writer; I remember a creative writing assignment back when I was at primary school. I reckon it was in my last year there (before I went to big school), so I would've been 11, and I wrote a story. It was a weird story, and to be honest, it was probably a bit of a crap story, since the whole thing was framed as an "it was all a dream, all along" narrative.


I got a crap mark for it, and the single, solitary bit of feedback I got for it was a note, in red pen, saying "A strange tale".

A strange tale? That's it? That's the reason I got a crap mark for that story that I actually put a ton of work into? Yes, it was a bit derivative, and I'm reasonably sure that one section of it was based on (i.e. stolen from) Fraggle Rock (plus the main plot was about an all-consuming darkness that was destroying the entire world, which was, erm, the plot of The NeverEnding Story), but writing "a strange tale" was the sole reason I got a bad mark, and was therefore, by extension, a bad thing?

Still, I'm now a science fiction writer. I write strange tales for a living, so who won that one, eh, eh, eh?  

HA! 

Ahem, anyway...

Playing God In My Own Personal Universe 

The thing about this whole creativity business is that it's the very antithesis of conformity; it inherently means taking risks, and trying new things, which is why I'm constantly shocked that I, risk-averse coward that I am, decided to go for it and be a writer. It's not the kind of job that inherently leads to happiness and stability.

As a lot of people (including the Slate article) have often said, you need to be a little bit askew to be a writer, especially a sci-fi writer. You have to see the world a little bit differently to everyone else, the very soul of creativity, and that's a surefire way to feel a teensy bit isolated, in a world that seemingly places a higher value on conformity. So why do we do it? Why would any writer willingly want to get into that?

Put simply, because we have to. We're storytellers by nature (and I do love the idea, as put forward by Pratchett, Stewart and Cohen, that human beings think in stories). We love it, that thrill of creating a world, of populating with living, breathing people, who oftentimes seem more real, somehow (and certainly more understandable), than the actual living, breathing people around us.

In short... well, look at the title of this entire blog.

The ever-expanding and growing Cynos Union Series is available to buy now! Subscribe for more news from the world (and brain) of Mark W. Bonnett!

'Strong Female Characters'? Seriously? You want to limit your palette like that?

Hoooooo blimey, this one's a thorny issue, and no mistake! Seriously, this one causes no end of introspection and outright navel-gazing, from every imaginable side of the whole gender debate, and since I'm a writer, it's one of those things I have to be aware of. Yes, it's the issue of "strong female characters", and I know I'm going to get flamed to a crisp by people who don't read past the headline, but the simple fact is this: "strong female characters" are dull.

And so are "strong male characters"...
Now then, I may be labouring under a false conception, here, but it's always struck me that when people say they want strong female characters, what they categorically do not mean is strongly written characters. Well, alright, some people do. Just as many people seem to want female characters bereft of weaknesses,devoid of character flaws. It's that second viewpoint that I have a problem with, because can you imagine what it would be like if characters had no weaknesses?

Dull as all hell, that's what it'd be like.

If that world came to pass, I can pretty much tell you what the world of fiction would look like: it'd be Red Sonja, but with varying degrees of swordiness and/or leather armour. The thing is, though, that the exact same thing would be true if male characters were all perfect, and bereft of weakness.

I suppose I really started musing about this whole issue when I read an interesting article back in August, from The New Statesman (have a read, it's a great article), and realised that it more or less summed up exactly how I feel.

I don't want "strong" characters, regardless of their gender. They're boring.

I want interestingly flawed characters of both genders. I want characters of both genders who throw their entire existence away through hubris. I want characters of both genders who overcome extreme adversity, to find their strength.

In short, I want characters of both genders who aren't defined by one singular buzzword...

Consider the most recent Tomb Raider game (written, incidentally, by the enormously talented Rhianna Pratchett); we see a naive, not particularly worldly-wise young woman go through an almost literal hell, an experience that moulds and forges her into the gleefully amoral killing machine we all know and love (seriously, you're not telling me Lara Croft of olde wasn't a complete headcase... those poor wolves...). That was a character journey that was worth watching.

And then, of course, there's someone who I consider to be one of the greatest characters ever written, the magnificent Lt. Cmdr. Susan Ivanova, from Babylon 5. She's strong, yes, but she's haunted by her past, torn over her relationship with characters in the present, and colossally, monumentally cynical. Ivanova stands as a tribute to a writer (J. Michael Straczynski) and actress (Claudia Christian) who between them got the character absolutely right.

That's what I'm aiming for in the characters I write. Characters who in some way cease to be characters, instead becoming real people, with their own quirks, idiosyncrasies, flaws and opportunities for extraordinary greatness, not by someone else's terms, and not by someone else saying they're "strong". No, they will be characters, of both genders (sometimes at the same time, for a few days every 8 months, in the case of the yowason) who succeed or fail, who rise or fall, on their own merits and to their own plan.

"Strong female characters"? No thanks, I'll stick with interesting characters, both male and female, ta...

The ever-expanding and growing Cynos Union Series is available to buy now! Subscribe for more news from the world (and brain) of Mark W. Bonnett!

Time for me to be a tease - say hello to the Cynos Union's newest alien, the enigmatic quintaceph

Ooh, not long now till The Abominable Moon is ready to go! I'm down to the final couple of chapters, so it's soon going to be winging its way to my editor, to get the final fine-toothed-comb treatment, before it's ready to be published on Amazon.

And so, I feel like being a tease.

Yes, it's time for me to introduce you to a new alien within the Cynosverse. I've already made my feelings clear about how I reckon that aliens should actually look alien, and given the general tone of The Abominable Moon, it just seemed natural for it to feature an alien species with five heads.

You may well be able to tell that I'm going for Lovecraftian weirdness with this book...
Of course, coming up with an alien that's got five heads presents its own unique grab-bag of hurdles to overcome, but perhaps the most pressing one to figure out was the question of how in the name of chuffery an alien with five bonces would even work. Would it have five separate brains? Would it have one brain in the central trunk, with the five "heads" being little more than sensory, respiratory and feeding pods?

At this point, you may be wondering what possessed me to come up with an alien that's got five heads, because such things are clearly insane, but the reason is actually kinda simple.

Take a look at the vast majority of animals on Earth, and you'll see that they're bilaterally symmetrical; draw a line down the middle of a human being, or a cow, or a tiger (er, you'll probably need a pen on a really long stick, for that last one) and you'll see that, by and large, they've got two of everything down the sides, and one of everything down the middle, or more or less in the middle, in the case of the heart.

Also, you sort of need to ignore all the internal organs that don't fit that pattern...

So, what's the easiest way to make an alien feel really alien? Simple: make sure it doesn't have bilateral symmetry!

Instead, each quintaceph (yes, their name means what you think it means) is radially symmetrical, like a starfish, albeit one that's a lot taller and that tends to paint frescoes on absolutely every available surface. They represent a true mystery, a species so fundamentally unlike life in the rest of the galaxy, that their mindset is almost impossible to fathom, and whose language has never been translated. The existence of the quintacephs is what makes their homeworld of Metriagoth, located in the Azhretophis system, such an exciting destination for men and women of science.

It's also one of the most dangerous destinations in the galaxy, because, as it turns out, the quintaceph civilisation isn't the only thing in the Azhretophis system.

Dark, twisted things lurk in the unexplored corners of the galaxy, and one of them is about to show its face...

The countdown to The Abominable Moon has begun! Subscribe for more news from the world (and brain) of Mark W. Bonnett!

Forget yer vampires, and ghosties, and long-leggity beasties - Lovecraftian horror is REAL horror

Blimey, I've not written many posts recently, have I? Mind you, there is a good reason; I'm knee-deep in writing the next book in the Cynos Union series, The Abominable Moon (coming soon to Amazon), y'see, and what with doing that and writing content for the redesign of my official site (and if you've not seen it yet, you really should go take a look; I am well proud of it), the blog's had to be put on pause for a bit.

But now, I'm back,and since The Abominable Moon is basically a horror story (the name's a bit of a giveaway, right?), I reckon now's the perfect time to talk about that genre.

I'd best also mention that as far as horror goes, vampires, werewolves, ghoulies and ghosties just don't cut it, for me. Why? Well I shall tell ya...
With vampires especially, people know the rules; they're hideously allergic to being stabbed in the heart with a big lump of wood (as is, y'know, everyone ever), or you can kill them by feeding them particularly strong spaghetti aglio e olio (garlic, y'see). Or, at a pinch, you could wave a really strong sunbed at them.

There's nothing horrifying whatsoever about vampires, not any more. They may have been scary once, but with all this gothic romance going about, vampires have gone from being monstrous predators to being whiny love interests. Something similar happened to zombies; after Danny Boyle made the brilliant 28 Days Later (which is not a zombie movie, as Boyle himself says), Hollywood latched onto the idea that zombies need to be fast, to be scary.

Sure, they may be scary in the same way that a pack of really peckish hyenas is scary, but they're never going to be horrifying. They're never going to provoke the kind of existential dread that makes you question yourself, the world around you, and the entirety of reality itself.

For real, genuine horror, one has to turn to the writings of a strange and brilliant man from Rhode Island...

H.P. Lovecraft, for all the discussions that go on online about the racism in his work, was arguably the greatest horror writer who ever lived, at least in my view. One of the primary exponents of the cosmic horror genre, Lovecraft was a grand master at showing how small and insignificant humanity truly is. His is a universe populated by vast, unknowable entities which would steamroller over humanity in seconds, utterly wiping us out without even noticing our existence, and which fundamentally change reality with their existence. That is true horror, and that is precisely what I'm aiming for with The Abominable Moon.

Not for nothing is one of the chapters therein called "Within The Moon Of Madness"... 

Where Messiah's Shard was always meant to be an epic, and where The Non-Random Dog was written as a good old-fashioned romp (complete with a dog in a spacesuit), The Abominable Moon is set in the dark side, the horrifying side, of the Cynos Union.

Are you ready to take a little trip...?

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The Song Of The Universe, And Other Musical Musings

So, music, eh? It really is brilliant, isn't it? I've long believed that art and especially music are just as responsible for the evolution of the human brain as science and technology. I like to think that's how Flash Gordon could beat Ming the Merciless; he had Queen on his side (and BRIANBLESSED, of course)...



I'm a sci-fi author, so you can take it as read that I'm obsessed with sci-fi. I mentioned in an earlier post that the reason I'm obsessed with sci-fi is that I listened to Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War Of The Worlds, but in that post, I also mentioned that this album is the reason why I'm a musician. I'm a drummer, in fact, and my love of music can be attributed mostly to that album.

It was pretty much inevitable, then, that music was going to factor into my story universe, the Cynos Union series, in some fashion...

Even if that was just in the form of sneaky references to War Of The Worlds (yep, they're in there), I always knew there had to be something in there, some little genius bonus that could give any reader who gets the reference a knowing smile on their face.

Cue the vossarulls...

Believe it or not, the vossarulls, lanky 7 foot tall humanoids that they are, were originally conceived as a race of, well, space elves. Even their name was different; as I was sketching out the universe my books would inhabit, I originally had the name 'sjatarr' in mind for them, to make them sound slightly Nordic (fun little aside: the three main races I came up with first, the koetaani, vossarulls née sjatarr, and the sookas, were inspired by UFO conspiracy stories, following the pattern of Greys, Nordics and Reptilians).

There was an ever so slight problem with them being space elves, though: space elves are boring, and so, like a good song, they needed a hook.

As I realised the significance of that last bit, I realised the answer was staring me in the face...

In the Cynos Union series, there's a realm of existence beyond the material universe, known as the Metastate. Going into detail about that is a thingie for another day, but for now, it's enough to say that if the universe exists within a bubble, then the Metastate is that bubble. It's also where souls come from, even split souls, and a split soul will confer different abilities on an entity, depending on their species. So, the koetaani, for example, all have split souls, and it's this which gives them their telepathic ability.

With the vossarulls, having a split soul allows them to hear 'the song of the universe', and thus a new race was born, one for whom the entirety existence is sound. They exclusively use sonic weapons (and swords, based on old sword dances). Their leader is the Diva. As for their name, vossarull, well...

Ah, but, y'see, the thing is, right, that when you include their design aesthetic (that wonderfully evocative 'raygun gothic', all fins and classic 30s rocket ships), they become one massive shoutout to something very specific.

Hmm, raygun gothic, golden-age-of-sci-fi styling, with a thumping, epic soundtrack...

What was that video at the start of this post, again?

The ever-expanding and growing Cynos Union Series is available to buy now! Subscribe for more news from the world (and brain) of Mark W. Bonnett!

Announcing the arrival of The Non-Random Dog!

Woohoo! It's finally finished and on sale, so I can tell you all about it!

Ladies and gentlemen, the second story in the Cynos Union, The Non-Random Dog, is now available to buy from both Amazon and Smashwords! I decided with this one that I wanted to do something rather different from the first full-length novel, Messiah's Shard, and write a short story with a tighter, less all-encompassing plot, that's not all about saving the galaxy.

Thus, this second story was born.

In the aftermath of the Abyssal War (detailed in Messiah's Shard), humanity has finally taken its place among the stars. The dream of the Cynos Union, a dream of disparate races finally coming together for the common good, a dream of a galaxy that finally knows peace, has come true.

And yet, there are still adventures to be had, as the crew of the human freighter Diomedes are about to find out. There's something a little bit unusual about their new passenger.

Although that might be because she's a dog in a spacesuit...

Captain Jacob Green, "Bulldog" Rymack and the rest of the crew are about to embark upon an adventure that will take them across two star systems and right into the heart of obsession, as they race to uncover the secret of THE NON-RANDOM DOG!

Ah, but there's more...

As a special treat, I'm giving The Non-Random Dog away for FREE, through Smashwords for the rest of May; simply enter the code JW24Q , at the checkout, and you will get the story for free. As in nothing to pay. As in no having to hand over cash. As in I should probably stop clarifying, because you already know what free means. 

That promotion's only running until the end of May, though, so now is the time to act if you want a free copy. 

That code, again, is JW24Q . 

As we say in Blighty, fill yer boots (and if you could see your way fit to leaving a review wherever you buy it, you would be the most awesome person in all of space and time)! 


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On bad (as in REALLY bad) video game writing...

Well, there you have it, folks. After a year of hoping for some glimmer of light, or the possibility of an ending that doesn't destroy the narrative of all three games, the final DLC for Mass Effect 3 has been released, and to quote the ever brilliant Top Gear, "It's not gone well."

Now, I'll say right away that this blog post is going to include spoilers for that new DLC, called simply 'Citadel'. And so, therefore, I'm going to make sure I only put in spoilers after the break; only click through and read it if you've played the Citadel DLC, or if you don't mind being spoiled, or if you're so jaded with the Mass Effect 3 debacle that you don't care...

Still with me? Right then, I'll continue. My vociferous hatred for the ending of Mass Effect 3 is well known by anyone who actually knows me. I loathe it, I really do, and I loathe the way it retroactively manages to knacker the preceding two games, as well. For those who haven't had the sheer horror of witnessing it first hand, the ending comes in the absolute worst form of deus ex machina, an almost literal one in fact, where you're taken up to meet the 'Catalyst', known variously as 'Spacebrat', 'Godkid', and 'That annoying little sprog who needs a good punch up the bracket'.

He then offers you three 'solutions' to the dilemma of the game, the Reaper invasion, and to be honest, all of them are pretty final.

Here's the problem, though: said Godkid is in fact the collective intelligence and will of the very enemies you've been fighting for the entire game. To 'win' (for a given value of 'win') the game, you have to agree with his worldview, capitulate to one of his solutions (all three of which are fundamentally mean-spirited and generally unpalatable), and do the enemy's job for him. And you cannot refuse.

Well, okay, you can refuse, as of the Extended Cut DLC, created specifically because fans hated the original ending, and what you get if you do refuse his demands is basically a glorified, non-standard game over.

This is alarming, because it shows that at no point did anyone within Bioware look at this hideous carbuncle of an ending and think, "Actually, this is kinda just like the bad guys winning, when you think about it for two seconds."

But no matter, they finally had the chance to fix it with the final Citadel DLC! This was it, this was their chance to make everything right! So, did they fix it?

No...

Instead, what we got (well, I say we, but I mean everyone who bought the DLC, because I chuffing well wasn't going to unless I knew it fixed the ending) was an idiotic, hackneyed, ridiculous side mission, the main villain of which is Shepard's Evil bloody Twin.

I swear, if I did to one of my novels what Bioware's done to Mass Effect 3, then my editors would rightfully tear me to pieces.

If they didn't catch it (which they would), I'd expect to haemorrhage fans, left, right and centre, till I fixed it!

So there we have it. The company who many viewed as the best storytellers in the video game industry really don't know how to tell a story (or at the very least, they don't know how to end a trilogy). I think it's fair to say that they've lost that particular crown, now.

Still it saves me money in the long run, that I would have spent on future Bioware/EA games, so silver lining and all that...

(Image Credit: Mobygames)

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People what done influenced me - Peter F. Hamilton

They say that no work is ever done in a vacuum, right, and that's true. It's just human nature, especially when it comes to creative type thingies; everything that gets made is influenced by what's gone before it, and at the same time, influences what comes after.

I've always been open about the people and, well, stuff that's influenced me, and in fact, I've got a list of my influences on my Goodreads page.

I reckon, though, that it might be a cool idea to talk in-depth about some of them. Also, you might learn about some authors whose work you've never read before, and that's always awesome.

So, first up, I reckon I'll talk about the utterly brilliant British author, Peter F. Hamilton...

I can still remember the first time I read the Night's Dawn Trilogy, back before the dawn of the new millennium; it must have been before we hit the year 2000, because The Naked God was published in 1999, and I distinctly having read the previous instalments before that, and having to get the third book in the trilogy the very picosecond it went on sale. Here was grand space opera presented with a hard sci-fi edge, and I pretty much instantly fell in love with the trilogy (it helps that I read it not long after seeing Babylon 5; yeah, expect a future post about that series, somewhere down the line).

And then, later on, I read the Commonwealth Saga, the 'duology' of Pandora's Star and Judas Unchained...

Now, it's fair to say that both books in the Commonwealth Saga are proper doorstops, both of them coming in at over a thousand pages (in the paperback versions, at least), but I distinctly remember it only taking me a couple of days to read through each of them. The Commonwealth Saga didn't have the same metaphysical themes as the Night's Dawn Trilogy (no energistic space zombies, this time round), but the same sense of, well, epicness was present and correct.

Instead of space zombies with energy powers, we got humans who had worked out how to cheat death. We got one of the most creative sci-fi races I've seen in a long time, in the shape of the Prime aliens from Dyson Alpha, an entire race compromised (eventually) of one individual (an idea that I loved so much, I had to work out a way to include my own 'mono-sentient' race in Messiah's Shard, hence the birth of the kochanqa super-consciousness). We got the brilliantly weird concept of the Silfen Paths, paths through forests, that lead to entirely new worlds, just by walking down them. We got the concept of an alien that can core out a person's mind and personality, making them into a vessel for its own programming (yeah, I know that's an old trope, but it's really well played here; and yes, that's the kochanqa again, as well as... well, you'll find that out in the next novel in the Cynos Union series).

Hamilton's biggest influence on my writing, basically, is that he made me think Big Ideas.

I already had big ideas, but now I had Big Ideas. Big difference, there; it's the difference between the way Messiah's Shard began life, as a script for s student movie, that was distinctly more X-Files-ish in tone, and where it ended up, as the first volume of a whole space opera series, during which there'll be wars, and aliens, and love, and huge great flappy monsters, and 42 stars being destroyed...

Oh aye, sorry, you don't know about the 42 stars yet, do you?

But yes, what I'm saying is that if my own books can be half as gobsmackingly briliant as Hamilton's, I'll be a very happy bunny indeed...

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