It’s a reproduction of a 1950s card came based on the Dan Dare comic. I’d guess the original was made in 1952 or so, because all the pictures on the cards are from the first three story arcs, from the start to the middle of Marooned on Mercury. And yes, I could tell that from glancing through the deck, and yes, I’m aware of what a massive geek that makes me.  (It’s worse than that: I immediately spotted an error on one of the cards. The elevated tube-train is labeled as a Treen telesender but it’s actually an electrosender: the telesender was a teleporter. Ha! I am a special kind of nerd.)

Anyway, the game itself is very simple. There are four suits with 11 numbered cards each, and the rules provided are for a simple trick-taking game along the lines of Whist. There’s nothing Dan Dare about the game besides the artwork. You could play that game with a normal set of playing cards. You could certainly put pictures of anything you liked on the cards and the game would be unchanged.

The game mechanics feel dated, more so than the 50s futuristic artwork. It’s interesting to compare the game with modern licensed board and card games. Games today are more complex and often make some attempt to model the story of the licensed property, with unique mechanics that reflect the property’s unique story elements. For example the Battlestar Galactica board game has the players moving their characters around the ships of the fleet and fighting off Cylon attacks, and has a special mechanic that some players are secretly Cylon agents. The Arkham Horror board game has the players running around Arkham fighting monsters, and has a sanity point mechanic to reflect the Lovecraft source material. If Dan Dare were new today, I’d expect a licensed game to have elaborate rules that modeled players cooperating to fight some evil Treen plot.

But those games reflect a modern approach to games design, influenced by cross-pollination from tabletop roleplaying games. Back in the 1950s there wasn’t that tradition of novelty in game design. Card games were things like Whist, so a licensed Dan Dare card game was a Whist variant with pictures of spaceships on the cards.

Also in the news recently, a prequel comic to Watchmen is apparently in development, and there are rumours of a Doctor Who movie. I’ve seen some fans outraged about these things on social media. A Doctor Who movie would spoil the TV series! Watchmen doesn’t need a prequel!

My thoughts: it’s true that Watchmen doesn’t need a prequel, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that a prequel would be bad. Alien didn’t need a sequel, but most people regard Aliens as very good. Similarly the Doctor Who TV series doesn’t need a spin-off movie, but the movie might turn out to be great.

Of course it’s possible that the Watchmen prequel and the Who movie will be awful. (Very likely in the case of the Watchmen prequel, but I’m hesitantly optimistic about the Who movie). But so what? There are lots of awful comics and movies: why should people get outraged about these ones?

Because these spin-offs spoil the original work. And that’s where I can’t get my head around the outrage: because however awful the Watchmen prequel turns out to be, my copy of Watchmen will still be there on my bookshelf. Perhaps I approach things differently as a writer, but I don’t feel obliged to read a work in the light of spin-offs made later by different writers or production teams.

The author’s intentions at the time of writing aren’t the way to evaluate a work, of course. But neither is the idea that there is a fixed canon, one true history of a fictional world, and all sequels or spin-offs of the same work are windows into that world. To go back to the Alien universe, I don’t have to watch the end of Aliens with the start of Alien3 in the back of my mind. I can watch Star Trek: The Next Generation without caring that the events of the series would somehow be ‘undone’ by the 2009 movie. I can watch the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica and pretend that it’s leading up to an ending that made some kind of sense. The writers didn’t have these later instalments in mind when they wrote the original works, so why should I think about them when watching them?

This isn’t about ignoring bits of canon that you don’t like: it’s about taking each work as a thing in itself, respecting it more rather than less because it’s not real, because it was created at a particular time by a particular person or set of people who had a partricular idea in their mind.

So, the prequel to The Thing added nothing to the original work, but it also took nothing away.

I don’t really intend to talk about politics or current affairs here much. But I read this morning that of the 62 apartments sold in One Hyde Park, the world’s most expensive residential block, only nine are paying council tax.  And that got me thinking: you know who would be good at writing laws?

Video game designers.

One of the first things you learn when designing game systems–either the easy way, from a more experienced designer, or the hard way from seeing how people play your game when it’s released–is to design rules with the assumption that they will be abused.

It’s not such a big deal with single-player games (where rules-abusers only affect themselves) or small-scale multiplayer games (where the group can police itself), but it becomes very important with massively multiplayer games. You’ve got to think about griefers (deliberately disruptive players), but you’ve also got to think about groups of players organising themselves to take advantage of the rules. You can design what you intend as a co-operative game, but if one player can get an advantage by screwing over the other players, that’s what they’ll do; and you can design what you think is a competitive game, but if players can maximise their rewards by co-operating, that’s what they’ll do. Players will always look for the way to maximise their rewards, even if it’s less fun to play that way and even if it screws over other players.

Game designers have to think about this as they design the game rules, so they release a game whose rules can’t be abused like this. And in most modern games, if they find after release that people are abusing the rules in a way that spoils the game for others, they can release a rules patch to fix it.

Maybe this is wishful thinking and betrays a lack of political knowledge, but when I see news stories like the one I linked to, I wish that the same design philosophy could be applied to real-world laws. Whatever legal hoops involving companies registered in the British Virgin Islands people can jump through to avoid paying tax, that’s clearly an abuse of the law, and the fact that the abuse is possible means the system is poorly designed.

I suspect that a lot of modern problems could be solved if we were to take a bit of games design wisdom and make it a guiding principle for our lawmakers: Design laws with the assumption that they will be abused, and if it turns out they can be abused, fix them.

Well, I believe in trying to give the readers what they want, so: as far as I can tell (from IMDB), the character is listed simply as ‘Beautiful Girl’ and is played by Marcela Duarte Fonseca, who has no other film credits. I could be wrong, though: this is a mainstream movie aimed at teenage boys, so basically any of the female characters could be described as ‘Beautiful Girl’.

The film tells us very little about Beautiful Girl. Presumably Hal Jordan picked her up in a bar the night before the first scene, they had a one-night stand, and neither of them expects to see the other again. (The dialogue in that scene definitely implies that it’s the first time she’s been in his apartment.) Her presence in the scene is just to establish that he’s the kind of guy who picks up girls; having served this purpose, the character is forgotten about. Presumably Beautiful Girl goes back to her mundane, non-superheroic life, maybe occasionally noticing that the Green Lantern she sees on the news looks kind of like that guy she slept with one time.

But that’s boring. With so little to go on, we can invent whatever story for her we like. Here are some ideas:

• She’s a sleeper agent (yes, yes, pun intended) sent by the Guardians of Oa to observe potential Green Lanterns on Earth. She’s not actually a person but a tiny robot drone that projects a hard-light construct around itself, similar to the Green Lantern rings but able to do other colours as well. She keeps close to Hal by taking on new appearances that Hal will be attracted to, then letting him chat her up and take her home–in fact, almost every one of Hal’s sexual conquests have been this same robot. The reason Hal is fixated on Carol Ferris is that on some subconscious level he knows that she’s the only real woman to have ever been slightly interested in him. Because Hal is a jerk.
• She’s the real intended recipient of the Green Lantern ring, but a quirk of human physiology means that the rings can get confused between humans who have been in close physical contact recently. She’s genuinely brave, selfless, and kind-hearted, possesses huge reserves of willpower as well as being of peak physical fitness, and is also an accomplished sculptor with an amazing ability to imagine three-dimensional shapes. In some parallel universe, she led the Green Lantern Corps to usher in a new age of peace and justice for the universe. And she wouldn’t have been such a jerk.
• She’s a naive, romantic girl who’s had a crush on Hal Jordan for months, and has eventually got him to notice her. From his point of view, she’s just another of his conquests, but from hers it was a beautiful romance and Hal was clearly The One. But all Hal is interested in is the chase, so once he’s bedded her he forgets about her completely. She tries phoning him but he stops returning her calls, partly because he’s busy being a superhero, but mostly because he’s a jerk.

There are infinite other possibilities. Maybe she’s an alien construct as in the first idea, but rather than working for the Guardians, she works for an evil race for some sinister purpose. Maybe she will return to take part in a love triangle involving her and Carol Ferris. Maybe she’s quite coincidentally destined to be another superhero, and someday they’ll team up to fight robot zombies from the moon, during which Hal will wonder why she seems familiar but not be able to place her.

She’s a blank slate. Who do you want her to be?

P.S. to everyone who got to this page by searching for “slutty fantasy armour”: no.

After a month of umming and ahhing I’ve decided not to do NaNoWriMo this year. When I first did it back in 2009 it was a massive help to my writing, but right now I’m not at a stage in my writing development where it would be helpful. Tonight seemed the night to recommend it and to say a few words about its pros and cons, though.

The good

NaNoWriMo is a great help in turning off one’s inner editor for a month. Quality and coherence are jettisoned for the sake of churning out 50,000 words of prose. Back in 2009 that was exactly what I needed: I had written short stories, but I’d never finished something novel-length, and focusing on word count let me prove to myself that I could.

NaNoWriMo also helps you to spend time every day writing. You know you’ve got to write those 50k words, and the only way you’re going to do that is if you sit down and do 1,667 words per day, every day, for the month. You learn how to write quickly and you learn how to make time for it. Once November ends you might not be writing that heavily, but you’ll find sitting down to write a bit easier than you did previously.

Most importantly (for me at least) there’s the NaNoWriMo community. With NaNo you have a whole support network to help you achieve the things above: to give advice, to nag, to compare notes and to all be in it together. I made some great friends through NaNo, and it was only with their support that I got through the month. The reason I was even considering doing NaNo again this year was for the community element of it. But…

The bad

The bad is that NaNoWriMo is restrictive. It’s one-size-fits-all. The community pressure is great, but the community pressure is to write 50,000 words and nothing else. The only way people vary the formula within NaNo is to set themselves even more insane targets: 100,000 words, 200,000, more. The rules of NaNo become a straitjacket: you must write 50k words, the word count is more important than quality, you must start in November and not before. If that isn’t what’s best for you as a writer, you’re outside the community; it’s not fun to go to the parties and have people ask about your novel or word count and have to say, um, well, I’m not really doing NaNo as such. I was tempted to do NaNo just for the sake of being in the community, even though it would be a month wasted from the point of view of my development as a writer, and that was when I knew I had to give it a miss this year.

Another potential problem with NaNo is that it’s easy to stop there. It’s recreational novelling: you write a novel in a month but you don’t intend for anyone else to read it, and you might not write anything for the rest of the year. That’s great if recreational novelling is what you want, but if you’re serious about being a writer you have to step past that and judge whether next year’s NaNo is for you.

For anyone doing NaNo this year: good luck, and enjoy! If my local NaNo community is anything to go by, NaNoers are all brilliant people and I’m proud to be part of that community even if I’m not doing NaNo itself again.

And for anyone considering doing NaNo: it might not be right for you, but if you think it is, go for it! Depending on when you read this, it may not be too late to start. It’s a unique experience that’ll teach you valuable writing skills, even if there are other skills it doesn’t teach.

My story ‘The Song from Before the War’ is now online at the RuneScape website.

(Illustration by Paolo Puggioni.)

Very much enjoyed tonight’s episode. It’s nice to see the series having the confidence to use time travel as a story device, rather than just as a setup for adventures-of-the week in different settings. There were some great dramatic moments, especially towards the end, and it did a decent job of exploring the ethical implications of time travel rather than sidestepping them, leading to some dramatic moments. It was also very nicely paced: I loved the speed with which it got through the initial setup, and the abruptness with which it cut to the end credits.

I think the only major thing I’d have changed would have been the reason why the accelerated time stream that Amy gets trapped in exists. I’d also have added food dispensers around the place, rather than a ‘you don’t need to eat in here’ handwave. These details set my science-fiction-writer mind off thinking about their implications, which distracted me frm the point of the episode.

All the episode needed was a time-acceleration field where years passed inside for hours outside, but what it gave us is a field that selectively accelerates some biological processes and not others. Someone in the field experiences life, and ages, at the ‘fast’ rate; but diseases and the need to eat only progress at the ‘slow’ rate. A whole lot of energy is being magicked into Amy’s metabolism in order for her to keep functioning for 30-odd years without eating. The more you think about this, the less it makes sense. Suppose Amy cries or sweats: does she need to drink to recover that fluid? If her hair and nails keep growing and her skin cells replenish, where does that new mass come from if she doesn’t eat? (If her hair and nails aren’t growing, and her skin isn’t replanishing, how is she showing physical signs of aging?)

My first thought was: these aliens could create an accelerated time-field within which you can live life normally except that you don’t suffer from diseases and you don’t need to eat. Judging from the size of the facility, they had no problem creating this field over a large area. Why reserve it for people who had the plague? Why didn’t they all live inside it permanently?

The plague itself they could get away with by saying it’s a magic time-plague that somehow knows what time it is outside (which ties in nicely with a Time Lord being affected by it but not a human), but there was no need for the metabolic implications of Amy not needing to eat. I think it’s an example of two mistakes that can be made when writing science fiction:

Firstly, not thinking through implications. The writer comes up with a one-line handwave of something inconvenient (in this case, Amy not eating for a week) and doesn’t think through what this means. A different hand-wave (e.g. there’s a food dispenser in the room) could have worked just as well without the implications.

Secondly, fuzzy thinking about time passing at different rates. To use a different example, at first glance it makes sense that our hero might know he’s in a time-freeze because his watch has stopped–but if he’s able to act normally then the mechanical processes of his body must still be working, so how does the watch know to behave differently? Similarly, if Amy’s muscles can move at the normal rate for her new time stream, how does her digestive system know to slow down? If time is passing at a different rate, that should affect everything, and you should only see effects at the boundary between one time rate and another (e.g. you can look out of your slow-time bubble and see clock hands whizzing round, but your wristwatch should be working normally from your point of view). If you want a more complicated effect, you’ve got to have a different cause.

(For example: the two-streams facility could put the plague victim into a life support unit and plug their brain into a computer. With the aid of the computer, their consciousness lives at a greatly accelerated rate, inside a virtual-reality environment. The plague is still working on their real body out in meatspace, in real time, and the VR environment doesn’t have to make them feel hungry if they don’t want to eat inside the simulation. The simulation could age their simulated body at the normal rate, although there’s no technical reason why it has to. Family and friends could exchange messages via the computer, or even visit by temporarily jacking themselves in. Although, again, I’m wondering why this should be reserved for plague-victims…)

Yes, that’s a lot of text devoted to a nit-pick of what was generally an excellent episode, but in science fiction a lot can hang on technical details and it’s important for writers to think them through.

They ask, “What is your novel about?”

I can’t speak for all writers, but I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who finds this question challenging. Of course I know what my novel is about, but when I try to boil that down into one or two sentences that can keep the conversation going, I draw a blank.

Normally I say, “It’s about space pirates.” Which it kind of sort of is, although there’s really only one space pirate and her piratical activities aren’t the focus of the book. It also brings to mind images of cybernetic eyes and robot parrots and all sorts of clichés that aren’t anywhere in my novel, but they’re fun mental images that make the asker smile and keep the conversation going, and that’s what the answer is really meant to achieve.

But when someone wants a more detailed and less glib answer than “It’s about space pirates”, I find myself at a loss. Part of that is because I haven’t prepared a good answer. I’ll have to, when I come to write a covering letter, but that’s not for a while yet and when I do it I’ll have plenty of time to agonise over every word. Mostly, though, it’s because I didn’t set out to write a book about any particular theme. There are lots of things that my novel could be said to be about, and once we’ve got past the glib “space pirates” answer, I don’t know which to pick.

• It’s about a society that has collectively given up and resigned itself to extinction, and what such a society would be like for a cross-section of social classes.
• It’s about the different ways in which people’s personalities can be shaped by tragic events in their past.
• It’s about obsession.
• It’s about the question of whether, when you’re faced with an overwhelmingly powerful enemy, it’s better to make a futile last stand or just roll over and die.
• It’s about cyborg zombie space pirates vs giant planet-devouring alien robots. In space!

Some of these were part of my original idea; others are things that have emerged from the novel as I wrote it, without my being fully conscious of them until I examined what I was writing. Any of these would be a truthful but incomplete answer to what the novel is about. (Pedantically, the only complete answer would be 80,000 words long and identical with the novel itself; anything else loses detail.) When someone asks the question, I have to come up with an answer that both accurately reflects the novel, and also fits the tone of conversation and what that person wants to know. Because “It’s about space pirates” and “It’s about obsession” are different types of answer for different types of conversation, and I don’t think it’s disingenuous to pick one or the other based on context.

So, advice to writers: when you’re ready to tell people you’re writing something, have several answers lined up for when they ask what it’s about.

Oh, and Spoilers for the final Harry Potter film.

Harry Potter isn’t the hero. He’s the plot device. If you compare the series to The Lord of the Rings, he’s more like the ring than he is like Frodo.

From the start, Harry’s main quality is that he’s the Chosen One with the Special Destiny. He’s surrounded by people who are more competent than he is and who do most of the actual work: in particular Hermione, who seems to come up with most of the useful ideas but inexplicably lets the boys take most of the credit. Harry Potter is dragged along by a wave of destiny, continually given the hints and aid he needs by magical visions or by adults who know more than they let on.  If you take away this aid and this special destiny, he’s not any more heroic than the characters around him.

Over the course of the films/books (and especially in the final one) we learn  more about what Harry’s Special Destiny means–and I do love the fact that it turns out to mean something very specific, rather than being the vague sort of destiny that lets the author have things happen for no reason. Somewhat chillingly, Harry really is a magical macguffin, raised from birth for a particular purpose that doesn’t require any more from him than being in the path of the villain at a certain moment.

There’s the seed of a great story there, a twist on the normal fantasy formula. The hero of a work doesn’t need to be the same as the point of view character. Make the magical macguffin into a person, and you can tell the story from his point of view, as he watches the real hero or heroes get him into position and save the day. Our macguffin-man doesn’t need to be completely passive, but if his main asset is being the one with the special magic destiny, rather than having some actual useful skill, then the work shouldn’t treat him as the hero.

That could be an interesting story…but that’s not what the Harry Potter series does. It can’t seem to make up its mind whether Harry is the hero or the magic item. It explicitly tells us that Harry’s fate has been mapped out for him by others, that his only notable quality is something that happened to him as a baby that he had no control over–but it then expects us to believe that his going along with this plan makes him the world-saving hero, and expects us not to notice that most of the work is being done by others. I’m not saying he did nothing of use, but did he really do that much more than any of the supporting cast who fought and perhaps died in the final battle?

I’m not saying it was a bad film–it was very entertaining, and the story did mostly work–but I felt there was a good idea there that it didn’t properly explore.

The worst offender in recent years is Assassin’s Creed 2. The game is set in Italy, and the characters are presumably speaking in Italian, but this is mostly rendered in modern English. Good so far. But the dialogue is only mostly rendered in English, and there are odd Italian phrases dotted around (which are translated if I have subtitles turned on). While playing, it left me wondering what the change of language was meant to signify, since presumably the characters in-universe were speaking Italian the whole time. Worse still, they’ll often say a word in Italian and then repeat it in English. In-universe they’re speaking Italian both times, so did they repeat themselves for emphasis? Or did the writer expect players to believe that people in renaissance Italy spoke English with Italian accents?