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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-23220211265723070622020-03-05T23:02:15.377+00:00Playing God In My Own Personal UniverseThe Official Blog of science fiction and fantasy author, Mark W. BonnettAnonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-90457955614158540622015-03-20T00:36:00.000+00:002015-03-20T00:36:53.692+00:00Thank you, Pterry

I said, when I write my little tribute to Harold Ramis, that there was one tribute I was dreading having to write, as I knew it would be the one that would hit me the hardest. That time has sadly come, and in the end, it's taken me over a week to collect my thoughts, and finally get this written.

And I've decided: I'm not going to write a tribute to Terry Pratchett. It doesn't seem enough, somehow, not for the man whose work has had the greatest effect on not just my own writing, but on my worldview.

No, this isn't a tribute. This is a thank you...

I read my very first Discworld novel when I was a young'n, probably only about 12 or 13, when a cousin lent me The Colour Of Magic and The Light Fantastic. I was blown away instantly; never before had I seen the fantasy genre get the piss taken out of it so thoroughly, so affectionately, and so beautifully. From then, I was hooked, and as I read them, something happened to me, the same as I reckon happened a lot to people who read the Discworld novels.

I learned, and I changed.

I came to see the world differently, and not just because of the new and exciting ways I saw Pratchett twist and turn language into something wonderful. Pratchett may have been, to me, the greatest fantasy writer who's ever lived (and I say that entirely without irony or hyperbole), but what made his books really resonate round my brain, and rearrange my neurons in new and interesting ways, was just how insightful they were.

Show me any work about the human condition by Dickens, Austen, or any of the classics, and I'll hold up a Pratchett book and say, "I'm fine with this, thanks. It's got metaphor and dwarfs."

And so, I write this thank you. I'm not going to go on about how Terry Pratchett was a visionary and a genius (though he was those things). I'm just going to say thank you for making me the writer, and the man, I am today.

I hope Binky had his best saddle on when he came for you, Pterry. And like Granny Weatherwax said, if you haven't gone to a better place, you'll damn sure make it a better one.

(Image by Paul Kidby, source: paulkidby.net) Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-30279148811182590472014-06-29T19:24:00.000+01:002014-06-29T19:24:42.826+01:00Ehren Kruger has no business calling himself a writer

As I'm sure you can imagine, the art of storytelling is something that's, well, really really bloody important to me. I'd assumed it was important to everyone who makes a living through writing fiction, because when you're writing fiction, telling a convincing story is frankly everything. It's one of the main bleedin' points of the entire exercise.

So, imagine my surprise when I read that the writer for Transformers: Age of Extinction believes that it's just not that important...

Y'see, SlashFilm sat down with Ehren Kruger, the man who wrote all three of the Bayformers sequels, and what he said was rather illuminating. Specifically, what it illuminated was the opinion I spoke about in the title of this very post: Ehren Kruger has no business calling himself a writer. Oh, and I should also point out that this post isn't going to be about me shouting at the Bayformers movies for being utterly dire. I mean they are, obviously, but this little rant is going to be specifically about Ehren Kruger's interview.

I reckon you'll see exactly why it infuriates me so much, when I show you the money quote:

"When you're talking about aliens, robotic machines which disguise themselves as vehicles and animals, you start to make your peace with the idea that logical sense doesn't have to be the be-all, end-all."
I'm sorry, what? You mean to tell me that a story making sense is not one of the core bloody tenets of the whole bloody art of bloody storytelling? Well, what the hell have I been doing spending 90% of my time making sure that my books, y'know, make sense? Ye gods, I wish I'd known, I could have written any old drivel and still managed to sell it, and the books wouldn't take half as long to write!

Wow. Who knew that a narrative making sense wasn't the most important part of constructing a narrative in the first place?

Now, around this stage, I'd usually acknowledge that my opinion of Bayformers is entirely subjective, but that's sort of the point, really. I'm not actually ranting about the movies. I'm ranting about a man who calls himself a writer while, we can infer from his words, thinking the art of storytelling isn't actually that important.

And that disgusts me.

It cheapens the art of storytelling. It cheapens the hard work put in by writers who spend hours upon hours making sure their story makes sense. It's a huge insult to moviegoers and book readers, as it implies we're not smart enough to tell when a story is hideously badly written.

Besides which, as Mark Twain himself said, "It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."

Ehren Kruger, you should be ashamed of yourself...

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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-82363058614874579582014-06-24T18:08:00.000+01:002014-06-24T18:08:51.167+01:00Manic Depressives In Space

There's been a little bit of a theme in a couple of my books so far (namely the first in the Cynos Union saga, Messiah's Shard, and book 3, The Abominable Moon), of people not being quite who they say they are, or rather, not being totally honest with how they feel. In fact, it was a major plot point in both books; to see how, you'll just have to read them, but suffice to say, the basic point is that everyone, absolutely everyone, hides who they really are from the world. I keep using that trope, so now it's time to look at why.

I've mentioned before that a big part of why I write what I write is the fact that it's cathartic. Writing helps me to deal with my own personal demons, and in a way, understand myself better. Oh, and settle in, because this post will be a long'n (and also, possibly, maybe, a little bit uncomfortable to read, but keep going to the end, 'cos I promise it's not all doom and gloom)...

By fictionalising them, it makes them, well, safer to think about, I suppose, and easier. I guess that just comes as part of being hyper-analytical about everything, really: if I can sit back and look at how fictional characters deal with what's going through their minds, it somehow becomes divorced from myself (even though I wrote them), and I can look at them and go, "Ah, so that's how to deal with that thingy, then."

Yeah, I freely admit that thought process probably isn't going to make that much sense to other people...

Understanding Through Writing

But then, that bit, the fact that the whole experience makes very little sense to other people, is easily one of the worst parts about battling with depression or (in my case) borderline personality disorder. It's that bit that makes me (and, I can only assume, other people who have to battle these things) feel like they're alone. As odds go, that's edging towards 'insurmountable', and the only way I can describe is like this: you're trying to fight an army of demons vastly more powerful than you are, it's really hard to find any kind of energy to fight such a vastly overpowered foe, no-one can help you (because it's your fight which only you can win), and neither you nor they really understand the whole situation, anyway.

I'm not saying that Messiah's Shard is an allegory about fighting mental health issues, but I'm also not saying that it isn't, so you can probably draw your own conclusions...

And so, I write, to tell a story, yes, but also to understand, and maybe to help other people understand. Understanding's the hard bit, though. I mean, after all, how can I expect anyone else to understand this, until I understand it myself, right? Even then, though, there's still the stigma that comes from mental health issues, but we all know where that comes from, right?

Yep, once again (sing it with me), lack of understanding, and that's made worse by the whole thing being so hard to explain to anyone who's not suffered through it. Y'know, I've long thought that this page from Robot Hugs sums it up perfectly. Have a read, I'll wait...

...

...

Humans Are Useless At Doing Understanding

Welcome back. I try not to get angry when people offer advice like that, because after all, they are just trying to help, and it's not their fault that trying to make ourselves better is what people with mental health issues do all the time, 24/7, whether we like it or not. We know that what we feel is completely irrational, but without a serious run-up, and perchance a really big cricket bat to smack our personal demons about, we can't help it.

And then, the fact that we know those irrational thoughts are stupid makes us feel stupid, and powerless, for not being able to stop them. We know we need help, but even if we can muster the energy to try and get some, finding help isn't easy. That stigma goes all the way throughout a society that would, it seems, prefer to forget such edge cases like us happen, or encourage us to treat the symptoms with a pick 'n' mix of pharmaceuticals every day, instead of understanding and fighting the internal causes of the problem.

Hell, even people like us aren't that good at understanding and supporting other people like us. I can remember joining a general mental health support group, since therapy's so expensive, only to find that everyone else in the group wanted to focus on postnatal depression (a genuinely big problem, but not one I can ever understand or experience). The end result?

Another feeling of isolation, brought on by a group who were explicitly there to support people with mental health issues. I could have said something, but the point is this: the world constantly tells us there are people worse off than ourselves, and how do my problems compare to people with postnatal depression?

So, the situation's pretty much hopeless, right?

Well... no, actually...

We Will Fight, And Though We May Stumble, We Shall Not Fall

One of the deepest beliefs I've always held is that there is always hope. No matter how dark things get, hope will always abide. That's the deepest belief I cling to because, quite frankly, I have to. I have to believe that hope never dies, because otherwise, what's the point?

And do ye know, there's a funny thing about believing in hope. Believe in it, and work your bits off to make it happen, and it does get better. It really does. People like us, we go through the mill every day, to the point where even getting out of bed in the morning doesn't seem worth the effort.

Every day, we fight against that, but that's fine, because doing that just makes us stronger. I hate giving advice, because it's arrogant to think I know more about you than you do about yourself, so this is the only bit of advice I will ever give to anyone who, like me, struggles with these things: you are stronger than you realise. You will find that strength when you're ready to, you will survive your struggles, and you will outlast your personal demons.

After all, you've already proved you're a survivor by not letting those demons beat you, up till now.

People like you and I, we'll just carry on surviving, the same as we always do, and bit by bit, day by day, we'll win.

And yes, these things have, as you might have guessed, informed my writings.

I've always said that every Cynos Union book will, no matter how dark it gets throughout the story, have a somewhat happy ending. It might be a bittersweet ending, sure, but I refuse to use the kind of downer endings that strange, floppy-haired people claim to be the Only True Art™.

Like I said, there has to be hope, or what's the point?

Smacking Personal Demons With Big Angry Sticks

So in conclusion, never stop fighting. Though it may very well be the hardest thing we can ever possibly face, we won't lie down and give in. We won't allow the despair and the loneliness to destroy us from the inside out. Those things will try, those little doubts and niggles and personal demons that we sometimes forget are a part of ourselves because they feel so alien, but the fact is that they don't control us.

They are not who we are, and since we have boundless depths of inner strength, we can be bloody sure that we'll drag the little bleeders into the light, and prove how little power they have over us.

And the most important thing to remember is that we're never alone, not really. There are thousands upon thousands of people who feel like us, even people who hide it from, well, themselves. There are quite possibly millions of other civilisations out there in the blackness of space, too, and even amongst those, there will be thousands of people, or squids, or nine-limbed monkeys with tree frogs for faces, who feel just like we do.

Though it might sometimes feel like it, people like us, whether we're human or squid or something else that can't even be imagined by science, are not alone.

So now, it's over to you. Jump in with your thoughts. Tell the world, without shame, how you give those personal demons a bloody nose.

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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-30275244022861926212014-06-12T17:17:00.000+01:002014-06-29T19:51:41.450+01:00Can we pack it in with this nonsense about "proper literature", please?

Ah, the joys of being on holiday; it quite often means that I miss something the day it gets published and then have to rant about it a week after everyone else has given it a good going over. Usually, that'd lead to me not bothering, since people have already said everything I'd want to say by that point, but this time it's different.

This time, I done got the fire in my belly, and it all started when I read that article on Slate (you know the one), about how adults who read YA fiction should be embarrassed.

Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, this is not a post where I come out swinging in defence of Young Adult fiction, because quite frankly, I'm not a fan. I've tried to read some, here and there, and it's just not my cuppa tea. Instead, what I'm here to do is ask this question: when did it become a-okay to imply people are somehow deficient as humans (and "should be embarrassed") when they like something you don't?

I mean did I miss a memo, or something?

Mind you, let's be honest here, the original article, by writer Ruth Graham, isn't exactly anything new, is it? For those of us who like aliens and dragons, or rayguns and swords, being told that the thing we love is somehow not proper and decent for adult comsumption is something we're well used to. One only has to watch the mental hoops the supposed arbiters of culture jump through to ensure that George Orwell's 1984 cannot be a dystopian science fiction novel, or that Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol cannot possibly be a ghost-filled fantasy story.

No, they're both "proper literature", not the kind of disgusting, pulpy genre fiction that the unwashed and braindead masses consume like the animals they are. You know the stuff: Aldous Huxley, Mary Shelley, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, all those stories for plebs, that's not proper literature...

What it ultimately boils down to is snobbery, plain and simple, a kind of cultural elitism which states that only a narrowly defined range of things can be considered "worthy", and anything outside that narrow band of things can go do one.

"Science fiction can't be literature," they say. "Heavy metal can't be music. Comics and video games are for children, and should be banned anyway. You should be ashamed of yourself for liking such things, and should consume only what I say is good for you, for such is the path to salvation."

No, such is the path to stagnation. What people who make these claims seem to want is a society based purely around what they like. Other people's tastes? Things that other people may like?

Pah, what do those plebs know about anything?

There's an odd (well, perhaps not that odd) parallel here, with the world of publishing, or more specifically, with the world of traditional publishing. For years, publishers acted as the arbiters of culture, defining themselves as the gatekeepers of what the public should like (I firmly believe that's partly why traditional publishers are slowly going extinct, and not a moment too soon: the people are rebelling and deciding their tastes for themselves in this great ebook revolution), and that view, to my mind, looks pretty much identical to the one in the Slate article.

All of that seems to lead to one inescapable conclusion about how such people think, and it can be summed up thusly: you philistinies are too stupid to choose for yourselves.

It's a shockingly authoritarian view, and if there's one thing I really do loathe, it's people who paint themselves as authority figures; any person who says they know what's best for other people is someone who, quite frankly, disgusts me.

So go on reading YA fiction. Carry on reading your sci-fi epics where five-limbed squids do unthinkable things to humans. Read what you love. Oh sure, people will telll you that you're wrong to like what you like, complete with the subtle implication that they're better than you, but quite frankly, who cares what they think?

You're not reading for them. You're reading for you, and you alone, so enjoy it!

____

Addendum Edit-To-Add Thingummy:

Ruth Graham also had this to say in her original article, and I completely forgot to pick up on it as I was first writing this post...

Most importantly, these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction. These endings are for readers who prefer things to be wrapped up neatly, our heroes married or dead or happily grasping hands, looking to the future. But wanting endings like this is no more ambitious than only wanting to read books with "likable" protagonists.
What, precisely, is wrong with a book having, y'know, a proper ending? Is it some kind of crime to like stories, works of fiction, to have the narrative closed out in an emotionally-satisfying way (whether that emotion is elation or heartache)? Sure, some books can turn what might otherwise have been a cop-out ending into pure genius (American Psycho springs to mind), but why must every bit of adult fiction ever have the kind of ambiguous, narratively-unsatisfying ending that Ms. Graham seems to want to see?

I swear, some people are so hung up on deep and meaningful, they forget what it's like to tell, or be told, a story...

____

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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-33897412296292251852014-06-11T19:44:00.001+01:002014-06-12T14:32:05.945+01:00Food Supplies - A treatise on the most important part of planetary colonisationAuthor's Note: this story does not take place in the Cynos Union. I felt like a change of pace...

(Image courtesy of Serge Bertasius Photography / FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

People often ask me what the most important thing about colonising planets is. I swear, they ask questions like that all the time, and I'm convinced they want me to answer with something exciting, filled with much bravado and swinging between starships with plasma cannons held in our teeth.

This has never happened, ever. Also, don't try it. Ever. Plasma cannons have an annoying habit of going off unexpectedly, and your head won't grow back.

Trust me, I've seen it happen...

Anyway, here's the thing, right: the truth about planetary colonisation is that, well, it's boring. Everyone thinks it's going to be exciting, but it's just not. There's no death-defying fights against hostile aliens (plasma cannons again; hostile aliens tend to run away), the Science Institute's forcefield technology means that even hypercanes can't touch us, and if things do get a bit scary, standard colonisation procedure is to run away, and wait till the natives die out.

The point is this: none of those things really matter when you break ground on a new colony. No, I shall tell you what really matters:

Food supplies.

Seriously, the standard colony size the Science Institute sends out is around 600 members, and once we've made planetfall, we have to find some way to feed them all. Sure, we can send out the agriculture-mechs, but people get bored when all they have to eat is scropweed, right? Right, and don't tell me you wouldn't get bored if you only had scropweed to eat.

I mean come on, it's scropweed.Yes, I know it's incredibly nutritious, and yes, I know we were incredibly lucky to find it on that planet we colonised in the Vala Rell system, but the simple fact is that it tastes like perforated anus.

I've seen crews mutiny over that stuff. Just... no...

We're omnivores, we need meat in our diet, it's as simple as that. But where oh where does one find meat that's safe to consume on a world where the biochemistry is so radically different to our own?

Well I'm proud to say that I was the one who found the solution, on a rather backwards planet the Institute had been keeping under surveillance for a while. None of us knew that the indigenous creatures of this little planet would be our saviours, until one of us (that would be me, by the way) wondered whether they might actually be edible...

Well, praise the ancients, they were!

Not only that, but as was belied by their hideously ugly forms, they were unbelievably tasty! And so, our solution was clear: we began husbandry trials on these ugly creatures, to bring out their docile traits, and better improve their flesh-value for livestock purposes.

I'm sure you remember the news reports around the time. Everyone does. All those wild stories about how we were killing intelligent animals, just because they could use tools. Well let me tell you, many creatures on our old homeworld use tools, and that never stopped us eating them. Besides, we ran every single test imaginable, and I can personally guarantee that those creatures are not sentient.

They may use tools, but trust me on this, they do not show any signs of true sapience, and as we all know, the ability to open your mouth and wobble bits of it at people is not a mark of intelligence. Walthron-beasts can do that, after all, and I don't see you complaining about having nice, big steak to eat.

You'd have more luck finding intelligence in a rock than in one of those beasts, is what I'm saying.

Still, the ethics committee found nothing wrong in all of our tests, so we steamed on ahead, and let me tell you right now, the only reason our colonisation plans took off so quickly, the only reason our civilisation now spans four hundred star systems, is because of those ugly, pink things from that backwards planet that nobody likes going to.

Like I said, the most important part of any colonisation effort is food supplies, and the simple fact is this:

We wouldn't be where we are today, if we hadn't started eating 'humans'...

© 2013 Mark W. Bonnett

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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-26304205408047623072014-05-29T04:04:00.001+01:002014-05-29T04:08:52.366+01:00Never have I been prouder to be a metalhead than I am right now

Y'know, I've never made a secret of my musical tastes. I am a metalhead. I may not have the long hair any longer (because damn, did I ever look like Meatloaf, when I had long hair), and it's no longer dyed every colour they could find in the barber's, but I remain, in my very soul, a headbanger till the day I die. Hell, that's even leaked into my books; I was intent that the Cynos Union would be 80s sci-fi, but with added metal, a bit like if Star Wars suddenly decided to switch out John Williams for Steve Harris out of Iron Maiden.

But anyhow, there is a point to this preamble; over the past couple of days, something has happened, a thing that's left me feeling more proud to be a metalhead than I ever have before (and I was already pretty bloody proud). It all started in a little pub in Newcastle...

Well, alright, according to the original story on Chronicle Live, it all started when the big honcho of said pub, City Tavern, kicked out a bunch of heavy metal fans because they were, in fact, dressed like heavy metal fans. This is a pub that explicitly doesn't have a dress code, mind, plus the headbangers who got the boot had been regulars for years, largely because the pub used to be known as a rockers' pub.

But, y'know, new ownership, 250 grand refit, and an owner who's reported as saying, "You've came in here with Slayer T-shirts and belts, it's not a good look."

One does have to wonder how closely he had to look to see Slayer belts, but since they weren't wearing Slayer gear (and aren't even Slayer fans), it's probably a bit pointless to theorise. I'm not going to get drawn into talking about what kind of hang-ups the owner might have (because I can't know, and it's not fair to speculate), or what kind of clientèle he's wanting to attract (but come on, we all know it's stag do's and chavs). I'm not even going to call the owner what I want to, because it'd probably get me banned from the internet forever.

Nope, I'm going to focus on the good bit. The really good bit. The bit that made me immensely proud, except that the reason I'm proud might not be why you think...

Y'see, the pub's Facebook page is currently getting the arse trolled off it, to the point where this whole thing has gone viral, and well-known magazines like Metal Hammer, as well as people all round the globe, are talking about it. The lulz are epic, but that's not why I'm proud. No, I shall tell ye why I'm proud.

We metalheads, we're family. We look out for each other, and if an injustice is done against one, the very heart and soul of metal, fans like you and me, will rise up, roaring and snorting, and come to our fellow fan's aid. Sure, we might argue like cat and dog about who's better between Slayer and Iron Maiden (it's Iron Maiden, for the record), but that's just brothers and sisters doing what we do.

See, I know this from experience of being a drummer in more than my fair share of gigging bands. After a while, I could tell what the crowd was going to be like, just by looking at them, and the best audiences, the absolute nicest, most supportive people I've ever seen at a gig, were leather-clad bikers.

Bars like what City Tavern seems to want to be, now?

Yeah, those are the gigs I don't want to remember, especially the one where they started fighting as we were setting up.

And then, of course, there's the issue of tolerance, what with metalheads being the most accepting people I've met, too, which brings me on to a question m'good friend Bulldog (owner and canine overlord of NoiseMatters, a rather fandabbydozy place for finding unknown bands) suggested asking of City Tavern's owner. It's a good question, too, a nuclear-powered acid-edged scalpel of a question, made even better by being only four words.

"Where does it stop?"

Yeah, I don't even need to spell out the implications of that one, do I?

But enough of that. Talking about blatant bigotry against what someone clearly thought was an acceptable target isn't why I'm here. I'm writing this because I'm proud. Proud of you out there, my glorious, headbanging brothers and sister in arms, with yer leather and yer long hair, or yer short hair and yer cargo trousers, or yer Lita Ford blasting out while you fill in spreadsheets (because anyone who thinks there's one specific thing that can be classified as "a metal fan" is rather amusingly wrong; my 70 year old dad liking Nightwish is kinda proof of that).

Like the immortal prophets said, be excellent to each other. Oh, and of course, party on, dudes.

And always remember...

Oh, and if you want to Like the Boycott page on Facebook, here's yer linky...

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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-38280367812274697512014-05-22T21:54:00.000+01:002014-05-22T22:02:16.700+01:00A nerd's perspective - the EU is the model for humanity's future...

Well there we go, it's that time again. Today's the day when we've all flocked out to the polling booths for the European elections (I hope there's been a good turn-out, too; ye can't complain about who gets in if you didn't vote in the first place).

Anyone who's been following the news in the UK over the past few weeks (or, let's be honest, hasn't been comatose during the last few weeks) will know that the topic du jour is Britain being part of the EU.

Nationalistic sentiment has been spurting out all over the shop, rapidly transmogrifying into jingoism, and the results have been oh so very telling...

For starters, it's become almost impossible to see the motives of people who, say, want to vote for one particular political party (and you know which one I mean) as being anything other than simple xenophobia, masquerading as some kind of patriotic desire to "put Britain back in the hands of the British" (as if Britain isn't a nation whose population comes entirely from people coming and settling in/conquering the country). The language of anti-EU parties is one of fear, after all, with certain parties (yes, them again) encouraging the British population to fear the outsider.

However, the fact that UKIP is a party founded on xenophobia and bigotry is a rant for another day (and about 17,000 more words, give or take).

No, today is the day where I take a look at why pulling out of the EU would be A Very Bad Thing. There are, in fact, two reasons why it's a bad idea...

The sensible reason: Britain's economy will flatline

There's a lot of talk about how we need to pull out of the EU to bring Britain back under our own control, which isn't just wrong, it also neatly sidesteps the main issue: if we pulled out, Britain would, by turns, become a third world country.

Sure, maybe I'm being a teensy bit hyperbolic for effect, but look at what the ramifications of such a move would be. For starters, many companies have said they will cut funding to the UK if they pull out of Europe. Unilever is one of the big ones, then there's Airbus, Citi... the point is that we would become less economically attractive, so investment dries up, jobs disappear, and the whole thing gets compounded by countries (notably Japan) saying the same thing.

Still, at least UKIP's goal would come true, eh? There'd be less "foreigners" coming here to work. Sure, it would be because Britain had become an economic wasteland, but hey, like they say, you can't make an omelette without killing the very future of your own country breaking a few eggs...

The idealistic reason: the EU and the United Federation of Planets are the same damn thing

So that's one reason. That's not my favourite reason, though, although it's the most important one in the short-term. No sirree, my favourite reason is the one that takes the long-term view...

Ignore the economic reasons for staying in the EU for a second, and think about the other reasons. The pulling together of humanity in pursuit of a common goal. A union of disparate people, working towards the common good. The very notion that humans can pull together, for the common good, bonded by our core humanity.

And now, look at the European Union, then look at the United Federation of Planets from Star Trek.

They're the same bleedin' thing!

I'm fully aware that some people are undoubtedly lining up to call me naive, or they might decide to call me idealistic, as if that was ever a bad thing, but the point is this: while the EU may have its flaws (and I'm not blind enough to say it doesn't, but we don't get to help fix it if we're not a part of it), it's a symbol. It's a symbol of how humanity can rise above differences to become more than we were. The EU, quite simply, is humanity pulling itself up by its own bootstraps, and making itself better.

Regardless of political leanings or creeds, that should be the goal of our species. And that is why groups like UKIP are so pernicious; they want only to divide, to separate humanity into warring factions separated by mutual hatred.

They strike at the very soul of what gives our species so much potential for greatness, and we have to stand strong in the face of, as King Theoden of Rohan would say, such reckless hate.

We owe it to ourselves...

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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-75103296336961355422014-05-07T16:44:00.000+01:002014-05-07T16:45:41.921+01:00So THAT'S the difference between a 'character' and a 'person'...Warning: this post talks about Transformers. Again. Because I like Transformers. Deal with it.

There's been a massive furore in the world of Transformers over the past few months, even bigger than when Beast Wars happened, or when Bayformers happened (but then, Bayformers is awful, so...). That furore is over the whole issue of female Transformers, with the shorthand I've seen used in various places being "the Windblade issue".

Now, to forestall the argument that I'm only against Windblade because I'm sexist (the standard, instinctive reaction even to people making valid, well-thought out criticisms), I'm going to preface this little stream of consciousness by saying that I'm 100% in favour of having female characters in the Transformers mythos. There are already a whole shedload of women out there who love Transformers, and having female Cybertronians also has the rather desirable benefit of making the story universe within IDW's Transformers comics that much more diverse and wonderful.

It's just a shame that Windblade herself, the poster-girl for this absolutely necessary movement, is dire...

Y'see, there's another female character in the mythos, who is (like Windblade) brand new to the franchise, and when I compare the two, one of them comes across as little more than a dull cypher, while the other comes across as a genuine person.

That character is Nautica (the purple one in the pic), and she is, quite simply, awesome.

Blank slates = duuuuuuull

Now, you may remember that I did a post ages ago about 'strong female characters', and how they're rather boring. Well this post is kind of an extension of that, because it turns out that there's more to the story than just that. Y'see, Windblade herself is categorically not a 'strong female character', which is a good thing; she's naive about the situation on Cybertron, and trying to make the best of knowing virtually nothing about what's been going on throughout the civil war.

The problem, and the bit that makes her a bit of a non-entity, is this: that's all she is. She's essentially yer basic reader-surrogate, someone for the new reader to view the events of the story, and in that sense, she's kind of a blank slate.

The problem with blank slates is that they're not known for having bags of personality, and that is precisely what Windblade is missing.

You are the little things about you

Compare that to Nautica, currently being awesome in the More Than Meets The Eye comic, written by James Roberts. In the two scenes in which she appears, we learn a surprising amount of tiny, incidental details about her character, that (unlike Windblade) are in no way related to her role in the story. We learn that she's a quantum mechanic (pun of the year nominee, right there), who doesn't like the idea of moral absolutism, who loves to read, and who likes a wee dram of the good stuff.

None of those details matter in the grand scheme of things, but as Nightbeat (Cybertron's greatest detective) says in the very same issue, not being important is precisely what makes something important.

That, right there, is the big difference: Windblade feels like a cardboard cut-out, because we actually know next to nothing about what makes her tick, while in a mere two scenes, we get a sense of Nautica as a fictional person, real and fleshed out (metaled out?) instead of just being a mere character. It's like the real world, I suppose, where the wisdom of Tyler Durden says that you are not your job; at the minute, Windblade is just her job (that job being "reader-surrogate"), while Nautica is most definitely not.

'Character' bad, 'person' good

And so, we come back to what I said at the start of this post. The IDW Transformers comics are truly brilliant, and long may they continue to bring female characters into the fold. It serves to bring in new fans and it makes the universe more diverse, so the addition of female characters is, I'd say, rather essential.

It's just a shame that Nautica, one of the best new characters to join the franchise in years, is losing out on love, in favour of one of the dullest characters in years...

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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-60896738551098572892014-04-15T17:08:00.000+01:002014-04-15T17:08:04.359+01:00Heartbleed - unveiling a curious quirk in humanity's heart

Well, this week's been interesting so far, ain't it? Look around the internet, and you'll see that the biggest news story of the week (nay, of the bleedin' decade) has been this heap big palaver about the Heartbleed bug. Yes, this was the week that the internet collectively cacked its pants, because... well, let's not play down the seriousness, Heartbleed is one of the worst security threats to ever hit the internet.

It is, in short, a clustersmurf of epic proportions.

But - and this is a big but - the most interesting bit about the Heartbleed situation, for me, is that it illuminates one surprisingly prevalent trait of human nature: humanity's inherent propensity for running round like headless chickens, proclaiming that the end is very bloody nigh. And do ye know what? It's all evolution's fault...

I'll get onto that in a minute, but first... Heartbleed. Yes. It's nasty. It's not a virus (so ignore anyone who says it is), but a flaw in the OpenSSL security thingummies that a lot of sites (and some Android phones, and some broadband routers) use. In simple terms, it's a vulnerability that lets malicious types grab information from unpatched servers (hence why you need to change passwords, but why you also need to wait until a particular server - say Yahoo or Google, which have both been patched - has been fixed, because there's no point in changing your details while it's still vulnerable).

Yes, it's bad. Really very bad, in fact, but there's been a whole ton of misinformation spread about the situation since the news broke over the weekend. And why has there been misinformation?

Why yes! It's humanity's propensity to cack itself, and run round whimpering, at the drop of a hat! It's a weird one, that, because every single one of us realises, on a rational level, that you only get things solved when you stop panicking and get your backside in gear to actually solve it, so why do we keep doing it (and yes, I mean every human ever; training helps people to not panic, but the instinct is always there, as is that little blip of random, existential, falling-sky terror)?

Like I said earlier, I honestly believe that trait has a simple explanation, and it's all the fault of evolution.

Humanity is very good at seeing worst-case scenarios, y'see, and in this case, the worst-case scenario is "everyone in the known universe's identities being stolen, and the lives of everyone on the planet ruined".

Now consider our distant ancestors in Africa, where the worst-case scenario was "slide unhappily down a lion's gullet"; evolution selected for whatever genetic (or memetic/cultural; could go either way, this one, although the fact it's still hanging about today makes me think it could well be some genetic thingummy coding for a bit of the brain) trait made our ancestors more paranoid about worst-case scenarios, because if they weren't on guard for the worst-case, they'd end up (eventually) as lion poo.

Let's call it the CAN'T SLEEP EVERYTHING WANTS TO KILL ME instinct.

And thus, because there's never been any real evolutionary pressure for that instinct to disappear, we still cack our pants at the slightest provocation, and shout out to the world that danger is coming (it's especially humorous if we do that while having a friend called Will Robinson), because warning your mates (about Heartbleed, or bad weather if they're driving, or whatever) means that our mates don't get eaten by lions.

Heartbleed is our modern version of EVERYTHING WANTS TO KILL ME.

So, panic like this is natural, but - and again, it's a big but - raw panic is less than useful in getting things done, and this is why it's a good job plebs like me aren't in charge of fixing the Heartbleed situation (and it will get fixed, never doubt that, even though it'll take a metric arseton of work). Yes, you need to check that any sites you use have patched their servers, and yes, you need to change every single one of your passwords the second that the server it's used on is patched (again, no point changing it till the server's patched), but get past your inherent panic reflex, keep a calm head, actually get stuff done, and things shall turn out alright.

Until the next time, anyway, because when people say things like, "Security threats don't get bigger than this," I can't help but feel like they're tempting fate...

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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-58300477236989358682014-04-04T20:19:00.001+01:002014-04-04T20:19:34.692+01:00Female Aliens, or: Why Do People Insist On Putting Ladybumps On Lizards?

Blimey it's been a busy old month, what with one thing and another. There's the writing on the next book to keep on top of (which is loads of fun), there's some super-secret artwork that you've not seen yet, but that you will, eventually (which is also loads of fun)... yes, alright, basically, I'm saying that I've been having fun for a month, although it's fun that's actually productive at the same time, so basically, the key point to remember is that everyone's a winner!

Anyhow...

I had another crack at sketching out a sookas, one of the eight foot-tall, right-wing lizards that call the Cynos Union home, and a close friend said something to me that made me smile, as he spotted more or less exactly why I made the sookas the way they are. Y'see, the sookas in the pic is a female (as is the one in the pic just up there, above this paragraph), and he quite rightly pointed out that a lot of people would instantly think it's a male...

That, my friends, is kind of the point of the sookas.

Yes, that design choice was entirely deliberate, and there's a very good reason why I've made the female of that species into an eight-foot, armoured, perpetually angry, civil rights-abusing tosser. I'll explain how I came to their design in a sec, but the why of it is this: I cannot stand female aliens that're basically just male aliens (and they're invariably too human, as well) with ladybumps super-glued onto 'em.

Seriously, it bugs the crap out of me, and it has nothing to do with any kind of spittle-flecked feminist-social-justice-smash-the-patriarchy-rawr ranting. None of this warbling about binary-gender-thinking, here, no sirree bobby; there's a cast-iron scientific reason why denoting female aliens through cunning use of chesticles is a massive load of old cobblers.

Quite simply, unless you can think of some really twisty story shenanigans to explain how aliens and humans have a common ancestor (which I may have done, a bit, with the vossarulls) or are basically exactly the same as terrestrial mammals (even though evolution doesn't work that way), female aliens don't have breasts.

It's especially bad when you see it done with aliens who are ostensibly supposed to be reptilian, 'cos reptiles definitely don't have them. I mean seriously, mammals are named after mammary glands, 'cos they're the only sodding class of animals that have them (well, female mammals, anyway). One cannot make a lizard into a lizardette by making it curvier.

No. Wrong. Stop it.

So, we come back to the sookas, and since they're reptiles, I based on things like dinosaurs and, even more than that, komodo dragons. In reptile species, the females tend to be bigger than the males due to the fact they're the egg-layers, as ye can see in the case of Sue the T. rex, who's called "Sue" precisely because she's such a big bugger.

And so, your average female sookas stands around eight feet tell, and is built like several brick outhouses stacked up into a roughly humanoid shape.

Here's where it gets interesting, though, because they're mainly based on komodo dragons, quite possibly the most awesome lizard alive on Earth today (crocodiles and alligators aren't lizards, they don't count). Komodo dragons are fascinating animals, too, because they've recently been shown to be capable of parthenogenesis, of reproducing without a male, and since no-one in the Cynos Union has ever seen a male sookas (and it's long been theorised that the sookas may in fact be a mono-gendered species), would you like to take a guess on how these big, ugly aliens reproduce?

This is why I love doing my research before I get down to writing; through following wherever real world science leads, it means that I can come up with an all-female species of quite monstrous bigots, all of them eight foot-tall killing machines who make life miserable for the poor little ampullas, the other species that shares their homeworld, and who sound like Tony Todd.

Most importantly, they do not have funbags.

And then, of course, there's the yowason, who all look exactly the same, because they're all egg-laying, seasonally-gender-swapping hermaphrodites. Yeah, that one was fun to come up with, and no mistake...

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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-47275490814157472082014-02-24T23:49:00.001+00:002014-02-25T00:03:26.939+00:00A tribute (and a thank you) to the late, great Harold Ramis

It's no secret that while I may have been during the tail end of the 70s, I consider myself an 80s kid, through and through. I mean I may have been born 3 years before the decade started, but I grew up in the 80s, and something like is bound to have a big effect on a growing boy. Like everyone who was a child during the greatest decade there ever was, there's one thing that influenced me more than any other, beyond Transformers, or He-Man, or Duran Duran, or Robocop, or Frankie Goes To Hollywood, or any of that stuff.

Yes, I'm talking about Ghostbusters, a movie that, in hindsight, had a spectacularly big effect on how I write, and how I even think about plot-lines. And so, it was with a heavy heart that I read the news today (courtesy of The BBC), saying that Harold Ramis has died, aged 69...

I've often said that Ghostbusters was the best movie of the 80s by a country mile, and a huge part of why it's such a classic movie (still fantastic even today, 30 years later) is the script, co-written by Ramis and Dan Aykroyd. Of course, Ramis's turn as Egon Spengler was also one of the stand-out performances of the 80s, for me, but it's that script that makes the movie so timeless. Lest we forget, though, it's not just Ghostbusters for which Harold Ramis was accoladed as a writer. There's Meatballs. There's Stripes. There's Groundhog Day (which he also directed). Oh, and let's not forget those two ever so slightly well-known films, Caddyshack and National Lampoon's Animal House.

When I look at that list, I can't help but notice that a sizeable chunk of my childhood memories are defined by his work. Harold Ramis, it turns out, was the man who made me want to have a pet gopher, while driving around in a weaponised Winnebago and wearing a toga.

With a proton pack on my back, naturally.

I'd be lying if I said that his style of writing hadn't an influence on my own, too, with his trademark combination of humour, intelligence and note perfect pacing. Consider the Twinkie scene in Ghostbusters, or the rounded, three-dimensional characters in everything he wrote; that, along with the work of Terry Pratchett, is the yardstick next to which I aspire to measure my own writing.

The simple truth of it is this: cinema and television have today lost one of their greatest voices. But let's not get bogged down in the bad feelings. Let's instead remember the legacy Ramis left behind (and it's a big legacy), and revel in the glory of that scene...

And finally, on a personal note, thank you, Harold Ramis. Thank you for giving a 6 year-old boy something to aspire to while he was growing up. Of course, that aspiration might not have panned out since it's remarkably hard to find someone who'll build me an unlicensed nuclear accelerator and go hunting ghosts with me, but the other aspiration, the one to write as well as you did, well... that's still something I can aim for!

R.I.P. Dr. Spengler. We'll miss you.

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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-70098925833834875742014-02-08T18:12:00.000+00:002014-02-08T18:12:25.017+00:00Want instant fame? Create an insanely stupid conspiracy theory! I was watching TV today, and I was quite shocked to see a new advert for Tetley Tea show up ('cos there's not been one on telly for four years). I was also quite shocked, in a really rather good way, to see that it's got aliens in it...

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Now that is a cool alien design. However, after I'd boggled at how cool it was to see aliens advertising the very elixir of life (I haven't been this excited about an advert since the Smash robots), I had another thought, and it was this: "I wonder if someone has now said this advert is part of the alien conspiracy theory?"

So I had a look, and glory be, the conspiracy theorists didn't disappoint...

Y'see, apparently, this new advert is either another part of the insidious reptilian indoctrination that's going to make us all slaves of the NWO, or it's the governments of the world preparing us for when they finally disclose the fact that aliens don't just exist but are here. The details are a bit sketchy, since conspiracy theories tend to contradict each other rather a lot, but given that they're both a complete load of turgid cobblers, I'm not entirely sure it matters.

And there was me thinking Tetley just wanted to sell more tea by tapping into the ol' Doctor Who zeitgeist-y thing, and scaly skin being a damn sight easier to make look realistic than, say, feathers. Hell, the ad's creators, Creature London, may very well be aware of the whole reptilian conspiracy (hence the aliens being chameleonic), and decided to take the mickey 'cos, y'know, they are Brits.

It's kinda what we do...

We see this kind of thing all the time on places like AboveTopSecret and the David Icke forums; seriously, anything that even slightly involves aliens gets pegged as being part of the grand conspiracy theory (I've seen people say that about everything from Star Wars, to Doctor Who, to Mass Effect, and beyond), and that got me thinking.

I write books with aliens in them...

When are they going to accuse me of being a shill for the Illuminati? Where's my claims of being a disinformation agent?

More to the point, since that hasn't happened, why aren't I making my own conspiracy theory to take advantage of them, and sell more books? I mean I did already base three of the species in my books (the koetaani, sookas and vossarulls) on the three biggies in conspiracy theories (greys, reptilians and nordics), back when I was in my not-as-sceptical-as-I-should-have-been period, so surely I'm a shoe-in to have a conspiracy theory built around me, right?

So, if anyone has ideas about what kind of conspiracy theory could be built around me, leave a comment. The funnier the better.

Also, just to egg them on a bit, I do have scaly skin on my left hand, although that might just be eczema coming back. The truth is out there (or it's on my hand, at least)!

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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-86506539749995449442014-02-02T21:13:00.000+00:002014-02-08T18:09:33.879+00:00I wonder how hard it would be to write a sci-fi novel for the whole family...

I'm rather proud of the Cynos Union series, but then, I suppose I should be, because it's my baby. 'Tis the first ever book series I've published, after all, and like they always say, you never forget your first. It took me a long time to be able to say it (crippling self-esteem issues are always fun), but I'm proud of what I've achieved with the Cynos Union, and pre-emptively proud of what I'll achieve with it next.

However, while the Cynos Union series is many things, what it's categorically not is "suitable for younger readers".

There's entirely too much effin' and blindin' for that (which was bound to happen since the main characters are mostly salt of the earth Yorkshire sorts), not to mention the odd evisceration, and it's for that reason that each and every Cynos Union book comes with a disclaimer in the front-matter, saying that it's for mature readers only. But what if I went for a book that didn't need that disclaimer?

Basically... writing a young adult/teen fiction novel that the whole family can enjoy: how hard can it be?

Well, other than the obvious challenge of not swearing (ask anyone who knows me IRL, as the kids today say, and they'll tell you that I swear a lot), I don't reckon that it'd be any different to writing a Cynos Union book. Y'see, I'm conscious of the way the great Terry Pratchett seems to write kids' books, and the way he does it just makes so much sense to me.

If you read the Tiffany Aching books, and compare them to the main Discworld series, you'll see that there's not actually much difference between them. So far as I can tell, his method for writing kids' books is "cut out the swearing, and don't have too many sub-plots", which logically means that the best way to write a kids' book is to not treat them like idiots. None of this "See Spot run" nonsense, or girls being princesses, getting rescued by the dashing hero. As far as I can tell, it's the same thing with J.K. Rowling, as well (even if I've never actually read any Harry Potter).

So, if I were to write a book ostensibly aimed at younger folk, that the whole family can enjoy, what might it be like?

Well, for starters, it wouldn't be a fantasy book. Pratchett and Rowling have got that area nicely sewn up, so I don't reckon there's an awful lot I could write that'd even come close to competing with the way they play around with the genre's inherent tropes. Thus, fantasy book, no, not happening.

In that case, how about a science fiction series for the whole family? After all, sci-fi comes with its own raft of tropes that are just begging to be lampooned and toyed about with. On top of that, if I were to ever do a series for younger readers, I can pretty much guarantee what the tone would be.

Think "80s Saturday morning cartoon", because one, it'll bring the gosh-gee-whizz excitement needed to keep younger readers interested, and two, it'll bring enough winking knowingness to keep people my age interested.

Also, three, I'm a child of the 80s, and they're my books...

Hmm, y'know, I reckon I might have to try my hand at this fiction for younger readers business, one day. After the rigidly plotted out Cynos Union series (events in-universe are already planned out for around the next three centuries; I like to plan ahead), I reckon it could be a whole heap o' fun to take a trip into a universe that's governed entirely by the rules of Saturday morning cartoons, which is to say, by doing whatever seems most awesome at the time.

Now that could be fun.

One day, baby, one day...

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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-6886612349878781642014-01-30T14:15:00.002+00:002014-01-30T14:15:15.907+00:00Here's a thought - do compelling characters HAVE to be human?

Right then, here's an interesting thought. I was pootling about the other day, doing lots of ever so important and useful things (er, okay, I was on Facebook), and I happened to see that someone had left me a new review for The Non-Random Dog. It was a five star review, so I was pretty damn chuffed, but the really nice part was what the reviewer actually wrote about the book. Specifically, the part that made me really happy was where they said about the characters being the key thing in the book.

I was really rather happy to see that highlighted, 'cos that's kind of the point of what I'm doing. Y'see, the thing is, I loved sci-fi all my life, and while I love big technology and stars blowing up as much as the next nerd, the thing that's always hooked me in is the characters. From Deckard, to Ripley, to Optimus Prime, to Han Solo, to Lt. Cmdr. Susan Ivanova, to... well, you get the point. But here's a question for you guys and gals out there: do compelling characters absolutely have to be human?

I'm reminded, here, of the thing that usually happens whenever a new Transformers cartoon hits the airwaves: human characters are introduced, usually kids, and the fandom asks precisely why human characters are needed. It happens every single time, and the standard answer from Hasbro is always that "viewers need a human to relate to, or they won't watch". The same thing happened a bit more insidiously with the Bayformers movies, so-called because they spend less time on the robot characters, and more on the whole "U.S. Army, hell to the yeah" thing that Michael Bay has going on.

It's at that point that I have to wonder: do people actually need humans in a story in order to relate to it, or is that just another one of those not-truisms, a thing that everyone knows to be true in spite of the fact that it's not actually true?

After all, look at something like A Bug's Life, by Pixar. There's not one human in that, and yet it went on to be a rather big success. Hell, consider Transformers, come to that, where the fans get annoyed whenever human characters are added.

And so, my gut instinct says the following: no, the characters don't need to be human, as long as they're compelling and interesting. Yes, I know that the vast majority of the main characters in my books so far have been human (other than in the latest one, The Abominable Moon, where there's at least one of every species except the yowason, and the titular Curly in The Non-Random Dog, of course), but that's because I'm still in the middle of telling a very specific story, set around humanity, of which you've so far only seen the first part. My plan is to start bringing in more non-human main characters after the book I'm currently writing (since non-human characters can emphasise and reflect bits of humanity back at itself; also, for the really alien aliens, they can tell us about humanity by showing us what we're not like).

So I guess that's the question, really: what do you lovely people think? Do characters need to be human, or are non-human characters fun? And as for those non-human characters, do they need to be "human" enough to relate to, or is it more fun to learn about aspects of ourselves by looking at what real non-humanity is like?

So it's over to you! Sound off in the comments!

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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-79153651569698795082014-01-21T18:56:00.002+00:002014-01-21T19:01:44.759+00:00"What? You have souls in your books? But you're an atheist! TRAITOR!"

So, I was pootling about online a few days ago, and ended up chatting to someone who'd read Messiah's Shard, the first book in the Cynos Union series. It turned out to be an interesting conversation, not least because I think said person was a bit annoyed with me. Y'see, that person was a little bit baffled why I decided to make souls a thing that explicitly exist in my story universe, when I don't even marginally believe in them in the real world. They expressed that bafflement by calling me a traitor to the cause.

Naturally, this confused me somewhat, 'cos I didn't realise I even had a cause. Well... other than spinning the odd whimsy here and there, and trying to get people to read my books, of course, but being a writer, that's kinda my job description. Oh, and the word 'apologist' might have happened, as well...

It was an odd thing to be called, especially when I'd taken great pains to fit the idea of souls into the way I actually think about the universe (evidence trumps everything, so I was determined to have souls in my books be things that can be studied, analysed and measured; plus, it allowed me to explain away things like telepathy in the koetaani, and do a nicely twisted take-down of the idea of soulmates).

Anyway, here's what I think is the root of the problem: I honestly believe that some people have trouble separating reality from fiction. Y'see, I've seen an argument used before, which states that viewing or reading fictional thingummies at a young age, things like fairy tales, and fantasy, make it harder for people to be rational in later life. As reported by The Telegraph at the time, for instance, Richard Dawkins talked about the possibility that something like Harry Potter could have a bit of a pernicious effect on the development of a rational mind, what with the kid in question being taught to believe in wizards and magic.

Whether I agree with that or not (and for the record, I don't, based purely on my gut instinct and nothing else), it's one thing to say that kids' books could have that effect, but it's quite another to suggest that a science fiction novel emphatically aimed at adults would have the same effect.

If pushed, though, I'd probably have to admit that it'd probably have a stronger effect, since kids are smarter than adults...

Anyway, yes. Fiction. Reality. Very definitely not the same thing. Stop confusing the two, please. I've no intention of starting a religion based around my own books, so calm yerself down, eh? I mean, y'know, I do kinda specify in-universe that there's no actual deity or god in the world of the Cynos.

Well, not yet, anyway...

Y'know, I often wonder why people get so stroppy about people who happen to believe something different to what they themselves believe. I mean yes, there are some things that are so completely ludicrous that it boggles my mind when people are able to say them with a straight face, but if that's their belief system, and they're not forcing it on other people, who cares?

Yes, I completely understand the need to keep woo far, far away from things like science lessons and the military, and these are things we should never, ever stop fighting to achieve, but when you get down to a personal level, who gives a chuff which version of the almighty skybeard someone believes in? We're all just people, trying to make our way in the world, and if someone else believes in something I don't, then fair enough.

Now organised religion, though, that can jog on, as can any belief system that makes it okay to gleefully murder everyone else.

But that's a story for another book, quite possibly the one I'm writing now...

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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-80698653360978353082014-01-12T15:49:00.001+00:002014-01-13T00:58:54.057+00:00Verisimilitude (or, Building a convincing universe on the cheap)

Verisimilitude. That's a big word, ain't it? According to The Almighty Google, the exact meaning is 'the appearance of being true or real' (as in 'Piers Morgan tries for human, but lacks verisimilitude'), and when people talk about realism in books, or movies, or whatever, what they usually mean is verisimilitude. Take Jimmy McGovern's work, for instance; people often talk about his gritty realism, where 'gritty' basically means 'all life is misery and pain', but that has verisimilitude 'cos, in many ways, life is misery and pain.

But how do you achieve that same effect in science fiction, where you may very well be writing about people who aren't human? They might even be sentient five-limbed vampire squids, and when one has no frame of reference for what a sentient five-limbed vampire squid is like in the real world (because none of them return my calls, or even send me a postcard), how does one give them 'the appearance of being true or real'? Well, this is where the 'science' and the 'fiction' get down and dirty with each other...

The first step is research, although in fairness, you're not likely to find much concrete info online about sentient five-limbed vampire squids, other than on my website. What you will find, though, is lots of nice, juicy info about how evolution works; and once you've worked out what the squids' homeworld looks like, you can start to develop what they look like, based on how they might have evolved. Wallop in a good dollop of evolutionary psychology to flesh out their personalities, and the end result may well be a sentient five-limbed vampire squid that's ridiculously hard to kill, and thus, whose evolution gave them a general thrill-seeking outlook on life and a predilection to call everyone, male or female, 'dude' (which itself comes from the fact that each yowason is hermaphroditic; they're both male and female, and there's no sexual dimorphism going on, so to them, everyone is basically the same).

Those same principles go into designing, well, everything about the Cynos Union, from planets to technologies.

Take weapons tech, for example; I wanted something a bit different to the standard fare in science fiction, all lasers and plasma bolts and suchlike. So, I sat and thought about it for a minute, and realised that I'd given myself an answer already, when I said that the majority of the Cynos Union's technological advancements came about through precise control of gravity. Cue guns that launch projectiles using micro-sized, bi-directional gravity wells. Well, except in the case of the vossarulls, of course (who all use sonic weapons), and the yowason (who have squidly limbs that can't lift a gravity-actuated rifle).

Just don't ask how they generate those micro gravity wells. Verisimilitude only goes so far, and I'm not a quantum physicist (although my hair's getting increasingly Einstein-y as I get older)...

The thing is, y'see, that a lot of people think science fiction just goes wild, and abandons all the rules, but that is, in a very definite way, not true. It's especially not true in 'hard' sci-fi by the likes of the late, great Arthur C. Clarke, but it's still not true even in 'soft' sci-fi and space opera, like what I write.

It's just that the rules might be slightly (or very, very, very) different to the real world, in science fiction, but that doesn't mean there are no rules. That is where the idea of verisimilitude comes in, because when your universe runs on different rules to the real world, that ever-so-slightly knackers the idea of realism. Get the rules right, though, and you get something even better: a fantastical universe that feels real.

But why go to the trouble of building such a real-feeling universe? Well, there's the obvious answer, in that it makes the story better, but there's a little bit more to it than that; once you've got that universe, you can then hold it up to our own, ostensibly real universe to see what it tells us about, well, us.

That, though, is a story for another day...

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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-34976345164775026512014-01-08T14:03:00.000+00:002014-01-08T14:04:41.809+00:00The joys of storing an entire universe in my brain...

Ye gods, it's been a busy week, and no mistake! Not only did I have to tot up all the downloads from the freebie sale (and a massive, massive thank you to everyone who took part, and supported the Cynos Union), but I've only gone and published a new book (yep, The Abominable Moon is available to buy now), I've worked with the web designer to get the official site updated, and I've had random inspiration sleeting through my brain. Oh, and the cat was wanting some fuss (on his timescale, naturally, since he's a cat).

Anyway, that bit about random inspiration got me thinking about the mechanics of writing a big ol' saga like the Cynos Union. It's a bit of an odd sensation, storing an entire universe in my brain, but I tell you what; it's kinda fun, too...

Conversations with my own frontal lobe

It still makes me chuckle that in the beginning, when I first started writing Messiah's Shard, I never had anything even vaguely like the Cynos Union planned. But then, y'see, something happened, midway through writing it: my brain, quite unbidden, went, "Hang on, why don't you use this to set the stage for a whole galactic community like in Star Trek or Babylon 5? Come on, you know you want to, you love space opera, stop being a numpty, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, DO IT!"

Yes, I know, it's amazing how in-depth the conversations with my own brain can be...

The Grand Plan

And so, The Grand Plan was born. Messiah's Shard would herald the birth (or rebirth as it turned out, once I started to work out the backstory) of the Cynos Union. The canvas I would use for future novels would be created in that first book.

Round about then, another funny thing happened, when my brain (again, unbidden), went, "Here, hang on a minute, your first book's going to be the big, epic one, won't the rest of them seem like a bit of an anticlimax? You utter pillock, you!"

Hmm, in-depth and insulting. I sometimes think my brain might need a good slap, the cheeky little smegger. Mind you, it did have a point; Messiah's Shard was inspired by things like Stargate, and when you're chucking in lost civilisations and ancient evil from beyond the universe (not to mention defining the soul, and doing a really nasty twist on the idea of soulmates; I'm quite proud of that one, by the way), then 'epic' is going to happen, whether you want it to or not.

More than a canvas

Clearly it wasn't going to be enough to just think of the Cynos Union as a canvas. No, it had to be a story, a vast story spanning multiple books, and the key to it all was this: Messiah's Shard may have been the beginning of John Harley's story, but it didn't have to be the end. The central question was this: how could the seeds I planted in that first book play out into the future saga?

Well, now, it's time to let you in a little bit on The Grand Plan, and the important point can be summed up thusly: everything you're reading now (in Messiah's Shard, The Non-Random Dog and The Abominable Moon) will play into the larger story arc. You might not have worked out the connections just yet, but the larger story arc has begun.

As of Messiah's Shard, Ragnarok is no longer a threat, but the consequences of the Abyssal War have only just begun to play out. And the stakes in this larger story? Why, it's simple: the complete eradication of all reality.

Still, no pressure, eh?

Make yourself useful, brain

So, thank you, oh disruptive and insulting brain of mine, 'cos when you're right, you're right; doing it this way is so much more fun than writing a standalone novel or five. Of course, it does sometimes get a bit crowded in there, since I'm trying to store an entire universe in my brain (plus in Word documents and, oooooooh, many spreadsheets), but I wouldn't have it any other way.

The Cynos Union universe is ready; I reckon it's time to start royally putting it through the wringer...

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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-16217599470700316152013-12-28T14:22:00.000+00:002014-01-05T19:57:37.049+00:00The revenge of the not particularly heroic, nerdy wee fella

Earlier in the month, I did a post about how "strong female characters" bore the bits off me, and the same is true of "strong male characters". 'Tis a bit dull to see characters reduced to one buzzword, y'see, or at least in my opinion.

And I shall tell you what else bores me: heroes. Indomitable slabs of beef, who crush their enemies, and hear the lamentation of their women? Peerless warriors at the very peak of physical perfection? You can keep 'em!

I'll take the nerdy wee pleb over that, any day, because seriously, where's the "triumph over adversity" that we all love to see, when the hero in question is already written as being indomitably perfect (when it's a truth universally acknowledged, or in my head at least, that perfect people are, when you get right down to it, gits)?

I suppose, really, that I just love the idea of the average little lad and/or lass being the one who saves the universe, especially if it's clear that they want no part of such enterprise. They're not necessarily cowards, per se, it's just that there's heroes and soldiers and lots of other people trained in the arts of fightin' and cussin' and quaffin' and righteous murder, and they're much better at the whole universe-saving gig, so why not let them do it, because they'd be better at it anyway, right?

But then, that's the point, really. People like that are expected to be badasses. Being a badass is sort of their whole reason for existence, so it's not surprising when they actually, well, do it. I always find it far more satisfying when the average person (who usually wouldn't say boo to a goose) suddenly snaps, decides that enough is enough, and proceeds to take the bad guys to the cleaners.

It makes it that much more awesome.

All in all, that's why I love Rincewind (the "wizzard" who saves the world by, basically, running away from everything) from the Discworld novels, by the utterly peerless Terry Pratchett. It's why I love Swerve from the IDW Transformers comics, the little bot who just wants to run a bar, and who really can't shoot straight for the life of him.

That's what I was aiming for with John Harley, the main character in the first Cynos Union novel, Messiah's Shard. He'd be the first to admit that he's a pleb, that he's hopeless at driving a boat (or, as you may well find out in a future novel, piloting a shuttle), and that his fighting style is best described as "flail wildly at something till it goes away", although he does have an indomitable moral core, and the knowledge that some things are just wrong. Somehow, he has to become the one who'll save the entire universe and put those things right.

So yeah. Big, beefcake, perfect heroes? They can get stuffed. I'll take the crap one who overcomes their own essential crapness, to save the entirety of existence, thanks.

Incidentally, if you want to read about how John Harley overcomes his inherent crapness, to save the universe, then the first two Cynos Union books (Messiah's Shard and The Non-Random Dog) are are on sale, for FREE, till the end of the year. Go and grab 'em while they won't cost you anything!

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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-21003915671661964442013-12-23T21:45:00.001+00:002014-06-11T17:31:36.951+01:00On Which Planet? - A Cynos Union Christmas Storytime Special

(The following transcript is taken from a data recorder found floating in deep space just outside the Holligomistel system. Due to the nature of the recording, Holligomistel is off-limits until further notice - First Admiral Baraph Trighy, Cynos Security Fleet)

'Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except for what may or may not have been some kind of a weasel thing. Might have been a mouse, I'm not honestly sure. I never was much good at species classifications, to be honest. I find it easier to classify things as "furry, has antlers", or "slimy, eats flies, not a good idea to lick it".

Trust me, I speak from personal experience on that last one.

Anyway, you're not here to talk about taxonomy, are you? You probably want to know who I am, or maybe what I am, right? I mean you did come all this way to find me, so it seems only fair I give you the old autobiography, maybe even some of the juicy bits they leave out of the official story, eh?

Just to check, though, you're not recording this, are you? I happen to like my privacy, thank you very much, and I know what you humans are like for bugging anyone even vaguely famous. I don't want the paparazzi coming round here trying to take photos of me in my smalls is what I'm saying.

So, you're definitely not recording this, right? No? Good good! Then we can begin...

* * *

The truth of the matter is that I am far, far older than you can imagine although if I'm honest, even I can't really remember how old. I can remember running through the forests of Earth back when humanity was still fixated on scrawling antelopes and fertility goddesses all over every available surface. I'm still not entirely sure why they did that, though. I mean were the big women supposed to chase after the antelope or something? Although knowing you humans, it's probably about... goings on. It usually is.

Why have you gone all red?

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, the point is that I nudged a few antelopes their way, and all of a sudden, I was somehow worshipped as being a deliverer of glad tidings. I'm not quite sure how that happened, but humans back then were a superstitious lot, and no mistake!

Of course, the thing about being worshipped is that it tends to get one noticed by... well, I'm sure you can work who by. Big, shouty, tend to get all tetchy when they don't get their own way, and I don't need to tell you what happens when they get tetchy! Anyway, they came and found me, and they took me. Away from Earth! Away to the stars! I tell you this, though, human, I was shocked, because I knew those stars.

You see, it didn't feel like I was being taken away. No, it felt like I was being taken home. And when I saw them, I finally knew it. I finally knew it!

I was home, back with my own people!

It didn't last. According to them, I'd been "corrupted" by the primitives on Earth, or some such nonsense. They're very big on that. They have this grand plan, you see, and anyone who deviates from it is treated like... well, I won't elaborate, but believe me when I say it's not a pleasant tale. I'm sure you can find stories of it in your history books, if you know where to look.

Still, at least in my case, they only threw me in prison!

Well, I say that, but the truth is that there may have been some other things, too. My memory's a little hazy on the whole thing, really. Oh, I'm sure the memories are in there somewhere, I just don't relish the idea of going looking for them. One never knows what horrible repressed drives might come crashing out, and then I might end up like the rest of my people.

Anyway, the point is, I eventually broke out of there, like a proper lag! Snuck out while no-one was looking and had it away in one of their own shuttles! Ooh, I felt ever so naughty taking it but given the alternative... well, let's just say I didn't much like the alternative.

But where would I go? How could I get away from them? Well how about we have something to eat, and then I'll tell you the rest. Do you by any chance fancy a mince pie?

* * *

What? Oh yes, I know they're a bit meaty, but that's half the appeal. I'll have some loaded onto your ship before you leave, trust me, they're very moreish! Did you know that I invented the pie, by the way? I think I left the recipe in a really hot place down south, somewhere. Apparently that place is all sandy, now, and the locals got all obsessed with building pointy things, too.

Anyway, where was I?

Ah yes, the shuttle...

Well, I really only had one place left to go. I may have come from out there amongst the stars, and I may have once called my captors brothers, but my real home was Earth. Ooh, it hadn't half changed by the time I came back! I keep hearing all about the ghastly business with Ragnarok, and how the first human civilisation got wiped out, but I don't really remember that. I know I was around at the time, but I tended not to pay too much attention to it. The... my former brothers took me not long after humanity had been blasted back to the stone age, but when I came back around... well, I like to think of it as year zero. The funny thing is, some other fellows think of it as year zero as well. Something about Andy's Dominoes, or suchlike.

Still, I imagine my return must have been pretty spectacular, anyway. I came in a little bit hot, you see, so I must have looked like a falling star when I re-entered Earth's atmosphere. I think I landed in what you'd call the Middle East. I can't remember the name of the town I landed near, but I kept hearing about how they had a serious overcrowding problem. Nice people, though. Big on mangers, whatever one of those is.

Well, you'll never believe what I saw next! I only saw three fellows throwing gifts at a child! They were a bit baffling as well, if I'm honest. I mean I can understand giving a kid and his family some gold, to set them up with a bit of spare change, but the other two things? Two things that can best be described as "stinky stuff" and "embalming fluid"? What's a six year-old going to do with those?

Why are you looking at me like that? No, he wasn't a newborn, he was definitely six years old.

Anyway, look, the point is that those three wise old fellows inspired me! Giving gifts begets joy, so I wondered what Earth would be like if I could give gifts to everyone on it!

Of course, I needed a good strong image if I was going to build up brand awareness, and that is where the idea for the suit came from. Do you like it? I absolutely adore the white detailing on red, it's so jolly, don't you think? Heh, it always amuses me that my old name was The Deliverer, and here I am now, delivering things! Funny how things work out, isn't it?

Anyway, yes, I do the whole of the Cynos Union, now, not just Earth. It takes a lot more planning, and of course, getting the reindeer set up to breathe in space was a nightmare, but I think it was worth it. Sure, getting round an entire galaxy in one night is a lot harder than getting round a single planet, but that comes with the territory, I suppose. Besides, it does my heart good to see all those happy faces when they get a My Tiny Donkey action figure with realistic kung fu grip, or one of those newfangled robot toys, the ones that turn into other, slightly less valuable robot toys.

Well, the nice ones, anyway. The naughty ones, however, well, these mince pies don't make themselves.

I'm kidding, blimey, keep your hair on...

So yes, my friend, that's my tale, and now, you know the truth. It never fails to amuse, actually. People always say that I live at the North Pole. And yes, I do live at the North Pole, but the thing is that none of them ever go on to say the second part of that sentence.

On which planet?

Hehehohohohoho.

Sorry, what was that? The beard? Ah, well, it's a false one. Box clever, you see. I found it in a joke shop in... well, to be honest, I forget the name of the place. It could have been Swindon. Or Beijing. Hmm, maybe Cairo? Anyway, yes, it's a false beard.

Pardon? Show you what I look like without the beard? Well, I wouldn't normally, but... oh what the heck, it is Christmas, right? Here you go...

(At this point in the recording, the speaker's voice is muffled by the sound of running feet. His voice also appears to be getting further away from the data recorder.)

Hey, where are you going? Wait, please, was it something I said...?

(This data recorder was found floating in deep space alongside 75 individual pies which, when tested, proved to have no animal DNA or by-products in them whatsoever. Testers have stated that the pies are "a bit meaty", but that they'd "quite like another, please". There is no indication as to who is the owner of the data recorder, but under the circumstances, they probably do not want it back, anyway. Erasure of contents recommended, followed by giving it to an orphan somewhere. It is, after all, Christmas. - First Admiral Baraph Trighy, Cynos Security Fleet)

© 2013 Mark W. Bonnett

* * *

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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-67171777742373221662013-12-19T00:17:00.001+00:002013-12-19T00:18:33.923+00:00By embracing the dark side, we conquer the dark side

Ain't it always the first thing mentors and other authors say, whenever they're talking to fledgling writers? It's the same bit of advice that gets trotted out, and it goes like this: "Write what you know."

The thing is, though, that it's absolutely true. That's a large part of the reason why my first book, Messiah's Shard, starts off in a small village just up the road from Sheffield (plus, of course, I couldn't resist the idea of a big, epic science fiction novel being set just up the road from me; there's something ever so slightly awesome about that). The fictional village from which our hero hails, Brakenthorpe, is even based on a village where I spent a big chunk of time when I was a teen (school friends lived there, y'see), and another big chunk after I turned 18, although when we went on the swings after we'd ostensibly hit adulthood, we were considerably less sober.

The point is that anyone who lives in that real world village would find the fictional little hamlet of Brakenthorpe to be hauntingly familiar, because, well, write what you know. It doesn't end there, though...

The thing about me as a writer, y'see, is that I find writing to be a massively cathartic experience. In a way, it doesn't matter what ills are assailing the world, because I can deal with them by letting them inspire bits of my books. When bad things happen in the real world, it's kinda nice to have eerily similar bad things being thwarted by the good guys, in the fictional world.

The vengeance exacted for these bad things is always extraordinarily karmic, believe me...

Anyway, the thing that provoked me to write this post was something I saw while wandering aimlessly about the internet (as one does), and things might take a bit of a dark turn here; basically, I saw something on Facebook, and then had a quick exchange with someone not on Facebook, about the whole topic of capital punishment.

It's something I don't agree with, because there's always the possibility of a wrongful execution of someone innocent (far, far worse than wrongful imprisonment, because there's no coming back from it), but what really got me thinking was when the other person said to me, "Well, what would you do with evil people who are clearly guilty?"

The answer is, of course, that I'm a writer; I can think of far, far worse things to do to the "evil people", than merely executing them.

Extraordinary karmic vengeance, remember?

I've always felt that the key to what makes really powerful writing is an author who embraces their own dark side, and pours it into the work, along with their own light side.For me, at least, writing is a way to exorcise my own personal demons, or at least, smack them about with a very big stick till they stop being a pain in the bum.

Believe it or not, that was one of my goals with Messiah's Shard. I may have wanted it to play out across an epic canvas, but the core story was about loss and loneliness. About isolation and despair.

And, of course, about overcoming those things, about finding the strength to beat them.

They say that a writer should always write what he knows. I decided to try something a little different with Messiah's Shard. In amongst the ancient evil of Ragnarok, the lost Aztlani civilisation, the alien race whose sentient starship is clearly an 12,000 year old lush... in amongst all that, I wanted to write what everyone knows, the journey to self-realisation which every human undertakes.

Thus, while the tale may be writ large across the galactic canvas, the message of the story is simple: we can overcome. No matter the odds, the demons (of either the personal or the spiky, universe-hopping variety) can be beaten.

And by embracing our own dark sides, we can conquer them...

[Image: Google Maps]

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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-88741102328625922712013-12-13T19:44:00.003+00:002013-12-13T19:45:48.261+00:00Nail 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."

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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-82233282506343985012013-12-10T20:06:00.000+00:002013-12-13T19:46:45.766+00:00Musings 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 of 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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-61855971505316751852013-12-08T17:38:00.003+00:002013-12-12T05:06:58.070+00:00Creativity - 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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-62789606802384690612013-12-04T21:20:00.000+00:002013-12-04T21:30:01.157+00:00'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! Anonymoushttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-2322021126572307062.post-75562875362993199532013-10-21T19:51:00.003+01:002013-10-21T20:49:54.855+01:00Time 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! Anonymoushttp://firstname.lastname@example.com