I’ve been doing a lot of writing for Star Wars projects recently. Or maybe I should say “a lot of Star Wars projects I’ve written for have been announced recently”–some of these have been in the pipeline longer than others. For those interested, let’s run down the list!

As previously mentioned, my novel Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company is scheduled to come out in November. It’s connected to the upcoming Star Wars: Battlefront video game, but it’s an original story and not a novelization. I’m told an excerpt may appear at the back of the upcoming novel Star Wars: Dark Disciple, though I haven’t seen it myself.

Star Wars: Uprising is a new free-to-play mobile action RPG from Kabam scheduled to be released sometime this fall. I helped develop the overall story with the project lead, Daniel Erickson (who I previously worked with on Star Wars: The Old Republic) and wrote the game’s script. Uprising takes place shortly after Return of the Jedi, but the trailer sets up the premise best:

Speaking of Star Wars: The Old Republic, its next expansion–entitled Knights of the Fallen Empire–arrives October 27th, bringing massive story changes to the setting. The first nine chapters of episodic story content will be released all at once, but I’m the writer for chapter ten, “Anarchy in Paradise” and one later chapter that will appear in 2016. While the larger storyline is in the capable hands of the BioWare Austin writing team, I’m grateful to BioWare for inviting me to play in a small section of the SWTOR sandbox once again.

For anyone interested in hearing me talk about my past Star Wars work and the art of writing in the franchise, I was interviewed for the ForceCast podcast a few weeks back by Justin Bolger. I very much enjoyed the experience and thought some interesting lines of discussion came up.

And that’s it! That’s all the Star Wars projects I’m involved with this fall and winter. All the secrets have been revealed.

(All those secrets, anyway.)

Hoping to get back to a semi-regular schedule upon my return. In the meantime, a few bits and pieces:

I’ll be attending New York Comic Con from October 10th through 13th. Not currently planning any signings or events, but feel free to say “hi” if you see me on the show floor or ping me via e-mail or Twitter if you’d like to meet up.

Game Update 2.4, “The Dread War” is coming out soon for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Quite a lot of the writing for the planet Oricon is my work–my first (though not last) work for BioWare as a freelancer instead of as an in-house employee. It’s short and focused (and leads into the update’s Operations), but I think fans of story-based content will enjoy it.

My third Dragon Age comic book miniseries, Dragon Age: Until We Sleep is out in a lovely hardcover edition. The trilogy is now complete and bookshelf-appropriate! My latest Star Wars comics (the two-issue miniseries Star Wars: Purge – The Tyrant’s Fist) have also been collected in Star Wars: Purge–a trade paperback that also includes stories by John Ostrander and Haden Blackman.

That’s it for now. Once again, forgive my sporadic posts, and I’ll try to get some new content up after NYCC!

Suicide Squad (John Ostrander and Kim Yale)

Cover images are courtesy of the Grand Comics Database, which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.

I expect many readers are familiar with John Ostrander from his work on Star Wars comic books such as Legacy, Dawn of the Jedi, and Agent of the Empire (to name just a few–and we’ll get back to two of those shortly). But while I’d never downplay the significance of his Star Wars work, I still think of him as the man behind The Specter (what can only be described as a theological horror superhero comic), GrimJack (multiversal noir) and Suicide Squad.

Suicide Squad ran for 66 issues (plus annuals and specials) in the late eighties and early nineties. Set in the DC Comics superhero universe, the comic tells the story of a secret department within the US intelligence community that uses imprisoned supervillains for black ops missions. In return for furthering American interests in Colombia, the USSR and occasional alternate dimensions, prisoners receive reduced sentences. The team is overseen by a small group of support personnel and less-than-squeaky-clean superheroes, along with Amanda Waller–“the Wall”–the non-superpowered, middle-aged, overweight woman who was tougher than the rest of the team combined and who spent half her time fighting bureaucrats and congressional investigations.

Suicide Squad remains the single best work of superpowered espionage I’ve encountered. Ostrander–and starting around issue twenty, his co-writer (and wife) Kim Yale–built a morally gray world where psychiatrists and prison wardens worked alongside chronically depressed commanders and superhuman sociopaths. While the squad’s mission objectives were usually respectable (rescuing political dissidents or stopping superpowered terrorists), the squad itself was a corrosive environment. Squad members died or dropped out on a regular basis, as many due to betrayals, psychological problems, and ethical qualms as enemy fire.

While the relationship between non-powered individuals and superhumans was never a focus of Suicide Squad, the book painted a picture of a world where gods roamed the Earth but someone still needed to do the dirty work. The Imperial Agent influence should be obvious.

Alas, the series is largely unavailable nowadays–approximately the first third of the series is available in collected editions and in digital format on Comixology, but I find the run from the mid-twenties to the mid-fifties to be the most consistent (it takes a while before Ostrander fully finds his footing, around the same time Yale is credited). Nonetheless, even the early issues are worth seeking out, and–if you’re not sold–many other bloggers have written extensively on the series as well (some spoilers in the previous links).

Now, as for Ostrander’s Star Wars work… both Legacy and Agent of the Empire have Imperial spies among their cast. While these books both began after SWTOR development was in progress, I find it personally pleasing to see Ostrander tapping into some of his old Suicide Squad tricks….

The Lensmen Series (E. E. Smith)

Covers courtesy OpenLibrary.org

E. E. “Doc” Smith is commonly regarded as the father of space opera as a genre, and his Lensmen series–mostly published in the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s, later collected in six novels–is the grandest of his space operas. It’s fair to say that without Lensmen, there would be no Star Wars–or at least Star Wars as we know it would be unrecognizable. It’s the story of a galactic civilization policed by a force of highly trained, morally upright telepathic guardians drawn from hundreds of different alien races (many of which have utterly inhuman thought processes, but nonetheless share a common virtue) and battling an evil empire wielding an increasingly mad series of superweapons. (The Death Star would fit somewhere in the midrange of Lensmen weaponry.)

In short, it’s a must-read for anyone writing Star Wars. It may be a greater influence on space opera than Lord of the Rings is on epic fantasy, which should say something.

But while I could write thousands of words on the influence (and general wonderfulness) of Lensmen, this article is supposed to be about Imperial Agent-inspiring science-fiction espionage, not Star Wars or space opera generally. Espionage is a relatively small but important part of the Lensmen stories–protagonist Kimball Kinnison frequently goes undercover to get close enough to the enemy for mind-reading, and while his psychic powers make these infiltrations unconventional, they’re no less delightful for it.

Military intelligence-gathering and its associated gadgets also play an important role in the Lensmen novels, and it’s fascinating to see what concepts would eventually be reflected in the real world (stealth vehicles rendered radar-invisible and painted black to avoid visual detection) and which ones wouldn’t (x-ray telescopes).

Not pure espionage by any means, but well worth tracking down for those with any interest in the history of space opera. I recommend starting with the third novel, Galactic Patrol, and skipping over any prologue or summary of the preceding books–Triplanetary and First Lensmen, while entertaining, were written after the rest of the series, and as prequels end up spoiling some later plot twists.

Modern readers may resist E. E. Smith’s admittedly rather bombastic style of prose, but his mastery of it is complete–he puts together some of the most readable and engaging purple prose imaginable. One of my favorite moments in the series is a section where Smith parodies his own work–Kinnison, using a cover identity as a science-fiction writer to keep a low profile, produces some truly terrible writing:

Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the afterbulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armor of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmex-like snout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship’s plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall…

Mercifully, that’s the only passage we see of Kinnison’s novel. But it’s always nice when authors have a sense of humor about their own excesses.

Use of Weapons (Iain M. Banks)

Cover courtesy OpenLibrary.org

From the origins of space opera to its modern incarnation: Iain M. Banks is the author of numerous novels set in the universe of “the Culture.” The Culture novels posit a galaxy with many of the familiar space opera tropes–hundreds of alien races, centuries-long wars, massive starships, etc.–but updates it with a layer of nanotechnology, transhumanist thought, and progressive politics (though whether one considers the Culture a utopia or dystopia is a matter of taste).

Use of Weapons is one of several Culture novels dealing heavily with “Special Circumstances”–essentially the Culture’s espionage agency. Special Circumstances agents frequently infiltrate alien societies in order to manipulate them to the Culture’s ends. Such agents often commit horrible crimes and suffer terrible psychological tolls in order to succeed at their missions–and those missions can be gruesome in themselves, if the Culture determines that an enemy civilization or race is essentially irredeemable.

Use of Weapons in particular and the Culture novels as a whole are an excellent example of space opera tropes used in the service of ground-level, human stories. In much of the series, whether planets or galaxies are at stake is largely irrelevant–what matters are the moral and psychological costs involved. (The incomprehensibility of galactic-level stakes for human minds, in fact, is a point that’s never directly addressed to my recollection, but certainly plays a role in characters’ decision-making processes.) For readers interested in dark science-fiction espionage stories set against the backdrop of a wondrous high-tech universe, Use of Weapons should serve nicely.

The Prisoner

Cover of Patrick McGoohan: Danger Man or Prisoner? courtesy OpenLibrary.org

I’ll happily argue that The Prisoner (starring and co-created by Patrick McGoohan) is one of the great television shows of all time. It’s certainly some of the best science-fiction ever done in the medium. The Prisoner ran for seventeen episodes beginning in 1967 and centers around a British spy who, after resigning from his job, is captured and imprisoned in the mysterious “Village”–an apparently “idyllic” isolated community. The Village is occupied by other former spies and persons with sensitive information, and the people who run the Village (whose allegiance is unclear) use every possible means to dehumanize and break their captives. Villagers are referred to by number, not name–we only know our protagonist as “Number Six.” The leader of the village frequently and inexplicably changes, but is always “Number Two.” No one knows the identity of Number One.

Most episodes of The Prisoner deal with the wardens attempting some new way of breaking Number Six (using methods ranging from trickery to psychotropic drugs) and encouraging him to conform to Village life; or, alternately, Number Six’s latest escape attempt. Sometimes both. Themes of control and rebellion are ever-present, and virtue and conscience are the province of individuals, never organizations.

The Prisoner’s sense of humor is worth noting as well. Sly and sardonic, some of the most entertaining exchanges are between McGoohan’s Number Six and Leo McKern’s Number Two:

For its overall themes and its bizarre assortment of hallucinogenic technologies, The Prisoner easily wins a place on this list. It’s available, in full, on Crackle.com and on Crackle’s YouTube channel (though curiously, some episodes appear to be mislabeled in the latter). I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Aeon Flux

Take the mind games of The Prisoner and put them to use in the service of interpersonal, rather than political themes, then filter the result through a violent, sexy science-fiction world that wouldn’t be out of place in a 2000 AD comic book. Aeon Flux was televised first as a series of animated shorts, then as full-length episodes on MTV during the early 1990s. (Ignore the later live-action film version.)

The eponymous heroine is an amoral anarchist (of sorts) working against (usually) an oppressive regime. While the show’s conceptual depth is considerable, the weird aesthetics and technology are well worth attention as well–Aeon is cloned and killed, meets angelic beings, and keeps insect eggs in her boots in case of emergency. Creator Peter Chung develops a bizarre, fascinating, and horrifying world with a unique science-fiction flavor.

Much of Aeon Flux is available at MTV’s Liquid Television site, and while certainly not to everyone’s taste, it’s worth a look. If episode descriptions and title cards such as “Trevor attempts to shoot a ray that will end human evolution” and “Aeon Flux and the Monican resistance have captured the Demiurge, a powerful god-like being, and prepare to send it into space to rid the Earth of its influence” don’t at least intrigue you (and if you’re willing to give the show a chance to prove that Aeon’s outfit isn’t entirely gratuitous), give a few episodes a try. In any order, really–it doesn’t actually matter.

That’s not actually true, of course. There were other writers who were interested and willing to take on the task. But as it happened, they were more interested in other classes while I was most interested in the odd duck of the lot–the one class that didn’t correspond in a neat, one-for-one fashion with a classic Star Wars archetype.

The talented Fanny Holmberg created this fantastic poster based on the Imperial agent story. She was kind enough to let me reproduce it here. Full-size version available through the link.

Which isn’t to say that the Imperial agent doesn’t fulfill a role in the Star Wars setting. The agent is the Imperial everyman, representing every background officer and ordinary citizen who supports his or her tyrannical nation. The agent is the person hoping he or she won’t be choked to death by Darth Vader for someone else’s mistake. Of course, “average citizen” or even “fleet officer” wouldn’t make a very playable class for a game like SWTOR; therefore, the Imperial agent serves as a combination of this concept with the rich (albeit background) espionage plotlines of Star Wars.

I won’t belabor this particular point, as I discussed it at length on the SWTOR website. Alas, the original article has been lost to redesigns, but is available via the Wayback Machine here–I encourage folks interested in how the agent relates to the larger Star Wars universe to take a look.

In any event, I wanted the agent for myself largely because of that lack of an obvious Star Wars predecessor archetype. It meant the class would appeal to fewer players, perhaps–but it also meant I had a freer hand in developing what the class meant. The Jedi Knight had to fight Sith and the Sith classes had to come into conflict with their masters–players were coming to the game looking for a recognizably Star Wars experience, and they’d be rightfully disappointed if at least some of their expectations weren’t met.

But with the agent, no one knew what to expect. Which meant we had plenty of opportunities… and plenty of rope to hang ourselves with.

(And I say “we” because, in the end, everything that went into SWTOR was a collaborative effort. In particular, much credit should go to Daniel Erickson–as Lead Writer from the start, he reviewed every plot summary and every line of dialogue. And if something wasn’t working, it didn’t make it past him.)

So we had our two halves, broadly defined by Star Wars without being all-encompassing. The Imperial half was, as mentioned, the Imperial everyman–with shades of Grand Moff Tarkin, the one non-Sith capable of “holding Vader’s leash” and an equal among the mightiest of the mighty. The espionage half was more ambiguous–we knew what spies in Star Wars did (steal superweapon plans, disguise themselves, snitch to stormtroopers), but not so much who they were.

The agent started out with a heavily James Bond flavor. Which makes sense, of course–Bond is the pop culture spy, and draws from the same over-the-top, pulp style of drama that Star Wars itself draws from. But Bond’s generally upbeat tone didn’t seem entirely right for a character doing dirty deeds for a morally abhorrent government. In the real world, international espionage tends toward moral ambiguity even for the most benevolent nation–portraying the Empire’s covert operations as a romp felt almost ghoulish.

We kept the agent cool, seductive, and laden with tech gimmicks–some of the spy traits most associated with Bond. We also took pages from more serious, “gritty” modern espionage works as well–24, the Jason Bourne films, Spooks, La Femme Nikita, etc. We looked to the real world Nazi SS and (perhaps even more so) the Soviet KGB.

(Fans of the Star Wars Expanded Universe will rightly point out that there have been a number of fleshed-out spies in Star Wars books and comics, too. This is true–and I’ll touch on those created by John Ostrander in my next post–but none, no matter how well-written they were, have penetrated the pop culture mainstream. Nor, I confess, am I as deeply familiar with the EU as some of my former colleagues–so I’m sure certain sources were left unplundered.)

I’m a strong believer in psychological realism–characters may perform unbelievable feats in mad circumstances, but they ought to react to those feats and the pain they endure in a relatable way. Which meant I wanted stories for the Imperial agent that took a toll; even in the best of cases, it seemed wrong that someone could work inside the guts of an evil empire and never be worn down or scarred. Living a life of lies, disguises, and treachery–for any cause, no matter how just–ought to change a person, and I wanted to to focus on that. An entirely light side agent would be possible, as would an entirely dark side one, but I wanted the story to challenge players who stayed true to ideals over pragmatism.

A fan put this trailer together during the game’s beta. I thought this seemed like a good excuse to post it.

But back to inspirations. The individual chapter storylines were designed to gently emulate different subgenres of spy fiction. Chapter one was the modern-day, gritty anti-terrorism story–24 or Bourne. Chapter two was a split between a Bond-style romp–big, flashy villains and mad science–wrapped in a psychological envelope in the style of The Prisoner and The Manchurian Candidate. Chapter three was the global conspiracy storyline–the sort seen in video games like Deus Ex and Metal Gear Solid. (That’s not to say the chapters were directly based on these particular works–rather, they’re examples of the larger subgenres the chapters fit into.)

Still, not every source we drew from for the Imperial agent was about modern day, “realistic” espionage. In my next post, I’ll run down some of the science-fiction spy fiction I took particular inspiration from.

But I’ve still got some items in the pipeline. Here’s a handy list of things that will be out shortly:

Star Wars: The Old Republic – Rise of the Hutt Cartel. There’s a little more detail on my involvement in this project on the Bibliography page, but suffice it to say I did a substantial amount of work on the first SWTOR expansion before I left BioWare. It’s out some time this spring, and I’m looking forward to it.

Dragon Age: Until We Sleep. The third Dragon Age comic book series by David Gaider and myself, sequel to The Silent Grove and Those Who Speak. It wraps up the trilogy starring Alistair, Varric, and Isabela. The first issue comes out in print and digital format on March 27th, and Dark Horse has a pre-order form you can take to your comic shop.

If you missed my two-issue comic miniseries Star Wars: Purge – The Tyrant’s Fist last month, Dark Horse Comics has just announced that it will be included in Star Wars: Purge, a trade paperback collection of my series and three one-shots written by John Ostrander and Haden Blackman. It’s scheduled to be out in July.

Also, if you want to meet and chat or discuss business, I’m going to be showing up two places in March:

I’ll be at Emerald City Comic Con, which runs March 1st through 3rd in Seattle, WA. I’ve never been before, and am very much looking forward to it. The plan is that I’ll be signing at the Dark Horse Comics booth first thing on Saturday, at 10 AM. If this changes, I’ll post here or on Twitter (and hey, feel free to poke me on Twitter if you want to catch me wandering around the convention–I’ll be in and out throughout the weekend, particularly on Friday).

Lastly, I’ll be at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco from March 25th to March 29th, catching up with my fellow games writers and learning a few things at the Narrative Summit. (Also, skipping out from time to time to play tourist.)

More updates as they come!