Can Sci-Fi this Mashed Up Be This Good?

I once interviewed Ellen Kushner.¹ This was years ago, when I was in my early twenties, and she was at a conference on myth and storytelling in the modern world. The event was put on in celebration of Joseph Campbell, and I was just covering what looked like an interesting conclave of storytellers. I’ve misplaced my notes from the interview, and I can’t find a copy of the article I ended up producing, but one thing she told me has never left my mind.

A story doesn’t have to be wholly original, but it does need to be conscious of the elements its playing with, and be skilled at weaving them into something different.

I’m paraphrasing, from memory, but I think I’ve captured the spirit of her point. She used the metaphor of a pebble pushed down the river by the currents. In the beginning, it’s a jagged hunk of rock, dislodged from a mountain side. As it rolls along the river floor, constantly rushing across other stones, its hard edges fade. Slowly it becomes more curved than jagged. By the time it comes to rest downstream, it has the telltale polish and smooth, round edges of a pebble.

Story is like that, so sayeth Kushner. So sayeth Joseph Campbell and others, but I’ll attribute it to Kushner, because she was one of the most delightful people I’ve ever interviewed. She was making a larger point, that some of the greatest storytellers of our generation are often playing with very old material. What makes them good is an awareness of that fact, and a willingness to be part of that process of pushing the pebble downstream. I had cited Neil Gaiman in particular as an example of just such a storyteller, but there are plenty of others.

Another way of saying this: It’s all in the execution.

I’ve never really bought into the meme that to be truly great, one must be truly original. In film school, the primary focus of my studies was the art of film adaptation. I was very much a fan, and liked to point out to people how many films were adapted from something else. In truth, most films aren’t entirely original creations. They started out as a book, a play, a video game, or something else.

Every year, we are subjected again and again with this meme.² Those who criticize the raft of sequels, remakes, and adaptations and bemoan the death of originality in Hollywood can’t seem to help themselves. I will leave that particular argument for another day, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the lack of originality to this criticism. Also film is hardly the only medium guilty of the practice. There, I’m done.

But there is a rather exquisite example of what can go so deliciously right when somebody comes along and mashes up a bunch of other things into a new story. Mass Effect is a video game that has spawned two sequels (the third in the series will come out next spring), a few novels, some comic books, and excellent soundtracks. It blatantly weaves bits and pieces from Star Trek, Star Wars, Stargate, and a few other science-fiction universes into a single mythology.

It is good. It is really good. Mass Effect is so good, in fact, that it puts the lie to the notion that only original content can be great.

The sheer volume of material that has been developed is pretty surprising, given the size of the franchise. There’s no movie (yet) or TV series (please, pretty please) and the number of novelizations can be counted on a single hand. The comics are relatively light in length, as comics tend to be, and there aren’t yet enough of them to account for a sizable oeuvre. Nevertheless, Mass Effect has its own wiki with over 1,900 individual entries.

Most of this material is contained entirely within the two Mass Effect games, sprawling interactive narratives with stunning graphics and plenty of ways for the player to control the storyline. The actual gameplay is stunning enough³, but the story is what interests me most.

The premise of the story is as follows:

[Mass Effect] is set in the year 2183 CE, 35 years after humans discovered the ruins of an ancient spacefaring race called the Protheans on Mars. With the technology from these ruins, humanity learned the secrets of mass effect physics and element zero, unlocking faster-than-light travel. Humans also discovered the mass relay network that threaded the galaxy, permitting instantaneous passage across thousands of light-years. Humanity began its journey among the stars, encountering various alien races and establishing itself on the galactic stage. — Mass Effect Wiki

It’s as simple a science-fiction premise as you can get. A couple hundred years from now (give or take), humanity has learned how to travel between the stars. Alien races are found, looking remarkably humanoid. Sounds like Star Trek, though in its defense the premise for Star Trek wasn’t exactly high on the originality scale. There’s a sort of galactic capital and a loose federation of species that keeps the intergalactic peace. If that sounds like the Federation in Gene Roddenberry’s creation, well it isn’t terribly far off.⁴

In this universe, there’s also people called biotics. They have the ability to manipulate dark matter⁵, an innate skill that’s amplified by bio-mechanical implants. The result is an ability to do cool, superhero tricks. Think picking people up and forcing the to float across a room, right up until you decide to slam them into a wall. Think firing off massive electrical bolts that take out everyone in your path.

Yes, think Jedi force powers, a la Star Wars.

Then there’s the whole Protheans bit. Yes, we learned how to travel through the stars thanks to technology left behind in our solar system millenia ago by a now-extinct (we think) species of super-advanced aliens. They’ve developed these gates all over the galaxy that allow a ship to be flung at faster-than-light speeds from one star system to another.

Does that sound a little bit like Stargate to you?

Look, I could go on. Those are the big three influences I noticed right off the bat, but I’m willing to bet there’s more. There are also caveats, and I’ll own up to them. Yes, science-fiction is a genre riddled with copy-cats and overt influences, arguably more so than most other genres. And yes, I know the concepts in all three of the aforementioned franchises were not entirely original to them (see Lucas’ discussion of origins and influences on Star Wars in this Wired article), so it’s hard to say Mass Effect is aping them when they are aping something else.

Yet all those caveats don’t change the fundamental point. Mass Effect is a franchise built entirely out of the spare parts of science-fiction tropes that came before it. They’re tweaked, to be sure. In Stargate the Ancients (as clever a name as you can come up with for an ancient species that’s no longer around) built a network of gates on planets, connecting worlds to each other. In Mass Effect, the gates are in space and they’re designed to hurl starships from one solar system to another.

Even the characters are, as often as not, deeply inspired by existing work. Could you have the artificial intelligence on the ship in Mass Effect 2 without 2001: A Space Odyssey? Or without Kit in Knight Rider for that matter? Joker, the pilot of Mass Effect, has to have a little in common with other sci-fi pilots, no? His personality struck me as at least a little bit like Wash from Firefly.

Yet just as it could all have felt like a hack job, a ship built from scrap that barely stays afloat (or flat out sinks), Mass Effect isn’t like that at all. It’s a solid universe, rich with character and potential. Humanity at its most vulnerable, and simultaneously at its most ascendant, is not a bad place to set a story. Or dozens. And that’s just the human side of the ledger. The alien species are so rich, that whole novels could be written about them. Who doesn’t want to see a good story about the development of humans with biotic abilities that make them like superheroes? Who doesn’t want to read a novel about humanity’s first interstellar war with an alien species? This is the key to a good world: you want to go back and spend more time there.

This is in no way surprising to me, but then I was already a fan of the idea that good storytelling often involves recycling others’ material. Those who argue that originality is the key are the ones who need a good healthy dose of Bioware’s latest video game franchise.

They succeed, obviously, because their execution is sound. Take a look at the reams of background material they’ve included in the game, easily accessible via a menu of data files, and you’ll see just how much thought went into the development of the Mass Effect universe.

As for me, I’m just thankful the franchise has some ancillary media. Once Mass Effect 2 is fully in my rear-view mirror, I’ll at least have some novels and comic books to hold me over until Mass Effect 3 comes out. Cue my girlfriend rolling her eyes.