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I danced around the room like an imbecile when my story got into the original Machine of Death collection. I didn’t really know what it was doing there, next to all these awesome ideas, but I didn’t care. Until it came out. It’s flattering to be in such wonderful company, of course, but I can’t help wincing at the way EXPLODED painstakingly re-explains the concept, and details the creation of the machine as if you’ve never heard of such a thing. Explaining yourself clearly is the first thing you learn in games writing, but it totally backfired for me in this context. And I hadn’t thought about how heavy a collection of stories about people who know how they’ll die could be. EXPLODED has jokes, but it dwells on its deaths.
One of my favourites in the collection is TORN APART AND DEVOURED BY LIONS, because it’s such a breath of fresh air. It doesn’t explain the concept, and it doesn’t even really have a plot, but it’s so funny, breezy and fun that you don’t want it to end. The third demoralising thing I realised reading Machine of Death was that I suddenly had a much, much better idea for a story on this concept. The crux of so many stories comes down to that Can’t Beat The Machine rule, and I got thinking about what would happen if you started from that. If the characters in your story had all read this whole collection, and were intimately familiar with the weird ways fate would bend itself to make the machine’s predictions come true. And then you tried to write an action film.
That’s when Machine of Death 2 was announced, and it wasn’t a hard decision to enter. Writing EXPLODED was a quick and enormously fun process, a handful of evenings, something I’d do again without any hope of inclusion. So I wrote out the story idea I’d been kicking around, looked at it, and ditched it. The problem was that it was about heroes – soldiers, really, but soldiers about whom I could only ever say one of a few things:
These are the four worst story concepts ever. And they don’t exactly lend themselves to the light, breezy tone I wanted to steal from DEVOURED. The truth is, I don’t give a shit about fictional soldiers. I’ve watched them, been them, killed them more times than makes sense. I just liked the concept of how these guys would work in a Machine of Death world, how they would use that to their advantage, and wanted to write a story where things worked like that. Really, the only interesting thing I could ask about some Machine of Death-enhanced superheroes was “What would it be like to fight them?” It would fucking suck. It would be like fighting the player in a videogame, or the hero in a movie – the asshole all the bullets miss, for whom every twist of physics seems to land in his favour. What’s that like? Ask a supervillain. Actually, ask his henchmen. LAZARUS REACTOR FISSION SEQUENCE is about three henchpersons, the supervillain they work for, and the supersoldier superheroes who keep fucking up their shit. It got accepted into the Machine of Death 2 collection on my birthday, and I danced around the room like an imbecile.
More Machine of Death
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The stories from the Machine of Death collection are being gradually released as a free podcast, a sort of episodic audiobook. Mine just came out, read rather excellently by Christopher Joseph. Warning! Strong language from the first word. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Not totally sure why I don’t get a mention, I think that might be an oversight. The site makes it clear enough who wrote it so it’s no big deal. One of many reasons I declined to read my own story was that my narrator is American and I am not, so it’s great to hear it in its pseudo-native tongue. The flipside, of course, is that I’m not perfect at expressing the exact tone of voice characters are using, so inevitably there are parts that aren’t as I’d imagined them. I don’t mind that at all – my narrator is intentionally not me in some important ways, so it’s kind of nice to hear him say things the way I wouldn’t. It also makes me realise how much clearer I need to be about who’s speaking. Chris always gets it right, but without doing some kind of comedy accent for one of the characters, that’s not enough for the listener to always know. I think I’m meant to write scripts rather than prose, I don’t really care how non-dialogue information is communicated so long as it’s clear. Here’s the direct MP3 link if you want to download it, or the RSS link to subscribe. The book is now $12 from Amazon.com or £11 from Amazon.co.uk. You can also get it as an iBook for $5.99 or on the Kindle for £7.29. The whole thing is also free in PDF form, and the text of my story for it is online here.
More Machine of Death
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ihranator: Well any info is good info. Thanks.
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I was a little dubious about this one, solely because one character refers to the other as ‘kid’ – something I’m not yet sure people do in real life. But it’s one of the most interesting settings for a Machine of Death story – one of the few that has the courage to put the machine itself well into the background of the world, and tell a story that is affected by it, but not about it. It’s about two soliders, stranded on an island, who both know how they will die. One is STARVATION, the other is HOMICIDE. So the entire scenario is overcast by both men endlessly reconjecturing about how their personal prophecy could come true. That makes it very tense at times, particularly since my twist-happy brain likes to spend its downtime trying to pre-empt every eventuality. But I can honestly say the ending surprised me, and in a way that made me the story seem smarter than me. Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 from Amazon or Topatoco in the US, or in the UK for £11.50 with free shipping from The Book Depository. The whole thing is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here. | ||
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Mike McQuaid: In with a completely tangental point that one of the managers in my company calls the younger employees "kid".
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A lab assistant charged with one of the first machines of death refuses to test himself, while everyone around him succumbs. Pure pleasure to read – or in my case, listen to. It’s the longest story so far, but every time reader Kevin McShane (who sounds excitingly like Peter from Fringe) pauses for more than a second, you’re hoping it’s not going to end. The whole story is a log, that rapidly devolves into a journal, written in a friendly and clear-headed style. The watch-word of this collection has been ‘refreshing’, and what’s refreshing about Chernega’s protagonist is his almost complete lack of curiosity. He’s curious about other people’s predictions, but he’s one of the few characters in the book so far not even tempted by the prospect.
His diary charts the escalating public reaction to the machines, covering some of the same territory as my own, and I’m honoured they didn’t just scrap mine when they read this. ALMOND plays much more with the machine’s enjoyably sinister ambiguity – when it starts giving more than a few people GOVERNMENT, you know something interesting’s about to go down. Some predictions are clever enigmas that are unraveled during the story, others are unexplained and seemingly unexplainable, and others seem to be openly fucking with you. That’s important, because the tension the story builds hinges on the narrator inferring a personality to the machine – one that becomes increasingly infuriating to him. It has a punch, but doesn’t conform to the usual twist-story structure: the set up is almost immediately before the payoff, which prevents it from risking anticlimax. The voice, humour and escalating intrigue don’t need a giant question mark hanging over them to keep the story compelling throughout. Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here. | ||
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Pentadact: I reviewed Lair of the Shadow Broker: http://www.pcgamer.c... ...er-review/
It's alright. Other people reviewed the others in PCG, haven't played them myself. So far they're really struggling to come up with something I want to play - Shadow Broker was the right concept, but it was pretty humdrum as ME2 quests go. | ||||
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An insurance salesman’s prediction turns his life around. Refreshingly unmopey, nonjudgmental and un-non-funny. This is an exploration of the positive impact a prediction could have: not by implying a long and happy life, but by implying a death so exotic you have to assume things are going to get more interesting from here. That’s really all there is to it, but it’s witty, fun, breezy and explores its concept with an infectious curiosity. The author is clearly a funny guy with a great writing voice, and he lets a little of it seep into every character. In a short story, that doesn’t hurt. Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here. | ||
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Quellan: This was probably my favourite story in the book.
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You’re a doctor, and six unconscious patients come in with a mysterious condition. Their Machine of Death predictions all read: TESTS. What do you do? A great story, and a great premise. All the stories hinge on the machine in some way, but it’s the sign of a great one when it feels like it’d be worth making up the machine just to tell it. It’s also cool to have a story that’s serious and urgent, rather than chin-strokey. From 800 submissions that must have been tediously similar at times, you can see why a medical drama would stand out to Malki and co. If I had to criticise, I’d say the thing with the security guard, which I won’t spoil, felt jammed in for character development. Not enough room in a short story to make it feel natural. And like any story that ends on a question, it’d be better if it didn’t. Neither bothered me much, and I’m expecting this to remain one of my favourites. Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here. | ||
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Kit Y: Loved this story. Wonderfully done.
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The second story in the collection to take its title from a confectionary-related death that turns out to be irrelevant to the main characters. And like Flaming Marshmallow, that put me off it for a while. Fudge is not quite a twist story, but the whole thing does lead up to a prediction, and the nature of the prediction is what gives it its punch. It doesn’t count as a twist because we don’t really find out what it means, only how it affects the protagonist. And then, Fudge ends. That’s the other thing you can do with a short story – end on a note that is not so much “Oh my God what the fuck barbecue” as “Hmmm.” It’s good, and well-read by author Kit Yona in the podcast version, but personally I quite like to be all “Oh my God what the fuck barbecue.” Machine of Death: a book that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here. | ||
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Jaz: @Kit: Should have called it "Nut-punch".
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The book I’m reading just got putdownable, so I’ve finally dug into Machine of Death. I’d also been following the podcast, trying each entry to see if I like the reader’s voice, and saving it to read in the book if I don’t. What? That’s not weird. I’m overly fussy about reading voices. My plan is to review every story in the book except my own. We’ve had lots of lovely reviews, but in a normal review you don’t analyse every story – most don’t even mention standouts. But short story collections are diverse, if they’re good, and for all I know ours is both. I don’t know any of the other authors personally, except for brief e-mail exchanges about the book, so it’s not hard to be objective. I will be more polite than I am in game reviews, though, since I can’t claim to be well-read or good at analysing literature.
A school girl frets about what social clique her prediction will put her in. I have to admit I avoided this story at first, because the title made me think “Sigh, comedy death.” It’s not a comedy, and that prediction has almost nothing to do with it. Instead, it’s an incredibly focused picture of what feels like a very thoroughly imagined version of the Machine of Death world, set long after any initial shock or uncertainty about the use of the machine. Everyone’s so settled into it that schoolkids define their hang-out groups and social status by their predicted deaths; violent ones the coolest. Something rings very true about the ease with which kids accept the morbidity of death predictions, and get more excited about the possibilities than bogged down by the fatalism. The story’s payload, to me at least, is a situation where a girl is desperately hoping for the stickiest possible end, while her father longs for something dull and distant. She does get her prediction, but the only failing of Marshmallow is that it isn’t immediately clear what it means. That ambiguity’s a useful tool in other stories, but here I’m just not totally sure if the words are referring to something I’m not familiar with. The characters understand it, and we understand it through them, but the scene could have had more punch if it was something we could immediately grasp the implications of, to both parties. This feels like one of the most convincing worlds, though, and the voice of the narrator is authentically young and fun. Machine of Death: a thing that appears to be good so far. It’s now $18 whether you buy it from Amazon or Topatoco, and I think Topatoco have faster international shipping. The whole book is free in PDF form, and is trickling out steadily as an audiobook in podcast form. My story for it is online here. | ||
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Helvetica: Don't forget to mention the art. The pre-story art did influence some of the mood and feeling I had whilst reading the subsequent story.
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Don't Make Me Play Football Manager
Invincibles
Team Fortress 2 Weapon Ideas
SWAT 4: The Movie
Exploded
A Life In Questions
Impression Of A Buddy
Oh My God What The Fuck Barbecue
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GUESS WHAT? Teenagers angst!
and
SURPRISE! The past (or what I skimmed of it from an encyclopedia) sucked!
I mean, at least the first one sometimes leads to a trio of ski patrol brothers fighting dinosaurs in Antarctica while two of them are snow blind.