I’ve watched with great interest the wailing and gnashing of teeth over the ironically titled book, Mass Effect: Deception. The ten-peso version of the controversy is Del Ray Books published a series of novels set in the universe of the video game Mass Effect. A significant number of major release video games get novel treatment and Mass Effect is no different, with four books written under the title. The three previous books were each written by Bioware staff writer Drew Karpyshyn, but the task of writing the fourth and final book in the series, Mass Effect: Deception, was instead given to science fiction author William C. Dietz. But unlike Karpyshyn’s books, Dietz’ novel is full of inconsistencies with the established canon of the Mass Effect universe.
Normally this sort of controversy wouldn’t be worth noting. Science fiction accuracy debates – and adjoining nerd rage – are a tediously common occurrence on the Internet.
But this one is unique. The author’s errors – cataloged by fans here – are so fascinatingly bad. We’re talking queer erasure and ableism bad.
Gillian Grayson is the name of one of the main characters. (That’s her on the cover.) She’s autistic. Or, at least, she was as a 12-year-old in Mass Effect: Ascension. In Deception, she’s 18 (even though the book takes place three years later) and, turns out, her autism was apparently an adolescent phase she has “gotten over.”
Huh.
Hendel Mitra, another character in the novels, is the only homosexual character in the series. In Deception, Mitra is, for some reason, identified as heterosexual and promptly killed off.
The mistakes were so glaring that Bioware and Del Ray announced that another edition of the book would be released with “a number” of changes.
That’s the gist of what happened. But, as a writer, what interests me so much more is figuring out how this happened.
The company outsourced this project to Dietz in the first place because Karpyshyn was busy working here in Austin on Bioware’s new multiplayer RPG, Star Wars: The Old Republic. There was nothing remotely unusual about this move, as Dietz is no stranger to adaptation. He’s previously written tie-in novels to Star Wars, Halo, Hitman, Resistance, and Starcraft. This is what Dietz does. He churns out product. When asked about the negative reviews his book Halo: The Flood received, Dietz said:
“I haven’t read all of the reviews of Halo: The Flood – there’s so many! But of those that I have read, the negative ones often say something to the effect that the book is just like the game, so why read it? What those readers may not realize is that I was hired to novelize the game. That means taking the game and turning it into a book. Which is different from writing a completely new tie-in story like the books Mr. (Eric) Nylund wrote. Or, put another way, I did what I was hired to do.”
I’m reminded of the quote from Alec Baldwin on why he’s previously accepted roles for movies he knew were going to be terrible:
“I needed to make a living. People don’t realize actors are like plumbers. When you invite a plumber to your house and say, ‘I want you to put this sink in my bathroom,’ the plumber doesn’t say, ‘I’m not going to install that sink, it’s hideous. You have the worst taste in sinks!’ No, he just says, ‘OK,’ and he puts it in.”
You give William Dietz a setting and a basic plot-line and he can quickly bang you out a story containing all the requisite elements. Yet none of his previous adapted works contain anywhere approaching the number of errors found in Mass Effect: Deception.
I don’t know Dietz. I don’t know the specifics of how he adapts a work. But the debacle makes me suspect that his other tie-in novels were submitted back to their respective video game companies with the same level of inconsistency.
That’s not a problem. That’s where quality control comes in. The book is copy-edited but obviously not content-edited.
So what should have happened? As much as he may be getting roasted by fans, most of the blame doesn’t fall on Dietz. Mass Effect is Bioware’s license and it’s their responsibility to handle lore consistency. Dietz’ primary failure is rather with the basic narrative consistency that exists within the work itself.
As a science fiction author, he should have been able to handle the basic physics. I don’t expect you to know going in how the nervous system of a Krogan functions (incidentally, it functions in no way like Dietz describes in Deception). What I do expect is for you to understand that beryllium is highly toxic (IARC Group 1) and, ergo, makes for a poor hand-exchanged currency.
And maybe read the previous books in the series to figure out if one of your main characters is autistic. Pro-tip, there.
It’s fine that he’s not obsessed with the details of Mass Effect. He doesn’t need to be in order to write a good book. But he should have at least sent an advance reader copy to someone who is, such as a member of the Mass Effect Wiki community, and made the necessary changes – like, say, having the opening scene of the book take place on a planet humans could feasibly walk around on.
At this point, it should have been thoroughly reviewed by the creators of the original game. This clearly did not happen. At the time, game director Casey Hudson and the writing staff were in the thick of creating Mass Effect 3. Hudson claims via Twitter that he reviewed the book, but that review couldn’t have been very stringent.
William Dietz is an accomplished writer. He’s not new to this game, and he deserves credit for being a military sci-fi writer who was actually a member of a military (U.S. Navy medic).
But regardless of the circumstances or intentions, the result was he, Casey Hudson, Bioware, and EA putting their names on a book in which the series’ only gay character was made straight and a girl’s autism was just a phase she got over.
Quality control, folks. Works wonders.
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