Way back in the day, the original Mass Effect was my favorite video game. I played it more than a dozen times before Mass Effect 2 came out, eager to immerse myself in BioWare’s slick new space opera and its cosmic mysteries. I was pretty young back then in 2007, still a college kid who wasn’t old enough to legally drink alcohol, and a longtime Star Wars nerd dealing with how much I hated the prequel movies. Mass Effect hit the spot.
Cut to a couple decades later. I’ve just finished reading a series of novels, dubbed the Revelation Space series after the first book, by Welsh author Alastair Reynolds. In the early Aughts, Reynolds released a trilogy of these books along with a standalone side novel, a prequel novel, a pair of novellas, and a bunch of short stories. All of these works were set in his own original and extremely weird science-fiction universe that seems to have been extraordinarily influential on the games industry. Having now read them, it’s difficult not to see the way that some of Reynolds’ best and strangest ideas made their way into all sorts of games–Stellaris, Destiny, Dead Space, Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect are some that immediately spring to mind.
I myself finally got around to reading these books because they are commonly accepted as inspiration for Mass Effect’s Reapers. In Mass Effect, the Reapers are a race of ancient machines who periodically pop up to wipe out any galactic civilization that may have risen up. In Revelation Space, published in 2000, we instead have the Inhibitors, a race of ancient machines who periodically pop up to wipe out any galactic civilization that may have risen up. While sci-fi writers have always loved their ancient space civilizations, these are too specifically similar to ignore.
While Revelation Space’s influence on Mass Effect is fairly obvious, I’m not accusing BioWare of plagiarism–like all stories, Mass Effect is a pastiche of a lot of things that came before. It’s got as much Star Wars, Babylon 5, and Starship Troopers in its DNA as it does Revelation Space, and Mass Effect is not truly hard sci-fi the way that Revelation Space is. BioWare may have borrowed some concepts from Revelation Space, but it took them all in very different directions. And none of those other directions, in this writer’s humble opinion, can hold a candle to Reynolds’s vision.
Revelation Space, as a series, tells the future history of human expansion into the depths of outer space and some of the super bizarre things they find as they go. Thanks to Reynolds’s background as an astrophysicist, Revelation Space is a work of “hard” sci-fi that delves deeply into the mechanics of how everything works, even when Reynolds is trying to describe impossible things. That penchant results in an unusual storytelling structure that may not be satisfying in all the usual ways–but it’s more a matter of defying convention than it is one of competence.
Revelation Space is a sprawling series, but the heart of it is a 400-year saga that kicks off in the 26th century at an archaeological dig on a remote planet called Resurgam. The dig concerns an alien race called the Amarantin, who were rendered extinct a million years before, just as they began expanding into space. As we learn a little bit later in the book, the Amarantin were the victims of the Inhibitors, machines that emerge and destroy any civilization advanced enough to leave their home solar system and accidentally trigger any of the signaling devices that the Inhibitors had left all over the galaxy. And while humanity had managed to expand throughout a 20-light year bubble around Earth without yet triggering the Inhibitors, that streak of luck is coming to an end.
But with Revelation Space’s hard sci-fi bent, this conflict is a very long one. One of the key pillars of this universe is that faster-than-light travel isn’t possible–those who have tried, in a fun little twist, tend to accidentally delete themselves from history during their attempts. Without any FTL ability, travel between solar systems takes a really long time (like years or decades), and so there’s no hopping around all over the universe like it’s no big deal.
Along the way, we dive very deeply into a ton of spectacularly bizarre concepts. We’ve got alien entities like the Shrouders (beings who live in restructured and compressed regions of spacetime) and the Pattern Jugglers (apparently sentient ocean bacteria that do all sorts of weird and exciting and scary stuff to a human consciousness). We’ve got the human Conjoiners, who have computers in their heads that allow them a semblance of a hive mind, and who have been communing with future versions of themselves in order to be better prepared for the inevitable arrival of the Inhibitors. There’s also a lot of fun cyberpunk concepts within the novels, including conversations about AI, digital consciousness, and all manners of body modifications. And I’d be remiss to not mention the neutron star that houses an alien computer from the beginning of time that a person can only access by having their body physically destroyed.
It’s fair to say that Reynolds did not quite have the storytelling chops to pull off everything he wanted to do with these books–Revelation Space is absurdly ambitious for a first novel. The most common complaint about those early books in particular is their rushed climaxes, but that issue stems, I believe, from Reynolds’ intense commitment to thinking everything all the way through. When he’s in that mode, natural stopping points simply do not arise because one thing always leads to something else. So his endings are often abrupt and overly neat. But the journey to those endings is always so f**king strange and mind-opening that I can forgive those missteps.
It’s that particular aspect of the Revelation Space universe that, nearly two decades later, is helping me process some residual subconscious frustrations I’ve long had about the Mass Effect trilogy but didn’t know how to articulate. I always felt that Mass Effect 2 was the trilogy’s weak link–it has a lot of cool individual stories, but they don’t add up to anything. Cerberus and the Illusive Man are completely inscrutable and make little sense, the human Reaper is a big wet fart, and you spend the entire game doing side quests that are largely unrelated to the main plot or each other. I understood what parts of that game frustrated me, but I didn’t really get the why of it.
After reading these novels, though, I’m somehow mad about that human Reaper all over again, because now I have a better grasp of what it represents about how the powers-that-be at BioWare chose to tell Mass Effect’s story. The premise with the Reapers is that when they wipe out a civilization, they “harvest” the people by breaking them down and uploading their matter to a new Reaper. Mass Effect 2 really doesn’t want you to think too hard about this–it presents this process as simply a horror that needs to be stopped by any means. So you shoot the human Reaper until it’s dead, and then are presented with a choice of what to do with the corpse that never matters in any way.
But the human Reaper would have actually been a really interesting idea if BioWare had followed through with its original idea, which was that the Reapers were actually uploading those people wholesale into a digital construct of some kind–collecting civilizations, more or less intact, and storing them in Reaper form. Mechanically, it’s basically the same concept as the neutron star supercomputer from Revelation Space that I mentioned above, but applied in a very different way.
But Mass Effect never had time for ideas that complex, and the whole concept was gutted. But imagine how much different the ending of Mass Effect 2, not to mention the entirety of the third game, would have been had BioWare been willing to go all the way on just this one concept. It would have fundamentally altered how we dealt with the human Reaper, it probably would have led to some actual understanding about what the Illusive Man and Cerberus are doing, and the entire fight against the rest of the Reapers in Mass Effect 3 would have had a different tenor.
That, to me, is the real tragedy of Mass Effect, looking back through this new lens. BioWare seems to have borrowed many concepts from Revelation Space, but very little of it is explored with any depth, and none of the ideas are given new twists that improve upon them. The human Reaper could have been one such improvement, giving the Reapers actual character and giving the player an actual reason to consider allowing the Reapers to keep existing at the end of Mass Effect 3.
But since Mass Effect avoided most of the extra weird stuff, the ending of Mass Effect 3 never really had a chance to be good. The choices presented by the Catalyst at the climax of the trilogy are very big and impactful ones that we are simply unable to process because the groundwork was never laid for them. It didn’t matter how much extra exposition they added with the extended cut ending–since BioWare had simplified the rest of the story for the lowest common denominator for three straight games, any ending with actual big ideas was always doomed to feel like some goofy nonsense that came out of left field. Because that’s exactly what it was.
Fortunately, at least some corners of the games industry have matured greatly in the decade since Mass Effect 3 came out. Cyberpunk 2077 is a blockbuster title that goes hard on all the fantastical cyberpunk stuff that Mass Effect dodged, and nowadays I feel about that game the same way I did about Mass Effect in 2007. Cyberpunk 2077 and Revelation Space actually have a lot of commonalities in that regard, since Reynolds’s books are chock full of cyberpunk weirdness–and 2077 actually explores those ideas with comparable depth. So that game serves as an excellent primer for Revelation Space, oddly enough.
But whether you’re an old Mass Effect fan who wants a deeper and more interesting version of that story, or a Cyberpunk 2077 fan who’s looking to get even weirder, Revelation Space will hit spots in your brain that you didn’t even know were there. These books and stories are beautifully bizarre, and must-reads for any sci-fi nerd.
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