Andre Czausov

It's about Elite of course – rocketships, laser fire, gung-ho combat flight... in other words, a space opera. As such, I want to imbue it with a breathless action quality, and a fair amount of intrigue. But that's not enough... so there is more. It's also a look at life from an inter-generational perspective. The story will be driven by two central characters – mortal enemies in fact – forced by destiny into each other's company but who each view the universe from a very different perspective – age and youth. Being Elite, aliens will of course feature in the story... but it could be said that the most extreme alien-ness you will encounter are the mutually exclusive perspectives of the central characters – that is, alien to one another! The old man versus the young apprentice: a classic tension-filled motif. Both believe themselves to hold all the answers. The old man has seen more, done more, been deceived more, and has more financially. His experience is his strength, yet sometimes also his limitation. His physical strength is gone, and cannot be drawn on in emergencies. The young man, all cockiness and energy, discounts experience as an asset and has an unshakeable belief in his own street smart sensibility and capacity to respond with strength, speed and good judgement. If they can work together without killing each other, the two represent a formidable team. I do not aim to favour one over the other: from my forty-plus vantage point I understand and identify with both the young tearaway and the old geezer equally.

This tension between the old and the new echos the history of Elite:Dangerous and its players. While we all hope there will be many gobsmacked teenagers trading credits and flying Sidewinders around the galaxy, it is clear that a huge demographic for the new game will be people (like myself) who played the original and who now, a generation later, are encountering middle age. The game technology itself is the product of a generational tension: crude wireframe graphics versus the textured cinematic wonderstuff of today.

Much of the story cannot (and should not) be revealed at this point, because as yet no significant details about the “new” Elite universe have been revealed by Frontier Developments. There will likely be canonical changes, and I intend to make the most of them as they come to light to amp the story and hook into the new game world as deeply as possible for the benefit of the reader.

My story begins with the original, quintessential Elite player-character, Commander Jameson. At 59, even given the medical advances of his era is no longer the action man of his youth. A gun pilot, he served with honour in the Thargoid Wars and suffered personal damage as a result. Following the war he succeeded financially – first as a trader plying the Lave-Riedquat corridor and later as a more gravity-bound businessman. Cashing out eventually, he exiled himself and his alien-hybrid partner to the serene tropical waters of the small backwater planetoid Lwxana, a moon of the gas giant Diioru. There, on the shores of the Quiig Archipelago, he built the two of them a handsome estate and settled down to a little extended play luxury. Along the way his partner was killed in a freak accident, which affected him greatly and he remains paranoid and destabilised to this day. At the opening of the book his thoughts are dark and growing darker, he spends more and more time dwelling on the unpleasantries of the war, of his sacrifices and the ultimate vacuity of his chosen lifestyle.

The peace of remote Lwxana is broken by Xarak 'Nailgunner' Jones, an apprentice crook and bounty hunter. His taste for reckless destruction and his obsessive accuracy are rather advanced for his tender 19 years of age. His childhood and family origin are unknown, and he is loathe to speak about his background at all. Not that he is big on conversation: should you ever be in a situation where the two of you might converse, most likely he will already have been paid to kill or collect you, and simply let his automatic weapons do the talking. Loudly. He has made a successful career so far, freed himself from a damaging MDK habit, and has survived long enough to earn a pilot rating of Deadly. Bringing in Jameson will take his career to the next level.

These two characters anchor the story, but a wide array of personalities will be encountered along the way, many created by project backers.

That would be telling. Broadly though, the story kicks off with hunter (Jones) in pursuit of his somewhat weary yet unstable quarry (Jameson), who manages to escape early in the tale. As a chase unfolds, a terrorist strike on Lwxana throws the local system into chaos. In the mayhem, hunter and prey find themselves forced by fate to coexist, and at the same time stumble upon a galaxy-wide conspiracy which leads to a kind of road trip though witch-space, across many worlds and meeting many odd characters.

Conflict, love, alienness, the meaning of life, the majesty of the Cosmos, interdependence of all things, terrorism, loneliness, ennui, self-awareness, mateship, and how to make an easy credit on the Silk Road of Lave-Xexedi.

What's the deal with the Premium Edition? Illustrated?

Yes, select events from the narrative will be the subject of six (6) full colour full-page illustrations created by the author (who is also an aspiring environmental artist), all to be included in the Premium PDF edition of the book. I will use a combination of photo-montage and manual drawing/painting techniques to create each piece. They will feature characters and action scenes as well as more static environmental (ie landscape) subjects.

Above: some of my previous illustration work

Further illustration work will appear as special Bonus Content, in the form of ship technical specs (ie schematic blueprint-type graphics) describing the ships as flown by the two main protagonists, and as feature graphics in the mock magazine Void. A detailed high resolution promotional poster will also be created, in the same style as the Premium edition illustrations. 

Certainly – probably overqualified, being a Literary Studies and Journalism double major at university, as well as a lifelong fan of Elite, dating back to 1985. I remember the thrill of the hypserspace jump, the trauma of docking, plus the zen experience of pushing my imagination past the crude hidden-line-removal vector graphics to create a real game world. True, I have not published any work before – this will be effectively my debut novel – but I have had ample experience in creative writing, and have successfully completed the NaNoWriMo challenge before: creating a draft novel of fifty thousand words. I aim to bring the exciting new environment of Elite:Dangerous to life on the page, and make it as immersive as my narrative skills can make it. Below you will find a passage from “Victory Blues”, a novel I drafted in 2005 which may serve as an example of my style.

Prose writing sample from 'Victory Blues', an earlier piece of mine in a similar genre (unpublished)...

Jan 2014 :

Feb 2014 : Final proof of book released as PDF