Towards A Supercute Future

Regular followers of the Inventory Full blog roll may recognize the name Martin Millar. I added his blog to the list a while back. He doesn't post often and when he does it's mostly just to let us all know he has a new book coming out, which is why I put the link there in the first place. I really want to know when Martin Millar has a new book coming out.

Martin Millar is an exemplar of something I've been pointing out to would-be authors for a quarter of a century or more. I tend to meet a lot of them, one way or another. As he explains in this short post, Millar's been a professional writer of fantasy and science fiction for thirty-five years and yet he's still, in his own words, "struggling". Despite much commerical and critical success over his long career, he is, as far as I can tell, without a publishing contract and back, once again, to publishing and publicizing his own work, a route to publication that is, thankfully, much more practical and productive than it used to be.

I first became aware of him and his work when I met him hawking copies of his comic around the bar at one of the UK Comic Arts Conventions I attended in the eighties and nineties. I didn't buy one of his comic books - I only wish I had. I can't even claim the meeting fixed his name in my mind but a year or two later, one of my friends who'd been sitting with me during the brief exchange in the UKCAC bar, gave me a copy of The Good Fairies of New York as a Christmas present.

I loved it. I went on to read just about everything else he'd written at the time and I've kept that up, on and off, ever since. I say "on and off" because for a long while I had no idea Millar also writes under another name - Martin Scott. 

As Scott he's written a dozen fantasy novels featuring the mercenary-turned-private-investigator, Thraxas. The series sold well, especially in the USA. It got off to a great start, with the first winning the World Fantasy Award. Despite commercial and critical success, after eight books his UK publisher had had enough and his American publisher fell out with Millar's agent over rights, leaving Millar to self-publish. Four more volumes have appeared since then, with more to come but you'd pretty much have to know about the series already to get your hands on one. You're unlikely to walk into a bookshop and find a copy.

Good though the Thraxas series is - and it's very good - Millar's best work has been published under his own name. I'd recommend pretty much anything with his name on, especially the aforementioned "Good Fairies of New York" and the absolutely wonderful Kalix the Werewolf trilogy but what I'm here to talk about today is his latest literary creation, the stunningly good Supercute Futures series.

I've just finished the second, Supercute Second Future, and it's possibly even better than the first. If I read a sharper, funnier, more thrilling extrapolation of the present into the near future this year I'll... well, I'll be delighted, obviously. But there won't be one. This is as good as it gets.

The future Supercute presents is one I find extraordinarily easy to accept. If you want to know what the future of gaming is going to look like, I think this is a good place to start. Also the future of the planet, although that's a far less appealing prospect.

Millar's vision of online gaming in the late 21st or early 22nd century (Dates are hazy.) shares some similarities with Tad Williams' Otherland, another convincing glimpse into our hobby's possible future, but where that series now seems dated, Supercute World feels like it's just about to happen. Millar completely sidesteps all the current vibey tripe about the crypto-driven metaverse (Words he never even mentions.) to jump straight into a scenario that seems far more likely - huge, intricate, AI-driven virtual universes that act as global social networks, while retaining all the functionality of massively multiple online role-playing games; vast, bright, busy, vibrant spaces that provide a refuge from reality for millions trapped in miserable conditions as the world falls apart.

All of which would be highly depressing if it wasn't for the characters and their incredibly upbeat, optimistic, can-do attitudes. From the creators of the ever-growing Supercute empire themselves, Mox and Mitsu, the world's self-acknowledged cutest super-geniuses, two lifelong friends now so bio-technically enhanced and adapted even the most sophisticated security systems can't recognize them since they ceased to register as either human or machine, to Supercute SuperSuperFan Amowie and her teen pals Raquel, Brigit and Meihui, collectively known as Keoma Bishojo, to WELCAT (An acronym for We Especially Love Clothes and Toys.) a quantum supercomputer who represents as a cat, to the irritable Dr. Ishikawa and her paramour, Supercute security chief Ben Castle, former enemies now allies of Mox and Mitsu, converted to their cause, if very much not to their cult of personality...

I could go on. And on. There are dozens of characters and every one of them crackles with individual charm or menace,
even though they may only get a line or two, like Ammo Baby, ferocious leader of the Ultra Waifs, one of Supercute Space Warriors' most famous player teams (Guilds, if you prefer.) 

If this all seems overwhelming then so it should. The books are a non-stop torrent of action, adventure and fashion advice. And yet, to any mmorpg player, much will feel familiar. Supercute Space Warriors, the crowning glory of Supercute's portfolio of games, offers a vast galaxy of adventure that's immediately recognizeable as an mmorpg. In it, Keoma Bishojo go on missions, earn experience, level up and engage in PvP. The Ultra Waifs raid there. The myriad NPCs, AI-controlled, behave in very much the way so many developers have told us they would like to achieve, with something that looks almost like and yet is not free will. Yet...

Underpinning all of this is a positively insane amount of world-building and a rock-solid adventure plot, all tied together by Millar's deceptively simple prose. He's as adept at action sequences as he is at nuanced characterisation and he's a master at building tension. Even though Mox and Mitsu are incomparably competent and always stronger, faster and smarter than anyone else, there's never a moment when you don't feel that this could be the time they over-reach. 

There's pretty much nothing about the Supercute Future series that I don't love, except that there are only two books in it so far and I've read them both. I only wish I was in the happy position I imagine most people reading this will be and still had that pleasure to come.

On the other hand, if the prospect of seeing the words "Super" and "Cute" collapsed together in myriad combinations like "Extra Super Always Happy Bundle", "Super Space Unicorn", "Supercute Super Colour Super Plastic Beads Set, Deluxe Edition", "Supercute 100 Different Kitten Earrings Funpack", over and over again to the point of madness doesn't appeal, or your heart doesn't race at the thought of yet another Super-Kitty Rampage overturning the Stonehenge Cuddly Super Set, sending Presenter Bear and Plumpy Panda scurrying for safety, maybe this is not the book for you, after all. 

It'll be your loss.