Heavy metal is a masked ball where everyone pretends to be a lunatic. No matter how excessive KISS, Black Sabbath, and Slayer, they were always willing to unmask themselves at the end of the night and admit that it was an act.

It was only a matter of time before metal attracted a band of actual lunatics who didn’t realise or care that it was supposed to be an act . Mayhem was that band. Marking their career with dead bodies and burned churches instead of gold and platinum records, the sheer spectacle of Mayhem destroyed any serious mainstream interest their music might have had. Maybe that was their goal from the start. Either way, there was no mask or pretense with the music they played and the people they were, the ugliness started at the face and went straight to the bone.

Deathcrush, released in 1987, provides a bridge between the first wave of black metal and what would eventually become its second. It retains the sloppy punk tendencies of Venom and Discharge, but spikes it with antifreeze, creating something colder and more emotionless. The guitars are trebled to a fizz that sounds like hissing bacon. The drumming could be described as “spirited”, and not the good kind of spirits, either. The percussion section thrashes and pounds wildly like a demonically possessed horse trying to gallop on three broken legs. Somewhere in this mess there’s a bass guitar. Songwriting? What is this songwriting of which you speak?

Tracks kind of blur into each other, merging amoeba-like into a continual impression of darkness and coldness. It’s certainly violent and noisy. It’s also calculated and conniving. The EP opens with an avant garde percussion piece by experimental electronica producer Conrad Schnitzler – probably to give the EP art school pretentions. “(Weird) Manheim” is more experimentation, this time on a slightly out of tune piano.

The rest of the EP is a blur of frost-rimed crust punk. The title track is fast and unrelenting, “Chainsaw Gutsfuck” is even more so, and then you almost stop noticing when one track ends and the next begins. There’s a Venom cover stuck somewhere in this anthology of musical hoar frost, pulverised into something as brutal and faceless as all the others.

Despite the EP’s 17 minute length, you’ll eventually start searching for more substance, and you will not find it. The musicianship is basic. The riffs are all interchangeable. Maniac’s yelps and shrieks soon stop being terrifying and start verging on being nearly comical, like a cat trying to yodel.

Is a dark atmosphere enough to anchor an EP as a classic? In the minds of many people, yes. For the rest of us, it’s interesting to know that at Prince Prospero’s ball, the Red Death once walked in earnest – if perhaps only for a brief time.

In 1999, Ensemble Studios made a game that changed the world.

Trivially, every game changes the world. Even a game programmed and left unreleased in a military bunker changes the world, insofar as there is now less free energy to make more games. But Age of Empires II did more than accelerate the universe’s incoming heat death. It gave us cause to regret it.

You don’t hear much about real-time strategy any more. I experienced the history of the genre in reverse, starting from AoE2 and working backwards through all the classics. It was like being a gaming Benjamin Button. Everything just getting crappier and crappier. Starcraft only lets you select 12 units at a time. Total Annihilation has craptastic pathfinding. Age of Empires I has a 50 unit limit and no production queuing. Warcraft II only lets you select 9 units at a time. Command and Conquer has clunky controls and rat-fecal AI. Warcraft I only lets you select 4 units at a time. Dune II only lets you select ONE unit at a time. It felt like the joke where a Jewish kid asks for five dollars, and his dad goes “Four dollars? What the hell do you want three dollars for?”

Curiously, I don’t experience the reverse experience when I play games made after Age of Empires II. There’s no sense of “wow, this is much better”. I suspect Age of Empires II was about as good as the genre ever got.

The game’s tons of fun. It takes the first Age of Empires’ “Warcraft but now you can pretend to mum and dad you’re learning about history” hook and takes it into the middle ages. Can Frankish paladins overcome Persian war elephants? Are Mongolian cavalry archers a match for Turkish artillery? Will your prepubescent opponent question your sexual orientation and your mother’s virtue? Learn these answers and more.

As a new player, your first instinct will be to haul ass to the single-player mode. General surgeon’s warning: AoE2’s singleplayer is slow, boring, repetitive, and teaches you bad habits. Spent as little time there as possible.

Play multiplayer instead. This game’s multiplayer is great, and at a certain skill level, transcends great and becomes godlike. There’s so much artistry, so much finesse, the axle of a 1vs1 turning on such pivots as a forward tower losing 10hp to an attacking villager, or someone having a position that’s slightly downhill. The game’s surprisingly almost balanced between civilisations and unit types, and various fan mods and patches scratch the word “almost” away from that description. 1vs1s are like a fencing match, full of lightning-fast action and counteraction. 4vs4s change the dynamic to something huge and Game of Thrones-esque. It almost feels like a totally different game.

But let’s be honest, these games are dark triad simulators.

Age of Empires II puts you in control of many putative human lives, but not in a way where they emotionally effect you. They’re so far away on the screen that your brain just registers them as “game pieces”. There’s no “grieving widow” meter in this game. Everyone’s just kind of cannon fodder. How careful you are in sacrificing men depends entirely on how much food, gold, and wood you have to make new ones.

In Grand Theft Auto, human beings behave like human beings. Even a primitive game like Doom puts you up close and personal to the monsters, so you can see them react in pain. But real time strategy games seem like how a sociopath views the world. I know I lasted about a week on my first Age of Empires II forum before I stopped calling my soldiers “men” and started calling them “units” like everyone else.

Potentially disturbing insights into your psych aside, Age of Empires II is an aesthetically nice game. Starcraft and Total Annihilation are set in dismal hellscapes. Age of Empires II takes place in landscapes as pretty as a travel brochure. Everything has a nice heft and sense of scale – castles tower above the landscape, galleons seem appropriately big. The game is visceral enough to break through the sociopath filter every now and then, although not always intentionally. You can control sheep, and send them on long journeys across the map. Demonic possession? And slain bodies swiftly decay into skeletons – often while other soldiers are still fighting around them. Disturbing, as if everyone is caught in a time-lapse vortex.

These days I see a bored programmer going “who gives a fuck, nobody will care about that” and punching out for the day. But back then, these little flaws in the reality of the game were kind of creepy. They seemed like they must have been planned. That’s one of the things about being a kid. Everything seems planned.

I first played this game as a child, and although I commanded a kingdom, mentally I was probably more like those villagers, who trustingly obey orders even when you make them walk in circles, or into enemy fire. These guys don’t realise that sometimes the ship’s captain is an idiot, or that sometimes the ship has a broken rudder.

Anyway, what I’m saying is that this game is pretty good.

Here. Price currently nuked to 0.99 until the 24th.

Review copies could potentially be available for even less. Contact me if you’re interested.

Executive Summary

A disaster befalls the United States. It must never be repeated. And so, tomorrow’s light shines in a thousand million million eyes.

Invisible nanobot-based cameras now blanket the cities and the skies, recording data and transmitting it to the Pentagon. Every single event: recorded. Every single incident: captured. It’s the ultimate law enforcement tool, a security feed that spans coast to coast.

But something is going wrong.

The nanocams are transmitting bizarre scenes to the Pentagon – events that have never happened, images that seem to be from another world.

Are the recordings being doctored?

Or is something far more sinister afoot?

A powerful and malevolent intelligence is emerging from the ruins of America, and it might be too late to stop it. An intelligence analyst called Viktor Kertesz now stands at the threshold of a new chapter of human history…and zero has just become one.

…In More Detail

Vanadium Dark is a strange, ultra-violent science fiction/thriller/horror novel set in the near future. I wrote it as a Venn diagram intersection of two ideas.

Idea Uno: global surveillance, and the reality that most oppression to date has been done with crude, ineffective, and limited methods.

Nero did not have chartered jets, and blacked-out vans to help him apprehend Christians. Torquemada did not have electric fires to burn his victims. Hitler did not have genome testing that could immediately determine, through a tiny drop of blood or sliver of skin, whether someone was a Jew.

They killed millions. And they were amateurs.

We’ve already seen the NES and SNES of oppression. The Oculus Rift of oppression could be coming soon. What form will it take?

18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham predicted a new sort of prison, called a panopticon. A huge array of cells, arranged so that a single guard (via reflective lenses) can watch them all from a single control tower without the prisoners knowing that they’re being watched. The beauty of it is that even though huge numbers of prisoners are going unwatched (the guard only has two eyes in his head) they all must behave as if they’re being watched, as they cannot know whether the guard is looking into their cell at the moment.

The United States of Vanadium Dark is, essentially, a panopticon. The air is no longer just oxygen, helium, and nitrogen molecules – now it’s infested with nanoscopic cameras, connected to an immense security apparatus in the Pentagon. You are being watched. Your every move is now a performance. An anti-terrorism weapon, apparently. Sponsored by a relatively benign government.

Unfortunately, it works perfectly and the public loves it.

Idea Dos (MS-DOS?): computer intelligence.

Lots of people have written about the singularity – the point at which machine intelligence outstrips human intelligence. But the singularity is, by definition, something that cannot be written about, because it’s the point at which computer intelligence takes over, and you’re like a monkey writing about early human culture, or early humans writing about civilisation, or medieval peasants writing about the industrial revolution, or even people from 1850 writing about now. Nobody is very good at predicting the next rung on the ladder. We can only look down, not up.

Stories about the future, like stories about the past, are always distorted by the funhouse mirror of the present. In Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ he has Roman centurions wearing medieval plate armor. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, one of the characters makes note of a ticking clock. Likewise superintelligent computers in fiction always come off like high-tech versions of Clippy: kind of rote and overpredictable, or like Data from Star Trek, adding lots of zeros to figures, and having trouble understanding human emotions.

I wanted to make a superintelligent AI that’s just an unfettered force of chaos: completely out of control and unpredictable. Not much more than a cyclone that can talk.

My ideas are probably wrong. But I hope they reach the level of convincing lies.

My Brain Wants to Do Pattern Matching. What Can I Compare It To?

Please provide the individual serial number on your brain, so we can provide better feedback. Maybe JG Ballard, or HP Lovecraft. Maybe Michael Crichton, or Dean Koontz. Maybe Greg Egan, or Eliezer Yudkowsky. Maybe Paddington Bear. Two different people who read Vanadium Dark are reading two different books.

Who Wrote It?

Ben Sheffield, from Australia. There are a few Ben Sheffields from Australia, but we’re all the same. I have found that the best way to understand the world is to experience it from a few different bodies.

(Re)commendations obtained with racks, thumbscrews, comfy chairs, et cetera

“This is definitely a different and terrifying story that got under my skin and stuck with me.” – Kristen Gough

“The author keeps the story alive and moving along with believable characters and an interesting story-line.” – SarahC

“Ben Sheffield gives us a terrifying, nail biting story. This is one book I will never forget in a hurry!” – Chrissy