Peter Watts On ‘Blindsight’, ‘Armored Core’ And Working With Neill Blomkamp
The writer and novelist Peter Watts.Do-Ming Lum/Tiger Mountain Creative Services
Back when Secret Level was released, I really enjoyed the Armored Core episode, only to find out the story had been written by Peter Watts, so I caught up with him to find out more.
Peter is also one of my favorite authors. His novel Blindsight is a remarkably imaginative and thoughtful book, if also utterly terrifying.
So to have Peter tackle Armored Core, a series of mecha games I have been dutifully playing for 28 years, was a rare and wonderful treat.
However, before we get to all that, I wanted to know more about how Peter became a writer in the first place.
“I was born in Calgary, the heart of the Albertan Bible-Belt. Escaped to Ontario with my parents when I was thirteen. As it turned out, Ontario wasn’t much better.
“The things I enjoyed doing. Reading (voraciously; even back then, it was mainly science fiction and marine biology for kids). Writing. Designing pedal-powered submarines with canvas hulls, and underwater habitats made out of plywood and inverted garbage cans anchored to the bottom of Gull Lake. Surprisingly, none of these surpassing technological feats ever made it past the design stage.
“I once dug a secret underground hideout in our backyard that worked really well until my parents decided to put a compost heap in the same spot. Dad nearly broke his leg when he stamped his foot down on the shovel and broke through the planks under the dirt I’d thrown on top. (In hindsight, the fact that I was even able to build an underground hideout without my parents knowing about it says something about the degree of independence granted to kids back then. Or maybe it just says something about my ancestors’ parenting skills.)
“Oh, and trying to avoid getting beaten up at recess. I really enjoyed doing that. I did it a lot.
“As for getting into writing, I was maybe seven or eight. It was a Sunday. CBC Radio was playing the soundtrack album for Walt Disney’s adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Those old Disney soundtracks weren’t just music cuts; they were basically audio plays of the movie, replete with narration, sound effects, and movie dialog. It was the whole story.
“I was entranced. After it was finished, I wrote down everything I could remember on a couple of pieces of foolscap and showed my dad “this story I wrote”. Astonishingly, he didn’t call me out for my obvious plagiarism. He just suggested ways I might improve the next draft ("They abandoned ship too quickly. Maybe have them fight harder to save the Nautilus.") And I thought, Hey, I got away with it. That was easy. I bet I could keep on getting away with it.
“From that point on, I wrote stories like I was chasing the dragon. Stories about radiation-burned mutants, Octopus-Human Hybrid Fetuses That Would Not Die, and captive Loch Ness Monsters as tourist attractions being treated so abominably that the only person who actually cared about them ended up blowing their heads off with a shotgun to save them from further suffering. I was a better writer than other kids my age; a story I wrote for Grade Ten English class got returned to me because the head of the department thought it was plagiarized on account of being too good to have been written by a 14-year-old (which I guess is ironic given how I got started in this whole thing). But I was still, objectively, pretty abysmal.
“I wrote all through high school and three university degrees without making a single sale. Got lots of positive feedback, mind you; I once got rejected by a magazine I’d never even sent a story to (Analog; the editor at Asimov’s sent it on to them on my behalf). I took their “we’re interested in seeing more of your work” to heart and sent them everything I wrote over the next decade. Only in hindsight did I realize that Analog’s rejections, initially long, detailed, and encouraging, were getting ever shorter and more generic over time, which suggests that I was getting worse with practice. The most frequent criticism I got was some variant of “this is really well written but it’s awfully depressing. Could you maybe bring in some clowns?”
“I didn’t get a single thing published until I was thirty-one, and even that was in some small press no one had ever heard of. (That same story got me my first form-rejection slip from Analog, completing my trajectory from Promising Acolyte to Slush-Pile Reject.) From that point on, I started getting published semiregularly in small mags and semi-pros. To this day, I’ve never got a story into any of the big US traditionals. I stopped even trying back around the turn of the century.
“My day job back then involved working for a university consortium founded to research a catastrophic decline in piscivorous marine mammal populations in the Bering and the North Pacific. Given that this decline coincided with the large-scale movement of the US Commercial fishing fleet into those waters, the idea that overfishing might have something to do with it seemed a reasonable hypothesis. The problem was that the vast majority of the consortium’s funding came from the fishing industry itself. So the head of the consortium, the kind of guy we used to call a “biostitute” on account of his, shall we say, flexible perspectives, kept sidling up to me during Friday afternoon beers and suggesting that maybe it was killer whales to blame for the decline, or maybe the animals were all dying from some kind of sexually-transmitted calicivirus. Because, you know, Steller sea lions have notoriously loose morals.
“I put up with that for as long as I could, then quit in a huff. At which point I had about a year before the UI ran out. So I figured, what the hell. You’ve wanted to be a real author for thirty years. If you don’t do it now, you never will. Starfish came out in 1999 and ended up as a NY Times Notable Book of the Year. The rest is history.
“So basically, you could say I owe my writing career to a tantrum.”Watts' novel 'Blindsight' won the Japanese Seiun Award in 2014.Tor Books
Following this, I asked the impossible question of who were Peter’s favorite writers. He was kind enough not to bite my head off and gave me some fascinating answers.
“I see that as two different but related questions: 1) Who were the authors who influenced me most back in my formative years, and 2) Who are my favorite authors today?
“The first question is easy: John Brunner, first among equals, for the jagged prose, the topicality of his works, the enormous amount of research that went into his novels, and the grimy realpolitik infusing his fiction at a time when so much science fiction was still spandex and space ships. The Sheep Look Up is one of two books that literally changed my life: upon finishing it for the first time, I knew in my bones that a) I had to become not just a writer, but that kind of writer, and b) that I had to work to prevent the all-too-plausible future Brunner described. I did both of those things; I only succeeded at one of them.
“Samuel Delany for his gorgeous prose and (in some cases anyway) his resolute refusal to connect the dots for his readers (looking at you, Dhalgren). Robert Silverberg, for his more-restrained-but-still-elegant prose, and for his compelling exploration of scientific/ethical concepts. (Dying Inside stays with me fifty years after I read it; “Our Lady of the Sauropods” blew the doors off dinosaur resurrection a decade before Crichton picked up that baton, and was better written to boot.) Maybe William Gibson, who was of course a kick in the ass for the whole genre, but who came along after my own voice had pretty much congealed.
“Note that there were a lot more authors back then whose writing I admired or adored, Ursula Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Larry Niven and Alfred Bester to name but a few, but I only wanted to read them. I never wanted to write like them.
“The second question is a bit tougher because an unfortunate downside of being an actual writer (for me at least) is that I somehow don’t have nearly as much time to be a reader as I used to. In grad school, I’d finish off a couple of novels a week, all while running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, exploring the biophysical ecology of harbor seals on remote islands with no plumbing facilities, and going to see Aliens three times within the first five days of release. Now, most of my reading comes down to research for my own work and manuscripts presented to me in search of blurbs (some of which at least make me feel quite a bit better about my own octopus-human-fetus efforts). The time I have left is limited; I’m only just now getting caught up on my Gene Wolfe, and there are genre authors in the current top critical tier whom I’ve yet to read at all.
“So the following sample is in no way an expert take on the best writers working in the field today. I lack the expertise to make such calls. But they are authors whom I’ve read recently, and whose work I admire (sometimes to the point of outright envy).
“China Miéville; I’ve only read three or four of his novels, but the prose rocks and the concepts are solid, even if the plots are sometimes a wee bit episodic. I’ve been known to prod partners awake deep in the night for no better reason than to admiringly read excerpts of Miéville prose. And I’m not even into New Weird.
“Seth Dickensen, based entirely on his novel Exordia. Dude’s mainly known for fantasy, but Exordia is hard science fiction and it rocks. Viscerally horrific, conceptually mindblowing, achingly humane.
“I’m also starting to get seriously jealous of Adrian Tchaikovsky, although I’ve only read one short story and two novels out of his library-filling oeuvre. Children of Time was good; the short story (which I don’t think has been published yet) was great; but his latest novel (Shroud) serves up one of the most rigorously defined and intensely alien ecosystems I’ve ever encountered in fiction and is a terrific first-contact story to boot.
“Hiron Ennes. A newish author; imagine a transporter accident where Gene Wolfe, Mervin Peake, and China Miéville all get mooshed together. In Leech, a parasitic hive mind that infests people discovers another parasitic hive mind that infests people, competing for the same brain space (told in first-person from the POV of the former parasitic hive mind). The Works of Vermin is visceral Cronenbergian steampunk; think Victorian London, perched over a chasm, infested by anarchists and giant burrowing centipedes and you may get a vague sense of the book’s aesthetic.
“Finally, someone I’m sure none of you have ever heard of, because she’s a new Canadian author published by the tiny Bumblepuppy Press, and by the time you read this, her books will be prohibitively expensive due to tariffs. Rachel Rosen, whose ongoing Sleep of Reason trilogy (the second book has only just been released) depicts a future climate-ravaged world in which demons stalk the Rockies and so-called “MAIs” (Magic-Affected Individuals) are used by Canadian politicians to plan their campaigns. Canada falls into dictatorship in the first book; the Resistance hangs on by its fingernails in the second. There are Earthquakes and opera singers and prison camps for human experimentation. There’s a sapient tech-bro submarine. I don’t know how many non-Canadians these books might resonate with, but I’ll bet that number is increasing daily, down below the 49th at least. I would not have believed that a fantasy novel could be so depressingly relevant.
“As for favorite novels, that’s another implicit two-parter I’m thinking, and the answer to the second part (i.e., what are my current favorites) is already laid out above. The first (what are my past influences) also, albeit to a lesser extent: Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up, Silverberg’s Dying Inside, Delany’s Dhalgren have already been cited. Add Brunner’s Hugo-winning Stand on Zanzibar to that list. While Sheep focuses on environmental devastation, Stand delves into a wider range of subjects; AI, genetic engineering, hobby terrorism and pop culture, against the broad backdrop of overpopulation.
“Throw in Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (sometimes cited as the first cyberpunk novel, even though it was published back in 1956), for the sheer inventive density of cool ideas on every page: teleportation as an innate human ability, religion as pornography, asteroid cargo cults where the cultists are descended from actual scientists. Cybernetic augmentation decades before it was cool. PyrE. The healing power of revenge. A novel way ahead of its time: I can easily forgive the fact that Bester cut-and-pasted the exact same few paragraphs of prose into two separate parts of the same story.
“Gibson’s Neuromancer. Because of course. Although his Count Zero might be a wee bit better on a purely technical level.”
It was here I wanted to know more about the recent work Peter had done on Secret Level, and the story he’d written for the Armored Core episode.'Secret Level' featured a segment on 'Armored Core' with the story written by Watts.FromSoftware, Amazon
Over on Peter’s blog, he covered a good chunk of what happened, but some criticism of the episode from newer and less experienced players claimed that it wasn’t “Armored Core enough”.
Naturally, I disagreed with this, and could see that quite a lot had been cut out, but before all that I just wanted to know how Peter got involved with it in the first place.
“Apparently, I have fans at Blur Studio (the force behind Love, Death, and Robots). Way back in 2022 they reached out and asked if I’d be interested in pitching for a new anthology series based on a variety of new and classic video games: Secret Level, they called it. I’d loved Love, Death and Robots. I was bitterly envious of all those other science fiction writers who’d made an appearance there. This was my chance to sit at the Cool Kids Table, not to mention stretching creative muscles in a format I’d never even attempted before. I was gonna say no to that?
“For the Armored Core story, the plan was to write a prequel to the events of Fires of Rubicon, the latest game in that franchise. Blur loaded me up with all sorts of Armored Core VI backstory: a profile of “Raven”, the game’s protagonist (heard but never seen in-game); his relationships with various other characters; the history of Rubicon itself and the nature of Coral (a kind of networked artificial aeroplankton that serves as the story’s MacGuffin). I was told enough of the game’s plot to avoid stepping on its toes: there was a list of Dos and Don’ts (all of Blur’s pitch decks come with those) stipulating the elements I could explore and those that had to be kept in reserve for the game itself.
“So I put together a pitch to meet those specs. Subsequent changes decreed from on high (which is to say FromSoftware, not Blur) started small: suddenly we weren’t allowed to call Raven by name. Okay. Ayre (a sapient manifestation of networked coral, which manifested as a voice fed through Raven’s cortical augments) went from being sexless to female. Sure.
“Then we couldn’t call her Ayre. Then we couldn’t call it Coral. Then the protagonist couldn’t be Raven, whether we named him or not. Then the story couldn’t be explicitly set on Rubicon. I’m not entirely sure whether FromSoftware were simply worried about spoilers (which would be odd, given that the short came out more than a year after the game did) or if they just decided they wanted a more generic story that would draw attention to the wider franchise without focusing on any particular installment.
“Either way, my original story involved Raven and Ayre making a seminal discovery about Coral in the war-ravaged wastelands of Rubicon. You can see the problem.”
“In the end, the Armored Core episode turned out far better than it had any right to, given the constraints. JT Petty’s screenplay managed to keep the essence of my story intact, the overall plot structure, the worldbuilding, the character development, even a surprisingly large amount of dialog, while stripping away all the Rubicon-specific elements and swapping in a completely different payoff at the end. His ending, in fact, packed way more of a gut-punch than mine had; there were a couple of fridge-logic issues (like why the enemy mecha didn’t reach out more explicitly to our pilot instead of immediately engaging him in battle), but the punchline was just so good that they never even occurred to me until well after the credits rolled.
“If I’d had my way, I might have inserted a couple of lines of dialog to sew up that seam. Otherwise, it was spot-on. I’m proud to have had a hand in it.”
Moving on, we touched on Peter’s upcoming work with movie director Neill Blomkamp, but obviously he couldn’t go into too much detail.
“I can at least say the project exists, now: I’m about to start writing an episodic treatment for an 8-10-episode series adaptation of my novel Blindsight.
“Neill and I have had a long and tortured history with that property. When he first expressed interest, the rights were tied up with a third party. We almost made it work regardless; Neill was initially interested in doing a movie that wasn’t set in the Blindsight universe at all, but which merely used the speculative biology I’d invented to justify the existence of Blindsight’s vampires. “Sicario with Vampires” was Neill’s elevator pitch, and as chance would have it the guys who had the rights back then had forgotten to renew them. So we just hunkered quietly until those rights expired, and the recently-rights-holding parties said Oh my goodness we thought we’d renewed those already can we have them back? And I said, Sure; but you gotta carve out this little IP exclusion on the biology so Neill can do his vampire thing.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. It was good idea, dammit. We got the carve-out and everything. But then one of innumerable dead-eyed suits didn’t think it was explicit enough, and the rights-holders started messing us around, and what looked like a done deal turned to ash. We lost a year or more on that account.
“But eventually the rights expired again, for good this time. And there was Neill, waiting patiently in the shadows to pounce. So now he’s developing both his Sicario-with-vampires movie and an actual Blindsight adaptation. I should probably keep the current status of those projects private for the time being. Neill’s cool with me revealing the existence of the Blindsight adaptation at least, and he’s long-since let the cat out of the bag for his vampire movie (although that was with some guy called Joe Rogan, don’t know how many people listen to him). But the stage of gestation, casting, and all those granular nuts and bolts are probably best kept under wraps for the moment.
“What I can say, though, is that it feels as though the book has been stuck in option limbo forever, never even made it to Development Hell, unless you count a couple of abortive screenplays. And for the first time, I feel like something’s actually happening. Stay tuned.”
Secret Level is available to watch via Amazon Prime, and if you haven’t already, you should really check out Peter’s amazing novel Blindsight.
If you are curious about any of my other interviews with various creators over the past decade, you can find links to those here.
Follow me on X, Facebook and YouTube. I also manage Mecha Damashii and am currently featured in the Giant Robots exhibition currently touring Japan.
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