Elite: Wanted by Stephen Deas and Gavin Smith

The 34th Century. A routine bit of piracy goes badly wrong, leaving the crew of the Song of Stone wanted by both the authorities and the most lethal criminal gang in inhabited space. When a bounty hunter famed for being relentless and efficient gets on their tail, events rapidly spiral out of control.

The Elite video game series has always had a good relationship with its tie-in fiction. The original game, released in 1984, had very simple graphics so relied on the manual and flavour text to fit in a lot of the background. Key to this was The Dark Wheel, a novella written by Robert Holdstock (who won the World Fantasy Award the same year for his seminal Mythago Wood) which brought the setting to life with memorable characters and a focused storyline about revenge and family.

For the release of Elite: Dangerous, the fourth game in the series, a whole line of new books are being released from several different publishers. First out of the gate is Wanted, a collaboration between Stephen Deas (best-known for the Memory of Flames fantasy sequence) and Gavin Smith (Veteran, War in Heaven, Age of Scorpio). This novel focuses on pirates, bounty-hunters and the dividing line between the law and lawlessness, key features of the Elite games which can also be used to generate good stories.

Wanted has a simple but extremely effective structure: chapters alternate between Captain Ravindra of the Song of Stone and Ziva, pilot of the Dragon Queen and one of the most renowned bounty hunters around. The characterisation of these two leading figures is strong, with the authors setting up each captain's motivations (Ravindra's wayward son and Ziva's relationship problems) and using them to drive the story forward. For a tie-in novel the risk is always that the iconic setting will overwhelm the story and characters, but there Deas and Smith avoid that, putting the central characters front-and-centre.

That said, they do handle the setting pretty well. There's always been a conflict between the Elite universe being set so far in the future and the relative low technology of it all, with no artificial gravity and ship-to-ship combat being carried out at close range rather than with drones from thousands of miles away. The two authors do a good job of staying true to the game setting whilst throwing their own innovations and extrapolations of technology into the mix.

On the weaker side of things, some of the secondary cast could do with being fleshed out more. The motivations of the villains is also under-developed, especially as the maguffin the plot revolves around is never really explained. On one meta-level it's irrelevant, as it's simply the excuse for the story to happen, but on another it means that the stakes are never properly defined.

Still, Smith and Deas deliver more than what was expected here: a punchy, rip-roaring space opera with some clever bits of science, some nicely-handled character relationships and a book that leaves the reader intrigued to try both the game and the other books in the setting. Elite: Wanted (****) is out now in the UK and USA.

Yet another ELITE: DANGEROUS trailer

Elite: Dangerous celebrates the arrival of the next stage of its beta test with a new video. This shows off the Orbis-class space station (a redesign of a station from Frontier: Elite II) which will appear in the game alongside the more familiar Coriolis-class. This video is best play at 1080p in fullscreen.

The Orbis is a nod to Space Station One from Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, hence the appropriate music (which was also the docking music for the original Elite).

Elite: Dangerous is expected for release at the end of the year, I suspect in October.

New ELITE: DANGEROUS trailer

Frontier Developments have released a new trailer for Elite: Dangerous.

The game has entered its premium beta phase and will be followed by a standard beta phase before release. Currently the smart money is on a release in October or November (unfortunately probably missing the 30th anniversary of the original Elite in September).

New ELITE: DANGEROUS video shows galactic map and hyperspace

The fourth alpha build of Elite: Dangerous has launched, giving backers a chance to experience the game's navigation and starflight capabilities for themselves. The new version includes the galactic map, which players will use to jump from system to system, and an early version of the hyperspace animation that will accompany these jumps.

Apparently, the fourth alpha of Elite: Dangerous will be the final one. A beta test, which will likely try to combine the different game systems (combat, trading, navigation) together, will begin in a few weeks. The full game should be out towards the end of the year.

Gollancz published three Elite: Dangerous e-book novels last week. They will be released in hardcover on 16 October this year.

ELITE: DANGEROUS reaches important milestone

Elite: Dangerous, the ambitious space trading game from Frontier Developments, hits an important milestone on 15 May. The game's fourth and final alpha build will be released, which will add the entire Milky Way galaxy to the game.

Part of the starmap in the original Elite, from 1984. Only go to Riedquat if you fancy dying, a lot.

At the moment the game, which is playable by those who backed the title's Kickstarter campaign, consists of a series of linked missions spanning around a single light-year, allowing fighting and docking but not much more. The new alpha release will add 400 billion star systems and the simulated space will increase to 100,000 light-years, effectively containing our entire galaxy. The game will accurately simulate the position of the stars relative to one another, including some nebulae and dust clouds. The game will remain limited in what can be done within this space - at the moment you can't visit Earth, for example, and the actual flyable space will be limited to a 200 light-year-wide stretch of the Bootes constellation - but it goes some way to showing the full potential of the game.

The starmap from Elite: Dangerous (concept art pictured) is a bit more impressive.

Several weeks after the release the fourth alpha build, the game will enter beta status as the last game systems (likely to involve missions, the economy and more varied AI enemies) are slotted into place. The game appears to be on track for a final release before the end of the year. Releasing the game in September would be appropriate, as that would mark the 30th anniversary of the release of the original Elite.

Meanwhile, on 15 May Gollancz will release three tie-in novels for the game in the UK.

Gollancz confirm details of three ELITE novels

Gollancz have confirmed the details of the three novels they are publishing to tie-in with the launch of the new space trading/combat game Elite: Dangerous.

Elite: Dangerous is the fourth game in the Elite series, which launched in September 1984 with the eponymous original game. The original Elite was accompanied by The Dark Wheel, a novella written by fantasy author Robert Holdstock (author of the mighty Mythago Wood sequence). Gollancz, Holdstock's publisher when he sadly (and prematurely) passed away in 2009, snapped up the rights to three Elite novels by contributing more than £13,000 to the game's funding campaign on Kickstarter.

The game - and the novels - are set at the dawn of the 34th Century. Humanity has expanded across dozens of worlds and star systems in a radius of several hundred light-years from Earth. There are three primary power groups in explored space: the Federation, centred on Earth; the Empire, centred on Achernar; and the Independent Alliance, a banding-together of small powers to resist the strength of the greater ones. Alien life is almost completely unknown, save for a mysterious insectoid species known as the Thargoids. Brutal enemies in Elite, completely missing in Frontier and pacified in First Encounters, it is rumoured that the Thargoids will return in force during the events of Elite: Dangerous.

Elite: Wanted is a collaboration between Gavin Smith (author of the splendid Veteran and War in Heaven) and Stephen Deas (author of the Memory of Flames fantasy sequence) featuring a duel between two starship crews. The Song of Stone has a bounty-hunter vessel on their trail, the feared Dragon Queen. The story flips between the two crews as they fight a battle of wits to keep ahead of the enemy.

Elite: Nemorensis, by Simon Spurrier (a writer for X-Men comics and the Warhammer franchise), is Bonny and Clyde in space, featuring two lovers who steal a spaceship, go on the run and end up becoming celebrities through the chaos they cause across known space.

Elite: Docking is Difficult by Gideon Defoe (the writer of the Oscar-nominated film The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists) is a humorous take on life in the 34th Century, in particular the dream of a young man to become 'Elite', the best of the best. Unfortunately, he has to cope with being broke and young first.

All three books will be available a e-editions on 15 May. Hardcover editions will be accompany the release of the game later this year.

No release date for Elite: Dangerous itself has been set. However, the game is currently being tested online by hundreds of players and it seems well on course for release before the end of this year.

ELITE: DANGEROUS shows off docking tutorial

Frontier Developments, the makers of Elite: Dangerous, have released a gameplay video showing how docking with space stations will work in the new game.

Veterans of the 30-year-old space trading series will know that docking has always been a tricky proposition in the series. The original Elite required careful lining up of the spacecraft with the docking port, matching rotation and slowly moving towards the station until the ship either successfully docked (about 20% of the time) or smashed into the docking bay walls at the last moment and exploded (the other 80%). It's rather notable that the sequels, Frontier and First Encounters, both made docking an automated affair to avoid the problem.

Elite: Dangerous returns to a manual docking approach and is easier, but requires the pilot to steer the ship to the correct docking bay inside the space station. You'll be able to buy docking computers later on to speed the process up, but they seem to have hit the right balance between making the game fun to play but not giving you everything on a plate.

Elite: Dangerous is tentatively scheduled for release later in the year, although don't be too surprised if there is a delay into 2015. The game's coming together impressively with each alpha iteration and trailer, but they've still got a little way to go.

ELITE: DANGEROUS combat alpha begins

Elite: Dangerous, the forthcoming, Kickstarted fourth game in the highly influential Elite franchise, has launched its combat alpha for backers of the project. This will allow backers to play a series of combat missions to get a feel for the game's user-interface, combat mechancis and spaceflight model.

The second and third games in the series, Frontier (1993) and First Encounters (1995), were lauded for their use of Newtonian physics and vast universes, but criticised for their combat which was confusing, messy and unenjoyable. The new game will employ a system more akin to that of the original Elite (1984) and games like the Wing Commander and Freespace series, allowing players to pull dynamic maneoeuvers and shunt energy from one subsystem to another for a quick boost to speed, shields or weapons. However, this system will be more complex in Elite: Dangerous and allow players to mask their energy signatures altogether to go into stealth mode (at the risk of overheating).

In the linked interview, David Braben also talks about the modelling of star systems within the game, with the 150,000 star systems closest to Earth modelled accurately (even down to their exoplanets, if known).

Elite: Dangerous will enter its beta stage in the New Year, with a full release hoped for by the middle of 2014. UK SF publishers Gollancz will be published a range of novels to tie in with the release of the game as well.

New ELITE: DANGEROUS trailer

Frontier Developments have unveiled a new trailer for Elite: Dangerous, the fourth game in the series. Made with money from Kickstarter, the game will be released in 2014, which is also the thirtieth anniversary of the release of the original Elite.

They've come a surprising way quite quickly and this is starting to look very promising indeed.

ELITE: DANGEROUS starmap is a thing of beauty

Frontier Developments have posted a new screenshot from their Kickstarter-funded space trading/combat game Elite: Dangerous. This screenshot shows their starmap, which the player will use to travel from system to system and within systems as well.

The starmap used in Frontier: Elite 2 was a phenomenal piece of work (considering it was an addendum to the main game) and it looks like the map in the fourth game is shaping up to be far more impressive.

As a bonus, see if you can catch all the SF references on the image.

Gollancz to publish three ELITE novels

Gollancz have announced that they will be publishing three novels based on the Elite series of computer games in 2014.

The new Elite game, Elite: Dangerous (the fourth in the thirty-year-old series), recently passed its funding goal on Kickstarter, ending with more than £1.5 million raised for game development. The title is expected to be released by mid-2014. To help the game reach its goal Gollancz pledged a significant sum on Kickstarter to buy the rights to publish three novels based on the Elite universe.

Gollancz had already been in discussions with David Braben and Frontier Studios about adding the original Elite tie-in novella, The Dark Wheel, to its SF Gateway online store. The Dark Wheel is notable as it was written by the late Robert Holdstock, best-known for his Mythago Wood series of novels. The Dark Wheel was packaged with the original BBC Micro release of Elite in 1984 (I still have a copy in a box somewhere). Frontier: Elite II, released in 1992, was also accompanied by a book of short stories entitled Tales of Life on the Frontier. Whether this will be reprinted at some point is unknown (but unlikely; it was not as good as Holdstock's novella).

The three novels will be published in 2014. The identities of the potential writers have not yet been revealed.

ELITE 4 Kickstarter announced

David Braben and Frontier Developments have put up a Kickstarter page for Elite: Dangerous, the long-awaited fourth game in the Elite series.

In visual terms, this was 1984's answer to Crysis II.

The original Elite was released in 1984 on the BBC Micro and is one of the most famous, seminal and game-changing titles of all time. It was an open-universe game in which you took a spaceship and could trade and fight your way across eight galaxies and some 2,000 star systems, all in (wireframe) 3D. It was the first major 3D game and one of the first games to give you total freedom in how you approached playing it. The sequel, Frontier: Elite II was released in 1993 and featured filled-in 3D graphics, multiple controllable spacecraft, an even vaster universe (hundreds of millions of procedurally-generated star systems in a - somewhat - accurate recreation of the Milky Way) and the ability to land on planets. The third game, First Encounters: Frontier II was released in 1995 and was notable for the number of bugs present in the game, resulting in a lawsuit between the developers and the publisher.

Braben has been teasing fans with the possibility of an Elite IV for many years before announcing this Kickstarter project. Braben indicates that raising funds the traditional way has been difficult, and he's only been able to spare a few developers to work on the project in moments of spare time, hence the decision to go down the Kickstarter route.

So far, mixed feelings. On the one hand, Elite was a seminal, brilliant game, a total gamechanger and one of the biggest steps forward in the history of the form. Frontier was also a very solid game, even if its ambition exceeded its grasp. However, the Kickstarter page is scant on details about the proposed title: no graphics or videos have been posted, which is odd for a game that's been in development (even if at a low ebb) for several years already. So far the only hard info that's been released is that the game will have modern graphics (as you'd expect) and some form of multiplayer component (as you'd expect). Otherwise there seems little to distinguish it from the X series of space sims or Chris Roberts's recently-announced Star Citizen (or even EVE Online, though presumably Elite IV will have direct 'twitch' controls rather than the mouse-driven interface of that title).

Still, with 10% of the funding already raised within hours of the announcement and even the BBC running a news story on it, it looks likely that this will be funded. Certainly a project worth keeping an eye on.