Meeting Katie: Why I Love the Battletech Fictional Universe

    So, a few days ago, I wrote a piece about my first exposure to Battletech. Everyone knows I’m a Battletech junkie. The franchise is a huge part of my life and I love the sandbox that it gives me to play in. As a brand, the Battletech universe has been growing more diverse and wonderful as the years have gone on. These are things I felt very assured of. But today, I had that viewpoint framed, highlighted, slammed into focus and illuminated in spotlights.

        I’ve been inching through the latest issue (#3) of Shrapnel, Battletech’s new magazine that shares stories, in-universe articles, scenarios, item tidbits and more. There’s a lot of great content in there, some of it serialized, most of it stand-alone and this most recent issue dropped as a bit of a surprise to me. It’s the holidays, and I’ve had a lot going on, so it’s been a nice well that I could dip into a little bit at a time for a quick fix of new BattleTech material. So here I was on Monday night, done with work for the day, finished with dinner, having sat down for a few frustrating matches of MWO to claim my holiday loot, and finally switching on the Patriots game to hope against all odds that maybe the horror of the 2020 season for the New England Patriots had come to an end.

Well, Cam Newton and the Patriots certainly didn’t disappoint, they were getting pretty badly shellacked. Sophie was at her laptop, headphones on over her cyberlox, bopping away while writing some tedious piece of paperwork for the lab. So I picked up my phone, tapped open the Kindle App, and opened up Shrapnel, which I was almost done with. There was just one story left, "The Secret Fox" by Bryan Young. It was set in 3143, and while I love the new material, something about the Dark Ages still puts them slightly behind the other Battletech eras in my mind. But Bryan Young is one of the best of the newer author’s in the stable right now, so I went in with reasonably high expectations that I would like this one.

    I started reading the story, set in the almost-periphery of the Lyran Commonwealth. It told the tale of a young woman named Katie who had dreams of becoming a MechWarrior while stuck out on the ass-end of the Inner Sphere. There was talk of AgroMechs, and for a split second, I had visions of the early MWDA novels come to life again. But I kept reading because I wanted to find out what the deal was with Katie. What was her story? What was her tiny piece of the massive Battletech puzzle? So I read on. And in almost no time, I found myself enthralled with this character. She was a girl with big dreams that seemed to be so far out of reach that they could never come true, but she still lived on those dreams with a smile on her face and a sparkle in her eye. The universe might tell her that she couldn’t have what she wanted, but she smiled and kept on dreaming about it in that way that said she still believed in her heart that her dream could come true. By the time a few more pages had turned, I found myself riding over her shoulder, watching her daydreaming and hoping against hope that this girl would have her dreams come true. In the matter of a few short pages, I had gone from tentatively hoping that an interesting story was about to unfold to clutching my phone tightly, willing this girl along in her journey. And she hadn’t even found a real mech yet. 

    I won’t spoil the story for you, but suffice it to say that as the story unfolded, I found myself cheering her on, feeling her sense of accomplishment, and hoping against odds that she was going to make amazing things happen. And she did. By the time I was finished, I was so connected and so in love with this character in a way that I have seldom, if ever, before found myself. She was so sweet and so dynamic, and just so plain real that I couldn’t get over it. I read a lot of fiction, and I rarely, if ever, get to a point of real connectedness with a character. Sure, I recognize them as good characters, see their strengths, root them on, but seldom do I genuinely feel for them in a way that makes them super relatable. I was getting emotional over a piece of writing. It has happened only a few times in my life as a reader. And boy did it happen here.

    And it happened because she was so real. She had so many little nuances and traits that I could relate to. I didn’t have to reimagine the character to something I could connect with, I could just genuinely connect with her as she was. And it dawned on me that this is exactly why we need diversity of characters and viewpoints in our stories. I get that MilSciFi tends to skew a certain way because of its audience in general. But there are so many different readers out there, and the more of us that can see characters in a universe that we can genuinely connect with, the greater the community becomes, and the more invested more people become in that community.

    I have always felt like I had a home in the Battletech universe, that there was a character out there that I could connect with and make real. It’s why I write my fanfiction, and it's why I play the game and roleplay characters in the universe. It’s a fun place for me to play around and explore ideas and themes and concepts in a way that vanilla reality never could offer. But now, having read this story, having met the character of Katie, it’s as though all of that has been reinforced and validated in a way that really touched me emotionally. It’s not often that I get that emotional response, and reading this story it was brought so far to the front. This story is why I love Battletech, because it’s a universe where Katies can have their stories told and people like me can find a real sense of a universe that accepts so much of what I am.

    More fiction should do this. This is what makes fiction a work of art, when it touches you the way that a piece of music or a beautiful painting does. This is what turns words on a page into literature, into something that is more than text, that is so very human. And this is where Battletech is going. I am beyond happy and excited about that. I really hope that some of you are too.

    If you haven’t gone out and bought Issue #3 of Shrapnel, do it. Read this piece. I know Katie won’t be as real for everyone as she was for me, but this is what good fiction done right is all about.

You can buy it on the Catalyst Game Labs Store or on Amazon for your Kindle.