> Despite writing at the turn of the last century, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cosmicism is something with which no major narrative of humanity’s journey through the stars

> Despite writing at the turn of the last century, H.P. Lovecraft’s Cosmicism is something with which no major narrative of humanity’s journey through the stars has dealt. Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep tackled this very subject decades ago, and with far greater poise than Mass Effect did. (And I say this as a fan of the series.) I suspect the author's reference pools are not as deep as they should be, and I say this because a lot of the topics that the author claims ME to be the first to address have in fact been bandied about in science fiction for a long time. Mass Effect is great in lots of ways; it brings together a lot of plot points and concepts from other series and synthesizes them together into a decently coherent whole. But the series is far from original thematically. (minor spoilers) In particular, the third game tries to address the idea of transhumanism in a way reminiscent of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, another game which came out a year before, but does it in a particularly cack-handed way. Even the ending choice in ME3 is thematically similar to the one from the earlier game.