Success Quote by Aaron Allston

Chaos, in Aaron Allston's hands, isn’t just a plot device; it’s a philosophy of momentum. "When all else fails, complicate matters" reads like gallows humor for storytellers: the moment a plan collapses, the instinct isn’t to simplify, regroup, or moralize. It’s to throw another wrench into the machinery and see what sparks. That wit matters because it inverts the self-help reflex. Instead of treating failure as a cue for clarity, Allston treats it as permission for escalation.

The specific intent is craft-level and character-level at once. For a novelist best known for tie-in fiction and genre work that thrives on pacing, "complicate" is a directive: raise stakes, introduce a new constraint, force a choice that reveals character. It’s a reminder that narrative energy often comes from pressure, not solutions. Subtextually, it’s also an affectionate jab at human psychology. When we feel powerless, we reach for agency wherever we can find it, even if that agency is destructive. Making things messier can be a way to feel in control again.

Context helps: Allston wrote within franchises where the end state can be partially predetermined. Complication becomes the playground - the space where surprise still lives. The line doubles as a quiet defense of genre storytelling itself: life rarely resolves neatly, so why should fiction pretend it does?