Adam

Easily a 4.5I haven't read too many books in the Warhammer 40k setting, but I really enjoyed this novel. I bought this quite a few years ago and just now got around to checking it out, apparently it's rather rare at this point, which is a shame, because it's a great novel. The one caveat to reading this that might be a downside is that in the middle of reading this I felt compelled to read [b:Codex Sisters of Battle 169092173 Codex Sisters of Battle (Warhammer 40,000 Supplement) Gavin Thorpe https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1686235022l/169092173.SX50.jpg 182482409], which is the rules supplement for the game. The main thing was that I didn't feel very well versed in the mechanics and history of the Adeptas Sororitas, so to give the novel a little bit more meaning, I read a codex. I tried to choose a codex that was written near the publication of the novel, because by today (2023) the Sisters have changed a little bit. I think their lore might have had some retcon-ing as well over the years. Either way, knowing a bit more depth and history did add to my enjoyment of the novel, so if you have the ability to read this and read a codex, I highly recommend.I think I've run into other books by James Swallow, but I'm drawing a blank on whether I just own them or if I've read them. This might be my first book by this author and reading this makes me look forward to reading other books by him in the future. He does an excellent job representing the Warhammer 40k universe in all its gritty and grim atmosphere. A future broken under the will of the Imperium as mankind struggles against its own institutions as well as actual enemies from within and without.I wasn't really sure what to expect from this novel, but this story takes a deep dive into the realms of witches and the witch hunters. From there we will be brought to the deepest corruptions within the priesthood and it is up to the devout sisters to hunt the witches and bring them to justice (or die trying). The story begins with a prisoner transfer overseen by the battle sisters, unfortunately the prisoner is a rather powerful psyker, Vaun, and somehow manages to escape. This gets the ball rolling and the hunt is on! The Sisters track the rogue psyker back to his home planet of Neva, where the head Deacon, LaHayn, in charge of the planet takes on some very curious request considering the rogue psyker. He wants him alive and amidst the chaos sowed by Vaun the Deacon starts making power plays to take ever more control of the planet and its holdings. This makes the Battle Sisters contingent pursuing Vaun somewhat suspicious of his actions, however, they are compelled to follow orders and so they carry out LaHayn's orders.Vaun manages to escape from the main city and turn another city to his will. This forces LaHayn to issue orders to hunt down Vaun and take down the command structure of the city. The Sister in charge of the force, Galatea, sends all her troops to war to take down the heretics. This whole sequence is true to form of the game and everything we expect to see in a 40k novel at some point. I love how Swallow wove it into the overarching story and gave more of a reason for fighting such a pitched battle.During this battle our real main characters of the story really come to light. Sisters, Verity, Miriya, Cassandra, and Isabel manage to track down the witch and are in hot pursuit as he tries to escape to some secret place on the planet. Verity is an important component in this story because she is a Hospitaller, not really a Sister of Battle, since she is basically part of the medical unit not combat. Anyway, the sisters technically disobey Galatea's orders to hunt down the mysteries and possible heresy of LaHayn in a secret installation called Null Keep. In Null Keep our intrepid heroes will have their faith tested and their wills nearly broken. LaHayn's heresy is nothing what I was expecting and it makes for an incredible story!There was really only one moment that seemed unbelievable, in the sense that it seemed out of character. At one point the Battle Sisters are captured, but their captor doesn't remove their power armor. They do mention that they were surprised they weren't stripped naked, and I am too. Leaving the Battle Sisters to have access to their power armor was odd and the only time the story didn't make much sense, but they really did need their Power Armor to complete the next leg of the story, which was excellent... so, I'll allow it.If you're a fan of 40k and a fan of the Battle Sisters, this will be a very enjoyable read. It's action packed with enough depth and mystery to make it not seem like a shallow novel about war. There is a sequel to this novel [b:Hammer and Anvil 13091852 Hammer and Anvil (Sisters of Battle #2) James Swallow https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347386695l/13091852.SY75.jpg 16409765], also by James Swallow, and I look forward to reading that in the near future as well.

3.5 at times

After reading the description of the Rogue Angel book series, I figured it might be something I liked. Finding out it was written and created by Mel Odom sealed the deal for me (Gold Eagle just has a stock author name for all their book series for some reason). I've enjoyed some of his other books and even though this is an early novel series for him, I was still pretty hopeful that this would be a good adventure. It's pretty much everything I expected, so solid points for that.

Rogue Angel is a book series that introduces the character Annja Creed to the world. She's an archaeologist by trade and for the start of her series she works for a TV show doing segments on histories monsters. So her dynamics of work and scholarship are a bit different from other characters written in this vein, which had me a bit worried, because I do like the archetype of someone working in a stuffy university. In the description it seemed like this was yet another female Indiana Jones styled character similar to Lara Croft and that is sort of who Annja is, but they took away some of the things the other characters had. Indiana Jones had university access and Lara Croft had access to, basically, infinite money, meanwhile, Annja has none of these things. So, while she is, essentially, a bit more of Lara Croft mixed with Indiana Jones, her life situation is extremely different and it makes her different enough to not feel too generic.

It is amusing to note, that at one point of the story it was commented that she's “not just some video game character.” Referencing that she's not a Lara Croft clone. Then, sometime later in the story when a gun fight breaks out and she has to choose weapons she chooses, not one, but two pistols. So, uhm... tell me more about how you don't want Annja seen as just another Lara Croft? I thought that was kind of a goofy thing, as if Annja Creed would ever overshadow the popularity of Lara Croft...

Anyway, even though this was a good story, it still sits around the three star mark for me. I think part of the problem is that the book suffers from the same “new hero” journey that a lot of stories do. It has exciting moments, sure, but this is the story of a generally boring regular person coming of age into the light of being nearly a super hero of sorts. So, these initial stories, while important, feel often slow for me. Lots of time spent on developing the characters and their interactions, lots of mood setting, etc. Meanwhile, I feel like the mystery Annja is trying to solve takes a back seat a bit for character development, whereas I want to find out what happens next! I do agree that stuff can be important, but it is also rather boring from time to time. I expect the future novels to be much faster paced where they can focus more on Annja solving mysteries and using her powers and new friends to get her through the hardships, which, I imagine, will be great fun.

This being Annja's “coming of age” story of sorts has her investigating an old French mystery called La Bete. In this journey she stumbles into things that involve Joan of Arc. It turns out there is a bit of a treasure mystery surrounding La Bete, but Annja didn't really know about this, so she's stumbled into a hornets nest with a gangster, LeSauvage, that is after the treasure. Another more mysterious party, Roux, who is actually looking for pieces of Joan of Arc's broken sword. These two parties cross paths with Annja stuck right in the middle! Roux is an excellent character with an extremely mysterious past. His past acquaintance Garin comes to Annja's rescue at some point, which holds LeSauvage at bay.

It does follow in the footsteps of Indy and Tomb Raider that there is a degree of actual magic in the world. I don't want to give too much of it away, but the major component of the Rogue Angel series deals with the fact that Roux manages to find all the missing pieces of Joan of Arc's sword. Garin decides to put his murderous intent of Roux on hold in favor of helping Annja view the sword pieces, because Roux thinks she might be special. Turns out, she is, when she goes to touch the sword hilt, the sword reassembles itself and disappears. It goes “somewhere,” but Annja finds she can summon it at will. This is why the book is titled Destiny. Roux theorizes that Annja was destined to wield the sword.

In the end, while it was slow going at times, I found the overall story very enjoyable. The mad rush to try and find a treasure while being hunted by gangsters was a good ride. Unravelling what actually happened in history was well written and good fun too. So, this has all the makings of a good series of stories and I look forward to more tales to come now that the stage has been set and future volumes can focus more on good stories rather than Annja's creation. I will say, if you are a fan of modern Lara Croft stories (the 2018 era-ish), then Annja Creed does a really good job of hitting that mark as well.

More in the 3.5 range

I remember when this comic first came out, I really enjoyed this story quite a bit, but re-reading this many years later and being an Aliens fan for most of my life, I guess I can see some of the flaws and how generally ridiculous the overall concept is. It's still not a bad story though and there are features of this that I really like a lot. One of the major differences for this story is that it really high lights the fact that Aliens is technically in a bit of a cyberpunk styled setting. It's got that high tech dystopia that's laid out in many of the concepts in William Gibson novels and Chet Williamson does a very good job of paying homage to that in the story design.

Williamson also brought back a few key elements that we haven't really seen in a while, namely the cults that worship the Alien creatures and the use of the Royal Jelly drug that was popular in earlier issues. Part of the reason I probably liked this so much was that it was a breath of fresh air after a string of mad scientist story arcs. Albeit, “Labyrinth” was excellent. Still, it was good to have something really different in the Aliens setting.

The first issue cover is extremely eye catching with ninjas on the cover and Aliens coming for them. It's a bit of a misleading cover as the ninjas don't play a massive role in this story, but I'll never forget seeing that cover for the first time and wanting to get this comic just to see where that whole concept leads! Instead this story is more focused on musicians and making music, hence the title “Music of the Spears”. The tale centers on avantgarde composer Damon, and he wants an Alien in his next composition. He's not a popular musician really, but his record label still decides to help him in the acquisition of the Alien. This is where things take a bit of a cyberpunk narrative. The record label obviously doesn't have Aliens on hand, but the executives know a medical company that has eggs and they are in a major rivalry with that company... for reasons. Anyway, the record label decides to help this unpopular musician in their project, just to stick it to a corporate rival. Williamson and his team do an excellent job portraying how run down and poor the average city goer is compared with the lavish money the record label spends on making this project a reality.

So, Damon gets his Alien and given who the Aliens are, Damon needs to make some tough decisions, because he just gets an egg. That means he'll have to agree to sacrificing a human so that the Alien can be born. Obviously he agrees, or else the story wouldn't go anywhere, but it starts Damon down a path of Alien obsession which leads to serious drug abuse during the project. If you are squeamish of animals being killed, this comic won't be for you. It's very sad and I had completely forgotten they even did this in the comic. But to get the Alien to scream they start trying to figure out what things it should kill, so they start with animals. Eventually they figure out humans with non-lethal weapons are best, but that seems kind of obvious, so I don't know why they didn't just start there? I think it was just to make the whole scenario as disturbing as possible.

In the end, the medical company goes looking for it's missing inventory and this ends on a pretty predictable note. Ends kind of the same way most of the Aliens comics end. I did like this story in the sense that it fleshed out Earth society a bit more and it was interesting to see people living with the reality of the Alien and how generally irresponsible corporations are with the organism. I thought all of that world building was excellent and on par with how things would probably go down.

Let me first preface this rating with the fact that, I do understand that it must be hard to write a tie-in-novel while a brand new TV show is currently being aired. The publishing date of 1996 had given me a bit of hope that maybe this was written deeper into Season 1 of Xena, but that doesn't seem to be the case. On the up side, this isn't the same debacle of the Star Trek: TNG novels where the author had never been able to see a single episode while being commissioned to write a book about it! To be perfectly honest, I do not think an author is to blame for the lack of quality, I blame the TV producers who commission authors to write books about material that clearly hasn't been fully developed or don't give authors enough information to make it work with the show in tandem.

This story takes place right after episode 13 when Gabrielle visited the Athens school of Performing Bards. So, I'm going to assume Emerson didn't have too much information beyond that episode when she was actually writing this book. The style of the story is firmly rooted in Season 1, which I thought was only okay. Back in the 80's/90's I feel like the first season of shows tended to only be okay and it took a little bit of time for a show to really gain its legs, as it were, for setting the tone and feel of the characters. I think Xena suffered from this a bit, don't get me wrong, there were some good episodes, but not all of them were excellent. At some point I remember the show getting much better over time, but that being the case The Empty Throne rather suffers from the woes of being a first season tie-in.

The Empty Throne is kind of a bizarre book, it has two completely different stories in it and the two don't feel all that related. In the first portion of the book Xena and Gabrielle find themselves in a small town that is being harassed by someone turning the men into pigs. So, you imagine it's some evil sorceress that they will need to outsmart or fight or something. But no, the conclusion is entirely anti-climatic and pretty boring. Turns out, Gabrielle is here to save the day and thwart Xena's plan to fight... by simply talking to the sorceress and convincing her she can make friends with people. That's it, that's the story. Gabrielle fully involved in this story and by far the most annoying character to read about. She talks incessantly, lies constantly and just gets incredibly annoying from the moment she opened her mouth. For some reason, the on screen performance of this isn't as bad, but in written form, I don't know... it just hits very differently. I think Emerson actually did a good job writing Gabrielle based on the actresses performance, but that fast talking confidence women role wasn't as well done on paper. To her credit Renee O'Connor does a good job, but it was amusing seeing the episode where Bruce Campbell shows up who has years of experience playing that type of character to see the difference. I think Gabrielle got more awesome as the seasons went on though, because it's hard to do without also seeming annoying, if you know what I mean.Okay, so once that conflict is resolved, they hear rumors that Draco's army has besieged the island where Odysseus is from. (For the record, I did like how Emerson tried to continue the them of show where she ties in all these Greek legends into her story.) As soon as Xena and Gabrielle make it to the palace and sneak in, Xena just leaves Gabrielle with the queen. What feels like the first half of the story, Gabrielle pretty much just spends asleep. I wasn't about to complain because by this point I had already had enough of Gabrielle's fast talking antics. Even when she wakes up and interacts it feels like a very different Gabrielle. She's way less annoying and feels more in line with how Gabrielle is in the show. The sad part is, she almost feels like an after thought in this branch of the story, which really isn't the case in the show.So now the conflict transitions to Xena needing to outsmart Draco and his large army. Luckily, Xena's character is written pretty on point. One of the weird errors I found was that on one page it is stated that there are 22 ships and then on the next Draco has 27 ships... Anyway, I don't know why, but I feel like Draco wasn't written how he was in the show. Some of the conversations he has with Xena are kind of weird as if he wasn't working with Xena's old army or they didn't used to be lovers. Draco also spends almost all of his time in the palace sitting around eating. In any event Xena comes up with an elaborate plan to fool Draco into thinking Odysseus has returned with his army. All of four pages is devoted to this and it's probably the best part of the entire book. Everything else is extremely tedious descriptions that just make the book feel extra dense for no reason. There is one part where Xena walks around the island and we get a blow by blow description of all the things. This happens quite a few times and just makes the novel feel a bit bloated. I feel like this novel is a hundred pages too long in that regard. In the end, this story doesn't really add anything in the Xena universe for me. Hopefully the other books Emerson wrote were commissioned during season 2, at least, and the stories feel less haphazard. Emerson had some decent concept ideas, but their execution felt more thrown together than it should have been. For such a short novel, it took me way too long to read this. I kept putting it down to take breaks and read other books I found more interesting.

Status: Deadzone is the first book published in the Necromunda setting and it's a collection of short stories that seem to have been published in Games Workshop's Inferno! Magazine in the late 90's. Necromunda is a sub-setting of the Warhammer 40k universe. Basically, the game developers wanted something more in the way of blending a cyberpunk feel with Mad Max I would say. In aesthetic it rather feels like a resurrection of their Dark Future setting which kicked off with [b:Route 666 15294471 Route 666 David Pringle https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1339086229l/15294471.SY75.jpg 49185842]. Dark Future had gangs and high speed car chases, which was extremely Mad Max inspired (Dark Future spawned out of another game called Battle Cars mind you), but it was its own setting. I think they wanted to bring that feel back, because it is super fun, but in trying to make it a bit more successful they tied into the wildly popular game Warhammer 40,000.All the creators really did was take a lot of these elements and just create a game set on a single planet in the Warhammer 40k universe. In this case we find ourselves on the hive world Necromunda. These planets are necessary in the Imperium because it provides important resources for the military machine conquering and fighting in the Warhammer 40k setting. Since we get to focus our time on a single world, though, we can dive deeper into the inner workings of that area. What is the political structure? What is the economy like? In this regard it starts to feel a lot more like the usual Blade Runner or William Gibson novel. The [b:Necromunda Rulebook 2760000 Necromunda Rulebook Rick Priestley https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1329235343l/2760000.SX50.jpg 2785708] board game (1995), however, focuses much more on just the gang warfare of the lower levels of the hive. This gives it that post-apocalyptic Mad Max vibe as you play the game in the rotting bowels of the Underhive. Once again, Games Workshop has tried to blend as many things as possible into a single setting, much like they tried to blend every single Sci-Fi concept into Warhammer 40k. Sometimes I think it is absolutely overkill in 40k, but I have to admit, I think it rather works for the Necromunda setting. Necromunda is gritty and dark gang warfare in a really interesting environment, which makes the whole thing really fun to play.This first batch of stories were short tie-in stories and even though the game came out in 1995, the first story didn't hit until 1997. One of the interesting things about Necromunda when these stories were first being written is that in 1995, I think Games Workshop just wanted to make a game based on rival gangs, so when writing the stories there wasn't really a lot of lore baggage that authors had to worry about like those writing for 40k.A World Above (May 1998) , The Daemon Bottle (July 1997), Rat in the Walls (September 1999) by Alex HammondInterestingly the first story in this anthology is not the first story written for the Necromunda setting. The first story written in Necromunda, is by Alex Hammond, but it is his second story in this anthology. A World Above first appeared in Inferno! Issue 6 and it doesn't seem to have much to do with The Daemon Bottle, which makes it more maddening that the stories aren't in order, and what's worse Rat in the Walls does have to do with A World Above and it comes much later in the anthology. I really wish they had grouped things together in a more sensible fashion... I realize that it gives it that magazine issue feel, where you read a different short story in between Hammond's stories, but when reading an anthology like this, it's annoying.That complaint aside, A World Above introduces us to the character Knife Edge Liz of the Escher gang and a leader of her own little team. This story feels extremely inspired by [b:The Most Dangerous Game 157076 The Most Dangerous Game Richard Connell https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1554310590l/157076.SX50.jpg 151586], although, it ends up feeling more like Ice-T's movie Surviving the Game (which I thought was an entertaining movie for what it was). Essentially, some of the nobles have been working with a Hive merchant of sorts to set up hunting scenarios where they get to hunt some “underhive scum” as they put it. The gangs are enticed into traps by a go-between because he hires the gangs to go somewhere for a job, but it turns out to be an ambush by the nobles. In this case, they just aren't prepared for Liz.One of the things Hammond does that is interesting for the Necromunda setting is the battle in this story takes place in the upper Spires of the city. Most of the Necromunda world is set in the Hive or lower, rarely the Spires where the nobles live. So, to bring a gang warfare element to the upper echelons of the city is pretty different. The story is fast paced and action packed. Once it gets going I really enjoyed it, my one complaint is that Hammond tried to sort of re-create the battle in this weird flash-back styled setting, which can work, but I think it felt a bit convoluted at times since it was such a short tale. After this, readers are probably better off skipping to Rat in the Walls.With Rat in the Walls I will say that I actually found the story a bit unexpected in the way it turns out. First off, I expected it to be a sort of revenge hunt based on the first story, and it is that, but it's a bit more. Liz finds out a man named Ran Lo is the noble behind the hunts in the Underhive, so she's seeking them. Remember though, she's been heavily injured and while stalking around in the upper levels she winds up passing out and is discovered! Now, I'd expect her to be strung up and killed immediately, however, her discoverer heals her and everything! The reason is steeped in political intrigue of the noble caste, which I wasn't expecting at all based on the first foray into Necromunda. I won't give it away, as it was a good twist. My one complaint is that at the beginning the story feels a bit haphazard as Liz is wandering around, but once we get into the meat of the story it even outs quite a bit. The ending of the story was fine, but it's got basically the same ending as The Daemon Bottle and it just seems like Hammond can think of only one ending.The Daemon Bottle is the first story published in the Necromunda setting, but appears on the middle of this anthology. I have to say, it wasn't a very good story, so I can see when arranging this book they started us off with A World Above. The Daemon Bottle is told from a first person perspective and is the story of a half-rat half-man named Sarak. He's a weak and sniveling character that has gotten himself into some rather hot water with a gang leader. He owes the man money and can't pay, so instead he sends Sarak on a dangerous job to kill off someone that stands in the way of his trade. The problem is the person is with the wretched people that live deeper in the Hive, so it's not even in the Underhive. These are the rejects and mutants of the more civilized society, but they are a nuisance and raid trade caravans from time to time, thus Sarak, is tasked with helping. It may seem like Sarak is a bad choice, but the fact that he's half-rat can help him blend into this area of the hive a little bit more, the problem is Sarak is a little more intelligent and he's not a full brainless mutant like the others. It was an okay first story, the “Daemon Bottle” name refers to the popular drink Wildsnake, which causes hallucinations to the drinker. It's basically Absynth, but back in the original games development they allowed a little bit more leeway and in this story Sarak has managed to tap into the realms of Chaos. We don't really get to see that fact until the very end of the story and it's not something they kept in the stories or game of the future, but in this initial tale... we have an interestingly unique thing for Necromunda.The Day of Thirst (May 1998) by Tully R. SummersThis was first published in Inferno! Magazine #6. I've read through all the Hammond material first and I'm rather glad I did because he wrote the earliest story and his other two are related. So, now I'm going back and reading The Day of Thirst. Initially I didn't think this was going to be a first person perspective story, but after a couple pages it suddenly shifts and we, the reader, realize we've been hearing the story through the lens of a bartender. It's very unusual to bring the bartender along on any kind of adventure and in that regard this story is rather unique, because the bartender gets roped into a conflict when another man is sorely needed. Basically, one of the patrons gets into a fight with an Escher gang and vows to fight them. Since he's down a man, they enlist the bartender to round out the crew. Naturally, in the game of Necromunda skirmishes there is a specific size of the gang you face off against, so this is clearly in need of accommodating the rules of the game. The Escher gang presented in this story is highly unusual. They are, sort of, performing rituals of blood to feed creatures or something. It has a lot of Lovecraftian vibes in that regard, with the leader reading from something akin to the Necronomicon. It's strange to me, because it seems more like the Redemptionists would be doing this sort of thing, but it might be a bit in character for the Escher with their penchant for genetic engineering and creating creatures.This story really does read like a blow by blow report of someone playing the game Necromunda. In that regard, it's a rather forgettable story and certainly doesn't stand out very much. The problem is that the story was so short there's no real way to get to know any of the characters. And since we're mostly here for some semblance of action, all we're going to get is an action report. Summers does try to round things up a little bit more, but once the conflict starts, it's just a small conflict in the realms of Necromunda.Bad Spirits (November 1997) by Jonathan GreenThis story was originally published in Inferno! Magazine #3. I rather enjoyed this short story, it's a bit longer than the prior story by Summers, so that might have something to do with it. Green's take on a Necromunda short, felt more compelling in pretty in line with the setting. The one thing that strikes me in the first stories so far is that almost none of the stories have to do with gang warfare... not in the spirit of playing the actual game at least. The other strange feature, is aside from the story arc concerning Liz in the first story, every single story so far has had ratskin characters or involves dealing with them. It's like the authors thought this was really what set Necromunda apart from other settings, so these creatures must be involved in everything! I'm not sure how realistic that is, given how prejudice regular people are supposed to be against them. I've got nothing against the ratskin characters, but I'm just saying there's more to this setting than them to make it feel “different”.In this story we follow a bounty hunter named Creed and thankfully this is not told in the first person! I don't mind first person too much, but I feel like an overabundance of what I read lately is first person and I tire of it. Anyway, Creed has been hired to do a job, and weirdly we never really get too much insight into what his job is for a while, but as far as I can tell this story doesn't really take place in the Underhive. It takes place on the outskirts and uncovering secrets in an old mine. Archeotech is pretty sought after in the realms of Warhammer 40k and Necromunda is an old occupied planet dating back before the Dark Age of Technology, so it stands to reason there may be some treasures out the somewhere. The miner in the story thinks he's found such a cash, but something is massively going wrong.The main problem stems from the fact that the Ratskins and the Van Saar have teamed up to plunder the mine... but in addition to that they may uncovered something in the deep. In some ways that whole concept feels very Tolkien. However, there is certainly no Balrog waiting in the depths. When Creed goes to investigate, naturally, a firefight breaks out. Amidst this the “monster” appears and at first the description felt like it might be a Penitent Engine, which would have been pretty awesome, but alas, the author never says.In the end, I think Green wrote a fun and fast paced story. It's still pretty early in the days of Necromunda, so I understand why maybe some material isn't as fleshed out. However, I was pleased to see a gang other than Escher show up in major battles.Badlands Skelter's Downhive Monster Show (March, 1999) by Matthew FarrerThis story originally appeared in Inferno! Magazine #11. At first I was worried I wouldn't be very into this tale. Skelter's Downhive Monster Show is basically a circus type of concept that travels from town to town. They have acrobatics, strong men, and other acts as well, but one of the big draws are the exotic creatures they've captured in various places in the Underhive and probably lower. Now, I'm not exactly big on circus stories, so I wasn't immediately taken with the tale, but it does get pretty decent by the end.Skelter and his crew are entering a town they've never visited before, Fever's Break, trying to expand their reach to new areas. Unfortunately for them, the town has quite a few members of the Cawdor gang. And worse, they've somehow run afoul of Redemptionists, even though it is never explicitly stated that is what they are. According to the Redemptionists, the circus will be too much of a distraction for the population when they could be better off spending their time praying to the Emperor. The Redemptionists have little recourse due to the fact that Skelter carries the proper paper work giving him license to practice. I'm sure you can gather what happens next, given the fact that this is Necromunda and it's all about gang warfare.The story is pretty well done and I did enjoy it by the end. Once things really kick off it was quite exciting. However, unlike some really good short stories where I want more, I was pretty happy with where this ended. It's a short sweet tale and it doesn't really leave us salivating for more or anything.Mark of a Warrior (July, 2000) by Richard WilliamsThis story originally appeared in Inferno! Magazine #19. This story was on the much shorter side of things and features a gang perspective many other authors seem to not discuss. Firstly, it's about the Goliaths gang and from what I've read so far, it seems to be the gang that is left out a bit. Maybe they are an oversimplified archetype of bruisers or something, so people don't find as much substance there. Williams tried to give it a bit more depth in this story of a young recruit trying to pass a test to get into the Goliaths gang.This story is told in the first person and it makes a lot of sense to do it that way in this case. This gives us insight into the delusions of grandeur only a young person would dream up, not to mention doing so in a potentially dangerous situation. It serves to high light how young the character really is, so in that way there is a bit of a brutality to asking a young person to fight for their lives in the hopes to prove themselves worthy. It's a one dimensional story really and Williams does a good job of not waxing too poetic or taking too dense of a take on the information, instead he sticks to the main tale he wants to tell and when it is done, it's done. It's a good tale of what youth's expectations are and what reality is ready to actually serve up. In the end, it's not the best story in the anthology, but it's not terrible or anything.Rites of Passage (January, 1998) by Gordon RennieThis story originally appeared in Inferno! Magazine #4. Rites of Passage is another story about recruits similar to Mark of a Warrior except this story features House Orlock. It's a similar test where they expect the juves to take on a battle in the Underhive in order to be allowed into the gang officially. The intended battle was a brawl with other gangers, but this story ends up being similar to the Goliath's tale where they end up coming across a single opponent. Granted it's not a monster of the lower levels of the Hive, instead it's a monster from the upper levels a Spyrer.I think the nature of Spyrer's have changed over time and they don't seem to be mentioned in the 2018 edition of the game so far. I rather like their incarnation in the middle era of 2005 or so where they are treated like a special forces group for nobles to send into the Hive and lower solving delicate problems. In this earlier version they seem to be strung out hunters that go into the Underhive simply to rack up a body count for reasons. So, in our story the Orlock juves are walking into a massacre, where they think they'll be equally matched against other fighters, only to find out everyone has been slaughtered by a near invincible spyrer. The juves in the story have their own issues and in some respects couldn't get of their own way in the face of the spyrer, so the story was alright. It felt like I had just read a story like this, so it seemed a tad repetitive. In the end I think I liked this one a little bit better than Mark of a Warrior.Sisters (January, 1999) by Neil RutledgeThe table of contents in the front of the book is actually incorrect and Sisters appears before the The Lake in the printing.This story originally appeared in Inferno! Magazine #10. This is another story featuring the Escher gang and this story was actually pretty well done. It actually felt like it had a character in it beyond just having someone get into a skirmish. We follow an aging Escher named Blades, the leader of her gang, to clean up an issue. The problem is that a zombie seems to have wandered into her territory. She resolves the problem and it was pretty solid Necromundan fun.The Lake (November, 1998) by Tully R. SummersThis story originally appeared in Inferno! Magazine #9. This story was okay, kind of strange. Hunting spider eyes, but being turned into a genetic anomaly instead.Descent by Simon JowettUnlike the prior tales, this closing novella is unique to this anthology. This novella wasn't very good at all. It felt very haphazardly written as if the author lost track of his own writing and suddenly remembered where he was. He tries to jump around with time a lot and it's extremely confusing the way he does it. The main character is named Kayne... I can't read it as anything but Kanye. Kayne seeks to find the Hunting party he left in the Underhive, but encounters dangerous Archaeotech instead.

It seems awfully strange to review and read something from Warhammer 40,000 second edition, when the tenth edition of the game just came out. However, I was reading an Adeptas Sororitas novel by James Swallow and I just didn't know that much about the sisters, so I figured I'd pick up a codex. Since the game had a new edition coming, I wanted to wait for an updated codex... so why an old edition. First off, I really love the old art style from the early Warhammer days and sometimes I'll pick these up just for artistic reasons. Don't get me wrong, the new art is awesome, but there's just something about the old days that I enjoy for nostalgic reasons. And here we are a second edition Codex for the Sisters of Battle.

As I said, the old art is great, and that stands true throughout this codex. So, if you're a fan of the historical art of Warhammer, these old game books are certainly worth adding to your archives. You may not use them in game, unless you are really fiending for a 2nd edition game, but they are certainly fun to look at. All the art and photographs of the old miniatures are really quite wonderful in my opinion.

The Adeptas Sororitas are a military unit that are involved with the religious arm of the Warhammer 40k war machine. The Ecclesiarchy is clearly inspired by the Holy Roman Emperor concept drawn from our own human history. The Sisters are, effectively, a militarized variation of “warrior nuns” as it were. As such, the game designers tried to set things up more like a standard fair Catholic styled church order, where the Priests are the ones really running the show. So, this book covers more than just what you'd expect to find in a military order of warrior nuns.

This pretty much gave me what I was looking for, I wanted to read a bit of the history of the founding of the Sisters of Battle and a codex is really designed to do that as well as give you details on how certain in game units behave. But I was mainly here for the history. I don't know how much the history of the Sisters has evolved since 1997 when this first came out, but I imagine this overview is good enough. The first half lays out the foundation of the Sisters order during a very dark time of the Imperium which was later set on the “righteous path” by Sebastian Thor. Basically, the daughters were mislead and used by a heretic leader Vadelis and once the Sisters were shown the error of their ways, they were instrumental in felling the heretic. Ever since then the Sisters have been a specialized unit used to keep the power in the Imperium in check. They are instrumental in making sure no single leader can gain too much power again. It was a really interesting and well written history.

I was slightly disappointed in the second half, but I think the game has changed a bit since this was published. As I said, there is a lot of writing about the priests and other characters that really “run the show” as the religion will certainly be male dominated. So, the second half is rather devoted more to the men involved that the Sisters follow. The thing that I didn't like was that when it got to the stories and some of the history the Sisters aren't really even mentioned in these parts. Like they're just not even there... The stories were good and I found them interesting, but I couldn't help but wonder, why they were in this codex if they didn't even feature the Sisters. Instead they were more about what the Confessors or the Frateris are doing.

This is why I think some stuff has changed since the 2nd edition. In the modern boxes of the miniatures I don't see too much in the way of these guys around, so I'm rather looking forward to a more Sisters devoted Codex in the updated versions. I could be wrong, I haven't played the game in a very long time and I'm only diving in again with the 10th edition and never played Sisters before, so we'll see how it goes!

Definitely a 3.5 most of the time.

I think “Labyrinth” was one of the earliest Aliens comics I ever picked up and it was around the time I first started buying comics when I was little. One could argue that these comics were certainly not for a 5th grader, but decades later here I am still a fan of Aliens. My first exposure to “Labyrinth” was very positive and I really liked the comic and the way they setup the whole mad scientist scenario was fascinating to me. However, as an adult and trying to revisit these tales in the order of publication, I think this story is pretty good. I think as a child seeing it was so new and fresh I rather favored it more, but now, I think I have read better Aliens stories and there is at least one thing I thought was “stupid” in this book.

Aliens “Labyrinth” returns to the tried and true theme of scientists studying the Alien organism. It's certainly a logical progression story wise, but if you read the comics in publication order this does seem like it might be a bit too predictable as it starts. For the first two issues things run in pretty much the same fashion as an earlier story, however, I must give credit where credit is due and Jim Woodring takes a twist by the third issue that is very unpredictable.

In this story we have a new military liaison, Crespi, being sent to a research facility, the pilot that flew him there, McGiunness, is also interested in the secretive research being done there. These two are and their possible subterfuge of the facility are a major part of the story. The lead scientist in this facility is Dr. Church and, honestly, he's probably the best part of this entire story. He's an excellent mad scientist and the traumatic experience he has at the hands of the Aliens in his past does an excellent job of explaining his obsession. His research may not exactly coincide with legality, but, as usual, many corporations and the military are willing to turn a blind eye to what he is doing in the name of progress. Crespi and McGuinness might have a different opinion on his work and this is where the greater conflict comes from in the story.

The part of the story I actually didn't like was the whole background tale of Dr. Church. Now, I think a lot of what Woodring came up with was actually a really interesting idea, so don't get me wrong. Essentially, when Church was younger his parents were terraformers and so he has a bit of that Newt quality to his background. However, on one of the planets they visit an Alien hive had been established and naturally he and his family get taken by the Aliens. The hive is very different from any of the other Aliens stories, because for whatever reason the hive is sort of dying or it's not a viable hive. I thought this concept was incredibly different and a really good idea. However, the weirdness of how the Aliens behave was not that great, in my opinion. In this situation they do all kinds of weird things with the humans like torture them and "study" them or whatever you want to call it. It just seemed far more out of character for the Aliens than you'd ever expect. And then there is a part where one of the females from Church's ship "gives birth" to a brood of Aliens, which makes no real sense physiologically speaking for the Aliens. However, to me, it seems like this spawned some of the ideas we'd later see in the writing of [b:Alien Resurrection|271378|Alien Resurrection|A.C. Crispin|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1385163770l/271378._SY75_.jpg|263094], which was a pretty good film until the whole Alien/Human hybrid showed up. The whole Alien scene from Church's past, while at first a novel and very cool idea, quickly descended into something out of character and sometimes stupid. I think Woodring was trying to show that Church was insane and he experienced all myriad of unspeakable horrors in that hive, which is true. But it was just out of character for the Aliens in my opinion. They came off as being caricatures of something Sade would write about.

The art, overall, was pretty okay. Killian Plunkett did an okay job, I think some of his art at this time feels a bit more like he's just throwing together a sketch, but he does do an excellent job of capturing the mood and atmosphere of the scenes. Honestly, that's all you really need for this kind of stuff. Capturing those elements are for more important than presenting a highly perfect and movie replicated drawing in my opinion anyway.

In the end, I still liked “Labyrinth,” it was just a bit more diminished than when I first read the story. There are a lot of good ideas in here and some rather unpredictable twists, so it's definitely excellent writing in that regard and if you're a fan of Aliens, I still think the Dr. Church character is one of the better mad scientists created in the universe.

Sometimes a 4.5 for me. Losing a point for the sexism though for sure.

Usually I like to read books in the order they were released, but this is my first foray into the world of Necromunda. I believe this is the third book published in that setting so far. However, this is the first book in a trilogy featuring the bounty hunter Kal Jerico. Now, I don't know if the original game books featured him as a character when they were released in the 90's and this is the first attempt at a novelization, or if this an entirely original character made up by the authors... I might pick up a copy of the original game book someday to find out, plus I do like a lot of the old art from the original game compared to the new 2020 edition. Both editions look cool, there's just something about that old art that is nostalgic for me I suppose, but I never played Necromunda when it was originally published.

All that being said, I think this novel lived up to my expectations. It's a novel from the mid 2000's and a game franchise tie-in to boot, so you should not expect a complex tale or anything people would consider “high literature,” which can be stuffy and boring, so yes, it has its downsides too! But, if you're after stupid fun, this book could hit the mark. Now, I love the Necromunda setting, but being across the pond, I don't always get a whiff of what's going out of the UK until it's been released for years and thus I have recently found novels from this setting! Given the length of the book you can expect a short campaign styled story that will feel like an RPG session that was run over a few nights at most. The world build of Necromunda is rather short on details and I think the expectation of the authors is that the reader will be somewhat familiar with the setting and potentially Warhammer 40k in general, so this book tends to focus mainly on the action. Which, I think is probably true to form of the Necromunda game style at the time with it being more about fast paced gang warfare.

Kal Jerico isn't a ganger, in fact, he's a bounty hunter and he works for the highest bidder as it were. Kal is, by far, the most fleshed out character since the book is primarily about him, but we get some insight into his companions Yolanda and Scabbs. Yolanda, an ex-member of the Escher gang, was probably my favorite character, and I think she was probably the most badass of the whole group. In “Blood Royal” there are a string of mysterious murders, which start with the deaths of other bounty hunters. The curious part is that upon finding the bodies they are all drained of their blood and swiftly this turns into a bounty given to hunt for a vampire. Now, I think vampires are kind of stupid, so I groaned whenever I ran into this. I know Warhammer 40k tries to basically include everything from every imagined setting ever, but could we not have a focus on this? However, I was pleased to see that it's not really the same thing here. The vampire in question is a corrupted individual from the upper classes in the spire and now they are hunting in the Hive and even the Underhive. So, Kal and his crew take the contract and try to hunt down the vampire.

Amidst all this, there is a conspiracy brewing in the up spire area and Kal finds himself stumbling into a bigger situation than he ever expected. As usual, the problems of the nobles have trickled down to the Underhive and the remnants of a small Escher gang, the Wildcats, with Kal find themselves crossing paths with a Spyrer force from the spire. Will they figure out that in order to beat the vampire? Or will they continue to fight each other? The book does a pretty solid job of presenting that conflict in an action packed way and with an outcome that I found rather enjoyable in the end.

Naturally, there are a few problems here and there. If you are not familiar with Necromunda it can feel kind of overwhelming to have the characters travelling all over the place from the Hive, to the Underhive, to the Wastes and to the Spire. So, this is probably not a book you can pick up totally unfamiliar with the situation. The worst part of the book is the writing of the female characters. As readers we are treated to a description of all of their boobs. Every character is “buxom,” the word of the day in that authors mind for sure. I think they managed to vary it up once and say “voluptuous” in one scene. But rest assured, when female characters are running from one place to another, we certainly get some insight on how their chest is reacting. There is no balance here, men are not described similarly. There are no Conan level characters, no Adonis to fawn over. I even tried to figure out a justification for this in some respects to the setting since a lot of the women were from the Escher gang and the Escher gang is into genetics.... so, maybe they were “enhancing” their feminine features more? So uh... it was important for us to be aware of that? Yes, uhm.... that's it. I just can't give these guys the benefit of the doubt though, because there is one scene where a female bounty hunter is killed, she is literally in the book for a couple of paragraphs before being killed... but do we walk away knowing her chest size? Oh for sure we do! Pertinent information, now we can feel bad about her death right? We shall mourn the boobs lost on this day... much tragedy. It's kind of a good thing the rest of the book was mostly just action packed fun, because otherwise I think I would have fixated on how stupid this was and hated the book. It's almost an attempt at fan service without it being an anime/manga! So, basically, you really can't stand fan service, parts of this book will be truly tedious. With games like this at this time frame, I do expect a degree of male gaze writing, it's still bad writing though and hopefully the newer launch fixes some of it. I am not opposed to fan service per se, I have nothing wrong with women being described as attractive or hot even... it's just the excessiveness of it or the imbalance with male characters that makes it bad or if that's all these characters have to them with no other substance. Sure, real life people can be shallow, but we'd hardly consider them interesting to read about in a book.

There were two other poorly written parts with female characters and when you run into it, it feels like the two authors just forgot what the other had written. There are two women on the Spyrer team, apparently, but for the longest time you think there is only one. The first one we meet, Chimone, goes on an internal monologue about being the only female Spyrer and proving herself etc. In a play to give her character a lot more depth and so on. But then later on, I guess they forgot about that part of the book and we find out another Spyrer Leoni was female the whole time?? It's just confusing.

The detractions are sort of made up a bit with the conspiracy that interfaces with the spire. The political intrigue aspect of this book was kind of interesting and unexpected in a book this short. So, I did kind of enjoy that and we got to see quite a few of the major characters playing in the Necromunda world. Sometimes I think the authors tried to include too many characters though. They really should have streamlined how many people they included in this book or, you know, maybe spent less time giving names to all the women and describing how “buxom” they all were. I think there is one woman in the whole book where we never learned about her breasts and I was shocked, because I was waiting to find out by the end!

In the end, this book is stupid fun if you can get beyond some of the writing style and some slight inconsistencies internally. Kal and his friends are a cool group to read about and it's good fun with a bit of hijinks for good measure. So, if you're familiar with Necromunda and want fast paced fun in that environment, I think this novel hits the mark in that regard. Just don't wander in expecting a gritty and tense noire tale or anything like that.

Easily a 4.5I've taken a bit of a break from the world of BattleTech since I finished all the major story arcs of the early setting. But now, I've dived back in with an author I've never heard of and boy what a ride this novel was. I ended up tearing through this book once it got going, because I really just had to find out what happened next! If you've been reading my reviews you'll notice that at some point I start to complain about the fact that none of the BattleTech books have been about the Free World's League, and it felt like that entire place was sort of an after thought for the game developers! Well, I am happy to report we finally have our first full novel in that setting.I will admit, I was a bit worried at first, because when the first part of the book kicked off with just “politics,” I was concerned we'd be in for a slog. To make matters worse the major motivation seemed to relate things to the tales of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Ideal War centers on the creation of the Knights of the Inner Sphere by Thomas Marik, one of the major leaders of the Free Worlds League. In the book our actual main character, Paul Masters, meets with Marik about the concept of forming the knighthood. In fact, Marik gives Masters a copy of Malory's “[b:Le Morte Arthur. the Adventures of Sir Launcelot Du Lake, Ed. by T. Ponton 27447419 Le Morte Arthur. the Adventures of Sir Launcelot Du Lake, Ed. by T. Ponton Thomas Malory https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1452925525l/27447419.SY75.jpg 1361856]. Allegedly Masters reads this book cover to cover in the course of a day or two, because it is so amazing and engrossing, to the point where he never even left his room. I've never read a book “this good” and I find it hard to believe Arthurian legends are this engrossing. Maybe I'm just being cynical.Since BattleMechs are basically a proxy for the armor worn by knights in the middle ages, it does make sense to relate these things. However, if we were just going to get a medieval tale of chivalrous knights just recast in a sci-fi setting, I was prepared to be less than impressed and rather bored. Kubasik doesn't do this at all! Instead, he crafts an excellent story that challenges the entire concept of having a knightly code. Presenting the idea that living by such ideals is actually a very fragile thing and it might not take much for things to collapse. Now, usually I find the paladin archetype to be insufferable, but I think Kubasik did a fine job of balancing out our main hero Masters. While he definitely has the Paladin like qualities and he sort of expects people to follow a code of ethics in war, it makes more sense, because he really just expects wars to be conducted by the restrictions of the Ares Convention. However, on backwater worlds that are not being watched very closely, he finds out that things are not always done according to the rules.This story takes place on the planet Gibson (for some reason I assume it's named after the author [a:William Gibson 9226 William Gibson https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1373826214p2/9226.jpg], however, I am too lazy to look that up just now.) As with most BattleTech books there is a lot of political intrigue behind the scenes of ongoing battles. After the Battle of Tukayyid there was a schism in the realms of ComStar. At this point ComStar has split and the offshoot faction The Word of Blake has broken away from the original order. Thomas Marik promised them refuge on the planet Gibson, because of Gibson's rather tolerant outlook on differing religious factions. However, Word of Blake has ingrained itself into the planet politics, which were already toxic upon its arrival. An uprising had already been in play, however, rather than try to find a solution and help the people, Word of Blake threw their lot in with the already corrupted officials. It turns out the tactics they are willing to employ are rather beyond the pale, as Masters is soon to discover.Marik sends Masters to the planet in order to assist in finding a peaceful solution, but what he finds is that he has been thrown into a den of intrigue with liars and zealots. The best way I can think of to describe this novel is that it's sort of like taking a knight from the time of Arthur with all those sensibilities and throwing them into the Vietnam War or something akin to that. Everything operation Masters encounters is more insane and immoral than the next. He finds the enemy could include children and rather than be horrified at this, the Word of Blake just counts them as an enemy to be tallied slaughtering towns entirely with their ‘Mechs. It is an absolutely wild ride and so much more is going on than I describe here, so don't think I'm giving too much away.Usually I rather complain if a novel wraps up too quickly, but in the case of Ideal War I think the abrupt ending makes a lot of sense. So, it ends in a fashion that I felt satisfied with for the most part. The only thing I was dissatisfied with is that we never learned what happened to Masters' astech Jen. She was a cool character, and I think we are meant to assume she is alive and well by the end of the book? However, it is never expressly stated. The book also ends with something completely shocking, something I wasn't ready to see this early in the BattleTech setting... so get ready for a shock by the end of this book.If you are a fan of the BattleTech setting then I can't imagine someone would find this book terrible. Maybe three stars at the worst. For me, though, I loved it. It was an intense ride and quite the page turner. This was exactly the type of book I was looking to read after reading a couple of novels that went a bit slower (not BattleTech novels mind you).

Honestly, 1.5 stars

What started off as a relatively promising book fleshing out the world of Dead Island quickly nose dived into “did this author play the game?” Now, I'm reading this many years after both titles have been released, in fact, I've just finished up playing Dead Island 2 which came out very recently to give people an idea of the time frame we're talking about here. I think the developer had set this novel up to be released simultaneously with the game, because I can't seriously believe the author had access to a finished copy of the game or even played the game in order for this book to be the outcome. Instead, I assume they were given some synopsis or storyboarding details, but not much beyond that. Some of the changes Morris employed are just absolutely maddening to read.

First off, I just want to say, this game had no need to be novelized. The game isn't particularly hard, nor is it all that scary. Scary survivalist horror would be something on par with Dead Space, but Dead Island is a zombie shooter/action RPG game really. I was ramping up for the release of Dead Island 2 and decided to revisit the first game in preparation. I'm kind of glad I did, because the second game has some small details from our first adventures on Banoi. I also had a copy of the book, so I figured, why not, I'll dive into this as well. They never wrote any other novels in the Dead Island universe, and after reading this, I can sort of see why.

If you've never played or heard of Dead Island, the basic gist of the story is that the player characters arrive on the island of Banoi a tropical island near Papua New Guinea. Your character wakes up the next day in the hotel to the aftermath of a zombie outbreak that ravaged the island overnight. The outbreak is so fast it's just terrifying in that regard, but we soon find out that our intrepid heroes are actually immune to the virus. There's a lot of overlapping story lines, one of which involves a cannibalistic tribe where the disease may have originated from, however, there is a shadowy organization that seems to know a lot more than it should about the whole affair. Deep mysteries that are later brought up more in Dead Island 2. In any event, your character now need to fight their way through a city of zombies to try and find a way off of the island. As someone who doesn't care much about zombies or zombie stories, I actually rather enjoyed this game and it won me over with enough different things to make it fun.

Honestly, I had high hopes for this book at first, even if I didn't need the story of the game re-told to me. Morris started off by fleshing out the characters and a bit of the background of their arrival on the island. The details he fleshed out here along with the first stages of the outbreak at the hotel were wonderful! I was pretty excited because it was shaping up to be a solid four star read, especially if he could capture the fast paced action of the game. I was curious how we would incorporate some of the side quest components, but at this point I was confident it would be a fun light read. But then we got into the thick of it... after our player characters leave the hotel this novel is pretty much all downhill. Character development kind of takes a back seat, which is a real shame, because if the game lacked anything, it was a deeper look at our characters. But since the author couldn't have played through the game, he wrote their post hotel forays rather poorly.

When the zombies first appear, Morris spends way too much time explaining what the various zombies look like. Pages upon pages of these descriptions whenever the group encounters a zombie and this just gets extremely tedious to read after a while. It also makes the book feel extremely unbalanced, because about half way through he stops doing this. (Granted, I was thankful he stopped.) In the second half of the book he just has the crew running around blowing away zombies with very little description of them. It would have made more sense to sift his detailed descriptions throughout the book, because as it's written, it just feels overwhelming at the beginning... not to mention boring after a while.

He gets hung up on strange details as well. For example, in many of the encounters the team has with zombies there are often child zombies in the group. Now, there are no child zombies in the game, for rather obvious reasons. Granted, Morris is probably accurate in his portrayal that child zombies would certainly exist on this resort island and their existence isn't really where I have a problem. It's the fact that he dives into the details describing the child zombie and then how the characters kill or destroy the child. Like, it comes up a lot in this book, way more than it should. I think he was trying to use it as a “growth” concept for his characters where they needed to do truly horrible things to survive... and I guess that's fine, but you only really needed to explain it to me once.

The first NPC you really run into in the game is a life guard named Sinamoi. He and a decent sized group of people are holed up in a building on the beach. Sinamoi wants your help to get these people to a better location in the lifeguard tower. Sinamoi is basically an Australian guy working for the resort. In the novel... we first run into him at the hotel and he's by himself. This single event made me have all kinds of red flags about where this was going. Furthermore, Sinamoi didn't speak English very well, and didn't seem to understand everything and seemed to generally be a nuisance for our characters after a certain point. Meanwhile, in the video game Sinamoi spoke great English and he was a very capable leader. In the book, the rescue of other people is pretty much entirely forgotten... except for Jin.

The true downfall with the story hits when we encounter the character Jin. In the game Jin is a young NPC who our characters have the opportunity to rescue. She ends up following us to different safe zones in the game and she even comes with us to end sequence. Jin's character is a bit of a tragic case, because we first encounter her and her father, but her father had been recently bitten. However, we need his help to outfit a vehicle, since he's a mechanic, and we need him to do it before he turns. He agrees to help us, as long as we agree to take his daughter Jin to safety with us. Obviously we agree. All of this happens in the book, except that we seem to not have a vehicle nor have no need for one. Instead the main characters just agree to help Jin. (The in game characters would agree as well, but the RPG aspect/quest concept to get materials to outfit the truck is part of the fun.)

Once you get into the greater city, the safe zone is a church. Once we get in there, we basically park Jin in there with all the people in the church. In the novel, there are very few people in there and the characters don't talk to many of them. However, Morris does give us a nice glimpse into the world of side questing when the people at the church ask the characters to go and get a cache of guns at the police station. In the game, you do go to the police station, but it is overrun by zombies already and you are there for a totally different reason. In the book they take Jin to the police station with them instead of leaving her at the church for...uh... reasons? Well, Morris had a reason. Inside the police station are three escaped convicts that are holed up there. The characters stupidly tell them they have a code for the armory and can get them access to more guns. The convicts tell the characters to go get them food and leave Jin and the guy who knows the codes behind as insurance? Then they'll make the trade. This entire setup literally makes no real sense, but it happened and the reason it happened was so that Jin could be raped by all three guys while the player characters go get food. So now, Jin has lost her father and has been raped... this never happened in the video game mind you. The worst part of the book is that later on Logan tells a rape joke and it's just so out there, because he never did such types of comments before and at this point in the story he was supposed start becoming a more redeemable character. You know, still sort of an asshole, but not as bad. So, it felt like the author just went out of their way to tell a rape joke at the expense of a new victim.

Jin is actually kept behind by prisoners in the game, but it is not at the police station referenced in the novel. It is in the actual prison at the end of the game, but, once again, nothing bad actually happens to her there. She's also there with someone else and they aren't harmed either. Jin at the police station is a complete fabrication by the author.

Now fast forward a little more into the story, we get to a point in the game/story where we encounter the cannibal tribe I referenced above. Part of that arc involves rescuing a tribe girl named Yerema. Part of the rescue you find out that she too was imprisoned and ritually raped by her tribe. At this point, this theme is getting frustrating and getting into generally bad writing territory. Every woman doesn't need this to happen in order for them to be relevant characters in a story. In fact, Morris addresses this aspect of the characters so poorly I just wanted this book over with and I was glad when it wrapped up somewhat quickly.

When we get to the prison we run into Kevin and he is presented as the leader of the prisoners. This is not true in the game. Someone else is in charge and Kevin is sent to help us do certain tasks. The main points of the ending are entirely changed and just wind up being way different from the game. I don't know why the ending was changed, but the book has a way worse ending. Some portions of it are the same, but major story implications are not. To the point where I can't believe they said it was fine, if they had a say at all, which they might not have.

In the end, if you are a fan of Dead Island, skip out on this book. It really wound up being a one star toward by the end. I'm giving it two, because I did actually enjoy the beginning of the book. That part was great fun, but then it started to quickly drop to a three star. Then two... and finally one when we get to the botched ending. I can see why no other novels were made. Honestly, they should have written a novel that wasn't about the main characters, but instead fleshed out the universe a bit more. In fact, they should have never opted for a simultaneous release and instead commissioned a novel later and hired an author that had played the game so they could capture the real story and atmosphere of the outbreak. Remember, the game is fun, the novel is not.

Jumps around between 2.5 and 3.5I wound up reading this book, because I picked up the second book at a library sale and it sounded awesome. Anything that is described as a wild ride through a Mad Max styled waste land can usually get my attention. When I got home though and entered the book into goodreads, I saw that it was a sequel. So, I could not read my new book right away, so I ordered a copy of the first book as I prefer reading things in order, even if it doesn't matter. Interestingly, I don't think it matters that much for these books, they just take place in the same universe.As far as I can tell, this is the debut novel for this author. Debut novels are either off the charts amazing or a good start for an author to grow into a great author. That being said, my take away from this book was that it was okay. It was pretty fun, as promised, but it wasn't on the same level as Mad Max and things of that nature. A lot of this is likely due to the usual, first novel growing pains, but that can lead to five star books in the future and I do rather like the way K.S. Merebeth writes, so I'm hopeful for her future novels.Now, as far as Merebeth's post apocalyptic world build is concerned, it feels somewhat sparse, I guess. It has that 1980's flair of the atomic bombs have dropped and now humanity tries to survive on what little is left in a radiation fueled wasteland. It's pretty much the standard world build of Mad Max: [b:Mad Max 2 491933 Mad Max 2 Terry Hayes https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1456607098l/491933.SX50.jpg 480135], Deathlands: [b:Pilgrimage to Hell 744040 Pilgrimage to Hell (Deathlands, #1) James Axler https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1347219089l/744040.SX50.jpg 730191], the Fallout video games (especially starting with Fallout 3), and the movie Book of Eli. To me, this book felt very Fallout inspired, especially with the whole raiders and then the way the characters interacted with whatever small settlements existed. I think Mad Max gets referenced in the reviews, because it does have a bit of the “Beyond Thunderdome” feel with the wandering vs. settlements vibe, but, to me, Merebeth's world build feels more like an attempt to novelize something in Fallout 3.Bite doesn't try to be a complicated tale and, instead, feels like simplicity is the name of the game in the story telling. The way Merebeth wrote this book feels very fast paced and it's written in a smoother fashion similar to the way a [a:John Scalzi 4763 John Scalzi https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1562613145p2/4763.jpg] novel will play out. Scalzi is a bit of a master at writing books that aren't too dense, but still feel like an amazing ride. Merebeth, I want to say, isn't quite there yet, but she is easily on her way! A major difference is that Bite, I want to say, gives off some major Young Adult genre vibes. Don't get me wrong, this story very much isn't, but it feels like it's written in a similar fashion. Writing in a more simple fashion for a younger audience, rather than to emphasize the pace of the ride, if that makes sense.Bite thrusts us into the world of our main protagonist, Kid, when she is wandering the desert wastelands and is picked up by two wanderers, Dolly and Wolf. Luckily they have a car, which makes getting around a little bit easier than what Kid was doing before. After some messy hi-jinks we run into two more people from Wolf and Dolly's crew, Tank and Pretty Boy. That's right, we never learn anyone's real name, nor do we get much of their backgrounds. Everyone is guarded and doesn't exactly trust anyone else fully. The big social faux pas on display throughout this novel is that Wolf and his crew are cannibals and raiders. So, they will go around raiding downs and killing the inhabitants, followed by eating them, and selling the excess meat to other settlements. Kid points out in the book that even though the world has basically ended, cannibalism crosses a line that very few people are willing to cross. So, Wolf and his crew are not really welcome and they're part of the reason people probably don't trust anyone in this wasteland. Wolf has fully embraced being the bad guy and is totally for this. Dolly follows Wolf, because he helped her when she needed it and Tank and Pretty Boy just seem to be along for the ride.The story is told in a first person fashion through the eyes of Kid, a teenage girl. This is probably why it gives off a bit more Young Adult vibes than usual, but I think the writing style is more the culprit there. Anyway, if you don't like first person novels, that will be a huge turn off for anyone picking this up. It's not my favorite perspective, and I think I had recently finished another first person book prior to reading this, so I was a bit tired of it when reading this. Our main focus is growing with Kid into something of a ruthless raider who learns to kill and eventually succumbs to eating other people with her new crew.Now, I want to say, Merebeth's design of the world and how people react in it is pretty on point. It's how I think things would actually be in a wasteland world. It's pretty different from things like Fallout 3 where when you find a town, you talk to the people and they give you quests to do etc. People are usually somewhat friendly and there are a couple well established towns for the player to interact with. That's not really how things work in Merebeth's build. There are some established towns, like when they go an visit the Queen of the Wastelands, but everyone is very cagey and not very forthcoming with any information. I think this kind of hampered the story a little bit, because you never really got to know anyone. Even within the main characters, you don't really know anyone. They all seem to be following Wolf, no one else is around to follow for them, and he just falls haphazardly into things doing whatever. Eventually they wind up having a goal of sorts, but that's only in the last few pages of the book.Therein lies the real crux of why this wound up being three stars. There's no real goal fleshing out the major portion of the story. If you think back to how good the movie “Mad Max 2” or “The Road Warrior” was, yes Max fell haphazardly into a situation, but the movie was occupied with a goal. Trying to get the fuel away from Humongous and escape him and his raiders. Even if you want to write from the perspective of the raiders, Humongous had a goal. He wanted their fuel. Bite doesn't really have much of a goal for anyone to latch onto. The only real goal is to survive to the next day, which, again, while very realistic, doesn't make for that much of an interesting read as far as I'm concerned. As a result, this doesn't feel nearly as much of a wild ride as a Mad Max film. If you're not going to have deep character development, you need a goal. If you're not going to have a goal, we need deeper characters. I think that's the balance that Merebeth was missing in this book.In the end, it wasn't a bad a book. I am very curious to see what the second one will bring us, since it's supposed to be quite different. I want to see if she strikes that balance or goes with one option over another.

Probably more 1.5...When I as my local bookstore they had a whole shelf dedicated to cozy mysteries, something I happened to be quite in the mood for while I was searching. Now, I absolutely love cats and have had one as my reading companion ever since I was born, it has been rare in my life not to have a cat by my side in some capacity. So, when I saw the covers of the “Cat in the Stacks” series, I was overjoyed because I thought this was just the perfect book to read. With blurbs on the cover declaring “Charlie's feline sidekick, Diesel, is a real charmer.” I was pretty optimistic about the book for sure, so I happily purchased it and put it in my list to read next.Now, the main reason I was looking for a new cozy mystery series which featured cats is because I'm pretty far along the series written by [a:Lillian Jackson Braun 22569573 Lillian Jackson Braun https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]. Since she has passed away, I know there are only so many books in that series and I have almost all of them, so I was feeling around for what to get next when I came across this book. I feel like I was reading this book for different reasons than the author intended... so, based on other reviews I've read, I'm not even sure if I was the target audience for this thing.Anyway, while I know this is the second book in the series, it's the only one I intend to read, because I almost DNF'd this book a few times, but since I paid cover price for the book I was intent on finishing it. I'll note here that Miranda James is a pen name for [a:Dean A. James 59640 Dean A. James https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]. He has also won the Agatha award, which I find humorous given how much other reviewers mention Agatha Christie and the multiple times he mentions Agatha Christie in his own book!This book is the sequel to [b:Murder Past Due 7337871 Murder Past Due (Cat in the Stacks, #1) Miranda James https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1274450870l/7337871.SY75.jpg 9020908], but I figured these stories would be more episodic and I'd be missing out on personal character details. For example, I assumed I was supposed to know something of the relationship between the main character and his son prior, but it didn't affect the overall story. The real problem was that my bookstore just didn't have the first novel, so here we are.This book continues the story of Charlie and his cat named Diesel. Diesel is a huge cat, 30+ pounds and a Maine Coon. This is huge for a Maine Coon even, and I rather think maybe James should have gone for an actual exotic cat like a domesticated Cerval or something? Might have made for a really different interaction overall, of course, he'd have to have had experience with Cerval's to know how to write about them. I assume finding themselves amidst the throws of a good mystery is going to be a standard event for our two characters and the backdrop for this mystery is that a wealthy patron of library Charlie volunteer's at hires Charlie to help organize his rare book collection. The patron is Mr. Delacorte and he naturally lives in a mansion. So, it starts to feel a bit like a game of Clue at this point and I'm not lost on the possible reference of [b:The Body in the Library 16319 The Body in the Library Agatha Christie https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389733809l/16319.SY75.jpg 3038784].While trying to sort the books and track down the thief our wealthy patron is shockingly murdered, but they tell us that on the back of the book, so I don't feel I'm even remotely spoiling this. This launches an investigation with a cast of characters where everyone in household could be a suspect of the murder! Now it is really starting to feel like Clue, minus the fun, and we have a so so cast of characters to follow around and figure out the who-done-it.There are two major reasons I did not like this book and a bunch of minor ones, which I will put behind the spoiler tag. The absolute most major reason is I didn't like the way he wrote the cat. If you own a cat and you are interested in reading about cat antics amidst a good mystery, the only recommendation I have for you at this time is “The Cat Who...” series by Braun mentioned above. Her books are not all amazing, but they are all pretty fun and cute with very well written cats. There's almost thirty books in her series, so you will be well occupied if you've never read those. Let's get on with Diesel. As far as fictional cats go, frankly, he's boring. He is the most un-catlike cat I've ever really read about. At first I was pretty excited, because Charlie brings his cat literally everywhere with him. So, I was expecting some seriously silly cat hijinks throughout the book. But there is only one one real instance at the end. Really? It took the whole book for Diesel to act like a cat and only act like a cat once? The majority of the book, Diesel just seems to exist. Charlie interacts with Diesel by patting him on the head or whatever and Diesel warbles at Charlie, but that is all he does, aside from go to the bathroom. And let me tell you, we get told about every single time Diesel uses his litterbox or needs to go. This information does not need to be in this story, like at all. It bears absolutely no relevance and your wasting pages when you could have Diesel be a cat, not a dog. That's the main thing I got out of this, James wanted to write about a well trained dog companion, but maybe cozy mysteries with cat companions sell better, so he made the dog a cat, but it still 100% acts like a dog. It was kind of infuriating to read about the whole thing. If you've owned a cat you know this book is way off the mark and for that reason, I don't think I could ever really read another one.The second reason I just couldn't go onto another book is that this book is easily 100 pages too long. This book is overly descriptive to the point where it feels like a teenager fleshing out an English essay for the sake of fleshing out an English essay just to hit that word/page count requirement. We are treated to every single little detail of Charlie and Sean's day. What they ate for breakfast everyday this book occurs. Every meal they eat. They don't just “go home for lunch” then come back to sort the library. No, we go with them! It's absolutely maddening to read this at times. We don't need to know any of this information. It felt like this book was written for people incapable of imagining what lunch is, or people that are “yeah, they had lunch, but what did they eat?” At which point, I'd want to know, why do you care what a fictional character ate every moment of every day?Now, I happen to be well aware that I am a fast paced filthy Northerner, but this book felt so slow to read. The pacing was daunting when it didn't feel the need to be. While a lot of people loved Charlie, I feel like I got annoyed with him. The over-politeness dedication, which I guess is typical of the stereotyped southern gentleman did wind up wearing thin with me. There are multiple instances where Charlie “feels he's in trouble” and they talk about his embarrassment like being in the principles office. All he really was doing was giving information to a cop, so it just felt weird. I think I prefer the irascible hard hitting detectives out there a bit more, which is why I mentioned above that I may not be the target audience for this type of book. It takes the concept of “cozy” and makes it a synonym for a slow and languid jaunt through Charlie's life.The mystery itself, to be honest, felt a little cliché. I know James tried to do a pretty good job casting aspersions to other characters, but when it is revealed who the murder is, you saw it coming many pages before hand. You are able to narrow down the household to literally two suspects nearly halfway through the book, and your assumptions end up being confirmed all around by the end. Now the book does end somewhat abruptly and I felt more could be written about the aftermath of the case, but, alas, we had to hear about all the details of those breakfasts and the cooking process... so much more important than story after all.My weird misgiving is the method of the murder weapon. Mr. Delacorte is presented to us as being an elderly gentleman, and since this book is not written in the future, his murder just hits weird to me. He has a deathly allergy to peanuts and he is killed when he ingests peanuts. Now the peanut allergy outbreak is only something that is coming about since 1995 or so, based on the government documents I looked up. I may be wrong about this, but based on the report I read Mr. Delacorte would have had to develop this allergy later in life, and while I know you can develop allergies later as you age, I do not think peanuts was one of them. So, in my mind, while I read this book, I couldn't stop saying to myself, this guy should have died many many years ago already. No one cared about peanut allergies when he was a kid and we had peanut butter all over in terms of availability when he was growing up. So, the murder weapon made no sense to me. Also, the method of delivery was peanut butter cookies... bought from a grocery store. There's no way this guy accidentally ate a whole bunch of these cookies (which is what they claim in the book).I will say, this book did score some serious points for me with the whole element of inclusivity. There's at least one gay character, Stewart, and they're not the murderer and they were my favorite character. Mainly because they just seemed so personable and did not hide behind a veneer of politeness. I was pleased to see the other characters supportive of Stewart in general and it just felt very well done.In the end, if you want a cat mystery novel with cute cat antics, these are not going to fill that void. These books are entirely human centric. The animals just kind of exist next to the humans. But they never go off and do crazy animal things. The dog and cat are super well behaved and never get into any real mischief, which makes them boring. They don't do anything. If you are, however, looking for what I assume is an Agatha Christie styled mystery, then this might strike that chord much better. Even amidst this book Charlie mentions twice that it's “like being in an Agatha Christie novel”. By all means, write an Agatha Christie novel, don't market this as a cozy cat mystery, because that's not really what we get out of it.

We return to the adventures of Qwillerin, Koko and Yum Yum! Around the time the book [b:The Cat Who Played Post Office 38436 The Cat Who Played Post Office (Cat Who..., #6) Lilian Jackson Braun https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1373977566l/38436.SY75.jpg 1189541] I feel like Lilian Jackson Braun had finally hit a level of consistency in her story telling that was very enjoyable. Qwill seem to have settled down into the town a Pick Axe a bit more and the antics portrayed in the last few books are just as good in this one.However, now that we've moved into the next novel, I can finally complain about the ending of the last one a little bit. One of the things I really enjoyed in the prior books was the antics surrounding the cats as they enjoyed their time in the large mansion. Unfortunately, at the end of the last book Braun decided to have the mansion burn down, I felt like this was rather abrupt and I really wish the cats had had a few more novels to enjoy the lavish luxury. Qwill had, pretty much, always been using the apartments above the garage as his living space, but I did like the stories with the cats getting into various types of mischief exploring the huge house. I just felt like there was so much more to explore there, or there could have been, instead the books with the mansion feature only a few rooms of note. Alas, it is no more.“The Cat Who Sniffed Glue” brings us into the continuation of Qwill's saga. Qwill has joined the local theater troop and he's planning on acting in an upcoming play. As a result, the book has an interesting format where each chapter tells us the scene and the people we will meet. It's funny because, I remember thinking why didn't she use this setup with the book [b:The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare 42056 The Cat Who Knew Shakespeare (Cat Who..., #7) Lilian Jackson Braun https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408927824l/42056.SY75.jpg 2457557]. Anyway, “the plays the thing,” is phrase that rather works well, as the players involved will be involved with the theater in some way. Qwill is also getting involved with the local newspaper and I am elated to see his friend Arch Riker join us again, even though he has a bit of a background role in this story, I look forward to having him in future novels, since I quite liked his character.Qwill's continuous woman troubles continue and his play for the librarian Polly Duncan seems to be cooling quite a bit in this novel. So, he ends up going to dinner with a string of various women from the local area and Down Below. Polly is an okay match, but I still really preferred the doctor he dated a couple novels ago. At this novel didn't start off with Polly suddenly moving away out of the blue. I think that's part of the tensions of the novels though, we all pine for Qwill to finally meet someone, because he is actively looking after all. It would be different if he had no interest, like Sherlock Holmes. Mrs. Cobb only makes a brief appearance in this book, when Qwill goes to visit her new place at the Goodwinter museum. We are also introduced to a new character, Edd, who runs a book shop in town. I rather liked this character adding in, it gave Qwill someone to talk books with and I thought that was pretty fun.I feel like there was actually quite a bit of a setup in this novel before the real mystery hits. Eventually a murder takes place at the Fitch mansion and some notorious suspects from the nearby town of Chipmunk are suspected. However, Qwill doesn't feel like that explanation really adds up. Naturally, we need Koko on the case and he is already giving Qwill clues early on with rubbing paintins of ships and pulling out books of a nautical nature, such as [b:Moby-Dick or, the Whale 153747 Moby-Dick or, the Whale Herman Melville https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327940656l/153747.SY75.jpg 2409320]. The clues bring Qwill to various places in pick-axe trying to chase down an old bitter family history concerning the murdered couple. It's a pretty sad tale, but I never guessed who the murderer really was by the end. I will say, in the past novels, I found it hard to guess the murderer because it felt like the mystery was solved so abruptly it came out of nowhere. That wasn't the case this time around. When we get to the end of the book and Koko makes his final play to bring Qwill the answers, the explanation makes perfect sense and I felt it was more well crafted than some of the other stories. Hopefully Braun can keep up this caliber of a mystery in the future novels, it really was one of the most fun so far.In the end, I really enjoyed this book and I tore through it rather quickly. They're short books, but it was especially so with this novel. The hi-jinx of Koko and Yum Yum are wonderful as usual and it is really great to read about the cat antics amidst the murder mystery. If you've enjoyed Braun's cat mystery books so far, I'd wager you'd enjoy this one as well.

Sometimes this is in the 2 range... but I'll bump it up a little bit. Technically, I'd say it's a 2.5 overall.I've been a fan of Indiana Jones since I was a child. I have a lot of the children's novels, comic books, adult novels that were published later... but I was never interested in reading movie novelizations until fairly recently. So, I tracked down all the ones for Indiana Jones. Luckily they had a re-print run occur when the fourth film came out, so getting my hands on these was relatively easy when I wanted to do it. Who knows how long that will last, especially with the franchise likely ending due to the age of Harrison Ford... because it would just be weird to have someone else take over the role at this point. Although, I'm sure Hollywood will attempt a re-launch in ten some odd years from now for no reason and it will probably flop. Because creating a similar new character is just too hard...In any event, originally this movie and book were just released as “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” even though George Lucas had had the idea to release a series of adventure stories from the inception of the concept. One of my favorite fun facts at this point is that originally the main character was to be named Indiana Smith, and that just doesn't even remotely feel right. Luckily Spielberg stepped in and recommended switching it and Jones was offered as an alternative. Indiana Smith just doesn't have the same flow, I just imagine that scene in Egypt where they're carrying Marion around in the basket and her yelling out “Smiiiiitttthhhh!!!!”... I don't know, it just sounds wrong. The concept behind the script was originally written up in the early 70's and Spielberg had been interested in possibly doing a James Bond film, but Lucas told him the idea for Indiana Jones and Spielberg loved it. This is probably why there is a bit of the James Bond feel to things at times, which we sort of get with the revolving women in Indiana's life due to the “Bond girl” trope in those films.Indiana Jones is a bit of a combination of the “great white hunter” and “explorers” of the late 1800's and early 1900's. During this time there were still people exploring terrain on Earth that no one had ever set foot upon, as far as anyone knew at the time. Perhaps some inspiration for Indy being an archaeologist was derived from [a:Sir Leonard Woolley 22190425 Sir Leonard Woolley https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] who uncovered the city of Ur and opened up a whole new civilization to study all occurring in the early 1900's. However, the archetype of an archeologist adventurer is likely based on many other explorers of the era as well. I would think Percy Fawcett a big one. Combine all that with books by the likes of [a:H. Rider Haggard 4633123 H. Rider Haggard https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1298296700p2/4633123.jpg] with his Alan Quatermain series or [a:Arthur Conan Doyle 2448 Arthur Conan Doyle https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1495008883p2/2448.jpg] who wrote a series based on his character Professor Challenger, which the creators of Indiana Jones probably read as kids. So they basically take all those influences into a mixing pot with James Bond and there we find Indiana Jones, and with the desire to bring back the serialized films from the 30's/40's era.As far as Campbell Black's novelization goes, I find it to be merely okay at the end of the day. It has all the major portions of the film, sure, but there are just so many little details that are different, and frankly, ten times better executed in the film. This really made me wonder about how much had changed from script to screen. At the very beginning we have Indiana Jones in the jungles of South America looking for a lost artifact of great value. In the book, it felt like Indiana Jones talked way too much, and he kept finishing his lines with “my friend,” to the point where it got kind of annoying. When you compare this with the actual opening scene we get a very different mood and character. Jones is a man of very few words and it creates so much more on screen tension that I think I wound up being more annoyed by the book, because the movie did it so much better. I will say, the trap sequence was a little bit different in the book, so it made me wonder if they made changes by the time they got to filming, or if in the script it just said something like “Indiana Jones encounters traps” with maybe a basic outline for some of them, because some of them were similar, but the final trap was not.The overall sexism is a bit more extreme in the book than even in the film. Honestly, it's a film set in the 30's, so I definitely expect a degree of that. And even in the 80's things were getting better in terms of all around equality, but if we're being honest, they still weren't all that great in the 80's. In the book, though, Indy is much more of a womanizer and it's basically alluded to that he pretty regularly sleeps with his students. I don't know if that was in the original script or if that was an extrapolation on Black's behalf based on the girl that wrote “Love You” on her eyelids. In any event, while these things happened between students and professors, probably more regularly than we want to admit back in the 30's, it just felt above and beyond in the book. I liked what they did in the movie a bit more, since it was more subtle.These minor changes and differences persisted through the book and I felt like the only characters that really stayed on point were Beloq and Sallah. Indy was okay, but his interactions with Marion were almost just weird and sometimes creepy. She seemed way off. Marion and Toht were the two characters that just seemed like completely different people. Toht was described as a bit of a cowardly weasel of a man, but in the films he had a rather ruthless threatening aura, which was way more interesting and he just wasn't terrifying at all in the book. Marion was supposed to be head strong and a bit world weary, which made her a pretty good foil for Indy, but in the book, she just felt like a helpless love interest. (In some regards she had a bit of the always needing Indy's help in the film, but not nearly as much as in the book. Like she devised plans to escape Beloq, she fought people in her bar, etc.) The real horrible thing, for me, was her interactions with Beloq when she was captured at the Tanis dig. She and Beloq make out, and she can't help herself, because she is just so overcome with lust for that man, but thankfully, this never happens in the movie. It just seemed so out of character for her and if that was in the original script, I'm so glad someone put a stop to that thread altogether. It just made no sense and seemed pretty stupid. I don't care that she was attracted to another man or anything in terms of “preserving virtue,” it was who she was kissing that was the problem.In the book they make a big deal about him losing his hat when he gets on the submarine, but in the films his hat is safely on his head in the third film. I think this makes sense, because he would have left his hat and jacket behind on the boat and he could have easily had those items returned to him through Sallah. This leads me to the final scene of the film, where all of this is pretty on par with the film, except for one critical moment. When Indiana Jones jumps out and threatens to blow up the Ark with a rocket launcher... he does it in the middle of a bunch of soldiers. So, yeah, he gets jumped from behind. It was just so stupid, the movie made way more sense where Indy ambushes the column of soldiers in the hills. It just seemed like such a weird thing to write and way out of character for Jones, who is supposed to be rather good at this.One aspect of the book that I did enjoy quite a bit, was that Black would include scenes of what the Germans were up to at various times. These were either cut from the original script to save film time, or they're entirely made up by Black. In any event, these scenes where he fleshes out the side of the enemy are what I really enjoyed. Sadly, they are not that many, but when they are there, it made the book more worth reading.In the end, I have a hard time faulting an author that likely never saw the film or any of the edits/changes made mid-filming. The overall gist of the story is here and it is still quite an exciting adventure tale regardless. I just really like a lot of the changes made from whatever this script was to the lines delivered on screen. There are sarcastic one liners that Indy throws out from time to time, that just don't exist in this book. That leads me to believe that these lines were just not in the original script in the first place and probably showed up in subsequent rounds of editing if not ad-libbed during filming. I don't know how much a fan of the films would consider this worth reading. I'm glad I read it, because of my general curiosity about franchises I enjoy, but this book will certainly wind up in the pile of books that are just never worth reading again, but books I'll keep because I refuse to break up a completed collection.

This book will definitely fluctuate between a 1 and a 3.5 throughout the reading.TW: This book series is designed to be brutal, it has rape, torture, and other things you'd expect from the fall of man.Okay everyone, buckle up... I have spent about the past hour reading about the history behind this book series and it's just fascinating. It's a book history I, personally, have never encountered before, so let's try to dive in. Deathlands is a series of books spanning well over a hundred installments at this point. The whole project was supposed to be a joint effort between Christopher Lowder (aka Jack Adrian) and Laurence James (aka James Axler), however, the first installment of this world Pilgrimage to Hell did not seem to go as expected. As has become clear to me now there is a rather massive shift in the format of this book towards the end, well it turns out that despite this being a joint project idea, Lowder wrote the first 3/4's of the book, but then he became ill and Laurence James stepped in and finished off the story. I will say, despite this happening James did a good job of keeping a feeling of continuity as he took over. I actually didn't really notice except for one detail in the formatting. So, that's the story of the authors behind the series.This book series was published by Gold Eagle Books. I've looked at some of the advertisements in the backs of the other Deathlands books and it conjures up a memory from my younger years. There was this television station in the U.S. called TBS and they would sometimes run a sequence of films all day and they would advertise it as “movies for guys who like movies” and they would run films like Mad Max, Aliens, Predator, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, etc. Lots of franchise-y action packed films filled with Mary Sue styled characters (obviously the male variation Gary Stu etc.) that are invincible and kill all the bad guys. Gold Eagle seems to primarily want to publish books of this ilk. Many of them feel like a b-series movie starring Chuck Norris. Deathlands isn't really all that different, and while these things are not considered “good” in any shape or form, they are fun if done right. Despite how campy some of those b-movies of the 80's were, man, some of them are awesomely bad, which makes them great fun and worth watching. Sometimes the overall story is well written, it just suffers from campy execution, but a good story even told in this medium is still pretty good and can be enjoyable.Now, enter Deathlands. First off, remember the first major portions of this book were written by Christopher Lowder, and he was a British author, so when it came to world building this America of the future it's not being told from the same political lens you would think of here. The whole first fifty or so pages are devoted to a background info-dump that lead to where humans wound up in the book series. The love of Reagan as president is interesting from that point of view as I sort of started reading this like it was some apocalypse preppers wet dream of a novel, but it's not really like that at all once we get deeper in. It was amusing to see the setup talk about Reagan so favorably and the democrats so negatively, but then say none of that even mattered because terrorists set off nuclear bombs in 2001 triggering a U.S. vs. U.S.S.R. mutually assured destruction response on part of both nations, when the terrorists had nothing to do with either nation. Interestingly this all occurred in 2001 mind you and for those who are confused about the Soviet threat... that's our next history dump.For any modern people diving into this series, you have to read this with a little bit of context of the times to understand things. This book was originally written in 1986, the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was still going quite strong. Yes, I remember when the wall fell in Berlin, I'm that old. So, I remember growing up in a time when we feared nuclear response in the arms race, this is why so many movies have that theme in the 80's still, think Terminator, and it's not just some holdover from the 70's and further back. You see the Cold War had been going on for so long that it just felt like it's how things were always going to be from then on. So, it's not outlandish to even project fifteen years into the future and suppose that's when the real nuclear war would finally break out.So, what is Deathlands really about? If you've played the video games in the Fallout series, then you kind of already know the gist of Deathlands, only Deathlands is pre-Fallout. Anyway, the initial nuclear war occurred in 2001 and the Deathlands series picks up a hundred years after that. The old world has been absolutely ravaged by nuclear fallout, entire portions of the world are unlivable. Most places are a desert wasteland and what is left of humanity struggles to survive. If you're saying, “...but isn't this the Mad Max movie Road Warrior,” the answer is yes, yes it is. Road Warrior is one of my favorite movies of all time, so when I had heard Deathlands was kind of like that... naturally I'm reading it. Since there are no novels written in the Mad Max universe, but in retrospect, I rather wish there were now.Some context: At the time a lot of these things were written we didn't really understand what would happen in the aftermath of massive nuclear weapons. We knew about the aftermaths of the bombings of Japan, but compared to the weapons that existed by the 1980's those were small time weapons. The hydrogen bombs that we have today weren't even around in World War II, so as the theory went, at the time, those types of weapons would turn the world into a total wasteland where nothing could grow, hence the deserts of Mad Max. The disaster at the Chernobyl power plant hadn't happened yet either, and in the 80's it probably would have only confirmed what people thought would happen. However, after long term studying of the Chernobyl disaster, we don't really think the world will be thrust into a nuclear wasteland for thousands of years. Sure, fallout will be a problem, there is still radioactive materials in the vegetation of Bikini Atoll, but we no longer believe it will be as lethal as once imagined at the height of the Cold War.However, when imagining the world of the Deathlands, the authors basically wanted to create a landscape that was desolate, but also an environment where anything goes. In the world of Deathlands there are mutants, muties, humans who have been changed by radiation and possibly other rogue scientific experimentation. Our intrepid heroes fight these “monsters” off in the first engagement of the book. These muties range from ugly deformed creatures, to regular looking people, but with special psychic powers. The theory that the radiation contamination over the years has forced mankind to evolve in radically different ways. Once we get to the first mutant engagement we have finally started the story proper. Lowder's info dump was exhausting, I can sort of see why he did it, but I much prefer being thrown into the action and having a fifty page info dump sifted throughout the actual story. However, if you're going to try and tackle the entirety of the Deathlands series, then you might need to tackle this for the sake of context.The main story starts by introducing us to a well established figure in the Deathlands known as The Trader. Yeah, everyone actually just calls him Trader. Despite the nuclear war happening, there were facilities around like NORAD which were huge stock piles of old world technology and weapons. The Trader and an associate of his found one and from that stock pile of arms he managed to generate a thriving business, becoming a sort of arms dealer of the wastelands and trading with what was left of civilization. They tell of him travelling all over North America looking for these lost treasures of the old world, since old tech is much better than new. (Interestingly this is the same concept in the BattleTech universe, which pre-dates Deathlands in release, only the BattleTech series is set in space.)Our major story is not really about The Trader, instead the star of the show is his second in command, Ryan Crowder and his team. Lowder was obviously being very original in his naming conventions here. An interesting part of this original pressing is that there is a poster styled insert in the middle of book and it actually has a drawing of the main characters. Anyway, Ryan Crowder is basically Snake Plisskin from the movie Escape from New York. (If you're a guy that likes movies for guys that like movies, I highly recommend.) He's basically your standard fair male action hero. Short of dialogue and feelings, long on weapons training and killing bad guys. Then we have J.B. Dix, his best friend I assume, the weapons master, who's like this genius super tech. I actually really liked Dix. He's only a side character, but he's almost more interesting than the main character in some ways.Rounding out The Trader's crew is a few hundred people. But we really get to know more of the people in Ryan's smaller group. I was really surprised that this book seemed to take more of Mad Max feel when it comes to representation. The other top people in the group include a mix of male and female characters. Some of which I found really surprising. One of my favorites was Hunakar, she's blood thirsty and extremely good in battle. Ryan often takes her as his second into battle, because of her skills. She has green hair, and wait for it... she's bi-sexual. I was kind of shocked to see this show up in this book. Even though they say this, she is introduced as having a girlfriend and only seems interested in women throughout the book. Color me shocked, for a 1980's novel like this to have representation of any kind blew me away. I mean, they acknowledge the existence of other people! And they're not villains! In any event, she was one of my favorite characters and they didn't kill her off or anything either and I look forward to seeing her in future installments. Next we have a black woman named Samantha who is pretty much as equally badass as Hunakar, unfortunately she wasn't written about as much other than her helping out the team. Maybe there will be more featuring her in the future installments. Finally we have Koll, a tall imposing blonde fellow, who made me think of some Scandinavian dude. We didn't get to know him as well either, which was sad, because like Samantha he seemed pretty interesting too. It sort of makes sense given the length of the book that we mainly got to know Ryan, the Trader, Dix, and Hunaker.Okay, moving onto the story proper. The story starts off with the Trader and his crew bringing a delivery to a town called Mocsin. To illustrate how dangerous the Deathlands are, we are immediately thrust into action (finally, after all the info dumps) and the Trader's group is beset upon by mutants! These mutants think they have stock piled enough armaments to take on the Trader, but now we'll get to see how good the Trader and his team really are. Essentially, they make short work of the mutants and the Trader sends Ryan and his team to go and take out any stragglers. Ryan and his team follow them back to an abandoned building where they notice the mutants have a captive. This is none other than the future love interest Krysty Wroth. (Yes, that's Krysty, with a two y's...) Upon escaping the devastating loss at the hands of the Trader the head mutant decides it is finally time to rape Krysty... this is where the book started to hit that 1 to 2-star average. It was literally setup that she was a damsel in distress and Ryan needed to save her. The rape scene is absolutely baffling and includes, for our benefit, a dude trying to explain Krysty's defensive response by suddenly menstruating... yes, that happened. It was terrible and definitely the worst part of the entire book, bringing us to zero star territory very briefly. I decided to soldier on and see what would happen, interestingly Krysty proved a capable warrior and ended up helping Ryan fight the mutants off. It wasn't as simple as Ryan steps in shoots all the bad guys and the girl falls madly in love. No, Krysty is combat trained and ends up saving Ryan in the end, an interesting twist I wasn't really expecting, but it was Ryan's disruption of the scene that gave her the advantage. Now, Krysty is by far a Mary Sue styled character as well. She is perfectly beautiful, perfectly intelligent, combat ready, somehow clean and I'm sure has no unsightly body hair... in the wastelands of the future... right? Right. Despite her battle competence Lowder's installment of this book seems to use her more as a foil for Ryan to fight off bad guys and Krysty often winds up nude or partially nude at the hands of her torturers. It's just bad writing at that point, because it happens more than once. Luckily when Laurence James takes over, I feel like that narrative fell away... but we'll see what happens in book two.So, now we have the proper full cast! Once the mutants are vanquished we resume our trek to the town of Mocsin. Mocsin is not much of a thriving town, it's probably a bit inspired by Barter Town in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, but more like what happens in the aftermath after Max and his group take away it's energy. I think some of the aspects of this remind me a lot of Fallout: New Vegas as well. There were themes in that game that made me think the writers had read the Deathlands series. Mocsin is where the brutality envelope gets pushed quite a bit. The leaders of the town, Jordan Teague and his security man (sec man) Strasser are the main villains. Strasser's character was very obviously inspired by the heroes/villains of the Marquis des Sade. Strasser rapes, kills, and tortures indiscriminately. There is a bit of a power tug of war between Teague and Strasser, unfortunately, the Trader and his crew have just stumbled into Strasser's power play and that's what the story mainly goes with. Ryan and his team are sent into Mocsin as an advance team to see if the deal is still in place, and that's when all hell breaks loose. Now it's up to them to try and escape and get back to the Trader!That's the main adventure of the story, but it's interesting because this isn't really where it ended. Along the way they pick up a mysterious character called Doc and he confirms stories of this area called the Darks. Earlier we were introduced to a legend Krysty grew up with about the Darks. So, after one conflict is finished we move on with Ryan and his team entering an area of the Deathlands called the Darks and looking for an old stockpile. It's nothing like they expect it to be and I feel like this should have just been it's own book... but they manage to get into this special area and Doc shows them a matter transporter in the facility which will teleport them to various areas round the U.S. The book ends with Ryan waking up in some new location and I assume the next novel takes off from there? It was just such a bizarre ending, because they actually had them teleport to a few other areas... whatever. The book was almost 400 pages and needed to be ended, so I'll deal with it.Also, be forewarned, there are a lot of info dumps about guns. I can't figure out if this was written by gun nuts for gun nuts, or the author bought a bunch of random Guns and Ammo magazines and just wrote about whatever he came across. However, many readers might be annoyed by the constant specific modelling and ammo type being used every single time a character pulls a weapon. It just sort of creates this unnecessary bloat in the writing. This reminded me of [b:Highschool of the Dead, Vol. 1 8849808 Highschool of the Dead, Vol. 1 (Highschool of the Dead, #1) Daisuke Sato https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388603233l/8849808.SY75.jpg 13441349] with it's info-dumps about weapons.In the end, I think this book was better than I expected it to be. Rest assured, there are some terrible moments in this book. Some of which are super cringy, such as fighting Native Americans, that seem to only have bows and arrows, with machine guns at one point... but the Native Americans were stronger by numbers, so it was sort of a Custer's last stand feel. I don't know, it was bad and weird really. I'm really hoping the series starts to settle into it's own solidified form since Laurence James takes over the series going forward under the moniker James Axler, calling this the “Axlerverse”. One distinction that is much more welcoming is James' reasonably written chapter lengths. Lowder wrote chapters that were 25 to 45 pages long... then when James took over suddenly they stayed to within 10 to 15 pages, a real boon by the end of the book! So, I look forward to reading the next one. I consider this a bit of a preliminary read to get the world building out of the way and whatever terrible writing nonsense it had... so, till next time.

A solid 3.5I read the other two issue set written in the Watch Dogs universe, [b:Watch_Dogs: Return To Rocinha 52404155 Watch_Dogs Return To Rocinha Simon Kansara https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1566107408l/52404155.SX50_SY75.jpg 72411448], which was pretty good, but like the other video games didn't feel on par with Watch Dogs: Legion. With Legion, I feel like this IP took a next level step and made an good game exceptionally awesome. I tried playing the other games, and they were fine, but they just didn't have the feel or depth of Legion, which I absolutely loved playing. So that original comic series, while good, just didn't have the Legion feel. It was nice to see a setting outside of London though and see a bigger world out there. However, with this volume collecting the first four issues in the Legion setting, it was a lot more akin to the video game and it was quite enjoyable.This has a bit of a setup like the video game where Dedsec recruits people to fight against the corruption inherent in the systems of London. There are quite a few familiar sites from the video game, which was actually really cool. This was similar to any of the standard fair side missions you'd get from the game though. You have to be realistic, this is only a four issue comic book series, so the story can only have so many layers of complexity. Furthermore, it's a bit light on the character development, whereas the game was able to go a little deeper in some scenarios. I think this setting is more akin to a longer run of comics or novels, given how complex some of the missions can go. I'd still only expect one theme in a novel, but just way better character development. This comic quickly throws a team together and we never get to know too much about them other than basic backgrounds and them wanting to make changes to their lives and others' lives. One thing I thought was interesting, is they introduced a character that was on the fence about joining Dedsec, believing the propaganda that Dedsec are terrorists (which they kind of are from a government point of view in this universe). The only real problem was that the character was never given much leeway in thinking about joining and in the end suddenly changes her mind extremely abruptly... this is why having more time to flesh out characters would be better, especially if you're talking about creating a Dedsec team! Not just a couple people doing a single mission for four issues.This four issue series takes on a journey starting with mysterious disappearances in the refugee camp. A Dedsec operative infiltrates the volunteer groups to investigate the situation. Meanwhile the Kelley's gang is up to their old tricks and terrorizing London through gang intimidation. However, the gang might be up to deeper things than is obvious and may have started working with some higher up political figures. This was somewhat similar to a couple arcs in the video game and we see some familiar faces, which means I'm pretty sure this story is a prequel to the game itself. I don't want to say too much more, because it will give away too many of the threads. I thought it was a fun comic and well done given their short length.In the end, if you really enjoyed the world of Watch Dogs: Legion, then this a quick romp through a cool side quest. I think many fans will enjoy this and the art is pretty well done as well. It's not a mind blowing series I'll read over and over again, but it was a fun romp through the streets of London one more time.

Honestly, more in the 1.5 range.The original Terminator novel suffers from a couple problems, one of which there is a much better version of this book in existence. If I didn't read the other book, I don't know if I would have kicked Hutson's book to a three or not? Possibly not, which you'll understand why when I get into the overall criticism of this novelization. This book is a very strange one indeed, because there are two movie novelizations of the terminator by two different authors. [b:The Terminator 1048678 The Terminator (Terminator Movie Novelisation, #1) Randall Frakes https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387703164l/1048678.SY75.jpg 1035121] by Randall Frakes is usually viewed as the better of the novels and I happen to agree with that. However, it may be unfair, because apparently Frakes was a good friend to Cameron and likely had access to the film and other changes made during filming. So, in that regard Frakes' book is much better, but he clearly had an unfair advantage in his writing. Shaun Hutson, obviously, did not have this luxury (just based on reading this book alone). It is a very strange thing to do though, have an author from the U.S. write a novelization for the audience here and then have a U.K. author write one for the audience there? I can't imagine why on earth any studio would decide to do this, but apparently it happened more than once back in the 80's, but probably doesn't happen anymore, I'd imagine. Was it really that important that 18-wheelers be called “lorry” in England to warrant such a difference? Or have the elevators called “lifts”? Would the English audience have been baffled by Frakes' book at the time? I mean it would make more sense to me to have asked this of a non-native English speaking audience. Say a German author, or something along those lines? But it's not like they even speak a different language in the U.K. Whatever, there are now two totally different novelizations of the movie The Terminator and I just had to read both because it's just too tempting to never find out what's different. So here we go.Frakes' book is much better in my opinion, and it's not entirely due to the fact that he had access to Cameron. Hutson's book is much shorter than Frakes and I'm rather glad for that. Hutson does write in a more plupy sci-fi way, but the real problem was that I felt like this was more of a dry report of what Cameron and Hurd's script said. Like it was just a list of events that had happened rather than a fleshed out actual story. There really wasn't much character depth on display at all. I think one of the reasons I steered away from movie novelizations in the past is because, well, I had already seen the movie, and who really cares about a blow by blow retelling of something you've seen? For some reason, no one told me these were based on original scripts and could wind up being quite different or offer more depth to the story. Frakes adds a lot more depth to the characters and actually fleshes out their personalities a lot more. He even takes the time to flesh out the details of the random people in the film, like the guy Terminator throws out of the phone booth. Hutson doesn't make any attempt at this, so you don't really feel anything for the guy thrown out of the phone booth. You don't care why he was on the phone at all or generally anything about him. At some point I got tired of reading about Huston's portrayal of Terminator as being “emotionless” in his tasks. I mean, I get bringing it up the first time, but he brings it up a lot throughout the book and it just wore thing after a while. Terminator is a robot, so it's pretty obvious it's going to go about doing things robotically and at some point it felt like he was just filling space. See, the dry police report style of writing when talking about Terminator kind of makes sense, it would have created a really good atmosphere about his character... but Hutson just has that everywhere. So, it just gets to be a boring read in the end and you really could have watched the movie instead. One really curious incident does show up in this book though. When we come to the moment where Terminator drives the car into the police station and we all heard that iconic line... it's not in here. Instead Hutson writes “I'll come back,” which just doesn't have the same level of gravitas as the line from the film. However, it made me really wonder, was “I'll be back,” an ad lib during filming? It's in Frakes' book, which makes me think he really had access to the film, but did Hutson change the line or was it just not in the original script. Another curious difference, if I remember correctly, is Reese telling Sarah about the computer system Titan. Later in the novel he talks about Skynet, but Titan is like a pre-curser, I guess. I don't remember that being mentioned in the film or other novel?In the end Hutson's book falls far too short for me as a solid rendition of this iconic film. It's just too dryly written for my tastes. I don't know how Hutson's other books are, I've never read anything else by him, so don't judge his other works based on this. I think it's hard to write these kinds of books, because, as an author, you probably don't want to mess with someone else's creation too much or change too many things so that it is no longer theirs. I'm still pretty glad I read this book though, it satisfied my curiosity and made me wonder about a few nit-picky details, which I find enjoyable to think about. However, unless you're a die-hard collector like me, this really isn't worth tracking down.

Mostly a 2.5 the majority of the time.TW: Way too many dogs die in this book.This is the first novel written as a tie-in for the tabletop RPG game Forgotten Realms. Forgotten Realms is a game setting originally created by TSR using the system from Dungeons & Dragons. Most anyone picking up books in the Forgotten Realms setting likely knows all this information, but due to massive repressing's and TSR being purchased by Wizards of the Coast many years later, some of the original TSR material might come across as disordered or lost to new comers of the genre. Back in the 80's and 90's TSR expanded the world of Dungeons & Dragons into various settings. Dragonlance is probably the most popular other setting to come from the publisher. Prior to these two extremely popular settings D&D worked within a setting of Greyhawk quite a bit in the 70's and you can even find very old fantasy novels written by the legendary creator Gary Gygax. They tried to re-launch interest in the Greyhawk setting in the 90's and wrote several new novels there, but nothing compared to the popularity of Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms. Not every setting developed by TSR got a novel companion, Al-Qadim, for example, never had one and none of their sci-fi IP's really had novels. When Wizards of the Coast took over TSR they repressed the old Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms books, but never looked at the other settings much. A small attempt to re-launch Dark Sun was made, but that never took off. Eventually the whole novel publishing sequence collapsed and now it appears we won't be getting anything close to what we used to read in the original forms. Only a handful of authors continue to write in these settings, but their novels are published by other publishers at this point and Wizards of the Coast seems to have dropped the publishing of novels altogether.Okay, well that's history out of the way for anyone curious abut what you're getting into when you pick up Forgotten Realms, know there are a lot of books to dive into! Forgotten Realms is a setting developed by Ed Greenwood and the basic concept is that at one point in time the Realms were closely related to Earth, but over time they became more and more separated and “forgotten”. So, essentially, Forgotten Realms is basically Earth-ish, with magic available.“Darkwalker on Moonshae” kicks off the epic journey through the Realms and new author Douglas Niles was picked to write the book. Now, when you go into this book realize this is Niles' first book ever, so I'm going to cut him a bit of slack in that regard. I have read future books by Douglas Niles and they were great, but after reading this book, I am only going to expect so much out of this first trilogy. Even R.A. Salvatore's first trilogy in Forgotten Realms was just okay to me. I think the main problem I had with this book is that “Darkwalker on Moonshae” came out a couple years after [b:Dragons of Autumn Twilight 259836 Dragons of Autumn Twilight (Dragonlance Chronicles, #1) Margaret Weis https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390668127l/259836.SY75.jpg 251833] in the Dragonlance setting and I was expecting something to be on par with that. Unfortunately, this book never even touched Dragonlance in quality as far as I'm concerned. One of the things that I liked about these old TSR publications is that they would have pictures and drawings throughout the book, a little detail that I really just enjoyed overall. This later fell out of vogue, but while it was there, I liked it quite a bit. Even a lot of 80's sci-fi books did this, Battletech novels come to mind off the top of my head. So, it was with some level of disappointment that I thought the art was rather poor when compared to what Dragonlance had put out. It would have been one thing if the art was the same, but two years later and your art is worse? That's just strange to me...Unfortunately, I'm going to write a chunk of this review through the lens comparing the different TSR settings, so bear with me. One major thing Dragonlance did right, to me, was it made me feel like I was in a different world very early on. There was just a lot of different things that made me feel like I wasn't on some facsimile of Earth in medieval times that happened to have elves or something. While the Lord of the Rings influence in high fantasy is unavoidable, I did feel like Dragonlance was different to a degree. Dragonlance got better about this as it went on. However, Forgotten Realms suffers mightily from two major issues when this was first launched. First, Greyhawk already existed and if I remember correctly was set on Oerth, so basically... Earth, but with Orcs and other mythological creatures. Then TSR creates Forgotten Realms... it just feels like Oerth again. Like, this isn't really a different place in the least. Worst of all, it just feels an awful lot like Middle Earth with some creatures switched out here and there. “Darkwalker on Moonshae” is even worse in this regard, because it's literally just a Medieval Celtic tale where they eventually fight the Vikings! They throw in some elves and dwarves to make it feel like “this is different,” but it's just not. It's a Celtic version of Middle Earth and that's about all this is. As I was reading this, I just felt like Douglas Niles wanted to write a different book. He just wanted to write a historical fiction story about the Celts fighting off a Viking horde, that's it. It really just seemed like he had already written this book, and then TSR commissioned him and he was like “oh, we can just change around a few character types in this other thing I wrote and we'll have a Forgotten Realms book!” It turns out... that's exactly what happened.I think what was really going on is Gygax was having issues with the company at the time. D&D's default setting was Greyhawk, and so they needed a newer “default setting” to work with if Gygax was out... so enter Ed Greenwood with his Forgotten Realms. It's similar to Greyhawk, but different enough etc. It certainly didn't help matters that Douglas Niles' book was published before the actual setting was launched, so who knows how much game design was really fit into this. On top of that, since Forgotten Realms was supposed to be “closely related to Earth,” it was an easy cop out to just modify Niles' Celtic series of books and rebrand them.Well... that was a lot of historical baggage out of the way. Let's dive into the actual book. This book follows the tale of Tristan the Prince of Corwell, whose your sort of stock character prince that is spoiled, but has something prove. In that regard this ends up being the overly told coming of age story about a prince becoming what it means to be a king. You can basically imagine being Scotland or Ireland throughout this entire book in terms of the overall setting. It has the RPG feel where Tristan has a few friends like Pawldo the Halfling, but then meets a new friend from an amusing confrontation in Daryth the Calishite. I actually really liked the Daryth character throughout the book and sorely wished the book was more about him. Tristan has an adopted “sister,” that needs to be in quotes, because this definitely goes down the road of the future anime/manga tropes of the “oh we're not brother/sister, one of us is adopted, so it's okay for us to get married.” Anyway, his “sister” Robyn has druidic powers and pretty strong and commanding overall. I liked her character quite a bit as well and even though Tristan spends a good deal of time hitting on her, she rebukes him. So, when they confess their love eventually, it sort of came out of nowhere and I sorely wished they hadn't ever gotten together... but books need “romance” right? Eventually, they run into a bard named Keren and that rounds out the adventure party. All men and a token female... standard 1980's D&D setup.The real conflict starts out with the fact that the Goddess of the land is losing her power, because she has been sabotaged by a great evil. The book never says what the evil creature is, in fact, it is this amorphous thing. It starts by infiltrating human settlements and it can shape shift into all kinds of different things, corrupting everything it touches. The strange part is, it is never named what kind of creature this is, which makes sense because the setting of Forgotten Realms might not have been fully hammered out by the time this book was made and since this amorphous evil was a huge part of this story, it was hard to go back and just make it up. It actually reminded me an awful lot of the evil goo that killed Tasha Yar at the end of the first Star Trek: The Next Generation series. Eventually it finds its way to a band of Vikings amassing an army to take over the lands where Corwell is. So, our heroes must prepare for war. Some parts of the book were quite good, such as when the bard is kidnapped and the rest of the adventurers need to save him from these creatures called the Firbolgs which are being controlled by the evil presence. Their infiltration of the Firbolg stronghold felt like a proper D&D dungeon crawl complete with treasure finding and everything else. That was probably the best part of the book to be honest. They also picked up a female dwarven companion, who was also a great character, but sort of bounced in and out of the story unfortunately.At some point, it almost seemed like Niles realized he only had two women in the story and in order to rectify that he introduced a band of Elven warriors that were all female. They were summoned by the goddess (loosely) to help fight against the Viking threat. I don't know how much they were just inserted into the story to make it a Forgotten Realms tale, but after they're introduced they sort of fall in and out of the story as well, just like the dwarves. For most of the final battle they're gone, until the Bloodriders appear and now they're back! I don't know, it just felt kind of weird and unfocused towards the end of the book.In the end, this was not a very strong start to the new setting. It certainly doesn't help when you kind of hate the main character. Tristan is typically insufferable and unworthy of the things he has, despite the author telling us he is. I am curious if the other books stay like this, since based on what I read about this series it seemed like Niles had written the entire trilogy before adapting it into a Forgotten Realms book. However, fear not, even if this trilogy is not very good, I have read future releases in this setting and I think they are excellent books. By the time R.A. Salvatore enters the picture I think they had gotten a more serious hold on what the setting was like, so he was able to write his books in a far more cohesive fashion. At this point, I think “Darkwalker on Moonshae” is going to wind up being a historical curiosity in the history of TSR for me. I'm glad I read it, and I will certainly read the other two novels in this trilogy as I like to try and get a really good historical perspective on these franchises I've enjoyed so much throughout my life, the good and the bad moments.

Hovers to 4.5 sometimes.First off the concept of this story is a solid five star idea. This is a story of first contact with extra terrestrials and it is unlike any I have come across before. This book is actually a classic dating back to the 70's, but because it came out of Russia it probably wasn't as widely read in the science fiction community due to Cold War biases of the time for those of us growing up in the West. However, the world renowned Ursula K. Le Guin stirred a bit of controversy by offering a very favorable review of the book in the 70's, which probably did, at least, catch the eye of other authors of sci-fi at the time. For that reason, I think this book has born some serious influence on popular titles to emerge in the future of the genre. Le Guin offers up an excellent foreword in this particular repressing of the book reminiscing of the time and impact of this novel.One thing I like about the Strugatsky brothers is that they bring us into a very strange world and doing an excellent job of making us feel like we are there observing with them. This is a tactic William Gibson would use in his novels in the future, though I doubt this is a unique tactic of the Strugatsky's. If it's well done, I rather like being thrust into a world with little explanation and we're sort of learning bits and pieces as we go. We may not get answers for everything, because there is no point in the characters explaining it, but it really does feel quite immersive.The concept of Roadside Picnic is quite wonderful, especially for the time it was written. It is a story after first contact with extra-terrestrials had taken place. We join Red Schuhart and his job of illegally scavenging for alien artifacts. What happened here is aliens had visited our world, but they never interacted with humanity. As if they had stopped off here on some other journey and the presence of humans was irrelevant to them. Once their craft moved on, they left behind all sorts of garbage and messed up the properties of the land where the craft sat. Now, scavengers like Schuhart make their living by going into these “zones” and looking for artifacts. In the novel these people are referred to as Stalkers, yes this was the inspiration for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video game titles. I have not played the games, but after reading this book, I very much want to see how they have expanded this world.The problem with these landing zones is that the areas are “damaged” in some way and they are lethal for humans. Some of the toxic waste left behind, which they call “hell slime” in the book is deadly. Other strange “traps” exist, and so people like Schuhart have to stalk their way very carefully through the terrain. Thanks to the interesting afterword from Boris Strugatsky we get insight into why the name “stalker” was chosen, and it is not because they are moving slowly through the terrain stalking anything. Apparently it is taken from a Kipling story called The Reckless Bunch. In any event, some of the artifacts that are brought out of the zones have been studied and used to benefit mankind. It has helped us make technological leaps and thus we deem the dangers worth facing in the zones. However, this doesn't stop stalkers like Schuhart going in illegally to sell some “extra” pieces on the black market.One of the things that is interesting about this book is that, unlike other first contact books, this is not a story about the experts and governments working with aliens etc. This is about the man on the ground floor, the man who does the dirty work and is underpaid. Forcing them to take greater risks in the zones to sell to other buyers unofficially. This is more a tale of people trying to make it by in the world after the aliens have left and making adjustments to supply a new economy so that they can survive and raise their own families. It's definitely a different perspective to work with and in that regard the story is very different for a first contact tale as well.For such a short book, I found this to be an extremely ambitious tale and it's told in four parts. Normally I abhor long chapters, but I can understand why they set the book up the way they did. One of the things I found truly fascinating about this is that we never really get any answers about the aliens and we get precious little insight into their technology. Instead we are left to marvel at it with the characters. So, if you're the type of person that needs to be told all the information, this book will leave you sorely lacking. You'll never find out what anything is really for. You'll find out what humans have adapted some objects for, but that is all, and humanity isn't even sure they are using it correctly. It's a pretty wild tale overall. Personally, I loved this aspect of the whole story.The one part I didn't really like was that some phenomena caused corpses to become re-animated. I felt like this was just weird and wasn't too sure what the point of the zombies were. It seemed like a reason for Schuhart to interact with someone who died in the past. Other than that, it seems like it was just to add in another weird element to the story, but I found it to be somewhat unnecessary. The mysteriousness of the artifacts and their technology was more than enough in my opinion.In Russia they made a movie inspired by this, but it is not at all what I expected. I feel like we are following the path of an entirely different stalker in a totally different zone. In the movie we don't do anything like in the book. In the beginning of the book we go on an approved journey to help a scientist retrieve an artifact. In the movie it's setup similarly, but in the book we encounter the alien technology pretty quickly, in the movie, even after an hour and half in, we do not and the movie is nearly three hours long. Maybe the overall message of the book is what was captured in the film... but it certainly doesn't feel like the story of Red Schuhart.In the end, I would rate this as a must read. I think it has inspired the likes of [b:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 11 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1) Douglas Adams https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1531891848l/11.SY75.jpg 3078186], which focuses on the whole point of humans not really being that special although with far more humor! Roadside Picnic is very much not a comedy book, so don't get any ideas. I think one of the objects referenced in this book spawned a whole novel by Michael Crichton called [b:Sphere 455373 Sphere Michael Crichton https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1660273071l/455373.SY75.jpg 2651694]. One of the objects referenced in Roadside Picnic was a golden sphere that granted wishes... and well... that is pretty much the exact object Crichton talks about. So, I imagine Crichton read this book at some point and created a whole tale around the concept of that object. Hence why I say I think this story, though short, has influenced quite a few other ideas over time.

Incredible, that's what I've got upon finishing up this book. I have not read any other books in this line of books published by Titan, and I typically meticulously try to engage my reading in order of release and grow with a series of works. However, I have been burned many times with the likes of Holmes and I have never been truly satisfied like I have just felt today upon conclusion of this book. For example, I was quite excited to see films arise inspired by Holmes and the casting of Robert Downey Jr., I confess, had me quite excited, but these were not very well done. I did not even enjoy the re-imagined Holmes with Cumberbach. Both of these actors are quite excellent and I enjoy many films with them, but just not their rendition of Holmes. Another massive issue is that a lot of Holmes stories take on a supernatural flair. They fall to the level of mere Scooby-Doo mysteries, which are fine, but not even remotely what Doyle wrote. This is what the string of Marvel films seem to be to me. The closest Doyle ever touched the super natural is probably in “The Last Vampire” my least favorite story, but it is understandable given Doyle's friendship with Stoker of around the same time.

For me, the penultimate Holmes has been portrayed on screen by Jeremy Brett. That series is peerless in my eyes and one of the few areas where Mycroft is portrayed exactly as I have imagined him. Mycroft is oft a sticking point in my interest in Holmes, he is one of my favorite characters and strangely I personally identify with him more than Holmes, albeit I agree, Holmes is a more exciting character to read about. No, many takes on Mycroft are simply out of character and strange to me. Kareem Abdul-Jabar and Anna Waterhouse's books seemed most intriguing at first glance, but they are action books. And Mycroft, in my estimation, is the antithesis of “action”. While I quite enjoyed the concept behind Enola Holmes, I was dismayed at the portrayal of Mycroft in these as well. He's far too emotional on screen and makes no sense for that character.

So, I was with some serious trepidation that I placed and order for this Philip Purser-Hallard novel, it's description seemed, hopefully on par with my expectations of a well written Holmes story. I do not want any modernizations, I don't want any supernatural nonsense, I want a good Holmes story inspired by Doyle, as much as that is possible. Purser-Hallard delivered that story in the most surprising way possible. The story he's managed to craft had such an ending that I never saw it coming. I truly hope this isn't a one time occurrence, because I will certainly be reading the rest of the novels in this series now... though the first author seems to have gone the supernatural route and I am sure I will rate those low until Philip swoops in to rescue me.

The overall format of the book is quite interesting and very well done. If the other books published by Titan are in a similar frame, I think they have truly hit on something special in the Holmes genre. In this book when a particular document is being viewed by Holmes or Watson, we are actually treated to a rendition of what the characters are reading. It is setup in a different font to look hand-written, and I really liked how it helped me feel more immersed in the mystery. Whenever they figured out to do this, they should keep this feature. I thought it was marvelous.

I cannot go into extreme details, but I will hide the main points with the spoiler function. If you intend to read this book, I highly recommend you do not read my spoilers. The basic setup of the story is that Holmes and Watson become embroiled in an espionage case, which they are called to investigate at the behest of Mycroft. Philip brings in the detective Hopkins from an earlier case of Sherlock Holmes, though the name of the story escapes me at the moment. I believe it was the case involving the two pistols. In any event, they stumble into another thread of a master forger, this is the “Masters of Lies” our title is built upon. It is an excellent mystery and very well thought out. Fans of Holmes and the mystery genre in general will likely be quite entertained by this novel.

I must say, I have never been duped by a novel in the way this novel has. I have never read a book where the vast majority of it may be false. Now, it seems to me that this probably isn't entirely unique, I just haven't come across one yet. So, whatever author Philip was inspired by to do this, kudos to all around. I must say, due to my own deductive skills and love of Doyle that I was quite suspicious about the characterizations in the book. However, I had encountered poor portrayals of Holmes and Watson so often, that I merely chalked it up to being, once again, dismayed at bad writing. So, it was in this way that Philip was easily able to fake me out. Also, to his advantage, I had not read any of his other books about Holmes, so perhaps I would have smelled the ruse earlier had I had more experience. When the bait and switch happened, I was just astonished! I had to finish the book immediately after that and was overjoyed at the ending. Absolutely incredible story craft! It was great fun and I look forward to reading more from this author, I hope he has many more Holmes mysteries for us in the future.

Honestly, a 2.5Finally entering the world of Tomb Raider in comic book form. As usual, I don't have the graphic novel, I have these as individual issues, so I'm not sure if this includes issue zero or the [b:Tomb Raider (Top Cow) #0.5 39907400 Tomb Raider (Top Cow) #0.5 Dan Jurgens https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1674499500l/39907400.SY75.jpg 61758780] issue. I'll review those separately. Now, before we get into the comic, we have to build some expectations around who is publishing this thing and the era in which it was created. Top Cow was the first publisher of Tomb Raider, but they had been rather intimately involved with Image comics back in the day. Now, comic books have always rather had the whole “everyone is beautiful” kind of aspect to them, so it's nothing new for it being in the 90's. However, Image and others, probably inspired by the likes of Frank Frazetta, famous for the Conan Barbarian art style, set out to draw things a bit more accurately and less of the 80's fairly cartoonish style. For me, I think Image at the time it was made was a little grittier than what Marvel was publishing at the time, and Marvel was a more intense version of DC in some ways. DC even split off and made a more mature imprint with Vertigo and there are some excellent stories from that line. So, growing up, Gen 13 and Spawn were my mainstays as a kid growing up. It's not surprise to see the art of Tomb Raider fall in line with what we saw with early Gen 13 and Top Cows other titles like Witchblade and Aphrodite IX.Lara Crofts image of the busty adventurer would certainly turn heads and find a home in the realms of Top Cows catalog of comics. It rather did make sense, with the Image/Top Cow style being more about everything being sexy and as far as the game developer was concerned, it was probably what was in line with their ideas at the time. Bringing her to the big screen with Angelina Jolie certainly helped, but as far as characters go did these original Top Cow efforts hold up over the years? In my opinion, not really. Don't get me wrong, I still really like Andy Park's art and rendition of her along with everyone else he drew in the comics, but I find far more problems with the original story than Parks unrealistic constantly sexy poses mid-gun fight. Which, art wise, honestly, I'm fine with, because it being a comic and all.My problem here was solidified with my problems in the 1/2 issue. To me, and maybe I missed something in reading about the early games, but to me, Lara Croft is supposed to be an academic power house on par with Indiana Jones. On top of that, she is no nonsense and very self sufficient. Naturally, I expect a bit of that “female version of Indiana Jones,” it would be difficult to make an adventure/archaeology type story without the reference. Look at the world of Uncharted! Very good, but also, you can't ignore the Indiana Jones! And with Indiana Jones you can't ignore Allan Quatermain! I digress, my point here is that Lara, to me is supposed to be a very strong female lead. Sexy, yes, of course, but also an academic powerhouse. She speaks many languages, is very well versed in history and antiquities etc. In the end... this is not what we got.I will say, the first issue in this series was rather promising. However, it has other issues with the bordering on racism “why Iran is bad” etc. No way this would get published today with that script. However, we are introduced to Lara mid-heist of a rare artefact that was originally stolen from Israel. Even though this came first, the movies gave a bit of a team atmosphere with Lara working with a couple other key people with her in the lead. The comic has that a bit with her working with the family body guard as back-up. After a narrow escape we are featured to a series of panels on Lara's yacht in a sexy bathing suite... because of course. However, despite being in this swimsuit she has also scheduled a meeting with a shadowy figure who wants her to hunt down a priceless artifact. She accepts and we are off to hunt for the Medusa Mask!As far as artifact adventure stories go, this part of the comic was pretty well done. It was a cool hunt through history. It only sort of suffers from wanting to be a more epic journey than the writer had time for. Jurgens had to cram it all into four issues and wrap the story up in time to start the next one. The four issue length story format is pretty common in comics, Dark Horse publishes a huge amount of the Aliens and Predator comics in four issue blocks, so I'm not surprise to see it employed here. We journey with Lara and face danger in the high seas and eventually wind our way into the hidden areas of Nepal. Once again, a lot of derisive comments are made by the characters about how “terrible Nepal” is as a place to just exist in. It really just makes the characters come off as assholes, to be honest, which is probably in line with a stuffy British demeanor, but doesn't really fit the whole “well travelled, seasoned artifact hunter” vibes they're supposed to give off. Yes, even her body guard Compton is supposed to be ex-Military.Ok, the overall craft of the story concept was fine. The real problem I had with this was how helpless Lara came off half the time. Her ex-boyfriend Chase Carver shows up, he was Gerard Butler's character in the movie, I believe. And Butler did a good job of it and I'm glad he didn't play Chase like this guy. In any event, Chase shows up to save Lara from an attack, which is fine... but it was pretty much almost every time after that Lara couldn't do things without the man saving her. It was just ridiculous. To add insult to injury Chase forces himself on her and kisses her when the first meet, she tells him not to do that again, which, to his credit, he doesn't. But then he just proceeds to hit on her in literally every line of his dialogue. Trying to impress her with how “long he can last” and other annoying crap. It's just overwhelming. If this is what beautiful women have to put up with on the regular, no wonder they're completely tired of this nonsense. It's overwhelming and I by the end of this comic I just felt outright bad for Lara. It's one thing, as a writing aspect to throw in a couple “hit on the hot girl” lines, but this is like nearly every dialogue between the too. It's daunting to put up with as a reader. The plot twist at the end was a bit weird though. I get the whole betrayal of the close companion narrative, but it felt way out of character for Compton. It didn't seem like he had any prior knowledge of the Medusa Mask and there was no indicator that he had even ever wanted the thing. However, we're meant to think he'd been biding his time all these years until this moment. It was just weird. In addition, we also learn that it was Compton who 'caused the plane to crash that killed Lara's parents and, in fact, he was expecting her to die too. From this he would inherent the Croft fortune or something. But why now? Lara had been on countless dangerous adventures before, even at the beginning of issue 1... why didn't he just leave her to die in Iran? Especially if all he wanted to do was inherit her fortune. Either this is bad writing or there just wasn't enough space to craft a better story. It would have made more sense to let this arc sit for quite a few more issues and build up Compton's background more. His betrayal just doesn't have much emotional impact on such short notice and makes little to no sense in the context of the story.In the end, the overall concept of the story was a cool idea and a cool adventure plot... but the character development is sorely lacking at this point. Lara needs to be able to function without a mans help. I'm not saying don't have her have a team, but let's at least have some semblance of equal skill sets or complimentary skill sets! Angelina and Gerard pulled this off to a certain degree in the films I think.

I've had the entire set of Tomb Raider comic books for a while now and I'm finally getting around to diving into some of them. Tomb Raider has gone through some wild revisions over the years and, in my opinion, they have been a real boon to the franchise. Now, a full confession on my part in order, I've never played these early games, so story-line wise this might be totally in order for the character. However, I've seen the movies, read a novel at this point, and played the newer games released for the Playstation 4 era, which I have enjoyed thoroughly. Part of the reason I never played these things is because I was massively into first person shooters and, at the time, found the whole third person view feel somewhat clunky. Fast forward to modern systems and I like third person as much as first person, so maybe I will go back in time and revisit these games.

Now, Tomb Raider came out in 1996 to much fan fair. My problem at the time is that I only had access to Macintosh computer and the games were never released for that system. So, I was severely limited in what games I could play at the time. The amusing part is that I once played the game Pitfall at a friends house and I remember us surmising at the time that it was a precursor to the Tomb Raider concept. Now, I'm not sure how much background story is given about Lara Croft, but when the comic books launched there wasn't much said originally. However, back in the 90's it was pretty common for a 1/2 issue to be released by Wizard Magazine if a title got popular enough. These often has special covers and a certificate of authenticity, which what my issue has.

In this 1/2 issue Dan Jurgens attempts to write a background story for Lara. All we knew from the original first four comics is that her parents and fiancé were killed in a plane crash, of which she was the sole survivor. Here we learn that Lara was on her way to becoming yet another spoiled trust fund rich girl, but when that plane crashed she was thrust into the wilderness to survive on her own. Andy Park's art aside, it's amusing to me that they put her in this snow covered mountain terrain and there are so many images of her just running around in shorts. In others she's got the bare midriff shirt and no jacket... it's just ridiculous. In retrospect, I am definitely spoiled by the more realistic grittier redesign of her character.

In any event, her experience changed her life and set her down the path of becoming the Tomb Raider she is today. It's actually a rather terrible story, because it shows her skirting her academics and being a lazy student. There is nothing about her love of history and academics, as if there's no way she could inherently have that interest because she is hot. Meanwhile, characters like Indiana Jones, who have their doctorate granted, but show great detail into their love of academics as well as the adventure of recovery of lost artifacts. Needless to say, this 1/2 issue, which I've read first did not pique my interest for hope in the writing of this series.

As far as as Parks art is concerned, I quite like it, but I'm certainly a bit biased having been raised on the likes of Gen 13 and Chaos Comics at this point. So the sexy femme fatale image has been rather burnt into me during my formative years. You can certainly level criticism at it, and I understand those, but this was comics in the 90's for me.

I actually rather prefer the background they laid out in the movies instead of going with whatever this was. This probably wasn't guided by the developer and her background story in the later games is much more palatable. For me, it would have been better if they had just thrown together a cool one shot artifact hung like they later did with issue 0, which I read following this one.

Probably more of a 3.5

I've been a big fan of the Terminator series since I was quite young. This plus Aliens and Predator are my main childhood joys! I usually don't bother with movie novelizations, but then I found out there were two movie novelizations for The Terminator and now... now I just have to know! In an article I read, it turns out that this was sort of in vogue in the 80's. There would be a U.S. movie novelization released and there would be a UK version, written by different authors based on the same script. I have no idea why anyone would think this is a good idea, and obviously it wasn't because no one does this anymore and it seems like the practice died off pretty quickly. In any event, I definitely plan on reading both of these, this version was just the first I was able to track down.

Most people herald the Randall Frakes and Bill Wisher novel the best one. However, this is probably because they had a bit of an unfair advantage. One major thing is that these two authors knew James Cameron and they worked with Cameron on previous projects. This book also came out quite a bit after the film was released and it seems rather likely both authors had seen the film. Most of their descriptions of the characters and what happens are spot on to the film, and based on other movie novelizations I've read, that is definitely not usual. These authors are probably lucky to even know who's been cast in the film half the time, and instead they're just working with a script.

All that being said, it seems to have benefitted the novel quite a bit and lovers of The Terminator would actually find it worth their time to give this a read. This book is a bit more than just a re-telling of the iconic film, Frakes and Wisher have really spent a good deal of time fleshing out the details of the script. There are a lot of moments that were downplayed or just left out of the film, either due to budget or running time of the film.

One of the major details is the fact that Sarah is supposed to be 19 and going to college. The film just seems to treat her as a “young woman” working as a waitress, her going to school is all but removed from the film. There are even parts of the book where she is on campus dealing with classes, which I didn't expect at all when I started this. In the film I felt more like Sarah was in her 20's for some reason. I think the Reese in the novel was supposed to be much younger, but, like the Sarah of the film, I got the impression of he was supposed to in his 20's as well. We get to see Sarah's and Gina's relationship in a lot more detail as well in this book, and the loss of Gina and Matt later in the book is a lot more meaningful.

One of the other aspects of the book that was pretty significantly different from the film is the way the Terminator was going about identifying his target. Remember, in the film, they said a lot of files were destroyed so Skynet didn't really know who was who, this is why Terminator was killing everyone in the phone book with the name Sarah Connor. Well, in the book there was another means to identify her and that was that she had pins in her leg from a break at some point in time. So, whenever the Terminator killed someone he would cut open their legs and look for the pins. This created an even crazier mystery for the police arc of the story, which was pretty interesting. In the book we find out Sarah gets the pin in her leg after the end of the movie, meaning the Terminator was never going to be able to identify her this way, so it made me wonder what would have happened if he killed all the Sarah's and none of them had the pin in their leg? Maybe they realized this problem and just left it out of the film. Apparently though, the original treatment had her getting the pin from a skating accident when she was younger, so it would have been a valid identifier in that case.

In addition to these changes we also find that Reese's reflections of the future are far more detailed. Naturally, this would have probably made the movie too expensive to make, but they were, by far, the more interesting things to read about in the book.

In the end, this was a very well done fleshing out of a great movie. Now, granted, I did personally Like T2 more, but I don't deny the original movie is still quite good. So, if you enjoyed the movie, this novelization is actually worth your time. Now, hopefully I will get to read the Hutson version of this soon.

Despite any criticism I'm going to level at this book during the review, I still really enjoyed this book. Jacey Bedford's world building was just so engrossing I loved being there throughout this novel. Nimbus is the final installment to the trilogy started with [b:Empire of Dust 21864071 Empire of Dust (Psi-Tech, #1) Jacey Bedford https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1398794655l/21864071.SY75.jpg 41154158]. That first book just seems so far off at this point. I have a hard time getting through 500+ page books, so I tend not to read them on the regular and as such, I rather savored this series over a few years. Rather than tearing through it in a couple months, which I probably could have done if had I had stayed on task. I'm glad I did savor it though, since there are only three books in this universe, and it's not something I can return to with a new installment. After the second book [b:Crossways 23591054 Crossways (Psi-Tech, #2) Jacey Bedford https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1438433968l/23591054.SY75.jpg 43193724], it still wasn't particularly obvious where things would go. The only thing it sort of seemed like is that Bedford was digging herself into a hole of story lines that were needing wrapping up. Nimbus, I can tell you manages to wrap up all the loose ends and does a pretty good job of it. There was only one thread that ended in a way that I thought was rather stupid/cliché, but I'll dive into that later.After Crossways we saw that there are more things to be afraid of in the folds than just dragons, and our characters came face to face with the entity known as the Nimbus. In this book we finally close in on the mysteries of the folds, which has been my favorite actual sci-fi part of this whole series, if I'm being honest. Most everything else in her construction has been rather standard fair human expansion into space, which has been done in many series already. While travelling through interdimensional corridors/space isn't unique either, the way these interdimensional creatures are presented was just very well done, it may not be unique, but it's very well done and entertaining.Nimbus picks up quite a while after Crossways and people have started to set into their new lives on Crossways station. The entire station has been moved to a new planet now and repair of the station has been slow going to a certain degree. However, Garrick and Mother Remona are unequivocally in charge of the station now, which helps Ben and Cara with the Free Company immensely. One thing I like about Bedford's books is that when her characters experience some level of trauma, it stays with them. This is becoming a more common trend compared to books from the 80's and 90's in these genres where half the time characters just shrug things off or “tough it out” or whatever. Here, because Ben and Garrick were exposed to the Nimbus creature in the folds, they have had continued nightmares for the past year. Ben, being Ben tries his best to deal, but Garrick turns to drugs to get over the trauma and just get some rest. This brings us down a whole arc of a major character struggling with addiction.Now, I thought that arc was very well done, but one, sort of complaint, I have with the book is that in true RPG fashion our heroes go on many side quests. I felt like there were just way too many side quests in this book compared to other books. They also felt a bit more frivolous at times. And while I enjoy a good side quest in video games, reading about some of them felt like more re-hashed ideas. While I appreciated tying up the loose end of Sanctuary with Cara and Jussaro, sometimes I felt like they could have skipped more ahead with that arc and saved us a few pages of reading about the slog of the quest, since the whole point of it was so they could go and do this other thing instead. I also understand that the universe is dangerous and there could be incidents around any corner, but it doesn't have to be all the time, and it wasn't exactly all the time. But there were a huge amount of life or death crises leveled at our characters and sometimes it felt overdone compared to the prior books which felt more balanced. Majority of the time everything was great though, just minor tweaks here and there would have made this feel less constantly overwhelming. It sort felt like the editing was a bit more lax on this book than in the prior two, I definitely found a lot more grammatical errors and outright typos compared to the first. In such huge books, you're bound to find some, but the volume was noticeable in this book to me.Another thing that slowed this book down, but honestly, this literally slows down all third books in series this big, they repeat scenes from earlier books to remind the reader. To her credit, I felt like Bedford didn't like these things either so I really believe she tried to keep these at a minimum. But a whole rehashing of the scene with Ben, Garrick, Kitty and the Nimbus was just not necessary. It's literally the biggest event in the second book. If her readers forgot that...After about two hundred pages of setting the stage and various side quests, we finally dive into the meat of the story. Honestly, the meat of the story is what makes it all worth it, because the events she lays at us are a truly wild ride. It had been established pretty early in the series that ships will sometimes disappear into the folds and never come out. Well, in this book we find out that this has been increasing over the years. The rate is actually quite alarming, but the megacorporations have all been hiding the volume of ships. Suddenly small isolated colonies start to go dark... and that's where the most major part of this mystery takes off. This was one of the most engrossing parts of the book in my opinion, that entire arc. What's actually happening is that the Nimbus is consuming the ships and holding them in some form of stasis. It then "reprograms" the humans on board and sends them out to destroy human settlements. They wipe out the human settlements in various ways, some poison water supplies, others outright attack. When a ship approaches Jamundi where the new ecolibrian settlement and Ben's family are... Crossways sends out a huge force to deal with the threat. But the people seem entirely normal, until a switch is flipped and they become ravenous and start attacking everything and everyone. I felt like the concept was a bit inspired by the Reavers from the Firefly setting. Bedford's use is a little bit different, but it definitely felt similar with the raiding of settlements etc. The whole thing comes to a head when a major attack is launched against Chenon a major human settlement. What good space opera book wouldn't end with an epic space battle? Actually, it was rather predictable at this point, because the last two books have ended in rather epic battles, so we all knew it was coming at some point. The reason this attacks are happening is that it turns out when humans travel into the folds they are polluting the folds with their technology. The precious platinum everyone is after is the real culprit. So when the ships create waste from their drives jumping into the folds it is hurting the creatures in the folds.Amidst all this, there was an arc where Cara and Ben were at odds about something concerning Max's and Gen's child, and while it is all very reasonable, it felt like a bit of an excuse to have them fight about something... because that's how romances go? I don't know, I rather more thoroughly enjoyed the whole power couple dynamic that existed in the majority of the books and breaking that felt unnecessary at this time. However, it did touch on things that needed addressing, which was Ben's “white knight syndrome” as they call it in the book. Always playing the hero and protecting everyone else, etc. However, a lot of that didn't exactly get addressed. Cara and Ben never really had a talk about it and it's one of the only things that feels kind of unresolved and it's just like “oh, Cara will just put up with it” in the end, because she loves him. I don't know, I think it would have made more sense for them to fight over the conflicting paths where Cara was working with Sanctuary and Ben wanted to deal with Crossways and his team. They could have addressed a way more typical conflict in a relationship without nearly breaking it... it just felt shoved in at the end too in some ways.So, the only thread that wrapped up and I didn't like was the thread concerning Crowder. Ah yes, remember Crowder? Ben's arch nemesis in this series. I liked about half of it, I would say, the other was just blasé. I really liked the whole attempt at legal intrigue in this arc where Ben turned himself in to the Monitors and sought to exonerate himself and the Free Company from the charges against them. I was somewhat hoping for a bit more of the court room drama appeal, but there weren't many pages left and our characters had already gone on too many side quests, so I'm sure Bedford was looking to wrap this up quickly, but she should have gone more for a court room drama aesthetic. Instead, Crowder tries to assassinate Ben's witnesses in one fell swoop, once again putting them in all kinds of danger at literally every turn. Most of them survive, while being injured, they STILL have the hearing. It's kind of ridiculous. Instead of going after Crowder entirely, they offer the corporations something and in the process they would agree to drop charges, since they were made up anyway. Sure, fine, BUT then, they go out into the hall to await decisions from backroom deals and Crowder's men try to assassinate Ben! Come on! This is getting ridiculous now. Crowder is just hanging out and watching them try to throw Ben down an elevator shaft, when Trust board comes out and sees Crowder literally red handed with his men. After that, then the head of the board throws Crowder down the shaft, finally killing him, in front of EVERYONE. It's just absolutely ridiculous. It's a good thing the rest of this book is SO good, because this ending to the Crowder arc is just not satisfying. I'm telling you courtroom drama with Crowder disgraced or in jail would have been WAY more interesting to read.So, in the end, despite a couple points of contention, I really did love this book and the entire series. Granted series this epic are tough to end and I sympathize with any author trying to wrap things up with characters and a world they love. It's okay though, I loved the characters and the world too and while I wasn't satisfied with every single little thing, I enjoyed the journey immensely. Part of me is sad to leave this universe behind, but another part of me is glad it's only three books. I think doing more would just drag things on too much. If Bedford ever decides to return to this world, she should choose to write about other characters and other happenings in this universe, please don't fall for the Star Wars trap and feel the need to write about a single group only, you're so good at writing characters that any new ones you focus on will be wonderful!

This was quite a more exceptional read than I was expecting compared to when I initially delved in. I spend a great deal of my time writing mathematics, but I have never really read a book on “how to write mathematics well.” I've mostly picked it up and given written work to colleagues for feedback and the like. I think mathematical exposition is extremely different from a lot of other disciplines out there and having a book that covers some essential “do's” and “don'ts” is a wonderful creation.

Normally, I would put this more towards the end of the review, but I feel it is important to note that this book is no for beginners. This book is written for students with some mathematical familiarity already. I would say it is written for upper level undergraduates that intend to pursue a graduate degree of some kind, whether it be a masters or PhD. I think working knowledge of Calculus, formal logic, set theory, and basic proof writing would be a good pre-requisite before really diving into this text. A bit of exposure to Real Analysis will certainly be more helpful, but familiarity with series and sequences is a must for getting through some sections at least.

Vivaldi starts this book off with some helpful writing hints and even includes exercises to getting his readers to think more deeply about reading and writing mathematics, which is something likely not focused on during undergraduate course work. The part that I was surprised about in this book is the sheer volume of actual mathematics that is covered throughout the text. Vivaldi goes into painstaking details about various topics and rounds us out into doing proof analysis from a formal logic perspective and even goes into how to write good definitions! This is essential advice for going down the path of technical writing in this fashion. I think mathematicians being trained to say things as concisely as possible with as few words as possible does have merit, but as Vivaldi points out, if your reader doesn't understand what you have written, then that doesn't really matter does it? Vivaldi's goal from the outset is foster clear exposition, and he does bring up the major aspects of “knowing your audience” a cardinal rule to consider for anyone doing technical writing of any kind.

I truly appreciated the last chapter on preparing for writing various kinds of papers. Such as diving into the details on the different between monographs, research papers, PhD thesis, etc. He gives some helpful details on writing good abstracts and even weighs in on whether snazzy titles are a good idea or bad idea.

In the end this wound up being a more pleasant read than I expected and I wish I had read it many years ago before even going into a graduate program. It really does have some invaluable advice and even has insight into topics some students may even struggle with even at a later undergraduate level. A real gem, highly recommend for students ready to read something at this level.