The Man Himself pointed it out before I got a chance but Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog reminded me of Skullcrusher Mountain and The Future Soon quite a bit. Regardless Whedon really nailed it with the musical adventure here. Today is your last chance to catch the fun for free to enjoy it while you have the chance.
Developed by GSC Game World and published by THQ, STALKER is a dark first-person shooter with adventure and rpg elements set in the nuclear tinged, twisted landscape landscape of Chernobyl referred to in the game as the Zone. Based on Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic it shares its name (minus the horrible acronym whose periods I am abandoning here in favor of using all caps) from the Andre Tarkovsky film, also based on the book, Stalker.
The Story. After an opening cut scene in which, presumably, your character is being carted to the Zone only to have the transport vehicle struck by a bolt of lightning, you wake up inside the Zone. Known throughout the game as the “Marked One,” your ostensible goal is to find and eliminate the Stalker known as Strelok. At the same time you are uncovering more about your mysterious past and the secrets behind the Zone. The game can unfold in a fairly linear path, if you choose, but there are plenty of side treks and tasks to attempt along your journey through the Zone.
The World. The Zone is a bleak landscape. Crumbled factorys and ruined towns fill the terrain while wrecked cars stand abandoned on the roadside. Strange phenomenon, called anomalies, dot the landscape in various forms twisting reality around them while mutants, brigands, and other Stalkers roam the landscape. Anomalies aren’t all bad however since they often produce items called Relics that can be attached to your person to enhance your abilities. Unfortunately Relics are often irradiated and can be detrimental to your health. As such there is a delicate balancing act between relics that raise your rad count and those that lower it. Speaking of radiation, as if mutants, gun toting pyschos, and weird rips in reality weren’t enough you have to watch out for highly irradiated areas that sap your health away; often at frustrating moments.
The quality texture works and fantastic lighting of GSC’s X-ray engine real adds to the atmosphere of the Zone but the real clincher is the sound. The constant ticcing of the Geiger counter, the constant thrum and boom of nearby anomalies, the howling of wind, or the distant barks, growls, grunts, and moans of mutants all ratchet up the tension and keep you spinning around looking for the source of the sounds. The game has a subtle music soundtrack that serves as a counterpoint to the tension generating sound effects. The only music in the game occurs in the populated “safe” areas of the game whether through an old radio in the Bar, or a lone Stalker sitting near a fire strumming a sad song on his guitar music is a signal for brief respite from the tensions of travelling the Zone.
Gameplay. STALKER is, first and foremost, an FPS but the strong quest element and item-collection aspects of the game lend it an RPG feel. Much was made of the game’s ballistics model which uses what I pressume are realistic physics for weapon accuracy and bullet drop. There are no laser like accurate guns here, you miss and miss a lot, making firefights tense, drawn-out affairs. Hit detection left me a bit wanting however as enemies typically reacted the same no matter where they’re shot (excepting the head which is usually fatal).
Weapons and armor degrade over time. Armor loses its protection while guns become less accurate and jam more frequently, thankfully there are enough enemeies in the game that finding a weapon is never hard. Armor is a different story. There were many times that on particularly long missions where my armor was almost completely gone and there is no way to repair or buy no armor once your commited; the last level of the game is particularly brutal in this regard. To make things more difficult your carrying capacity is limited to 50 pounds making item selection a particularly important aspect of the game.
There is a certain amount of repetiveness to the gameplay; though some of that was due to my inability to find a good weapon with a silencer. Initial stealthy approaches often dissolve into straight out firefights and enemy AI, even on normal, is pretty brutal (I kicked the game down to easy about halfway through). Major deviation in gameplay comes near the end of the game when it becomes suddenly apparent that running and not fighting becomes the better option. Like Crysis the game features a weapon modding system and you’ll find scopes, silencers (which I didn’t find any of), and grenade launchers to attach to the plethora of weapons throughout the game. Again, the ability to play with and customize your armament is one of my favorite aspects of the FPS and kudos to STALKER for jumping on that bandwagon.
Where the game falls short is in the narrative. Part of my problem here is mine and part is in the game itself. Discovering things about the Zone is a fun and exciting element of the game. My first delve into an abandoned scientific laboratory brought back fond memories of Fallout and was a nice balance of creepy and cool. Unfortunately while the game does a nice job of the fleshing out the world your in most of the character development occurs in the form of a diary kept in your PDA. It’s like playing the game gives you a basic outline of the story while the details are hidden away. A fact that is IMO, a bad design. Then you have the whole Strelock angle which, by the time I got to the end of the game, was NEVER EXPLAINED. Or so I thought. Thanks to the internet a quick search online revealed that an OPTIONAL part of the final level explains who you are, who Strelock is, and what the Zone is all about. WFT? GSC builds all these cool, mysterious cut scenes into the game then doesn’t explain them unless you stumble into this last section of the game!? Disappointing to say the least and a fact that made the endgame feel decidedly anticlimatic.
Influences. As mentioned above Fallout seems to be a major influence for this game, or maybe it’s just the similarity of the environments, but there was a certain bleakness to the game that reminded me of that series. The major influence, that took me a while to pinpoint at least until a certain major announcement was made by Blizzard, was Diablo. The Zones of “wild” areas interspersed by safe areas, the quests, even the music reminded me of the Diablo series; IMO and as usual YMMV (sorry, felt I need a few more acronyms).
In a nutshell. Tense, action gameplay in an atmospheric creepy world equates to a fun, but flawed game from a new(er) developer that should appeal to fans of FPSs and RPGs (more acronyms!). The prequel STALKER: Clear Sky is due August 29th.
Stealing Light
Gary Gibson
Tor Books, 2008
Contrary to what I initially thought this is not an official US release. In fact both versions currently on offer over at Amazon appear to imports of the hardcover and paperback US versions. Which is a shame since I think this book would do well in the U.S. In terms of scope and style Gibson is most comparable to Ian Banks and Alistair Reynolds (and likely other who I haven’t read) but those two in particular stuck out in my mind as I read. However I think Gibson’s work, for the most part, stands on its own.
Dakota Merrick is a “machine-head” pilot; a human augmented by cybernetic implants that allow her to interfaces with computers. Unfortunately, do to tragic events in the past, machine-heads are illegal and Dakota must hide who she is. She is forced to eke out a living on the fringe of society and take whatever jobs come her way. A job gone awry and forced to take on assumed identity Dakota is stuck working for people who hate her kind the most while trying to figure just what the alien Shoal, gatekeepers of faster than light travel, are up to.
The book is fast paced and easy to read with plenty of action and mystery to keep things moving. Which in turn is both the books weakness and its strength. It’s exciting yes but also sparse in the slower moments that allow for more robust character development. What we do get of that plays as a mere footnote to the action which is sad since those character moments are particularly interesting. In particular I thought Dakota’s relationship with her ship was interesting; and by relationship I mean that in every sense of the word. Gibson’s heavy focus on action takes something away from the initial exploration of the alien derelict a scene that could have been cool and atmospheric again becomes a footnote to driving the action onwards (Just thinking of derelicts makes me want to watch Event Horizon again).
Gibson manages to craft a real sense of history and life to the human aspects of the story. From the various human colonies to the other machine-heads we meet it is easy to see that Gibson has a particular vision for his universe. The city in the giant Shoal ship was especially impressive scene that reminded me of the cantina scene from Star Wars, with its motley collection of characters and high-stakes chase. Most impressive perhaps is the final section of the novel which, as action-packed as it was, still manages to play out in an almost stately pace with multiple points of view and world-defining revelations occuring right up until the end.
Stealing Light is an exciting read that pays homage to the space opera genre; a fact that is both a boon and curse for the novel. The elments that truly reveal Gibson’s potential often take a backseat for the more familiar scenes fans of space opera have read before. Which is a shame, since Gibson’s instincts, from gripping opening page to the well choreographed finale, are spot on. Recommended for sci-fi fans looking for a good, epic sci-fi yarn though not something completely ground-breaking or original. Good luck finding a copy though.
Rolling Thunder
John Varley
Ace Books, 2008
A first-person narrative and somewhat sequel to some of Varley’s earlier works Rolling Thunder follows Podkayne (whose full name is so ridiculously long I won’t type it out here), the granddaughter of Mars’ first president, through her various careers (Naval and Entertainment) during a turbulent time in the, not so distant, galactic future. The first thing I noticed about this book is the exuberance of the writing style. Podkayne’s frank tone, clipped speech, and quick paced narrative indicate an author who seems to have had a lot of fun writing the book. A fact that comes across when reading; carrying the action across at a breakneck pace and barelling though even the slower scenes. A lot happens in this book, and Varley (and Podkayne) are up front about sharing with you everything that’s going on but aren’t so hip about explaining anything.
Hard sci-fi this is not. It walks a middle ground between the adventure sci-fi and classic space opera; never leaning to hard on the science aspect of anything. That isn’t to say it isn’t there but, by putting us into the head of character admitedly mediocre at math and science, Varley neatly glosses over the technical aspects of the science allowing for metaphor and imagination to fill in the gaps. More than science this is a book about the ideas behind science and, to some extent certainly, the intersection of science and art. That intersection is embodied in the relationship between Podkayne and Jubal Broussard; as Podkayne states “We fit each other like yan and yang.”
On the one hand you have Podkayne, our singer who recognizes the slow singing of the strange alien crystal mountains of Jupiter’s Europa, with a strong verbal acuity but a weakness in math and science. On the other hand there is Jubal Broussard, scientific genius (cited alongside Newton and Einstein), inventor of the “bubble technology” (a stasis field used for energy, as a weapon, as well as other more mundane things) and verbally and emotionally stunted do to severe childhood trauma both physical and psychological. Somehow (again unexplained in the novel) the two become linked in the stasis spheres drawing them together. In that inexplicable and unexplainable link between these two essentially contrasting characters Varley seems to be speaking about a greater link between both science and art that tends to get overlooked. Not only that, but by not explaining either the greater cosmic mysteries (the songs of the crsystal mountains, the bubble technology) or the relationship between those characters, Varley creates another link between the idea of man’s mystery to himself to the greater infinite strangeness of the universe at large.
Or maybe he just wants to write another book. Take your pick.
Packed full of adventures, mysteries, wonders and excitement Rolling Thunder was a past paced read with a straight forward manner the belies greater depth than at first glance. There are some troublesome elements, there is a constant reference to ‘googling’ that takes me out of the action, and some elements of the absurd that occaisonally threaten to overwhelm the narration (”Patricia Kelly Elizabeth Podkayne Strickland-Garcia-Redmond-Broussard”, see my first paragraph), but the good far outweighs the bad. Hard sci-fi fans might find the lack of explanation hard to swallow but I find the sense of mystery and wonder about the more fantastic science-fiction facets of the novels an integral aspect of the type of novel Varley set out to write; facets that hearken back to the classic science fiction stories of yore. A B+ title bordering on an A, recommended for sci-fi fans of every stripe looking to be reminded about why they started reading sci-fi in the first place.
It’s always good to end the week with the knowledge that our society is that little bit closer to creating our cyborg overlords. From Dean Kamen (the guy who brought you the Segway scooter) comes “Luke”, a robotic arm controlled by a series of pressure pads and other controls. In addition to being just plain badass and a far more useful display of Kamen’s technological genius than the Segway, it movies us one creepy step further into cyborg territory. Soon this king of technology will pave the way for the true cyborgs who will inevitably rely on eugenics in an attempt to perfect their remaining human components while forcing the rest of us to do their bidding.
But wait, you say…there’s a huge flaw in this plan. Everyone knows that cyborg software technology often warps the human brain, turning the “person” into a promiscuous nymphomaniac. How will the cyborgs keep from diluting the gene pool of their robotic master race? An Australian research team found the simple answer: remote controlled implants that can block the vas deferens. Now these horrible combinations of man and machine can hump anything that will sit still long enough and not have to worry about pregnancy unless they decide to allow it. And as a huge added benefit, they can install them in the rest of us non-cyborgs to keep our population under control. Leave it to Australians to mess up our only hope: overpowering them with sheer numbers.
Ragamuffin is the sequel to Buckell’s previous novel Crystal Rain though that might not be apparent in the beginning, especially to anyone who hasn’t read Cyrstal Rain, a fact that might cause a problem when the reader hits the middle of the book and the narrative shifts from space to the previous novel’s Nagagada (or New Anagada if you prefer). The plot initially focuses on Nashara a badass ladystyles sent from her homeworld Chimson to generally kick ass and deliver a secret weapon that will hopefully help liberate the masses of oppressed humans from non-human/alien overlords.
The novel started a bit slow, which I think was intentional, since as a reader I shared in Nashara’s sence of being trapped on a world she didn’t want to be in. Once she hits open space though, gets a chance to really open up and kick the aforementioned ass, things really shine. In a particularly brilliant action scene Nashara uses a minigun in a rather unorthodox, though fairly awesome, manner and later, in the novel’s final climatic battle, Nashara shines once again with brilliant use of her secret weapon. Buckell introduces other new interesting aspects like the mind-controlling Satraps and certain revelations regarding the Teotl, both of which may or may not be related to one another.
The previously mentioned shift in narrative came right as I was starting to really enjoy Nashara so the shift back to Pepper, John and company really killed the pace for me a bit. While I like the characters here I can’t help but feel this was the weaker section of the book. The Jerome(John’s Son)/Xipilli element is what really brought things down for me. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t badly written, in fact Xipilli was actually quite a tragic character and what he was trying to do in the novel was actually quite noble but both it felt rather extraneous in terms of the novels actual plot and story development. It did lead to an important moment for Jerome towards the end of the novel and did reinforce the overarching theme portraying to what levels aliens have caused humans to sink to but regardless detracted from what I felt was the more interesting and better written parts of the book.
Regardless this wasn’t enough to stop me reading and the last 75 to 100 pages were more than enough to make up for any chaff along the way. In many ways the final scenes reminded a bit of the space battle from Return of the Jedi: a disparate alliance fighting an implaccable enemy in an against all odds scenario; thrilling stuff. Overall, given the greater emphasis on action and overall fantastic world-building I’d rank Ragamuffin slightly above it’s predecessor. Highly recommanded title for all sci-fi fans who enjoy a well-developed, colorful world that is at the same time familiar and refreshingly original populated by unique and, for the most part, universally appealing characters.
UPDATE: Rock, Paper, Shotgun pointed to an excellent article over at Gamesetwatch on the design in Crysis’ first half. Manveer Heir, game designer at Raven Software, boils down my own feelings on both that first half and the problems later in the game much better than I was able to and I highly recommend you take a gander at what he was to say.
Much has been said about Crysis‘ story, mostly regarding its lack of originality and sub-par scripting. Even more has been said about it’s ridiculous system requirements so I’m not going to touch on either of those except to say that the story isn’t amazing and that the game runs great on my rig until the final level when things go downhill. What Crysis does well, especially in the beginning, is disguise its linear progression in a fairly open world.
The trick is that world is open at all. You’re on rails, they’re just very forgiving rails. Missions typically consist of getting from Point A to Point B, an obviously linear progression, but that tactics and means you use to do that are, more or less, up to you. Do you go the stealthy route? Using your suit and cloak to slip by enemies or do you maliciously slaughter your enemies in an almost sociopathic quest to leave no one alive behind you (Hint: I chose the latter).
I did see some complaints about the ineffectiveness of Crysis‘ weapons a point I disagree with. Most enemies well take anywhere from one to three shots (in the head) to kill. The higher numbers on that end are for helmeted enemies and the fact that using a silencer degrades range and stopping power. It also discounts the exosuit enemies later in the game. I chose to snipe enemies from afar using foliage and and my cloak to sneak around enemy strongholds and sow death and confusion in my wake. It is sad but it took me nearly the entire first half of the game to realize I could switch my rate of fire. Once I realized I could use single shot my sniper tactics so an almost exponential improvement.
The game features a entertaining, if not entirely useful weapon modding systems. That lets you attach various tactical items to guns. Laser sights, flashlights, various scopes, a grenade launcher and a dart gun round out your options. Each set-up plays to different tactical approach to combat that turns out to work pretty well. I am less keen on multiple ammo types (I think it only applies to one gun) and am uncertain how effective the incendiary rounds are. Combining weapon load out with the suits functions enhances combat quite a bit. For example the shotgun and strength power (or a sniper rifle) reduce recoil and improves aim at the cost of armor.
It’s only a shame that all this becomes mostly useless for the last half of the game. The alien enemies feel a lot stupider than the human enemies and what was fun stealth/action combat turns into a more straight forward run and gun affair. Combine that with missions that jar with the rest of the game, in particular the hover-jet mission, and you have an overall weakening of what I found to be the games core strengths. Regardless I found the game a blast and I can see myself going back and playing the first half again sometime in the future. More than anything else, and shortcomings aside, I had fun playing this game which, when you come right down to it, is what games are all about.
This core element, unfortunately, is what brings us to Bioshock. vLauded by the gaming community at large as an artistic triumph, Game of the Year level product and my expectations for both story and gameplay were, needless to say, rather high. At first glance Bioshock does indeed seem to be all its cracked up to be. That lasted until my first Big Daddy fight.
I remember reading about the Big Daddies in the pre-release furor of the game and their advanced AI, and general badassedness and I would say that both are spot on. A fact that turns out to be a bad thing. Since Big Daddies take a beating to be taken out, their resistance to all forms of attack (both your powers and your weapons) combined with the general scarcity of ammo combine into a foul tasting brew. Throw in the fact that you need to take out Big Daddies to get at Little Sisters, arguably the most important part of the game, and I’m railroaded into doing something I don’t want to do.
I know what your saying. I’m complaining because the game is hard. That is true to an extent but the Big Daddy fights aren’t fun. Not fun at all and even more of a drag since you can’t really say no to them. There are other problems with combat since the splicers are actually quite dumb. As a result combat swings back and forth from the incredibly easy to the frustratingly difficult. The splicers suffer from “Diablo syndrome;” they occasionally look different but for the most they feel like the same enemy, different skin or color, but the same enemy.
The level design isn’t fantastic. Rapture is fascinating from an architectural standpoint, and it oozes atmosphere, but more often than not that appearance is more like a disguise hiding the traditional Doom-inspired linear level design. Indeed even the recordings you find on your path are an element ripped straight out of Doom 3. The story is interesting, and I’m at least curious as to what happened, what is going on, and who exactly our main hero is. The flashes of memory(?) you get serve as a passable means of keeping you engaged in the story. Interesting yes, but it wasn’t enough to make me want to keep playing. With books to read, other games to play, a backlog of DVRed television, not to mention two jobs means what I’m playing has to entice me back and Bioshock just didn’t do that for me….at least until I started cheating.
I’m not using god mode, or infinite ammo instead I’m using a cheat that gives me $200 dollars every time I press the F10 button. Indeed my enjoyment of the game has gone up considerably as a result. Ammo is no longer scarce, but it isn’t exactly abundant either. The long stretches from a vending machine have little to no ammo drops so I find myself low on ammo in some cases. Special (electric buck, rockets, etc.) ammo is still scarce enough to force me to be careful with it but I no longer worry about things too much and can throw myself into Big Daddy fights with suicidal glee.
It doesn’t resolve all my complaints with the game and doesn’t address the fact that your powers never really feel totally useful. Sure they’re interesting, they have some viable non-combat use, but I never really feel like I need them. The game is atmospheric and creepy but never outright scary (Aliens vs. Predator and Eternal Darkness are the two games the scared me the most). The recordings used as fluff are fun, as they were in Doom 3, and a great way to introduce story without breaking the flow of gameplay. The lack of cut scenes leaves you in the drivers seat for the whole game, an admirable acheivment, that helps eliminate the presence of the 4th wall that video games typically share with other entertainment mediums.
I still don’t think the game is as amazing as everyone said it was. But what the game does in terms of story and narrative is inevitably dragged down by the gameplay. I plan on finishing the game, not because I enjoy it, but because I want to see how the story ends. Which is why Bioshock, in my opinion at least, fails as a game. Because, given a choice between Bioshock the game and Bioshock the novel (if it existed), I would inevitably choose the novel.
Bioshock and Crysis making an interesting side by side comparison because their faults are complimentary. Where Crysis lacks in narrative originality Bioshock shines, where Bioshock lacks in polished, balanced gameplay, Crysis shines. Both games seem to pander to a different audience: where fans of Deus Ex and System Shock 2 will inevitably gravitate towards Bioshock, fans of Far Cry (duh!), Half-life and more traditional shooters will gravitate towards Crysis. Both games work, and work especially well when they focus on their strengths, but seem to fall apart when you scrutinize their faults.
I’ve wandered a bit further afield than I intended to. Regardless of my dissapointment with Bioshock I am enjoying my experience with the game and hope that things improve more as I go on and more of the story is unearthed. Crysis was fun to play and I highly recommend it on looks alone if you can run it. The early gameplay, while familiar to anyone who played Far Cry, is made fresh and interesting thanks to the addition of the exosuit powers. Both have demos at least (for the PC versions) so you can try out both before taking any kind of monetary plunge and a highly recommend you give both a try. All in all both are good games the fall shy of great thanks to a number of shortcomings.
Galaxy Blues by Allen Steele
Ace Books, 2008
This was an interesting book. It’s a space opera adventure that reads in a very old school way. The first person narrative, written like a memoir, combined with chapter headings that provide a summary of what will happen engender a feeling reminiscent of something out of a nineteenth century novel. The plot is simple enough as spacer Jules Truffant seeks political asylum from the Union Astronautica in the Coyote Federation. Managing to make his way to Coyote a bit of bad luck finds him in jail where he is scooped up by a corporate big whig to help in a delegation sent to open trade between humanity and the greater universe at large (i.e. aliens). Jules luck doesn’t hold long though and he, and his fellow crewmates, find themselves in a rather trying, and dangerous, situation.
The scrappy and ‘barbaric’ humanity amidst the cosmopolitan and ‘civilized’ galactic society isn’t the most original plot element, it was used in Mass Effect recently, and the relationship between humanity and the alien hjadd is very similar to that of humans and the Vorlons from Babylon 5. Familiar, but the humanity as intergalactic underdog element is still an interesting plot device that Steele uses well here. Indeed Jules final confrontation with the arrogance of the elder aliens near the novel’s conclusion is evidence of a fairly original take on the concept.
This being my first experience with Steele’s Coyote universe I found the world of Coyote fairly interesting. Steele manages to conjure an image of an old west frontier town with something out of Star Trek. We don’t spend much time there though as the novel sticks with the action moving along at a rapid fire pace emphasized by short chapters and the clipped sparse narration of Jules. Indeed given the first person perspective the novel focuses on Jules interactions and relationships with the people around him from the beutiful Rain to the enigmatic Ash. The above lends a very intimate feel to the novel and, while it takes place within the same universe as Steele’s earlier trilogy, is self-contained and comes to a satisfying conclusion that leaves things open for more, but doesn’t necessitate them with any kind of dangling plot threads.
In the end this was a solid read, though a little slow to start. Short and self-contained the novel doesn’t quite have the same ‘epic’ feel as other space operas but is, none-the-less, a rolicking adventure tale. A solid B+ recommanded for Sci-fi fans looking for a lighter read or something to suggest to their non-genre reading friends.
Science allows us to do plenty of cool and creepy things. But whether you’re into weird science for resurrecting extinct species or just to grow ears on the backs of mice, PETA wants you to know that they’ve one-upped you.
PETA is offering a $1 million prize to the contest participant able to make the first in vitro chicken meat and sell it to the public by June 30, 2012. The contestant must do both of the following:
• Produce an in vitro chicken-meat product that has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and meat-eaters alike.
• Manufacture the approved product in large enough quantities to be sold commercially, and successfully sell it at a competitive price in at least 10 states.
First off, I would like to salute PETA on this. Usually they strike me as militant dolts, but the phrase “in vitro meat” is a stroke of brilliance. The idea itself is doomed to failure at the moment though. Many vegetarians won’t eat the meat because “animal cruelty” is not their primary reason for being vegetarian in the first place. And the number that do switch over to eating in vitro meat will probably be offset by people who are scared or weirded out by the concept itself and refuse to eat it. Plus, even if they can get people to eat it, there’s still the problem of cost. The amount of R&D needed to grow edible tissues in culture will be astronomical (and the $1 million prize is likely a laughable drop in the bucket). All of that money will be reflected in the price of the meat and realistically, crazy organic-loving hippies aside, there’s probably not a huge market for bizarre pseudo-chicken that costs more than regular chicken.
UPDATE:
Upon seeing this I immediately thought of an episode of Sci-fi Channel’s blissfully goofy Eureka. It took me a while to find the info but a blog over at tvguide by pgoody had a succinct summary of what I remember:
With that crisis averted, Jack turns his attention to the “dumb virus” and soon deduces that all the dummies all ate chicken at Café Diem. After investigating the chicken farm, Jack finds out that the chicken farmer doesn’t want to kill birds so she uses stem-cell technology to grow independent chicken parts (yummy?). The cloned chicken parts, while organic, causes some chemical reaction that makes people who eat them stupid. A vegetarian doctor, who kept her smarts, develops the antidote, and all goes back to “normal” at GD.
Episode was from Season 2 called “E=MC…?” Not that I expect anything of the sort to happen in real life but it reminded me of that whole fiction to reality surealness I posted about earlier.
-Mike
It has been a little over a year since I started this series and it has been, on the whole, an entertaining ride. It is hard coming at a review from this angle so bear with me here.
Honor Harrington starts off as a Captain in the Royal Navy of Manitcore. For 11 books she is beaten, abused, triumphant, exalted, loved and hated by people in no less than three star systems, fights enemies both foreign and domestic, and grows along the way. Across the eleven books readers follow what is essentially the ongoing struggle between the Star Kingdom of Manticore and the People’s Republic of Haven. Set amidst the backdrop of interstellar war and politics is the very human story of Honor’s maturation from green Captain to important personage. Indeed both the political and military aspects of the novel work in tandem with the emotional development of Honor’s character to create a compelling narrative tension that drives you forward from book to book. Emotion certainly plays a strong part in the series at large thanks to Honor’s bond to a treecat named Nimitz. Treecats, sentient cat-like creature that are both empathic and telepathic, form strong bonds with humans. While not true in the early books Honor’s bond (contrary to other people’s bonds) allows her to sense the emotions of other people through Nimitz’s own empathic abilities. While animal-human bonding is a hallmark of fantasy literature (Hobb’s Farseer trilogies come to mind) Weber provides a fascinating and engaging twist in a sci-fi environment, in the process creating a society of creatures that could perhaps stand on its own in a wholly seperate series.
I would argue that the first five novels offer the strongest outing by Weber, with the best elements of personal tragedy and grand scale action managed in a taught well-paced narratives. Later in the series things start to suffer a bit from page bloat, copious infodumps, and occaisonally unnecessary recaps. That last of course comes with a small caveat since, having read the novels over the course of some 13 to 14 months, the narrative was typically fresh in my mind. Of the later novels both Echoes of Honor and Ashes of Victory suffer most from the info dump. Characters grow long winded in discussion or, where they are brief, are interupted mid-dialalogue for lengthy sections of exposition that brings the pace to a screeching halt. However the later novels also feature some of the best battle scenes, and Weber’s command of space naval combat is something worth reading. Furthermore War of Honor has some of the most politically interesting story elements of any of the novels and tames some of the exposition down a bit.
Regardless of the weaker narrative in the late volumes I have enjoyed my foray into the ‘honorverse’ and would recommend it to anyone interested in grand scale epic space opera. As Novelist was my initial introduction to the series (Novelist is a reader’s advisory service provided by Ebsco host and typically available in most medium-large public libraries) I feel obligated to point out that their recomemdation that fans of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorksokian might also like Honor Harrington was right on the money. Like the Vorksogian series Weber’s Honorverse features a strong dose of the romantic that occaisonally slides into the melodramatic but never threatens to overwhelm the narrative, in fact Honor’s bond with Nimitz often takes what could be construed as melodramatic and makes it a far more potent element of conflict.
While I’ve been using my library to borrow all of these books I should hasten to point out that they are available for free online. With the release of At All Costs Baen published a CD of Weber’s books that has since made it’s way online. Anyway as I said this is a fun, space opera, adventure series well worth a look for any genre fan.
