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StarCraft Ghost: Nova Review by the Rev. Brian Worley
Sometimes, you have to read a book because you know it's going to be bad. For the same reason that one might watch “The Stuff”or “Revenge of the Teenage Vixens from Outer Space.” In short, because they're amazingly bad. For Atomjack editor Adicus Ryan Garton's last birthday, I bought him a used copy of Planet X, an X-Men/Star Trek: The Next Generation crossover. Starcraft Ghost: Nova is different, though. Before I can explain how, though, let me give you a brief introduction to the world that is Starcraft. Start here: Starcraft was a PC game released in 1998, and it was a real phenomenon. It's considered to be one of the best real-time strategy games of all time, but it didn't take itself too seriously. Units would quote lines that were obvious homages to other science fiction (Star Trek TNG and Voyager, Alien, Starship Troopers, and Fahrenheit 451, just to name a few). Now fast forward a couple of years, to 2002. Blizzard, the people responsible for Starcraft, announce that they're going to make a third-person adventure game for consoles set in the Starcraft universe. I read up on it, and got a kind of excitement that one shouldn't have for video games. And nothing happened. SC:Ghost very persistently was not released. Meanwhile, Blizzard became multi-quadrillionaires with World of Warcraft. Then, in mid-2007, Blizzard announced Starcraft 2, nearly ten years after the original. Jump to a couple of weeks ago, to me perusing a used bookstore with Adicus. We came across Starcraft Ghost: Nova and looked at it, then at each other. “Well,” he asked, “are you going to buy it or am I?” This promised to give some insight into the character whose game languished in production hell for so long, as well as provide a warm-up for the release of Starcraft 2. Now, I'm finally ready to talk about the book. In a word, it was awful. Allow me to further reiterate it by reproducing a line from the book: “AaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH That is one capital A, a dozen or so lowercase As, another dozen capital As, thirty or so capital Hs, another thirty or so italicized capital Hs, and nine exclamation points. Seeing this paragraph in print, and seeing Keith DeCandido badly break all the SF writer's rules gives me the same feeling I get when I watch a bad B-movie. I'm not quite sure whether I should applaud or turn it off/close the book. The plot goes like this: young Nova (short for November) is the daughter of a very wealthy family. Nova, as it turns out, has latent psychic abilities. The military automatically conscripts all psychics for their Ghost special soldier program, but because her family is so powerful, Nova's father keeps her in the dark about her abilities, and keeps the military away from her. Then her family is tragically murdered by a political terrorist group, which triggers Nova to release a burst of psionic energy, killing nearly 300 people. The rest of the book deals with Nova's life on the street, in the forced employment of a crime lord, and the military agent who is trying to track her down. Unfortunately, wooden dialog and poor storytelling don't make this very exciting. If it was a movie, you'd be able to see the boom mic through half of the movie, and the actors would keep looking at the camera. All of this is forgivable, though. I mean, you don't buy a book like this without knowing what you're getting yourself into. There are a couple of things I can't forgive. Foremost: the novel has none of the fun that Blizzard so carefully put into the games. Blizzard balances bad humor with high action in a way that would make John McClane proud. If Starcraft Ghost: Nova has humor, it's the kind where no one really knows if it's supposed to be a joke. The next thing I can't forgive is the way they try to reconcile the fact that the game may not sync up with the book: The first thing a new recruit into the Ghost program does is get a memory wipe. Clean slate. Which makes it exactly like those episodes of TV shows that turn out just to be a dream. That means it has absolutely no bearing on the story, and it leaves people wondering why they bothered to read it at all. I like the occasional bad SF novel, and this is one of the worst I've ever read. Honestly, it still waxed my enthusiasm for the release of Starcraft 2, but if you want to read a bad novel, I'd recommend Planet X instead. And I haven't even read it yet.
The Rev. Brian Worley is the lead singer of a Monster Magnet cover band. He agrees to stop liking science fiction when real life is as awesome as Battlestar Galactica. Starcraft Ghost: Nova can be purchased at Barnes & Noble. |
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