Franchise Fiction - Richard Castle - Heat Wave (2009)

I also borrowed this bad boy from Nadia (which I never would have forgotten because of the mildly saccharine inscription just inside the cover written by her husband). I expressed an interest in watching this show, but at the time that it started it fell off the radar, as many shows did when I moved out.

First off, let's talk about the really weird universe ABC is trying to create with this book. It is a real book that was written by a real person. But everything--acknowledgements, copyright, accolades, even author photo (Nathan Fillion himself)--points to it being the work of this fictional character. So I genuinely had to do some digging, and found this article where an exec asserts that it was the labors of a fictional person who created the book.

I understand the logic of a ghostwriter. Many of those teen novels everyone liked (for example, Sweet Valley High) were written by ghostwriters to share the load. But the dedication to this "fact" is really kind of astounding, if you think about it. The problem is you may end up spending too much time thinking about it.

When you actually read the book itself, the real writer of the novel appears, although not in name or face. This was clearly written by one of the show's scriptwriters. That isn't to say that it is formatted like a script or lacks in description or anything like that. It really does just read like a novelization of an episode of a somewhat humorous crime-drama. Each end of a chapter even feels like a commercial break. But some of the effort put forth by those making sure the book exists doesn't really translate into the effort of writing the book. The Richard Castle allegory in this book is a character named Jameson Rook. Rook? Really? That's hardly trying at all. Was Fortress taken?

At less than two hundred pages, it flies by rather quickly. And I do give them credit for including a scene that could never be on network TV in a million years. But the book is average. And you can't really shake the feeling that some poor bastard is being stiffed with this position that ABC is taking.

7/10

Buy it @ Amazon.
Buy it @ Barnes & Noble.

Franchise Fiction - James Wyatt - Dragon Forge (2009)

I did say that I had started reading the next book in this series already. I finished it yesterday, but since I've recently posted here about the book before this one, there isn't too much to be said. Much of what I said before is still true.

That being said, there was a few more parts I didn't like and a few more parts that I did. For one thing, it turns out that the changeling is a member of the Royal Eyes. That makes him a lot less interesting now, because the Royal Eyes commonly use changelings as spies. But the fact that he didn't spend as much time doing spy work made up for it. Instead, he befriended a bunch of misfit warriors and traveled into the Demon Wastes, which I though was cool. The Labyrinth stuff was awesome, and Vor was the greatest character they had in the stable. An orc paladin that used to guard the Wastes and who let a pregnant human go because she was carrying his child? More of that, please! And of course he had to kill him off. Because nobody can really be interesting.

Something I didn't like was the whole marital issues between Gaven and Rienne. I am not reading your parts about going to Argonnessen because I want to hear about how Rienne thinks Gaven is self-absorbed. I don't give two fucks. Get to the being slaughtered by dragons, please. And this book in particular tries to hard to make Gaven special. Sure, he's the Storm Dragon, but I don't see what that had to do with their abomination machine.

Though, to be fair, I didn't understand how their abomination machine was supposed to work. In attempts to keep the whole thing cloaked in mysticism, Wyatt leaves the reader in the dark about the thing the damn book was named after. I still couldn't tell you what it was supposed to do.

I do appreciate, for reals though, the budding romance between Cart and Ashara. A warforged and a member of the house that built the warforged? That's the kind of shit that I crave. But watch, the next book will start with Ashara contracting a fast-acting disease called spear-to-the-face, just like everyone else with any interesting qualities.

Finally, these people don't know what dragonborn and eladrin are? What? Have they never been to Q'barra? What about hearing about the feyspires? These are kind of a big deal. If you know what a tiefling is, there is absolutely no reason you shouldn't recognize a dragonborn or eladrin when you see them, you guys. I thought you were all well-traveled and shit. :P

4.5/10

Fiction - Eric Garcia - The Repossession Mambo (2009)

I told you the next review wouldn't be fantasy. But of course that meant I had to read it, and let me tell you up front, it wasn't fun. I actually read most of it yesterday, in one sitting. Not because it was really good, but because I didn't want to be sitting on it for a long time because I didn't like it.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

I bought the book in my last shopping trip too; I don't know why I keep reading these books that haven't been in my house for very long, but there you go. If the title sounds familiar, it might be because the movie Repo Men was based on this book (which is a lie, but I'll get to that later). I never watched Repo Men, primarily because I didn't give a shit, and also because, after Sherlock Holmes, how can Jude Law be anything but an awesome Watson?

I mentioned that it was a lie to say that that movie was based on this book. The Wikipedia page can tell you some, but the author's note at the end describes the process in more detail: he wrote a short story, then a manuscript of a novel on the idea, and then the script and movie was started before it was published. Then, once the movie was pretty far into production, he decided to publish the book with very few of the edits made to the plot for the movie.

And dear God, it reads like it.

In the author's note, one of the things that Garcia mentions he kept was "the unruly structure". His words, not mine. But they are apt; it was a pain in the ass to keep track of which section was referring to which time in his life. He flips frequently between the past and the present, focusing a lot on his military experience, the parade of wives he traipsed through, and his being on the run. It doesn't even get to the parts we care about, why he got an artificial organ and why he didn't pay for it, until the second half of the book. And it flips randomly around between these subjects. It's not like he goes into the military stuff, then the wife stuff, then the present, or anything like that. Fuck, he doesn't even talk about these things chronologically! The whole thing reads more like a stream of consciousness diary than a novel.

And that's not even going into the fact that the premise is suspect as well. People get artificial organs with usurious loans, and when the default, they die. Seems simple enough, I guess, until you start to think about the changes this would make to the world, and how unbelievable it gets the more you think of it.

For instance, the economic destruction that comes afterwards. These aren't just people getting artificial organs to replace the ones that fail. They are getting them with tons of unnecessary features, features that serve no real purpose other than convince people with healthy organs to get artificial ones as well. And then, when they can't pay the loan on them (and most of them go for as much as a house), repo men are sent out to reclaim the organ so that they can sell it again. They don't mention whether or not the organs cost that much to make, or if they are just overpriced. If they are overpriced, do you happen to remember the housing crisis of the past few years? The only thing saving this Credit Union from going belly-up is the fact that people are lined up around the block to try to get a loan to buy an organ.

On the same note, they mention that sometimes people just can't afford it, and fall delinquent on their loan in order to pay for food and rent. If the price of not paying is death (which it always is), why wouldn't you pay that first? The book tries to explain it away by saying that the bills run up to several thousand a month, and you pay mostly interest anyway. So the whole system is set up to fail. Awesome. How is that legal?

And why wouldn't the government get involved? It has things that each side of the aisle hates: death panels and preying on the poor. It sounds to me like there would be a lot of congressional hearings with whoever is in charge of the Credit Union, possibly every day based on what the book describes as gross negligence on the part of their repo department. Allow me to explain.

There is a described incident in which a repo man repossesses an organ from a guy while his wife is trying to convince him that they are all paid up. The repo man goes back to the office to find that oh, she was right. He just killed a guy for no reason. Where are the legal repercussions? The murder charges, the wrongful death lawsuit, the arguments on pundits' shows that these men have too much power? Nothing. Nada. They pay her some cash and that's it. Yeah, I don't think so.

There are also multiple incidents that someone's nonessential organ is repossessed, but because they do not receive any medical care whatsoever afterwards, they die, usually of blood loss. There is a character with a gall bladder. He could have lived! They even mention that there are some other organs that are repossessed with the same deadly results, such as eyes and tongues. You can live without both. Why do they die? Because nothing is done. This is why they should be paying through the nose in settlements and lawsuits.

For a book that I didn't like, it certainly gave me a lot to talk about. Mostly because the premise is okay, but horridly handled. There was a lot of opportunity for great world-building and even philosophical questions, such as if a person is mostly artificial parts, are they still human? But the author didn't even try.

There were two, and exactly two, saving graces to this novel, and that is why this book gets such a low score:

1. The opening sentence.

The first time I ever held a pancreas in my hands, I got an erection.

2.   The reason he quit his lucrative job as a repo man, even with an artificial heart.

1.5/10

Fantasy - Stephen Deas - The Adamantine Palace (2009)

Did anybody else catch Game of Thrones on HBO last night? I had been looking forward to that for like a year, and it totally did not disappoint. Mostly for hardcore Song of Ice and Fire fans, though. Not a lot of names for characters for the uninitiated. But Bryan liked it, primarily because of the sheer quantity of breasts. Whatever floats his boat.

Is that even here or there? Probably not. Anyway, The Adamantine Palace.

It took me a while to get into this. Which sucked because it was the kind of fantasy that I normally prefer: society and politics, plus how the fantastic changes the world. In this case, the fantastic takes the form of dragons, but if you can't figure that out from the cover, you must be reading the Braille version.

With as many ravings all over the covers about how awesome the dragons are, I was very disappointed at the outset because they were essentially fancy horses. There are hunting types and warring types, and they get stabled and traded and have zero personality. At first I thought it would just be like in Dragonriders of Pern, where the dragon-riders perform a service or something that allows for the dragon-kings and -queens to enjoy a heightened status. No. They're just dragons. Domesticated ones. What? You want something more? Fuck you, says Deas.

Until about a third of the way through with Snow and Kailin. It turns out that the domesticated state of dragons is a balance of drugs to dragon, and if the dragon tips the scales (see what I did there?) in his favor, shit hits the fucking fan. Snow "wakes up" and is hungry to kill. Mostly indiscriminately, I mean, she's really pissed, but later she focuses almost entirely on the alchemists that create the dragon soma that make them all the fancy horses they are at the beginning. She is also focused on waking up the other dragons she encounters.

Meanwhile, there are political machinations aplenty. An asshole marries a brutal queen's daughter, and they has sex with another immature queen. There is also the fact that the Speaker, kind of like a one-man UN for the nations, is retiring and has to choose his successor from among the kings and queens that are really just a hair away from warring. That's more like it. It even makes up for the sellswords that I hate, Sollos and Kemir.

Sollos and Kemir are lame. I'm not just saying that because they swear a lot, but they sound very modern. If their dialogue was placed in, say, contemporary New York, you would think they were just a little odd. Here, it stands out like a sore thumb. It's not good.

While the reviewers of this book loved how the dragons turned into vicious slaughter machines about halfway through, I was still disappointed by it. I may be a traditionalist in this way, but I like my dragons to be treasure hoarders, have distinct personalities beyond "I'm real mad!", and just a step below gods. I never really liked Dragonriders of Pern because why should dragons be ridden by people? People should be cowering before dragons. I especially like the dragons of Elizabeth Haydon's Symphony of the Ages series, because they have that majesty and terrifying aspect, but they can also take on a human form that still betrays the draconic nature beneath the skin. Dragons should want jewels and precious things, not whole scale genocide because they were enslaved by drugs.

8.0/10