Franchise Fiction - Richard Castle - Naked Heat (2010)

I've already talked at length in my previous post about how weird it is to be giving authorial credit to a fictional entity, so let's just move on, shall we?

This entry into the series is much longer than its predecessor and flows differently, as if a different writer worked on this one from the last one. While each chapter in the previous entry ended like a commercial break, this one seems to be in love with ending chapters with the characters knowing one important piece of information that the reader will have to read on, even one more sentence into the next chapter to find out.

I'm not a fan.

Don't get me wrong, the story here was, at least for me, more compelling than the previous one, possibly because of the long suspect list to keep you guessing. But this "the characters read a name and then move into action; you want the name? Better read the next chapter" thing is bullshit. I wouldn't have such a problem with it if it just happened once or twice. But as the book goes on and the stakes get higher, the author relies on this device as if it was the only thing he has ever learned from creative writing classes or critiques.

Maybe there's a person out there that eats that shit up. It doesn't appetize me. It just gets my frustrated. Granted, I'm easily frustrated, especially by books, but it feels so much like a cheap trick that I want to rebel against their manipulation. I actually stopped part of the way through for a week to get over being mad about this.

The real lesson here is, if you have a trick, don't overuse it. You'll just piss your audience off.

7/10

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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

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Franchise Fiction - Robin D. Laws - The Freedom Phalanx (2006)

Now this is how you write franchise fiction. My god, this one is so much better than the first one it's hard to believe.

This is another one of Bryan's books, obviously, though I was with him in the store when he got it. I think I was the one that found it on the shelf for him. :)

This particular book isn't about the original Freedom Phalanx of the first book, but instead the formation of the Phalanx in the game. All the guys on the cover are there: Manticore being a dick, Sister Psyche being the helpless girl, Statesman being from another era, Synapse being annoying, and Positron being Positron.

Where the last one fell short, this one succeeds with flying colors. Its perfect balance of action and repose works in this book, which is just as much about how the characters learn to work together and deal with their clashing personalities and opinions as much as it is a conspiracy involving food additives. Chapters actually end on cliffhangers, and each hero has a villain counterpart they have to contend with along with their own inner demons.

This one was an absolute joy to read.

There are only a couple of things I had problems with: the fact that Sister Psyche had to be the captured one because of her gender, and the fact that there was no opportunity for the reader to figure out what the bad guys' plans were on their own. I've spoken before on that last bit.

I know that in comic books, which is where this game pulls most of its inspiration, female heroes are frequently the target of kidnappings. In this case, it fits in the story to use Sister Psyche's psionic power as a battery and affect the minds of Paragon City's citizens. But it still felt like it was just a way to take the female character out of the game so the big strong manly male heroes could save the day and her without her help.

Because of that, it doesn't get a perfect score. Sorry, Mr. Laws.

9/10

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Franchise Fiction - Robert Weinberg - The Web of Arachnos (2005)

You may or may not know this, but City of Heroes was a superhero MMORPG that Bryan and I played a lot over the years. I say "was" because while we were in Seattle for PAX we heard from a friend that NCSoft was dissolving Paragon Studios, the developers who were still working on new content for the game. It's still available to play until the end of November, but we are already in mourning for our game.

So, with this new knowledge, I thought it was prudent to read the two City of Heroes novels that Bryan purchased before I got into the game back in '08. After all, very soon they were not going to be relevant anymore.

If you feel the urge to purchase this book, which is essentially the origin story of Statesman, Lord Recluse, and the Nemesis villain group, I feel it is necessary to point out to you that it's not very good. Even for franchise fiction, it's pretty bad.

It's been a few days since I finished it, so I've had some time to gain some distance from it. It hasn't truly tempered my feelings about it. The whole thing just feels like an amateur job, particularly completed by someone who doesn't do a lot of reading himself.

When you describe a person in fiction, do you give their exact heights and weights, and hope that is plenty of explanation? In case you weren't aware, the answer is no. Don't say that a girl is five feet six inches tall and weighs only one hundred three pounds (also, WHAT THE FUCK. That's not a human being. That's a skeleton.), say that she is of slightly above average height and very skinny. Let US, the audience, decide what we imagine from that.

One of the main characters, Stefan Richter, makes a big deal in the first quarter of the book about how he doesn't believe in myths and magic, he believes in logic, science, and technology. That's all well and good. The frequency in which he asserts this belief (OUT LOUD, for fuck's sake) is annoying, but considering the crazy shit they begin to find (the Well of the Furies with curative liquid and stuff), I was willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume that it meant the character was trying to reassure himself in the face of this cognitive dissonance. But when we get into his head, there isn't any cognitive dissonance. Just stupid crap. And then, (spoiler!) when he turns evil, we are never given any reason why he chose that path. Just a flimsy excuse of "it's the logical way of things" is bullshit, and you know it, Mr. Weinberg.

The other superheroes that are introduced--in the later half of the book, mind you--get almost no screen time to explain their personalities and motives. Their time spent in the book is mostly where they got their powers, and then using them against baddies. Where's the characterization?

It's kind of sad when your most interesting parts are the ones that DON'T include the superpowered beings, and instead the thugs of the Prohibition era.

One last point: this book spent too much effort trying to couch the events in its pages with things that happened in real history. Statesman was not a friend of a friend of Hemingway, just so you can namedrop him. There was no need to make Arachnos part of Mussolini's cadre. Your efforts to shoehorn Mickey Mouse in were disruptive. If you are writing a book that takes place in a point of history and you want to make it relevant, don't do this. If you must associate with something to breathe life in your story, first analyze what's wrong that it needs this shit, and please try to limit it to one. This author went too far, and it did more to anger me and frustrate me as a reader than intrigue me.

3/10

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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

Franchise Fiction - James Wyatt - Storm Dragon (2007)

I mentioned in the last post that I was ass-deep in D&D stuff. While I did not purchase this book then, I did start reading it in that time period. We've just started playing last night, and I actually finished reading this a couple days ago. I started it a while ago. I wasn't keeping super on top of anything, let alone my reading regimen, so again, I apologize.

I honestly don't read a lot of franchise fiction. We do have a few though; that teen novel from the last post, the City of Heroes novels, and the first two books of this series. I don't usually read franchise fiction because I don't believe that a story should depend on an existing IP to sell. I bought this and the second book because of that little word in the top right corner of the cover: Eberron.

When I bought this book, I was still working on my first adventure and devouring lore for Eberron, our campaign setting of choice. I liked that it wasn't high fantasy, good-versus-evil gameplay, so I wanted to dig in. In particular, I wanted to figure out the feel of the world beyond steampunk, technology-runs-on-magic fantasy. And in the end, I'm still more inclined to point my own campaign towards my preconceptions than that of the story provided.

If it was standing alone as a story, I probably would be giving it a lower score than I am. The story itself is fairly basic: there is a prophecy detailing the events leading to the rise of the Storm Dragon, and there are a group of fugitives orchestrating these events. The main character is a member of the dragonmarked House of Storm, and knows all of the prophecy regarding the Storm Dragon. Is it any surprise, then, when (Spoiler!) he becomes the Storm Dragon in question?

The story itself is rather high fantasy. However, the only thing I can compare it to is the story of Final Fantasy 12. They go and collect people and artifacts to make certain things happen, even if the characters themselves are at odds with each other. In this book, those items are information and artifacts from various places in the world, and collecting them all to one spot to force an event to take place, one that was supposed to send one of the more unsavory characters to godhood.

Again, as a story, it was subpar. The main character quickly and easily forgives and changes his mind about people and events. He feels little to no remorse, taking an "ends justify the means" attitude. And since he does end up being the legendary Storm Dragon, he becoming even more of an unbelievable character. If he was too naive or kind to appreciate the destructive power he has been gifted with, or even if he descended even more into the delicious madness the beginning of the book hinted at, then I would have been enthralled. Instead, he just comes off as a douchebag.

The fact that his biggest conflict is that he wants to choose his own destiny also just makes me want to gag.

However, the fact of the matter is, for all of this book's flaws, it actually gave me ideas and techniques to use in my future adventures. I know now how I'm going to end the campaign. I know how to work with some of the more contradictory dragonmarked houses now. And I know how to use the Draconic Prophecy in my campaign, which was the primary reason I wanted to read these books in the first place. It had been so confusing to me before. Now I get it, and I may even employ some of it.

The best thing I got out of it though is the use of changelings. One of the side characters that grows into a main character is a changeling. At first I just though it was cool that Wyatt was including that side of Eberron in his story. But the use of the changeling was so polished. That character felt like a real guy with a stable of faces and personalities in his head. And the way he molded himself based on personality and name was just awesome. If I got nothing else out of this, I got that, and that was good enough for me to start reading the second book already.

4.0/10

Franchise Fiction - Laura O'Neill - No More "Little Miss Perfect" (1992)

I'm sorry I haven't posted much. I also haven't been reading much, so there you go. Honestly, I was really getting deeply into D&D stuff: I wrote my adventure, I recruited players, I helped them make characters, I was researching tips and tricks and lore... I was really into D&D for like, a month.

I even read this book the same day the last post was new, and didn't have the desire to write a post for it until I was able to surface from the D&D water I was submerged in. In other words, today. So I apologize again, this time for the fact that this may not be the most comprehensive review ever. I mean, I did read it a month ago.

An aside: I never watched this show. Ever. I barely remember it being on. But it ran from 1991 to 1993, according to Wikipedia. I was five to seven then. Why should I care about a teen drama, even if it was on the channel I watched the most? So I don't know anything about the characters and their relations to each other. I don't even really know what they look like.

The premise of this book is that Courtney has a diary that she hides in her school locker to keep it safe. What an idiot. And then, a bitch named Brooke finds it and discovers all these parts about Courtney's best friend Ashley being too nice and too studious. She then shows these parts to Ashley, who gets mad at Courtney, doesn't tell her why, and briefly becomes a biker chick.

Why should I care? I don't see the draw.

The whole thing reads like it should just be an episode of a teen drama, which may have been the goal, but it left zero room for any human reactions. Why didn't Ashley say something to Courtney about what she wrote, or about Brooke violating her privacy? The whole thing is just one misunderstanding after another, and then at the end, everything is status quo. Yuck.

2.0/10