Tie-In reading list

Novels on my list related to games, movies, and so on. Been building this portion of the list for a while now, but never posted it or read anything on it yet. (Some of them I have already read years ago, before the blog)

---

Star Wars:
The Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy: Before the Storm; Shield of Lies; and Tyrant's Test
The Bounty Hunter Wars Trilogy: The Mandalorian Armor; Slave Ship; and Hard Merchandise
Tales of the Bounty Hunters (Anthology)

New Jedi Order: Dark Tide 1 (Onslaught) and 2 (Ruin)

Darth Plagueis
Yoda: Dark Rendezvous (Re-read)
Knight Errant (Re-read)

StarCraft: 

Flashpoint
Devil's Due

Queen of Blades

The Dark Templar Saga: Firstborn; Shadow Hunters; and Twilight (Re-read)

Starcraft Archives: Liberty's Crusade; Shadow of the Xel Naga; Speed of Darkness; Uprising

Alien:

Out of the Shadows

River of Pain

Sea of Sorrows

Indiana Jones:

Indiana Jones and the Army of the Dead

Indiana Jones and the Dance of Giants

Indiana Jones and the Seven Veils

Other:

Halo: The Fall of Reach

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

---

Starcraft Ghost: Spectres

The sequel to the last Starcraft novel I read. This volume is written by Nate Kenyon. (2011, Pocket Star Books, 392 pages) And oh boy, Spectres is great. It's really what I was hoping the first book would be like. So much exciting action! 
    The book came out five years after the first, and led up to the release of the second game. Some characters from Ghost: Nova reprise, and events of the first novel are mentioned often. There are also references to events I have no idea about. It turns out these are things that happened in the Ghost Academy comic series. I haven't read it, so I think there were some missing pieces, but regardless, it was still easy to follow the story.
    The book follows Nova along with a few other characters, mostly ghosts or psionically gifted people. Nova has been helping the Dominion look for missing Ghosts. Gabriel Tosh is a man who has been kidnapping the Ghosts and giving them a drug called Terrazine, which restores their memory and gives hallucinations. He wishes to recreate Team Blue, which was a group in the Ghost Academy. Ghosts have their memory wiped after every mission, and are dedicated soldiers for the Dominion. But Tosh tries to set them free, to open their eyes to the horrible deeds of the Dominion's Ghost training and experiments. Many of the Ghosts of Team Blue are convinced by Tosh, and on Terrazine they become Spectres. Spectres are like Ghosts but they have their memories, and are more powerful due to the chemical. To boot, the Spectre suits have more capability than Ghost suits.

    Tosh has a vendetta against Emperor Mengsk, and at one point the Spectres move in to kill him. They are stopped by Nova, who is loyal to a fault to the Dominion. Not long after, Nova herself is captured by Tosh and given the Terrazine.
    The Terrazine gives her flashbacks of her life prior to the Ghost Academy (these are the references from the first book) including Mal Kelerchian, the wrangler who took Nova into the Ghost program in the first place. They kind of have a little fling going on, Nova certainly has feelings for him. He is held and his wrists are cut, as he is used as a hostage, and Nova goes to rescue him rather than complete her duty. 
    As Nova's memories resurface, she remembers more of Team Blue. Lio is one of them, and he is an interesting character. His mind has been transferred into the computer systems as an AI, and he can access nearly anything he wishes, including video feed in the Emperor's palace itself. He only speaks to the characters through text, and they have to respond through text as well. He is essentially the greatest hacker known to man, and helps out the Spectres at first, then helps out Kath Toom, and finally shows his loyalty to Nova. His humanity gradually slips away, and he becomes more artificial; Nova finally says goodbye to Lio near the end of the book, where Lio decides to disperse himself as data, removing his personality. This nearly brings a tear to Nova's eye. 
    It's interesting because as Ghosts none of them are supposed to show emotion, yet there is so much emotion going on in this novel, including the two love stories (Nova and Mal, and Tosh and Kath Toom). It was very satisfying. All throughout I was questioning whether in the end Nova would choose to keep her memories, and thus her emotions, or would she return to the Dominion's Ghost program and get her memory wiped again. In the end she does the latter, displaying her undying loyalty to not only the Dominion, but also the idea of forgetting her past. 
    Tosh and the Spectres all work from a station called Gehenna. It is built from a giant asteroid the size of a small moon, which was integrated with a space platform, and moves through space like a ship. It's a cool science fiction concept, as they are inside the halls of a ship, yet there are rock walls, and it feels underground. 
    After the attempt on Mengsk's life, Nova seeks out Gehenna to confront Tosh. There's a lot of fun action here, as she fights and sneaks her way through Gehenna, saves Mal, and manages to make it out of Gehenna before the Dominion nukes the station. All the while, the characters are mostly communicating psionically.
    Just before her escape, she witnesses Tosh lost in his madness, and sees many stasis chambers with people inside. These are Ghosts Tosh has captured, yet he was not so kind to them as he was to the members of Team Blue. It looked forced upon these Ghosts. This is what finally cements Nova's loyalty to the Dominion, over the Spectres and keeping her memories (it doesn't explicitly say Nova's memory was wiped, but I'm assuming it was).
    All said, this was one of the best tie-in novels I've ever read. It helps that I love the game so much, but man, Ghost: Spectres really delivered.  

Starcraft Ghost: Nova

Here's a video game tie-in novel from one of my favorite games, StarCraft. Written by Keith A. DeCandido. (Pocket Star Books, 2006, 304 pages) This novel was written before StarCraft II came out. It's very dated, to a great era of StarCraft before it had been too cleaned up. 

It lays out the backstory of Nova, the titular character. She is a Psionic Ghost, a covert ops program of the Terran Dominion. I was expecting some sort of Covert Ops oriented story, there actually wasn't too much of that here. In this novel, she is 15 and just becoming aware of her Psionic abilities.

Her last name is Terra, and she comes from a rich family of the old Terran Confederacy. Her family is murdered at her 15th birthday party, unleashing her telekinetic power upon the 300+ guests and killing everybody there. This all has something to do with a group of radicals, Nova's parents, her father's mistress, and her mother's jig having disagreements. In any case the family's death is blamed on Mengsk, as his group the Sons of Korhal have caused other groups to follow such courses. Nova's only remaining family member claims on the news that she is dead.

After fleeing the scene of her mass murder, she finds herself in a slum area of Tarsonis called The Gutter. Here she tries to survive on her own for a while, living on the streets, with nobody but a stray cat she named Pip. She prefers being around animals to people, as their thoughts are simpler and easier to block out. Nova is constantly having to block out what she hears people thinking to themselves around her.

She ends up being hunted by Fagin, a local ganglord. He uses a Psi Screen to block her telepathy and forces her to be his hit girl, killing over 70 people for him in The Gutter. However, he wears the Psi Screen for far too long; he keeps it on for 6 months straight, when it is meant to be used for seven hours at a time. This makes him aggressive and agitated, so he keeps telling Nova to kill others for him.

Meanwhile, Agent Malcom Kelerchian is searching for her. He is a Wrangler, a special agent sent to hunt down telepaths for the Ghost Program. He seems to have some trouble finding her until he is given a troop of Marines to help him. In what you might call the battle, a building is brought down by the Marines. Fagin and many others die in the wreckage.

Between this time and when Malcom wakes up in the hospital from the wreckage, a lot has changed. The Terran Confederacy has been overthrown, replaced now by Mengsk's Terran Dominion. Malcom had heard Mengsk's fleet was threatening Tarsonis, yet when he awakes, the attack is blamed on the Zerg. Here is where the timeline syncs up with the games; not much else from most of the novel has to do with the game. The Zerg and Protoss aren't even believed to be real by many characters in the novel; The Gutter is a universe of its own.

Malcom tells Nova that Mengsk wants him dead for some reason, yet Malcom has found his place for him within the Wranglers. Nova is determined to to finish the Ghost program because she wants her memory erased. She doesn't want to remember killing her family, she doesn't want to remember the thoughts of over 300 people as they died. But she seems to have the highest skill and Psi Index of anyone in the program at the time. 

The book closes with her final mission before getting her memory wiped. She is sent to kill the leader of the rebel group that killed her parents. It's a good way to end the novel. I expected something a little more military, but it was a great backstory to the character I'd never known about.

There's a few more StarCraft related novels I have that I may read soon, including a sequel to this one- we'll see when I can get through them. Until next!

The Gods of Ireland Book 1: "Most Ancient Song" (by Casey Flynn)

This book is the first of two, written by Casey Flynn. [Bantam Spectra Fantasy, 1991, 259 pages] It is supposedly based on pre-Christian Celtic mythology. But it turned out to be much different than I expected, not a very mythic tale at all, or at least there are no Gods as the title implies.

It concerns a people led by Nemed, calling themselves Nemedians. They have fled their harsh homeland in attempt to find a 'Blessed Land' for their people. The novel begins when the ships first land (I'm assuming it's Ireland, of course) and they find an abandoned settlement, proving that once people lived there. They have been gone for some time before Nemed arrives. Soon the Nemedians are introduced to the Fomor, a race of people who are native to the area, yet do not seem to live on the Island. The Fomor demand tribute from the Nemedians, namely all of their children. This disagreement spurns on the whole rest of the novel.

The character Dagda is the protagonist, the biggest and strongest Nemedian. He was originally led to the camp by a being of shining lights. He leads most of the expeditions while Nemed stays with the people. 

Dagda's wife Moira, is affected by some poison the Fomor put into the lake on their wedding night. Six months later, she gives birth to some deformed biological egg, from which massive blood sucking leeches
come forth. This is a very disgusting part of the novel. Moira leaves the camp after this, and wanders the woods alone as The Morrigan, coming back to help Dagda near the end of the novel.

The magic in this novel is all over the place. From vials of unidentified poisons, to form-shifting shining beings, to summoning a storm. There are also more science or technology based events, which I felt were out of place, considering the mythic setting. There is a massive being in armor that can shoot lasers. There are descriptions of things such as elevators and syringes, that are not stated outright for the reader, as the characters would have no such knowledge. In addition, things that appear to be mutants are among the Fomor. These are misshapen creatures, or people with the heads of animals. 

The Fomor wish to use Nemedian children to continue breeding their race, without mutation. After many women and children are taken captive, the Nemedians march with all of their remaining warriors to the Fomor stronghold. 

Over the course of the novel, the Nemedians are continually battered, their numbers are constantly thinning, due to plague(unleashed upon them by the Fomor), battle, and survival. From about 1000 people at the beginning of the novel, only about 200 remain at the end, mostly women and children who were rescued from the Fomor  Though they triumph over the Fomor this time, they are too weak to do much else, with so few warriors. Dagda takes 3 ships of people to the west to search for new lands. This is where the novel ends.

The writing is pretty simple. We are given very little backstory about the characters, and their motivations don't seem to have much depth to them. There is a second book of this series, but I don't think I'll read it anytime soon. 

---

New Arrivals 2-23

Just adding a few more titles from my collection to the reading list. 

---
Norvel W. Page- Flame Winds 

Stephen Baxter- Silverhair; Icebones; Longtusk 

Brian Lumley- Clock of Dreams 

Juanita Coulson- The Web of Wizardry 
---

"Witherwing" by David Jarret

Kicking off 2023 with an interesting fantasy novel. David Jarrett's Witherwing.
[Warner Books, 1979, 236 pages] This only took me a few days. Hopefully a bit of that momentum will continue in the coming year.

The awesome Frank Frazetta painting had me interested right away, portraying the pulpy adventure style of the novel. The vocabulary used by Jarrett here is impressive, yet not without its' flaws. There are a fair amount of spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes throughout. 

A useful map is provided at the beginning of the book, giving nice context, as much of the book concerns travel and survival in the wild. It's a bare-bones map, very easy to read. Not up there with Tolkien's cartography. But that kind of art isn't necessary. The world of Witherwing is not an overly complex place.

On to the story: It begins with the telling of King Rumi, of the city  of Tum-Barlum. While visiting the Tree-folk, a woman forced herself as his wife, bearing him a son. It is revealed that she is some sort of sorceress, called by the people of Tum-Barlum, The Queen of Dread. Rumi left her, to return to his city and his six other sons. To curse Rumi, she transformed his six sons into swans, seemingly to shock the princess. The princess of Tum-Barlum wove silver shirts for each of the sons, but did not have time to complete the left arm of the sixth, for the youngest. They were transformed back into humans, and the youngest child's left arm remained a swan's wing. The only name he is ever referenced by is Witherwing.

Witherwing's eldest brother, Harand, is next in line for Rumi's throne. Rumi sends him on a mission to the Flatlands, north of Tum-Barlum, that are being invaded by what men call The Horde. These seem like me to zombies, lifeless bodies wandering aimlessly in a herd. Witherwing joins Rumi and his party to repel the Horde from Tum-Barlum. They laboriously bait, lead, and herd the bodies through a certain eastward pass to avoid the city. This all takes place when Witherwing is still a child.

When he reaches adulthood, Rumi is visited by a man called Hess. He seems to be excited over the violent and bloody sports he witnesses on his tour of Tum-Barlum. A party, including Witherwing and Harand, are directed to the lands of the Forest Folk. Once they return from this strange meeting, a new party is appointed by Rumi, for a much longer journey: beyond the flatlands to the city of Karn-Ingli. This is home to Hrasp the Hunter, the antagonist that Witherwing is tasked to kill.

There are a few different races in the world of Witherwing: The Forest Folk, the Flatland Folk, and Karns. Over the course of the novel Witherwing copulates with one of each race, excepting the Karns, and including a member of the Horde. 

These races are referred to by Harand as mutants. The Forest Folk are certainly somewhat unnatural, or perhaps the opposite. Their bodies blend perfectly with the trees of their territory, and speak in a manner that sounds like rustling trees. Their city seems to be made of the trees branches and trunks, still living and growing. The Flatlanders are actually humans who live off the land, not some other species. Witherwing's future wife, Nada, is a Flatlander.

Witherwing's journey takes him far. Through swamplands, to Kryll the enchanter's tower at Lizard Lake, through snow passes and across barren mountains. But the most fantastic part of his journey takes place in some sort of portal-path, into what seems like a higher plane of reality. They were led there by Hess, who reveals to Witherwing that he is going to meet his Step-mother, the Queen of Dread. The Karns worship her as Mother Winter.

Hess, and Kryll, the enchanter characters, all speak of some Game that is being played between cosmic beings. There is a heavy sense of irony to their dialogue, speaking of things that humans have no comprehension of. Witherwing and Nada are brought into whatever dimension the cosmic beings live in. It is revealed that these beings are in eternal, deathless slumber, and have every event that has happened recorded in a file. They can enter the world of mortals, to 'play the game'. The Queen sleeps quite carelessly, not even wanting to remember what she has done outside of her slumber.

But Hess convinces her to come forth. In the end, she leads Witherwing to the valley of glowing stones, which supposedly hold some sort of great power, and is the reason Rumi sent Witherwing on this quest. Here he duels Hrasp, who was revealed to be one of the immortals. He is a giant man with antlers sprouting from his head, which he uses to impale his enemies. Witherwing bests him, in the end. He removes Hrasp's head, and proclaims himself the new master of the Karns. He commands them to lead him back home to Tum-Barlum in victory. The Karns follow him, being a primitive and dependent people. 

There are many references made to the work of bards; Witherwing knows that their tales aren't exactly as things went and often wonders what a bard might say of his current situation. There are a few poems and verses throughout the novel, with some interesting rhyme schemes. 

Overall, I enjoyed it. A somewhat Conan esque, swashbuckling fantasy adventure. Near the end, when the immortals are concerned, an almost Science fiction vibe is given to their vocabulary, speech, and technology; yet there are plenty of questions about the immortals and 'the game' that are truly unanswered and unexplained. I like this kind of cosmic fiction, which seems to be Fantasy but turns out to have some sort of Sci-Fi action behind it.

Witherwing was a good first book of the year! Looking through my collection to find the next one, coming soon. 

Hello 2023!

Oh man... A lot has happened this past year, and I drifted away from reading for a long time, not finishing a single title all year. I was travelling and focusing on other endeavors, and dealing with an injury that transpired. Recently I have regained access to my book collection, and have been reminded of some great books I've read, as well as ones I'm excited to read. I am back to try and knock out more of the reading list I've amassed over the last few years.

Keep an eye out for future reports!