SAGA, VOLUME ONE by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Saga, Volume One (2013) collects the first six issues of the Image comic written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Fiona Staples. Here, two lovers whose people are at war attempt to flee the planet with their newborn baby.

Saga is an interesting and imaginative blend of science fiction and fantasy that calls to mind both Star Wars and Mass Effect, but which does so without feeling particularly derivative. Vaughan has created a cast of good characters, all with believable motivations. In fact, The Will and Prince Robot IV might be more interesting and more sympathetic than the wishy-washy Marko (although he gets better quickly) and the walking annoying rage tantrum that is Alana. The themes of parenting and family are particularly well done, though, which makes them endearing enough.  

Saga is consistently explicit, both in terms of violence and sex. At times, this is used to good storytelling effect (e.g., Prince Robot IV and his wife in issue #1), but more often, it’s just gratuitous. In combination with some of the dialogue, Saga sometimes feels like Vaughan is trying too hard to be edgy, and it works a lot better when he’s not.

Entirely apart from this issue, Staples’ art is quite good. Her characters are realistic, and she uses backgrounds to create a rich world. The highlight, though, is her faces, which are excellent both in their expression and consistency. The only real complaint with the art is that the heavy inks on the characters often make them look like paper cutouts overlaid on the much softer backgrounds.

So, while it’s got a few issues, Saga is a reasonably compelling story that’s rich with potential. I don’t know that I’d run out for Volume Two, but I was invested enough to wonder, at least, what happened next.

RECOMMENDED

CRESCENT by Homer Hickam

Crescent is a 2013 young-adult science fiction novel by Homer Hickam, the second of his Helium-3 books. Here, Crater befriends an enemy mercenary as he gets into various moon shenanigans.

First, a note: I didn’t particularly care for the first book in the series. I only read Crescent because Hickam saw my two-star review of Crater on Amazon and came and found me on this site. He encouraged me to give the series another chance, and I agreed to read the next one. So here we are.

Crescent is a definite improvement over the first book. Crater himself has become a more interesting character. He’s complex and somewhat inscrutable, he isn’t nearly as insecure as he was in Crater, and he has a number of very good moments. Crescent, too, is a sympathetic and engaging character, even if her arc covers well-trod ground. We do less well with many of the one-dimensional supporting characters – the brutal-dictator-turned-small-time-sheriff is tough to take seriously, and the three slacker legionnaires (whose chapters could have been omitted completely) give us four out of four supposedly-fearsome crowhoppers turned cuddly. The romantic tension and conflict between Crater and Maria fails to generate much interest.  

Again, Hickam’s mining and aerospace background shine through, as he provides immersive detail, good science, and reasonable conjecture about all things related to piloting, the moon, and space.

Apart from this, though, the writing has problems. Conversations are frequently stilted; there aren’t enough contractions. Too much dialogue is “growled.” Most damaging, the story is all over the place, meandering and full of detours. Crater is doing everything – plot element after plot element is picked up, only to fall by the wayside, leaving the reader to wonder what, if anything, is really important to whatever the story might turn out to be. It seems as though Hickam had a number of themes he wanted to hit (if you missed any, he recounts them for you in his author’s note), and so in they went.

Crescent also lacks anything remotely resembling a climax – Hickam assembles his ragtag group and the book ends, leaving the reader to feel like the whole thing’s been little more than setup for what surely must be a more interesting third book.

While I feel that the Helium-3 series is definitely trending upward, Crescent has enough problems that I had something of a hard time just getting through it.

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STAR TREK: LOG FIVE by Alan Dean Foster

Star Trek: Log Five (1975) includes three TV-script-to-novella adaptations by Alan Dean Foster based on episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series: “The Ambergris Element,” “Pirates of Orion,” and “Jihad.” Here, Kirk and Spock get turned into fish people, Spock contracts a terminal illness, and an inter-species task force seeks to prevent a war.

Filling this many pages with stories from half-hour teleplays has been a challenge throughout this series, but here, Foster does a quality job of expanding and adding to these episodes in interesting ways. Foster opens, for example, with ten pages of backstory on M’ress; while this doesn’t make for the most fluid narrative (she doesn’t feature in any of the stories), it’s interesting enough. And Foster’s detailed descriptions give these exotic settings far more depth than the Filmation cartoon ever could.

The stories themselves aren’t phenomenal – “The Ambergris Element” is meandering, yet fairly predictable, and the reveal at the end of “Jihad” is underdeveloped, but Foster really gets the most out of his material here, and the pacing never gets too bad.

We also get the usual silliness and un-Trek-isms from Foster. We’ve got Scotty calling McCoy “Bones,” Spock using contractions and, more egregiously, such imprecisions as “a minute or so,” Kirk’s got a trash can built into his chair, and the Enterprise doesn’t seem to have a second science officer or navigator on board.   

In short, it’s nothing wonderful, but Star Trek: Log Five is certainly one of the more readable books in the Log series.

RECOMMENDED

ANOMALY by Krista McGee

Anomaly is a 2013 young adult science fiction novel by Krista McGee. Here, in a post-apocalyptic eugenics lab, a girl is singled out for execution because she experiences emotions.

Anomaly is reminiscent of a number of books and films, including The Hunger Games, The Island, and THX 1138. The problem is not that Anomaly ever feels too derivative, but that it never really carves out its own niche. A little more setting and world building would have gone a long way toward making the book more immersive and giving it a distinct identity.

Anomaly follows all the traditions established by The Hunger Games for the currently popular female-protagonized dystopian young adult sci fi genre, no matter how forced, such as writing in the first-person present tense and including the obligatory two love interests, regardless of how believable. This doesn’t help Anomaly’s quest for identity, either.

Anomaly turns out to be an overtly Christian book, and McGee does a nice job of presenting the Gospel accurately and exploring faith in the face of death. Unfortunately, the Gospel presentation itself feels forced, like McGee has an agenda, and this contrivance saps meaning from Thalli’s obviously inevitable conversion.

Contrivance, which turns out to be widespread throughout the book, is Anomaly’s biggest problem. Things happen because McGee needs them to happen, perhaps leading the reader to ask things like “Why on earth don’t they ever lock Thalli’s door?” “Why doesn’t anybody seem to care that she has constant access to John?” and “Who the heck is responsible for the cameras around here?” (never mind questions like “Why do they call them ‘the Ancients’ when this is like two generations later and at least one is still alive?” and “Why don’t they ever kiss?”).

Complicating this criticism, however, is the fact that McGee tries to address nearly all these contrivances in the last few pages. It’s a nice try at getting away with it, I guess, but it’s pretty unsatisfying, it may make the reader wonder at just how oblivious these characters are, and it really doesn’t have the air of competence about it.

There are other issues. McGee’s writing is at a lower level than one typically expects from this genre: there are a lot of simple, see-Dick-run sentences, and it doesn’t help that Thalli is a master of stating the obvious or that everyone talks to her like she’s a little child (which may be necessary for the character but is grating for the reader). The general lack of contractions in speech makes for some stilted dialogue (but these test-tube kids do use them every now and then), and McGee has a tendency to go back and forth between the past and present tenses in an awkward way.

Thalli herself is just too passive to be a compelling protagonist, as by and large, she’s acted upon by various other characters, clueless, led here and there by their actions. No, the real protagonist of Anomaly is Berk, who perpetually risks both his life and career to act on behalf of Thalli. But he remains on the sideline as a supporting character, appearing when needed to save the day or advance the plot.  

Anomaly is a book I wanted to like, and I take no pleasure in giving it a bad review. But the volume of contrivance and the quality of the writing are deal-breakers.

NOT RECOMMENDED

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

STAR TREK: LOG FOUR by Alan Dean Foster

Star Trek: Log Four (1975) contains three TV-script-to-novella adaptations by Alan Dean Foster based on episodes of Star Trek: The Animated Series: “The Terratin Incident,” “Time Trap,” and “More Tribbles, More Troubles.” Here, the Enterprise crew shrinks to Lilliputian dimensions, gets caught in a time warp, and re-encounters Cyrano Jones and his collection of tribbles.

Adapting a 23-minute teleplay to a seventy-page story is no small challenge, and Foster generally does a fair job, giving the stories a more leisurely pace that allows him to build some cosmic atmosphere and bring some depth to the ship and crew. When it doesn’t go well, however, things degenerate to a nigh-unreadable slog.

That’s the case here with “The Terratin Incident,” which is easily the silliest of the three stories here, but which is inexplicably dragged out over half the book. Foster really drops the ball with the logic of his explanations for the phenomenon: if the crew shrinks but retains their original weight, they must also retain their original strength – otherwise they wouldn’t be able to move; they should be little super ant people. Instead, they’re straining at knobs and building tiny ladders. Also terrible is Foster’s embarrassing failure at shamelessly contriving some suspense at the end.   

The other two stories are quite a bit better, however. They’re also significantly shorter and much better paced. “More Tribbles, More Troubles” is the best, and it’s the shortest. One can’t help but think that given the fixed length of these volumes, four episodes would be a better number for each than three.

Foster’s dialogue, a problem throughout this series, again doesn’t ring true for a number of characters in many places. And there are a number of other things that Foster inserts that don’t fit with the Star Trek world we know (or even the one we knew in 1975), including a wife for Scotty and Federation mind-wiping.

In short, the other two stories are pretty solid, but “The Terratin Incident” just kills Log Four.

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