Dharma Bum

"I live by two rules. One, never kill someone without a reason. Two, I can always find a reason to kill someone." – Saren

Mass Effect: Revelation is a prequel novel to the video game of the same pre-coloned name, set twenty years before Eden Prime is made to look like the Lars family farm post imperial entanglement. It explains the wilder crap that happens in the video game, but the author, Drew Karpyshyn, is more Kevin J. Anderson than Stephen King. While he was writing the book, he was also leading a team that wrote the story and dialogue for the game, a task which equaled about five full length movies worth of script, so the existence of a 300 page novel from this same man is an impressive feat. It’s fun to read if you’re at all interested in the Mass Effect universe, but as a stand alone Sci Fi novel, it’s kind of ass.

From the first chapter, there are a lot of glaring inaccuracies and assumptions made about genetics, physics and human progress. The physics stuff is easy to overlook because it’s science fiction, but the other stuff is mind bogglingly awful. With one paragraph, the book demands that you assume that in the span of only two hundred years, a people who are today willing to detonate themselves and their own children because of their belief in God, as well as those who are slightly less devout, all said "filk this" just because some alien ruins were found on Mars.

Also, again in this short time span of 200 years, humanity has so interbred between races, that we’re all caramel skin toned, and blondes are extinct. This is a lot of bull, from a social and genetic perspective. This stuff is made to explain that humanity, more or less, is at peace with itself, and is ready to unite against galactic threats. That’s fine, but you don’t have turn our society into the dumbest parts of TNG to do it, Drew.

These aren’t the only annoying inaccuracies. Military actions are described with the grace of a High School paper’s acne riddled sports writer describing a football game. This is coming from a man who reads, watches and plays anything with Tom Clancy’s name on it, and whose best friends are mostly real soldiers, so maybe I have higher standards when it comes to the technical stuff. It’s all really naive, but I guess you could argue the soldiers are incompetent?

There is a lot to love about Mass Effect: Revelation. The story boils down to being about aliens shooting each other in the face. My favorite character, Sklarr, is a Krogan – a species of bloodthirsty giant lizards with cute little tails. They’re like upright walking dinosaurs with thumbs, and are incredibly powerful and mobile. Every time Sklarr enters a scene, somebody is going to get their elbow broken, or head caved in like a melon. The main antagonists are Batarians, a species that isn’t seen in the Mass Effect game, because by the end of the novel, they’re so pissed off at humanity that they’ve resigned from the galactic government and go off to do their own thing. They’re a species of super manipulative, xenophobic bastards who apparently evolved from four eyed hammerhead sharks. A lot of detail about their culture is given, as well as a lot of hints that they’ll be back in a sequel to mess things up for humanity.

The two main characters are David Andersen and Saren, both of whom play huge roles in the Mass Effect game. This shows Andersen, who was played by Keith David in the game, when he was young and just a grunt. He’s charged with finding Kahlee Sanders, a scientist who left a top secret lab a day before it was apparently destroyed in a terrorist attack. He’s the king of cool, and keeps an even head whether he’s carrying a wounded soldier out of an exploding building, or when Sklarr grabs him by the throat and nearly snaps his neck in half. With his courageousness and conviction to do his duties even at the expense of his personal life, Andersen is perhaps the only military character Karpyshyn got right. On the other hand, he’s the hero of the story, so he’s the only one he needed to get right, and the feebleness and expendability of other soldiers in the book further highlights his heroism.

Saren is also a soldier who keeps his cool, but in an evil way. A turian, a race of lobster-like people who are very similar to humans in social respects, he hates humans because we kicked his species’ ass after making first contact. He does everything he can to screw with humans diplomatically, and kills many innocent people along the way. The game kind of goads you into feeling sympathetic for him, but this book proves that Saren has always been a prick, and you should savor any pain you get to lay down on him as Commander Shepherd.

Overall, this one thinks Mass Effect: Revelations was a bumpy ride. It’s a quick read, and there are a lot of flaws, but if you can take it in as a stupid action, science fiction novel, there are parts that are really enjoyable.