The Red Star

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful fictional World
Review: I recently read the Red Star and was blown away at the world it was placed in. It has beautiful detailed characters and allows to reader to be immersed into their world. It really allows you to connect on a personal level with them. The action in it is wonderful and leaves you on edge wondering what will happen next. Great plot. The only thing I didn't really like about it was the abrupt ending, which left you somewhat hanging. But it also pretty much says it has a sequel in store.

Rating:
Summary: Dreadful-- Buy the Comic Instead
Review: Novelizations of comic books rarely work: they're often entrusted to authors of lesser quality, authors who have little or no emotional connection to the work they're novelizing; the source material is often too flimsy to serve as the basis for a novel (or series of novels); and the publishers often do a half-hearted job producing the finished work.

"The Red Star" should've been an easy one. The novel has a credible author in Arthur Byron Cover-he was nominated for a Nebula Award almost 30 years ago-and it's based on one of the truly outstanding and fully-realized comic series of the last twenty years (or more). And yet the novel is an almost total failure; it's full of old military hack-novel clichés and clumsy exposition, it lacks a cohesive narrative, and it's so rife with typos and editing errors as to be almost unreadable.

The plot has been explained already, so I won't rehash it here. After a rather pointless prologue in which lip-service is paid to one of the major figures in Russian history, we're brought forward 750 years or so, for some character-establishing chapters whose main purpose seems to be the beatification of the protagonist, Maya Antares; the bulk of the first two chapters is given over to demonstration of just how damn wonderful Maya is (I expect she'll be sainted in the next novel). As with the prologue, these chapters don't really fulfill any purpose that couldn't have been established in the main body of the novel. And the classical-music discussion is just plain contrived.

Chapter Three brings us into the story proper, and the war in Al'Istaan. As in the comic, the war is told in flashback, narrated by Maya to an old soldier at the military cemetery. In the comic, this works; the art does much of the narration. In the novel, it's disastrous- Maya spends huge chunks of the flashback telling the old soldier things he would already know (bits of history, military procedure, and geography), so that the reader can get up to speed on the story's background. This is common in poor SF, where showing is often replaced with telling, and world-building details are all thrown together, rather than being selectively chosen and gradually revealed. No, the old soldier wouldn't necessarily know how ventral-blast immolation works, but it's unlikely Maya would spend so much time describing it for him, either.

It especially doesn't work because Cover is so inconsistent with his style. Much of Maya's flashback narrative is stiffly formal to the point of being unrealistic, only to drop such inappropriate anachronisms as "kick ass" and "high-tailed" into the mix. (Note to writers: when dealing with a foreign culture, even an imagined one, make up your own appropriate colloquialisms, or borrow some from the culture in question.) Worse, Maya relates things that she couldn't possibly know, such as minor events on the battlefield, or her husband's actions at points where she doesn't have a frame of reference-even when she admits she doesn't really know what he was thinking, she continues to narrate as if she does.

Maya's flashback ends, and the stage is set for the second major sequence in the book, the war in Nokgorka. We're in the present... wait, no we're not. We're back at the battle of Kar Dathra's gate, in yet another flashback, this time as seen through the eyes of a lackey on Maya's ship. (What is this, "Rashomon?" ) Yes, I know it's in the comic, but here, it simply stalls the novel's momentum.

Finally, we arrive in Nokgorka. Or is it Nakgorka? Or Nogorka? Most of the names in the book are misspelled, sometimes in multiple ways. Alexandra or Alexandria? Maya is once spelled "May"; Marcus is once spelled-in a manner that could've only been processed by a spell-checker-"March us." Words are often left out of sentences. In one particularly egregious editing blunder, a character is male in one scene, then female for the rest of the book. Hello, editor?

The main character in the Nokgorka section is war-orphan Makita. In what may have been clever character conception on Cover's part, Makita's sections of the narrative are told in the present tense, as if she's incapable of dwelling much on the past (in contrast to Maya's sections, which seem to be trapped in it). In the second half of the book, this tense-shift works to a degree, but during the later sections-where Makita's and Maya's narratives intermingle-- it's distracting. With so many flashbacks and tense shifts, the story never achieves any momentum; the shifting constantly alerts the reader to the author's storytelling artifice.

There's little about the writing in this novel that brings it to life; the reader never really engages with the story because the sensory details are neither striking nor original. We get the clanking of tanks, the smell of chemicals, and the heat of furnaces, but how is this different from such things in the here and now? The Hydra krawl, for instance, seems nothing more than a standard tank on steroids. Most of the action takes place on one of the vast skyfurnaces, and we learn something about the workings of these vessels, but we get no feel for them. We're told that magic is at work, but never really shown. Yes, the comic has the advantage of its visuals; the novelist has to work harder to make things impressive and interesting. But he could've done so.

"The Red Star" has all of the elements of the great myths, of Homer and the Icelandic Sagas and the Kyrgyz Manas: undying loves, epic wars, principles of honor, freedom, betrayal and sacrifice, immortal beings manipulating human affairs. Yet, rather than the product of an accomplished author, as Cover once must've been, the novel reads like by-the-numbers fanfiction. An interested reader would do vastly better to stick to one of the comic collections, where the imagination and depth of the story can be experienced at its uncompromised best.