Ecliptic Rift

Yeah, I know I’ve arrived really, really late to this party. But I just finished reading The Empyrean Age by Tony Gonzales and I need to let you know, if you didn’t already, that it SUCKS.

You may rightly ask yourself, “why would Casiella, a known lover of EVE fiction, say such a thing?” I wanted to like this book. I wanted to read it and say to everyone who has griped previously that they just didn’t understand, that Tony Gonzales actually worked subtle magic.

But then I read the book, and I knew that in fact this novel consists of (almost) nothing but classically bad writing. Leaving aside for a moment the thematic element (Jamyl’s telepathy) that simply doesn’t belong in the cyberpunk post-humanist world of EVE, the writing itself struck me as about on the level of a university freshman creative writing class. Evidently, he never met a breathless superlative he didn’t like, nor a plot hole he cared to cover. He repeated other elements constantly, to the point where  Rettic suggested a drinking game for every time someone “banged their fist on the table in anger”. And perhaps he could have found other ways to describe volumetric displays besides endlessly referring to, erm, volumetric displays.

Many of the sex scenes (and this book has quite a few) seem thrown into the plot purely for titillation rather than to serve any atmospheric purpose, much less advance the storyline. The rape scene in particular could have held tremendous symbolism, but the ham-handed writing instead turned it into something that creates a different sort of meta-disgust in the reader. Come to think of it, you could say that about almost anything you care to note in the book.

The book did have a few bits that made it worth the few dollars I spent on it, all related to background info. We get a better view of capsuleer-related technology, for example, and the inner workings of the Caldari and Minmatar governments.

But these few bits don’t even begin to compensate for the pain this book caused me, not in wonderment at the cold, harsh universe of the game world, but the cold, harsh universe that tricked me into reading this book.

I still trust The Burning Life, the EVE novel by Hjalti “CCP Abraxas” Danielsson coming out in a few weeks, will rebuild my trust in what the CCP storyline team can accomplish.

Related posts:

1. Worldbuilding in EVE Online
2. OOC: Which posts do you enjoy the most?
3. New EVE Chronicle: “Prosopagnosia”