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Genesis | Rating | |
| B | |||
| Jack McKinney | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Robotech: First Generation | Genesis, Battle Cry, Homecoming, Battlehymn, Force of Arms, Doomsday, Southern Cross, Metal Fire, The Final Nightmare, Invid Invasion, Metamorphosis, Symphony of Light, The Devil's Hand, Dark Powers, Death Dance, World Killers, Rubicon, The End of the Circle | ||
Robotech was a cartoon in the early-to-mid 80s, one of the first animés I ever saw. I only saw a few episodes and remember even less, but I distinctly recall being impressed by the writing quality and the serial storyline. Seeing the episodes out of order, in other words, was a bad idea, and bad things happened to good people. Compared to American animation pap that was the Saturday morning staple, it was gold.
The story isn't too difficult to summarize, at least in broad strokes. The alien Zentraedi have lost their Super-Dimensional Fortress, a starship that contains the secrets of something called Protoculture. One of their own kind sent it to Earth in an attempt to get it away from the evil Robotech Masters. The arrival of the starship ended ten years of global war that seemed destined to annihilate the human race, and over the next decade the crashed ship was explored and rebuilt, the technology successfully copied and applied. But now, on Launching Day, the Zentraedi have finally tracked down the location of their lost ship, and they want it back.
The pace of the story is pretty fast. Rarely is there not something going on, often something with a lot of action and motion. However, the author is a bit sparse when it comes to describing the characters physically. Sometimes all we get is the color of their hair; sometimes not even that. I think McKinney was probably relying on people having watched the shows and already knowing the characters.
Since this is the novelization of an animé television show, animé physics occasionally crop up. Laser beams splitting in two for no reason, opening a cockpit during a power dive, and forty- to eighty-foot alien humanoids can all be found here. This wouldn't be so bad if McKinney didn't go out of his way to point out how wierd this stuff was, how much this was against the laws of physics and must be attributed to the strange ways Protoculture can twist them. Some things he can't get around - the giant size of the Zentraedi, for instance, is of fair importance to the plot later on - but some others he could easily have changed. The freezing of free water in space instead of it boiling away sticks in my mind; it was an error on the part of the animé writers and animators, but has no plot significance. Rather than adhere so rigorously to what was protrayed in the show, I feel he should have rewritten some of the spots to make more sense, so long as it didn't impact things elsewhere.
It's a fun book, mind you. I had a good time reading it, and fans of animé in general or Robotech in particular might feel it's just fine. But to me they were problems that just didn't have to be there.
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