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The Devil's Hand | Rating | |
| C | |||
| Jack McKinney | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| Robotech: The Sentinels | 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 | ||
After the war against the Zentraedi ends with the mutual destruction of Khyron's flagship and the SDF-1 and SDF-2, there is still more to be done. Earth fears the Zentraedi's creators, the Robotech Masters, will send more against them in an attempt to wrest back ownership of the mysterious Protoculture Matrix. So they build the SDF-3 and send it to the homeworld of the Masters in a mission to negotiate a peace. But they find an utterly unexpected situation: the Masters have already left for Earth, and it is the Invid Regent who occupies Tirol!
The beginning of the book is a decidedly mixed bag. On the one hand, it reintroduces characters like Rick Hunter and T. R. Edwards and Minmei, and concepts like the reconfigurable fighters and Porotuclture. It also includes a protracted fight sequence, a battle that lasts apparently for days or even weeks. On the other hand, the part of the beginning that takes place on Earth that serves to reintroduce most of those characters is protracted well beyond what is needed. Most of those pages consist of press conferences telling the world the intent and reasoning behind the SDF-3's mission, final testing of the new fighter, policy debates, supplying the mission, and a wedding. What I wasn't disinterested in, even outright bored by, I thought I should have taken place earlier. Not earlier in the book, either, but earlier in the setting. With the exception of the wedding, this should have been done and over with well before the book started.
The story, unsurprisingly, unfolds in a rather simple, cartoonish manner even when it tries to be complex. Minmei is just as shallow and needy as ever, and manages to fall in love at first sight again, and Edwards' growing villainy could have been nipped in the bud by any one of several well-justified court-martials. Both of those will clearly grow into significant subplots and problems of their own, making them predictable as well as illogical and unlikely.
I have been, and still am, willing to forgive a certain amount of flawed plotting in the Robotech series, thanks to its origins. As I've said many times, however, what works in animé doesn't always work in text, and some of the plot holes here are just too big to ignore. Facets of the story are too predictable, the evil human faction gets away with too much without censure or consequences. Robotech fans, or animé fans in general, will probably want to read this, especially in light of how this is the novelization of a part of the series that never actually aired on television. But I find it difficult to believe anyone else would be interested. And even those who do may find themselves disappointed.
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