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The End of the Circle | 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 | ||
With the Sentinals War complete, and the Invid Regis on Earth, it is time for the SDF-3 to return home and help protect humanity from the ravaging alien hordes. But the SDF and fold drives do not get along well, and once again a mysterious flaw has put the gigantic ship off course. Way off course - not only is it not back at Earth, it's not even in our universe! Worse, the fold drives have disappeared - again. What does this have to do with the Awakening of the supercomputer that is the planet Hayden IV, nobody knows. What it means for our universe, though, just might be the end.
All the other books are based on previously existing plans. The first twelve were the straight-up novelizations of a cartoon, while the next five were the taking of a show that never was and making it public for the first time. But The End of the Circle had no real guide other than a few ideas of what should happen. It was essentially written like a book, not an interpretation of something for another medium entirely. Free of trying to adjust a script to text form, of having to incorporate events fans all know happened, no matter how rediculous, the author was freer to be more realistic in how people act, what they say, and how events in general take shape.
But the setting still has a few things inherent to it that I have grown to loathe. Protoculture is still depicted as a mystical substance, almost sentient and definitely not under complete control. People say such things as, "the Protoculture wills it". I much liked it when Protoculture was essentially supercharged honey capable of fuelling vehicles. And I hate mysticism. All too often it just becomes an excuse to break the laws of physics, logic, and common sense. It's appened all too often in Robotech, and it happens again here.
It happens again a lot here. And again and again. The book is chock gull of "what the hell is going on?" moments. Things appear out of nowhere. People and mecha vanish. Strange lights, apparitions, other people's memories all show up. In a few cases, explanations ar offered. But they're really no more than lucky guesses, conjecture that fits the known facts which hardly gave me cause to trust their conclusions - even if they did end up being right.
Only int he last third of the book do things pull together enough to start making sense. Not sense in that it was remotely possible or even plausible for any of this to ever actually happen, not in the real universe. Only in how some of these manifestations and weirdnesses get explained away by third-grade philosophy. It hangs together. It doesn't make sense, realistically, but it hangs together.
But two hundred pages and more of confusion is just a bit much, I should think. That last hundred or so kept me from tossing the book, or at least considering it just plain wretched storytelling, but it's still hardly to my liking. Someone needs to tell the author that confusing does not equate to deep.
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