After enjoy­ing the Res­i­dent Evil book series, I was real­ly excit­ed to try read­ing Mass Effect. Upon shop­ping, I noticed that reviews were not so stel­lar. That does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly both­er me as I pre­fer com­ing to my own opin­ions, so I bought them any­ways — Androm­e­da includ­ed. Here, I explore my impres­sions about the first book in the series.

Rec­om­mend­ed: NO

Rat­ing: 2 out of 5

Mass Effect — Revelation (2007)

Pre­quel to the Mass Effect games, writ­ten by Drew Karpyshyn

323 pages

Sum­ma­ry

This book is a pre­quel to the events set with­in the game series. It cov­ers Cap­tain David Ander­son from his N7 train­ing to his Lieu­tenant rank, and also includes Saren the Spec­tre. The pro­logue explains how Rear Admi­ral Gris­som, Hero of Earth, chose Ander­son specif­i­cal­ly out of all the can­di­dates of the N7 pro­gram to help lead troops dur­ing the First Con­tact War with the Turi­ans. Then fast-for­ward to a mis­sion where Lt. Ander­son and his patrol team inves­ti­gate a may­day sig­nal. He is paint­ed a capa­ble leader and hero before return­ing to the Citadel. He bit­ter­ly deals with divorce from his wife back on Earth and is then giv­en his next mission–one that’s on the down-low. He’s to go after Kahlee Sanders, the child of Admi­ral Gris­som (now retired and grumpy) who is in trou­ble as the lone sur­vivor after a ques­tion­able lab was destroyed (the one Ander­son respond­ed to). They must con­tend with Skarr the mer­ce­nary Kro­gan, the Blue Suns mer­ce­nary group, and Saren the Turi­an Spec­tre. The secrets of the destroyed lab are uncov­ered, paint­ing humans in a bad light. Human Ambas­sador Goyle must play the Coun­cil (or be played?) to help defend the human race and for­ward their agen­da. Along the way, Ander­son grows feel­ings for his ward, and then feels betrayed when she does­n’t ful­ly trust him. Even­tu­al­ly, Sanders gets cap­tured by the Blue Suns’ rich Batar­i­an employ­er. Although Saren must help Ander­son by order of the Coun­cil, he and Ander­son split up any­ways. Saren blows up the ele­ment zero facil­i­ty to com­plete his mis­sion, but not before learn­ing about Sov­er­eign and want­i­ng it for him­self, while Ander­son strug­gles to kill Skarr and save Sanders. The book ends with Ander­son upset that Sanders does not wish to get into a roman­tic rela­tion­ship with him, and she leaves.

Pros — The sto­ry helps to uncov­er more about Ander­son who isn’t touched upon too much in the game. It brings togeth­er some his­to­ry that can become con­fus­ing­ly lost in the lore-rich games. Human­i­ty is quite new to every­thing, so this high­lights some of the thoughts and strug­gles of humans as they attempt to inte­grate and gain respect from the oth­er aliens. Uneth­i­cal and tor­ture-lov­ing Saren is very well described, and his role segues neat­ly into the first Mass Effect game where he had already found Sov­er­eign and was being slow­ly indoc­tri­nat­ed. Most of the alien species were explored in this book, even the Batar­i­ans who don’t get a lot of love in the game.

Cons - The author spends an inor­di­nate amount of time describ­ing — so much so, that I skipped through most of it. His por­tray­al of females in the book is not par­tic­u­lar­ly favor­able, paint­ing most, if not all, the females as inept in some fash­ion or form. Even though Ander­son is the main focus of the book, I found him to be an absolute idiot much of the time. In fact, of all the char­ac­ters, Saren and Skarr are prob­a­bly the only ones who weren’t irri­tat­ing. Apart from Saren’s tor­ture scenes, the book felt quite bor­ing as a whole. The bare bones of the book flows, but the nar­ra­tive (espe­cial­ly towards the end) bor­ders on illog­i­cal or unnec­es­sary.

Impres­sions

As men­tioned pri­or, I was real­ly excit­ed to read this. As a pre­quel, and there­fore an orig­i­nal work, it had the poten­tial to be great, as it would not be con­fined to the sto­ry­line of the game. Sad­ly, I do NOT rec­om­mend this book even if you’re a fan of the Mass Effect series. The pro­logue start­ed out poor­ly for me, where after the first few para­graphs I already had to reread the words a few times out of bore­dom. As a whole, I end­ed up read­ing prob­a­bly half of the book, skip­ping much of it for lack of inter­est. While it did a good job of even­tu­al­ly tying into the first Mass Effect game, I just want­ed the book to be done and over. None of the char­ac­ters res­onat­ed with me aside from Saren and Skarr because every­one else was an idiot. The book left a sour taste in my mouth that made me not want to read the rest of the series, pre­fer­ring to just play the real Mass Effect game.

As a spoil­er, Kahlee Sanders appears to be one of the main char­ac­ters in the sec­ond book which is set right after Saren and Sov­er­eign attack the Citadel. UGH. I read as far as see­ing her there, and imme­di­ate­ly quit read­ing. If I felt her to be unlike­able in the first book, then I doubt I’ll like her in the sec­ond one. Per­haps I will return to the series in the future when I have noth­ing else to read.

Gripes

Descrip­tion: My first prob­lem with this was in the pro­logue where the author describes the ship car­ry­ing Admi­ral Gris­som. The worst case was of the Pre­sid­i­um. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, this would be a recur­ring prob­lem: entire­ly too much descrip­tion and not enough action. I found myself skip­ping large sec­tions of text just to get to next part, it felt so exces­sive. And bor­ing. I get that the book was writ­ten in such a way that if peo­ple were to read it with­out play­ing the game, then they could under­stand, but I felt it to be too much. I wish the author had spent as much time nar­rat­ing the action scenes as describ­ing places.

Intro­spec­tion: Gen­er­al­ly, I enjoy get­ting into the minds of char­ac­ters, espe­cial­ly after play­ing the game, but I did not enjoy the intro­spec­tion in this book. There was just not much going on their heads and the things they did think about were incon­se­quen­tial to char­ac­ter build­ing. The only thought process­es I found myself inter­est­ed in were from Saren, who, by the way, was well written…perhaps because of all the char­ac­ters in this book, he was the only one with a ded­i­cat­ed per­son­al­i­ty in the game…hmm. Lack of cre­ativ­i­ty on the author’s part?

Char­ac­ters: The char­ac­ters are not enjoy­able. They did not res­onate with me. Most of them were por­trayed as morons or were irri­tat­ing. I found myself not car­ing about the two main char­ac­ters, Ander­son and Sanders, though I want­ed to care about Ander­son because I liked him a lot in the game. He’d get upset over tiny insignif­i­cant things that a sol­dier as expe­ri­enced and sup­pos­ed­ly fan­tas­tic as a leader as he was should­n’t have got­ten in a tizzy about. Even Goyle, whom I ini­tial­ly liked as com­pared to Udi­na in the game, even­tu­al­ly grew…unhinged? I’m not sure what the author was try­ing to do to her.

Females: That brings me to the next gripe: the por­tray­al of women. Is it because the author is male? I’m not sure, but all the main females were obnox­ious in some fash­ion or form. Goyle as men­tioned above, start­ed out as a strong leader, but then her sub­se­quent intro­spec­tion paint­ed her…as not (per­haps the exces­sive explo­ration into her mind did her in here)? The book starts out with Ander­son lead­ing his small group respond­ing to a dis­tress call. In the group is one woman, Gun­nery Chief Dah, who is described as larg­er than most of the males, mus­cu­lar, and basi­cal­ly an uncouth brute with a mouth, yet supreme­ly skill­ful. Any­ways, she ends up get­ting shot in the leg, and instead of get­ting up to try and limp out of the col­laps­ing facil­i­ty like the tough marine she was sup­posed to be, she just lay there, and Ander­son had to car­ry her huge frame on his back. Even­tu­al­ly, she passed out alto­geth­er and all the males had to car­ry her. So much for tough sol­dier. Then there’s Ander­son­’s ex-wife on Earth who divorced him because he nev­er came home for many, many years. He’s bit­ter about the divorce for the entire­ty book, and I sim­ply can­not com­mis­er­ate with him. She’s por­trayed as a bad per­son for the divorce when she’d been wait­ing for him for about a decade, trapped inside of a rela­tion­ship with entire galax­ies in between and no accu­rate time­line of his return. Talk about a long-dis­tance rela­tion­ship! At least she end­ed it offi­cial­ly before try­ing to move on with the rest of her life. Then there’s the female Batar­i­an that betrays her facil­i­ty and then gets killed mer­ci­less­ly by Saren.

Ander­son: For the sup­posed main pro­tag­o­nist, he is not a like­able guy, and eas­i­ly offend­ed. He was good in the begin­ning dur­ing the N7 pro­logue, and clear­ly an excep­tion­al sol­dier in his lead­ing of the botched dis­tress call response. The whole divorce thing? Dumb, as stat­ed above. He’s a jerk, espe­cial­ly when deal­ing with the Salari­an infor­ma­tion deal­er. Yeah, he has high ideals, so what? Instead of being grate­ful for the black-mar­ket infor­ma­tion, he berates her about hav­ing access to top secret infor­ma­tion. He does that again lat­er in the book, too. Dude. They have info. Who cares if they hacked in. They’re hack­ers. He’s extreme­ly emo­tion­al, and not over­ly smart…something that his N7 badge and gold­en ser­vice records are in direct oppo­si­tion to. Hard­ened sol­dier: emo­tion­al? When he’s deal­ing with Saren who is a noto­ri­ous and accom­plished Spec­tre, he tries to fist fight him. Then he devel­ops this stu­pid idea of feel­ings for Kahlee Sanders, his ward. OKAY, maybe there’s some slack to be cut because he was recent­ly divorced…or maybe not because it’s not like he ever saw his wife any­ways? If he’s as ded­i­cat­ed to his career as a sol­dier as he’s claimed to be, he would be see­ing her as a mis­sion objec­tive, not a poten­tial part­ner. The end­ing is the worst. Ander­son and Sanders exchange some words before he tries to kiss her and she stops him, explain­ing that their lives are about to be split apart again with their next mis­sions. It’s rea­son­able to not start some­thing as they would hard­ly ever see each oth­er. He gets real­ly upset, like mad, as if his last rela­tion­ship had­n’t just failed for the same rea­son. Per­haps he thinks he deserves a reward for pro­tect­ing and sav­ing her? That’s what it felt like to me, at least. Also, it’s nev­er clear exact­ly how old he is. She’s clear­ly young.

Sanders: Then that brings me to my biggest gripe of all: Kahlee Sanders, the lone sur­viv­ing sci­en­tist from the mys­te­ri­ous lab that explod­ed. In Mass Effect, any­one who is in space for the Alliance will be trained as a sol­dier. The book iter­ates over and over that she’s intel­li­gent — more intel­li­gent than your aver­age sci­en­tist. It also paints her ear­ly on as an extreme­ly capa­ble sol­dier when she defends her­self with bru­tal effi­cien­cy against a Blue Suns mer­ce­nary who tries to abduct her in Ely­si­um. She is Jon Gris­som’s daugh­ter after all! Well. Once Ander­son shows up, she’s sud­den­ly an annoy­ing damsel in dis­tress. What hap­pened to that capa­ble sol­dier? Even­tu­al­ly, she gets cap­tured where she is fear­ful of the tor­ture meth­ods they’re plan­ning on sub­ject­ing her to even though no one said any­thing about it (that is just bad sto­ry­telling, hon­est­ly). In the con­fine­ment, she con­sid­ered bash­ing her head repeat­ed­ly against the wall (what???) and then decides against it. When the door is loose, she man­ages to dis­lo­cate her shoul­der knock­ing it off (real­ly…?) which forces her sav­ior, Ander­son, to pop it back into place. Then, as they run from the quick­ly dis­in­te­grat­ing, explod­ing ele­ment zero fac­to­ry, she sud­den­ly, out of the blue falls to the ground, and is sim­ply so dis­tressed about every­thing (dur­ing an actu­al, life threat­en­ing, cri­sis sit­u­a­tion, mind you), that she refus­es to get up and move because she’s not a sol­dier, she’s just a sci­en­tist! She’s weak! Then Ander­son says, “…get up off your ass and get your feet mov­ing! That’s an order!” The text then goes, “Like a good sol­dier, she respond­ed to his com­mands.” So…wait…she’s a sol­dier now, not just a sci­en­tist? What exact­ly is she? A bur­den. Her only sav­ing grace is that she’s able to block Ander­son­’s moves at the end with a rea­son­able bit of log­ic.

In Con­clu­sion

It appears the book reviews are spot on. I’d rate it 2 stars out of 5. There were good parts, but most­ly I did not enjoy it. When you’re skip­ping half of the text in an effort to just fin­ish the darn thing, it’s not a good sign. Try­ing to read the sec­ond book and find­ing that it also has noth­ing to do with Com­man­der Shep­ard was also extreme­ly dis­ap­point­ing. I guess I was hop­ing it would be like Res­i­dent Evil where I get to vis­it the same sto­ry but in book form. There’s artis­tic license avail­able to an author (with agree­ment from the pub­lish­er, of course) that would allow them to explore what would be “canon” in a game or not. I want­ed a sto­ry about Shep­ard’s adven­ture. He/she would not have to involve them­selves in any rela­tion­ships what­so­ev­er apart from cama­raderie and occa­sion­al, non-seri­ous flings. Shep­ard is a sol­dier after all, with a mis­sion. I get that there could be fall­out from fans, but man­ga and ani­me reg­u­lar­ly con­flict, and that’s because you under­stand that one is a book and the oth­er is not. As a pre­quel, though, this sto­ry would have been fine because it’s an orig­i­nal piece. What a let­down.