Will Leave the Galaxy for Good by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw review

    WILL LEAVE THE GALAXY FOR GOOD by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw is the third and final installment of the Jack McKeown series. The series is about an out of work star pilot and his feud with the seemingly fictional Jack McKeown, a author of rugged stories about star pilots who has actually rewritten the adventures of both the protagaonist as well as his many friends. Due to complicated stories, the protagonist is also forced to adopt the identity of Jack McKeown on multiple occassions. Sometimes he’s also known as Dashford Pierce, even though that is also a pseudonym.

    The third book opens with Jack/Dashford struggling with the fact that Jack McKeown is no longer as popular as he used to be. The Flash Gordon-esque star pilot stories have gotten passe and the public have moved on to the more Star Trek-like Trail Spacers. Worse, the protagonist can’t write any new books to continue his legacy because, well, he’s not actually an author. Instead, the point becomes moot when his apartment blows up and Jack/Dashford assumes that it is Jacques McKeown behind it.

    There’s a certain melancholy to the third book as I really think this could have remained a ongoing series as the humor of Yahtzee remains relevant throughout. Still, you could tell he was perhaps running low on the premise as there’s only so many ways you can reinterperet the same premise of, “maybe Golden Age heroism wasn’t all its cracked up to be and we should all be living in the real world versus fantasies.” Which is a hard needle to thread when you are reading escapist literature primarily read by fans of the same.

    This isn’t me criticizing the book and whether or not this is actually the Aesop being supported by the protagonist or the author is deliberately undercutting it at every turn is up for interpretation. Much like Martin Scorseze, he presents star pilots and the protagonists as stunted man children but also individuals have a genuine sense of heroism that is needed against, well, very unheroic sorts of people. Indeed, analyzing this contradiction and what it means may be the heart of this story.

    The primary difference between Trailspacers and the star pilots is, without mentioning it, the Prime Directive. The TrailSpacers observe things happening but don’t interfere and then pat themselves on the back for doing nothing. This, of course, is rarely what the protagonists of Star Trek do but there’s been a few indications when they take the attitude it’s morally superior to do nothing but observe. This is then contrasted to the people who watch TrailSpacers and the people who are stuck inside the show. I can’t say more without spoiling things.

    I will say that this is a pretty good ending for the series and that most of the major plotlines are wrapped up in a satisfying way. I was surprised by the identity of Jacques McKeown and I think no one will properly guess his identity but that it is surprisingly timely with recent scandals among Amazon and other publishers. I also think the series nicely ties into MOGWORLD and if you haven’t read that book then you probably should.

    In conclusion, it is sad to say goodbye to Dashford Pierce/Jack McKeown but we’ve had a good run. Very few books get more than one great book about the series. This one isn’t quite as good as the previous two since it seems to restart itself after having a couple of perfectly satisfying endings to begin with. That’s a small complaint, though. I gladly would have continued to enjoy the adventures of the last star pilot.

Available here

Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw

    WILL DESTROY THE GALAXY FOR CASH by Ben “Yahtzee” Crowshaw is the scond book in the Jacques McKeown series. The series is about a washed up space hero who lost his job after teleportation (quan-tunneling) wiped out the necessity for spaceships. The first book was an absolute treat and I immediately picked up the second one in the series. This is one of those series that is best listened to in audiobook form because Ben Croshaw’s voice is so distinctive as well as so much of his humor tied into his delivery.

    The premise for this volume is that our protagonist has unfortunately found himself impersonating the fictional Jack McKeown, world famous author-adventurer, who the protagonist bitterly loathes because all of said adventurer’s adventures are plagarized from other star pilots (like himself). A life of absolute luxury and wealth seem like a poor way of torturing our hero but he can’t bring himself to enjoy any of it knowing that it comes from pretending to be someone he’s not.

    This all becomes extra-twisted as Warden, “Jack’s” employer from the last book wants to hire him for a job that suspiciously sounds like a heist. Specifically a heist of Jimmy Henderson, boy mob boss, as he pays for McKeown Con. It’s supposed to be for a cure that will help the protagonist’s father-figure/mentor, Robert Blaze, but you can never take anything as it seems in these books.

    I really enjoyed the heist crew of this book and Derby, a self-styled gentleman thief, and Malcolm Sturb, a nebbish mad scientist who invented the setting’s equivalent of the Borg. Oh and he was also the protagonist’s archnemesis. The three of them play off one another well and also underscore the fact that so much of the series is about men playing dress up as well as trying to pass themselves off as the heroes of their own narrative.

    Fans of the original more or less know what to expect with the sequel. It’s a kind of zany Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy travel through the bizarre world where space piloting was a brief Golden Age of Sci-Fi/Flash Gordon-esque time of heroes before popping like a soap bubble. Sort of like the Wild West. However, the question of whether the star pilots were ever actually that heroic in the first place is repeatedly brought up. Were they actually heroes or just guys living out their adolescent fantasies on worlds that hadn’t discovered steam power?

    Ben Croshaw is a fantastic narrator and performer but he’s also a great writer of comedy and this comes from someone who writes comedy for a living. His word-building isn’t bad either and it more or less hangs together. Things may be absurd or silly but they’re never such for its own sake but as a commentary on the driving forces of capitalism and human pride.

    In conclusion, this is a fantastic follow-up to the original novel and manages to capture most of the magic. The books have something to say about wish-fulfillment in fiction but I’m not sure it’s wholly negative. After all, the star pilots are mostly heroes. It’s just some of them weren’t at times.

Available here

Writing Update - April 24, 2024

Hey folks,

I thought I would give a wonderful update about what's going on with my current projects because what is the point of this if not to keep my fans updated with what's in the works? This has been a very busy April and the news is both good, bad, and in-between.

* The Supervillainy Saga: The next book, THE RISE OF SUPERVILLAINY, is presently slated to be the finale of the series. It's lasted ten books but sales are a bit down and Gary has achieved a lot of what I've wanted to tell so putting the series to rest for a time seems like a sensible choice. The premise for it is well-timed, though, because we'll be doing a "Gary meets the X-men" style story.

+ Fear not fans of the Gary universe as when the Supervillainy Saga is finished, we'll be doing a sequel series called WORLD'S WORST SUPERHERO. Which will take place in the same world and deal with Gary's opposite number in would-be patriotic superhero, Jack Washington Junior. Except, well, he just  keeps doing villainy! By accident, really!

+ Space Academy Miscreants (Space Academy #4) is now off to the recording studio at Podium where we'll be seeing Vance Turbo's adventures against the evil SLAVE LORDS OF CRIUS and meeting someone he never expected to see: [spoiler]! I think this will be a very enjoyable work.

+ Speaking of Space Academy, SPACE ACADEMY VAGRANTS will be coming out probably just two months after the release of Space Academy Miscreants. It will be a massive treasure hunt story and a redoing of the planned third Lucifer's Star book. Basically, the concept just fit for Vance and crew.

+ We will actually be wrapping up the Lucifer's Star series with a short story included with Miscreants called "The End of History" which will provide a nice epilogue for Cassius and company looking back on their connections to Vance Turbo and his crew.

+ The fourth and final Cthulhu Armageddon book, CTHULHU'S CANYON has been started up and I hope to have it done by the end of Summer. This will return John Henry Booth to the Wasteland for one last time to discover the fate of his two children and whether it's possible to save what little remains of humanity.

+ Speaking of Cthulhu, I have a novelette in TIME LOOPERS, a Cthulhu Mythos anthology edited by David Hambling  of Harry Stubbs fame. We're also going to be releasing THE BOOK OF HASTUR, which is another set of excellent Cthulhu Mythos stories that will be starring John Henry Booth. It's my hope to eventually do a compliation of all of the short stories into one Pulpy mythos volume.

+ Plans remain for the third Moon Cops book and second Morgan Detective Agency book. A Peter Stone sequel too but finishing up the above is currently preoccupying me. Not that I have too much on my plate, no sir!

Review - Fallout: 76 - Six Years Later

 
    FALLOUT 76 is a game that both frustrates me as well as invites me in. Six years ago, I was one of the early adopters of the video game and it was one of the worst experiences of my gaming career. The world was lifeless, empty, lacking in any real stakes, and most of all felt unfinished. Fallout 76 was set in my home state of West Virginia where I lived fifteen years and yet somehow managed to not only fail to capture any of the places' uniqueness but didn't really have any of the kind of hilarious dark humor that it's just begging to have applied.

    Part of the problem was the idea that Fallout 76 would be a playground for players rather than a single player campaign. The idea was that they would interact with one another, be vendors, and create their own fun. Never has a video company more misread what fans wanted from their games since the introduction of Diablo to cellphones in lieu of announcing a new game. Basically, the fans of Fallout wanted to shoot guns and do quests. The wildly divergent leveling and equipment also meant PVP was terrible too.

    It didn't help the excuse for a single player campaign wasn't exactly inspired either. Basically, some genetic experiments have turned bats into dragons. Yes, they're called Scorchbeasts but they're dragons and even incorporate the programming from Skyrim. These dragons are also necromancers spreading a Resident Evil-style plague that turns people into zombies. The "Scorched" are basically feral ghouls who can use guns and want to kill all other life in the Virginia Commonwealth. Then the world. It's a painfully generic plot that somehow makes dragonslaying boring.

    But how does the game stand up six years later? The game has been patched, patched, and patched again with sixteen seasons having been released. A new season is released roughly every three months and they've added NPCs, new regions, hundreds of quests, new equipment, as well as personalized Vault dwellings that the player character can customize to their heart's content. 

    The changes to Fallout 76 can't be understated but can be summarized in a very simple statement: the game is fun to play now. The addition of NPCs is just the beginning of the reforms but adds a personal touch to the setting that was previously lacking. You actually have people to protect in the Foundation Settlers, Crater Raiders, Whitespring Refuge, and the actual living Brotherhood of Steel. The Appalachian Wasteland is no longer so empty and you have reasons to carry out the various quests you're given other than boredom.

    There's also some good new locations added to the setting with Nuka World providing some fun local color to the otherwise dingy coal mine areas. We finally get to meet the Overseer in person and she provides some extra places to craft weapons, armor, and materials while encouraging you to seek out inoculations for the new residents of Appalachia. That's not even getting into the Expeditions system that allows you to visit The Pitt (from Fallout 3) and a New Vegas inspired Atlantic City.

    The game has improved in some ways but not in others. The existence of the Vault dwellings (acquired during a quest) provides a nice solution to the hobo-like camps that most players are stuck with. I'd much rather exist in a nice, cool and enjoyable Vault room to store all of my crafting stations and decorations. However, most of the material is locked behind either the Atomic Shop or acquired in-universe plans that limit what you can build. The VATS system still is essentially nonexistent and best ignored.

    The introduction of NPCs to talk to also allows your character to voicelessly respond with snark, psychopathic glee, or unexpected characterization like a fanatical loyalty to Vault-Tec. There's even skill checks like the fact I managed to persuade a Raider to take the vaccine against Scorchdom by pointing out various science facts that convince her I know what I'm talking about. These are all welcome and I hope Bethesda will keep adding these things.

    The game has an unlimited leveling system where you cap your existing SPECIAL stats at 15 but get new perk cards every five levels. This allows you to experiment with more builds and also gradually build up your character into exactly what you want them to be. The fact you can't do this instantly is also something that's designed to keep you playing. Leveling enough is fast enough, though, especially if you are part of the multiplayer events.

    Do I have any complaints? Well, yes, the game is still a live service slot machine designed to take as much money from the player as possible. You have to belong to Xbox Live to play, which is a monthly subscription, and yet there's an additional subscription you can subscribe to in order to get in-game bonuses like the NCR Ranger Armor. The main quest is also the most boring one of them all. My biggest annoyance is you can't acquire repair kits save in the Atomic Shop, which is again designed to take your money but you can earn the points in-game, at least.

    In conclusion, Fallout 76 is now a game that's worth picking up if you're on Steam or Console. If you have Amazon Prime, you can acquire a copy of the game for free because they're being given away as part of the Fallout: The Series promotion. It's available on Playstation but I note that Bethesda is very much on Team X.

Available here

Fallout: The Series Season One review

 

*plays Atom Bomb by The Five Stars*

    I love Fallout to an unhealthy degree. Seriously, I had a Fallout wallet for years. My wife got me a Fallout themed Xbox as a birthday present. I've loved Fallout since Fallout 3, like many fans, but have also played the original Interplay games. I can tell you the secrets of the Vaults, who three fictional Presidents were, and why you should never eat Iguana on a Stick. So, I am THE target audience for Fallout: The Series. Mind you, I'm also going to be one of those annoyingly hard to please people that notices everything wrong too.

    So is it fantastic? Or an atomic bomb? Well, much like the games themselves, it has a little of both but is closer to Fallout: New Vegas versus Fallout 76. It is something that my wife, who is only familiar with Fallout through what she can see over my shoulder, enjoyed very much and probably benefited from someone to tell her little details about but is perfectly accessible to a newcomer. Indeed, what I think people are most likely to complain about is going to be from hardcore fans who are going to be upset about some lore changes-probably unreasonably so but fan is short for fanatic for a reason.

    The premise for the franchise is that it is an alternate 23rd century where the world was nuked two hundred years ago. Technology is more advanced in some ways with power armor and robots on one-hand but black and white televisions on the other. The nuclear war that happened has still not been recovered from, if such a thing were possible, and it remains a mixture of Mad Max and Sixties science fiction movies. This is already a thing super-Fallout fans will be annoyed by as some fans insist the Earth would rebuild and only Bethesda Games is keeping it stuck in ruins.

    The story follows three protagonists with the first being the Ghoul/Cooper (Walter Goggins), who is a survivor of the Great War and a former Hollywood cowboy. The years have not been kind to him and he's gone from being a singing good guy cowboy to a murderous Spaghetti Western one. The second is Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), the daughter of Vault 33's Overseer (Kyle MacLachlan), who is setting up for her arranged marriage with a stranger from Vault 32. Finally, there is Maximus (Aaron Moten), who is a new recruit to the Brotherhood of Steel and a survivor of the sacking of Shady Sands.

    I'm disinclined to spoil any of this show because it's such a wonderful road trip that involves so many Easter Eggs, callbacks, plot twists, and surprises. We get a longstanding mystery from the franchise resolved as well as the plugging of a plot hole that has existed since Fallout 2 (why are Vault-Tec experimenting on people after the apocalypse when all of that data would be seemingly irrelevant?). We also get nods to all of the games ranging from the first ("Our water chip is busted") to New Vegas and the Commonwealth.

    The GOAT (Greatest of All Time) for this series is definitely Lucy and I hereby dub her "Vault Girl" as her official nickname for inclusion among such luminaries as the Vault Dweller, Courier, and Lone Wanderer. She is naive without being stupid, kind without being insipid, and believable in her journey to becoming a survivor. She never quite sheds her Good Karma Pacifist Run playthrough ideology and is all the more lovable for it. Cooper is almost as entertaining and utters an immortal line about how, no matter how important your goal is, you will always be sidetracked from it in the Wasteland. Maximus, by contrast, is...okay. This is no fault of the actor but he seems to be a lot more naive than Lucy in some ways with none of her excuse.

    The show manages to achieve a fun balance between world-building, characterization, plot, and humor. The humor, especially, works well by exploiting Fallout's peculiar tone of zany over-the-top violence with an alternate 1950s wholesomeness. Poor Lucy will be splattered with blood many times in this show and never quite lose her perky can-do attitude for example. She needs to definitely put a few more points into her Speech score, though. Fans of the Fallout soundtracks will note a lot of the songs get use in the show and it is all the better for it. They can also afford actual Johnny Cash tunes this time around too.

    The show makes the correct choice to embrace the absolute ridiculousness of Fallout's retro-future aesthetic with appearances by a Mr. Handy, the 1950s dinner decor of the Vaults, green DOS computers, and how the fact PipBoys geo-tracking works exactly like they do in the games. We don't see as many robots or mutants as we might have in the games but I suppose even the show's extensive budget had to draw the line somewhere.

    There's been some confusion over an error in the show's timeline, though. One that some fans believed resulted in New Vegas being rendered non-canonical. The developers have already come out and said this is not the case and the show makes many-many references to the game, so its extra strange but some people presumably need a reason to complain. Fans of NCR will also be upset with some of the developments in-universe but, well, War never changes. Oh and I was upset they didn't get Ron Pearlman to do a voice over. Those are my only complaints.

    I can't wait for Season Two.

Available here

Star Trek: Being Human (New Frontier #12) by Peter David

    I actually finished this one awhile ago and didn't get around to writing the review. Indeed, I actually read this and the sequel back to back so it's doubly problematic. Thankfully, though, that means I can do their reviews simultaneously. For those wondering what the long delay of about a year and four months was, it was due to my niece moving in. Which obviously disrupted a lot of my online time. However, I'm getting back to writing my Space Academy books so I might as well get these done since I'm definitely in a humorous space opera mood.

    This book introduces the revelation that Mark McHenry, the guy capable of flying a starship in his sleep, is actually a demigod. Indeed, he is the descendant of Apollo from Who Mourns Adonis?. Peter David has a fantastic love of TOS and makes the proper decision of attempting to weld the "Wild West" days of ST into the more stately and dignified TNG era to hilarious effect. It's part of why I love this series as I admit to being someone who enjoys the goofier side of Trek with all its whales, gangster planets, and more. People harp on the holodeck episode but I actually note it's when TNG was able to cut loose.

    Ironically, I think Being Human was when Peter David started to enter his "Dark Period" of New Frontier. The series lasted far longer than I expect he knew and probably was intended to potentially end with the destruction of the Excalibur way back when. Star Trek: Stargazer is one of my favorite Trek series but it only lasted five books with a couple of side-stories involving the cast as well as a much-appreciated coda in The Buried Age. Here, things kept going and that meant a lot of plotlines started getting traumatic and merciless. Seriously, the cast gets cut down like Post-Claremont X-men with less resurrection.

    As much as I love New Frontier, I can't say the Dark Period is my favorite part of the series as the characters start getting trimmed with the Reaper's scythe and often go through hellish circumstances to rival Miles O'Brien. In this case, the set ups for the deaths of Si Cwan, Morgan Primus, and more. The characters don't remain static in the New Frontier novels but the changes are going to be something that will put both them as well as the reader through the ringer.

    There's some questionable choices mythologically like the fact that McHenry's designated love interest (and abuser--which Peter David touches on tastefully) is Artemis, the Virgin Goddess. I think it was a weird choice and I think one of the other goddesses would have been a better choice like Aphrodite or even Athena (even though she is a virgin goddess as well--Ancient Greeks man).

    Oddly, my favorite part of the book was the Si Cwan parts after he accepts the help of the Danteri in rebuilding the Thallonian Empire. It was a bad idea, Calhoun knew it was a bad idea and Si Cwan knew it was a bad idea. However, Si Cwan is one of those characters I like ala Tyrion Lannister who thinks they're worse people than they are so they underestimate the level of stupidity as well as narcissism that makes evil people do things even against their own self-interest because pragmatism isn't actually a quality of the worst. Basically, Si Cwan can't comprehend the idea of giving up power to a master because toadying is antithetical to someone with genuine self-respect.

    Basically, you can't win the game of thrones by being smart because a lot of the people with power are just genuinely stupid. 

Available here

"The Gernsback Continuum" by William Gibson review

 

    “The Gernsback Continuum” is William Gibson of 1981, looking back forty years to the the Golden Age of Science Fiction from the 1920s to the 1930s. While not quite as long from the Nineteen Eighties to the Twenty-Twenties, it’s pretty close and interesting to note that the same wistful nostalgia filter we have regarding cyberpunk as envisioned by Gibson and his contemporaries is the same that he was undoubtedly feeling when he wrote this story.

    The premise is pretty simple, a photographer is sent to take photos of art deco architecture of a futuristic kind. Said photographer starts hallucinating an alternate 1980s with flying cars, massive highways, and people dressed like they’re from the planet Krypton. Anyone who has played Fallout has an idea of what this looks like as there’s the Red Rocket stations and Robbie the Robot-esque machines. His agent is surprisingly sympathetic to his losing his mind and says to basically “cool down” by watching a lot of porn and bad TV to shock his system back to normal.

    The actual meaning of the story is debatable and has, indeed, been debated for decades. For most people, it’s a straight up ode to the classic science fiction world as envisioned by the early Pulp writers that never came to exist. There’s no Jetsons, Flash Gordon, or Buck Rogers-esque future. Life became far more mundane and there’s a wistful nostalgia for a world where UFOs and crystal spires might have replaced skyscrapers or planes.

    I maintain that Gibson was far more critical in his short story of the world as it might have been and recognized the darker undercurrent that was lurking beneath the mind of many Pulp writers. People who were as often as not reactionary as progressive. For modern day fans, we can look back to Deep Space Nine’s “Far Beyond the Stars” to see how Pulp writers of the time period were really with all of the racism and sexism (arguably pretty toned down). Every HP Lovecraft fan certainly has to deal with the fact their author probably would have found some reason to hate them.

    “The Gernsback Continuum” has a particularly haunting scene where the protagonist comes across a couple of Aryan superman looking folk staring at one of their cities. White, CIS, het, and vaguely fascist in a way the Pulps envisioned because they didn’t see anyone outside of those norms having a place in the future. It becomes interesting to contrast cyberpunk, so-called dystopian fiction, as very much having a place for queer or people of color among it. William Gibson’s writing alone for example.

    Indeed, “The Gernsback Continuum” is a story that unwittingly sets itself up as the perfect metaphor for the current ongoing culture war between the Golden Age of Science Fiction and cyberpunk that it is a gateway story. The internet is absolutely filled with so-called speculative fiction fans that are furious at the inclusion of “woke” elements that represent the kind of reactionary future that cyberpunk challenged the assumptions of. To believe in a utopia in the 1930s was far easier for people who saw it as an extension of imperialist dreams and the status quo versus a dystopia that, ironically, promised an overthrow of the present order in the 1980s.

    I’ve unironically had conversations with people who state that dystopian and post-apocalypse fiction was anti-progressive. The Disney movie Tomorrowland is based around the idea that refusing to believe things are getting better was somehow antithetical to it happening. That always brings me back to this short story and what I think the real message of cyberpunk is: recognizing the systemic flaws so that they can be corrected.

    Writing my own cyberpunk, I think of it as a wistful nostalgia-filled dream of motorcycles, cybernetics, and katana. It is stuff from my childhood when I watched Ghost in the Shell, Akira, and Bubblegum Crisis. Sadly, the modern day is a place where we’ve got micro-computers, the internet, megacorps, computer criminals, and the massive wealth disparity but very few of the people rising up to cast down the man. I wonder what the next age looking back on us will be.

 Available here