Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1161705 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-22
• Released on: 2006-08-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Review

Review

From the Back Cover

Customer Reviews

Cynical fraudulent tie-in hack job
This book is nothing more than a hack job, intended to cash in on the Battlestar Galactica name. The author has no regard for Battlestar Galactica continuity, and violates it left and right.

He attempts to work events into the backstories of Adama, Tigh, Zarek, and the Colonies that simply don't fit - we're supposed to believe that news of the Cylons lurking about in a Dreadnaught ("close to ten times the size of Galactica") wouldn't leak from the crews of 6 battlestars to the rest of the populace, right after we're told that the Admiral couldn't keep the CIC personnel on the Galactica from blabbing to the rest of the crew. Yet, we're told in the TV series that nobody has seen the Cylons since the armistice - that's a critical backstory element.

Cylon Wariors from the period of the war look like the 1978 series' Centurions, not like the more modern versions that Shaw describes.

The Colonial High Command would not have been as lackadaisical about computer control of the Colonial military, had they known that a Cylon Dreadnaught was still out there at the edges of human space - even 20 years after the fact. Especially when they had been concerned enough to send 6 battlestars after it.

I can only guess that this was a manuscipt that the author had sitting around, in which he replaced his own characters with the BSG characters - labelling this as Battlestar Galactica is a fraud. I haven't been this angry about a book in a long, long time - unless you're short of material to burn in a fireplace, avoid this one... you won't know how bad a sucker job you missed. And if you see Craig Shaw Gardner, tell him I want my three hours back.

After the First War
This is an interesting story, but it in no way fits with the show's premises. Twenty years after the first Human-Cylon War, Adama is on the Battlestar Galactica and looking for outposts who lost contact during the war. The find a small outpost and some salvage operators. The salvage operators find the outpost first but meet disastrous results when making contact. The outpost is a scientific research facility meant to examine the relationship between Human and Cylon. That means that there are Cylon's present. But these Cylon's seem to be living in harmony with the few remaining humans but with the arrival of outsiders it would appear they are not as harmless as thought.

The Galactica crew manages to safely land and make contact with the outpost. Slowly they learn something about what has been going on but it is a surviving salvage crew member that discovers some of the hidden secrets on the planet. When more Cylon's show up, the Galactica crew has to remember that there is an armistice and the Cylons are not currently a foe although prejudice runs deep. Things escalate of course and soon the skies are full of Battlestars and raiders looking to stave off or end a possible Cylon threat.

Knowing that the Cylons have been active in Human space and that they have very powerful ships does not seem like something the Fleet would have completely forgotten about by the time of the show's beginning. Having main characters from the show and multiple Battlestars involved just succeed in making sure this story will not fit with the television show. The book also suffers heavily from the Christmas Curse where books put out too close to the holidays do so without benefit of proof reading. I have enjoyed many books by the author and would like to think that he would have had a better polished product. Could it be this was another instance of a draft getting released as a final copy (i.e. NERILKA'S STORY by McCaffrey)? The draft-like nature and the way it fails to fit the show will have disastrous effects on this book's popularity. But despite the two major flaws I did find the story fun to read but most readers familiar with the show will not be able to overcome the discrepancies.

Blegh!! Written for 12-year olds
Utter crap. Reads like the outline to a bad fan-fiction movie, complete with a girl-crush from the plucky young heroine on a young Tom Zarek.

For anyone that seriously enjoys the show, you need to skip this "book" and pretend it doesn't exist. Reading it will be painful and annoying - thankfully it is a very quick read so the torture doesn't drag on too long.

On a more serious note, it is written for preteens with a crude, simplistic plot and nearly non-existent character development. There are gaping plot holes and serious deviations from established canon that are distracting. While it claims to "based upon" the re-imagined series, the word "loosely" should be included in that statement.