William C. Dietz

While it’s nice to have a novelisation of the first Halo game, this action packed adventure translates poorly into the written format. It might be fun to shoot countless aliens and space parasites from behind a controller, but it isn’t fun to read about someone else doing it paragraph after paragraph.

That said, the novel provides some neat character insight and helps emphasis how creepy the Flood is. However, this could’ve been achieved better through a series of short stories.

I don’t recommend reading this unless you’re a massive Halo fan. Play the game instead.… (mais)

Thin and lame.

Let's be clear, when I'm reading military sci-fi, I'm not expecting Pulitzer material, or even Heinlein and Pournelle. Even with those expectations, this is still weak.

The few pages of military action are actually not bad, and if there'd been more of it, I would have got some of what I expected. Instead I got endless pages of poor attempts at political intrigue and a half hearted try at a love triangle Harlequin readers would giggle at. And no, mentioning null G sex in passing a couple of times with the only character that's ever described as attractive doesn't help any.

Plot holes like Swiss cheese and no real redeeming features. Skip it.… (mais)

I've heard mentioned many times this is the 'way of the future' - Video games spawning books and movies rather than the other way around. This book is a perfect example of how not to do it.

After reading [b:The Fall of Reach|60229|The Fall of Reach (Halo, #1)|Eric S. Nylund|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1170538877s/60229.jpg|1881174] I had decent expectations for this one, and ended up pretty disappointed. The Fall Of Reach is an OK novel with elements of the game folded into it. The authour worked hard to make a storyline and plot that hung together and fleshed out what we knew from the game.

This book on the other hand is mostly vast swathes of extra descriptive game walk-thru. And trust me, while I really enjoy playing Halo, a first person shooter game walk thru is not gripping reading material.

Turn left, shoot three Grunts, go up stairs, use grenade on group of Elites on walkway, turn right, shoot Grunt...

you get the picture.

I'm guessing the authour had zero lattitude to play with the story line. There are some original touches here or there, expanding on things from the game or adding bits not there at all. Those parts are actually pretty decent, and the only parts that read like a story. As for the rest of it, Master Chief and Cortana show more character in the game than they do here.

If you're a Halo fanatic and haven't read the book, then maybe there's something here for you, but otherwise try something else.… (mais)

"The countdown continues
in Earthrise, coming from
Ace Books in the fall of 2002!"

After investing 19 precious days reading a book that I thought had an ending, and I come to the above statement, I believe I have a right to be disappointed. I quadruple-checked Deathday's dust cover and located no notice that it was "number 1" in a series of books.

Deathday by William C. Dietz (another author who should go faceless)is a good old fashioned Earth versus alien invaders story. And while having one big strike against it being a 'Surprise! I'm book one in a series', it also deserves kudos for not having even one explicit sex scene in it.

Oh but Dietz's character's utter the most powerful word in the English language (sadly it is no longer 'freedom') and that is 'nigger'. And author Dietz will probably be hung with a noose from the nearest tree for using it too. (Oops, forgot we cannot use the word 'noose' either. Sorry.)

His concept is that the insect-invaders, the Zin's, being dark-brown, and many African-Americans also being dark-brown, the Zins make our human blacks overseers of the whites just as the Zin's are masters of their own lighter-skinned brethren, the Fon. Got that?

The ruling Zin race is able to leap thirty feet straight up and sometimes come squat down on an unwary human, and are as ruthless as ruthless can be and I loved it. Their religion, which causes them to conquer Earth in order to build their temples, has more fables and falsehoods than Scientology. (Knock! Knock! Who's that at my door but Cruise, Smith, Travolta and Phoenix, Arizona's own 'Wonderful Russ'?)

'White Separatists,' American-Blacks segregated out by the bugs for the higher slave positions, professional ex-soldier bodyguards for the black human 'president', 'Survivalists', a love triangle, and hidden unrest among their fellow-cockroaches-made-slaves, all add to the suspense, turmoil and action of Deathday.

The title of Deathday refers to another unique and interesting concept author Dietz dreamed up concerning the life-cycle of our alien-invaders.

Some of the metaphors are silly. One being that, since the Zins have pincers and not hands, several times an idea is rejected "... out of pincer." Har! Get it, ha, ha, ha, not.

I found more than one odd metaphor along the lines of, "... as the Suburban's huge mud and snow tires whispered down the street ..." I've heard mud and snow tires, but I've never heard them "whispering down" any of my streets. He also lards his sentences with so many adjectives that rather than drawing the reader deeper into the scene, he is distracted by having to chew up and then spit out so many unneeded descriptors.

Deathday is a good 'Mankind versus the Aliens' book. And if you don't mind reading several books to get to the conclusion, it'd be a fun series to read. However, I continue to be upset by being tricked into buying a book that does not end when I have a good-sized unread library of books that do have endings and are waiting to be read.


… (mais)