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Star Control!

Star Control: Interbellum

By W. T. Quick

When I first learned that there was indeed a Star Control novel out, I wet myself at the opportunity to get it. This fairly expensive (US $5.99 list price; probably can be found in cut out bins and recycling containers near you) paperback sports a picture of a Harika on the cover, but don't let that distract you; this novel takes place in the span of time following the destruction of the Sa-Matra and before the collapse of Hyperspace. Why, in fact, there is a Harika on the cover is still a mystery to me. The novel is based loosely on the interaction between the human commander, dubbed Omega by Quick, and the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za leaders in Star Control 2, but is largely about the human condition in a universe of questions and very few answers.

The above, I think, is the most flattering thing I could say about this book. I'll lay it out honestly from here on it: I do not believe Quick ever played Star Control. Ok, I've said it. The pathetic, limp wristed handling of the races, the fact that only a handful of races were even mentioned, the laughable rendition of ship combat, and just the general stinkiness of this work is sufficient proof that Quick was probably commissioned by George MacDonald of Accolade to write this book. The one thing he got right, the true nature of the Ortogs, strongly suggests that he was specifically told about this point; how else could somebody with no other understanding of the genre get such an obscure point correct?

I've broken this review into several sections; pick all those that aren't painful to look at.
Basic Synopsis
A Summary of the Races (Ab)used
Purchasing this Horrid Tripe

Basic Synopsis

The book starts out, and centers around, a young ortogherder on Unzervalt by the name of Jemmy Croft, who is unwittingly at the epicenter of events that will shake the races of the League of Sentient Races and pit the humans against the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za, who instinctively fear this dawning truth. Croft's only friend is a bull Ortog named "Lump," a foul smelling beast which, between chewing cud and flatulating, is evolving to a great intellect. Every other player in this novel, from the human commander Omega, to the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za Tsing a Kra (not a bad name for an Ur-Quan, really), is manuevered into position like so many pawns, to confront and bear witness to the change.

Jemmy and Lump discover a cave which is both inviting and threatening. Their exploration of it instills the Ortog's rapid evolution, not unlike the Cosmic UnDevolver in the Kessari Quadrant, but instead of instantly refueling the sentience, it only promotes rapid development. Their exploration is halted by the Ortogherder overseer, Carlo Ortegan, who has been paid by an Ur-Quan Kzer-Za, the Tsing a Kra, to disclose information on Crost, for the Ur-Quan's own reasons. While the Tsing explored that information from orbit, a cadre of humans in the Precursor Exploration Vessel Galacticus, lead by Commander Omega of Unzervalt, approached the world, as did an Utwig Juggernaught and Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah Marauder.

The exploration of the cave continued again, except that a botched surgery to remove his tracking device mortally wounded Jemmy. Lump's intellect had grown sufficiently to repair the damage with Jemmy's first aid kit, allowing him to continue to explore, but he expired anyhow, and Lump's own explorations took him into a vast antechamber, where he began working changes he barely understood, and then also was critically injured, this time by an Ilwrath assassin team sent down originally to bump off Crost.

Meanwhile, in orbit, the Galacticus was attacked by a Kohr-Ah Marauder, and, playing a deft hand, called upon the terms of the peace treaty between Ur-Quan and League races, forcing the Tsing a Kra to fire upon the Kohr-Ah vessel. The distraction allowed a human strike team to be deployed on the surface to stop the Ilwrath, and to find out what the heck was going on down there, but not unnoticed -- the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za commander also decided to inspect the operation personally, as did Omega and his crew.

All the players entered the chamber simultaneously, and, after a lot of open threatening, Toshi, an Androsynth in Omega's employ, effortlessly dispatched all of the Ilwrath marines. The Tsing a Kra had one more card to play -- that of the Great Hive, a Matrix of Leadership (from the Transformers) of Ur-Quan leaders hailing back to Kzer-Za himself, who manifested to psionically attack the humans, but Omega also had a trump card -- the Human Heart, whose own avatar, Berg (the significance of this name was NEVER explained), countered Kzer-Za. The deadlock was interrupted by the arrival of Lump, who stopped the battle by shuffling in and calmly explaining that all the pieces were in position -- then gave up the vestiges of his lingering life to Jemmy, who had returned as a bit of a savior, lifting the madness and burden from the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za, and from Omega, who had been scarred by his experiences (possibly from the grisly future vision mentioned in SC3?). Jemmy, who was now Alpha, served as the focus of all the races, altho not the Makers (Precursors, possibly?), but did instill The Change, that of a galvanizing force of all races who would accept him, and for them to look to the future with a unified purpose. Excepting the Utwig, who Alpha stated could not contact their own Avatar, but he did offer them hope.

And that's that.

A Summary of the Races (Ab)Used

Below is an alphabetical listing of those races who were disgraced and manhandled in this book.

Androsynth: Surprisingly, for a race that was surely extinct by the beginning of the Slave Revolt, the Androsynth make an appearance in this farce, or at least one does -- one of Omega's crew, Toshi, turns out to be an Androsynth, but not just any synthetic human. Toshi is the original Androsynth from which the others were modelled. Despite being witness to his subrace's rebellion, exodus, battle against their creators, and ultimate destruction at the fins of the Orz, Toshi is generally OK with his place in human society, even though he's the last of his kind, a kind that was genetically engineered as sterile slaves of humanity and treated as second class citizens. Toshi apparently passes for human, and thusly receives none of the ill treatment afforded his extinct brethren.

Pretty much, Toshi does little throughout the book; he more or less plays nursemaid to Dino while they stroll around in the cave that occupies the latter half of the novel. He performs one major act, that of killing every single Ilwrath marine the Tsing a Kra brought with him instantly and without so much as breaking a sweat. Which would be pretty cool if he was even vaguely realistic.

Druuge: The Druuge are mentioned only for flavor; apparently the Crimson Corporation produces brandy and all Druuge have a passion for Ortog meat. That seems to be the point of bringing them up.

Ilwrath: Of all the races that were utterly butchered in this book, few (except the Mycon) exceed the manhandling given the poor Ilwrath. Gone are the savage zealots who nearly eradicated themselves trying to sacrifice the Thraddash to their dark gods, Dogar and Kazon, this is a kindler, smarter breed of Ilwrath. While technically liberated from their enslavement by the Ilwrath, Quick gets around this by putting the Ilwrath under the employ of the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za as soldiers for hire. Cute idea, bad in execution.

The Ilwrath, apparently, have forsaken their names, and are instead referred to by their rank, which understandably causes confusion when Sargeant has to bawl out a particular Private for failing to buff his exoskeleton to a glossy sheen. In addition to this paperwork nightmare, the Ilwrath went so far as to express their apprehension when attacking humans and to express how much they respect them (Sargeant makes a wistful reference to the terran expression FUBAR). This, clearly, is not what one has come to expect from a race that gleefully picked fights with the other Battle Thralls under the oral bristles of their masters and who sadistically recounted the exquisite screams that humans make when their skin is peeled from their bodies.

Frankly, I couldn't wait for Toshi to kill them.

Kohr-Ah: Only one Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah makes an appearance in the book, but that hardly prevented them from being bastardized, too. To make a long story short, the Kohr-Ah are relegated to barbarian status, and time and time again, the Tsing a Kra expresses his hatred for his genetically spliced brethren, and dispatches one with as much disgust as one would toss aside a soiled diaper. For its part, the Kohr-Ah gnashed its teeth (or oral bristles, as the case may be), and earned the reputation the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za gave them, and also earned it a quick slagging, which was ok by me.

Mycon: The Mycon win the award for "Race Least Understood by W.T. Quick," a dubious distinction at best. Only one Mycon, Dram (an ok Mycon name, actually, but one forever cursed by its characterization) strode around on the decks of the Tsing a Kra's Dreadnought, and it displayed 3 very un-Myconlike traits: It thought of itself in the singular since, it never lapsed into the memories of its elders, and it showed real self-preservation instinct in the face of being eaten to death.

If you are feeling generous, you can assume that Dram is a Deep Child, and thusly was not burdened with the programming of the Elder Mycon. This is not unplausible; the Mycon were willing to give a Deep Child to the League of Sentient Races in SC3; surely the Ur-Quan would have demanded an unadulterated thrall to serve as chief tactician should they have known about the true nature of the Mycon sentience. However, they didn't know about that, and it seems very unlikely that Dram is a Deep Child. He/It is just an artifact of poor comprehension of the species, which follows Quick's literary style to a T.

The fact remains that Dram is a self-aware Mycon (perish the thought!) who serves his master with all the verve of a Spathi -- which is sort of odd. Many times does the author exposit that Ur-Quan Kzer-Za captains often ate crewmen who disturbed them. This may well be (but seems unlikely for the administrative Ur-Quan Kzer-Za; more later), but it is the foolish and dead Ur-Quan who attempts to ingest a Mycon, Deep Child or Elder, for they run at an ambient temperature of about 2000 degrees celcius (the boiling point of lead, as you'll recall). This tends to place Mycon tissue well beyond the palatability of Habanero peppers, and as such, Dram's fears of ingestion were as ill conceived as his concept of self.

Syreen: Like the Druuge, the Syreen are only brought in for flavor, this time in the form of a T-shirt. Jemmy struts around in a T-shirt depicting an unnatural act between a member of the Space Fleet and a terran chimpanzee, which annoyed his employer. Fascinating.

Ur-Quan Kzer-Za: Only one Ur-Quan makes an appearance in the book, at least formally, but a lot about the Ur-Quan was introduced here, and some of it is even interesting. The Ur-Quan Kzer-Za are led by The Hive, a collective will of souls not at all unlike the Autobot Matrix of Leadership, for you Transformers fans. This will acts through a Tsing a Kra, which passes on relevant information to them and carries out their decisions. All former Tsings are a part of The Hive, and the initiator of The Hive is none other than Kzer-Za himself, the Ur-Quan who first discovered that great pain would jar the mental control of the Dnyarri. Nice touch. One wonders if the brown Ur-Quan the Slylandro spoke about also had a Hive, and if so, are they cut off from it even now?

Beyond what is already mentioned above in the synopsis, the Tsing is no great embellishment upon his kind. The problem is that the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za are portrayed as plotting, brooding jerks, unable to take authority and confront problems by themselves, an attitude that does not jibe with voyaging for nearly 20,000 years, enslaving all that they came across. They hate their brethren, the Kohr-ah, again flying in the face of the lament expressed by Zor-ath, who flat out wondered if there was any hope to reuniting their species. The Tsing is also clouded by rage more often than not; the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za were enhanced by the Dnyarri to be the administrators of their gulag; it would not do for a slaver to turn and kill half of their charges for a simple mistake. Even though the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za are not afraid of using force, they fully realize that the threat of such is far more useful (take, for prime example, the "motivation" that got the Spathi to attend to their duties as Battle Thralls). Thusly, it seems unlikely that the leader, who draws upon the wisdom of generations, is given to fits of peevishness.

I didn't hate the representation of the Ur-Quan Kzer-Za; not as much as I did of the Mycon or Ilwrath, mostly because I like The Hive idea. Pity Quick extended this to every race.

Utwig: I'm glad the Utwig were only minor players in this book; they deserved so much better. Apparently taking the closing credit joke about the Utwig dropping their Ultron in the Sa-Matra destruction party seriously, Quick has plunged the Utwig into their usual moping, but this time referring to the Ultron as "The Broken Instrument." The Utwig are drawn to Unzervalt much as the humans and Ur-Quan, but their mission is one of enlightenment -- they seek something to reconnect them to the Utwig "Hive," and the loss of their Ultron has severed their link.

Not a terrible idea, I suppose, but the Ultron were referred to as children by the Ortog, something that it did not say in #3 (and one of the most advanced races in our quadrant does not deserve such treatment). Additionally, mask etiquette was lampooned by Quick; instead of attempting to cash in on their quirky cultural tradition, the exchange of appropriate concealments was relegated to "a heated exchange of masks" while they spoke. Gone was the Monocle of Lewd Ogling or the Hood of Grim and Stalwart Dedication; Quick was obviously too busy to bother with such trifling details, thus robbing the Utwig of any dignity in this book.

Purchasing This Horrid Tripe

Despite my willingness to send my copy to you, I cannot please all comers. If you should, for some sick reason, desire to ignore my warnings and pay actual credits for this book, you should check out Amazon.com and brace yourself for the inevitable disgust. Or, you could make me happy and send me the money instead, thus bringing more happiness into the universe -- or at least mine.

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