Friday, July 20, 2018

Books 24 and 25 - Classic Wraith Ships

Haha. Not Stargate Atlantis, although the Wraiths in that were a fairly decent (if over melodramatic) enemy.

Nah. Two more books completed, Wraith Squadron by Aaron Allston and something I picked up called Classic Ships. I enjoyed both of them and the Classic Ships book was a nice little in between one before I dive into the next Wraith Squadron book.

What is Wraith Squadron ?
It's a book that I feel is very definitely inspired by the X Wing games and the successors that were so excellent for their time on the PC.

They're from the first age of space games on the PC and the X Wing series had massive competition from games like Wing Commander (never played) and later Freespace (own but too busy with Tie Fighter). The screenshot above is from X Wing Alliance, which was a fairly late entry in the series, almost the last game actually.

The systems from the games are interwoven into the series of XWing books. It doesn't restrict the books at all, it somewhat adds to them as the game mechanics give them a skeleton to build up good space combat action sequences. But the stories aren't all about that.

Whereas the Rogue Squadron books were about a squadron of elite pilots, Wraith Squadron is about a far more interesting set of misfit characters who are on their last chances before losing their chance to fly space fighters. And it's not just about the space combat, the characters are brought together for their covert intrusion skills.

It all makes for a quite packed book where you really don't know where it's going to be going next. And that's just the plot. It's jammed full of character interaction too. The characters grow throughout the book. They change in more obvious ways than is usual for a book, at least the books I've been reading lately. Oh and the author has huge amounts of fun with his characters as well, with a few running jokes going through the story and relentless humour brought out when you're least expecting it.

If you understand Star Wars, you will definitely enjoy this book. If you're coming into it without reading too much of the old Star Wars Expanded Universe (the one that's been written out now!) then I think you'd enjoy it as well.

One thing about Wraith Squadron is those characters ... Outside of a couple of the regulars, they are all unknown. Which means no plot armour .... (Plot armour is when you have a major character like Luke, Leia, Han who has to stay around for future books, they won't be dying). And no plot armour and the style of this particular series means that death can happen at any time to the characters involved.

I like that. It adds in a certain uncertainty that adds a lot of interest to the book for me. In fact, one particular superbly dramatic scene had remained in my memory from my last reading which must be many, many years ago.

Next up is the second Wraith Squadron book, Iron Fist.

I quite enjoyed racing through Book 25 yesterday evening as well. It was Classic Ships, which I picked up thinking it would have lots of lovely pictures in (it does). A short book of just 123 pages, it goes from Tall Ships, to working ships, to ocean liners and gives you a few words about each.

It's curious to see how the ship designs changed over the years. I was especially curious about the low, thin and very long designs of the tall ships and the earlier steam driven ships. It feels like we started with clean lines, went all bumpy around the two World Wars and now we're back to cleaner lines again.

An enjoyable read.

In other news ...

Tap is still winning. I get the feeling it needs the old adaptor and its pipe chopped off and a new fitting applied. That's a job for a professional plumber.
Me ? I am super tired but I've booked a week off work in 3 weeks. If it gets cooler then that'll help. The heat wipes me out. This weekend will be chilling out with a few domestics to do.
And more healing too. Almost there.

And reading ! Around streams and Warcraft that is. Never go adventuring without a great looking hat.
That's Tashmetu, Shaman in Training.

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