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I tried really hard to give this book the benefit of the doubt.

Oh, there were warning signs early on. Little things that were wrong, that showed an author who hadn’t done their research. Since when does Valerian Mengsk of all fekking people use casual slang?

Still, I didn’t want to judge too harshly out of the gate. This was Timothy Zahn’s first book in the StarCraft universe, and besides, a few hiccups here and there aren’t the end of the world. Knaak’s writing can be a little rough, too, but I usually end up enjoying his stuff all the same.

I did a double-take when I realized that most of the new characters had received little to no physical description, forcing me to conjure my own images of them out of whole cloth. (I decided Tanya has red hair because she’s a ghost and, y’know, Kerrigan and all.) That should have been a pretty big red flag right there.

But StarCraft has had a really good run over the past year or two. Everything that’s been released in-game has been excellent, pretty much without exception, and it’s felt like the franchise has entered a golden age, like it can do no wrong.

So I pressed on. And I kept pressing on, until the end of the book, at which point I had no choice but to admit the truth: Evolution is a sloppy, dull book written by someone who appears to have little to no understanding of the StarCraft universe or its characters.

Evolution presents a rather bizarre scenario. It involves an attempt at a peace conference between the Swarm, the Dominion, and the Daelaam Protoss. What’s even more shocking is that the conference was orchestrated by the Zerg, by Zagara herself.

Zagara claims she wants to usher in a new era of peace in the Koprulu Sector, and to prove her intentions she’s used the Zerg mastery of bio-engineering to bring life to a formerly dead world. She promises do the same on Terran and Protoss worlds, to heal the scars wrought by the End War.

To test the truth of her claims, Emperor Valerian sends a survey team to the surface, including a surprisingly chill reaper, an underachieving pyrokinetic ghost, a scientist, a mysterious Protoss exile, and Generic Meathead Marine Dude #24601. It soon becomes clear to the survey team that sinister forces are at work on the newly green world, and tensions run high on all sides as a new war seems increasingly likely.

It’s a pretty weird premise, and a bit hard to swallow at first, but ultimately it’s the execution far more so than the concept that drags Evolution down.

And to be fair, it’s not entirely bad. Some of the new creatures and concepts introduced are pretty cool from a strictly sci-fi perspective, and if these plot threads are ever revisited (hopefully by a different author), they could go interesting places.

Some of the new characters aren’t bad, either. They’re no R.M. Dahl or Mike Liberty, but they’re not without their charm. Tanya, the ghost, is kind of cool, and I love the nickname the other ghosts gave her: Pyrokeet.

The pre-existing characters, though, are a mess. I’ve already said that Valerian’s speech pattern was all wrong, and Horner displayed basically zero personality through the whole thing.

Abathur, though, is the real travesty here. The author does not understand Abathur at all. He acts so wildly, absurdly out of character in this book that it’s just intolerable. I clearly remember dialogue in Heart of the Swarm that directly and completely contradicts all of Abathur’s behaviour in this book.

Artanis feels right, but really, how hard is it to write for Artanis? The man isn’t exactly complicated.

And there’s no shortage of things that are far-fetched, or just straight up don’t make sense. Like how an interstellar transport takes about eight hours just to cross one planet for some fekking reason.

The only real silver lining here is that Evolution doesn’t seem that relevant to the ongoing story. Normally this would be a bad thing, but this book is such a mess I’m glad it’s not super likely to have a lasting impact of the course of the StarCraft universe.

I wouldn’t mind seeing more stories about the adostra, but please, Blizzard, get Christie Golden to write them.

In the end, Evolution is a wreck, but it’s a pretty self-contained wreck. It’s not enough to spoil StarCraft’s current golden age.

Some of the StarCraft novels have been truly excellent, and are among the best sci-fi books I’ve ever read. This isn’t one of them.

At least it was better than Speed of Darkness.

Overall rating: 4.1/10

The interesting thing about this book is that it is not based on the games, as Christie Golden’s many other Warcraft novels have been, but instead the movie.

The Warcraft film has its own unique continuity, and so while Durotan covers roughly the same period of time as Golden’s Rise of the Horde, it’s a very different story. Think of it as an alternate universe, only without the headache-inducing confusion and absurdity of Warlords of Draenor.

Like the movie, it changes a lot about the established lore while still staying mostly true to the spirit of the world and its characters.

As the title would imply, the focus is given to Durotan and the Frostwolf clan. While Rise of the Horde provided a broad view of the fall of Draenor, the scale of Durotan is much more narrow and personal as the Frostwolves struggle to survive in a world that is slowly dying.

Durotan also introduces a new threat in the form of the Red Walkers, a rogue clan of vile flesh-eaters driven past the brink of madness by the ruin of their world. They serve as the primary antagonists, and they do a damn good job of it.

It’s a much simplified version of the lore, with none of the at-times overwhelming complexity that has come to define that period of history in the main universe, but while I wouldn’t necessarily want to see the game universe streamlined to this extant, it is interesting as a “what if” take. Durotan is certainly much more friendly to someone with little to no Warcraft lore knowledge than most of the recent Warcraft novels.

Ultimately, whether or not you will enjoy this book comes down to one question: Do you like Orcs?

If you answered “yes,” you will enjoy this book. If you answered “no,” probably not.

I’m not just saying that because basically every character in the book is an Orc. Everything about Durotan just oozes Orcish culture. This is the absolute Orciest, chest-thumpingest, skull-splittingest, zug-zugiest, lok’tariest book ever.

I like Orcs, so this is all good news to me. I especially like the Frostwolves and their culture — essentially the loyalty and fellowship of a wolf pack blown up to a full humanoid society — so it was a great joy to immerse myself in that mentality for three hundred pages or so.

I do have a few complaints, but all of them minor.

I know this is a very out of character thing for me to say, but I would have liked to have seen more of the Draenei. I was very curious how this newer, streamlined version of the lore explains them, but I was destined for disappointment on that front, as barely any attention was given to them in the book.

Similarly, I would have liked to see more of Garona, who turned out to be (surprisingly) a major highlight of the movie.

I’m not entirely keen on how Orgrim Doomhammer is portrayed in the book, either. He mostly comes across as a bit of a simpleton, which is a disservice to a character as complex as he has traditionally been.

The ending is slightly underwhelming, too, but I suppose that’s somewhat inevitable for a book that mainly serves to set up the movie. The climax of the story happens on the big screen, not between the covers.

Still, on the whole, it was a good read. Recommended to both fans of the games and people who’ve only seen the movie.

Overall rating: 8/10

Superior Realities

Tag Archives: books

Review: StarCraft, Evolution

Review: Warcraft, Durotan

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