Writing within pre-created universes

Today, I am urging you to do something that might seem a little odd. Scary, perhaps. Or worse yet, a waste of time. But believe me when I say that this is absolutely in your best interest.

Indulge your inner nerd and read a book based off an RPG. Or a video game. Or a war game.

I am absolutely, one hundred percent serious about this. I am currently absorbed in book two of The Eisenhorn Trilogy, a set of books by Dan Abnett based in the WarHammer 40K universe. Gregor Eisenhorn is one of the most frustrating literary characters I have ever encountered, because fundamentally he is a character I want to loathe: as an Inquisitor working for the vast, lumbering Empire he is licensed to do whatever he has to in order to root out heretics, aliens, rogue psychics, and anything else conceived to be a threat to humanity. This includes torture, murder, genocide, and liberal doses of intrigue and info-gathering. Despite all of this, because Eisenhorn is good at his job and immersed up to his elbows in things I find involuntarily repulsive, I DO like him. He's intensely loyal, good to his friends, perceptive and honorable in the Inquisitor way. And as my astute boyfriend has pointed out numerous times, when the alternative to martial law is Chaos and hellfire, the Spanish Inquisition doesn't look too bad.

The Eisenhorn Trilogy so far is entertaining, fascinating from a science fiction and anthropological point of view, and a pretty quick read. You could definitely do worse. Like read Grendel, God forbid. And since I'm pretty much a quintessential nerd, here are a couple other game-based books that I think are fun, interesting, and very entertaining:

Clan War, books 1-7 (Book One: The Scorpion)
By various authors
Based on the RPG Legend of the Five Rings
Why I liked it, and why you probably will too: The L5R RPG is one of the most engaging settings I've ever played, if only for the sheer variety of possibilities that are laid out with almost no difficult thinking on the player's part. The setting is frenetically Asiatic, and the world is clan based with each clan embodying specific characteristics (the Scorpion are sneaky bastards that might poison you, the Lion are unbearably noble and hard-headed, so on and so forth). The Clan War books move through one traumatic event in the L5R setting that shows the best and worst of each clan, while also giving the reader a sample of the history and characters embedded in the setting. They're fun, the characters are fascinating, and the way in which the events of the books interweaves with the fluff in the player's books is artfully done.

Dragons of A Fallen Sun One in a string of books based on Dungeons and Dragons
By Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman
Why I liked it, and why you will too: I will be painfully honest here and admit that I have never read the first handful of Dragonlance novels. I tried to get through Dragons of Autumn Twilight about four times before giving up out of boredom. But Fallen Sun is starkly exciting: the main character is a very Joan of Arc-like figure, young and waifish and absolutely fearless. There is a heavy twang of religious fervor hanging around on the pages, that gives even the happy moments a gray wash of fear. I haven't read the books that come after (there are two in the same continuity) but I think I'd like to - Mina, the girl pictured on the cover, performs miracles and gathers soldiers to her side as easily as breathing, and I'm interested to see how her story turns out.

The Angel Maker

I was quite excited when I picked up The Angel Maker, by Stefan Brijs, from a discount bookstore. The back promised me an eerie, probably viscerally disgusting medical horror, combining science, religion, and playing God in a way that seemed vastly more interesting than Frankenstein ever was. A Belgian novel by origin, The Angel Maker begins promisingly with the introduction of Doctor Victor Hoppe and his three identical, disfigured sons to a small village in Belgium called Wolfheim, and unwinds slowly into a nest of medical ethics versus progress, theological reasoning, and the power of people to rationalize the things that they don't understand.

The Angel Maker suffers from several things, first and foremost from a title that is far too heavy-handed. Much of what seems intended to be later revelations on behalf of the reader are too easily derived from the title and the names of the children, making the moments of what should be understanding towards Dr. Hoppe fall disappointingly flat. The brief on the back of my copy was also insufferably misleading, as this novel is not really about the Frankenstien-ian themes of creating life; it seems intended to show where science and religion cannot cross, taking the ethics of the situation for granted.

The novel also struggles with story-telling, as though Brijs did not have a clear understanding of how he wanted to put the story together. It is divided into three sections, and the first leads off very strongly. The second third is meant to comprise the backdrop to Dr. Hoppe's experiments in Wolfheim, and bounces between his awful childhood, his time in medical school, his previous research, and the events leading up immediately to his transfer to Wolfheim. This mosaic gets increasingly difficult to follow the longer it goes on, so that there are points when I had trouble distinguishing when I actually was in the timeline.

The third section of the novel is obviously meant to be the dramatic spiral downward for the doctor, but it comes too soon - there is not enough buildup to justify Dr. Hoppe's descent into madness. It has been clear through the whole book that he is obsessive and unbalanced, but there is no final tipping point; Brijs does not quite earn the final climactic scene, and so it becomes much less effective than it should be in favor of shock horror.

At its best, The Angel Maker is a fascinating look at genetics and scientific ethics, interspersed with occasional humanizing and touching element (the scenes of the children and their nanny-cum-teacher are poignant in a deeply satisfying way). At its worst, it takes the easy route, going for the cheap shocks and gasps and foregoing the furthering of the real issues. It is, however, intriguing, and a good read for those (like me) who can't seem to stay away from medical horror shows.