Eve: The Empyrean Age

World of Warcraft fan fiction; Matrix comic books; Warhammer novels; Transformers movies. It's fairly standard for a toy to become a film, or a game gets a book, or a book spawns a film trilogy which then spawns a game and a computer game. Anything can happen in this day and age.

For fan fiction though, the big hitters (Halo, Warhammer, Dungeons&Dragons, Star Wars) all seemed to offer the same thing: fairly standard, low-quality, mass produced paperback books, with spin-off characters and repetitive plots. The world itself was more engaging than the characters or plotlines. World of Warcraft books seem to be doing ok and that must be in part due to those obsessive fans (and we know warcraft collects them) who immerse themselves in the world so that even when no longer gaming they still want to read WoW.

Eve is a book of a game. This time, the game is Eve Online and the book took as its mission to write something of comparable depth and complexity as the game. The game, set in New Eden, an alternatively galaxy separated from Earth, allows the complete growth of a character within a space-age society that is both ruthless and demanding. The author, Tony Gonzales, has taken this futuristic universe, complete with pirates, warring factions, governments and mega-corporations, and woven a thread of three different stories into it. In some sense it is following the standard package for fan-fiction, by using the universe of the game as a starting point, and then adding characters, but it differentiates itself in terms of both character and plot.

As the book progressed, I was concerned that this triple-weave plot might wind up with a cliched ending, some kind of easy resolution, as Amarrian lord meets Minmatar fleet meets Caldarian revolution in some kind of 'closure' device. Instead, it became apparent that tragedy was the order of the day, and in fact the plots of Eve were leading to a fateful future (perhaps even the future in which the game is set, one in which Amarr and Minmater, Caldari and Gallente, battle endlessly). To try to pitch his book as some sort of pre-history to Eve Online rather than as a selected episode from the game gave a purpose to his tale and a freedom to narrate events in a manner of his own choosing. In fact, it almost appears as if Eve Online was merely used as a starting point for Gonzales, rich as the game is in history and immersive detail, and in fact once in that universe he made it his own, building upon already gleaned information to provide a level of authenticity and attraction to his tale.

Eve is not remarkable in using a computer game as its main influence; however, it goes further and achieves more from that standpoint than others I have encountered. Furthermore, it seems to glean the best elements from the sub-genre, while discarding the worst. Plot and characters are involving and well-drawn, and the prose is not bogged down with a undue amount of game references. In fact, the game heritage to the book is most noted in the meticulous attention Gonzales shows to naming each class of spaceship, displaying an impressive attention to in-game detail.

*****
by Tony Gonzales