Category Archives: Books

Wing Commander – Fleet Action

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This is the third in the series of Wing Commander novels and was published in 1994 by Baen. It was written entirely by William Forstchen this time and picks up the story shortly after the end of the previous book. Once again we get to follow the adventures of ‘Bear’, but this novel also features at one time or another near enough all the major characters from Freedom Flight. It flits between characters with Hunter taking a leading role for large sections (before being killed off 2/3 of the way through the book), and Admiral Tolwyn + his pilot nephew Kevin also taking major roles.

Briefly the plot is as follows. Following on from the successful raid in End Run, Confed has used to same tactics to devastating effect on the Kilrathi. Their supply ships are seriously depleted and Confed are on the verge of winning the war thanks to the Kilrathi being unable to build new carriers. The Kilrathi come up with a tactic of offering peace with Earth, while secretly using the extra time to build a devastating new fleet in a distant system. Earth’s politicians buy into this ruse and start dismantling Confeds fleet, in anticipation of peace. The military aren’t buying it though and Tolwyn deliberately gets himself stripped of his rank so that he can organise a covert mission to find out what the Kilrathi are up to. Paladin and Hunter go into Kilrathi space and get pictures of the new fleet while Bear’s light carrier is carrying out surveillance. At the cost of Hunter’s life they get the proof they want and Earth is left is a desperate race to try to get its fleet online again. The book ends in a climactic battle on Earth, with Earth barely repelling the fleet thanks to the Marines boarding the Kilrathi super-carriers and blowing them up from the inside. This comes at the cost of most of the fleet, including using civilian ships as cannon fodder.

Large parts of the novel deal with the conflict between politicians and the military and I can’t say this part of the story appeals to me much. It seems to portray a very biased viewpoint of stupid and/or traitorous politicians against a military who knows what needs to be done but is constantly held back.  It’s the equivalent of an 80’s maverick cop movie where the straight laced boss doesn’t allow him to do his job. This middle section of the book plods on fairly predicatably with characters that aren’t detailed enough for me to care about. The characterisation was very simplistic throughout to the extent of being childish and I did get the feeling that this book was aimed at a much younger audience than myself. Things pick up again for the final battle although I expected a more original solution that attempting to board the carriers which would surely be an obvious thing to do. I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t occur to the Kilrathi when they see a load of marine ships coming straight at them.

I was hoping before I started the novel, that it would tie in with the start of Wing Commander 3, with the Concordia being destroyed at the end. The Concordia was badly damaged and could possibly have crashed later but it wasn’t explicitly mentioned so I’ll be curious to see if the next novel starts immediately from this point. Even without this, for a book that felt quite lightweight in the most part, it’s a less than cheerful conclusion despite the victory,  with many human occupied planets being made radioactive and their populations wiped out by the Kilrathi.

This wasn’t a bad book but I didn’t enjoy it as much as the previous ones. I’d probably have enjoyed it more if I’d just sat down and read the whole thing in one go. There wasn’t enough to hold my interest over a few days, when I was reading a little at a time.  For all that, if they had used it as the basis for the Wing Commander movie, the end result would have been 10 times better than what we actually got. In fact, I think this would have made a better movie than it did a novel, as the plot more or less requires you to switch your brain off for the duration. Don’t let me put you off too much though. It was never boring and looking at the reviews on Amazon it seems that most people enjoyed it more than I did.

Quest For Clues 2

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I’ve only had time to read half of the next Wing Commander book so in the meanwhile I’ll briefly mention the next Quest For Clues book.  This was published in 1989 by Origin and is once again a collection of game walkthroughs contributed by Questbusters members. This time there is no introduction with a history of adventure games or the like so it’s more or less all game solutions and nothing else. You did get a free 3 month Questbusters subscription with the book but it wasn’t much use by the time I bought it.

All the solutions in the book are shown above on the back cover. Without any padding there are a stack of solutions in here for games you would struggle to find hints for elsewhere like Tangled Tales. This makes it still potentially useful but without any additional content, it’s less interesting for me as a collector than the first book. Of minor interest, I noticed that one of the solutions was contributed by Randy Sluganski, who has to be the same guy who writes articles at the Just Adventure (http://www.justadventure.com) website.

There isn’t a whole lot else to say about this one. I won’t bother scanning in anything from this book but if anyone wants one of the solutions to any of these games, post a comment and I’ll add it to the post.

On the subject of Questbusters, Terek Nor mentioned a great website over at http://questbusters3.yolasite.com which has scans of many of the Questbusters newsletters with game reviews and walkthroughs. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone interested in early RPG’s and adventure games.

Wing Commander – End Run

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Another Christmas gone and it’s back to work today. I took the next Wing Commander book with me over the break and managed to read through it over the last couple of days when I could get a little peace.

The next in the series is End Run. This was published in 1994 which puts it nearer the release of WC3 than WC2. This has a new pair of authors and branches away from the games, being based on events that occur after the end of Wing Commander 2. It’s split into two sections. The first of these is called Milk Run and is written by Stasheff. This has quite a different writing style to the second half and is a short story that tells of a mission to photograph activity on a Kilrathi occupied planet, ending with the heroic sacrifice of the woman sent to take the pictures. The mission is supposedly an easy one but the crew eventually find out they are the third ship sent to attempt it and a lot of the story concentrates on disputes between the ships captain and the mission’s leader/photographer. It’s not a bad short story in it’s own right, and possibly the better of the two. It’s less about the action and more character driven. It depends what you are looking for though and I expect others may find it slightly dull.

The second and much larger part of the book is written by Forstchen. This takes up the story of Jason “Bear” Bonderevsky, whom you may remember from one of the Wing Commander 2 expansions. In this his ship had rebelled against orders and you had to help bring them back to the confederation. At the start of the book, Bear has been promoted to Wing Commander, and assigned to a new type of carrier. These carriers are converted transports, that have basically been designed to be expendable. He isn’t initially too happy with the assignment and has doubts about the ships captain who has never done anything except command transport ships in the past. He does manage to knock the ships rookie pilots into ship, with the help of Doomsday. With the aid of the marines, they then take out an ancient palace discovered by the mission in the first part of the book.

We then discover that this is all a ploy to rile the Kilrathi. The palace was the ancestral home of the Emperors mother and they will now be honour bound to respond in force. Confed has been losing the war and even knowing this response is coming, they won’t be able to win the battle without reducing the opposing forces first. This is where Bear and his ship come in as they are sent on a suicidal mission to attack Kilrah itself and draw off some of the fleet. Bear ends up commanding the ship after the death of the Captain and is of course victorious managing to destroy ship manufacturing facilities on one of Kilrah’s moons and escape again although there are huge losses, including his girlfriend who is one of the assaulting marines.

All in all, this is an improvement over the first book. The original storyline helped a lot here, as I was never certain where it was going but there was also enough of a link to WC2 to spark my interest in the first place. The characters had a little more depth and the book had the feeling of an old fashioned epic war movie. It certainly rattles along at a good pace, taking maybe 4 hours to read the whole thing. It didn’t have the element of nostalgia that went with the first novel, with only a few peripheral characters carried over from WC2. Tolwyn’s character in this was interesting though, given what I know is to come. He is very much portrayed as a hero who goes in against orders to pull Bear and his ship out of trouble at the end of the book.

The whole thing is a mass of cliche’s but there is enough originality to stop it from ever becoming dull and it’s a good way to while away a few hours. These two books have been far better than I expected. I have a feeling that the standards will drop when I get to the books based around the movie but I’ve got another 3 novels to go before then. I’m back in work for a couple of days, then away again over new year so there probably won’t be any posts for a while. I’ll take a few books with me though, and expect I’ll get to read at least one of them before I’m back.

Wing Commander – Freedom Flight

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This is the first novel I’ve read for this blog and the first in a fairly long series of Wing Commander novels. It was published in 1992, which puts it around the time of Wing Commander 2. The story is set, however, during the Secret Missions 2 campaign and is a retelling of that expansion pack.

The story is told mainly from the point of view of Hunter who takes the role of the maverick hero, but is also told from the perspective of Hobbes and K’Kai (a Firekkan pilot). The book starts out with Hobbes defection from the Kilrathi. A small group of Kilrathi have realised that the war is pointless with neither side able to gain superiority and therefore bringing no honour to those involved. This rebellion aims to overthrow the emperor and needs the aid of the humans to do it so Hobbes is ordered to surrender the ship he commands.

Meanwhile, Hunter is taking leave on Firekka and getting very drunk with K’Kai a Firekkan pilot who is something of a rebel to have volunteered for pilot training in the first place. He is recalled back to the Tigers Claw, extremely hung over after his first night to fly patrols after some Kilrathi have unexpectedly shown up in the area. He ends up rescuing Hobbes’s Fralthi as it comes under attack from other Kilrathi ships and in return Hobbes transfers the loyalties of his second in command (Hirha) to Hunter himself, resulting in Hunter now having his own slave Kilrathi which he is less than thrilled about.

From here on the plot follows the game fairly closely with the Kilrathi arriving in force for their ceremony, which Hobbes gives the details of. The humans disrupt the ceremony by attacking it with marines which leads to the shaming of all Kilrathi involved and they all retreat since they no longer have the favour of their war-god. This is more or less where the game ended. However, in the book the Firekkan leaders are kidnapped by Thrakhath. Confed are doing nothing to save them and Hunter, Kirha and K’Kai end up hatching a plan to go in and rescue them from Kilrathi space single-handedly. They plan to hijack the Bonnie Heather for this but Paladdin and his comms officer Gwen agree to go along. Suffice to say that the plan succeeds and they rescue the leaders with the unfortunate death of Gwen. At the end of the novel, Hunter releases Kirha from his bond and makes him a free Kilrathi.

The plot is simple enough then and follows the game very closely. It’s written in a fast paced, easy to read style with a lot of background on the characters and cultures that there wasn’t room for in the game. It’s certainly a change of style from the confederation handbook, which was heavy on the science and this is far more along the lines of your typical space opera and was an entertaining if unchallenging read.

It’s not at all what I expected actually. I didn’t think it would be so faithful to the games but it didn’t come across as rehashing old material either. I’ve only read a few novels based on games, namely the Tex Murphy and Gabriel Knight novels. Both of these were decent enough books but they simply retold the story from the game and didn’t add anything. This on the other hand fleshed out the storyline of Secret Missions 2 and for the most part happened away from the games plotline whilst being based around the same events. The game was extremely limited in the story it could tell with nearly everything happening in either the bar or the briefing room. With these constraints off, the story gets some room to move and is far better for it.

I will say that the book did get a little cheesy at times with, for instance, all the usual rubbish about alien races not understanding each other that you could read in a million other sci-fi books. Also, I wouldn’t say the characters were one-dimensional but they are only really caricatures. Wing Commander wasn’t known for its intellectual storylines though and it all fits in with the game perfectly. I very much enjoyed reading this, far more than I thought I would. You can get through the whole book in a few hours and if you are a Wing Commander fan, it should be compulsory reading.

Wing Commander Confederation Handbook

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I’ve still not started on F-15 but I have been reading one of my recently purchased books, the Wing Commander Confederation handbook.


You’ll notice from my scans that this is a second-hand copy, originally from Carson City Library over in the States. It still has the sheet with the date stamps in the front and it was borrowed all of 3 times from 1999 when the book was published. Not what you would call popular then.


The term handbook is misleading since this is several times larger than your average paperback. The book is a guide to the history Wing Commander universe, clearly brought out to tie in with the movie rather than being aimed at fans of the games, despite what it says on the back cover. Large format colour books like this immediately make me think that it will be full of photos and not much content but there is a reasonable amount in there, even if it’s not what you would call heavy reading.

The book is 128 pages long, with the first half being in full colour and the second half giving way to black and white which is a little cheap in a book that would have cost $20. The content is best described as scene setting for the movie with information on characters, ships, history of the war and details of the technology used in the movie. It is presented as though you are using an information terminal, complete with buttons at the tops of the pages and headers with metadata. It’s all a bit unnecessary but may have appealed to a younger audience at the time.

If they are aiming for a young audience then some of the technical information is possibly over the top, with for instance details of how the jump drives work that contain lengthy details about graviton particles being used to create gravity wells, and objects on the event horizon of the well instantly hopping over the “gap” it creates thanks to the medium of subspace momentarily filling in the hole and bridging it. The science doesn’t quite stack up if you ask me but it’s a decent attempt at explaining jumping. I always enjoy sci-fi when it actually contains some science and it doesn’t happen all that often.

There are photos and stats of all the ships in the movie, with schematics of the Concordia. These aren’t especially interesting and I’ll never like the movie ship designs which look even worse in still photos. There is more pseudo-science about how the ships engines work. Apparently, they use a fusion reactor which powers itself with matter gathered from space using gravitic scoops which extend over a large area around the ship. These scoops cause a friction like effect as the ships speed up, which is why they handle the way they do and have top speeds. I may have missed it elsewhere but that’s the first explanation I’ve ever seen for this. It goes on to say that going faster increases the rate and which fuel is spent but this is balanced out as collection is increased since the scoop is travelling through a larger area of space. Afterburners, however, burn up this fuel and it has to be replenished by the capship. The obvious problem with all this is that if you are flying in a wing of fighters, the collection spheres would overlap and you would all run out of fuel.

Other parts of the book deal with the history of Earth venturing into space, including the war with the Pilgrims. This isn’t part of Wing Commander as far as I’m concerned but it comes across better here than it did in the movie. There are then technical details on marine equipment (basically an excuse to use some prop photos), background on all the characters in the movie, a thesis on the abilities of the Pilgrims and the book finishes with some correspondence between Taggart and Tolwyn as he is sent off on his secret assignment. The content is generally quite random and jumps around from one page to another. By the end, it covers more or less everything you could think of without actually saying anything about the plot of the film. Basically, if the film had been packaged like an old PC game, this could have been the manual.

There are no real revelations about Wing Commander in here but I still quite enjoyed reading this one. I would have enjoyed it more if it was based on the game rather than the movie universe but it was a whole load more interesting than the movie itself. Right now I can’t recall any aspect of the movie I actually liked so that’s not a glowing endorsement but clearly a reasonable amount of effort went into creating the universe for the movie to be set in. It’s possible that I might even like the movie slightly more if I were to watch it again having read this. I’m not sure I’m prepared to take that risk though.