Thoughts on games, work, and… well, mostly games

I finished Hidden Empire recently.  I had preordered it for my Kindle, and it magically appeared on the device on 12/22/2009.  I regarded it as a Christmas present to myself.

I read it fairly quickly.  I had a strong appetite for a story that bled more of the conspiracy-laden intrigue of the first novel, Empire, and the game that played alongside it: Shadow Complex.  (I don’t italicize game titles because I never had a high school English teacher drill that habit into me.)

This installment didn’t sate me; I feel like I skipped a meal with Hidden Empire.  Not only that, but to pursue this metaphor to its final stupidity, if Empire was a pizza, Hidden Empire was that part of a plate of spaghetti that your kid didn’t finish.  The two bear a passing resemblance to each other and share some of the same ingredients, but they don’t provide the same kind or quantity of energy.

I may be on to something here—a pattern in the way Orson Scott Card writes novels.  After reading Hidden Empire I was left a feeling familiar to me after I finished Speaker for the Dead, namely that I wondered what the sequel had to do with its predecessor.  (I’m apparently not the only one who feels this way about the Ender series.)

I don’t have a lot to say about Hidden Empire’s plot or characters, really.  It’s very much like what I imagine 24 is like, and that stands to reason considering Card’s comments at the end of Empire.  And that appeals to a lot of people, I suppose.  But it left me bored.  I kept waiting for a big reveal that never happened, and the most compelling character—Averell Torrent—didn’t undergo the punctuated evolution that I expected to be the climax of the story.

In Empire (and Shadow Complex) the big reveal was unmissable.  It was something incredible and amazing, but rendered as plausible as possible by the story and details that surrounded it.  Hidden Empire lacked that quality altogether.  Instead, it felt more like a sociology study centered around mother’s crisis of faith and her  precocious child.

Beginning later in the book and continuing into its finale, I felt like Hidden Empire sort of dissolved into conservative fan-fiction.  Honestly, when Rusty Humphries made his cameo appearance, I couldn’t get “AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!” out of my head.  And the irrational faith the hero (?) showed in the President—especially under the circumstances—was hard to swallow.  One day I think I’ll re-read Ender’s Game and re-examine whether zero gravity actually has a strong rightward pull.

Now, it’s my understanding that Donald Mustard of ChAIR Entertainment Group approached Card about writing a novel in the Empire universe.  Card subsequently licensed the rights to the Empire property from ChAIR in 2006 and wrote a book.  So far so good, Empire and Shadow Complex were supposed to tie together.  But the two stories diverged drastically.  They shared a giant underground base and a fake log cabin in common, but that’s it.  I can’t understand why the continuity problems between the stories don’t seem to be discussed anywhere: what, the base was infiltrated once by Jason & the NSA (?), subdued, hidden under a lake again, had its assembly line brought back online, rediscovered by Cole & Co., and then resubdued by the federal government?  And that giant airborne nuclear submarine—remember that?  Hit with three nuclear warheads over the pacific northwest and then crashed into a mountain?  I was astonishedthat the two stories didn’t acknowledge each other.  This is supposed to be a franchise, right?

I’ve lost interest in the Empire books at this point, and this is why: the people behind the canon can’t keep their stories straight.  And in a fight, the video game wins.