So when Richard Hatch (who portrayed Apollo in the original series run) announced he was coming out with a series of books and attempting to revive the franchise, I was excited and happy.
I desperately wanted to like this book.
Armageddon starts out promising. It is eighteen years after the series has ended. (Galactica 1980 is ignored - THANK GOD!) Commander Adama is on his deathbed. All of the characters who are so familiar to us from the series are there - Starbuck, Apollo, Athena, Cassiopeia, Boomer, Tigh and Sheba.
The only problem is, they're not acting the way we would expect the characters from the series to act.
I don't want to speculate on motivations here. I met Richard Hatch (who co-authored the book with Christopher Golden) at a convention and he seemed truly enthused about the project and genuinely interested in reviving the franchise.
The major shortcoming, is that I don't think either of them sat down and rewatched the episodes before writing this book, and instead relied on memories of the storyline from almost twenty years before.
In the very beginning of the book, Starbuck is presumed dead after a recon patrol goes bad. So there's no Starbuck for most of the book. Starbuck was the most popular character on the show.
However, we get to hear him talked about often enough, usually in the conversations of Athena (Apollo's sister and a former girlfriend of Starbuck) and Cassiopeia (Starbuck's girlfriend on the series, and mother to his daughter Dalton here). I found their conversations to be flat and without any real insight. It was more as if the conversations were there just for our benefit of knowing what had happened over the last eighteen years.
The character of Starbuck and Cassiopeia's daughter Dalton was also a hard character for me. I desperately wanted to like her, but Hatch and Golden often painted her with such recklessness and carelessness that I couldn't help but feel angry at her. She is said to have graduated faster than any cadet ever from their Academy, and yet her immaturity is so blatant that I can't imagine anyone allowing someone like her to be a part of a defensive patrol.
Hatch delves into an area I don't like as well with his Pure Kobollian lineage. Only they are allowed to command and such. This smacks of the beginnings of nazi-ism and is another frustrating point in this book. There are other problems with the general descriptions in this book that go against what we know from the series (such as describing all of the black characters as being from the planet Leonid, while Boomer had indicated in the series that he was from Caprica).
Sheba, who we were getting hints at being Apollo's love interest as the series wound down its one and only season, is almost completely neglected in this book.
Rigel a definite female in the series is described as being male here in the book.
Apollo's adopted son Boxey is in the book as well, and goes by the name of Troy now (the only homage to Galactica 1980). Again, it was a character of the next generation who I really wanted to like and had mixed feelings about.
Apollo seems to be written almost as larger-than-life. He is vying with his sister Athena for the command of the Galactica throughout the book. There is no real battle - no sneakiness or underhanded politics going on between them, it is just a debate who is more qualified to lead.
One of the few really interesting highlights of the book is an alien species Hatch calls The Sky. I really liked them and look forward to knowing more about them later on. There is a good general storyline about the Cylons developing a new weapon and Apollo and Starbuck ending up getting help from a very unlikely source in their quest to destroy it.
This book had a lot of potential - it being the first novel in a long time based on this television show. There were a lot of fans very hungry and hoping it would be better than it was. Unfortunately, the co-writers did not do a good job of getting their facts straight before giving us this effort. They might have been better off just starting from scratch with a science fiction book not based on anything ever written or televised before.
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