Customer Reviews

EVE: The Empyrean Age

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

As an Eve player, I picked up this book hoping to gain some greater insight into the events and people behind the stirring of war that was recently introduced with the 'Empyrean Age' expansion to the game. As an avid fan of sci-fi literature, I was just hoping for a good read.

As an Eve player, I was entirely satisfied. So much, in fact, that I piloted my ship through the game to visit the places discussed in the book and examine the remnants of those horrors witnessed while reading (and nearly got podded more than once).

The sci-fi levels in this book were also pretty high, and the story draws you in, and you really have no choice but to finish the book.

However, the book, alone is incomplete. Several of the characters have unfinished stories, the last chapter does not fit the scope of the book in any way, and throughout the book are inconsistencies of style and language.

If you can ignore these flaws, pick up a copy, and enjoy a rather thrilling journey across 4 nations and those heroes that love them.

I haven't written a book review before and I don't have a lot of time so this will be short and sweet. I have to say that this is one of the most well written books I have read in a long time. Even if you have never seen or heard about the computer game, EVE Online, this is just an all around great sci-fi. It always takes two or three chapters for any book to really start drawing me in but once I was into this book I couldn't put it down. It is rather dark however and I would not recommend it for children or anyone not old enough to handle violence and torture. The characters are all well written and fleshed out for the most part although I wish there had been a little more story on a few characters, but maybe we will see a sequel. Well done Tony Gonzales.

While this is clearly based on the background story of the EVE Online game you actually dont need to have played that game to understand what is happening in this pretty good book, in fact most of the specific terms that EVE Online gamers will easily understand can be easily looked up in the Eve Online story/game manual which is free to acquire from the official web site. In this case it only adds to the experience of this book.

This space opera is actually a collection of four different stories told from four different perspectives which are linked together by the declining political situation in the Eve Online universe.

The novel is very descriptive of the situation the characters find themselves in and a notice to parents some areas of this space opera are very graphic in their detail. People who are unaware of the background material of the Eve Online MMO will find the extended descriptions very helpful.

Essentially this is a lead up of events style book that leads to the apocalyptic war in the Eve Online Empyrean Age expansion, overall it is easy to read and understand, written for lovers of sci fi/space operas and for those of us who love galaxy wide political power plays.

Very few books draw me in so completely as did Tony Gonzales' first novel based on the folklore of Eve: Online. This is a series of background stories that explain all to anyone who has played Eve :The Empyrean Age" in the past year. What drew me in the most was not the attachment to the game, but the style of writing that demanded I continue to the next chapter. I found myself in disbelief at times at the way things unfolded "behind the scenes" - since all action is based on "news releases" online within the game of Eve.
The way all storylines are intertwined is masterful. The introduction of minor characters that are not flushed out is similar to people you meet once and never see again. The definitions of good and evil, life and death, and even religious fervor are questioned. This is a book based on "reality" even though it is considered science-fiction. A wonderful read.

I play EVE. The game is excellent! The book is written to give the gamer the background info leading up to the war between the four major factions of the game. The story is entertaining with the only caveat being the book provides the cause for the current war in the game. Therefore, there is no real conclusion to the war in the book. The book sets up the preface to the expansion of the game. The gamers will make the outcome of the war.

I greatly enjoyed the read and would recommend the book to any Sci-Fi fan, regardless of whether they play EVE or not. As an EVE capsuleer, I feel like the book helped enrich the backstory and brought to life many areas that I have found myself roaming through. Overall, the plot and characters are engaging. There are perhaps too many concurrent plot lines, and while the complex plot provides excitement, the downside is that character development is severely constrained by the lack of focus.

The book succeeds in providing the story that leads to the current situation with the Factional Warfare system in game. I also enjoyed that the characters have turned up in later EVE chronicles to further develop the story. Perhaps it is a consequence of being part of a living, breathing universe, but the hardest part about the novel is that it leaves you hanging at the end. I am still not sure what happens on Caldari Prime, and I have been playing the game for months since the novel came out. We have also been given very little additional insight into the craziness within the Amarr Empress, or what becomes of the racist and bloodthirsty leader of the Caldari. While the recent freeing of slaves may have been forshadowed by the experiences of the Empress' right hand man in the book, we are left on our own to figure out how the story ends.

I am personally counting on Mr. Gonzales to publish a sequel soon to explore these hanging threads. I hope he can slow down enough to really develop his characters while retaining the gripping quality he created in The Empyrean Age.

Overall, a good read for any Sci-Fi fan; a great read for those interested in jumping into the EVE world, and a must read for current players!

Well, I finally finished the book and here is what I think:

If you would ask me what I like most about EvE Online, I would say its seafaring aspects. Even though it might deal with spaceships, at its heart it is a game that has far more in common with The Old Man and the Sea than it does with Star Wars. EvE is all about the lone captain and his craft, out to score a big fish in a very large, very dangerous stellar ocean. Unfortunately, Tony Gonzales' EVE: The Empyrean Age ultimately fails to capture that essence for more than a brief moment.

The book starts out promising enough by introducing the reader to the crew of Retford, your classic hardscrabble salvager crewed by a bunch of outcasts and misfits desperate to make some ISK to keep the ship running for one more day. This, to me, is the essence of EvE Online. The book keeps this narrative thread for the first few chapters, inviting the reader to tag along as Retford makes a big discovery while salvaging a wreck and then has to hightail it to hide out in some of the less reputable parts of New Eden, including the requisite smoke-filled space station tavern. All good. All suitably EvE Online.

Unfortunately, Gonzales seems to lose interest in this story and instead switches gears and starts unfurling a tale of high level space opera politics, one involving a four way grudge match between EvE Online's four principle races. While I do recognize the necessity of introducing an EvE-ignorant reader to New Eden's political backstory, and while it is true that the political power-plays underway in New Eden are relevant to the story of Retford, I didn't - and still don't - see the need to devote the majority of the book to it. And that is what Gonzales ultimately does: he allots almost all of his energy detailing a very complex, yet very contrived, tale of four empires on the verge of all out war. Unfortunately, for me anyway, this loses the essence of EvE, especially when most of the book seems to take place not on the ships that will need to fight this war - which might have proved interesting - but planetside, where high level political and economic meetings and covert ops / racial rabble-rousing steal a good part of the spotlight. I find this ironic since EvE Online's players cannot interact with planets except in the most abstract way.

Speaking of the four empires, I found Gonzales' portrayal of them to be surprisingly black and white. The Gallente and Minmatar are your typical good guys wearing big white hats, while the Amarr and Caldari possess everything but the big black mustache and a cannonball bomb with a burning fuse. The Amarr, of course, are your proto-typical religious fanatics - well, sort of, as it seems only the mindless masses are true believers, while the powers that be secretly scoff at their faith and worship at the altar of Science! (with a big S and an exclamation point), gluttony, sexual perversion, and political power, of course (did Karl Marx write this?). The Caldari, on the other hand, are your proto-typical capitalists run amok, working their people to death while living the high life in opulent corporate offices (again, did Karl Marx write this?). If these two races - both of which I prefer to play in the game, so color me biased - needed to be the bad guys, couldn't Gonzales have come up with something more original than this silly Hollywood portrayal? Quite frankly, I would expect something more from a guy with a BA in Political Science.

The dialogue also left something to be desired. I appreciate the fact that Gonzales set out to write a dark and suitably serious novel for such a dark and serious game, unfortunately he chose to do it in the Hollywood way of throwing in a bunch of needless profanity and sex. While the sex was relatively infrequent, the profanity was profuse...and annoying. I mean, I expect sailors to swear like sailors...but prime ministers and presidents? Really? And I'm not talking about some sort of hoity-toity swearing either (is there such a thing?), but school yard profanity. It just seemed silly and out of place for the most part.

Then there is the shouting - oh, the shouting! It's no wonder New Eden is such a violent place when everyone is hollering at each other for reasons that are never quite clear. In fact, it sort of reminded me of the race from Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Remember the one that liked to write bad screenplays where the main characters would just glare at each other for minutes at a time? Same thing goin' on here. Like the swearing, it all becomes silly and tedious after a while.

While all of this is annoying, for me the biggest disappointment of the book is how Gonzales never really digs into the core concept of what is means to be a capsuleer, which, of course, is the player's sole role in EvE Online. While Gonzales does provide a sketchy backstory of how they came to be, and does a decent job of bringing these "immortals" elite status to light by conveying the sense of fear and awe people exhibit when meeting one, he never answers some basic questions that have been puzzling me since day one. For example, how does one becomes a capsuleer? Do you have to be rich? Politically connected? Brilliant? Have a high metachlorian count? What is the training like? Are there any obligations to the state? Not only are these questions never really explored, in some ways the book muddies the water even more because I always assumed that if you could pilot a starship, you were a capsuleer. Nope. At least in these pages, there are plenty of pilots who are not capsuleers. So...what's the distinction? We never find out, which is a travesty.

This is not to say the book is all bad. The best part of the book is the last hundred pages or so where the various factions all come to blows. Gonzales does a good job of bringing the war to life from multiple viewpoints, however, once again, most of the action seems to be focused on planetary assaults and not on the detailed fleet maneuverings you would expect (maybe this book was written as a tease for DUST 514?). But, again, there is some annoyance here too as the war is over before it really begins, leaving a lot of unanswered questions in its wake, the biggest of which is: why did you devote so little time to the best part of the story?!?

Overall, EVE: The Empyrean Age is a decent book. Sure, I have my gripes with it, but as game tie-ins go, it was tolerable. However, if I were to summarize all my gripes into a single observation, it would be this: after finishing the book (actually, while reading the last few pages, particularly after Gonzales describes a really cool orbital bombardment), I ran off and booted up a game. What game was that? It wasn't EvE Online. It was Sins of a Solar Empire.

What more needs to be said?

I played EvE Online for almost two years before having to discontinue due to real-life concerns and some disheartening player actions, but even though I don't actively play the game, I am still intrigued by the universe it presents and the attention to detail which its developers have shown in creating and maintaining it, which has contributed to its success and longevity. I don't think there's a more well-thought out epic space opera universe out there, except maybe the Dune series, and when I found this book in paperback, I was delighted to revisit the world beyond the collapsed wormhole known as the EvE gate once more. Reading about the epic events brought back a lot of memories, and as tribute to how well-written it is, I had a few visceral reactions to many of the events, since they took place in sectors and systems I had spent many hours playing in: An assault on Gallente-occupied Caldari Prime had me thinking for a minute "Whoa, I delivered a large shipment of oyxgen there!" while the blockade of the stargates in another system had me momentarily sweating bullets, since a player-corp I ran with rented hangar space in one of the stations there.

Having at least a cursory knowledge of the game's universe helps when you're reading this book, but the author, himself a long-time player, has included enough background on the four nations -- Caldari, Amarr, Minmatar and Gallente -- and their outlooks to keep a newcomer to the EvE-verse from getting completely lost. The opening chapters and the mystery surrounding an amnesiac clone awakening only to find himself attacked by assassins draws you in, wondering who this man is and why his enemies want him dead... and what secrets are hidden even to himself. There are a few places where the four main storylines get a little confusing, and I think a list of the characters would help keep one keep all the names and faces matched up, but in all, this is an awesome read for both fans of the game and fans of space opera at its finest.

This book is set in the Eve online universe, and is about the goings on in New Eden, the new civilizations of mankind eventually established after the collapse of a wormhole called Eve tens of thousands of years previously; a natural `stargate' that brought the ancestors of the present-day inhabitants of New Eden to New Eden from old Earth or `Terra' before it collapsed, cutting them off from old Earth forever. The book follows the goings on of characters in the four main civilizations of humanity in New Eden: The Amarr Empire, the Caldari State, the Gallente Federation and the Minmatar Republic. An important part of the book is the existence of beings known as `capsuleers'; men and women who have - through the augmentation of technology - been given the ability to transfer their consciousness into a cloned body at the point of death, effectively making them immortal. With this kind of power able to sway the balance of power between the competing empires of New Eden, only the superior firepower of the fleets of CONCORD - the peacekeepers of New Eden - can keep the capsuleers from abusing their power and in check. But war is coming.

Comments: this was a poor book, for a number of reasons. Firstly there were too many plot strands and as a result of this it was hard to keep up with all the action as there was just so much going on. Secondly these many plot lines didn't go anywhere, or had unsatisfactory conclusions. Thirdly as a result of there being so many plot lines it was hard to keep track of or remember who all the characters were as there were too many characters and not enough characterization. Fourthly the book was often a chore to read as the book was so often boring. On top of this the book was littered with typos (e.g. `I could care less' instead of `I couldn't care less' and countless spelling and grammar mistakes). Finally the conclusion of the book had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the book that had just preceded it and left me scratching my head. In conclusion this was a disappointing, poor read and an uninvolving book, which was annoying because when I read the back cover of the book it made the book sound good (which is why I bought the book, and here is an excerpt from the back cover: "This is EVE, The Empyrean Age. A test of our convictions and the will to survive.") but it is not. Maybe you enjoy the book more if you are a player of the MMORPG Eve Online? Conclusion: not recommended.

For those who don't know, the premise behind EVE (in short) is that a wormhole opened up in Earth's solar system leading to a distant and unknown space. Various civilizations sent fleets carrying scientists, settlers, tradesmen, and the like through the gate. The gate closed behind them isolating them. There they survived and grew on their own, staking out their own worlds and forming massive empires. (fell free to comment and correct me or add more details). Fast forward thousands of years and you have the time period of this book and the video game.

I have played the game EVE but I am by no means an EVE player, once in a while my friends and I will subscribe for a month to casually run missions together. That being said I had a general idea of the universe and its components when I read this book, which definitely helped, because the book doesn't give any background, however if you are an avid Sci-Fi reader you will have no time jumping into this and I easily recommend this for you. If you play the game but don't generally enjoy reading sci-fi (or reading at all for that matter) you may not like this.

As a general rule I avoid books concerning video games. After reading some of the reviews on here I decided to pick this up and I am really glad I did. The book does a great job balancing a larger scale story and smaller plots. It constantly jumps between the progression of plots in standard space opera form (I hate that term). It really throws you into the world of the characters and technology. The ending was adequate but in all honesty I liked it so much I would have enjoyed a couple hundred more pages because I didn't want it to end.

While I enjoyed this book I have to add that it is not for everyone, it will really be hit or miss for a lot of people; it is not lite Sci-Fi and it has some darker moments. It is not overly thought provoking or deep, but it is an awesome and fun read about galactic scale conflict, battles, technology, and space. I loved it and I think it is a great Sci-Fi read whether you play the game or not.