Customer Reviews

Transformers: Ghosts of Yesterday (Transformers (Ballantine Books))

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is the first Alan Dean Foster book that I have read. I see inside the cover that he has written original stories, and I would like to read those someday. I enjoyed his storytelling ability in this book. The rest of the shortcomings I don't hold against Mr. Foster, since he was simply writing the story he was paid to write.

The Good: Several favorite Gen 1 Autobots return, surely to be welcomed by diehard fans who grew up on TF like I did. Specifically, Optimus, Bumblebee, Ratchet, Jazz, and Ironhide. Starscream is the perennial main Decepticon character, and lives up to expectations perfectly, with the added bonus of not being whiny and annoying like on the cartoon. The other familiar Decepticon is Frenzy.

The Bad: The rest of the Decepticons are less familiar to Gen 1 fans, which includes Barricade, Blackout (with Scorponok as a tiny, dependent, mostly helpless symbiote), and Bonecrusher. Megatron is oft-referenced, but one of the linchpins of the plot is his long-term AWOL status, thus he is never directly involved.

Also Bad, Frenzy is present strictly as a token punching bag, and is rendered nonfunctional with no effort. In fact, I can remember him having just 3 lines of dialogue in the whole book. His entire presence is easy to forget and barely mentioned.

Still more Bad, not once is the physical appearance of any character described, human nor Transformer. It is apparently assumed that you will be familiar with the appearance of the toys, lest you would not be reading this book in the first place. Not being very familiar with recent TF toys by the newer Decepticon names, I was left with no real sense of their appearance nor abilities, and I know that had I not had prior knowledge of the 5 Autobots in the story, I would have experienced the same problem with them as well.

More "Bad" yet, the entire story takes place in 1969, concurrent with the Apollo 11 launch. Even my love of TF can do little to stay my hatred of "modern/futuristic technology placed into pre-modern history" stories.

IN CONCLUSION: If you are a hardcore Gen 1 TF fan, this book is reasonably entertaining, although dry and uninspired, and with FAR too small of a cast of Transformers. If you are unfamiliar with TF, or even if you are but not enough so to go see the new movie on opening day, then this book will be a complete waste of time.

While this book has a few errors in regard to the timeline established in the movie, it was a quick fun read. The best element was an expanded role for the powerhungry Starscream, whom we only see briefly on the screen. He's up to his dastardly best, trying to secure his place in the Decepticon food chain.

I also have to say that Foster did a pretty good job for having been handed a partially written manuscript and reshaping and adding to it, molding it into its present form.

Foster is a good writer, and when making fiction based off an existing franchise that's what really counts. I think the Transformers, by their very nature, are best appreciated visually. I mean, giant robots are hard to portray by just written description, you need to SEE how big they are. However, we have the movie images of the 'bots to run our imaginations off of, and Foster can tell a story quite well, so this comes off as being an interesting prequel if you already like the movie. Granted, we know nothing shocking will happen to many of this book's characters because we see them in the film, but the tale here definately adds some depth to the characters and creates a little more meaning to the goals in the film. It is sci-fi about giant alien robots, so you need to suspend a lot of disbelief to enjoy this thoroughly, but the plot is smooth, the characters are consistent, and the action does pull you in. If you even think you're interested in this genre then you'll enjoy reading this book.

This is a good setup for the upcoming (or grab the book Transformers) You can identify with all the charectors. The book itself was rushed. There are section that are just plain to short and thin on details, especially the climax.

I wish this could have had at least a mention in the other Transformers book. This book does give away certain information away to the Transformers that should have effected the movie and corisponding book, but it didn't.

If you want a little back story on the movie I recomend this book and The Transformers: The Movie Prequel (Transformers). It was a fun ride until the end.

If you need something to preoccupy yourself while wating for the Movie, go ahead and get the book. Some of the events that happened in the book are mentioned at the [...] site and in the comic book prequel.
It gives you more or less some background history to the Sector Seven government agency that plays a big part in the upcoming movie. And of course their frozen technological prize, Megatron.
Also, it goes on and tells of the autobot's and decepticon's first encounter with a group of humans from sector seven while experimenting with a spacecraft they built based on the technology from Megatron, that winds up in the middle of their war.
Though it seems a little fast pace and some there are some unanswered questions, it's worth a read. I would also get the Comic book Prequel series, all 4 issues of the 4 part series are out already.

I own the first 4 of Alan Dean Foster's Transformers novelizations. This is number 1. It is a prequel, to the 2007 movie. They are all very good and he seems natural at this, which should come as no real surprise. After all, he has written adaptions of such films as "Starman", "Alien", and "The Last Starfighter". I would like to say that these are my favorite of his novelizations. The story is very engaging so, if you liked the Transformers movie series, you really owe it to yourself to read these as well - they're equally as good!

If you enjoy Sci-Fi's, adventures, or suspenseful fictions, definitely grab this book. While the first two movies pull you in with their spectacular computer graphics and stories, this book is great for any Transformers fanatic who seeks to know even more about the series, the plot, and its background. Definitely thumbs up!

First a quick note on what this book isn't. This book isn't about how the Autobot/Decepticon war began, nor does it tell how the allspark cube got blasted into space, nor is there mention of exactly how Bumblebee lost his voice. There's no mention of characters from the Transformers mythology that didn't make it into the film or even a flashback to anything that happened on Cybertron.
However this book is a very nice read. It's a great story of cold war intrigue surrounding moving "The Iceman" aka Megatron from the arctic to Hover dam and the (from the movies POV) forgotten first contact between man and transformers in deep space that led the war to humanity's doorstep.

this book is amazing!!! Alan dean foster is a realy good writer and it gets you sucked in into the book.

Having read many of Alan Dean Foster's other books, I know that he knows how to develop a plot and create interesting characters. Unfortunately he didn't bother to do either in this book.

The eye-roll-inducing opening premise, an ultra high tech space program kept secret and developed in parallel with the Apollo program, made an initial suspension of disbelief impossible. Even this might have been forgivable and the story salvageable if Foster had bothered to create at least one character, human or machine even, to identify with and care about. Unfortunately the humans and Transformers both are nothing but cardboard caricatures. Cartoonish even.

Once the Machines show up the humans start doing things for no implicit or explicit reasons except maybe to put them where the so-called plot needs them to be.
Among the Transformer characters, the only ones even minimally interesting are Starscream, one of the bad guys (Decepticons), and Bumblebee, a good-guy Autobot. Starscream fails as a villain because of inconsistency, and bumblebee as a hero because of ineffectuality; the little side-kick has to be rescued from the only semi-interesting perils he gets into by his totally stereotypical Matt-Dillon type leader.

The old Transformers TV show and toys were aimed at approx. 4-10 year old boys. This book is faithful to that heritage; I get the same waste-of-time feeling from it that I used to get watching the TV show with my son in the early '80s. Unfortunately for this book, young boys are not going to be able or interested in reading it, and older readers are going to be numbed by the simple, unbelievable plot and flat, cartoonish characters.

I had great hopes that Foster was going to be able to transcend the Transformer legacy and produce an interesting, readable book. I was sorely disappointed. I suspect he slapped this off under contract for the money, with no real interest in crafting a quality story.