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35 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Is the enemy of our enemy our friend... or foe?, February 9, 2008
Twenty years ago, they arrived in 50 gigantic motherships offering their peace and universal friendship to Earth. They said they had come because their world was dying and desperately needed our help to manufacture chemicals found on our world in return for sharing their technology, cures for diseases and all the fruits of their knowledge. Skeptical of the Visitors intentions, a collective coalition of scientists became the unwitting scapegoats of a conspiracy against the Visitors and soon a state of martial law was imposed. A small but growing band of underground freedom fighters had organized into the Resistance led in Los Angeles by Dr. Juliette Parrish. News cameraman Mike Donovan had infiltrated the motherships to discover their clandestine truth and with the help of Visitor Fifth Columnist Martin who revealed the Visitors' true horrific intentions that they had come to rape our planet of its most precious resource - water - and to harvest human beings for food. The Resistance struck back and won a small but decisive victory against the Visitors and sent out a distress signal deep into space directed towards their homeworld near Sirius in hopes of it reaching one of the Visitors' adversaries who might answer the beacon and come to help them stave off the invasion.
Twenty years later, that call has been answered. The world under Visitor control is at its most critical point. Fifty percent of the water in the Earth's oceans have been depleted leaving behind a vast barren salt bed along the floor of the Pacific basin. The Golden Gate bridge now suspends atop two large peaks above the once aqueous San Francisco Bay. An entire generation has grown up under Visitor occupation and has bought into the lies and propaganda with unquestioning obedience to The Visitor Way and the apathetic human race have become complacent and submissive through the coercion of the Teammates - those humans that serve the Visitor Youth Corps and the Players - the corrupt collaborators who have betrayed their own kind to satisfy their own personal ambitions. The operation that Martin had said would take nearly a generation to complete was accelerating rapidly now with little opposition after the Resistance had been decimated by Commandant Diana's Great Purge in 1999 and with only a few years left until the Earth would become a barren, desolate planet devoid of all life.
Enter the Zedti - a humanoid race evolved from an insectoidial alien species who respond to the signal at our most desperate hour by sending three advance "emissaries" to make contact with the Resistance in the form of a pair of strangely humanoid females named Kayta and Bryke and a humanoid male named Ayden who are prepared to launch a counter-invasion force waiting in the wings to strike against their old enemies the Visitors whom they had defeated once before and rescue us from their oppression. But are their intentions benevolent, or do they have their own more diabolical plans for us and are we simply trading one dictatorship for an equal or even greater oppressor?
Kenneth Johnson's narrative is engaging and entertaining and manages to deftly interleave socio-political themes relevant to present day issues of counter-terrorism and political apathy as relevant as his brilliant allegory of neo-fascist takeover akin to the Nazi Holocaust that he employed in creating his V - The Original TV Miniseries. However, as a lifelong V fan, the biggest challenges I had to come to terms with while reading Kenny's book, is ignoring the problem of conflicting continuity between his original mini-series and the events of V - The Final Battle and V - The Complete Series of which he had no involvement with, and the fans are asked to simply accept the fact that those events had never even existed. Even more, the fates of several key characters established in Kenny's original story like Elias, who was killed off in the Series, and Robin Maxwell, who was impregnated by the Visitor Youth Leader Brian and gave birth to the half-breed Elizabeth, are overlooked or simply disregarded. In Kenny's mind, all of that never happened and many may welcome the idea that Elizabeth, the Star Child, doesn't save the human race with her hokey magical alien superpowers, the Visitors weren't defeated by the Red Dust, Robert Maxwell wasn't killed trying to help the Resistance commandeer the mothership, and Martin didn't die and come back as his zygote twin brother Philip who just happened to wear an identical human-looking mask. On the other hand we unfortunately never meet the stone-cold mercenary Ham Tyler nor his associate Chris Farber who joined up with the Resistance or other memorable characters indigenous to the series like Kyle Bates.
By disregarding the continuity of V: The Final Battle and V: The Series, there is, for better (*cough* Star Child) and for worse (*cough* Ham Tyler) gaps of unexplained and contradictory continuity between the Original and The Second Generation. Willy's true reptilian nature wasn't revealed to Harmony until V: The Final Battle when the Resistance captured and exposed him in front of a disbelieving Harmy and forced him to confess the truth to her. Complicating things even more, Harmony was killed during the Final Battle. Disregarding those events, the reader must make the supposition that Willy inevitably revealed the truth to her somehow and irregardless of which maintained her indiscriminate feelings toward him and they married and had a half-breed son named Ted and the reader is forced to accept the circumstances of altered continuity twenty years later as-is. With the introduction of the half-breed culture of Dregs at times it felt more like I was reading a page from Kenny's other series Alien Nation, not V.
As much as I would love to see a Second Generation of V revived, I don't think, with all due respect to Kenny, that this story, in its current form, should be used as the basis of a new mini-series because of the problems inherent with ignoring the continuity which old-school V fans might find jarring and confusing. Perhaps this is why initial plans for a new mini-series announced a few years ago by NBC have remained on indefinite hold and Warner Bros. felt like they could still profit from publishing Kenny's book while surreptitiously gauging fan interest in a possible revival or perhaps have their own agenda for a "re-imagining" of V ala "Battlestar Galactica" which I think would be a huge mistake because it would be a betrayal to a generation of loyal fans who, like myself, grew up in the 80's and grew attached to those characters and the actors who portrayed them. Still, I'll take Kenny's version of V the Second Generation over an outright remake or "re-imagining" any day and I'm all for getting behind a revival of V that would reunite original cast members Mark Singer, Faye Grant, Jane Badler, Michael Ironside, Robert Englund, Blair Tefkin, et al, but if and only if it's my generation of V.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Mixed Review, July 12, 2008
I read the previous reviews before I purchased the book, and I was well prepared. I accepted that the writer chose to deny the existence of V: The Final Battle and the Series which allowed me to approach the book with an open mind. All in all I'm glad I bought the book as it was an enjoyable read. I also agree with many of the gripes of other reviewers.
It's dreadfully obvious that the book was written AFTER a screenplay. I'd even go so far as to say it was hastily put together. I imagine the writer was not able to devote as much time and talent to its writing and was pressured by a deadline. Johnson does provide "sufficient" depth so that anyone reading it who hasn't seen the previous telecasts isn't left in the dark. I was also able to ignore the constant "jumping" from one seen to the next. Even tho most of the time there was no warning and I usually had to reread entire pages to see where it jumped. Occasionally some "jumps" are obvious, as the writer bolds the first sentence.
I'd have to say that the most annoying aspect in the book is it's lack of time. As others have written slightly about it, I feel they didn't describe it enough. There is NO mention of time except for a few instances in which the writer tells you if the sun is shining or stars are twinkling. I've had to reread several pages at a time to get a feel for when the "day" ended, and the "night" began. You'll find yourself imagining one or the other, until the writer tells u at the END of the scene. It's very easy to get lost in the time line, and very frustrating when you have to go back and reread sections at a time.
While the writer provides sufficient depth in some areas, it's horridly lacking in others. Reviewers before me have pointed out that the story ignores various prominent characters from the first series. I've come to the conclusion that once the movie is released, the confusion will evaporate. The book describes a memorial to people lost during the "great purge" as described in the book. Tho the writer only indicates to 2 people on the memorial, I'm assuming that when the movie is shown, we'll see the faces of the missing characters.
On the positive side I'm pleased at how easy the book is to read. The language and vernacular used is as easy to understand as a Harry Potter book. You may however want to censure the book from younger readers, as it does have strong sexual depictions. Speaking of, I was pleasantly surprised at the inclusion of gay characters in the novel. Johnson writes the gay characters as if they are "simply" gay, and pays no special attention to them. He does however, give them equal inclusion in the story line. Johnson plays this off very well and I thank him for not playing into other stereotypes.
Each of the characters are believable and engaging, this is another great aspect that many other authors too often miss. While I agree with others that parts of the story line are predictable, I also assert that every story has a certain predictability. The great thing is that this book is very suspenseful, and a majority of it does not unfold as you may suspect.
I found the ending to the story to be extremely satisfying, however there are some "holes". I also enjoy the that even tho there is a conclusion, it's also a cliff hanger. I have no doubt that if this book and movie is successful, johnson will continue the story line as there is ample room to do so. All in all I'm glad I bought the book and enjoyed reading it. I do have to remove a star as it's not perfect, tho I imagine that subsequent editions will fix the "jumping without notice" problem.
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19 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Atrocious, February 20, 2008
Ugh. I can't remember ever being as disappointed in a novel as this one.
I'm a huge V fan. I watched both original mini-series with rapt attention. I even watched the weekly series -- which was, while not good, not altogether horrible. I held onto my grainy VHS copies of the mini-series recorded off TV for more than a decade. When the mini-series and weekly series were released on DVD, I bought them. I even re-bought them from itunes and carry them on my ipod. In other words, as I mentioned, I'm a huge V fan.
This book is not for huge V fans. As other reviewers have pointed out, this book picks up where the FIRST mini-series left off, and ignores everything that came after. More annoyingly, the author never actually tells you what it's doing, but it becomes apparent pretty quickly. I could understand, and maybe even approve ignoring the weekly series. It wasn't well-received, and didn't have the same following as the minis. For most fans, though, V and V: The Final Battle are basically one entity. Many fans probably don't remember exactly which events took place in which. They have become a seamless whole. If anything, The Final Battle was a superior story, because it was more complete. Okay, the star-child was stupid, but that's just the last few minutes of the show, anyway.
In Kenneth Johnson's V: The Second Generation, Harmony is still alive. Martin is still alive, and was never discovered. He has no brother named Phillip, as far as we know. The Visitor Leader is now a woman. Robin Maxwell is MIA. Ham Tyler doesn't exist. The Resistance never invented the red dust. Most humans never figured out that the Visitors were evil. Diana doesn't have a conversion chamber. Julie and Donovan were never, as far as we know, romantically involved. Need I go on?
The dissonance is so severe that it would ruin this book even if it were otherwise good. Unfortunately, it is not. The characters are thin. Even the ones we knew from before seem less fleshed out than they did on TV. The plot makes no sense. Most of humanity continues to see the Visitors as benevolent, even though the planet has been basically destroyed. The new alien enemy of the Visitors are a goofy race that is unnecessarily mysterious. The Beyonce-ripoff character is painful to read about.
The whole book just plain sucks.
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