Legacy Review #20 – ROBOTECH BOOK 8 (Metal Fire)
Release Date: July 1987
Author: Jack McKinney (James Lucerno and Brian Daley)
Page Count: 216 pages (includes Chapter 1 from The Final Nightmare)
INTRODUCTION
The second of the three-book series covering the “Second Generation” of the Robotech franchise; at least as portrayed to North American audiences. Thus continued my rabid obsession with continuing the novelization of the anime I once enjoyed on Saturday mornings, and playing the Palladium Books ROBOTECH RPG years later.
REVIEW
Episode Counter. The first book encapsulates the events from Episodes 07 to 14:
Synopsis. The Robotech Masters have brushed aside the continued attacks from the micronians, more worried about the impact to their dwindling protoculture reserves than the damage to their ships or their forces. In an effort to make the best of crash landing one of their motherships, the Masters capture several humans in order to better learn from them; what they learn, and the subtle influence they have on the Masters' society is unnerving. The better course is thought to implant a spy amongst the ranks of the enemy forces, so the Zor Prime clone is sent, unknowingly transmitting what he sees back to the alien fortresses in orbit. Despite the relative cat-and-mouse action of this novel, the punch for counter-punch doesn't seem to lead to any one side gaining any clear advantage. Despite the Masters clearly holding the military overmatch, the spectres of the burial mounds over the SDF-1/SDF-2 and Khyron battlecruiser still gives them pause; just not quite as much as the apparent flawed logic of the micronian responses.
Crashed Alien Fortress. Unlike the original craft that began this multi-generational interstellar drama, the crash landing of the Robotech Master’s flagship does little to provide any benefit to Humanity. In fact, it is a more incursive element to military, and by extension government, decision making. Ironically, now that the ship is landed, it allows the Southern Cross the ability to bring the fight much easier; though winning said battle is a much different affair.
Heavy Armour as Reconnaissance. So, something of a bug-bear for a military officer to read/watch is an armored unit getting sent into a reconnaissance mission; something they are definitely NOT equipped or trained to accomplish. I get it, it’s an anime, they need the story to move, so Dana gets the job. And frankly, the hover tanks are likely the best equipped platforms, given the stranded nature of the Robotech Master’s ship and their blindingly lucky success bringing the same craft down from orbit. What is the most ironic point about it is that most of the time they were roaming about without their tanks. So I guess we’ll let this one slide, for the sake of getting the plot to move along.
Masters’ Plans. Something of an irony, the Masters crashing to the planet and allowing the 15th ATAC to penetrate their defenses allowed them the opportunity to study the Humans in a way their orbital positions would not have allowed. I found it somewhat amusing to follow the McKinney depiction of the Masters’ frustration in dealing with Humans, particularly the 15th ATAC’s penetration into the ship, and the damage it had on their cold and calculated way of running their society. Their capture and experimentation on captured humans was vaguely macabre, something that avoided tripping into the horror genre. The eventual schism faced by the Masters’ hierarchy, the loss of Musica, and the insertion of their own Zor clone were the three elements that would eventually come back to cause their downfall.
Music As the Great Correlation. As demonstrated in the First Generation, we find music has a defining role in the plot of the story. This time it rests in how the Robotech Masters motivate and control their own clones to continue their bidding, and to a degree the loss of Musica’s influence in her triumvirate would impact on the clones’ ability to affect their duties. This seemed a bit of an odd element to the series, and I understand the complexities behind the IP issues that lends to the problem. Once again music is a controlling element on whether one side will win out over the other; once again Humans have a champion that sways the musical dynamic in a way that benefits their side. I’m sure this seemed like a great plot point at the time; decades later it plays out as a tired trope.
Louie Nichols. So let me couch this point clearly. Anyone can volunteer to take up arms and fight for their country, even the super-intelligent. But as I was reading the clips that included Louie Nichols, things just came to a grinding halt. Understanding this comes from an anime and there are certain tropes to uphold, this guy would have been dragged out of the ATAC and sent into a Technical Staff job faster than a gunner could pull a trigger. Some of the insights he has do well to reflect the dichotomy of Dana’s shared birthright, and it brings a certain maturity to the reader I think could have been missed otherwise. Otherwise, this is one of those elements that really takes a bit of work to buy into and flips it from a simple gun-fighting escapade against aliens into something a little more nuanced.
Major John Carpenter. As if to reinforce the fragility of the Southern Cross’ position, the arrival of Maj Carpenter’s ship as it de-folded from Tirol reminded everyone of the SDF-3 and their mission; that event only recently buried as recent history now dredged up for everyone to recall. As if to re-create the ambitious fight of the SDF-1 against the Zentraedi, Carpenter launched his force against the remainder of the Master’s fleet. What could have been a strategic asset for the Southern Cross was quickly dismantled, dismissively blown apart. What’s worse, when Carpenter survived to be brought in front of Leonard and Emerson, he spoke of no REF involvement any time in the near future. The Southern Cross was truly alone in this fight.
Note: Understanding the violent smashing of IP by Karl Macek, one would have expected the fighters flown by Major Carpenter's ship to have been older model Veritech Fighters or the newer Alphas that had been outfitted aboard the SDF-3. I digress.
Southern Cross Armada. As if to reinforce Leonard’s incompetence, a fleet of ships and mecha are mustered to attack the recently re-launched Masters’ mothership and fleet. In this case we see both Leonard and Emerson coming at this strategy from two completely disparate angles; Leonard wants to demonstrate egregious violence and remove the aliens as soon as possible, while Emerson balks in favor of more cautious and diplomatic approaches, including tactical choices that preserves their personnel and limited mecha or ships. The book ends with a significant cliffhanger that sees both men at an inflection point that could decide the way things go.
CONCLUSION
While the tone of this book follows suite with that of Southern Cross, there are a few obvious elements that stray to support several anime tropes. It isn’t nearly as bad in the McKinney adaptations, but they are definitely recognizable. The Masters have a definitive military advantage, and the Southern Cross is led by a Commander that fails to understand this reality. Blinded by his bias, it swings his decisions from possibly being reasonable into the farcical. There are certainly historical records of militaries overcoming or tempering the more violent tendencies or incompetent proposals of their heads of state/military. We’re just not there with the Southern Cross as presented in the Second Generation.
The Masters, suffering a blow to their ship, landed on Earth and made the most of the problem space. Using the sojourn to the surface, they kidnapped and experimented on captured humans, finding themselves increasingly worried as to why their Zentraedi creations found themselves on the losing end of the battle. Insertion of the Zor clone and his covert transmission of what he experienced gave them more information that both informed but also befuddled the Masters assessments of the Earthlings.
Although not touched upon in the Review, the inclusion of additional characters, particularly that of Nova Satori, lends a much more rounded storyline. Her position as a Global Military Police (GMP) officer (‘gimp’ as the pejorative) and how she handles Dana and the things she finds important, lends a different perspective that helps move the reader to better sympathize and follow Dana’s adventure. This is particularly relevant in terms of her relationship with the Zor clone, and his help in explaining what is occurring on Earth, and how things are about to really kick off in book three of the trilogy, The Final Nightmare.
Current Assessment (6/10). There’s a lot that happens in this book that really feels like it is simply a continuation of the elements presented in Southern Cross, or really setting the pieces up for the finale in The Final Nightmare. That’s not to say the action and intrigue of this book are boring in any way. The dynamic between Leonard and Emerson continues to develop, each drifting further apart from the other, which doesn’t bode well for the soldiers of the Southern Cross or the population relying on them to fend off the Robotech Masters.
The insertion of the 15th ATAC as a reconnaissance group still gets a laugh every time I read it, but lets just chalk that up to 80’s anime writers and move on. The McKinney description of the interior to the Masters’ mothership, however, suitably made up for it and provided a bizarre, otherworldly experience for the reader. The trials the Masters threw at them, dividing and challenging them with various kinetic and non-kinetic problems made this aspect of the read a little less tedious.
Ultimately though, the book doesn’t pick up any real pace until the last act, when everything seems to happen at the same time. Carpenter’s return occurs, followed by the insertion of the Zor clone into the human’s clutches, where he is almost instantly found as a hover tank pilot for the 15th ATAC. This is then followed up by a double-act finale as Leonard orders dozens of battlecruisers to assault the Masters’ fleet, as Zor leads Dana into the buried tomb of the SDF battlecruisers and Khyron’s flagship. Where one is a relatively obvious result, the discovery by Dana and Zor certainly isn’t, a cliffhanger worthy of any other found among the McKinney novels.
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