Reading Resident Evil: Umbrella Conspiracy and Zero Hour by S.D. Perry

Drinking from the Resident Evil fire hose for the last couple months has been fun. This is a franchise that's a roller-coaster of quality, focus and interest across the board, from movies that appear to be whacked-out psychedelic trips through Alice in Zombie Land on down to the original adventure games full of weird puzzles and the current crop which is high-octane cinematic adventure that, like the films, sometimes requires leaps of logic too vast to span. And then there are the books...

The Resident Evil novel series started many years ago and I recall trying to read them and being unimpressed. I have also learned that almost any opinion of literature (fun or serious) that I had during my nebulous "Seattle years" spanning 1996-2005 is suspect, because during much of that time I was running on empty, literally; I worked a night-shift type job for most of those ten years and rarely got more than 3-4 hours of sleep every night, sometimes for months on end without reprise. I was in a strange relationship with my ex-wife and I often was too fatigued, worried and generally stressed to focus properly on anything. It's a miracle I was able to get anything done during this era.

As a result of this, I've often found that books I tried reading and discarded as too derivative, banal, uninteresting or annoying for whatever reason end up being much better now, in my "nicer years," where I get like...6 whole hours of sleep each night, I have a comfortable 7:30-4:30 PM type job, weekends always free, a wife with whom I have excellent synchronization and a son who is a total joy to raise. So yeah, I sometimes find books that I once dismissed to be actually rather fun.

The Resident Evil novels (not to be confused with the movie novelizations) were written by S.D. Perry and focus on actual adaptations of the original games up through Code: Veronica. There are seven books in the series. S.D. Perry is/was a master at the licensed adaptation, and did a very good job of writing engaging, suspenseful but otherwise lite-reading tales of the Resident Evil universe. I've gotten through two of them so far, will review more as we go along.

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Conspiracy

Umbrella Conspiracy starts with a direct adaptation of the events in the original game. it's a bit rocky, as you might imagine a tale of mercenary cops wandering in a haunted mansion full of zombies solving obscure adventure-style puzzles relying on adventure-game logic might be. We are treated to a bit of "pre-game" lead-in, explaining a bit about who the Special Tactics and Recon Squads (STARS) are, a sort of international mercenary outfit (think Blackwater, I guess) that is employed by Raccoon City to supplement and assist the local police department and is ostensibly also there at the request of Umbrella Corp, the pharmaceutical company that pretty much made Raccoon City what it is. We meet Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, Rebecca Chambers and Barry Burton, as well as the ever-evil Albert Wesker in the few moments we get to know him before he flips his evil switch on.

This was S.D. Perry's first attempt at a novel outside of her work on the Alien and Alien vs. Predator franchises. It's a bit rough, and she does an admirable job of trying to recast the events of the game in a way that works for fiction. When I originally tried reading this I remember being annoyed at specific details, or just how the story was framed relative to the game, which was much fresher in my mind at the time. Today it's been so long that I'm just impressed that the tale is detailed enough to invoke memories of specific events, locations and characters or creatures from the original! So in that sense it's quite a success. Indeed, if you ever wanted to know what the original was about, but didn't have the endurance, dexterity or temerity to find and plow through the game, this book is more than suited to the task of getting you up to speed.

The most amusing bits about this novelization are the pieces which don't quite "fit" with later canon. Wesker here does indeed go evil somewhere along the way, although his motives and complicity in the process aren't as exaggerated or obvious as they later become in retrospect. He also doesn't technically live to the end....but that's a suitable reveal for when he comes back in the future. Other moments, such as Rebecca Chambers and her experiences in Resident Evil Zero aren't entirely in sync with this novel. But as always one can imagine that a fiction like this is an amalgamation of bits and pieces inevitably corrupted by the unreliable narrator if you wish to reconcile the book with the setting canon.

Still, I enjoyed it. This is light reading, and you could easily give this to your younger reader to enjoy; there's little or nothing in the way of purely mature content that I noticed, while an adult looking for something fun to read over a series of lunch breaks (as I did) will be entertained, if not provoked.

Resident Evil: Zero Hour

Technically Zero Hour is the seventh book in the series, but chronologically it happens just before Umbrella Conspiracy, being an adaptation of Resident Evil Zero, which tells about the fate of Bravo Team, the STARS unit that went in to investigate the mysterious cannibal attacks around the Spencer Mansion just a few hours before Alpha team followed. This is one of the Resident Evil games I didn't play all the way through, for various reasons having to do with my horrendous work schedule, troubled marriage and lack of general time during my years in Seattle, so reading it was a chance to fill in some of the gaps in my RE lore.

Rebecca Chambers is a child genius, who graduated from college by age 17 and was hired on to the STARS as a chemical specialist due to her incredible credentials. Presumably she had interesting aspirations for a teenage girl, or maybe the STARS just pay really well...either way, she is the focus of the tale, along with the wanted criminal and accused murderer Billy Coen, recently escaped from a military police transfer thanks to the freakish luck of passing through the remote mountains right when some serious zombie smack-down starts off.

Zero Hour is focused on explaining a few lingering plot threads from the original tale, namely what happened in the first place to cause the outbreak of the T-Virus. If you thought this was fairly evident (if not exactly spelled out) from the first book/game, then you would be right: until Zero Hour the general assumption was somehow, perhaps due to industrial sabotage or sheer ineptitude the virus was released, causing a lock-down at the Spencer Estate and, as it turns out, a previously unseen Umbrella retreat and research compound.

After Bravo team crashes (no helicopter can survive a Resident Evil tale), they spread out to look for evidence as they wait for a rescue from Alpha team. While Rebecca finds evidence of a private transport train to the compound (coming from Raccoon City, presumably) that's been massacred by something spreading the T-Virus, Billy Coen runs into her and they settle into an uneasy truce to survive against the mysterious horrors that are crawling all over the place. As the two explore the train they find evidence of mutated leeches that seem to cooperate like a hive mind, connected somehow to a mysterious stranger. When the train starts up they find themselves deposited at the Umbrella Retreat and Compound, driven to escape the maddening complex by an unseen foe who is bent on helping and hindering them.

Zero Hour is the seventh book S.D. Perry wrote and it is actually very solid, a better read than Umbrella Conspiracy, despite being subject to the pacing and approach of the game's story line. The net result is a more coherent read, and a chance to see what Rebecca was up to prior to her arriving at the Spencer Mansion and running into Chris Redfield. It also helps to set her up for further adventures in the next novel, Caliban Cove (which I shall review next week). I definitely suggest reading it immediately after Umbrella Conspiracy, and not before, despite it being a prequel; it meshes better this way, as the inconsistencies in the timeline caused by Capcom's monkeying with jamming this story line in to the mix are more tolerable with a retrospective approach than trying to reconcile them after the fact. Put another way; Umbrella Conspiracy makes for better reading if you follow up with Zero Hour rather than the other way around. Zero Hour is definitely an improvement all across the board, and worth checking out.

Next up is Caliban Cove, the second novel in the series, and an original story which takes place between Umbrella Conspiracy and City of the Dead (the adaptation of Resident Evil 2). I'm halfway through it right now, but S.D. Perry's chance to shine with an original story is already my favorite. But I shall save details for another batch of reviews next week!

Travels in Hyperreality and Mogworld

Thought I'd get some sort of blog out today, cap off November. I have nothing in the can right now, will have to take some time this weekend to see what sort of theme or focus I want to work on for blogs in the coming months...the miserable, gloomy, holiday-ruptured Winter Is Nigh months. Woo hoo...!

I've been reading a lot of books lately...all at the same time, which makes expedient completion of singular tomes slow going. Still, some really good books. I set up some apps on the blog to the right of the text to show off some of the better stuff, which I thought I'd talk about.

I'm still plowing through Umberto Eco's Travels in Hyperreality, which is a great book for those interested in the concept of hyperreality, which I really hadn't delved much into before, but the short premise is that he takes times to analyze the many ways that we effectively reconstruct or remodel reality in ways that feel somehow more "real" or focused...from art, to museums, to film and performance. Interesting book.....if you are, like me, into reading about the philosophy of postmodernism and existentialism, you may find this one rather enjoyable. Eco is also a professor of semiotics, and his other books on the subject are equally fascinating.

I couldn't find Travels in Hyperreality on the Nook, so I am actually reading the dead tree edition.



I am also devouring Mogworld by Yahtzee Croshaw, who you may know of if you are A: into video games, B: like snarky humor and criticism, and C: have ever watched his show Zero Punctuation, where he scathingly skewers the latest video games with his rusty barbed wit. His book, Mogworld, is about a young magician's apprentice who perishes (more or less immediately) in the middle of a barbarian attack on his college of sorcery, and awakens some years later as a recently resurrected undead by an aspiring but not overly competent necromancer. As it turns out, this is but the first of many deaths as the apprentice's journeys take him through a land of fantasy that operates on rules suspiciously close to the worlds of MMOs. Anyway I've been having a hard time putting it down and may talk more about it when I finish, it's really one of the first good, fun fantasy reads I've found in a loooong time.



I'm reading Mogworld on the Nook, and I have also picked up his second novel, Jam, which also sounds awesome (the apocalypse world-ending event that NO ONE expected...and it involves jam.)

If you haven't seen them, check out his reviews at The Escapist here.

Thirty One Days of Horror: Dead Space

Day Twenty Five: Dead Space

Back to video game horror! I'm an unabashed fan of Dead Space, having played through it once on the Xbox 360 and twice on the PC. This is a rarity for me; I don't usually indulge in single player games more than once or twice, and very few titles have earned this honor, among them being Mass Effect, Fallout 3 and of course Dead Space.

If you don't know anything about Dead Space then I'll avoid spoiling it for you. The short synopsis is as follows: you play as Isaac Clark, an engineer onboard the USG Kellion, a deep space rescue and repair vessel that answers distress signals (shades of the earlier film Super Nova). In fact, it's just received one from the "planetcracker" mining vessel Ishimura, which has gone strangely silent after what must have been a massive systems failure. This particular ship is one of the first of its kind, a mining vessel that uses gravity tech to effectively gouge out chunks of planetoid and engage in an extremely high-efficiency refinement process to extract a variety of rare metals and other useful elements. It's a rough sort of job to work, and the ship environments in this game reflect an environment and standard of living that makes Alien's corporate-owned Nostromo look like a luxury liner.



Isaac and his cohorts quickly run into trouble and find their own ship disabled. Then they discover that something has gone horribly wrong onboard the Ishimura, which appears to have succumbed to some sort of invasion or assimilation by an alien presence: the necromorphs.

Plot complications begin to pile up quickly. Isaac has a bigger stake in things than normal, too. It turns out his girlfriend Nicole was on board the ship, and she was a convert to a cult of unitarianism that was prominent onboard the Ishimura's crew. The Ishimura stumbled across an ancient alien artifact, the Red Marker, the recovery of which sparked the entire debacle. The story spirals deeply into a troubled nexus of religion, alien transformation, government conspiracies and a desperate need to survive in the face of madness and death. Great stuff!

Dead Space as a game is actually much better to play on the PC than the Xbox in my experience. My original play through on the 360 was a bit frustrating, and there were spots where that frustration grew by leaps and bounds (there's an instance where you man a point defense canon to destroy asteroids threatening to breach the ship's hull, for example; on a mouse and keyboard this was a relatively simple task, but on the Xbox with a controller I almost quit and never returned....only dogged persistence saw me through).



The game was unique when it came out for employing "in game" queues and status interfaces that were effectively part of the actual environment. Isaac's engineering suit has gauges and a unique spinal tube of energy which fluctuates with the health of the character. When he talks to his associates who have hidden away and bark orders at him while staying as far from the action as they can, he relies on a projected holographic field that appears in front of him rather than on the screen. It was an innovate concept which helped greatly with the problem of immersion vs. UI issues other games had wrsetled with, and this innovative format continued into Dead Space 2.

Dead Space was the last genuinely true-to-spirit survival horror game I have played, discounting those moments in Resident Evil 5 or 6 where it touches upon the genre again (Before veering off into other action shooter formats). It embodied mood, a sense of distrurbing revelation slowly building over time, a desperate main character who's isolation and sanity are at odds with survival, and despite a wide arrange of firepower it manages to keep the main character in threat of danger and short on ammo. A first play through of Dead Space will always be hard; it can get easier and more efficient as you go through a second or third time, but even then there's the higher difficulty tempting you with incredibly difficult and deadly challenge.

If you haven't played Dead Space and have a tolerance for the sort of video games that require a third-person sense of spatial awareness, then this is one of the best and last true survival horror titles to come out in the last five years or so. Another one of Death Bat's A+ titles!



For extra Dead Space fun I recommend the novel Dead Space: Martyr written by B.K. Evenson, whose horror work I had run into before and quite enjoyed. Martyr takes place centuries earlier in the Dead Space universe, not long after man's expansion into space, and deals with the discovery of the first Marker, found on Earth, at the center of the Chiculub Crater off the Yucatan Coast. It's an extremely well done, creepy novel which adds a great deal to the Dead Space backstory and also helps to set up a decent explanation for the popularity and origin of the unitarian cult, as well as some of the mysteries of the Red Marker found in Dead Space. A great read, well worth checking out!

Busy Week! On Moving, the Nook Tablet, and Crude Matter

Just a minor update and apology, the blog's preloaded content has momentarily run dry and I have not had time or a regular internet connection to properly update, due to a sudden move into what feels like a veritable mansion compared to the rather quaint townhome situation my wife and I are used to. Marcus of course is taking it all in stride: one place is the same as another. He only got upset when the vast array of colors and shapes that he loved to look at (known to adults as my "bookshelf") disappeared, to be replaced by a plain ordinary brown set of blank shelves with no colors or shapes whatsoever. Then he let out a major wail.

I'll always have a million books (or at least that's what my aching back tells me I have after this weekend of moving) but I did take a bold step forward on my Birthday last week and bought a Nook Tablet. I figured hey, its kinda like a tablet, and its also like a reader, so maybe I can check out a bit of both. Then I promptly downloaded my vast Baen Library (both the free stuff and the other books I have bought there over time in the hopes I might one day find a convenient way to read them), then went on something of a fevered shopping frenzy for more book deals. It was not pretty, and I don't know whether to be thankful or irritated that my bank let me make so many minor transactions with Barnes & Noble without questioning why so much activity had hit my card. So yeah....



Anyway, it's only been four days and already I am perplexed by the crude plant matter that we once used to record data. Life before the Nook (or more precisely ereaders in general) seems like a strange dream.

The Nook and its like aren't good for some things. My giant Halo Encyclopedia or Age of Conan coffee table books do not translate well to the hand-sized Nook, for example. Even though in principle accessing a PDF of, say, Pathfinder can be more efficient, the Nook Tablet (or rather Pathfinder's PDF layout) still doesn't cater to the medium. Stuff like that. And while some publishers get that we know they have reduced overhead in electronic media, others appear to take a "threatened" stance against it and proceed to jack up electronic prices even more. Then there are publishers like the aforemention Baen books who absolutely get it.

I'm not asking for steep discounts...but if you're $8 paperback is retailing for $8 in electronic form, then I know you're charging me more for the virtual edition in terms of profit than the physical edition. There's nothing wrong with that, except of course how I will then not buy your e-copy and go instead for the competitor who marks their $8 books down to $6 (or sometimes even less).

It doesn't look like ebooks in general have reached the "Steam Holiday Clearance Sale" level yet, though. Maybe they have on Amazon, I don't know. I couldn't bring myself to buy a kindle, though. I like having more options, not less...Nook seemed to fit a happy middle ground somewhere.

Anyway, apologies for not having any recent content! Once the internet is hooked up in the new house there should be more to come. Maybe even a Mutant Epoch article or two if I can find some time to finish them up...

Speculative Reading Flowchart Fun!

Apparently NPR had a "Best 100 Science Fiction" books contest and the NPR readership voted in an extremely mixed bag of the 100 best novels. It says a lot more about the changing nature of today's reading demographic that some of the books on this list made it in, I suppose....but hey, I can't say any single one of the books chosen isn't good, and I've read close to half of what's on the list and can't claim disappointment with any of these choices.

That said, these guys here made an amazing flowchart to help you pick from the Top 100 mix to find your own personal book preference. It's a pretty amusing flowchart....so now you too can find that Special Book!