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Sometimes I get the urge to read crappy, mindless SF, but unfortunately I have an allergic reaction to everything Baen has published in the last twenty years or so, which limits my options greatly. I have standards, even when reading crap.

Thankfully there are the Robotech novelizations by "Jack McKinney" (a pseudonym for James Luceno and Brian Daley, both most famous for their Star Wars novels, though ironically from different eras, Daley's The Han Solo Adventures predating The Empire Strikes Back, while Luceno's are as recent as last year's Tarkin).

Robotech is a cartoon series cobbled together for American television from three unrelated anime, Superdimensional Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, Genesis Climber Mospeada. Macross is a classic that's spawned numerous sequels in Japan over the last thirty years (there's a new one in production now), while the other two are crap that would be forgotten if they hadn't been combined into Robotech. Macross was greatly dumbed down to make it fit with the other series, though Southern Cross and Mospeada actually benefited from the conversion.

Unfortunately, the American producers couldn't shoot new footage for Robotech, so there are numerous inconsistencies and plot holes between the various parts of the story. These novelizations try to fill those holes by adding backstory and technobabble. Overall they do manage to improve the story.

The most amusing part of the books are when the authors attempt to fill the other kinds of plot holes -- the ones that naturally occur because the source material is a Japanese cartoon series that, though attempting a certain level of realism, was full of implausibilities. The authors are clearly guys who understand science and recognize all the problems with the original material. So for instance, at one point a spaceship performs a "hyperspace fold" too close to the Earth and ends up taking a Pacific Island with it into space. In the original anime, the water around the island was depicted as instantaneously freezing when exposed to space, forming a giant dome of ice. This is impossible -- in an airless void, the water has no way to dump its thermal energy except through radiation, and without any surface tension, it's boiling point would be so low that it would simply sublime into space. The authors can't contradict the cartoon, but they aren't willing to ignore the problem, so they add a paragraph explaining that the strange physics of the space fold caused the water to freeze.

This tendency reaches the level of hilarity in battle scenes, which are peppered with the words like "somehow" and "miraculously," as the authors try to explain the ridiculous (but cool) maneuvers shown in the anime. Twenty missiles come flying at the hero? He performs and evasive maneuver and somehow miraculously dodges them all. This happens in every single battle.

There's one aspect of "McKinney's" writing that I think deserves praise, and that's his handling of the military characters. Brian Daley was a Vietnam veteran, and, like his fellow vets Joe Haldeman and David Drake, he doesn't go in for any of that Kipling crap that exemplifies so much of modern MilSF. His characters don't spend a lot of time thinking about how noble they are for being soldiers, and how journalists and liberal politicians are undermining the military. Now some of that is a result of the source material -- the protagonist, Rick Hunter starts out as a pacifist, and even after he's forced to take up arms, he still questions the military -- but even the characters who are soldiers by choice are just people doing a job. A necessary job, to be sure, but not one they enjoy or think is worthy of glorification. Rather than lauding bravery, the book is full of passages like this:

Contrary to what most civilians thought, real combat veterans seldom bragged among themselves of their heroism; it was a mark of high prestige to go on about how scared you were, how fouled up things were, how hairy the situation had gotten, how dumb the brass were. Because among them, everyone knew.

The funny thing is, despite how mediocre the books are on a technical level, there are a number of bits like that that have stuck in my head since I first read the series back in the middle school. Most of them are from the Dune-style epigrams at the start of each chapter -- Rick Hunter explaining that "pushing the envelope" refers to the upper right corner of a graph showing a plane's performance, and then noting that on real envelopes that's where the stamp gets canceled; a scientist saying Einstein was wrong -- not only does God play dice with the universe, but they're loaded.