Posts Tagged ‘Stargate Atlantis’

This review will contain some spoilers.  I will be reviewing Stargate Atlantis: Rising by Sally Malcolm, which is the first novelization of this series and is a novelization of the first two episodes of the show.

I am a lover of a little cheese in my sci-fi of which I have mentioned before if you are a follower of the site.  This causes me to love all things Stargate: SG1 and Stargate Atlantis.  They have just the right amount of cheesiness that just makes me smile when I watch them.  It is also the reason I was not a big fan of the re-launch of Battle Star Galactica and the newest member of the Stargate family, Stargate Universe because they have largely removed the cheesiness that I think makes sci-fi so delightfully fun.  Well, with my love for tie-in novels, Star Wars, The 4400, and the like, I thought it was time for me to jump into the Stargate novels, and so I began with the novelization of the first two Stargate Atlantis episodes in Rising by Sally Malcolm.

To be completely honest, there were two big mistakes made in this novel that made this novel tough for me to enjoy, and I do not know if the mistakes were the author Malcolm’s or the publishers’.  First, this novel was so short only 240 pages.  I do not know if that was just how many pages Malcolm wrote or if the publisher gave her such a short space, but with just 240 pages, this novel just did not have the pages to dive deeply into any feelings or psychology of the characters because the events that were taking place on the show must be told.  This left this novel with such a lack of emotional string pulling on the reader’s heart.  There is a scene where Major Shepherd has to shoot and kill Colonel Sumner or leave him to be tortured by the Wraith…what a gut wrenching decision that Shepherd faced, and it was over in three lines.  Malcolm missed an opportunity share with us the emotional turmoil raging in Shepherd in these few seconds before making the shot.  Malcolm does later at the end give us a couple of paragraphs of Shepherd’s heartache over having to kill Sumner, but it would have been nice to read that struggle in the moment.  Again, I do not know if that was by the author’s choice or by the publisher, but the brevity of this novel left so potential in unused pages.

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