Numenera: The Night Claive releases this November. Keep an eye out if you're interested... Muad'dib bless your soul. Numenera is a franchise which includes both a pen-and-paper RPG and PC game, two things I really like. And, now, it seems that the creators have some idea about getting into novelizations - much like Dungeons and Dragons, Dragonlance, and, for a little while, Magic: The Gathering. The idea is great, I love when a franchise based on a book-contained game works to expand its universe and express the function of character classes and their places within this imagined world. Sadly sometimes the idea and vision doesn't always translate well or is handled badly by the writer at hand. I couldn't tell you which is the case with Numenera: The Night Clave, as it's co-written, apparently, by the creator, but for everything this book strives to be - it fails to do much more than be annoying. No doubt, there is a lot of passion behind this novel. A lot of attention to the details of the world, but that all falls flat as the story is utterly forgettable. It all begins with an assassination plot, of a man who may or may not be evil, or maybe he is just evil to the characters at hand. It is honestly hard to tell what the motivations or exact goings-ons are as the writing tends to be over bloated and circular in execution. If a character has even one indication of a prior event, even something as mundane as preparation, then you are immediately presented with a bulk of expository information about something else that happened, or paragraphs upon paragraphs of equipment descriptions. The first chapter took me almost an hour to read, page upon page of this - meanwhile the characters at hand have literally done nothing besides move to a position and fire. There is just way too much exposition and, sadly, things do not get better. Continuing on, viewpoints switch, and you have to deal with a character who is written in spotty sentences. For. Some. Reason. I think it’s to provide a sense of urgency, but I didn’t feel it worked at all. Not to mention, there are still expository instances abound and it’s a layered event - the same thing is still going on as before, just another character is coming to make some change in that particular instance. Worse yet, the same details are mentioned over and over again, merely paragraphs from each other: he’s about to fire the launcher, he’s going to fire the launcher, I can’t watch him firing that launcher, I got to go the guy with the launcher. As much as I want to get into this book, I’m just pulled out completely by redundancy and poor stylistic choices. Horrible writing and pacing aside, the characters are not much more than generic slates and flat, blank, characters. Perhaps this is due to the RPG being based on character creation and classes, but characters cannot just be the weapons and things they carry, or the powers they have. They need to have some real substance, and being mad at the bad guy, the only dilemma being if he’s truly good or bad, is weak at best. The setting, as well, is all over the place. Everything but the kitchen sink is thrown into the equation, and when the given writer can’t explain something, they simply say that whatever an element is, the character didn’t understand the purpose - so it just can’t be explained (didn’t stop every single other little thing from being explained). You can tell that, whomever the cover artist was, they really couldn’t get past the fatty boring chapters and instead opted to describe the setting of the first chapter. Why not, it’s there for way longer than it should be anyhow. Numenera, what a place I’d like to learn about! But I couldn’t with this book, instances of the game's mechanics are here but they are the peanut butter on a hair sandwich. Yes, that metaphor was bad - but at least you didn’t have to read about for an eternity. I’ll take the sandwich over this book any day. -L. BROOKS
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