If you’ve seen Titan A.E. and were wondering how Akima got to be such a hotshot pilot, rest easy. Akima’s Story (Ace Books, $5.99) takes the reader from the death of her sainted grandmother to her meeting with Korso.
It’s really a little too complete, if you ask me. If the character’s worth writing a novel about, are 181 pages enough to cover five years? Akima goes to flight school, she spends a year or two working for a cultural historian. Five years is a long time, and I’m a little disappointed that it’s been entirely mapped out with little room left for the character to have a life. We know everything that happens now.
It’s just one more way that it’s made clear that Akima, as a character, is just another piece of property. Content.
Want to read an interesting story? Why bother -- let’s just find out how the pilot chick got to her point in the movie. Want interesting characters? Why bother -- we can just have them all be one-dimensional heroes or villains, pounding out the ‘Humans vs. the Universe’ tune over and over.
universe can be an interesting place.
I read the film novelization (also from Ace, this one by Steve and Dal Perry, $5.99) and discovered that the Drej are pretty cool villains, given a little room to work.
While lots of SF movies portray a small band of plucky humans facing tough odds, Titan puts the entire human race in those refugee shoes. Okay, it’s a little like Battlestar Galactica, but I still think the writers could have put a little more faith in the background they were given.
I don’t really blame
and Rebecca Moesta. I’m sure they tried. Now and then I did see a little honest emotion through the blandness. I don’t know how free a rein they were given -- maybe just a little background and no permission to fill in a few blanks. Maybe they had to keep it vague. It wouldn’t do to clutter the landscape too much, by, I don’t know, letting the authors loose on the setting.
The first three chapters are set at a slow pace that lets some of the sadness of a human race without a homeworld register. But once again, lost opportunities lurk on every side. Akima’s home, a "drifter colony" of refugee ships bolted together, could have been an amazing, exotic setting. Instead, it’s described as a sort of bazaar. With skies, for crying out loud. How big are these ships? Big enough, I guess. We never find out.
Cale’s Story, on the other hand (also from Ace, $5.99), opens on his alien foster father’s homeworld, which is described as a dreary, overworked planet. This actually turns out to be a nice touch, to the extent that it evokes Cale’s numbness and dislocation from the human race, which forms a fair chunk of his character in the movie.
The conflicts that the authors (Anderson and Moesta again) develop out of Cale’s departure from that world, though, are so simplistic I wanted to scream. He’s on the run from mysterious, ineffable aliens, who come along every few decades and destroy a planet, and no one can stop them or even begin to understand them.
Here, Cale’s big problem is a bully who favors silk shirts. Come on!
There is one real development, however, one that glues Cale’s Story and Akima’s Story together, as well as enriching the Titan A.E. universe.
Both characters come into contact with the secretive Qu’utians, aliens whose world was destroyed by the Drej decades before they got around to Earth. While the humans are largely mired in despair, the Qu’utians have had time and ambition to build an impressive secret city, and focus on a long-term plan for resistance.
This long-term outlook stands out like a splash of bright red paint in these otherwise drab and limited novels.
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