Tuesday, October 27, 2009

LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY, A GALAXY TURNED UGLY


Our pal hipspinster sent me a link to some new Dr Who fan anime, but along the way I was sidetracked by a squib for a new Joe Schreiber novel called Death Troopers that seems to be set in a reality where Star Wars meets the Saw series. It had to start me wondering if this was a true sign of the times, or just the 21st century vision of corporate publishing. I think I’m glad I’m too old and cranky to need any longer to consider doing such things.

“The storyline for Death Troopers is pretty simple, really — an Imperial prison barge, during the years right before the original Star Wars movie, runs into some engine trouble. Good thing they find a Star Destroyer in the middle of nowhere, which they can cannibalize for parts. Unfortunately, the Star Destroyer has some kind of weird virus on board, which kills everyone it comes into contact with... and the people who die don't stay dead. And that's about it. The survivors from the prison barge have to run a gauntlet of Imperial zombies and try to escape in one piece, while facing their own personal traumas and uncovering a sinister biological weapons program that comes straight from Lord Vader himself.
Among others, we meet a sadistic prison guard, Sartoris, an idealistic prison doctor, Cody, and the Longo brothers, the two sons of Trig Longo, a smuggler whom Sartoris murdered. Everybody gets a nice story arc in between (and during) zombie attacks.
It's a quick read, and there's a lot of chasing around dark corridors and crawlspaces and the holds of abandoned spaceships."
Click here for the whole story and a neat promo video.

The secret word is Nasty

3 comments:

Pig State Recon said...

Someone needs to run this by KW Jeter - his next Blade Runner sequel would no doubt benefit from a couple dozen zombies.

Benjamin Owens said...

I have to admit, even though I greatly enjoy the first three games in the resident evil series, I've never been fond of virus zombies... I only prefer 3 types of zombies, a. radioactive b. supernatural c. voodoo

The unexplained zombies are okay from time to time, but the virus zombies are just obnoxious... every single time experiments, likely illegal, in biological warfare go wrong & zombies are everywhere & there's always room for one more hidden facility or mutated strain of the virus to be conveniently hidden away.

Nonetheless I'm not buying another book ( besides those needed for school ) until I get Zone of Chaos. Also, you briefly covered zombies in The Time of the Feasting, just not the popular Romero style of rotting corpse zombies.

Dick Headley said...

I'll stick to vampires thanks. At least you can have a decent philosophical discussion.