[Powers that be are free to C&P this to the news page, if they like. I figure it isn't funny enough, so I shoved it here.]
Dragon Age: The Calling
By TNO
Video games have always struggled with artistic credibility. Although some games manage to don the mantle of intellectual gravitas, there’s always the sense of it being a not-quite-secure façade. Even the best examples fall a long way short of high art. The day when video games can be considered at least middle-brow is not yet here.
Books, on the other hand, have impeccable artistic credentials, and so writing an ip tie-in is a good way for your video game, pen and paper RPG, miniature war-game or whatever else to gain the trappings of intellectual respectability. These books, however, tend to be very bad.
David Gaider, I hope, has no pretensions to high art with his novels. So I won’t set the bar that high. I suspect the motive for most consumers is for an interesting and well-written yarn in a universe they like, in anticipation of the computer game. The first chapter has been released online to wet our appetite, and the book is to be released on the 13th of October (not that that's stopped a few 5 star reviews appearing on Amazon.) Let’s see if it’s any good.
Intro:
This is the second book Gaider has written in the DA universe (the first was DA: Stolen Throne) and follows on from the events in that work. As I disclaimer, I should make clear I haven’t read this earlier book, and nor (after reading this preview chapter) do I intend to. The speed in which the sequel has arrived (the original was published March this year) perhaps should cause worry about whether the quality of the writing has suffered in the speed to get these novels done before the release of the game, or even could suggest the use of a Ghost writer. However, we can be confident that Gaider has written these books in their entirety – a ghost writer would have done a better job than this.
Considering the cover has some guy decapitating someone above the mandible, the first chapter doesn’t deliver on the promise of huge amounts war-porn. Instead, we get the sort of things writers tend to focus on: characterization and development, conversations, and stuff like that.
In the beginning, there was the Word:
The first words of the story are an in-universe aphorism:
This isn’t a good start. Religious scriptures draw much of their power from being atavisms to a past world of different idiom. They also bear a continuity of tradition to the present day. Producing this language yourself is hard, and this attempt comes off as trite and insubstantial.
Brevity:
Gaider’s writing uses too many words. Much of this flab is needless qualifiers or modifiers (“almost waiflike”, “perhaps odd”, “little more than”, “Slightly more impressive”, etc.) None of these qualifiers improve the image in the readers mind, and should be removed. What does it matter if a given characteristic is a couple of shades but not too much towards a certain adjective? Why should I care?
Another issue is that Gaider’s style itself is prone to being too expansive and using unnecessary detail, and often circumnavigates the point at issue. Take a few examples from the confrontation between the King and his right hand man:
A couple of details here seem unnecessary: the ‘waiting for inevitable recriminations’ (just skip to them already!) and the information about the armour (if the battle and the chevaliers are important, they should be introduced elsewhere.)
This paragraph isn’t well-focussed, and the italicized sentences are particularly bad: they pretty much repeat themselves, and the addition of the arbitrary ‘strains of command’ trope is not a credit to the story or the writer. We can find out how ruthless or grim Maric is some other time.
P.S, spoiler: Rowan’s dead.
The entire sentence is unnecessary, given we see Loghain’s present-day melodramatics a paragraph earlier.
Description:
When Gaider doesn’t use qualifiers, he falls into another trap by using stock phrases:
Using stock phrases and constructions isn’t a crime in itself – sometimes, they are the best tool for the job. But neither example in this paragraph says very much: I have no idea what is meant by ‘chill right down to his bones’ signifies, and I don’t know how cold it has to be to beat Duncan's life experiences. Both descriptions are meant to tell us how cold it is, yet both say nothing.
Ellipsis abuse:
Ellipses (...) are commonly used to denote long pauses in a speech, or that it is trailing off. They can also be used in the narration itself, providing it has sufficient subjective character (i.e., first person, or certain styles of third person that have a clearly located narrative voice – common in Russian literature.) Gaider’s uses them repeatedly in this manner:
I have never seen Ellipsis used in a written work this way. The reason why I haven’t is because it is an exceptionally tacky and amateurish construction (“X, Y, but, drum roll please… This!”) In all the three cases I spotted in the first chapter, a full stop, an em dash or a comma would have done the same job without looking as ridiculous.
The Narrative voice
DA: The calling is written in past third person limited. The narrative is limited to a particular character and what they can perceive or do or know (contrast with first person, which would be Duncan’s account, or 3P Omniscient where there is no limitation on what the narrator can disclose to the reader.)
This choice isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that Gaider did not go for an ‘objective’ or ‘fly-on-the-wall’ perspective, where the narrative is further constrained to what could be seen by another person, and thus can’t leap inside the heads and feelings of the characters directly. This is an entirely respectable (if unambitious) style for a written work, and is right up Gaider’s street given his day-job as a writer for video games.
Instead, Gaider dives into the internal states of the characters with gusto. He makes like a kid in a candy store with all these literary devices:
Directly reported thoughts:
Indirectly reported internal states:
Even a dash of free indirect speech:
Pulling this off is a fairly high-difficulty mental gymnastics repertoire. Unfortunately, Gaider often falls flat on his face. The governing principle as to when we are treated to the inside of the protagonists skulls seem to be whenever it suits the author. Take ‘an odd choice, he thought.’ This (and similar constructions elsewhere) tee up some factoid about the world for a reveal later. Yet Duncan probably knows what is odd about it, and could tell us – but Gaider doesn’t want that, so the thought ends there. Other times, Gaider is happy to drop a lot of exposition inside the protagonists head to be passed on to the reader. It's not very fair.
Interlude
I don’t rate Gaider as a stylist, or a word craftsman: I struggle to find a good word to say about Dragon Age: The Calling in this respect. However, this need not be fatal. If the story and characters and drama of the tale work well, we can forgive its poor articulation. So let’s talk about these wider concerns, and focus on what Gaider says, as opposed to how he says it.
Dramatis personae
Dragon Age: The Calling introduces us to several important characters in the first chapter.
Duncan: Protagonist and miscreant.
Fiona: Elven mage, and (I predict by the law of narrative attraction) a probable love interest.
Genevieve: The head of the Grey Wardens (society of secrets, power, and moral ambiguity) in Ferelden (a place of gruff, xenophobic but stout and hardy people.)
Maric: The king of Ferelden
Loghain: A war hero, and Maric’s right hand man.
There are other sidekicks and stuff, but who cares.
Out of these characters, I think the chapter succeeds in portraying two of them: Genevieve and (to a lesser extent) Loghain. Both are fairly gruff military types, but Gaider makes the bar on these portrayals. Genevieve’s first appearance:
Now, there is a lot in this passage I think that could be written better (I put things I really disliked in italics) but this - combined with the conversation about G between Fiona and Duncan immediately beforehand - at least does the functional job of portraying G as a no-nonsense badass. She also survives the throne room encounters with the readers respect mostly intact.
We don’t get told much about Fiona besides how hot she is, but Maric and Duncan suffer serious credibility decline even in the very first chapter. This is partly due to them being responsible for the main continuity issues, but also because Gaider can’t pitch them appropriately. Even in an official audience between a king and other power, even after discovery of the ancient immortal evil which must be stopped by an epic and dangerous fetch quest, he has his characters engage in banter so camp it wouldn’t be out of place in a Carry on film:
Maybe Gaider wants us to be aware of how flawed his heroes are, but episodes like this make them seem ridiculous. Come to think of it, this trait seems to infect a lot of Gaider’s writing, including computer games. Characters either have these hilarious interludes, or (especially if they’re a love interest) descend into some angst about they’ve suffered more than you can possibly understand. The finer nuances of characterization are lost when everyone is prone to having the comic relief or emo dials turned up to eleven when required.
Continuity clangers
A balance must be sought between piquing the reader’s interest with the odd incongruity, but not so far the reader presumes the writer cocked it up. Two essential bits of the chapter convinced me of the latter hypothesis.
One: The audience.
When the Grey Wardens are in the audience of the King, we get the following in Duncan’s head when Loghain snipes at them.
This doesn’t make much sense. G is leading an audience bowing to the king and his sidekick, and it is the Greys who need them. What has Loghain got to fear being shirty with her?
Subsequent details make this even less sensible.
1) He’s pretty much equal to the king anyway.
2) The Grey Wardens got kicked out of this country a couple of hundred years ago
3) They end up asking him to put his life at risk.
4) They’re embarrassed because one of their own committed a crime.
So why should Duncan think Loghain should watch his step? He’s got all the cards. (In Gaider’s defence, Loghain mostly manages to keep the reader's credibility by being generally suspicious and snarky in this scene.)
Two: Duncan’s crime.
This bit is exceptionally badly thought out.
In case you didn’t see the problem, here’s the synopsis:
G: One of my dudes committed a crime.
M: What crime?
G: Well, he was a thief, and he tried to steal some stuff from one of your citizens. A guard tried to stop him, but the thief injured him. The guard survived though.
D: I could’a killed him, but…
M: Oh well, mea culpa. I’ll take the side of this criminal over one of my own soldiers, they’re often overzealous. He seems pretty contrite about it, after all.
D: *joke*
Seriously, what the fudge? Why on earth would a king – or anyone else - just let that slide and punish him? The Greys are, we’re told a pretty discredited minority (so no immunity) and, besides, they don’t mind Duncan being locked up. Did Gaider stamp ‘major protagonist’ on Duncan’s forehead, and Maric keeps him in the story out of narrative obligation?
But there’s more. Suspension of disbelief is about to go the way of the Takoma Narrows bridge:
Again, just so you didn’t miss anything wading through Gaider’s prose.
M: Okay, I’m still going to help you with your fetch quest.
G: Cool! But it will be very dangerous, can I assign you someone to protect you?
M: Sure.
G: Hmm… Duncan? How about you?
D: Le sigh… fine.
G: What do you think, Maric?
M: Sound’s good to me. What better choice could there be for a protector and servant of my royal person than a pick-pocket with a recent history of violent assault, after all?
I suspect what Gaider was going for was to make Maric the tolerant cosmopolitan good-cop to Loghain’s gruff and suspicious bad cop. However, passages like this just make Maric out to be an utter moron. A lot of the audience has this generally forced feel of Gaider ramming his characters through the choices he wants them to make to spin his yarn – perhaps the prequel helps, but I didn’t find the motives for Maric to abandon his throne and join the adventure convincing, either. It inspires suspicion in the reader, and further harms the world and the characters when you realize they’re going to do whatever Gaider wants them to rather than follow their own internal logic.
Imagery and description
Great writers have an eye for the right details and information which need to be conveyed to the reader. Even without literary pyrotechnics or eyeball kicks, writers like Pullman or Tolstoy can describe a scene through picking the telling few details which lets the reader fill in the rest. Even fairly average writers generally avoid filling their pages with needless detail.
Gaider, on the other hand, obsesses over how his characters look. Despite how many novels can survive with barely a line of description written about their protagonists, Gaider introduces every single character with a paragraph describing what they look like. Fiona’s entry is par for the course:
Duncan originally escapes this, but has three paragraphs describing him later. For writing a computer game or other visual media, the precise appearance of these characters are important – the person playing the game will be reminded of it whenever they look at them. However, for a book this information is unimportant – it doesn’t provoke an image in the reader’s mind (especially a casual one), and it detracts from what the writer should be talking about. The part where Genevieve introduces each member of the adventuring party in embryo reads less like prose, and more like a series of character sheets (“This is X, he is fighter with a big sword. This is Y, she is a dwarf monk who doesn’t talk. This is…”)
What about the wider aesthetic? One problem is that so much of the description is superfluous, because the objects described fall comfortably into cliché. The elves are slender and waiflike, the palaces impressive, the heaths large and the fires warm. A generic elf or palace seems pretty much the same as a Gaider described elf or palace.
This, sadly, applies to the setting as a whole. I didn’t get the impression of anything else going on besides fantasy generica. Look at the elements of the story so far:
An ancient, really powerful and prophesied evil
An elite military force that is not above moral ambiguity to stop this evil by any means necessary.
A humanoid race, all of which are evil.
One realm of hearty but suspicious folk, where it’s currently pretty cold.
Another realm of more continental folk with strange facial hair
These two groups don’t like each other very much.
Elves: tall, slender, can do magic.
Dwarves: Short, stout, (probably) can’t do magic.
Unarmed combatants (Monks)
I can’t, in short, see anything which really suggests a novel or interesting setting: switch around the proper nouns, and I think you’d see Faerun (aside: I’m not a big fan of some of the proper nouns: would any self-respecting people really name their city Denerim?) Although I’m told Gaider does deliberately subvert some of these tropes (the elves go indigenous, I’m told) he is still trapped by them. There doesn’t seem to be anything here which offers the prospect of a new and vital Intellectual property. It looks like another facsimile of every other fantasy that harks after D&D – a slight variation on a very tired theme.
Conclusions
I am unsure what Gaider wants these books to accomplish – they are differentiated from the usual pulp of IP work by the IP being the writers own, albeit developed for a different media. Perhaps then, the DA books could have made a first: a successful computer game and respectable books produced in parallel, rather than one being based off the other.
The question is this: if Gaider wasn’t the lead writer for an AAA computer game, but the Dragon Age universe only to be expressed in these books, would they have gotten published on the back of their own merit? I think the answer is almost certainly ‘no’. The books cash in on the publicity and repute of the game, and thus, like all other ip tie-ins, are pulp fiction.
It’s ballsy to put up a preview excerpt on the internet and make yourself a target for anyone with a vitriolic abscess and acrobat reader. But this review is broadly negative because the chapter was broadly bad. There are three reasons why Gaider isn’t hitting the target. The first is that the hold-overs he has from computer game are a hindrance to writing a good book – they are different media, and demand different approaches. The second is that he is an amateur at writing: a lot of the mistakes made are hard to excuse, and it is why I think an outsourced ghost writer would have made a better job of it. The third is more crushing – there just doesn’t seem to be very much here: not in style, the characters, the plot, or the setting. I worry that Gaider might just not have very much to say.
I don’t recommend that anyone read ip tie-ins – world literature has so much more to offer. However, even by the low standards of the ‘genre’, Dragon Age: The Calling doesn’t promise to be even mediocre. I suppose those who are already can’t get enough of the universe (although I honestly can’t see why) might want to give it a look, but playing the computer game promises to be better than the book. We expect even less of computer games, and whatever narrative crimes Gaider may commit in a computer game are easily forgiven. Not so here.
[Edit1, 12th Oct: Cosmetic touch ups, typo squashing.]
Dragon Age: The Calling
By TNO
Video games have always struggled with artistic credibility. Although some games manage to don the mantle of intellectual gravitas, there’s always the sense of it being a not-quite-secure façade. Even the best examples fall a long way short of high art. The day when video games can be considered at least middle-brow is not yet here.
Books, on the other hand, have impeccable artistic credentials, and so writing an ip tie-in is a good way for your video game, pen and paper RPG, miniature war-game or whatever else to gain the trappings of intellectual respectability. These books, however, tend to be very bad.
David Gaider, I hope, has no pretensions to high art with his novels. So I won’t set the bar that high. I suspect the motive for most consumers is for an interesting and well-written yarn in a universe they like, in anticipation of the computer game. The first chapter has been released online to wet our appetite, and the book is to be released on the 13th of October (not that that's stopped a few 5 star reviews appearing on Amazon.) Let’s see if it’s any good.
Intro:
This is the second book Gaider has written in the DA universe (the first was DA: Stolen Throne) and follows on from the events in that work. As I disclaimer, I should make clear I haven’t read this earlier book, and nor (after reading this preview chapter) do I intend to. The speed in which the sequel has arrived (the original was published March this year) perhaps should cause worry about whether the quality of the writing has suffered in the speed to get these novels done before the release of the game, or even could suggest the use of a Ghost writer. However, we can be confident that Gaider has written these books in their entirety – a ghost writer would have done a better job than this.
Considering the cover has some guy decapitating someone above the mandible, the first chapter doesn’t deliver on the promise of huge amounts war-porn. Instead, we get the sort of things writers tend to focus on: characterization and development, conversations, and stuff like that.
In the beginning, there was the Word:
The first words of the story are an in-universe aphorism:
This isn’t a good start. Religious scriptures draw much of their power from being atavisms to a past world of different idiom. They also bear a continuity of tradition to the present day. Producing this language yourself is hard, and this attempt comes off as trite and insubstantial.
Brevity:
Gaider’s writing uses too many words. Much of this flab is needless qualifiers or modifiers (“almost waiflike”, “perhaps odd”, “little more than”, “Slightly more impressive”, etc.) None of these qualifiers improve the image in the readers mind, and should be removed. What does it matter if a given characteristic is a couple of shades but not too much towards a certain adjective? Why should I care?
Another issue is that Gaider’s style itself is prone to being too expansive and using unnecessary detail, and often circumnavigates the point at issue. Take a few examples from the confrontation between the King and his right hand man:
A couple of details here seem unnecessary: the ‘waiting for inevitable recriminations’ (just skip to them already!) and the information about the armour (if the battle and the chevaliers are important, they should be introduced elsewhere.)
This paragraph isn’t well-focussed, and the italicized sentences are particularly bad: they pretty much repeat themselves, and the addition of the arbitrary ‘strains of command’ trope is not a credit to the story or the writer. We can find out how ruthless or grim Maric is some other time.
P.S, spoiler: Rowan’s dead.
The entire sentence is unnecessary, given we see Loghain’s present-day melodramatics a paragraph earlier.
Description:
When Gaider doesn’t use qualifiers, he falls into another trap by using stock phrases:
Using stock phrases and constructions isn’t a crime in itself – sometimes, they are the best tool for the job. But neither example in this paragraph says very much: I have no idea what is meant by ‘chill right down to his bones’ signifies, and I don’t know how cold it has to be to beat Duncan's life experiences. Both descriptions are meant to tell us how cold it is, yet both say nothing.
Ellipsis abuse:
Ellipses (...) are commonly used to denote long pauses in a speech, or that it is trailing off. They can also be used in the narration itself, providing it has sufficient subjective character (i.e., first person, or certain styles of third person that have a clearly located narrative voice – common in Russian literature.) Gaider’s uses them repeatedly in this manner:
I have never seen Ellipsis used in a written work this way. The reason why I haven’t is because it is an exceptionally tacky and amateurish construction (“X, Y, but, drum roll please… This!”) In all the three cases I spotted in the first chapter, a full stop, an em dash or a comma would have done the same job without looking as ridiculous.
The Narrative voice
DA: The calling is written in past third person limited. The narrative is limited to a particular character and what they can perceive or do or know (contrast with first person, which would be Duncan’s account, or 3P Omniscient where there is no limitation on what the narrator can disclose to the reader.)
This choice isn’t surprising. What is surprising is that Gaider did not go for an ‘objective’ or ‘fly-on-the-wall’ perspective, where the narrative is further constrained to what could be seen by another person, and thus can’t leap inside the heads and feelings of the characters directly. This is an entirely respectable (if unambitious) style for a written work, and is right up Gaider’s street given his day-job as a writer for video games.
Instead, Gaider dives into the internal states of the characters with gusto. He makes like a kid in a candy store with all these literary devices:
Directly reported thoughts:
Indirectly reported internal states:
Even a dash of free indirect speech:
Pulling this off is a fairly high-difficulty mental gymnastics repertoire. Unfortunately, Gaider often falls flat on his face. The governing principle as to when we are treated to the inside of the protagonists skulls seem to be whenever it suits the author. Take ‘an odd choice, he thought.’ This (and similar constructions elsewhere) tee up some factoid about the world for a reveal later. Yet Duncan probably knows what is odd about it, and could tell us – but Gaider doesn’t want that, so the thought ends there. Other times, Gaider is happy to drop a lot of exposition inside the protagonists head to be passed on to the reader. It's not very fair.
Interlude
I don’t rate Gaider as a stylist, or a word craftsman: I struggle to find a good word to say about Dragon Age: The Calling in this respect. However, this need not be fatal. If the story and characters and drama of the tale work well, we can forgive its poor articulation. So let’s talk about these wider concerns, and focus on what Gaider says, as opposed to how he says it.
Dramatis personae
Dragon Age: The Calling introduces us to several important characters in the first chapter.
Duncan: Protagonist and miscreant.
Fiona: Elven mage, and (I predict by the law of narrative attraction) a probable love interest.
Genevieve: The head of the Grey Wardens (society of secrets, power, and moral ambiguity) in Ferelden (a place of gruff, xenophobic but stout and hardy people.)
Maric: The king of Ferelden
Loghain: A war hero, and Maric’s right hand man.
There are other sidekicks and stuff, but who cares.
Out of these characters, I think the chapter succeeds in portraying two of them: Genevieve and (to a lesser extent) Loghain. Both are fairly gruff military types, but Gaider makes the bar on these portrayals. Genevieve’s first appearance:
Now, there is a lot in this passage I think that could be written better (I put things I really disliked in italics) but this - combined with the conversation about G between Fiona and Duncan immediately beforehand - at least does the functional job of portraying G as a no-nonsense badass. She also survives the throne room encounters with the readers respect mostly intact.
We don’t get told much about Fiona besides how hot she is, but Maric and Duncan suffer serious credibility decline even in the very first chapter. This is partly due to them being responsible for the main continuity issues, but also because Gaider can’t pitch them appropriately. Even in an official audience between a king and other power, even after discovery of the ancient immortal evil which must be stopped by an epic and dangerous fetch quest, he has his characters engage in banter so camp it wouldn’t be out of place in a Carry on film:
Maybe Gaider wants us to be aware of how flawed his heroes are, but episodes like this make them seem ridiculous. Come to think of it, this trait seems to infect a lot of Gaider’s writing, including computer games. Characters either have these hilarious interludes, or (especially if they’re a love interest) descend into some angst about they’ve suffered more than you can possibly understand. The finer nuances of characterization are lost when everyone is prone to having the comic relief or emo dials turned up to eleven when required.
Continuity clangers
A balance must be sought between piquing the reader’s interest with the odd incongruity, but not so far the reader presumes the writer cocked it up. Two essential bits of the chapter convinced me of the latter hypothesis.
One: The audience.
When the Grey Wardens are in the audience of the King, we get the following in Duncan’s head when Loghain snipes at them.
This doesn’t make much sense. G is leading an audience bowing to the king and his sidekick, and it is the Greys who need them. What has Loghain got to fear being shirty with her?
Subsequent details make this even less sensible.
1) He’s pretty much equal to the king anyway.
2) The Grey Wardens got kicked out of this country a couple of hundred years ago
3) They end up asking him to put his life at risk.
4) They’re embarrassed because one of their own committed a crime.
So why should Duncan think Loghain should watch his step? He’s got all the cards. (In Gaider’s defence, Loghain mostly manages to keep the reader's credibility by being generally suspicious and snarky in this scene.)
Two: Duncan’s crime.
This bit is exceptionally badly thought out.
In case you didn’t see the problem, here’s the synopsis:
G: One of my dudes committed a crime.
M: What crime?
G: Well, he was a thief, and he tried to steal some stuff from one of your citizens. A guard tried to stop him, but the thief injured him. The guard survived though.
D: I could’a killed him, but…
M: Oh well, mea culpa. I’ll take the side of this criminal over one of my own soldiers, they’re often overzealous. He seems pretty contrite about it, after all.
D: *joke*
Seriously, what the fudge? Why on earth would a king – or anyone else - just let that slide and punish him? The Greys are, we’re told a pretty discredited minority (so no immunity) and, besides, they don’t mind Duncan being locked up. Did Gaider stamp ‘major protagonist’ on Duncan’s forehead, and Maric keeps him in the story out of narrative obligation?
But there’s more. Suspension of disbelief is about to go the way of the Takoma Narrows bridge:
Again, just so you didn’t miss anything wading through Gaider’s prose.
M: Okay, I’m still going to help you with your fetch quest.
G: Cool! But it will be very dangerous, can I assign you someone to protect you?
M: Sure.
G: Hmm… Duncan? How about you?
D: Le sigh… fine.
G: What do you think, Maric?
M: Sound’s good to me. What better choice could there be for a protector and servant of my royal person than a pick-pocket with a recent history of violent assault, after all?
I suspect what Gaider was going for was to make Maric the tolerant cosmopolitan good-cop to Loghain’s gruff and suspicious bad cop. However, passages like this just make Maric out to be an utter moron. A lot of the audience has this generally forced feel of Gaider ramming his characters through the choices he wants them to make to spin his yarn – perhaps the prequel helps, but I didn’t find the motives for Maric to abandon his throne and join the adventure convincing, either. It inspires suspicion in the reader, and further harms the world and the characters when you realize they’re going to do whatever Gaider wants them to rather than follow their own internal logic.
Imagery and description
Great writers have an eye for the right details and information which need to be conveyed to the reader. Even without literary pyrotechnics or eyeball kicks, writers like Pullman or Tolstoy can describe a scene through picking the telling few details which lets the reader fill in the rest. Even fairly average writers generally avoid filling their pages with needless detail.
Gaider, on the other hand, obsesses over how his characters look. Despite how many novels can survive with barely a line of description written about their protagonists, Gaider introduces every single character with a paragraph describing what they look like. Fiona’s entry is par for the course:
Duncan originally escapes this, but has three paragraphs describing him later. For writing a computer game or other visual media, the precise appearance of these characters are important – the person playing the game will be reminded of it whenever they look at them. However, for a book this information is unimportant – it doesn’t provoke an image in the reader’s mind (especially a casual one), and it detracts from what the writer should be talking about. The part where Genevieve introduces each member of the adventuring party in embryo reads less like prose, and more like a series of character sheets (“This is X, he is fighter with a big sword. This is Y, she is a dwarf monk who doesn’t talk. This is…”)
What about the wider aesthetic? One problem is that so much of the description is superfluous, because the objects described fall comfortably into cliché. The elves are slender and waiflike, the palaces impressive, the heaths large and the fires warm. A generic elf or palace seems pretty much the same as a Gaider described elf or palace.
This, sadly, applies to the setting as a whole. I didn’t get the impression of anything else going on besides fantasy generica. Look at the elements of the story so far:
An ancient, really powerful and prophesied evil
An elite military force that is not above moral ambiguity to stop this evil by any means necessary.
A humanoid race, all of which are evil.
One realm of hearty but suspicious folk, where it’s currently pretty cold.
Another realm of more continental folk with strange facial hair
These two groups don’t like each other very much.
Elves: tall, slender, can do magic.
Dwarves: Short, stout, (probably) can’t do magic.
Unarmed combatants (Monks)
I can’t, in short, see anything which really suggests a novel or interesting setting: switch around the proper nouns, and I think you’d see Faerun (aside: I’m not a big fan of some of the proper nouns: would any self-respecting people really name their city Denerim?) Although I’m told Gaider does deliberately subvert some of these tropes (the elves go indigenous, I’m told) he is still trapped by them. There doesn’t seem to be anything here which offers the prospect of a new and vital Intellectual property. It looks like another facsimile of every other fantasy that harks after D&D – a slight variation on a very tired theme.
Conclusions
I am unsure what Gaider wants these books to accomplish – they are differentiated from the usual pulp of IP work by the IP being the writers own, albeit developed for a different media. Perhaps then, the DA books could have made a first: a successful computer game and respectable books produced in parallel, rather than one being based off the other.
The question is this: if Gaider wasn’t the lead writer for an AAA computer game, but the Dragon Age universe only to be expressed in these books, would they have gotten published on the back of their own merit? I think the answer is almost certainly ‘no’. The books cash in on the publicity and repute of the game, and thus, like all other ip tie-ins, are pulp fiction.
It’s ballsy to put up a preview excerpt on the internet and make yourself a target for anyone with a vitriolic abscess and acrobat reader. But this review is broadly negative because the chapter was broadly bad. There are three reasons why Gaider isn’t hitting the target. The first is that the hold-overs he has from computer game are a hindrance to writing a good book – they are different media, and demand different approaches. The second is that he is an amateur at writing: a lot of the mistakes made are hard to excuse, and it is why I think an outsourced ghost writer would have made a better job of it. The third is more crushing – there just doesn’t seem to be very much here: not in style, the characters, the plot, or the setting. I worry that Gaider might just not have very much to say.
I don’t recommend that anyone read ip tie-ins – world literature has so much more to offer. However, even by the low standards of the ‘genre’, Dragon Age: The Calling doesn’t promise to be even mediocre. I suppose those who are already can’t get enough of the universe (although I honestly can’t see why) might want to give it a look, but playing the computer game promises to be better than the book. We expect even less of computer games, and whatever narrative crimes Gaider may commit in a computer game are easily forgiven. Not so here.
[Edit1, 12th Oct: Cosmetic touch ups, typo squashing.]
) - critical but not biased, detailed and professional. 
