Crysis: Legion [Paperback]

Before I heard that Crysis 2 I knew very little about Canadian author Peter Watts. I did know that he was a hard science-fiction author and an associate of the amazing Richard K. Morgan but that was the extent of my knowledge. I planned on purchasing Crysis: Legion to round out the Crysis 2 experience but I didn't have high hopes for a deep story with interesting characters and complicated themes. I've read video game novelizations before, some are better than others, but rarely ever are they ground breaking master pieces. Let me tell you, I got both Crysis 2 and Crysis: Legion on Tuesday and had finished both by Wednesday. And then I was ready for another go.

Crysis: Legion is probably best read as a companion to the game. I would actually play Crysis 2 for a couple hours and then read up to that point in the book. It was a really cool experience. The main characters of first person shooters are generally left as hollow as possible, a mould for the player to pour themselves into. The one problem this presents is the complications to plot that arise. The cool thing about reading Crysis: Legion at the same time as playing the game was the very unique and vocal character Watts crafted out of the mould that is Alcatraz. Watts creates a real character here, with a believable voice. As a Force Recon Marine, Alcatraz has a pretty foul mouth but he also offers an insider view on this world that is both plausible and wildly different than our own. Alcatraz has a past and present and the reader gets a glimpse at all these things through some very cool name dropping. The narrator mentions these major events off hand that lend credence to the reality of the Crysis universe. You can very easily be hooked by things that Alcatraz nonchalantly speaks of and continues on his story like the reader should obviously know what he's talking about.

Another neat thing about Crysis: Legion is the way in which the story is told. The majority of the story is told from the first person perspective of Alcatraz as he is being interrogated. But throughout the interrogation are little excerpts from other sources. These sources include emails, broadcast intercepts, medical summaries, the Nanosuit 2 buyer's brochure, case studies, and an excerpt from a Senate Subcommittee Hearing. These sources not only break up the story but they also flesh out important plot lines and add depth to the Crysis Universe that couldn't have been included in the game. I think this was a very successful way to tell a broader story while maintaining the detail of a first person POV.

Probably the coolest aspect for me while reading Crysis: Legion was the symbiotic relationship between Alcatraz and the Nanosuit 2. Playing the game I felt like a god using the Nanosuit 2 and all the sweet abilities that came with it. No game has ever captured the feel of a super soldier quite so well. But what Watts is able to do with the book is make you question just how comfortable you are with the idea of this suit. Like anyone playing the game, at first Alcatraz is thrilled exploring the new capabilities that the suit has in store. It's only as the story goes on that he starts to question if this symbiotic relationship is such a good thing after all. The suit, while totally freaking awesome, really does have some creepy attributes (for instance being able to convert carrion into fuel). There is a real degree of philosophy here that separates Crysis: Legion from other novelizations. When you transcend the abilities of a common human soldier can you still be considered human?

I loved this novel. I highly recommend it for anyone who would like to get a deeper look into the Crysis Universe. I would also recommend it to anyone interested in the subject of transhumanism or even just military science fiction.

Watts has taken a recipe for disaster (step 1: novelize a first-person shooter) and cooked up something surprisingly fresh. "Legion" is a book that will disappoint all the right people. Gamers picking it up expecting typical ooh-rah military science fiction will be surprised to find that the novel focuses primarily on the ramifications (both physiological and psychological) of the protagonist's symbiosis with a battlefield prosthesis. With both barrels blazing at homophobes, technophobes, mercenaries, and denialists, Peter has blasted out a book that would've likely given pause to an American game developer.

Fortunately for us, Crytek is European.

This book doesn't feel as important as the work Watts does when he's working in his own universes, but it's genuinely thought-provoking nonetheless.

I picked up Crysis: Legion before playing the game. In fact, I read the first 50 pages through an online promotion over at the del rey site. If you are on the fence about purchasing the book the excerpt there will make up your mind (apparently external links are frowned upon; use google).

Six hours later, give or take, I had acquired a copy and read it from cover to cover. A few days after that, having played the game, I sat down to skim the book before writing this and shortly found that I had read the entire thing through again.

Having read some of Watts' previous work I was skeptical that his style would translate well into an action format, but his prose turns out to be portable across genres while his cutting-edge scientific and biological vocabulary are perfectly suited for a book meant to give the game more technical depth. Watts transforms the mute Alcatraz into a colorful and compelling narrator, supplemented by interviews, technical notes and even a senate subcommittee hearing, all of which are somehow not boring. At times the narrative can get a little thin as the cerebrally-enhanced Alcatraz uses metaphors too frequently in order to dumb things down for his interviewer(and the reader); at other times technical jargon may leave the reader behind; and those who have played the game may notice some blatant and deliberate retconning of the sillier bits. Such minor faults are easily forgiven in what by all accounts was a rushed project, and in fact my biggest quibbles related to the book are actually the relative shortcomings of the game, in which a number of scenes which would have been visually or narratively striking are absent or less well implemented.

More delicate readers may wish to note that the book has a decidedly dark and dystopian bent, containing a fair amount of disturbing material which was absent from the game or outside its' scope. The narrator relates mass death events which took place before the Manhattan incident and visceral accounts of the effects a fungal bioweapon has on its' human victims. Torture, exploding eyeballs and the philosophy of self may all put the reader off their lunch.

Obligatory warnings aside, Watts has taken a video game adaptation and managed to produce a book which I was unable to put down, steeped in neurophilosophy and cutting-edge science. It is high-brow and low-down, disturbing and humorous by turns. While imperfect and sometimes challenging, this reviewer found it a mind-expanding and extremely fun read.

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