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Dredd: Black Atlantic
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22nd
April 04 |
 Judge
Dredd: Black Atlantic
Simon Jowett
& Peter J Evans
Review by Richmond
Clements
What to expect:
Judge Dredd and an ill prepared team of bickering judges are on board a vast
Black Atlantic cityship, tracking down the ultimate bioweapon. High seas adventure
and explosive action.
Review:
This is the third novel in the ongoing series of Judge Dredd novels by Black Flame
publishing, the first being Gordon Rennie’s Dredd Vs Death, which was followed
by Bad Moon Rising by David Bishop.
Both these writers
are sure hands for the subject. Rennie is a scriptwriter of some note, and Bishop
has previously written some great Dredd novels, and the best in the Big Finish
audio series.
So, it was with
some trepidation that I approached this novel. Why? I hear you ask. Well, I’ll
start by telling you what went wrong with the last attempt at a series of Dredd
novels. You give a commission to a writer, no doubt a very good one, for a Dredd
novel and instead of researching the character and the world in which he lives,
they pull from off the shelf some hoary sci-fi plot that no other publisher is
interested in, and plonk Dredd down in the middle of it.
But the trepidation?
You ask again.
This book is written
by Simon Jowett and Peter J Evans. Who are they, and what do they know about Dredd?
Jowett, I have discovered, once wrote a Vector 13 tale. Evans, according to his
bio, writes for computer games magazines and such things. So, we’ve got
two writers who, on first impressions, look like they’re not the ideal choice
for writing Dredd. Do they know what they’re doing? Well, read on...
While investigating
illegal bio-weapons, which have been built by a rogue Tek-Judge, Dredd discovers
that one of the bio weapons has been taken on board a cityship. So, with his team
of judges, Dredd must board the ship, and stop the creature before it, well, kills
everything.
I know, I know,
it sounds all too familiar. We’ve all seen Alien; we’ve all seen Predator.
Yes, the story does bare some similarities to these movies but to be fair, not
all that many. You’ve got the small group of warriors up against it in an
industrial landscape, and you’ve got a killing machine that can turn invisible.
You have also got,
for the first act anyway, precious little Dredd in the tale. He makes an appearance
early on, and they writers make a big mistake immediately. Maybe it’s a
joke, I don’t know, but it had the affect of setting me on the wrong foot,
as far as the rest of the novel was concerned. They did this with five simple
words, "I knew you’d say that." And while I’m nitpicking,
at one point, Dredd holsters his gun on his belt. The five simple words might
have been a misfired joke, but this is just a plain mistake. Let’s be more
careful in the future, eh lads?
Dredd is sidelined
while we, the reader, are introduced to the various other characters, inhabitants
of the cityship, all mutants to boot. This has the desired effect. It is a simple
rule in writing: the reader has to identify with the character before they can
feel anything when that character is in distress. By concentrating on the ships
crew, we get to know them, and so do care later, when the shit hits the fan.
The cityship itself
is a great idea, though not, I believe, a new one. I’m pretty sure that
the early Dave Stone novel Wetworks featured a cityship, or at least, something
very like it. Nevertheless, Jowett and Evans are clearly having a lot of fun figuring
out how the whole thing works, physically and politically, and give some vivid
descriptions of the environment.
When Dredd does
eventually join in the story, along with his team of judges, the story moves up
a notch after a rather slow first act. The
action scenes, when they happen, are well written and kinetic, and, when it is
necessary, brutal and visceral.
As for their take
on Dredd’s character, they manage to sidestep side step this problem. A
lot of the time, we see Dredd through the eyes of their mutant guide, and are
never treated to what’s going on inside the big man's head. Dredd does have
a nice line in black humour and understatement here too, with some funny, though
not classic, one liners.
So, the plot pushes
along smoothly through the second act, as disaster is heaped upon misfortune,
and it’s all tied up nicely in the third act. Or not. In fact, the plot
contains some genuine surprises, well, they were to me, anyway, with a number
of plot threads left nicely hanging.
All in all, it’s
a pretty good book. It won’t set the world on fire with its new take on
the sci-fi genre, nor will it send the public to sleep in droves. It’s a
good book, and an entertaining read, and when the action gets going, a very good
book indeed. I think the best thing I can say is this: I’d trust these two
guys with Dredd, if and when they write another one of these.
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