When Eric Nylund wrote not one, but THREE novelizations for HALO, I thought that maybe game novel tie-ins had emerged from the annals of worthless potboiler and amateur hack writers and migrated to a respectable position of fiction. I've read Eric Nylund, I liked Eric Nylund, and let me tell you something, Keith Candido is no Eric Nylund.

The C&C 3 novelization has a lot of awful, awful literary mistakes in it, too many to list, but I'll try. The narrative flow roughly mirrors that of the actual game, like a side story, starting with the Philadelphia being destroyed and following a GDI division from San Diego to Australia and to Italy. Also throw in the beginning for good measure is a trip by a journalist to a Yellow Zone and GDI Boot Camp. Unfortunately with only 289 large-font pages this turns into a very very shallow mess. Nothing is elaborated upon, save for the harsh effects of Tiberium, and there is something outright "magical" in the vagueness of the author's descriptions of high-tech weaponry. Each battle in the book lasts about 10 pages, with the rest devoted to building up to each of these trite plot excuses.

Even the first 50 pages or so are a complete trainwreck, focusing on the Philadelphia and some easily written off characters. The development he devotes to these three or four characters who are killed off less than 100 pages into the book is mind-boggling. I actually felt like I had wasted my time reading them. With only 290 pages to work with, it was a severe mistake on Candido's part to fork the plot as jumping between the viewpoints of two different characters on different parts of the globe. The net result is that both are completely uninteresting.

I don't know where Candido's experience with military matters comes from (the pretentious quote in the dedication about how people who fight enjoy life in a way the protected never know led me to believe he had some real semblance of it), but it's a far cry from the awe-inspiring descriptions of John Steakley's Armor, or Eric Nylund's ship combat in the HALO novels. Everything is boring, like an observer in a C&C multiplayer game giving you the play-by-play. It was impossible for me to imagine the fighting in any way other than the C&C isometric view, and his use of location and orientation cues are sadly lacking. If you need any exact evidence of Candido's lack of military knowledge, flip to page 261 and laugh as he refers to the fuselage of an Orca aircraft as its "hull".

Finally, Candido has issues with religion and etymology. Horrible issues. The entire book is laden with newspeak cursing like "Fotze" and "Crack that". I'm surprised he wasn't so bold as to put "Shazbot" in there as well. The end result is awful, as Candido actually has to spend the first half of the novel TELLING YOU when the characters are cursing. The other colossal trainwreck comes from Candido's schizophrenic views on religion. Throughout the book on its face he tries to represent a multicultural world, with screams of drill instructors saying "Allah, God, Buddha, or whatever you worship", but whenever one of his characters takes a deity's name in vain, it comes out as "Goddess". Apparently in the year 2047 not only are the words "Fuck" and "Shit" obsolete, but Wicca has replaced Christianity as the world's dominant religion.

As a coup de grace of bad taste and borderline Mary Sueism, Michael McNeil of Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun fame appears as the division commander of the 22nd, completely clueless while his subordinate corporals and sergeants are fast thinkers. While I never thought of him as a good protagonist, Candido succeeds in changing him from campy to a complete idiot. How can I take a character seriously who brags about having impaled Kain on a steel beam in the last Tiberium War on one page but on the next has almost no control over his division and makes nepotistic promotion decisions?

This book is awful. The Command and Conquer "Canon" is fairly thin as it stands, but the answer to a lack of background information is NOT to place a hack writer at its helm. Writing Star Trek magic-technobabble is a lot different from writing for a near-future sci fi novel. Please, EA, the next time you try to publish a C&C media tie-in novel, hire somebody with a baccalaureate in the physical sciences and who can appreciate contemporary culture rather than turning it into a new age hippie meets cold hard reality screwup. Thanks. ( )