First Flight

Chris Claremont First Flight (1981)
I tried and I tried and I almost did it, but with forty pages to go, my reading glands rebelled and my hand reached for something else as though under the influence of some mysterious external force. I've got a lot of time for Chris Claremont, the man who wrote the X-Men comic book for seventeen years, but whoever told him to try his hand at a novel should take a long, hard look at themselves. I first noticed this title on the shelves of Half Price Books about a decade ago, and I've never been tempted because, to judge a book mostly by its Top Gun-esque cover, it looked fucking terrible.

Well, what do you know?

Somewhere under here, there's a decent story in the general vein of Heinlein, and Claremont knows how to put a sentence together; but pull back and you'll notice that the arresting image he's conjured is actually sprayed on the side of a van heading for Los Angeles with the best of the Doobie Brothers blasting from the eight track and the driver, who would probably benefit from a trip to the barbers, has just addressed you as man. The problem is that where Claremont has been father to many a beautifully written comic book, they're mostly written in collaboration with artists, and if I've taken anything from First Flight it's that the art of a good Claremont story does a share of the heavy lifting. It's not actually bad, but once we've established the narrative with snappy dialogue, it feels as though something is missing, that we should be staring at some galaxy-spanning vista drawn by John Byrne or whoever; because as it stands, the prose communicates very little of the wonder of space travel or our first encounter with an alien species, instead leaving the reader with a vague feeling of it having happened. I found myself drifting off because the characterisation is the only thing which holds the attention, and the characterisation is actually a lot like what I read in those X-Men comics all those years ago. At one point I noticed that our people were on a different spacecraft, having apparently made the transference while I was thinking about something else.

While, we're here, notice how the cover depicts spunky young pilots climbing into their individual starfighters - or summink - ready to scramble, or whatever it is that starfighters do. Well, whatever is going on here, isn't actually in the book so far as I can tell.