Waaay back in the 1990s I saw (and much enjoyed) Devlin-Emmerich Stargate. I didn't bother with the novelisation but I did pick up its sequel William A "Bill" McCay's Stargate Rebellion and - honestly, enjoyed that too. So I eagerly bought Stargate Retaliation but did not finish it. I forgot last week why 1996?7?-me got "filtered" so, seeing this book again at a library-sale for $4, I tried it again.
That McCay was following the demotic papyrus, and not the moving-hieroglyph, explains some discrepancies between what we all saw on screen and what I've been reading. Such as this frump being drawn as forty-year-old Jessica Rabbit from Texas. Might also explain why McCay's vision contributed so little to SG-1 which first season was 1997.
McCay's first book in the series, which again is the book after the novelisation which he didn't write, concerned Abydos if the US military, US politicians, and US mining-interests all jumped in on the pie of magic-minerals and FtL tech. I generally believed that the characters we met in the first movie all got justice and that McCay did well with the politics and economics of it all.
Then the third/second book happened. I can't really improve upon bullethead; I'll just say - now I remember what tossed me off the book. Mostly: it was Daniel.
Suddenly the self-insert for all us Bronze-Age mythology nerds had turned into a selfish jerk, a dumb "Foxtrot-Bravo". Now: I wouldn't actually mind this; we've all got rough edges, and Dr Jackson had got isekai'd having been just kicked out of his university and - further - wasn't necessarily everyone's buddy in the Air Force, either (or was it the Marines?). Jackson has moments of snideness in SG-1 too. My problem is that this particular character-arc belonged in McCay's first sequel-book; not after having saved Abydos a second time, this time from American Capitalism.
Shauri hadn't exactly made her case, either.
A cascade of "idiot balls", to use bullethead's term, were rained upon the plot; mostly around how trusting all the urt-men are about those two gates-to-vengeful-gods. (This will be a recurrent plot-point in SG-1. Which handles it lightyears better.)
bullethead overall thinks that the book which McCay wanted to write was the next one: Retribution. McCay acknowledges Devlin (and maybe Emmerich) for giving advice as to what sort of story this movie would develop into. Interestingly McCay had offered no such acknowledgement in Rebellion.
It's arguable McCay even needed to follow Devlin's advice; we've learnt from the Independence Day sequel what fools Devlin and Emmerich be. Mind you back then we didn't know that these two were fools; Independence Day had just come out and was just as much silly fun as was Stargate. But I wonder now if [the third act of] Independence Day was intended as that Stargate sequel. The technologically-advanced aliens are now coming to Earth.
- but that means we need a reason they're not coming to Abydos. So... was Stargate Retaliation the interquel? Suppose: McCay, simply to keep Devlin sweet, needed to bring an uneasily-peaceful Abydos to a point where Everything Falls Apart.
Ehh. All I know is that McCay did it bad.
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