Review Era of the Eclipse

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. It’s based on a TTRPG. Would it be like the novelization of a movie or some of the books from the Star Trek or Star Wars universes? Would it be cheesy or great? Well, it turned out to be way better than I expected. There were a few things that came through a little bit game-y, but they were few and far between. The two examples that stood out to me were a character who created a psychic bond with her companions allowing them to speak to each other a “battle mind”

and this quote from near the end of the book:

“when you’ve got a place and it’s underground and it’s full of puzzles and traps and there’s treasure at the end of it, usually you’d call that a dungeon, not a temple.”

And really that stood out mostly because that’s what we call a dungeon in TTRPGs, but in the real world dungeon == jail.

Those nitpicks aside, this book has a framing device of with 2 of the Starfinder Iconics (named characters that represent some of the ancestries/classes in the game and appear in the marketing materials and short stories) joining the Starfinder Society. It’s not a perfect analogy, but in Paizo’s games the Pathfinder and Starfinder societies are like Explorer’s Clubs from 1800s novels (and real life?) They are given what looks like grunt work to prove themselves and they end up finding a journal from the time of The Gap. This is where this novel really shines.

I’m new to Starfinder (which debuted in 2017), but here’s a quick backstory that’s relevant to this novel: Pathfinder - like D&D - is a sword and sorcery TTRPG. You play as bards, clerics, wizards, and so on in a roughly medieval world. Starfinder is that same solar system, but thousands of years in the future. The Starfinder game materials tell you that there was a period called The Gap that takes place a few hundred years before the present. After the gap the planet Golarion (where Pathfinder takes place) has disappeared and people’s memories of the time before the gap have been wiped. Only people who are extremely longed lived have memories from before the gap, but even they have memory missing from the Gap period. Also, all books, computers, photographs, etc during the gap were wiped or corrupted. I read that and I thought - neat - that gives the game designers room to play with thanks to this gap that no one can solve. (Also the gods ignore any questions about it)

But what makes this novel brilliant is that the journal is from right when the Gap happens. And it presents how terrifying it would be for everyone to suddenly have all their memories wiped and also not be able to look things up on computers. It humanized the event to me and made it real. The narrator’s jokey and upbeat attitude keeps the novel from becoming depressing or full-on horror, but I know I’ll never look at The Gap the same way.

If you’re still with me at the end, but aren’t a Starfinder player, from what I can tell, the author wrote this book to be approachable for people who are into science fantasy, but aren’t familiar with the source material. He often describes the ancestries (eg Ysoki, a humanoid rat) and anything else you might need to know. So if you’re looking for something different to read, it might be worth a shot.

You can also read this review on my Storygraph account or Goodreads

• Starfinder