Books like Robotech: The Macross Saga: Battle Cry

I usually don't read media tie-in books, mostly because a lot of them are of questionable quality that, at the worst of times, reads a lot like internet fan fiction. With the Robotech novels, however, I have mixed opinions. As most everybody knows, these short novels are based on the anime from the 1980s of the same name and novelizes all three seasons of the show. There were other Robotech novels too, but these sadly are now out of print and only the 12 books that retell the story of the show are still available, collected into four separate books (titled 'Battlecry', 'Doomsday', 'The Southern Cross' and 'The Invid Invasion' respectively). Battlecry covers the first half of the shows first season. For the most part, Jack McKinney (a pseudonym for the authors James Luceno and the late Brian Daley) stays pretty faithful to the source material. But they also attempt to fill in some of the shows' logical and story-telling holes. For example there is an entire sections of the book that shows how the SDF-1 was sent to earth, and the first expedition team sent to explore the ship after it crashed on earth. There is also a scene added that explains why the governments of earth decided to rebuild the ship. They also expand on the back stories of some of the characters like the SDF-1's creator Zor and, to a lesser degree, fan favorite Roy Fokker. There are some minor continuity screw ups however, the most infamous being the 'thinking cap' concept in where the mechs the main characters use are partly controlled by the pilot's thoughts; something that was never in the show. But these things are very minor and can be forgiven. My biggest problem with this novel and the other books in the series is the prose. Its god awful, it felt like I was reading fan fiction half the time and not something by two professional writers. This is especially true when you come to the sections that were written by James Luceno. I never thought Luceno was that great a writer to start with. But here his prose is so wooden that its almost unreadable, its as if he's not even trying. He rushes through entire scenes, some of which are actually kind of important to the plot, as if he wants to get the "boring stuff" out of the way so he can get to the big space battle. And even when he finally gets there, the space battle is boring as hell to read. The sections written by Delay, by far the more experienced writer of the two, are a little better but not by much. Delay regularly breaks the rule of "show, not tell" and he rarely grants us a peak inside the characters heads and lets us know what they are thinking and going through. If this wasn't Robotech, this book would have been in the trash long ago. But to be fair, the time constants that Luceno and Delay were under to write and publish these books was GALACTICLY ridiculous, even by today's standards. Harmony Gold, the company that owns Robotech, had them churning out a new book literally once a month, with little or no time for revision. That's insane, I don't think even the Star Wars authors are under that kind of pressure. So in that sense, I have a lot of respect for what they were able to do.Overall: As a book, Battlecry is a complete failure. But as a novelization of one of the best anime's of all time its pretty good. If you're a fan like me then pick this and the others up and check them out, otherwise stay away.