Empyrean Age might have been halfway enjoyable as a standalone book, but as an EVE Online novel it fails in a few different ways. I'll let this excellent review speak for itself as a longer description, but here are some highlights:

- Retconning of sides into clearly defined 'good' and 'bad guys'. As has been stated by CCP in multiple other places, EVE is not a white-and-black morality place; it is at best a grey-and-black morality place and usually more grey-and-grey. For TonyG, however, some sides are literally described as a 'utopia' while other factions have people raping and slaughtering each other for no apparent reason. Caldari

- Retconning of large portions of EVE history. Previously, the Ammatar were a Matari tribe who defected to the Amarr in order to secure their own continued power; now they are super sekrit agents who actually defected to save another group of Matari from the mean ol' Amarr... even though those Matari wouldn't actually be under threat for some time yet. Previously, Insorum was a rare compound held only in comparatively tiny samples, much of it by capsuleer loyalist groups of various stripes; now, the Republic gets piles and piles of the stuff due to the power of handwavium, which brings us to...

- Almost hilarious amounts of handwavium applied in order to keep specific plot points going. Need an entire national defense system taken down? Why yes, this one enlisted man can easily do this! Need to reinforce how poor and defenseless the Republic has been before Hero Shakor comes to defend it? Well of course the Amarr will have infiltrated every aspect of the Republic's government (and still are inept enough not to notice the enormous fleet they are building).

- Finally, the sex scenes. Dear God the sex scenes; more than any other aspect, this is what people have told me made them just stop reading. Look, you want me to know someone is a bad guy? Okay, that's fine - you don't need to write a graphic child-slave-orgy scene to prove it, let alone so many sex scenes.



Templar One is, in many respects, a far superior novel. TonyG manages to at least keep the plot moving and tone down the obvious-good-and-evil somewhat while resolving some wall-banger issues left from TEA.. In other issues, though, it's painfully bad as well; for instance, a massive battle involving fleets from all 4 nations and multiple supercapital assets occurs in a key system; yet nowhere else in the EVE universe are we ever given a hint that this battle happened. In another point, a character from The Empyrean Age is selected for an Amarr supersoldier program... despite him not being a soldier, and the Amarr having several different flavors of far-better-trained and far-more-loyal soldiers available for this program; this particular plotline goes about as well as you'd expect something that silly to.