V: The Chicago Conversion (Book #4)


 The Chicago Conversion is an interesting V book. The first two either cover the original series or run parallel to it. The third one features the TV cast running around in an attempt to capture Diana. This is effectively the first one that falls in that gap between the mini-series and the original series, and chooses to fix any problems with continuity by setting itself in a completely different locale, with a completely different cast. 

This has strengths and weaknesses. A strength is obviously that there is less chance of it contradicting the story that we see in other media, but a weakness is that the cast from the TV show is already well defined, and the book has to introduce a cast from scratch. I'm guessing that they were also written at pace, and so we tend to see a selection of common tropes appearing in the books. In this one, for instance, we have a hero called Sam Walker, an athletic Vietnam vet, a bit rough around the edges, a reluctant fighter driven by the loss (at the hands of the Visitors) of the love of his life. We have a power hungry leader (Alicia) in charge of the Visitor's Mother Ship, and we have a load of set pieces taking place in the shadows, on motherships, on football fields.

The twist here is that there is a troop of Visitors who found a batch of the antidote to the red toxin, so Alicia is using them to try and keep control of a resistance force in Chicago. As you'd expect, there's a spy involved in the resistance, but our brave heroes manage to overcome them. George W Proctor does his best within the restrictions he has been set, and it is an effective romp - it's notable though that it would be a much more enjoyable book if it had the cast that we knew from the TV show. Some of them do make a cameo towards the end and the book is instantly more readable at that point. 

But it all ends well - our heroes get away, the visitors live to fight another day, and there's nothing in here to contradict either the TV show that came before it nor the one that came after. On those terms, it's a success, and it's definitely a better constructed story than "The Pursuit of Diana"

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