Book: V – The Florida Project

I have been devouring these V books over the past several months to dive deep into the lore and get ideas for the Savage Worlds tabletop RPG campaign I may run. When I was a teen, I was obsessed with the mini-series, the books and the TV show. Unfortunately, the writing in the TV series proved to be less than I expected and I only read a few of the books before the series ended and everyone had moved on to something else. Going back now as a 50+ year old, I watched the series again and saw the decline in the writing, as well as in the books. I even started down the DC Comics path just to see if anything got any better.

Admittedly, there were a lot of plot holes and unexplained things in the TV products that proved problematic to writers of all the media associated to it. The property could not evolve past the two successful mini-series without really departing from the original concept. Not enough in the mini-series was laid to really give it that change of evolution, perhaps because they did not realize what they had.

The novels, I am learning, we just quick projects for writers to cash in on a property and get a few bucks. Obviously written for young adults, these were small books telling stories all over the world, sometimes circling back to the original characters while other times creating new ones fighting totally new resistance wars. The Florida Project caught my eye because it was in a different place other than LA and the blurb hints to a plot involving bio-engineered hybrids. This interested me greatly because it sounded like a perfect RPG adventure plot.

Set in the time period of the TV series, where the red dust is still a concerned in the more colder regions of the planet and less so in the temperate zones, the Visitors wage a war to take what they can from Earth and fulfill their Great Leaders mandate. Florida is obviously in the temperate zones, and the Everglades is where the central plot of this book takes place.

We are first introduced to Jack and Sabrina, two people in a relationship who live into Florida and lead totally opposite lives. Sabrina is a highly sought-after bio-engineer. Jack is a football player for the Miami Dolphins (written back in the day when you didn’t need the NFL’s permission to use their property names). Sabrina vanishes, whisked away by a well-known bio-engineer friend of hers, saying he has a offer she can’t refuse. Jack, unaware of this, tried to find her. This is the basic set of the plot.

Unfortunately, it immediately went in a direction I had hoped it wouldn’t. It brought in Ham and Chris, two of the main characters from the mini-series and the original books. It’s as if to say “LA to the rescure!” I am sure as a kid, I would have loved that but today, as a salty old man, I think the East Coast could handle itself without help from California. I would have been more interesting to bring in original characters, perhaps part of the resistance there in Florida. However, adding more characters would need more backstory and thus more pages and I am sure the authors were limited it pages. I rolled with this because Ham and Chris were two of my favorite characters. Michael Ironside played Ham in the shows and I have always enjoyed the characters he played.

The plot does in fact read like an RPG adventure in a lot of ways. There is a facility hidden deep in the Everglades, under the cover of holograms, that has been snatching people from the local native American reserve. We eventually learn that is the brain child of one Dr. Morrow (I can’t believe that name is by mistake) where he performs genetic experiments. At first, you believe Sabrina was brought onboard to work in the experiments but that changes as the book goes on.

The rest of the book follows Ham, Chris and Jack work with the local tribesman to plan what to do about the Visitors secret base. First they gather intel, only to be attacked and some captured. While one group works to plan an assault, the captured folks are exposed the truth of the compound – hybrid human-visitor-gator soliders. A big battle happens at the end, of course, that pulls in the other characters from the show as they help supply the small resistance of locals with arms.

I like this book because it decided to build on the lore and do something I think every book should – do something with the lore that they could not afford to do on TV. This book definitely had an over the top concept and really explored the lore. They added some other tech that TV could not do – hover platforms used by the guards. My only complaint is pulling in the characters from LA but I can understand.