Review by C.J. Bunce
It is an enormous shame the brand-new novel Borderlands: Debt or Alive, available now here at Amazon, isn’t the adaptation of the new Eli Roth movie Borderlands, starring Cate Blanchett, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, and Jack Black. Why? Because it’s the coolest sci-fi novel you’re going to read this year, a space Western in the realm of Cowboy Bebop, with dialogue so snappy and current you’d think writer Anthony Burch inherited the reins from Joss Whedon writing his first seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Rob Thomas scripting Veronica Mars. It’s a little bit Guardians of the Galaxy meets Thelma and Louise meets Valerian and Laureline as two con artist sisters decide it’s high-time they got the ultimate payoff so they can retire in luxury.
Both the novel and movie are tie-ins to the Gearbox and 2K Games video game series Borderlands–one of the biggest selling video game series of all time—but like Resident Evil and Assassin’s Creed and so many other games, it has multiple layers, stories, and characters, so the stars of this novel aren’t those you’ll find in the movie.
The first person, “looter shooter” game might as well be set exactly in the space Western, sci-fi setting of Cowboy Bebop. Borderlands: Debt or Alive is a continuation of the Telltale Games spin-off game Tales from the Borderlands, focusing on sisters Fiona and Sasha, two street urchins from Pandora, Sasha being the often dead, but easily resurrected long-distance girlfriend of “himbo” Rhys–Rhys, Fiona, and Sasha are all featured in the spin-off game.
A major secondary character is Gaige the red-haired “mechromancer” Vault Hunter, a character from the game Borderlands 2, which was also written by Anthony Burch. Grown-up from the games, Gaige still has her loyal flying killer robot Deathtrap and her immense social media following as she seeks out the killer of her father. Gaige’s relationship with Deathtrap borders on that affair-type thing Lando had going with the Millennium Falcon pilot in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Deathtrap or DT is a robot Chewbacca with a built-in weapons arsenal. Players of the game also will find a brief nod or two to Handsome Jack, and the characters as girls are introduced as they meet a father figure named Felix, who schools them in the ways of villainy. Fiona, Sasha, and Gaige are older here than in the games, but how much older we don’t really know.
Vaults are full of riches and sometimes great powers–think of a character in a video game snatching a purse that suddenly explodes with prizes. So instead of bounty hunters, Vault Hunters are after these sporadic caches of riches stashed across the galaxy–and nobody seems to know who put them there.
Burch knows this world inside and out, so well he can drop in fresh and witty dialogue from our universe that fits every situation perfectly. Each chapter is from the perspective of either Fiona, Sasha, Gaige, and even Deathtrap. When he writes Fiona, it’s first person, and he uses footnotes from Fiona as asides (something Elizabeth C. Bunce used similarly in her five Myrtle Hardcastle mystery novels), a rare convention used well here for laughs. Burch also incorporates a half-dozen side journeys by way of Choose Your Own Adventure trips, where the reader gets to choose where the story goes. Burch’s best voice is as Fiona, who is sassy and smart–for some reason I couldn’t help but cast her as Allison Scagliotti from Warehouse 13, always sparring with sister Sasha, who in my mind was played by an early Eliza Dushku from the Buffy years.
The story begins as Fiona, with Rhys and Vaughn and some others, finds a Vault, which emits a genie in the form of a Claptrap (the robots from the game). Fiona gets one wish, and chooses, of any form of wealth or reward… a rare action figure, a Typhon DeLeon Vaultlander limited edition action figure to be specific, and one she and Sasha must travel to Eden-5 to sell for top dollar. This is when the sisters encounter Gaige. Gaige is brilliant and unique, especially confronting the novel’s key villain Countess Holloway, one of the many billionaires on the planet Eden-5. Holloway is the prospective action figure buyer, who offers a bigger reward to the sisters.
The sisters find themselves retired, and spend money hand over fist. You know where movies end with the clever protagonists on a beach toasting each other with little umbrellas in their cocktails for their execution of some monumental undertaking resulting in a win of all the cash required to retire to Anuba? That’s pretty much where Borderlands: Debt or Alive begins. And it’s brilliant. Readers get to encounter many of the eccentric purchases, all funny. But soon the sisters need more from their lives. Ultimately they embark on a mission to help the poor, only their plans backfire. Soon enemies must come together to try to undo what has been done, although that’s difficult when the sisters’ actions result in a city burnt to the ground.
It’s the tightest writing you’ll find this year in a tie-in or sci-fi work, brilliant enough and ready-made to be the script for a Borderlands movie. You don’t need any familiarity with the video games to love this one. Just out from Titan Books in paperback, Borderlands: Debt or Alive is available now here at Amazon. The movie Borderlands is slated for release in theaters August 9, 2024.
