The Name is Snake, Solid Snake

Book report on Metal Gear Solid by Raymond Benson

The notes I took for this is almost 3 years old. During the initial pandemic related lockdown, yours truly took the chance to read every science fiction novel on their book shelf. Some real bangers if “Hugo Award winner” is your jam. Then there is this airport thriller ass airport thriller. I somehow took 6 pages worth of notes and now unleash it onto the world as the “conclusion” of my own MGS’ quarter centennial “trilogy”.

12 years late to this party

Metal Gear Solid is the novelization of a 1998 game with the same name, written originally in English by Raymond Benson. Published early 2008, this book can be seen as more of a tie-in product to that year’s Playstation 3 exclusive summer blockbuster Metal Gear Solid 4 Guns of Patriots. My 18 years old self back then was somewhat an ideal reader of this book.

Yours truly encountered MGS series at the age of 16 back in 2006. That teenager had played through Metal Gear Solid 2 Substance on PC twice despite the poor port, a worse localization into Chinese and a generally negative view on this game. The same year, a file book of MGS in Chinese was published with DVD disc “Snake Eater the Movie edited by Hideo Kojima” attached. While watching it cannot replace actually playing MGS3, I still caught up with the story as far back then.

So, with no access to and no interest in playing the 1998 original on Playstation, this book would have made sure my 18 years old self know the references in MGS4. Of course, playing the original for hot second in MGS4 would still go over the teenager’s head. Shadow Mosses would have been a place they only read about.

But I did not read the book back then, instead I read at the age of 30 all those years later, after binging through MGS 1 to 4 in 2014. Maybe it’s for the better as the difference between game and book is more interesting. Otherwise, there is not much to say about an airport thriller.

Male gaze of combat operative

In many ways, Benson seemingly took this opportunity to make up for the fact that his Bond books writing career started with Tomorrow Never Dies instead of Golden Eye. 1998’s Metal Gear Solid is a game clearly inspired by the 1995 Bond flick, with the whole Janus reveal lifted wholesale and stretched long. The whole Bond villain being another spy commando just like Bond is not hard to see. Though, the usual male gaze agent 007 cast at the women around him is implanted onto the seemingly asexual Solid Snake is a weird change of pace.

For starter, Snake calling every woman he sees “babe”. This is acceptable compared to him calling Meryl Silverburgh a “teenager” while she is in her mid-20s. The book did say her age, only that she was 10 during the Gulf War. This story, according to the game, took place in 2005. Or at least after September eleventh 2001, since Snake thought about the disaster of that day while climbing that two towers in Shadow Mosses, a fairly action packed segment of the game. “Girl” would also make sense with Snake being older than her, but teenager went bit too far on the patronizing women direction. Well, “spank and kiss” is literally the way Snake wanted to show affection…

Or maybe it’s just that English writers would just push action hero archetype towards being assholes. Solid Snake’s comment on FOXHOUND members during Mission Briefing is an example. The original Japanese amounts to “Something out of comic books”. The English translation in the PS game became the laconic “Lovely bunch.” Then this book changed into two lines: calling Decoy Octopus “talented follow” and the whole band “circus sideshow” quite insultingly. Snake do “enjoy all the killing” since he thought “nothing took the place of a living target”.

Maybe to MGS “purist”, the more action hero approach of this book is too much, Snake goes in armed with SCOM pistol and snaps a lot of necks. He even drops one-liners. But I guess with the hero called “combat operative” and no focus on sneaking mission, one might as well just enjoy whatever action is on offer here.

Live by retcon, die by retcon

Perhaps people who had played the 1998 game still needs to read this book before they went into MGS4. The tie-in aspect of the book lies in how it would introduce retcons to those who thought they knew the story already.

Retcon 1

Perhaps the more immediately one is how both Hal “Otcan” Emmerich and Meryl both live, with the those two being a fake “choice matters” thing in the 1998 game. Yours truly’s playthrough in 2014 was with Hal living in the end. My head cannon being that Hal needs Snake saving him while Ocelot probably took the seemingly dead but just unconscious Meryl hostage in case Colonel Cambell went after him. But the book got other ideas. To foreshadow Hal’s heroic resecure of all the hostages out of Big Shell, he liberated all other hostages out of Shadow Mosses.

Retcon 2

Sequel feeding back all around!

Before the shootout between Ocelot and Snake, the older man practically recapped the story of Snake Eater, which was of course not yet written back in 1998.d

Psycho Mantis would spoil MGS4 a little bit before he died, which amounted to “MGS4, coming this summer” back in 2008.

Emma Emmerich was mentioned too, somehow teasing both MGS2 and the sequel book Benson was yet to write.

Retcon 3

This is something that got retconned in 2010 and 2015. Master Miller is a healthy man with all his limbs in this book, still punching a sandbag before some ill shit happens, which is nothing like the broken man in Phantom Pain. He is third generation American Japanese, which was retconned into a bastard son between an American solider and a Japanese woman in Peace Walker. Miller’s service record includes SAS, Green Berets, Marine and of course FOXHOUND, but in the series’ 2010s installments he is just a mercenary before FOXHOUND.

Rection 4

This is actually the first thing one would read when they read this book. Dr. Clark, a woman speaking in “seductive and elegant voice” showed a U.S president(probably Nixon) the birth of Solid and Liquid. This is Kojima and crew putting an old trick with their language while the English translation could not catch up due to the frequency of pronouns. It’s not that Japanese language does not have pronoun, only that pronouns can be side stepped since “Dr. Clark” or “the doctor” can be used more frequently without feeling weird. So when they decided to map Dr. Clark onto lady Paramedic in MGS3, they did not have to think it as retcon.

Retcon 5

The only seen masked Johnny, the one who takes too much shit, is described as “tall and blond”, like how he was shown in MGS4 promotion material. Also, he was “promoted” from bit player prison guard to lead computer-technician on Shadow Mosses. Strange how Hal had nothing to say about the guy.

Pop culture

A fun thing about airport thriller written in English is the pop culture references author drops. The notes yours truly took is mostly about Psycho Mantis and Metal Gear Rex.

PM

Psycho Mantis is described as “a hideously scarred creature with a face that Darth Vader or Frankenstein’s Monster wouldn’t have wanted to possess” after he was defeated. An influential piece of science fiction cinema and the first science fiction novel, you sure are classy Mr. Benson.

Speak of Psycho Mantis, the fight against him is of course not about the non-existence second slot of controllers. Instead, it’s a deep probe into Solid Snake’s childhood involving a theme park in Oregon. It’s something another video game would do more than a year after this book’s publishment. It reminded me of the third Scarecrow fight in Batman Arkham Asylum at least.

MGR

Rex “resembled the hardware appearance of Transformer toys or spaceship in post-Star Wars science fiction movies”, not “hide the fact that it was completely mechanized” in this book. Guess the writer is as confused as yours truly regard how little this design had inspired merch.

Verdict

Reading this between Robert A Heinlein’s Hugo Awards winners sure did not do this book any favor in my eyes. Plus being a typical airport thriller, reading it at home would bring out a certain dryness in the text. But if you need to take a flight recently, there are worse to kill time than reading this.