contains spoilers






I only started reading this book so I'm not very far into it, but here are some thoughts about the first forty pages...

+ It's very movie-centric. I suppose this is essential to engage a casual audience of non-fans. It does draw on other canonical sources too, but mostly from the live action movie. Second to that it makes a lot of references to the G1 cartoon. It then makes few references to the G1 comics and even less frequent references to Beast Wars. I'm personally a bit disappointed by this as I think the G1 comics and Beast Wars would offer more to draw from in terms of having this kind of discussion, but I guess the authors felt it more prudent to rely more heavily on the movies and cartoon to make the book more accessible to non-fans.

+ The book seems to disregard the fact that Primus is a multiversal singularity and treats the G1 cartoon Transformers' genesis as being purely from the Quintessons. I personally think that they should have either accepted Primus as a multiversal singularity (as it is officially canon) or made a brief disclaimer stating that they're intentionally disregarding the retcon... even if done as a footnote.

+ The book begins by extensively almost implanting this assumption that the Transformers are descendant from machines originally built by organic life forms; suggesting that technological civilisations, given time, will be able to upload their minds into robotic bodies (much like the Cybermen in Dr. Who or even the Gobots! And of course the inhabitants of Gorlam Prime); implying that Transformers would have a similar genesis. At first this suggestion irked me as I immediately thought that it was rubbish... after all we know that the original 13 Transformers (one of which being the Fallen) was created by Primus and that the Transformers race are descendant from the original 13; another multiversal singularity. But since then I'm wondering if there could be some merit in what the book is suggesting; and I think it would've been better if the book had tried to draw more canonical sources to support this hypothesis. For instance, we know that Cybertron was originally an organic world before Primus reformatted it as a machine planet. This was established in 1. Beast Machines, 2. G1 cartoon (Trans-Organics, arguably the Quintessons are also transorganic/technorganic), 3. G1 comics (Cybertronian demons). There's also the fact that Cybertron has water and an Earth-like atmosphere in every continuity (humans are always able to walk around on Cybertron without the aid of a spacesuit). Furthermore one of the oldest mysteries in Transformers is _why_ they have cockpits/driver compartments, even in their original Cybertronian modes. Who are these cockpits designed for? I think Dreamwave was working on trying to answer this question but I never really got into it since their company collapsed.

+ The book provides interesting (and very extensive) justifications for why First Contact with extra-terrestrial sentient transforming robots is actually more realistic/probable than contact with organic extra-terrestrials. Furthermore it goes on to also explain that the way in which Transformers came in contact with Earth (i.e.: unintentionally / amidst a civil war / hiding in disguise) is also a more probable scenario than say an intentionally open visitation from a peace-loving pacifistic species. This was quite fascinating to read.