Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom - Novel

Novel

Forstchen and Ohlander made a number of significant deviations from the video game with their novelization, rewriting large swathes of background information. Changes include the following:

• In the opening sequence of the novel, Blair accidentally replays a holographic message from Rachel Coriolis, establishing why she left him.
• Catscratch and Vagabond are missing almost entirely; they do not defect with Blair and their fate after the loss of the Lexington is unknown. Sosa romances Blair instead of Catscratch, despite a few false starts in which Blair points out that he could be her grandfather (to which Sosa replies, "you'd have to have started early").
• Maniac serves as Blair's second-in-command and begins to grow into the role, developing maturity and no small amount of leadership skills. At the end of the novel he is given a long-overdue promotion to Lieutenant Colonel and assigned as Wing Commander aboard a light carrier. (Despite this, during Marshall's next appearance in Wing Commander Prophecy he is still a free-wheeling, irresponsible major; this inconsistency in plot and/or canon has not been resolved.)
• The Border Worlds' technology is totally rewritten, replacing the video game's Banshee, Vindicator and Avenger with Wing Commander II-era fighters.
• Tolwyn, though stripped of his rank and ultimately a suicide, is acknowledged by the novel's characters as something of a tragic hero, a man taking on the bitter and unwelcome job of ensuring humanity's survival at any cost—essentially reversing the moral of the video game by suggesting that the ends justify the means. The other difference is that Tolwyn's sentence is life imprisonment in the novel whereas it is execution in the game.
• Blair is known primarily as the "Heart of the Tiger," his Kilrathi warrior-name and the most famous title of the man who ended the war. Pilots' call signs are often bestowed by friends or instructors, and this particular call sign allows Blair to use the considerable weight of his celebrity status as a weapon in combat.