About time someone mentioned Star Wars
 

So I know that the whole Expanded Universe thing has been around since forever in vastly varying quality, but I've recently gotten into a Star Wars mood again and couldn't help picking up a book that caught my eye.

The book is called Shatterpoint, and it takes place during the Clone Wars, following Mace Windu's adventure on a jungle planet which just happens to be his homeworld. It's well-written, at least in my uneducated opinion, and it gives a lot of insight into the actions of one of my favourite characters in Star Wars. It also plays heavily on the way that a Jedi has to have great strength of will to avoid straying to the Dark Side. I haven't finished it yet but I'm about halfway through and have enjoyed every bit so far.

The quality of the book surprised me, actually. I had always been under the opinion that most of the Expanded Universe stuff was part cash-in, part fanfiction. Looking at the back of the chronologically farthest book so far, it turns out that Princess Leia and Han Solo's son has become a sith lord somehow and killed Luke Skywalker's wife. Also, Chewbacca's been dead for a while. It made me wonder... does George Lucas actually support any of this?

I dunno about "support", but all major events like those that you spoiler'd do hafta get his stamp of approval.

If you enjoyed Shatterpoint you should totally buy the upcoming Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor by the same author. Because Matt Stover deserves your money.

EDIT: Oh, and also his novelization of Episode III too, if you haven't read that. Do it for Mirai Gen!

As for myself, I stopped reading Star Wars EU after the New Jedi Order series. Not that I'm unhappy with it, but just that I've been busy with other books for quite some time. I'm really quite far behind now...

My favorite Star Wars EU novel is and always will be I, Jedi by Michael Stackpole. I don't care that Corran Horn is a Marty Sue.

I also stopped really reading Star Wars EU around nine years ago.

It's funny, I've always felt like making more stories after the Star Wars movies was pointless and needlessly indulgent. Probably why I love the KOTOR universe. But the NJO series has been so well received I should probably pick it up.

Than again I'm impossibly bad at picking up new things that aren't video games so I'm probably talking out my ass right now.

The thing about the NJO series, and why I felt it worked so well, is that it took all the barely-connected novels of varying quality of the Bantam publishing era and forged a universe that felt like it had a coherent chronology behind it. Even going so far as to include characters exclusive to young reader novels and making them major players in the series. Greg Keyes and Troy Denning did this best.

Well, that and NJO has Traitor, my favorite Stover SW novel. (I only neglected it previously because it makes little sense without the x-odd books that come before it.)

This right here. Words cannot describe my love for I, Jedi.

I also liked some of the Jedi Apprentice series (I believe that's what it was called) of the time with Qui-Gon and Obi Wan before Ep. 1.

You know what just depressed me? I just realized I've been reading Star Wars EU since 1994 (when the last novel of Zahn's first trilogy came out in paperback). On one hand it makes me realize how long ago that was and I start to feel old. On the other hand, goddamn was I young when I started reading these. O.o

That's all well and good but the reason I avoid it is because I like having characters go through plot changes, and lots of the Star Wars novels feel like "Luke and Leia save the day". I picked up the novel when Leia was pregnant with the twins and went to the planet with the cat-people, and it kind of bored me.

How much of the NJO features the main cast of the original movies?

Once NJO rolled around it got lame...I mean I was so pissed when they killed off Chewie I just didn't want anything to do with the EU anymore and well I've actually written everything after NJO off as well. As far as I can tell it's only gotten worse and worse...I do own 2 NJO books but only because Stackpole wrote them and I have all his other SW books. Thank God for Timothy Zahn not getting sucked in to the cesspool that is NJO and that series after it...I bought one of those too because it had Boba Fett on the cover...and guess what? they gave Boba Fett fucking cancer...I mean what the fuck?

So I'm just going to stick with the good old stuff because I really don't want anything to do with the shit they're foysting off on the fans now...Not that there wasn't crap in the older books either (the tales of the bounty hunters story about Boba Fett? what the hell was up with that...good thing K. W. Jeter did everything right in his Bounty Hunters Wars books a trilogy that everyone should read and no one should miss out on...and let's not forget Children of the Jedi and the Twilight Planet...those two weren't so fantastic...and some others) At least the story was moderatly cohesive back then...before George Lucas came back and messed up the time line with the prequels...

Now I know that Lucas is the one who made it and blah blah blah...he abandoned his creation for almost 2 decades...then once people fill in the gaps he says "Fuck that" and just makes his own timeline throwing all of that off...and then not only does he make 3 shoddy movies the books became progressively worse starting with NJO...I can tell you the exact moment when it just about all went to hell...when Timothy Zahn's Hand of Thrawn duology was released. After that it was open season and we were flooded with NJO crap. Even Stackpole's books didn't help the situation. There have, I'll admit, been some bright spots like Zahn's 3 most recent additions (Survivor's Quest, Outbound Flight, and Alliegence) and Tatooinee Ghost, and Alan Dean Foster's return to the Universe. I don't know about the Death Star book that just came out...but since it's not in NJO or that other one then I'm betting it's at least decent

But though the books from the 90's were only loosely connected at least most of them were good...instead of pretty much crap across the board. I mean who really wants any of the stuff that's happened in NJO and afterwards? I read these books all through my childhood...and then they just eviscerate it...Like the characters don't mean anything. The worst part is They kill off Chewie when he saves Anakin right? But then they just kill off Anakin anyways It's like they just took a big dump on every character and also in some cases what they stand for "ha ha ha Chewie's death means nothing, Admiral Ackbar dies and we gave Boba Fett cancer, Han and Leia's kid goes evil and kills Mara Jade oh and is trying to turn Mara and Luke's kid to the darkside, oh and Luke decapitates Jacen's teacher because that's just the kind of person Luke is...he couldn't kill the Emperor because he was proud to be a Jedi and fight for the light side but hey what the hell let's just have him kill brutally. Not only has the quality of stories gone down but the writing has gone down too...I haven't wasted much time on NJO or the one after but the magic of Wikipedia and other sources have kept me updated with summaries. I don't like what I see...

Part of the 90's books charm was that while they were all connected in some fasion they weren't tied down to each other. Each book and series could stretch its wings and at least come to some kind of fruition and meaning. NJO and the one after seem to be only about violence and destruction. And that really isn't the message of Star Wars...not for me.

Until next time,

Death by Stabbing

Hm. I actually disagree with quite a bit of that, and I think I'll come back to respond to it point by point when I'm not so sleepy. There is one thing I wanna point out real quick, though. Boba Fett getting cancer wasn't an invention of the Legacy series. If I remember correctly, that was mentioned way back in the Tales of the Bounty Hunters anthology (which, admittedly you did single out as disliking). But it's not anything new.

EDIT: Nevermind, gonna do it now.

As for the NJO, while it was a radical departure from what had come before, I really didn't think it was all that bad. On the contrary, I quite enjoyed some of the installments, and I really liked the concept of the Vong. I think they were probably the most interesting SW aliens introduced to date. Chewbacca dying honestly didn't bother me all that much. I mean, yeah, he was a main character and all, and it did kinda suck that they seemed to kill him off just to say, hey people can die in the SW universe now, but you know... it was kind of ridiculous that they could go through all those adventures and never get hurt. It added an urgency and suspension to the books that was altogether lacking in the Bantam era. ('Cause I mean, was there ever any doubt in any of those books that everything would be okay by the end?) I haven't read any of Legacy yet, and other than Jacen going Sith and killing Mara Jade I don't know too much about it. I do strongly dislike Jacen turning to the dark side. But only because I think it goes against his character arc from NJO, which seemed to say that he had achieved the perfect balance--had in fact become the ideal Jedi.

I'll be honest, I don't really care that much for Timothy Zahn's books--not that I dislike them, it's just I don't really see him as the end-all-be-all of Star Wars. I haven't even read his last three (own them, but haven't got around to 'em yet). I read the Bounty Hunter Wars once and didn't think they were all that great, admittedly.

I strongly disagree with the "almost everything after Hand of Thrawn (ie, the Del Rey publishing era) is crap" idea. I quite liked the majority of the Clone Wars books (that said, Jedi Trial and The Cestus Deception were totally crap). I actually think the Bantam books had a higher miss-to-hit ratio. I actually re-read through the entire Bantam line chronologically (starting with Rogue Squadron) a few years ago, reading many of them for the first time in nearly a decade, and I was surprised how many of them seemed so bad to me. I couldn't stand Kevin J Anderson's books--not even for his plots; it was his writing style that threw me off. The only ones that really stood out to me as being better on this reading were the Black Fleet Crisis books, which I remembered as taking a lot of flack for portraying the Big Three with significantly different personalities than their movie versions--but upon reading it I found that it seemed like they were actually getting some development for once! Okay, so... you haven't read them but you think the quality of the writing has gone down? How does that make any sense? Unless you just mean the plots, which really have little to do with the writing quality in and of itself? Because for myself I think that people like Matt Stover, Karen Traviss, and James Luceno have been raising the overall quality from a purely writing stand-point. While I agree that's not the message of Star Wars, I don't really get that vibe from the books.

EDIT EDIT: Just realized I never answered Mirai's question. Well from what I remember, the first novel is fairly limited to Luke and his wife, Leia, Han, and their children, and Lando and his wife, plus a handful of Jedi and dignitaries. This was done to ease in readers new to the EU. Then throughout the series more and more EU characters are brought in. But as for character development... aside from several deaths, the movie characters don't change all that much. Han gets all depressed / drunk after Chewie's death, and his story arc gets kinda dark for a while, including almost destroying his marriage, but by the end he's pretty much back to normal, if perhaps less exuberant--a more sober Han Solo, if you will (literally and figuratively). Luke actually gets pretty much shafted in the NJO, which was probably my biggest complaint with the series. He does very little until close to the end, and it's kind of frustrating. Really, most of the NJO is shifting the focus to the next generation. (Which is somewhat appropriate, given the ages of the main cast at this point.) The Solo kids are the real stars of the NJO, and they get some serious character development. I don't know if you've read Matt Stover's Traitor or not, but it's basically a book entirely composed of character development for Jacen Solo.


...Holy crap, that's a lot of Star Wars talk. I better shut up for a while...