He died of natural causes in 29 ABY.
Greatest Hits and Misses of the Star Wars Expanded Universe
- Thread starter DarKush
- Start date
Hits:
The Zahn trilogy
Misses:
Every other piece of EU fiction.
There, that was easy.
The Zahn trilogy
Misses:
Every other piece of EU fiction.
There, that was easy.
Really, just no. The Thrawn Trilogy is SOOO overrated.
I agree. It's quite good and really kicked off the EU as we know it today, but a lot of fans tend to get overly precious about it.
I think the Thrawn Trilogy is really excellent and well written but it definitely has some big problems. C'Boath is just a silly villain, and Luuuuuuuke is just embarrassing. There's also the convenience of the heroes just slipping away in the nick of time over and over again.
No, it's C'Baouuth.
Much like the twisted morass of Star Trek 'canon,' the Star Wars EU descended into a mess of intractable drek before long. Zahn actually used The Force as depicted in the films, not as a infinite source of magic destruction and his version of the Clone Wars was actually interesting.
I'll go one further: Zahn's trilogy is better than the films. Even Empire.
Now that is just crazy talk.
While I'm not the pickiest of connoisseurs, since I usually enjoy anything that I read that has Star Wars on the front, I particularly enjoyed:
The Thrawn Trilogy
The stand-alone books like Death Star, Millennium Falcon, Darth Plageius
Many of the "Clone Wars"-era books like Dark Rendezvous and Shatterpoint
However, it's truly a terrible book when I not only don't care for it, but actively recommend folks skip it. Both of Barbara Hambly's books (Children of the Jedi, Planet of Twilight) were seriously, seriously bad in my opinion.
The Thrawn Trilogy
The stand-alone books like Death Star, Millennium Falcon, Darth Plageius
Many of the "Clone Wars"-era books like Dark Rendezvous and Shatterpoint
However, it's truly a terrible book when I not only don't care for it, but actively recommend folks skip it. Both of Barbara Hambly's books (Children of the Jedi, Planet of Twilight) were seriously, seriously bad in my opinion.
I'd agree with this completely except it never would have been written if the films didn't exist.
You had me...
...then you seriously lost me.
Me, I was into the EU for a while, but lost interest by the late nineties when the chaff-to-wheat ratio became too high.
Hits:
- Just about everything that stars with X-Wing.
- The Thrawn Trilogy
- Stackpole's standalones
- The New Jedi Order
- The Fate of the Jedi
- The Black Fleet Crisis
- KOTOR series
- The Old Republic
- Legacy
- Lando trilogy
- Star Wars Lego
- Chuck Norr...Kyle Katarn (or at least Dark Forces and the Jedi Knight games)
Misses
- Everything Zahn has done after his original trilogy
- Most of the middle (as in between the films and the NJO) Bantam novels.
- Legacy of the Force, let down by one of the authors obsession with Fett and a terrible conclusion that ruined some quite good stuff.
- Boba Fett, sort of cool in films, but got really overused/used poorly. Probably only read one decent piece featuring him and it was a short in one of the "Tales of..." anthologies.
- Endless "what's canon" arguments.
- Just about everything that stars with X-Wing.
- The Thrawn Trilogy
- Stackpole's standalones
- The New Jedi Order
- The Fate of the Jedi
- The Black Fleet Crisis
- KOTOR series
- The Old Republic
- Legacy
- Lando trilogy
- Star Wars Lego
- Chuck Norr...Kyle Katarn (or at least Dark Forces and the Jedi Knight games)
Misses
- Everything Zahn has done after his original trilogy
- Most of the middle (as in between the films and the NJO) Bantam novels.
- Legacy of the Force, let down by one of the authors obsession with Fett and a terrible conclusion that ruined some quite good stuff.
- Boba Fett, sort of cool in films, but got really overused/used poorly. Probably only read one decent piece featuring him and it was a short in one of the "Tales of..." anthologies.
- Endless "what's canon" arguments.
The last time I read Legacy of the Force, I skipped most of the Mandalorian scenes (pretty much everything except Jaina's training). The series flowed so much better that way.
Mr Light said:Probably only read one decent piece featuring him and it was a short in one of the "Tales of..." anthologies.>>
That's not canon after AOTC
The annoying thing was that people would insist that it was still canon after AOTC, because of how Jango Fett: Open Seasons repurposed "Jaster Mereel" into the name of Jango's mentor and because somewhere it was retconned that Boba took on the name Jaster Mereel as an alias. ( You could even get banned on a certain website for claiming that AOTC trashed Boba's EU backstory. )
The truth is that the films have always overridden the books and comics, even in the OT days, and in the PT era it was no different.
I'm too lazy to go through everything to give a full list but hits are the Zahn trilogy and misses Crystal Star, Children of the Jedi and anything by Karen Traviss. Her obsession with Mandalorians got annoying real quick.
Jeez! Between this and some of the horror stories I've heard about Outpost Gallifrey, it makes me wonder if The Trek BBS is the only major fan message board out there that doesn't have some rediculous banning rules for those that don't adhere to a certain orthodoxy.So long as someone is mentioning Kyle Katarn, I figured I'd mention a really awesome trilogy of Kyle Katarn fanfilms at http://www.spiritsoftheforce.com/ . (And I swear this has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I wrote 2 of them and acted in 3 of them.
) BTW, Michael Stackpole himself has a cameo in the opening scene of the 3rd film, "Reflections of Evil."