OT: Christie Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

Re: OT: Christine Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

Oh, don't even get me started on Tahiri...

 

Re: OT: Christine Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

I lost interest in the Star Wars books about 435 books into the New Jedi Order.

 

Re: OT: Christine Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

Julio, can I ask what you liked?

I thought the idea of a turn to the Dark Side out of good motives was fascinating, and I thought his arc right through Sacrifice was stunning. The moment after he turns, when all of a sudden the tactics of the space battle Just Make Sense, was triumphant in a really creepy way. Traviss had her excesses, but I think she nailed that.

Then Denning, in Inferno, made Jacen into a complete idiot for absolutely no reason. Nuke Kashyyyk? Why not! No one will think THAT'S a bad move! I mean, the whole core of the story was just lost at that point, lost completely. Becoming a Sith should've made Jacen a genius, Thrawn-style perhaps; instead, it made him an idiotic maniac.

I mean, the lack of author communication and general incoherence was a problem, too, but I thought the real issue was that the story took a character and completely screwed him up for no ultimate purpose except to give the story another villain. Like you said, it just didn't mean anything. So why bother? I mean, even NJO meant something, and had some fascinating twists, especially in Traitor. Legacy just pretended to turn everything on its head, then went right back to The Dark Side Is Evil And Stupid and ran away from everything it started that was interesting.

And when everyone just gave up on Jacen, including LUKE who redeemed VADER for Chrissakes, it just got pathetic. I honestly felt like the authors weren't even trying.

We've read a thousand saber fights, and enough EVIL IS BAD pseudo-philosophy to last a lifetime. What was it that these books actually offered? What did you like?

 

Re: OT: Christine Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

actually the star wars books are all counted as canon i heard. I dont remember where i heard that. I agree about NJO being too long, i got to Star by Star and it was greeat, i am now on Dark Journey and its taking forever!

 

I must admit, I was a big fan of the NJO and I rather liked LoF, but given that I'm not a big fan of Ms Goldie, I'll see what force.net have to say in their reviews before I purchase an all hardback series of novels!

 

I liked the first 2 Voyager relaunch books. The second 2 were ok, perhaps there was something missing there....Maybe it was because all the characters were so spread out, I mean Tuvoks on Titan now, Janeway is an Admiral, Chakotay, Kim and Paris are th only ones ON Voyager right now, Torres is on Boreth and Seven and the Doctor are on Earth, maybe its just getting used to the main cast being all over that is the key here. We will see how it goes with Kirstins book!

 

Re: OT: Christine Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

That's what Lucasfilm says, but they have an odd definition of canon, because Lucas himself ignores the books and doesn't hesitate to contradict them. Lucasfilm has this convoluted system of "levels" of canon with letter prefixes, which is just an overly complicated and misleading way of saying that although the books, comics, etc. aren't actually canonical (i.e. not at all binding on the films or TV shows), they're obligated to remain consistent with one another.

 

Re: OT: Christine Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

thats what i figured chris, especially since the chronology had everything from every comic video game and book fit in to one big history

 

Re: OT: Christine Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

Betrayal was just a great kickoff to the series, and Jacen's turn and what he does to Nelani (sic?) is like a punch in the guts. Bloodlines got rid of Thrackan Sal-Solo (enough reason alone to canonize Traviss), and the Boba Fett storyline was actually interesting. Tempest sort of dips, partly because of Alema. Exile was great for Ben's adventure and what happens to him on Ziost (him coming back for the little girl is one of those fist-pump-in-the-air moments, for me at least). Sacrifice features a great fight scene between Mara and Jacen (I don't buy how people complain how he defeated her; deception is a Sith tool, and he used it to perfection in this case), but meandered badly with politics for too much of the book. Inferno worked for me as an action book and contains a lot of great moments: Alema finding the new Sith Order (and their subsequent conversation); Luke finding Caedus torturing Ben and their subsequent battle; Leia's heartwrenching realization that Jacen is lost to them when he begins bombing Kashyyyk; and the opening scene with Caedus and Tahiri flow-walking (which I still think is one of the coolest applications of the Force). Fury is a bit foggy at the moment, but Caedus defeating Kyle Katarn and the other Jedi force sent to capture him was pretty cool, and the plot with Allana (and when she's taken away) was, as a father, kind of hard to read. Revelation again does something interesting with Boba Fett, Jaina's training, Caedus being revealed to the rest of the cast, and Caedus rescuing Tahiri were highlights for me. And Invincible, while short, puts Caedus over big time (when he uses the Shatterpoint technique to destroy the Beskar armor was a jaw-dropping moment for me) and his battles with Jaina were fantastic.

I'm not trying to be an apologist for the series, and I completely get why people don't like a lot of it. But I dug it.

 

Re: OT: Christine Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

WHen you guys talk about it being repetitive, do you mean that each book tells the same story, or that it tells a story we have already gotten?

 

Re: OT: Christine Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

We mean that there's a Climactic Battle between someone and Caedus about 7 times. Luke even completely defeats him at the end of book 6, and just walks away because "the time isn't right". It's like each author felt like they wanted to make their book as climactic as possible, so they kept upping the stakes so high that they had to come up with silly, comic ways for the bad guys to keep escaping so that the next author could do it again.

Not so much a constant buildup as an endless series of teases - "COULD THIS BE THE END?! No."

 

Re: OT: Christine Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

Both, at least in my case. The first book sets up the premise, then it seems that every book afterwards just follows the same plot points. The number of times Alema Rar stages an attack against the main characters only to escape to try again next book... like I said upthread, it was like watching a Saturday morning cartoon. (And the villains were about as complex, too. I hate the squandered opportunity of having a main character turn Sith; KOTOR, KOTOR: Sith Lords and the Darth Bane books have, above and beyond, a far more interesting treatment of the Sith and their philosophy than this grade-school 'EVIL' crap. Not to mention the horrible retcon of making Vergere into a Sith, taking one of the most fascinating characters in recent EU history and reducing her to just another 'EVIL' dark-sider).

Meta-narrative, it was also repetitive. I saw no reason to retread the territory the Prequel Trilogy had already covered with the whole secessionist movement, but if they were going to go there again, the least they could have done was try and do it better than the films did. Instead, the political impetus seems to vanish into the background until you can't remember why all of this is happening in the first place; the Jedi Order under Luke is just as blind and dumb as the lumbering, decadent Prequel-era Order; and Jacen goes from being an interesting character to a poor man's Sidious, blunt and so terribly obvious that you can't figure out why nobody else sees his descent. And then there's Jacen telling himself that he can embark on the path of the Sith because he isn't his grandfather--right after a force vision that shows him that Anakin joined the Sith for the exact same reason he did: fearing for the safety of his secret lover and child. True, the Star Wars universe has a certain degree of cyclicality to it, but that can be communicated without doing the exact same bleeding story.

Fictitiously yours, Trent Roman

 

Re: OT: Christine Golden Part of Next Star Wars 9-Book Series

Plus, to me it made all of our main characters some degree of either stupid or evil, because they keep deluding themselves about Jacen until the death toll reaches absurd heights, and finally take him out themselves. There's this whole section of Ben making sure that Jacen is actually evil by finding out if he killed Mara, when they'd seen him do other completely vile things already, but I guess it only counts when he killed a family member.

If the next series isn't about the entire galaxy getting tired of the Skywalker family's constant drama, drama that manages to kill off a substantial portion of the galaxy each time it flares up, I'll be seriously annoyed. If I lived in that galaxy, I sure would be tired of it.

 

If I were a member of the Skywalker family, I would've given in to despair by now...

Look at Luke and Leia, who've spent their entire adult lives fighting (essentially) the same enemies, and are now pushing sixty, without ever achieving any true and lasting peace for the galaxy; and are rewarded for their troubles on a personal level by losing more and more of their loved ones to the conflict--when they don't have to kill them themselves.

 

^ It's called "Star Wars" for a reason, isn't it?

 

Well, but it's less "Star Wars" now and more "Star Family Squabbles", it's just that the squabbles are enormous.

 

Fair enough, and I suppose it lives up to its billing...

...but if we went there, we'd also have to talk about the lack of Trek in much of the ST franchise.

Either way, I still maintain that that's one depressing galaxy--more and more so over time.

 

I agree. I think Star Wars and Star Trek, in their original forms, were both fundamentally optimistic. Different kinds of optimistic, for sure, but optimistic nonetheless.

The Star Trek tie-in fiction has kept that brand of optimism alive and thriving, pushing tolerance and the betterment of humanity from a bunch of different angles. Especially Titan. Depressing stories are completely ok, and even desirable, in an optimistic universe (see: DS9) because it just makes the victories better. It's necessary to have darkness to have triumph.

But where Star Wars fails these days, I think, is that there's no ongoing story that ends optimistically at this point. They're playing around in the Sith Wars 1000 years ago, in which our sympathetic character is evil; they're writing a lot in the period between Episode 3 and Episode 4, which is pretty much a galactic shitstorm where the good guys cause as much damage as the bad guys; and they just finished up Legacy Of The Force, one of the most depressing stories they've ever put out. There's just no optimism, no lip service to progress or peace. It just gets worse with every series.

 

Honestly, I got tired of the NJO books to the point where I just stopped reading SW books at all.

 

Was the Thrawn trilogy that good? I have the first one on my shelf. I just finished the Truce at Bakura and oh boy, it stunk.