Star Wars Books Thread

[Hippocrates Noah]

I know it gets a lot of praise, but I'm sort of on the fence about the ROTS novel. On the one hand it does a great job of getting inside the various character's heads and portrays a seemingly more coherent narrative. It also very wisely avoids portraying the more elaborate or drawn out action scenes (it skips the crash landing in it's entirety!) A trap even the normal novels often fell into as their authors fail to realise that action scenes in prose form are almost universally boring, for much the same reason that exposition heavy cinema is typically dull; It plays directly against the strengths of the given medium.

On the other hand the repeated references to EU events that it portrays as integral to the plot, yet entirely absent from the movie is something I found more than a little jarring. Plus it's portrayal of General Grievous was nothing short of gratuitously violent. One can barely believe it's even the same character. In a weird way he's even more ridiculous than the more broadly villainous version from the movie & TV show. Even the (admittedly cool) version from the micro-series didn't make him out to be such a blood thirsty psycho.

I think the TPM book took the optimal approach by just adapted the movie as if nothing else even existed. As a result I feel it's aged much better than either AotC (which I found largely forgettable) or RotS.

Yeah, that's kind of a problem with Star Wars as novels, the battles don't work well as written word. Both major space battles from the OT, Yavin and Endor, were some of the most boring reading I've ever done while the scenes are among my favorite. I remember at one point in the RotJ novelization the writer seemed to kind of give up and just had a full page of back and forth pilot banter without any attempt to describe what was going on. The guy was like, y'all are gonna see the movie and get the idea, it's kind of hard to describe. There are some exciting space battles in the EU though, written with being a novel in mind, but the novelizations I've read seem to have a hard time adapting the screen action to book action.

 

[fireproof78]

I thought ROTS did well with the space battles, as did TPM with describing what, in my opinion, was a rather poorly visualized battle.

 

[Reverend]

The mistake a lot of EU authors fell into was getting too tied up in the blow-by-blow and loosing sight of what the fight is actually about. Be it a space, blaster or lightsaber battle, the focus should be on the characters, not the action.

Probably the best example of an action scene in prose I've ever read was in 'Dune' and it was the knife fight between Paul and Jamis. Herbert kept a laser focus on Paul and what he was thinking, driving the action through his perspective.
For space battles, it's probably the early Honor Harrington books. Whatever else one might say about those books, at least in the early days the space battles were always thrilling and vividly described so you never lost track of what was going on.

As for Star Wars, the only EU author who was any good at this IMO was Stackpole because again, he kept the action in the cockpit not out in space as a dry third person account. Even the likes of Zahn struggled at times, especially with the lightsaber duels. His best stuff was with Thrawn's fleet battles but that's mostly because they were constructed like a Sherlock Holmes deduction scene or a well executed magic trick. The focus was on the strategy, not the minutia.

 

[Set Harth]

Plus it's portrayal of General Grievous was nothing short of gratuitously violent.

That's so unlike him!

 

[Hound of UIster]

It was just going after his characterization defined in Labyrinth of Evil and that was going after the perception in ROTS that Grievous was such a threat that justified Palpatine keeping his emergency powers. Grievous becoming a dick dastardly cartoon character only happened afterwards in TCW.

 

[WebLurker]

It was just going after his characterization defined in Labyrinth of Evil and that was going after the perception in ROTS that Grievous was such a threat that justified Palpatine keeping his emergency powers. Grievous becoming a dick dastardly cartoon character only happened afterwards in TCW.

To be fair, he is shown to be a huge threat in TCW as well.

 

[JD]

StarWars.com has posted an announcement for a new book, From A Certain Point of View, a new 40th Anniversary anthology. It will feature 40 short stories by 40 different authors, with each story focusing on a different ANH background character.
They've put together a pretty interesting group of writers for this one.
Hmm, so I wonder if this will be the first story Ashley Ekstein has been involved with that wasn't about Ahsoka?
None of the authors were paid for their stories, instead all of their proceeds are being donated to First Book, a charity that "provides new books, learning materials, and other essentials to educators and organizations serving children in need".

 

[The Wormhole]

Hmm, so I wonder if this will be the first story Ashley Ekstein has been involved with that wasn't about Ahsoka?

As she's collaborating with the one who wrote the Ahsoka novel, I wouldn't rule out some connection just yet.

 

[JD]

If that is the case, then I have to wonder what ANH character could be featured. Does the Ahsoka novel have any ANH background characters in it?

 

[Reverend]

If that is the case, then I have to wonder what ANH character could be featured. Does the Ahsoka novel have any ANH background characters in it?

Not counting the obvious ones like Kenobi, Leia, Artoo & Threepio, only Captain Antillies comes to mind.

That said it wouldn't take much imagination to pick one of the random human background characters in Mos Eisley and make them a survivor of Raada, or one of the daughters of the Fardi smuggling clan. Indeed most of the younger ones would be in their mid-to-late 20's by the time of ANH. The Tonnika sisters maybe?
The force sensitive child would be the more interesting choice, but what are the odds that she would happen to be on the same planet as Luke & Ben later in life? "The will of the Force" only takes you so far, especially when no female characters directly interacted with any of the main characters or could have directly affected events. SO far as we know anyway.

Can't think of any non-human characters from that book that would work. Most of the alien characters I can think of are of a species that didn't show up in ANH (Sullustian, Togruta etc.) I think maybe there was a Rodian but he died?

So yeah, Antillies seems the most likely option.

 

[Skywalker]

I wonder if someone will do a story about the random Y-wing pilot who survived the Battle of Yavin.

 

[Reverend]

I wonder if someone will do a story about the random Y-wing pilot who survived the Battle of Yavin.

They already have.

 

[Skywalker]

They already have.

Doh! I forgot about that.

 

[WebLurker]

StarWars.com has posted an announcement for a new book, From A Certain Point of View, a new 40th Anniversary anthology. It will feature 40 short stories by 40 different authors, with each story focusing on a different ANH background character.

Sounds a little bit like a successor to the Tales From the Mos Eiesly Cantina anthology, except with a wider scope (maybe we'll get stories about characters serving on the Death Star?).

Hope that thing's getting a hard copy release and that you can get it from Barnes and Nobel

 

[The Wormhole]

Hope that thing's getting a hard copy release

It is

 

[WebLurker]

It is

Good, I hate e-book exclusives.

 

[Hound of UIster]

To be fair, he is shown to be a huge threat in TCW as well.

The Legends Clone Wars did a better job of demonstrating he was actually a physical threat to the named Jedi even without the Force and how he served the Confederacy by translating Palpatine and Dooku's planning and plotting into the realities on the battlefield and how he was capable of compensating when their plans go awry.

 

[WebLurker]

Timothy Zahn's Thawn novel came out today. Started reading it, pretty good so far. Lot of ties to Rebels, if you like that sort of thing.

Zahn gave an interview on starwars.com (found here). Pretty interesting stuff (although some spoilers for recent Rebels episodes).

 

[kirk55555]

Timothy Zahn's Thawn novel came out today. Started reading it, pretty good so far. Lot of ties to Rebels, if you like that sort of thing.

Zahn gave an interview on starwars.com (found here). Pretty interesting stuff (although some spoilers for recent Rebels episodes).

Well, that's disappointing. I guess my (mostly joking, until now) conspiracy theory of Thrawn being ghost written by Filoni is more true then I thought. Well, at least the trainwreck will produce a (hopefully cathartic) rant about sellouts and how Filoni needs to go away. It looks like Zahn is basically done writing good books. It seems to happen to some good writers, eventually they just either stop giving a crap or just lose their writing ability. In my experience its been more common with comic book writers, but Zahn seems to be in that group. Now, it might be less about him losing his writing ability and more about him being a sellout under the control of that hack Filoni, but the result is the same. The character of Thrawn is thoroughly a "Saturday morning cartoon" character, complete with being unable to kill a group of incompetent characters he should have defeated in his first appearance. Well, at least now I know there is no redemption for the character, so I can just ignore him instead of getting angrier and angrier.

On other book related talk, the public Library recently got two of the newer SW books, so even though I knew I'd hate them, I did check them out and look at them. Its a good thing they're library books, because if they weren't I would have legitimately chucked Lost Stars out the nearest window. I got about 15 pages before the whininess and YA cliches completely infuriated me. I think I actually got farther into Twilight (not much farther, but probably a good 5-10 pages). It was kind of impressive to completely hate a book from the very first page. I actually laughed at the whole "child with abusive parents" subplot because it was so pointless and badly done. Based on that book, no one should ever be allowed to give any old EU book shit ever again, because even the really bad old EU stuff was better written then what I managed to force myself to read of Lost Stars.

The other book is Ahsoka. It starts out on fake racist idiot Mandalore, which almost made me stop reading instantly. I'll give it a few more pages, but I'm pretty sure it will continue my current trend of disliking ever new canon book I've tried to read for awhile (so far its Aftermath 2, Twilight Company and Lost Stars all being dropped before the half way point). When the first freaking Rebels tie in is still, so far, one of the only decent new canon books, I start to question what the point of them still making books is. So far, its three good books (Tarkin, Lords of the Sith and New Dawn) and a bunch of mediocre to terrible ones. The only books I still need to try are Heir to the Jedi, Dark Disciple and Catalyst (which are the last two remaining GA books, everything else is YA, the pointless novelizations or the last Aftermath book which will be just as terrible as the first two). Of those three, one has gotten critically panned, the next is based on an unused TCW script from after TCW went to shit and the last one is basically agreed to be a completely useless tie-in that adds nothing to Rogue One. Its basically the worst time since I've been alive to be a fan of non-movie SW stuff.

 

[fireproof78]

Nah, Jaxx still has everyone beat as far as bad tie ins