Star Wars

Foster's original works are awesome. I'm a fan of the Pip and Flinx novels myself. And I'm definitely a fan of Zahn's Star Wars work. I've never read any of his original stuff.

Zahn got worse with time. Later on, it became clear that he couldn't, or wouldn't, write any story where Thrawn wasn't front and center.

An underrated author was Steve Perry. He has the benefit of not being called on to churn out book after book, and what he did write, Shadows of the Empire and the Med Star duology, were both excellent.

edited 13th May '15 5:13:07 AM by CrimsonZephyr

In high school I read a series that Zahn wrote in that wasn't Star Wars, but it was still something of a space opera. It was pretty good though, and had an interesting concept. He made up a Bond Creature that took the form of a tattoo when it was being "worn" by another person.

I also enjoy James Luceno. Darth Plagueis was one of my favorite Star Wars books in a while.

edited 13th May '15 9:03:05 AM by theLibrarian

Zahn's "Dragon" series - yes, those were fun. His only books that he wrote specifically for a younger audience, I think.

His Quadrail trilogy was also good.

I agree that his Star Wars books went downhill after the Thrawn Triology, Shadow of the Past, and Vision of the Future; his later ones have his favourite characters being too overwhelmingly hypercompetent, and they whitewash the Empire.

Vision of the Future was the *perfect* high note for the franchise to go out on.

Are Shadow and Vision that Hand of Thrawn duology?

Yes, and they're fantastic.

Yeah, my brother bought them as audiobooks.

I'd like to buy them myself, or I could try and persuade him to let me download the audiobooks. Even though I don't like C'baoth's voice.

I've read the Thrawn Trilogy and Outbound Flight. I haven't read the duology yet, though I will some day.

Survivor's Quest is also pretty good, since it's essentially a Luke/Mara buddy cop story in Chiss space. It thrills the Luke/Mara shipper in me and has a pretty competent mystery at the heart of its plot, so I was pleased. And it does form a sort of duology with Outbound Flight.

Outbound Flight was marred by it turning into an exercise of "How much can Zahn fellate Thrawn before the ending of this book" about two fifths of the way through. The parts with Lorana were great, though. I hate how, in Zahn's book, Thrawn is at the center of goddamn everything.

He's Zahn's pet character. Granted, he could do with more show rather than tell, but do you really expect a writer like that to focus his stories on the stock character types present in the franchise?

He could also stop referring to people other than the one that is speaking as "the other".

That was the problem with the late-EU. Everyone got pet characters and they would just run them into the ground. The Insane Troll Logic that caused Saba to kill Kenth Hamner in Fate of the Jedi is the one thing that I always use to point out how terrible it got.

Saba was a Denning character, who was trained by one of Luke's former students. Let's forget the fact that apparently Luke deemed it against the rules to train an entire species as Jedi because... well apparently Luke's a Space Racist in Troy Denning's Star Wars. She straight up killed a dude who was supposed to be her friend, a fellow member of the Jedi Council. And what does the rest of the council do in Denning's universe? They name her Acting Grand Master.

Zahn was guilty of it. Stackpole was guilty of it. Allston was guilty of it.

Traitor is my favorite book. Period. Ever. But I will say that Stover has a tendency to get all up in his own ass. He's a great author though...

It would be a great disservice to the new EU if they don't include some of his work.

Sorry for my random musings.

edited 19th May '15 6:54:24 PM by sarcastibot

Who did Allston do it with?

Wedge and his assorted starfighter bros. To be fair, these characters were never written poorly (except in LOTF, where Wedge collaborates with a transparently totalitarian government after escaping genteel captivity by the Galactic Alliance), but man, you knew Allston preferred writing about them, especially in books that weren't explicitly about them.

edited 20th May '15 5:35:39 AM by CrimsonZephyr

That sort of thing is honestly the fundamental flaw of the post-Bantam era of the EU (i.e., everything after the Hand of Thrawn duology).

The Bantam era generally left each author to write their own thing: Zahn had his series, Slackpole had X-Wing and Allston had Wraith Squadron, and so on. It led to differing views of the EU across series, but at least left each story self-consistent (and still relatively reconcilable, as seen with the Hand of Thrawn).

In contrast, NJO, LOTF, and FTJ all suffered for forcing multiple authors to collaborate on a single long-running arc and playing with the same cast of characters and the same plot—their differing perspectives on the same material made conflict and inconsistency inevitable. So you kept the same sort of inconsistency across the greater EU, while also making individual series inconsistent (as exemplified by LOTF).

I could just be talking out of my ass, but that's just me general feeling about the EU. I simply enjoyed the older EU a lot more, and never really got into NJO and what came afterward.

I liked how the Hand of Thrawn ended on an upbeat note to the point that the Vong just made me mad, which is why i couldn't get into NJO at all, abandoned it after a few books. The Empire had made peace with the New Republic, Luke and Mara OTP, etc. Yeah there was setup in there for the Vong, but it could have worked if the vague threats had stayed vague, and left for future generations to deal with.

imo, they should have jumped from there to whatever that +120 years one was, leaving out Legacy and NJO altogether, a nice happy note for the OT-era characters to go out on.

I came into the EU when the NJO was first coming out. I really, really identified with Anakin Solo and because of that got hooked into those books. I was 11 in 1999 when they started. Chewbacca died saving my favorite character in Vector Prime so his sacrifice was a fitting start to the series, and I was excited.

I remember when Star by Star came out and Anakin Solo died, I was so angry I couldn't figure out how to handle it. They put ASOIAF (which I was reading at the time as well) in my Star Wars. I didn't like ASOIAF in my Star Wars.

I finished the rest of the NJO with vague, detached interest. I thought Jacen was badass in Traitor but had no expectations as far as he went, because by the end of the NJO there was were fucking equivalents of the Red Wedding all over my Star Wars.

Then I started dating a guy who was working at Barnes and Noble right when Legacy of the Force was coming out. And Jacen, who was always a bit of a numbskull, went full retard (you never go full retard). And there was an equivalent of Oberyn Martell's head getting popped in that series too.

I tried Outcast from Fate of the Jedi because I'm a masochist and it read like a fix fic. I'm really hoping that we can get a couple of hope spots in this new EU. Star Wars is not Star Peace, I understand that. But all the blood and guts and darkness and FUCKING FRATRICIDE ENDORSED BY THE JEDI COUNCIL, it was time to blow the fucker up.

edited 21st May '15 1:27:32 PM by sarcastibot

What, so for you it's okay for Ulic Qel-Droma to kill his brother but not for Jaina to kill her own brother who has fallen to the dark side and become a ruthless Sith Lord dictator?!

I reread my post and can't really see where you would get the idea that I had that thought...

However, Ulic's arc makes sense. Yeah, he killed Cay, but eventually redeemed himself through Vima.

When the Council sends Jaina after Jacen they tell her to kill him. They even tell her that she's shouldn't try to redeem him. And Denning, the sadist that he is, starts every chapter with Jacen's idiot puns.

Darth Vader, who slaughtered an entire temple's worth of younglings, was worthy of redemption. Jacen, who managed to get some bureaucratic systems to shift in his favor? Eliminate with extreme prejudice.

Pretty sure that having a Sith Lord be the unopposed ruler of the galaxy in a Palpatine-style takeover and having a Sith Lord be the apprentice of a Sith Lord that was the unopposed ruler of the galaxy are two very different circumstances. Jacen was rapidly becoming another Palpatine, even if he thought he was doing the right thing.

Did anyone ever try? And where was Jacen's Moral Event Horizon, where redemption was impossible? Luke himself stood next to Emperor Palpatine and his father, and surrendered his weapon. The only thing that made him cross blades with Vader was his attachment to his friends. Then he gave up again. And the only thing that made him cross blades with Vader again was his love of Leia.

But Jacen, who yes, was a Sith Lord, was completely irredeemable? I can tell you that he was an idiot by completely missing the point of Vergere's teachings, but completely, utterly irredeemable? Needed to be put down by his twin sister without a conversation? Nah.

The Doylist point is that the writing should never have made that a question the authors had to ponder. It should have gone nowhere near where it did.

Jacen bombarded Kashyyyk deliberately, attacked the Jedi Temple with his secret police, killed Mara Jade...Take your pick.