Would that it were so simple.
Here's my thoughts on authors:
The Good: Timothy Zahn Bantam Era, Michael Stackpole, Steve Perry, Matt Stover, Aaron Allston, and James Luceno.
The Bad: Troy Denning, Karen Traviss, Barbara Hambly, Kevin J. Anderson,
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
Agree with you on most of them, though there were a lot of elements in Hambly's Planet of Twlight that I liked.
I also like Kathy Tyers' The Truce at Bakura, and despite my general dislike of the Yuzzhan Vong plot, Greg Bear's "Conquest" is very good as well.
KJA is especially frustrating because I like the idea of the Young Jedi Knights novels, I like the protagonists, the books are just hampered by a lack of complexity in characterization and crippled by Anderson's inability to write compentent villains. Jedi Academy books and Darksaber have the same issues but are just outright bad because it's not just the villains who act like idiots, it's also the protagonists.
What did Steve Perry write?
edited 30th Sep '17 5:57:21 PM by Galadriel
Would that it were so simple.
Shadows of the Empire, mainly. He also wrote a Clone Wars era duology about a team of frontline Republic doctors, MedStar.
Anderson, to be fair, also wrote Tales of the Jedi, an absolutely phenomenal comic. His books were garbage, though.
edited 30th Sep '17 7:51:13 PM by CrimsonZephyr
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
Welp, now I'm two-thirds of the way through Legacy of the Force, the chunk where the story goes from "highly questionable at absolute best" to "grimderp." Exile had some okay-ish subplots to distract from everything else going on a bit, but the other two books grew to be actively unpleasant to read, especially with Inferno essentially being a parade of bad people doing bad things. Jacen/Caedus makes for a very good Hate Sink but not an especially good or compelling villain as he becomes more and more of a cartoon character and despite the fact that he buys his own hype he's put up a very poor performance during each of the major three fights he's had so far; when he fought Aurra Sing in Tempest he had to get bailed out by his four-year-old daughter, the only reason he came out on top versus Mara in Sacrifice was due to an underhanded cheap shot, and Inferno concludes what is essentially a book-long Humiliation Conga with him being on the receiving end of the most brutal beat down I've seen in the franchise, the kind usually reserved for slasher villains. Jarring considering how the climax of the New Jedi Order was building him up as the Gohan to Luke's Goku, and now he's instead the Majin Vegeta. Only thing he's got over his alternate universe counterpart IMO is that he has a lot more heinous stuff under his belt.
Inferno also had an author interview at the back of the book, and while that kind of thing is always nice to read Karen Traviss's Beware the Superman mindset is really apparent in her answers, and you really get the impression that Allston has second thoughts about the direction they took the story in but is too polite to say it.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Author Tract turned into full on Edit War towards the end of Legacy, and it always seemed Traviss wound up being a part of it. They cleaned up a bit when they jumped forward into the 120's ABY, but by that point the franchise was running on fumes and goodwill generated by continually going back to the Clone Wars to get Obi-Wan and Yoda involved. While Traviss catches most of the flak, the rest of the writers stable descended to her level and sniped right back, and all told it is probably a good thing they went for a new crop of writers for the new EU.
So I read Lost Stars, Bloodline, and just finished Leia: Princess of Alderaan, and I can now say for certain that Claudia Gray is my favorite Star Wars author, and I want her to write every Leia book.
"In 900 years of time and space I've never met anyone who wasn't important."
Zahn has not lost a step, but I think Gray is my favorite besides him among the current authors. And I wholeheartedly agree about Leia-I am going to compare every appearance of her character to Gray's portrayal, and I expect most of them to fall short. I am hoping they tap her to write some comics, if they are going to keep the OT main trio in the spotlight.
Lost Stars was also pretty great.
LEGENDARY GALE
I'm trying to get through Bloodline, but its prose feels like a bit of a slog. It might just be the content it has to work with, though. I honestly have a hard time making myself give a damn about the new canon's NR, and especially its late-game political struggles.
I wonder if the story team might bring Jeff Grubb and Matt Stover back? Stover's style is a bit out there, but he's written some of my favorite books ever, and Grubb is just a straight-up good writer in my experience. Paul Kemp also did some decent stuff, but I don't really think of him too much.
Also, on the subject of Denning- one of his books, the last of the Swarm War, was actually the book that got me into the Legends books, but in hindsight it does have a really bizarre stuff in it that feels like it shouldn't be in Star Wars. I never really thought about it before, but Denning's style really does show itself in a lot of late Legends stuff, even the books he hasn't written. (Interestingly, as far as I can tell, the book he wrote for Halo a couple years back was actually quite well-received despite the fandom generally being rather critical of Halo novels at the time.)
but HOW?
Would that it were so simple.
Claudia Gray is hugely overrated. Bloodline, apart from being one long hatchet job on the NR, is just a plodding read, and Lost Stars is nothing that special.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
The one criticism I have of Zahn's Thrawn book is that he makes Thrawn talking monotonous. Not from anything Thrawn says, but he always uses "Thrawn said" at the end of each of his lines. No variation at all, really.
Would that it were so simple.
Well, avoiding Said Bookism is generally a good thing.
Otherwise, we would have "'Grand Admiral,' Lieutenant Tschel ejaculated. 'The Republic Fleet has jumped out of hyperspace in the sector!'" a la Harry Potter.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
With interesting timing given what else is going on with the franchise and fandom right now, I have finished Invincible, and with it the Legacy of the Force series.
So I'm going to start by actually complimenting the final third on something, though in a backhanded way. One of the criticisms I had read about the series before finally finishing it years later, and did identify with during my read-through, is that many of the books feel detached from one another, often along authorial lines. They're all following the same general plot and working towards the same conclusion, but the three authors seem to largely go out of their way to avoid referencing specific events or using specific characters utilized in the other two authors' books unless they absolutely have to, and sometimes not even then. It leads to things like much of Ben's character development being tied to his experiences in the GAG as shown in Traviss's and to a lesser extent Dennings's books, yet Allston barely pays lip service to that, or Jacen having three different #1 aides across the whole series, or possessing a secret Servile Snarker battle droid who only shows up in Dennings's books even when it really would've been useful in others.
So I was a little surprised to see a greater degree of cross-pollination in the final third, such as Fury having Jag incorporate the Mandalorian armor Boba Fett decides to have sent to Han in Sacrifice as a kind of sick joke into his anti-Alema battle suit, Revelation giving Kral Nevil, a Mauve Shirt previously used by Allston, a little bit of limelight, and the (noticeably more fallible) Mandalorians playing a decent supporting role in the first half of Invincible. It shows how low the bar is that I'm praising something that should be expected, but I'll take what I can get here.
I'm not going to say too many more words here. At my most charitable I'd describe Legacy of the Force as grimderp, at my least I'd call it torture porn. Despite most of the first half basically being The Dark Age of Comics: The Novel Epic, the New Jedi Order series eventually found its footing and worked towards an Earn Your Happy Ending conclusion that fit the themes of the franchise since the Original Trilogy and despite the tragedy along the way there was still a sense of triumph and hope at the end IMO. Here, despite what Invincible's final scene tries to represent, there was no gain, only loss. Not helped by the fact that even the writers seemed to be in a hurry to get it over with given the relative short length of the novel and the fact that it hastily resolves a bunch of stuff off-screen, so that it ends but it doesn't really conclude.
But in the end I'm not going to lay the blame solely at the feet of Denning or Traviss or some other scapegoat because this was a group effort. The writers, the editors, the other consultants; it's on all of them for producing this unpleasant work. They should've been asking themselves, really asking themselves, questions like "Are these actions the characters would organically take instead of being railroaded into them?" or "Would the fans really respond well to these developments?", and "Are we being true to the spirit of Star Wars?" There were ways they could've made this story more palpable, backdoors and outs they could've taken, but they didn't. From what I've read Lucasfilm did try to course-correct somewhat afterwards, but I can definitely see why it dealt a heavy blow to fans' perception of the EU - it certainly turned me off originally, and that was before it had even gotten to the really questionable stuff.
Anyway, now I don't have to read it again. Millenium Falcon sounds like it'll be some degree of a palette cleanser, and then Fate of the Jedi sounds more "weird" and "convoluted" than outright grimderp, so we'll see how they go.
edited 19th Dec '17 10:10:43 PM by ComicX6
Well, I suppose I'm impressed with your fortitude. I dropped LOTF two chapters into the first book because I couldn't stand the idiocy.
The Senate
Recently Bought I, Jedi and am on chapter 14
Some quick thoughts
The first person pov took a while to get used to
It's kind of weird how the old eu was very inconsistent as to whether or not Darth Vader being Anakin was common knowledge
It's interesting seeing how authors thought that Jedi marriage was perfectly ok before Lucas said it wasn't. And when that revelation happened it was retconned so that Luke New what the rule was but found it to be dumb and ignored it
The whole concept of other Jedi sects is incredibly intriguing. It just seems odd that the Jedi would only have one base of operations
Having not read Jedi Academy do they ever explain where Gantoris got the materials to make a lightsaber.
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?
I don't remember the Jedi Academy books (other than I, Jedi) in a lot of detail, but based on other EU books the materials that go into making a lightsaber aren't all that complicated.
Hi, I going to star reading legends, if there any book I should start? I know continuity become a bitch later one so I want to see if there one place.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"
Would that it were so simple.
Start with the Thrawn Trilogy and Shadows of the Empire.
"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
It depends on which era you want to start at, but Wookiepedia
has a pretty exhaustive listing of all the novels in chronological order. Starting with the Thrawn Trilogy for post-Original Trilogy stuff is the usual recommendation since it's the backbone that so much of EU built off of, though it has more than a bit of Early-Installment Weirdness.
edited 20th Dec '17 9:00:41 PM by ComicX6
Brenner's Wolves Fight Again
Iss this thread about Old EU stuff?
Where there's life, there's hope.
Destroyer of Worlds
Old and new EU.
"You can't change the world without getting your hands dirty."
The Senate
@unknowing If your one of those people whose obsessed with chronological order than Dawn of the Jedi Into The Void.
Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?
A lot of the books set relatively close to the end of ROTJ are a good place to start. The Truce At Bakura is set immediately after ROTJ. About 3-4 years after ROTJ, you have the X-Wing: Rogue Squadron novels (Rogue Squadron, Wedge's Gamble, The Krytos Trap, and The Bacta War), about the events surrounding the battles for Coruscant; they're immediately followed by the Wraith Squadron novels (Wraith Squadron, Iron Fist, and Solo Command), about the hunt for a rogue ex-imperial warlord named Zsinj who has a Super Star Destroyer. About 5 years after Return of the Jedi you have the Thrawn Trilogy (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command).
All of them are good.
And then you have the last two X-wing novels that take place after Thrawn (book 8 starting at the beginning of the Battle of Bilbringi).
I read that one. I read all of those. It was such an out of character thing I have no idea what Traviss was thinking. She probably just wanted a reason for extra angst in the next ones. I mean, you could make a case that her stress over having Darman's kid and having to hide it from the Jedi caused her to snap, but that's a stretch.