Star Wars Novels (Keep your EU shit out of here!)

Just ticked The Legends of Luke Skywalker off the list. Short and to the point opinion: this book is crap. I didn't finish it so much as put it down without any intention of ever picking it back up again. It's another collection of short stories though in this case all by the same author (Ken Liu). All of them are accounts of interactions with Luke Skywalker or someone thought to be Luke told by various common man types (as well as a droid and an intelligent species of flea). And for the most part they relied too much on name dropping in an attempt to make otherwise weak stories compelling.

This was billed as one of the Journey to The Last Jedi books but, from the parts of it I did read, it really doesn't do much to set the movie up. The narrative throughline connecting all of the stories takes place on a cargo freighter headed to Canto Bight (where part of TLJ takes place) and one of the stories delves into Luke exploring the philosophy of the light and dark sides of the force as two parts of a whole that work in unison (one of the emerging themes of TLJ) but that was about it. One interesting takeaway from that story was an elder who had refused to share her knowledge with Luke told him she hoped that one day he to would be pestered by a student eager to learn what he did not wish to teach. Some obvious foreshadowing there.

I finished off the stack today with Battlefront II: Inferno Squad. It was a quick read.

Going into it I knew it would not be an easy thing to take a setting like Star Wars and tell a story with the long established bad guys as compelling protagonists. Especially one without a central figure like Tarkin or Vader to make it interesting. But Christie Golden made smart choice after smart choice in crafting her tale in a way to get over that hurdle. I won't go so far as to say they're easy characters to "cheer" for, because I didn't find them to be quite that. But they're likeable enough and they do wrestle with moral and emotional conflicts that one would hope to find in characters that are more than just cardboard cutout bad guys.

In spite of this book being promotionally attached to the Battlefront game the Inferno Squad isn't some sort of special forces strike team. They're actually a small counter intelligence group which really allowed the book to distinguish itself from the first Battlefront novel and offers what I think is probably more interesting material to build a story, and future stories, from. That said I didn't like this one as much as the first Battlefront novel but that isn't a slight as that is one of my favorite books in the new canon. This one is certainly a solid entry and a recommended read.

Just finished the new Thrawn novel : Treason. Very interesting and entertaining, if you liked the previous Zahn books you'll like this one!

Hoss said:

Got about a half dozen star wars books signed by timothy zahn a couple weeks ago. It was pretty cool, and he's a nice guy. I asked him how many I could get signed, he looked at the bag I was carrying and said, pull them all out. I couldn't find them all, but at least I got the new thrawn book and the original thrawn trilogy signed.

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Timothy Zahn put his car up for collateral to secure a loan for the first (and only...) Dr Who convention in Champaign IL. It was the first convention appearance of then brand-new Doctor Colin Baker and was a disaster with a blizzard and everything. In retrospect scheduling a convention in the midwest in the winter was a terrible idea.

I went to this convention as a kid and the University club that organized it (TTA - Time Travelers Anonymous) was still paying back that loan a few years later when I was an officer of said club. Timothy was always in attendance at the monthly meetings (where we screened the latest episodes from bootleg VHS copies shipped over from England) with his wife and son and often brought copies of his latest book that he sold for basically the price of printing.

The day Heir to the Empire came out I rushed over to Waldenbooks during my break from my job at the mall movie theater in order to grab a copy. Low and behold Zahn was also there looking to see it on shelves and we got a chance to catch up. He offered to sign the book and we had to go to the store counter to borrow a pen since neither of us had one on us. In explaining why we needed a pen I managed to convince the very-not-impressed Wadendrone that they'd be smart to get him to sign the rest of the copies they had on the shelf.

At any rate sitting on the shelf at my Mom's house is the very first autographed copy of Heir to the Empire.

So I’m going through the Thrawn Trilogy again, and I’m curious to how powerful some of the other force users are supposed to be

from what I would gather:

Mara Jade during TTT=Leia during TTT<Luke during ROTJ<Mara Jade during ROTJ<Luke during TTT<Joruus C’Baoth<Darth Vader<Luke tapping into dark side ROTJ< Emperor

that seem about right?

Hoss said:

Luke tapping into the darkside in rotj? When was that?

Max Luke power levels in the original movies was less than Vader. Because the power of love doesn't count. When he died in ep8 he was probably higher than Vader. In the books he probably got equal to Vader before they retconned them all.

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When Vader taunts him that he will turn Leia

Luke kicks his ass, and cuts off his hand. Emperor is like “good: your hate has made you powerful!” I always took it to mean Luke was drifting into dark side territory