Looking Back: The Grand Admiral Thrawn Trilogy, by Timothy Zahn

For my last review, I'm taking a look back to books from the older days of Star Wars, the Grand Admiral Thrawn trilogy. This series, written by Timothy Zahn, first came out in 1991 and is generally credited with relaunching the Star Wars Expanded Universe. If we're being entirely honest about the old EU it was definitely of mixed quality ranging from such debacles as the Jedi Prince series to such weird installments as Splinter of the Mind's Eye. But the Thrawn trilogy, consisting of Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command, was widely regarded as one of the best installments of the old EU.

The books are set about five years after the Battle of Endor. The New Republic has taken the galactic capital of Coruscant and is in the process of transitioning to a permanent government. The Empire, divided after the loss of the Emperor and Darth Vader, has been slowly losing ground in the war. But this soon changes when Grand Admiral Thrawn, the only non-human Grand Admiral in Imperial History, returns from beyond the edge of the known galaxy to take command of the Imperial remnants. From the bridge of the Star Destroyer Chimera with the assistance of Captain Gilad Pellaeon, Thrawn stops the New Republic's advance and puts the Republic in a fight for survival.

I originally read these books a long, long time ago when I was in seventh grade, but I remember these books as being fairly good. Coming back to them about fifteen years later and after all the events of the prequels and then the Disney take over and reboot I will say that it's a little weird to come back to the books after all this time. Especially with the cloning plot within this series and the insane Jedi clone Joruus C'baoth when we finally found out what the Clone Wars were, the series feels a little weird to come back to. It's almost like reading quaint older science fiction that used what was at the time cutting scientific theory which has since been discredited or reanalyzed.

The thing that I liked the least about these books was how the characters kept referencing things in the movies. I feel like the people who are likely to read the books are the sorts of people who have seen the movies and so we don't necessarily need reminders of what happened in the movies. Maybe it would be necessary for people who hadn't seen the movies, but if you haven't seen Star Wars then why the heck are you reading a Star Wars book?

But I think where this book really shines is where Zahn introduces new characters and ideas into the series. I will say that Thrawn and Pellaeon were a lot more ruthless than I remembered, which fit them as Imperial officers. But there are plenty of other characters such as Borsk Fey'lya, Garm Bel Iblis, Talon Karrde, and of course Mara Jade. The book does rely fairly heavily on the movie characters: Han, Leia, Luke, Chewbacca, Lando, as well as more minor characters such as Mon Mothma, Wedge Antilles, and Admiral Ackbar. But the introduction of new characters into the series means that we're not just seeing the adventures of Han, Luke, and Leia over and over again.

Overall as dated as these books feel now, and despite the imperfections, I actually think these books are pretty good and worth taking the time to check out. They may no longer be canon, but I think they're fun Star Wars adventures that build on the universe and take it into new directions.

- Kalpar

Darth Plagueis, by James Luceno

Today I'm looking at another Star Wars book because apparently I'm a glutton for punishment. Of course this book is part of the Legends canon so it doesn't count as canon anymore within the new Disney canon. (Yes, Star Wars is confusing.) I think this was one of the last books written before the Disney takeover, though, so it kind of shows how complicated the canon had gotten. If you've had the misfortune to sit through Revenge of the Sith you probably remember Palpatine's speech about the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wiiiiiiiise. After the movie a lot of fan theories floated around about who exactly Darth Plagueis was with the favorite being that Darth Plagueis was Palpatine's own former teacher. This book confirmed that theory and expanded on both Plagueis and Palpatine. But I feel that this book in an attempt to answer questions just ends up raising more questions.

This book establishes that Darth Plagueis is a Muun. Now if you don't remember what the heck a Muun is, I certainly don't blame you. Basically they were these tall aliens and they were behind the Intergalactic Banking Clan, the major economic power in the galaxy. Darth Plagueis, like so many Muuns, is a major financial broker in his own right. Now on one level this makes a lot of sense because someone with massive financial power would be able to set the conflict of the Clone Wars into motion, both through political manipulation as well as underwriting the manufacture of armaments for each respective faction. In a way this makes a lot of sense. But the trouble with this book is that it just creates a disconnect between Darth Plagueis the manipulator and Darth Plagueis the immortality-obsessed maniac. Of the two, the chasing immortality plotline seems to have been almost forgotten at times, like Luceno was like, ''Oh right, the immortality and the midichlorians. Right. Got to include that.'' Plagueis's ultimate goal is to rule the galaxy for forever, but based on where the book spent its focus it felt like Plagueis's main goal was galactic domination and immortality was just a sweet bonus.

This book also focuses a lot on midichlorians (when Plagueis is actually working on the immortality project) and then all the financial and political debates that were in the prequels. Now I think it's pretty safe to say that there were a lot of people who didn't like the tedious political debates that were in the prequels, so having a whole book with a lot of those debates is probably not going to be appealing to the average Star Wars fan. Not to say that political intrigue and Star Wars couldn't potentially be an interesting story like Song of Ice and Fire, but in this case it's a more of the prequel variety which isn't that great.

The canon problems also start getting confusing. This book includes a reference to the Heir to the Empire with Jorus C'baoth making a cameo and I'm pretty sure that there's an inclusion of a plotline about Darth Maul taking out leaders of the Black Sun criminal organization.And I'm pretty sure I read a comic with that exact same plot back when I was a teenager. (It's called Star Wars: Darth Maul published by Dark Horse, if anyone's interested) And those are the only two references I was able to catch, I'm sure there were more that I missed as well. But this just made me think of the of the fact that Jorus C'baoth was cloned and his clone suffered from clone madness, all of which got forgotten with the new Clone Wars. So now I'm mixing canons that contradict each other in my head.

I feel like this book tries to answer some other questions such as ''What the heck were all those giant bottomless shafts in Naboo that the lightsaber fight was in? And for that matter why is the Trade Federation blockading Naboo? What space supplies could this lush, verdant planet need that would cause them to surrender?'' Well this book actually answers those questions that we had. It turns out that Naboo's entire economy is based around mining plasma and then the Trade Federation has a contract to ship it off world. So the blockade by the Federation is over a disagreement involving shipping rates and it brings Naboo's economy to a standstill because their economy is based on a single export. And those bottomless shafts are just plasma mines.

...except that plasma is an ionized gas either found in either the upper atmosphere or more commonly what stars are made out of. So...you...shouldn't be mining it from a planet's core. I...it just doesn't make sense. I'm sorry, I know I'm making a big deal about this but it bugs me on some level. And this is just the biggest thing that bothers me, there are a lot of other questions that I'm left asking about this book. It just raises more questions.

Overall I think this book is worth skipping. While it explains more of how the Clone Wars were set up, it does it in such a dry manner that I don't think most fans are going to want to read this entire book just for that.

- Kalpar

Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil, by Drew Karpyshyn

Today I'm finishing the Darth Bane trilogy with the last book, Dynasty of Evil. As I mentioned in reviews of the previous books I hadn't known quite how to feel about these books. On the one hand, the books don't try to make the Sith out as misunderstood bad guys or the Republic as little better than terrorists. But on the other hand with the ending of the last book I was unsure where the series was going to go from where it ended. The final book is okay but it leaves me ultimately wondering if we needed the story to be told at all.

The book picks up another ten years after the last book, with Bane and Zannah living in secrecy, slowly building their plan to destroy the Jedi and the Republic. The problem for Bane is that so far Zannah hasn't made any attempt to challenge him and take the mantle of leadership. Bane has become worried that Zannah is merely waiting for the ravages of time to do him in, completely violating the principle of the Rule of Two. But if Bane is to successfully replace Zannah with another apprentice he'll need to find a way to cheat death itself.

Meanwhile, it turns out that Serra, the daughter of the healer Caleb who Bane intimidated and then murdered, has married into the royal family of the planet Doan. When her husband, the crown prince, is murdered by a rebel group, Serra ends up on a path of revenge that will take her to face her greatest fears and confront Darth Bane.

The biggest feeling I was left with at the end of this book was did we really need to tell this story? I mean, I kind of like Serra's arc and discovering that revenge truly isn't worth it in the end and making her peace with that, but this is really the first time she's a character in these books. I think I'd have preferred a more in-depth plot with the Jedi across all three books, rather than the haphazard sort of approach we have to the non-Sith characters. It's not that Serra's a bad character, but it feels like they had a couple different ideas for protagonists against the Sith and went with all of the instead of just focusing on a few. I think it would have made the books feel more connected, because as they are they feel like episodes rather than a complete arc.

As for Bane and Zannah, I feel like we didn't need to see the ending of their conflict. We knew one way or another that Zannah would eventually replace Bane and continue the line of the Sith which would end with Palpatine and Vader. I kind of took it for granted that Zannah would be the one to succeed in this conflict and the biggest question was who of the three Force-sensitive characters we have in this book would end up being the next apprentice. I'm just left wondering if this was a story that needed to be told.

I think what would have improved this series would have been more development on the light-side of things, maybe having a few consistent Jedi characters, perhaps motivated slightly by revenge or tempted by the dark side, to serve as a contrast or foil to Bane and Zannah. Instead we end up with multiple characters who get far less spotlight time than Bane and Zannah. It also could have produced a better arc over three books than each book feeling like its own story. These books are okay, but definitely leave room for improvement.

- Kalpar

Darth Bane: Rule of Two, by Drew Karpyshyn

Today I'm looking at the second book in the three-book Darth Bane series, Rule of Two. As can so often be the case with trilogies, I felt like this book was meandering around rather than setting up the third act in the series. There is conflict and Bane and his apprentice, Zannah, move closer towards their goals, but I don't feel like they were brought to the lowest point in their story arc, like in other stories such as Empire Strikes Back or The Two Towers, just for sake of example. Depending on how the last book, Dynasty of Evil, goes I'll have to see where the series goes. This isn't to say there weren't things I enjoyed about this book, but rather I really wished there were some things that were done differently with the book.

Basically this book starts with Bane and Zannah having several problems they need to overcome. Bane gets infested with Dark Side Force-eating parasites called orbalisks. The orbalisks are impossible to remove and cause Bane excruciating pain, but they form armor over his body that is impervious to even lightsabers, so that's kind of neat. Bane is also trying to create his own Sith holocron but keeps failing for reasons he doesn't understand and he suspects there's some secret to forming holocrons still concealed from him. Zannah meanwhile is performing her Sith training and is slowly working to become more powerful than Bane so she can finally kill and replace him, but she has to bide her time until Bane can teach her nothing more.

The thing that bugs me about this book is that for most of it the Jedi assume that the Sith are extinct after the thought bomb exploded on Ruusan. It's really only because one Jedi, Johun Othone, won't give up the idea that there are still Sith out in the galaxy and he manages to find Zannah's cousin who witnessed her and Bane attack him at the epicenter of the thought bomb. Once Othone, Valenthyne Farfalla, and a couple other Jedi find out, they go to hunt down Bane and end up...dead. Like, really anticlimactically dead, and once again, the Jedi think that the Sith order is extinct. So in that respect it feels like we got reset back to where we were at the beginning of the book which makes me wonder why we bothered in the first place. And the deaths of Othone and Farfalla are even more disappointing because I felt they weren't well-developed as characters but with intriguing possibilities for development that are literally cut short.

And the shame is there are some things that I really liked about this book and other stuff set thousands upon thousands of years before the movies when Jedi and Sith battled each other across the galaxy. There seems to be a freedom to include whatever weird cool stuff you could think of and throw it into the stories. I think it's kind of neat that a Sith alchemist came up with a way to use the Dark Side to turn flesh into metal and circuitry and create an army of cyborg zombies. I thought that was a neat idea. And I find it intriguing that the Jedi have a far more militant bend prior to the Ruusan Reformations and seem to allow things like emotional attachments. I say this because Farfalla has this ridiculously pimped out bed showing key scenes from his life including his birth and becoming a Jedi Master which seems like a really important emotional possession that the Jedi Order I'm more familiar with wouldn't permit. There's just a lot of neat stuff in how things look different compared to how they look in the movies.

Maybe if I want more of the cool, different, but still Star Wars stuff I need to go track down the comics and/or books set even further back in the history of the Republic. This book is okay, but I find the stuff that makes it so much like the movies I like less than the stuff that makes it different.

- Kalpar

Phasma, by Delilah S. Dawson

So if you've seen anything going on with Angela from the Doubleclicks recently you'll know she's a huge fan of Captain Phasma and said she really liked this book. Since it became available on audiobook at the library I decided to give it a try. This book delves into Phasma's past on the planet Parnassos and how she met Brendol Hux and eventually joined the First Order. There are some moments where Phasma manages to do some really cool stuff in this book, but like most of the rest of the books in the new expanded universe canon I feel like there's far too much protesting that the Empire and the First Order aren't all that bad. You know, despite the fact that they kidnap children to be soldiers, probably practice slavery, and try to blow up planets.

This book has a framing device of Captain Cardinal, a First Order captain with special red stormtrooper armor, who is interrogating Vi Moradi, a Resistance spy. Vi Moradi recently made a trip into the Unknown Regions to get information on the First Order and their leaders, but was captured by the Star Destroyer Absolution. Cardinal wants information about Phasma who's been taking over the stormtrooper training program. Cardinal wants dirt on Phasma so he can take her down in the deadly game of New Order politics.

I was interested in this book because I was curious to see if Phasma did any really badass stuff in it, and I have to concede Phasma does some pretty freaking cool stuff including the equivalent of a ''Diana, Shield'' maneuver. If anything it really makes me wish they had used that in Force Awakens and Last Jedi because I got the feeling that they were trying to build Phasma up into the next Boba Fett-level badass. Now, to be fair Boba Fett did absolutely nothing in Empire Strikes Back but sass Darth Vader and even less in Return of the Jedi. (Way to get punched into that Sarlaac by a blind man, Fett.) So if anything it's a criticism of the fandom's rabid love for Boba Fett than anything else. But I think it would have been a lot better to have Phasma do cool stuff in the movies, rather than having to go to a book.

As for the issues with the First Order, we have both Captain Cardinal and Brendol Hux (father of Armitage Hux who's the Hux in the movies) extolling the virtures of the First Order. They put a lot of emphasis on how the First Order treats everyone equally and brings law and order to the galaxy, opposed to the chaos and anarchy of the ''nebulous freedom'' that the New Republic supports. They also argue that the majority of people in the galaxy don't know what's good for them, so they need an enlightened group of people to tell them what's best for them, and everyone except for Vi Moradi seems to just be...fine with this argument.

Now I can understand the equality argument working for a lot of people, especially the people who are on planets that have, or feel that they have been left behind by the New Republic. Especially in the case of Parnassos which was devastated by a nuclear reactor accident and then abandoned by the mining conglomerate that had caused the accident. I can understand people being upset that the mining company didn't suffer any legal consequences for their actions, and the Empire or the New Order sure wouldn't tolerate that level of incompetence. But when you start saying that you need the ''right sort of people'' to make decisions for everyone else, it begs the question how do we decide who's going to be making the decisions. And all too often it's the people with the biggest guns who decide who's going to be making the decisions for everyone else.

So I'd say that this book is in the middle territory for books in the Star Wars universe. Phasma does some awesome stuff, but also leaves me absolutely terrified because she's willing to kill anyone to achieve her goals. Seriously, don't mess with Phasma. But like with the rest of the new canon, I'm not a huge fan of the fact that people seem to be super okay with the First Order going around killing people, creating child soldiers, enslaving people, and just...just being bad people.

- Kalpar

Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, by Drew Karpyshyn

So as you probably realized I've been listening to a lot of books from the Star Wars expanded universe, mostly from the new canon, and I had been feeling kind of disappointed with the results. So I decided to go back and look at a book from the old canon that I remember as being mostly good and see if my tastes had changed or if the books were as good as I remembered. I will say this book seemed pretty okay, if nothing particularly special. I think that's partly because this jumps outside of the movie canon going back to a thousand years before the Battle of Yavin so it doesn't have the baggage associated with the movies.

This book, as you can probably guess, is the start of a series about Darth Bane, who reforged the the Sith order and established the Rule of Two. This book starts with Dessel, a miner trapped on a company-controlled planet digging for cortosis ore that the Republic needs to build armor during the seemingly interminable war against the Sith Empire. Dessel and many other Outer Rim residents have little use for the Republic which doesn't really care what happens as long as the resources continue flow towards the Core. After killing a Republic trooper in self-defense, Dessel chooses to flee and join the Sith Empire as a regular footsoldier. But it's soon discovered that Dessel has an affinity for the Force and he is recruited to join the ranks of the Brotherhood of Darkness.

The book focuses mostly on Bane and his path to becoming the ultimate Dark Lord of the Sith, as well as his conflict with the leadership of the Brotherhood of Darkness. I thought it was interesting to watch how Bane develops as a character and grows in the dark side, opposed to how Luke or many other characters developed on the light side of the Force. It's not a lot to write home about, but I thought it was okay.

Something I wish this book had expanded on more, and maybe we'll see more of in the later books, was the Jedi order at this time. The book focuses a lot on the Sith Order and the Sith forces but doesn't delve a lot into the Jedi order or the Republic forces. In fact, we don't really see the Republic or any Jedi until the last third of the book or so. I think it would be more interesting to see the contrast between the Jedi and the Sith when the galaxy is in open war between the two factions before the Sith go into hiding. It's also interesting that Jedi are going around calling themselves Lord which seems counter to Jedi ideology, so I'd like to see how the Jedi order changed over a thousand years.

Overall I think this book was pretty okay and I'm willing to go check out the other books within this sub-series. I'll have to see if it has the same issues that other parts of the canon have had that I've noticed recently.

- Kalpar

Tarkin, by James Luceno

Today I'm looking at yet another book in the new Star Wars canon, Tarkin, apparently because I'm a sucker for punishment. Or I'm just desperate for something to listen to from the library. Bit of column A, bit of column B. As you can probably guess, this book focuses on Wilhuff Tarkin about five years after the events of Revenge of the Sith. This book bothers me like a lot of the rest of the new canon because it drags the Rebellion down to the level of the Empire and creates a sort of moral equivalency between the two. In a way I find it rather ironic because when Disney first bought Star Wars everyone was concerned that the franchise would be, well, Disneyfied and made lighter and softer. But instead it seems like they've gone in the opposite direction and I don't know if I really like that change in the Star Wars universe. Star Wars as a universe has always been fairly black and white, which I'll admit has been to its detriment at time, but I feel like we're going too far in the other way whihc is making Star Wars...well...not Star Wars.

The reason I bring this up is because in this book we once again have a band of rebels who fall more heavily on the terrorist side of the freedom fighter/terrorist spectrum. And while I don't oppose the idea that the Rebellion wasn't entirely filled with pure, good, innocent people like Luke Skywalker. After all, Han Solo didn't exactly start as good person when he signed up for the Rebellion. The problem is that in the new expanded canon, we seem to be moving towards all factions of the Rebellion being ideological extremists. The flip side of this is that the Empire also gets more humanized which, again, is fine, but when the Empire is regularly committing atrocities such as blowing up planets and people think this is fair and necessary it really undermines the idea that people in the Empire aren't terrible. Ultimately I feel like the new canon is dragging both the Rebellion and the Empire to a level of them being shades of grey and it just feels wrong for Star Wars. But I'm willing to accept that I'm part of the old-school fandom who probably wouldn't have been happy regardless of what Disney did.

The majority of this book focuses on Tarkin and Darth Vader doing what almost amounts to a buddy cop story. The Emperor sends them to investigate a rebel plot and ultimately Tarkin's special ship Carrion Spike gets stolen by rebels so Vader and Tarkin have to get it back. Which weirdly results in Tarkin doing a lot of detective work to figure out who the rebels who stole his ship are, where they're going to strike next, and how to stop them. I'm not sure if this is supposed to be an homage to the fact that Peter Cushing played Sherlock Holmes in a Hammer Horror adaptation of Hound of the Baskervilles and in a 60's TV adaptation, but I'm going to pretend that it is. I don't know if it really makes sense for Tarkin to be a great detective, but I'm willing to at least roll with it.

But the other personality traits and abilities they give Tarkin don't really hold up. Especially with him being a crack fighter pilot. I say he's a crack fighter pilot because there's a part of the book where he flies an old-school V-wing Starfighter in a dogfight and manages to keep pace with Vader. Now I consulted with several old-school fans who agreed with me that this was a feat of flying which would require a pilot on the level of Wedge Antilles or Soontir Fel. So while Tarkin might not have racked up enough fighter kills to be counted as an ace, he certainly has the skills to be a crack pilot. And it just...it doesn't work for Tarkin.

At the risk of going all Plinkett on you, Tarkin always struck me as a political bigwig with connections that enabled him to reach a position of influence. Probably someone from a core world with all the benefits of the upper classes to help ease his ascent into the command ranks. Tarkin seemed the sort of person who would be truly comfortable on the command deck of a Star Destroyer, marshaling a fleet, but would be incredibly out of place in the cockpit of a starfighter. It's just a weird thing that stood out among the other things in Tarkin's backstory that seem so at odds with the character as I knew him from the original Star Wars. Again, I'm probably being an old fuddy-duddy who's upset over the replacement of the old canon but I feel like there are some legitimate complaints against the new canon to make.

Ultimately I don't know if this book really works well. Tarkin gets a backstory and abilities, some of which mesh with the cruel administrator who advocates rule through fear, and some which just leave me confused. This book doesn't build on the canon in any meaningful way, and I don't think we really needed to explore why Tarkin believed rule through fear was the way to handle the galaxy. I think this book can be safely skipped, even by the most diehard fans of the canon, old and new.

- Kalpar

Empire's End, by Chuck Wendig

Today I'm finishing the Aftermath trilogy with the book Empire's End and in coming to the end I'm still left with more questions than answers. I get the feeling that I went into this series with completely wrong expectations because I was hoping to at least get some more explanation on issues, the biggest one being WHERE THE HECK DID SNOKE COME FROM?! This question has been vexing me and my friends for some time, moreso after Last Jedi came out, and even the expanded universe has been incapable of answering that question. This book does finally, partway answer the question of where the First Order came from but I feel like the books weren't worth the ultimate effort.

As I mentioned in my review of Life Debt, a lot of this focus is also on the relationships of characters such as Norra and Temmin Wexley, Jas Emari, and Sinjir Rath Velus. However it's difficult for me to get invested in the series for a couple of reasons. The first is the lack of emotional stakes in the series, which is something I mentioned in my review of Aftermath. There are multiple points where Norra almost dies and Temmin's robot Mr. Bones actually gets destroyed but at the end of the book Mr. Bones is put back together. The second book was similar in that respect. Our characters were put in danger, but nobody died. Jom Barell lost an eye, Brentin Wexley was a programmed sleeper agent, and Mon Mothma got seriously wounded but everyone was still alive afterwards. It didn't feel like there were serious consequences.

This book keeps doing the same thing with putting Sinjir's boyfriend, Conder Kyl in danger (but no actual harm), and even going so far as to bomb Mon Mothma's office (but without Mon Mothma in it).  The book does finally pull the trigger, in a very literal sense, and kills off both Jom Barell and Bretin Wexley (oh and Mr. Bones dies too), but neither had as much of an emotional punch for me. In fact, it seemed strange to me in the end of the book that Temmin seemed more upset that Mr. Bones was destroyed than the fact that his dad died. Norra also seemed to move on pretty quickly to Wedge after Bretin's death as well. I guess it could be implied that they had already moved on emotionally since Bretin had disappeared years ago but I felt it would have been more emotionally impactful for Norra and Temmin to get Bretin back from the dead just to lose him again. As for Jom, I felt like the books simply weren't long enough for him to be developed into a character for me to be invested in.

At the end of the day, I feel like these books took a little too much time for too little payoff. I appreciate the attempt to introduce new characters, but for whatever reason I found it difficult for me to get emotionally invested in them. While we get some explanation of where the First Order came from, with the remnants of the old Empire fleeing beyond the edges of the known galaxy. It does beg the question of what happened to Admiral Sloane afterwards and again, HOW THE HECK DID SNOKE END UP IN CHARGE? But otherwise there doesn't seem to be a lot recommending this, or other books in the new canon.

- Kalpar

Life Debt, by Chuck Wendig

Today I'm looking at the second book in the Aftermath trilogy, Life Debt. As Star Wars fans can probably guess from the title, this book focuses, at least in part, on the liberation of the wookie homeworld Kashyyyk, and includes some awesome scenes of wookies ripping stormtroopers apart.And of course I'm all for that, but the liberation of Kashyyyk makes up only a small part of the book, most of it focusing instead on the relationships of not only Han and Leia, but the relationships of the members of Norra Wexley's team as well. I think the hardest part is that I haven't really connected emotionally with the members of Norra's team so it's hard for me to get invested in their personal relationships.

The things I care the most about these books, obviously, is how much it explains the political situation in the galaxy when we get to The Force Awakens. Unfortunately this book just leaves me with as many, if not more questions, than I had previously. The biggest complaint people have had recently, especially after The Last Jedi, is we know basically nothing about Chairman Snoke. We don't know who he is, where he came from, how he ended up in charge, or why we should care about him. However we're into the second book and the only people in charge of the remnant Empire at this point are Grand Admiral Rae Sloane and Fleet Admiral Gallius Rax. We have gotten some hints that Admiral Rax had deep connections with Emperor Palpatine and may be a Dark Side cultist of some sort, but Snoke hasn't made any appearance. Obviously this is still some thirty years until the events of Last Jedi but I feel like this would have been a good explanation for how the First Order came about from the ashes of the old Empire.

Another thing that I didn't care for was the prison ship Ashmead's Lock, which was apparently a centuries-old prison ship that crashed on Kashyyyk and was retrofitted by the Empire to hold rebel prisoners in stasis. There are a couple of problems with this ship. First, and perhaps dumbest thing about the ship, is that it uses the prisoners as a power supply, just like in The Matrix. It was dumb when The Matrix did it, and it's dumb when it's done here because using humans and other living beings as batteries is impossible. Humans and other biological beings generate heat, true, but only by burning calories from food they consume. To get energy out of a human being you have to put just as much, if not more energy in, making any energy profit impossible.

Secondly, Ashmead's Lock is part of a program to brainwash rebel prisoners and make them sleeper agents for the Empire, to activate them to wreak havoc with the rebellion. I will admit this would be a spoiler for the book except that it's telegraphed so obviously that it's hardly a surprise when it does happen. Admiral Rax orchestrates the liberation of Ashmead's Lock so it's clear that it's part of some nefarious plan he's got cooking. Then we see the liberated prisoners acting strangely after they came back and having secret meetings, so when they try to assassinate Mon Mothma and the rest of the New Republic leadership it doesn't come as a surprise at all. It also doesn't make much sense for the Empire to be sitting on these sleeper agents for years and years and never deploying them when they could conceivably use the agents to deal the rebellion a blow after a setback such as Yavin. Why keep them until the Empire's all but lost the war for the galaxy?

Overall the book's okay. By far the largest parts of the book focus on the personal relationships of the characters, but because I haven't gotten deeply invested in people such as Jas Emari and Sinjir Velus, so those parts of the book just don't hold as much appeal for me as other sections. If people get invested in those characters those parts of the book will obviously have greater appeal, but for whatever reason they just don't work for me. Otherwise these books don't answer nearly as many questions as I'd hoped.

- Kalpar

Battlefront II: Inferno Squad, by Christie Golden

Today I'm looking at another Star Wars book, Battlefront II: Inferno Squad, which is a tie-in with the video game Battlefront II and with the Clone Wars animated series. The book focuses on the titular unit, Inferno Squad, an Imperial special forces unit that handles tasks that the regular Imperial military or the Imperial Security Bureau can't handle. Inferno Squad is charged with infiltrating the Dreamers, an extremist rebel faction led by survivors of Saw Garrera's Partisans. The Dreamers have been hitting multiple high-level Imperial targets and appear to have access to restricted Imperial information so Inferno Squad's goal is to discover where their information is coming from, seal the leak, and then eliminate the Dreamers.

I'll be honest, I didn't much care for this book and mostly because it's a continuation of this evolution that the Star Wars universe has taken and I'm not sure if I much care for it. There seems to have been a movement in Star Wars towards a darker and grittier universe, where not only are the Imperials a ruthless and sinister lot, but the Rebels are as well. Both sides engage in indiscriminate killings and torture to achieve their goals, making the line between good guys and bad guys blur. Now I'm not opposed to there being good Imperials, in fact in the old EU the Imperial officer Gilad Pellaeon was one of my favorite characters. But for a universe whose theme seems to be that there's always hope, it's a little concerning that the universe seems to be taking a darker turn. I'm not saying that there can't be bad Rebels or morally ambiguous Rebels, but I'm not used to the Star Wars universe being so darn dark.

I also have to say it's difficult for me to care over much about the characters in the book, especially the Imperials. At the beginning the book the Imperial characters basically justify destroying Alderaan with the argument that the Rebel children would only grow up to be adult Rebels who would kill more innocent Imperials, so it's best that they were killed when they were young. Now the Rebels make the same argument about killing a bunch of Imperial children, but far more of the Rebels raise objections to killing children than any Imperials do to the same. The problem with trying to make the Rebels and the Empire equivalent is that the factions really aren't, because the Empire practices slavery, restricts personal freedoms, and blows up planets. There really isn't any moral equivalency between the two of them.

It also was very hard for me to empathize with the characters because they were so blase about torturing or murdering people. I feel like there's an attempt to make the Imperial characters more sympathetic by having them develop personal relationships with the Dreamers, but this doesn't work for a couple of reasons. First, Inferno Squad is trying to ingratiate themselves with the Dreamers so they pretend to be friends with the Dreamers to make that goal easier. A second reason is that they kill all the Dreamers at the end of the book. Like, seriously, just execute all of the Dreamers and be proud about it as well. So it's really hard for me to like the members of Inferno Squad as characters.

Overall I was kind of disappointed with this book. It's kind of funny because when Disney first bought Star Wars a lot of people were worried that they'd Disney-fy the franchise and turn it into upbeat kid-friendly musicals. But it seems like under the Disney leadership, Star Wars has taken a darker and edgier turn and I'm not sure if I really like that. I'm willing to admit that this is probably me being an old person who's complaining about how they changed things and different things are bad, but I still feel like a grimdark universe isn't quite right for Star Wars.

- Kalpar

Aftermath, by Chuck Wendig

Today I'm looking at the first of three books in the Aftermath trilogy which helps to fill in the gaps between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens. I'm hoping that these books will answer some of my questions about the political situation in the galaxy, although I'm not overly optimistic about the results. To start with as I've said before about Star Wars as a franchise, I worry about the multimedia nature the franchise is starting to take. I've been getting the feeling that to truly understand everything going on in the Star Wars universe, you have to go track down all the comics, books, video games, movies, and whatever other versions of media they decide to utilize. On the one hand, the old Expanded Universe was very much like this and so for people who really like Star Wars it gives them a lot of stuff to explore and enjoy.

On the other hand, to paraphrase Mr. Plinkett, we shouldn't have to read a book to understand a movie. The original movies were self-contained and while not everything was explained in agonizing detail, we didn't have to go check supplemental sources to understand the plotline. We weren't told how the Emperor became Emperor, but for the purposes of the story that wasn't terribly important. We knew he was the Emperor and was in charge, how that came to be was largely secondary. However in the case of Force Awakens, we don't really get an explanation as to who the First Order is or where they came from. Or for that matter what the situation with the Resistance is, because they're apparently not the military of the Republic but they're Republic aligned. So why is the Republic being defended by a paramilitary force? These are questions which probably should be answered within the movie, and we don't even need a super long explanation, a few lines of exposition would be necessary.

As for the plot of this book, Wedge Antilles is doing some post-Endor scouting operations for the New Republic and finds not one but three Star Destroyers in the backwater system of Akiva. Wedge concludes that something big is going down but before he can get the word back to the Republic he finds himself captured by the Empire. He manages to get a message out to Norra Wexley, another Republic operative, who puts together a team on planet to disrupt the Imperial meeting and strike another blow for the New Republic.

Plot-wise this book is okay. Mostly I got the impression that the Empire has bases and resources out in the Outer Rim and beyond the edges of known space where they'll regroup and possibly form the New Order. Otherwise this feels a lot like other Star Wars books which I've read before and I don't know if it brings all that much new to the table. Republic wins and the Empire gets driven further back. I think what I liked most is the vignettes of other things happening around the galaxy to show that the Civil War is not yet over and there are still battles to be won and work to be done to make the galaxy a better place.

The thing that bugs me the most about this book, though, is the character Temmin Wexley, Norra's son. Norra left Temmin behind three years ago to join the Rebel Alliance and has been involved in battles like Endor. She returns to find her son Temmin has gotten involved in black market dealings and basically turned into a typical shitty teenager. I actually found myself really disliking Temmin throughout the book. He isn't interested in the galactic struggle, just wants to keep his head down and make money. By the end of the book he's gotten fully on board with the Republic cause, but I feel like he hasn't learned as a character at all. What annoys me the most is that Temmin doesn't experience any loss during the book. At multiple points his mom Norra almost dies because of her fights against the Empire and towards the end of the book Temmin's robot Mr. Bones (a psychotic patched together battle droid) is shot by the Imperials. But at the end of the book Temmin has his mom and he has Mr. Bones. I felt like this really undermined the book because Temmin didn't experience loss forcing him to grow as a character. Everything turned out okay for him at the end and he goes on further adventures.

I'll have to see where the rest of the books in this series go because so far it's been kind of a disappointment. It's certainly not the most interesting Star Wars book I've read or feeling all that vital yet.

- Kalpar

Thrawn, by Timothy Zahn

If any of you are familiar with the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, there's a very good chance that you're familiar with Grand Admiral Thrawn. Heir to the Empire and its sequels are some of the most popular old EU books written by the truly fantastic Timothy Zahn. Seriously, Zahn is probably the best EU author out there. Part of the appeal of Grand Admiral Thrawn was he was a complex and believable character. One of the struggles the EU ran into was a lot of Imperial characters were bad stereotypes, real cackling villain type. Thrawn and his subordinate, Gilad Pellaon, were reasonable authority figures. Soldiers trying to do the work of the Empire and faced with not a lot of great options. Zahn illustrated that even if the Empire was a bad organization, there could be reasonable people in the ranks.

When Disney announced that the old EU was no longer canon, the fact that Thrawn was no longer canon was the biggest disappointment for old fans. Trust me, there's a lot of old EU material that wasn't a huge loss, looking at you Jedi Prince. So it was with mixed emotions Thrawn appeared in the Rebels TV show. On the one hand, it was good to see an old friend come back into the new canon, on the other hand it does raise some questions such as what ultimately happens to Thrawn. In the old EU Thrawn got sent on a secret mission to Unknown Space by the Emperor, which explains why Thrawn wasn't present during the fall of the Empire. I'm curious to see what happens to him later in the universe although I think it's very unlikely Thrawn will show up in the new film universe.

This book focuses on Thrawn's rise through the ranks of the Imperial Navy, his career shepherded by the Emperor's influence. With his aide, Eli Vanto, Thrawn goes through the Imperial academy, serves as a weapons officer, a first officer, and eventually commander of his own Star Destroyer, the Chimera (which is its own reference). On some level I feel like Thrawn's rise is almost too fast and very obviously influenced by the Emperor. It's like we know that Thrawn will end up a Grand Admiral in the Imperial Navy and we're just marking time to see how it happens. Thrawn's tactical genius does come into play multiple times through the book, which makes sense since it is written by Zahn, but I almost feel like it's a story that didn't need to be told.

The other thing that concerns me about this book is that Thrawn basically outright states that there's a threat from beyond the galaxy which threatens both the Chiss Ascendancy and the Galactic Empire. (Which makes me think of the Yuuzhan Vong, which threatens to make the Star Wars universe even more complicated again.) Thrawn is apparently on a mission from the Chiss to determine whether the Empire is an ally worth cultivating, or best used as a distraction to buy the Chiss time while they try to put weapons together to defeat whatever threat it is from beyond the galaxy. I'm worried that we're going back into the original problems of the EU where we have dozens of plot threads and putting them into a coherent whole is almost impossible.

Overall I think this book was okay, but I think it's feeding into the problem we had with the old EU.

- Kalpar

Rebel Rising, by Beth Revis

Today I'm looking at a Star Wars book that talks about the life of Jyn Erso, protagonist of the film Rogue One which I just loved the ever loving daylight out of. Rebel Rising reveals Jyn's backstory in the missing years of the movie between when she's found by Saw Gerrera and when we meet her again on Wobani. This does fill in a bunch of details about Jyn's life and shows her being first a member of Garrera's resistance cell and later an independent forger. However, I think there are some issues with this book that show how the Star Wars franchise has changed in recent years.

Ultimately the biggest problem with this book is that it delves into the history of a character which we probably imagined in our heads in a way we liked better. But this is usually a problem when we get an origin story for a character we met more or less fully-formed. I'm reminded of The Shepherd's Tale from the Firefly 'verse. It could have been the greatest story ever written (although I have my own issues with it), but there are going to be a large number of people who are disappointed because they wrote their own story in their head that they'll always prefer. And I think we have this issue in Rebel Rising as well because this book will always make Jyn's backstory more limited than we could have imagined it to be. No matter how well Revis could have written Jyn's backstory it's going to be up against the reader's own imagination.

There's a trend I've started noticing in recent years that starts comparing the Rebels to terrorist groups and I'm honestly not sure what to think about this. First of all, this is definitely a reflection of our collective experience in the twenty-first century in which terrorism is a regular concern, as well as our awareness that the line between freedom fighters and terrorists can depend on where you stand. And don't get me wrong, Garrera's resistance cell does engage in at least one act of terror within the book where Garrera's group assassinate a newly installed Imperial governor. Instead of just targeting the governor, Garrera and his allies bring about twenty something flechette launchers and fire them directly into a crowd. So not only do they take out the Imperial governor and his bodyguard of stormtroopers, but they kill the local head of state for the planet, dignitaries, local nobility, and who knows how many bystanders. Garrera states the purpose is to strike fear into the Empire and people who support it, but I feel like it would significantly undermine his own cause by randomly killing civilians who are very clearly not thrilled about having an Imperial presence on their planet.

Another reason this concerns me is because I have seen recently on the internet some people who dismiss the Rebellion as nothing more than a murderous band of terrorists and come to the conclusion that the Empire Did Nothing Wrong. Which...okay, this is kind of a big issue for a couple reasons. First, it's a little simplistic to say that because one side is bad, the other side automatically must be good, ignoring the possibility that both sides are bad or both are good or more likely everyone's a mix of the two and there are no easy answers. Unfortunately by introducing darker, morally ambiguous aspects to the Rebellion people seem to be taking the Empire's side and it bothers me for a number of reasons. First, the Empire practices slavery and if you don't see the problem with that we need to have a long talk I don't want to get into here.

Second, the Empire practices rule through military force and terror, which ultimately becomes absurdly inefficient. This is something that I noticed in this book in particular. Jyn spends a lot of her time kicking around distant backwaters on the Outer Rim which have limited strategic or economic value but the Empire is absolutely determined to set up a garrison everywhere it can and is quite frankly ridiculously inefficient. Police states are prohibitively expensive and you spend so many resources on making sure stormtroopers are on every street corner and TIE fighters are patrolling every sky that you lose more resources than you could possibly gain through total galactic control. Yet I've recently seen people embracing this as an idea worthy of emulation and I find it...distressing on a lot of levels.

There have been other books about figures like Janek Sunber who are on the Imperial side but aren't necessarily bad people. At least, they're not the cackling villains that some Imperials tend to be, instead portraying people loyal to the Empire as complex individuals with their own motivations. This book simply doesn't do that. All the Imperials we meet fall into the cruel, ruthless, or potentially cackling villain categories which we've seen before. So it severely undermines Revis's attempt to cast the conflict between the Empire and the Rebellion in shades of grey instead turning it into a case of grey and black.

I think I can appreciate the attempt to make the Star Wars universe more complex and morally ambiguous, but this book just falls short of the mark. Jyn ends up hating both sides because she sees them as destructive forces, which leaves us in a dark and hopeless galaxy which I feel just goes against the essence of Star Wars. While Garrera and other rebels are depicted as less than heroic, the Empire is as bad or worse and I don't know if I like that feeling. I'll give Revis credit for trying, but I don't think I quite like the result.

- Kalpar

The Princess Diarist, by Carrie Fisher

As I'm sure you all remember, exactly a year ago yesterday, in a tremendous, final ''Fuck you!'' to all of us, the dumpster fire of 2016 took Carrie Fisher from us. It was a final gut-punch to many people, especially the Star Wars fans big and small across the world. The Princess Diarist as a result was the last book Fisher ever published, (at least, none have been published posthumously yet), and I felt that making this book the last review of 2017 would be a fitting tribute to a woman who inspired millions of people.

While filming Star Wars in 1976 for about three months in London, the then barely nineteen year old Carrie Fisher kept a series of diaries recording her emotions and experiences both on and off the set, as well as her affair with costar Harrison Ford. Forty years later Carrie discovered these diaries in a box of old belongings and went through them and decided to publish excerpts, as well as extensive commentary from Fisher looking at the affair forty years later with the benefits of perspective. However, the book does not talk mostly about her experiences filming Star Wars, her first major role and what would become the biggest role ever in her career. Fisher provides some background material such as her own childhood and how she managed to land the part, but the book focuses mostly on her affair with Harrison Ford, and later her emotional relationships with her fans. At times explicit but also intimate, The Princess Diarist provides a look into the mind of a young girl who took a step into a larger world.

Some people have described this book as cringe-worthy regarding the amount of detail that Fisher went into. And while there were parts that I cringed at, it was more out of sympathy for a young Carrie Fisher about to die from embarrassment than from any sordid details. Frankly as far as I'm concerned, the fact that Fisher and Ford had an affair is hardly surprising. Certainly not the most ethical decision considering Ford was married with two children at the time, but I'm hardly one to throw stones when it comes to monogamy and the matter's been over and done with for forty years. It was a young girl who had no idea what she was looking for and an older man who probably should have known better, but to castigate them for a lapse in judgment is hardly worth the effort.

I think what's more important out of this book, than any shocking (or perhaps not so shocking) revelations about who was involved with whom, is the window into the mind of nineteen year old Carrie Fisher. We see a girl trying to be a woman who is troubled, who has had a life filled with emotional turmoil. A girl who wanted to avoid show business because she saw what it had done to her parents, but who had also dropped out of high school and was faced with the possibility that she was unsuited for any work but show business. Although Fisher does not talk about her struggle with bipolar explicitly in this book but you can see elements of that in her recollections and in the excerpts from her diaries. And the issues with drug abuse can be seen starting to creep into her life, but again are not really focused upon.

I think what I like most about this book was how vulnerable Fisher was willing to be with the world. She could have very easily burned the diaries, or hidden them away where they wouldn't be found, or just put them back in the box and forgotten about them again. She certainly didn't have to write a book about it. And while people might say it was cynically a cash grab with another tell-all memoir (the fact that she describes her convention appearances as lapdances certainly doesn't help), I prefer to take a kinder view. Fisher was willing to share with us an emotional time in her life when she was vulnerable and, really like the rest of us, had no idea what the heck she wanted to do with her life. And personally I think that's encouraging. Just knowing there are other people, people like Carrie who were catapulted to stardom by the age of twenty, who still were making it up as they went along, just like the rest of us. Maybe that's a tad too much of a ''they're just like normal people'' argument, but I still find it encouraging.

This book is complex and raunchy, going both high and low and everywhere in between. Maybe Fisher overshared, but I don't feel that she did. It was her story and I'd rather hear it coming from her than from anybody else. And if a sixty-year old woman wants to share the details of her life forty years ago, that's her prerogative. Ultimately I think this is a book you have to read for yourself, but if you felt some connection to our princess I think this book has something for you.

- Kalpar

Catalyst, by James Luceno

Today I'm looking at a book called Catalyst set within the new Star Wars universe after the reboot/realignment/whathaveyou after the Disney purchase of the franchise. Catalyst takes place over several years, starting during the Clone Wars and ending sometime before Rogue One begins. The book is mostly about Jyn Erso's parents, Lyra and Galen, as well as Orson Krennic. (The guy with the white uniform in Rogue One if you weren't sure.) As you might also guess from the cover, the book has a lot to do with the Death Star project and Galen Erso's initially unknowing cooperation in the development of the Death Star's planet-killing superlaser.

The book begins with the Ersos being on a remote planet of the galaxy involved in research of kyber crystals, the crystals used in lightsabers, and their incredible energy potential. Unfortunately for them, the Clone Wars results in a shift of planetary government and Galen finds himself imprisoned on suspicion of being a Republic spy. Fortunately Krennic, an old school friend of Galen's and involved in the highly secret Republic superweapon project, puts together a rescue team. However this proves to be a mixed blessing because Krennic's real motivations for helping the Ersos is to get Galen, even somewhat indirectly, to start working on crystal technology that can be applied to the superweapon.

My overall opinion of the book is it was okay, but not really worth the effort of reading or listening to. It has that major problem of prequels in that we know the main characters are going to survive to the point where they started in Rogue One so there's not a lot of tension for bad things happening. Despite all the setbacks Krennic suffers, we know he's going to survive to be an antagonist in Rogue One with CGI Tarkin. Despite the horrible discoveries into Imperial plans the Ersos make, we know they're going to make it to their farm. As I've said before, a good prequel manages to make you doubt how it's going to end, even though you already know the ending, and I think that was the biggest strength of Rogue One. Even knowing that the Death Star plans were going to get to Leia by the end of the movie, I still wasn't certain that Jyn and Cassian would get the message through in time. Catalyst just lacks that same tension which makes it a bad prequel.

Another big issue I had was this book started raising some serious questions about the Death Star. I know that it's kind of silly for me to say the Death Star is unrealistic. I mean, it's a giant moon-sized space station capable of destroying a planet, as well as travelling through hyperspace. It's inherently a ridiculous notion. The problem I have is how under wraps the entire project manages to be successfully kept secret for two decades. Sometime during the Clone Wars the Republic actually begins construction of the Death Star, called the Ultimate Weapon. In the book it's implied that a whole government committee is involved in overseeing the project and getting regular status updates on it as well. And there are two things government committees spawn, regardless of the universe they're in: paperwork and more committees. I don't think Luceno exactly states how many people are involved in these committees but I got the impression it was fairly large, which would make it nearly impossible to keep everyone from talking about it.

And then there are the sheer number of resources involved as well. The Empire is literally stripping planets bare to come up with the resources to build the Death Star, along with their Star Destroyers, TIE fighters, AT-ATs, and who knows what else. In the book it's stated that all the Death Star resources get hidden in the huge ledgers of materials the Empire is using, but considering the Death Star's being built at Geonosis and there are no major shipyards or other factories there, you'd think people would start wondering. I could see the Death Star being built and kept secret over a period of three or five years. That makes sense to me. But two decades stretches my suspension of disbelief, even for Star Wars.

We also sort of get the religious elements of kyber crystals, and yet not really. We do see Lyra being a Force...devotee I guess? Like she believes in the Force as a religion but I got the impression she wasn't actually Force-sensitive. Space magic is weird. And it's mentioned that other people worship the kyber crystals as well sort of like what we saw on Jedha in Rogue One. But aside from sort of a vague explanation that the crystals are magic, we don't really know why people hold them to be sacred. I kind of wish there had been more of an explanation for this because it still seems really odd to me.

We also get an environmental message in the book through Galen Erso's quest to find ''sustainable energy'' from kyber crystals, and seeing how the Empire is strip-mining Legacy Worlds to build its Death Star, basically the equivalent of strip-mining a national park. The sustainable energy bit doesn't make a lot of sense to me because it's already established that the Star Wars universe has fusion power, currently something of a holy grail in the sustainable energy. So if you have fusion reactors, why the heck do you need more sustainable energy? Are you running out of hydrogen? It just raises too many questions. Second, the Empire strip-mining nature reserves is played for shock value when honestly that's one of the less evil things they've done. Don't get me wrong, it's bad, but corporations would do the same thing if there was money in it. Considering the Empire enslaves people and destroyed Alderaan, I think we've firmly established that the Empire are the bad guys. Seriously, remember Alderaan? And how they blew it up? And were going to blow up any other planets that resisted them? They're evil! Of course they strip-mine planets! They probably kick puppies too.

The result is a book that it honestly doesn't feel worth the effort of reading. If I really, really want to know how the Death Star was constructed, I could probably just look it up on Wookiepedia, and get several different versions of the story. The Ersos and Krennic don't feel very well developed as characters so I found it difficult to care about what happens to them before Rogue One. Add some issues like the heavy-handed but out of place environmentalism and it just makes the book feel worse. I think I can honestly say you're not missing a whole heck of a lot by skipping this book.

- Kalpar

Star Wars: Bloodline, by Claudia Gray

Today I'm looking at another Star Wars novel, in this case the recent book Bloodline. This is another one of the new books which is part of the new canon tied with The Force Awakens, opposed to all the old books that I read when I was a teenager and now are no longer canon and...okay so the lore's kind of become a mess but you have to expect that with a popular property that's nearly forty years old at this point.

The plot of Bloodline follows Senator Leia Organa some twenty years after the events of Return of the Jedi, and I refuse to refer to her as princess despite almost everyone doing so in the novel because: 1. The planet she was a princess of doesn't exist anymore and 2. She's going into middle age at this point, doesn't she deserve to be called Queen or Viceroy or something? I'm pretty sure Alderaan wasn't a principality. But I digress. The senate of the New Republic has split into two major factions, the Populists like Senator Organa who favor local control and are more concerned with keeping the central government from repeating the tyrannies of the Empire, and the Centrists who wish to establish a stronger central government with more authority in military and economic affairs. The dispute between the two factions has led to endless debates over points of protocol within the Senate and brought the organs of government to a grinding halt.

As a result, things are starting to break down throughout the galaxy. There is increased discontent among member worlds of the New Republic and issues such as piracy and organized crime are beginning to take their toll on local economies. Action is desperately needed and both the Centrists and Populists are intensely frustrated with the deadlock but are unwilling to compromise to create progress. When a request from an emissary of Ryloth begs the Senate to investigate growing criminal enterprises around their planet, Senator Organa and the young Centrist Senator Ransolm Casterfo volunteer to go on a senatorial investigation and soon uncover that there's far more to this spice-trading cartel than there initially appears.

Plot-wise the book helps explain the origins of the Resistance and the New Order who are the major players in The Force Awakens, as well as the split between the Resistance and the New Republic. While this answers some questions I had when I watched the movie, it does give me pause. I am largely of the opinion that a story told in a movie format should be self-contained within the movie. Now with the saga nature of the Star Wars franchise I can understand people having to watch earlier movies in the franchise to have it make sense, but at least those are within the same medium. I'm not sure how I feel about people having to read comics or books or play video games or watch tv series to find out important bits of information in movies. Especially when the book comes out some five months after the movie does.

This is a trend that's sort of been happening with the Marvel cinematic universe as well, where the movies are all getting more and more densely connected and also tied to things like the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. tv series. On the one hand it's an interesting experiment in multi-media platforms to tell a much larger story in a way that I'm not sure has really been attempted before now. On the other hand, it then becomes a challenge to go read/watch/consume everything within that franchise to understand everything that's going on. Which is one of the problems I've had when I've tried to read superhero comics in the past because the crossovers mean you have to go and read a dozen different titles to understand everything going on in a plot, which I'm just not used to. So I can see how it might be fun for people with all these different stories, but I can also see how outsiders might get even more put off because of the complexity of the lore and refuse to jump in.

There are a couple of things I also just really don't understand about this book either. First is the almost ingrained antipathy sci-fi writers seem to have for governments in general and legislatures in specific. I think I really only notice it because I'm reading one of the Honor Harrington novels at the time I listened to this book (more on that later this month) and both had corrupt or incompetent politicians who just make things work. There are some decent people, but the Senate as a whole is depicted as a petty, incompetent, and constantly squabbling group that would argue over the proper seating arrangements for lunch before getting to the menu. On the one hand, it feels very much like an Articles of Confederacy situation where the New Republic is too afraid of centralizing authority because of past experiences with a centralized authority, but at the same time it feels like this has gone on for too long for nobody to do anything about it. I can understand people's frustration with government, but it still does stuff on a pretty regular basis.

The other thing that just seems really weird to me is Ransolm, who is an avid collector of Imperial war antiques, such as helmets, flags, pieces of propaganda, and so on. Senator Organa is, of course, very upset by his decision to display his collection in his office and that makes some sense. Ransolm strenuously denies that he wants the brutal tyranny of the Empire and its corruption to come back, but he says he does admire their strength and efficiency and the valor of the ordinary men and women who were fighting for a cause they believed in. Leia counters with the argument that whatever good the Empire may have done, such as coming down on pirates and smugglers, was far outweighed by the bad, including the destruction of Alderaan. And as my girlfriend said it's kind of weird that he collects this stuff. It's almost like if somebody had a collection of Nazi relics and while they deplored Hitler and the Holocaust, they admired the efficiency and strength of the Third Reich. By the narrowest definition they're not doing anything wrong, but you certainly would be looking askance at someone who talked like that. I know I would be.

Ransolm's hobby makes even less sense when his backstory is revealed and it turns out that not only did his parents work themselves to death in an Imperial labor camp on his homeworld, but he watched Darth Vader kill his own father in front of him when he was no older than six. Understandably Ransolm has some very, very good and very personal reasons to hate Palpatine and Vader. But his desire to collect Imperial artifacts makes even less sense with this backstory. You would think he'd want nothing to do with the Empire. I just can't seem to wrap my head around it.

Overall this book is okay and it's definitely better than some of the other stuff from the Expanded Universe I've let myself read over the years. I think most of the problems I have usually boil down to I learned an entirely different chronology and backstory and so I don't know how I feel about this entirely new and different canon which replaces the old canon. And if you want to know more about how the galaxy got into the mess it did right before Force Awakens, then Bloodline has answers for you.

- Kalpar

Battlefront: Twilight Company, by Alexander Freed

This week I'm descending once again into the craziness of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, although in this case I'm reading something that's apparently canon. For the time being, anyway. This is one thing which kind of confuses me is figuring out what's canon anymore and what isn't. I understand the decision made a few years back to declare basically everything but the three movies not canon. (''But Kalpar!'' you're probably saying. ''What about the other three movies and the two tv series?'' To which I respond: ''What other three movies and two tv series?'') After thirty years the EU had gotten so clogged with novels, comics, and video games that you needed an encyclopedia to keep track of everything. So by razing everything to the ground it makes a lot of sense. Although now with the introduction of yet more novels, comics, and video games it's becoming an even more incomprehensible tangle. Much like how the Marvel cinematic universe is becoming a crazy, interlocking mess in its own way, but that's a rant for another day.

Battlefront: Twilight Company is a tie-in to the video game Star Wars Battlefront, actually the second game with that name because I totally remember when the first one came out. But again, a rant for another day. This book follows the adventures of the 61st Rebel Mobile Infantry, also known as Twilight Company, in the days immediately before and then after the Battle of Hoth, with one of the characters actually participating in the ground battle and managing to escape from the Empire's net. The book is pretty standard sci-fi military fare, which I've read numerous times with the 40k novels about the Imperial Guard over the years. What makes this one different is it focuses a lot more on the struggles of Twilight Company in sticking together.

Within the universe of Star Wars these are dark times for the Rebellion. Although there's the victory of destroying the Death Star, the Empire has scattered the Rebels across the galaxy and they haven't had much success since then. The loss on Hoth is also a crippling attack on morale. So this book deals a lot with rebel soldiers, the ground-pounders who are fighting, bleeding, and dying on countless worlds against the stormtrooper legions of the Empire. And you really get a sense of the desperation and how hard it can be for people to keep fighting. Especially when it seems like they're fighting for a lost cause. So while there are elements of standard sci-fi military fiction with daring raids and infantry attacks, it's got a more psychological element as well.

There's also the inclusion of a character who serves as a member of the stormtrooper garrison on the planet Sullust, and her path eventually crosses with Twilight Company, albeit in a limited fashion. And I'm kind of mixed on her inclusion in the story. On the one hand it's a good thing because it humanizes stormtroopers, the ultimate faceless goons who have been killed in droves since 1977, and helps people understand why someone might join the Empire and be proud of that. But on the other hand, it feels kind of tacked on compared to the rest of the story. She really could have gotten her own book that explored and humanized the Empire and how people saw it as a force for order, but it's sort of an addendum to the book and feels less developed.

Because this is an audiobook I will comment on the sound effects which I actually commented upon in other Star Wars audiobooks I've listened to. In this case, I felt like it just wasn't quite up to par with some of the other books. As it was a military book there was a lot of blaster fire used, but it felt like the same sound effect got used a lot which got repetitive really quickly. The inclusion of music from the movies was nice and really useful in one or two scenes, but it was rather limited. It just felt like there was less effort spent on sound production in this book compared to others.

Overall the book's okay. I wouldn't say it's really breaking into new ground. Especially if you're like me and you've read far too much pulp sci-fi military adventure stories than is strictly healthy for you. (I do love me some space operas.) But I liked that it's a fresh perspective in the Star Wars universe which seems to spend an inordinate amount of time following the main characters around all the time. If you like military sci-fi this is a good choice.

- Kalpar

Death Troopers, by Joe Schreiber

This week I'm taking a look at Death Troopers, which when I first saw it come out years ago I remember it being billed as ''Star Wars, but with zombies!'' And while I'm not terribly big on zombies as a monster or genre (zombies count as a genre, right?) I am happy to read or in this case listen to things in the Star Wars universe that take a slightly different approach than some of the more traditional Expanded Universe stories. In this case the book was pretty good, although the ending had some problems as far as I was concerned, but more about that later.

As some of you might remember, earlier this year I reviewed another audio book within the Star Wars EU, Allegiance by Timothy Zahn. One of the things I liked most about Allegiance and which holds true for Death Troopers as well, is the high production quality which is put into the audio books. I haven't been mentioning it much in my reviews and partly that's because I've been listening to non-fiction books that don't really require sound effects or musical accompaniment, or even multiple voices for characters. However, in some of the fiction books that I've listened to, Dune especially, I've found myself questioning some of the decisions regarding voice actors and use of music which seems haphazard at best. Death Troopers however, has distinct voices for numerous characters, incorporates music from the film franchise, and makes good use of sound effects to flesh out the narrative. So from a production quality standpoint alone these books have so far been an absolute delight.

Another thing that was really good about this book was it set the atmosphere very well. The plot involves an imperial prison barge which comes across an Imperial Star Destroyer floating adrift in deep space. A team goes across to scavenge spare parts but when they come back almost all of the boarding party appears to be afflicted by a mysterious illness which soon sweeps through the ship. Schreiber does a really good job with the pacing and expressing just how creepy finding a derelict ship, especially one as big as a Star Destroyer, can be. The one thing that I think really undermined the creepiness factor was at every chapter the narrator would state the chapter title and then another voice would sort of whisper-scream it. Like you know those creepy voices that show up on tape in horror movies? Sort of like that. I felt like it was just trying too hard at that point and came across as kind of silly. Otherwise, it did a very good job at being creepy.

The issues I had with the book really came towards the end. I didn't really mind Han Solo and Chewbacca showing up towards the middle of the book, even if it didn't make terribly much sense from a plot perspective. I'm sure it was like a requirement or something that characters from the movie be included in some capacity. But, I think the book could have stood fine on its own without Han and Chewie. There was one character who's supposed to be an unabashed psychopath but he actually came across as less so than some ''heroic'' characters I've encountered in the past. Plus he goes through a whole redemption arc which I felt undermined his being a psychopath because psychopaths don't feel remorse, but that's just me. There were also some deus ex machina bits towards the end that wrapped the plot up neatly which probably explains why there isn't a zombie-infested Star Destroyer mentioned anywhere else in the universe.

Overall I think the book was okay. As an audio book it's pretty enjoyable and the tension is very well done. I just had some issues with how it was wrapped up.

- Kalpar

Allegiance, by Timothy Zahn

This week I'm dipping, at least for a little bit, back into the world of Star Wars with another Timothy Zahn novel, in this case Allegiance, which is read by Marc Thompson. Readers of my blog may be passingly familiar with Timothy Zahn as I've mentioned him before on the blog and actually have reviewed one of his other books, Scoundrels. And when I was younger and only slightly more foolish than I am now I also read probably Zahn's most famous work, the Thrawn Trilogy, as well as the Hand of Thrawn Duology which followed much later. Overall Zahn has a very good reputation as a science fiction writer in general and specifically in the Star Wars Expanded Universe (which of course is all irrelevant now anyway, but that's another conversation.)

Quality has always been a bit of a problem in the heady days when the Expanded Universe grew free like a kudzu vine, smothering everything with its choking and expansive embrace. Some of the books read as little more than very bad fanfiction which was given the Lucasfilm sanction, if we're being entirely honest, to get another dime out of the franchise. (A favorite example one of my friends likes to bring up is the truly awful Jedi Prince series, which the excuse of being made for children simply does not excuse its numerous sins.) Zahn stands out in this field for creating compelling and interesting storylines as well as depicting Imperial characters, who were all too often depicted as third-rate stage villains chewing the scenery and gloating in being evil for evil's sake, as actual three-dimensional characters with motivations and reasons for behaving the way they do. They may not be terribly good reasons, but they're still good reasons. And with a title like Allegiance, I was hoping Zahn would deliver more interesting characters and situations.

The story is set sometime between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back where the Rebellion, although buoyed by its success in destroying the Death Star, is still a long way away from toppling the Empire and restoring freedom to the galaxy. In fact the Alliance is still in very great danger of falling apart at the seams. The plot starts out with three separate threads which eventually come together into one overarching plot towards the end of the novel. First we have what I consider the least interesting plot, which is Han, Luke, and Leia who are doing a variety of things to keep the Alliance functioning, such as investigating pirate raids on rebel supply lines and playing the careful game of diplomacy among the Alliance's more individualistic leaders.

I say this plot is probably the least interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, thanks to the movies we know what happens to Han, Luke, and Leia so there're protected by plot armor the entire time. They may be in danger, but they'll be alive and well for Empire, as we already know. Secondly, you remember how Luke was still kind of a whiny kid in A New Hope and how Han wasn't really into the whole Rebellion thing in the first place? Zahn really emphasizes that in this novel and while it's certainly true to the characters, it's traits that I don't really enjoy in them as characters. Luke especially is far more enjoyable when he grows into being an awesome Jedi Knight instead of the whiny farm kid from nowhere. And finally Zahn also brings back a really awkward and unfortunate aspect of the old trilogy. See, you guys kind of remember how in A New Hope and in Empire Strikes Back there was that vague, poorly developed love triangle between Han, Luke, and Leia? That was like vague enough to not be fully developed but unfortunately included this?

OH MY GOD THAT'S YOUR BROTHER!

Which gets really really awkward in hindsight when they decided to make Luke and Leia siblings? Yeah, Zahn brings that vague, uncomfortable sense of awkwardness back with a bit of a vengence. I could also go on about how there's a point where Luke gets out of a situation only because the voice of Obi-wan Kenobi, who apparently read the script, tells him exactly what to do, but on further reflection that's actually not that far off from the movies either so I'll just let it go at this point.

The second plotline involves Mara Jade in her role as the Emperor's Hand, something which old veterans of the EU such as myself would be familiar with but maybe not newcomers. Basically while Darth Vader was the highly public enforcer of the Emperor's will, using the sledgehammers of Star Destroyers and stormtrooper legions, Mara Jade was more like a scalpel. The Emperor used her to infiltrate and investigate all levels of the imperial hierarchy, searching for and exposing treason. While she could act publicly, she much preferred to act clandestinely from the shadows. In this book Mara's investigating a plot which could involve an entire sector government for all she knows. This plot's slightly more interesting, for me at least, but as I also know what happens to Mara in the EU there's that lack of tension as well.

The third plot, and what I consider the most interesting, revolves around a group of five stormtroopers who eventually call themselves the Hand of Judgement. All five of them had seen the Empire do good things for the galaxy, bring about law and order, suppress pirates, help fill the vacuum after the Clone Wars, and all of them jumped at the chance to serve in the Empire's elite stormtrooper corps. However after a massacre on Teardrop, when they're ordered to eliminate an entire village of civilians just because they're suspected of being Rebel sympathizers, they begin questioning if the Empire's still worth serving. After an incident on their Star Destroyer in which one of them accidentally kills an officer, they're left with no choice but to run and question whether the Empire is still worth serving. This was the plot I was most interested in, if for nothing else than it introduces new characters who aren't guaranteed to come out of this alive, and I've always had a bit of fondness for redshirts and their cousins across science fiction, like the stormtroopers. If the book had been more about these guys, with just a little bit less about more familiar characters I think I'd recommend it more strongly, but they unfortunately have to share the spotlight in this instance. 

I do want to compliment Marc Thompson who goes to great lengths to provide unique voices for the characters in the novel. He certainly does a serviceable young Luke and Han Solo impression and while it's a little odd to hear a stormtrooper with a Texas drawl or a vaguely New Jersey accent, it certainly helps to keep the characters apart when you're listening instead of reading. The inclusion of music from the series, as well as sound effects, also helps to make you feel like you're really there in the Star Wars universe and makes it a more complete experience. My only regret is that Thompson, through no fault of his own, really only has one voice for female characters so Leia and Mara Jade ended up sounding a lot alike to me. I know it would probably add to the cost, which they might not be willing to pay as there's a tragically low number of female characters in Star Wars, but I think it would certainly help to have a female voice actor for the female parts in novels, but that's just me. 

Overall, the book is okay, but not great. Like I said, two of the three main plots didn't overly interest me so it was kind of hard to get too terribly invested. There are some interesting character debates about allegiance, as per the title, and what they're loyal to and why they're loyal to the things they are, but it's probably not the best work done on the subject. Zahn's writing is okay, but there were definitely some weak points and I don't think this is the best thing he's produced for the EU. The introduction of new characters and pointing out that not everyone who serves the Empire is blind to its problems certainly adds depth to the series, but there are better examples from this author, let alone this series. 

- Kalpar

Scoundrels, by Timothy Zahn

This past winter one of my favorite authors in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Timothy Zahn, released a new novel called Scoundrels. Although I cannot, for the time being, permit myself to purchase anything Star Wars related until I know how the new movie planned by J.J. Abrams is going to turn out, I decided to go ahead and borrow this book from the local library and see if it was any good. The short answer is that I was in no way disappointed and I am glad to see that Zahn is still doing the EU credit with his excellent writing. If you're a fan of Star Wars and have spent plenty of time tramping around the EU, I'd definitely recommend you pick this book up if you haven't already.

Scoundrels is set between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back and follows Han Solo, Lando Calrissian, and Chewbacca as they put a team together to pull off the heist of a cool 163 million credits from the vault of a local crime lord, but it isn't going to be easy. They're going to need a brilliant burglar, an explosives expert, and a couple of smooth-talking con men just to get at the vault, to say nothing about getting the goodies out. With a solid plan and a little luck, Han should be able to get enough credits to pay back Jabba once and for all.

I think part of why I really enjoyed this novel was because it was basically Ocean's Eleven but in the Star Wars universe with some familiar characters. As much as I love sci-fi and huge space-operas with titanic interstelllar wars and attack ships on fire off of the shoulder of Orion, I occasionally get bored with those sorts of stories because it generally boils down to a good guys vs. bad guys conflict and there's only so many ways to tell that story and keep it interesting. The Expanded Universe often has had that problem because Star Wars is, of course, rooted in the space opera tradition and many of the EU stories have gone in the same vein. I just thought it was a really refreshing change of pace for this space-opera universe to be used for a heist story.

I have to admit, though, that if you're new to the EU then you probably should spend some time tramping around before you try to tackle this book. At the very least I think a familiarity with Black Sun and Imperial Intelligence would help readers get a fuller experience from the book. Newcomers to the EU certainly can start with this novel and there are definitely worse places to start your journey, but I think a good grounding across the galaxy will help you enjoy this book a lot more as a reader. If you're as old a hand as I am and are looking for something fresh you're definitely going to love this.

Like all heist novels a lot of the plan isn't explained to the audience before it happens because it'd be boring if the characters told us the plan and then it worked, there has to be a certain degree of suspense. So a lot of the book you're going to be in the dark and wondering how they're going to get past the next obstacle. However, the pacing is very well executed and I could hardly put the book down because of my desire to find out what happened next. Throw in some truly awesome twists at the end, and a very elaborate Indiana Jones reference, and you have a pretty gripping read.

- Kalpar