Last year a friend asked me for some advice about where he might start if he were to begin reading “Star Wars” fiction. I had been describing Karen Traviss’ “Republic Commando” series and the then-ongoing “Legacy of the Force” series to him. He had grown up reading Edgar Rice Burroughs and was interested in the possibilities of the “Star Wars” “Expanded Universe.”
This is an updated and revised version of what I e-mailed to him. Comments, constructive criticism and factual corrections (though I hope none of the last are needed) are welcome; everyone needs an editor, but bloggers, including yours truly usually don’t have them.
Since the first movie’s release in 1977, there have been more than 100 works of adult fiction set in the “Star Wars” universe. The amount of material available has exploded since the prequels’ release, and the trend has been toward producing series with multiple authors that carry one story arc from beginning to end, with book releases spaced several months apart. There have been so many “Star Wars” novels published that I haven’t read them all. This list is hardly comprehensive, then. I can offer only highlights of what I have read, though my choice of reading is certainly influenced by the promised contents of each book as well as time constraints, as well as, perhaps, the quality of cover.
My wife calls my “Star Wars” reading my version of “beach reading.” After listening to my summary of story lines, she remarked on the similarities in form to soap operas. Many of the “Star Wars” books, she notes, are essentially soap operas for men, or at least for “Star Wars” fans. They sometimes contain illustrations of deep truths in life and sometimes are written well enough to bring out the reader’s emotions, but for the most part they are true to the movies and so are in the category of fun, light reading, which is in keeping with George Lucas’ Saturday matinee style for the movies.
Beach reading.
That said, here are some ideas for light “Star Wars” reading.
Short stories
You might start with one or two of these books to get a feel for the “Star Wars” “Expanded Universe.” I still have the first two; feel free to borrow them. The rest of the books sold on half.com almost as fast as I listed them:
“Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina”
Most of the “Tales” short-story collections are from the 1990s. Each book contains stories centered on one or more of the minor characters visible in the original movies. A common story thread is present in each, while the events of a scene or two in the movies are present in the background.
The “Cantina” book’s tales concern the Cantina creatures, including one of the band members, a Jawa, the Hammerhead and the horned Devil-liked creature. The bartender gets his own story, too.
My favorites, both for writing and plot are “We Don’t Do Weddings: The Band’s Tale” (Kathy Tyers), and “Empire Blues: The Devaronian’s Tale” (Daniel Keys Moran). The Devaronin happens to be a music fanatic, and the author does a fantastic job of illustrating his passion. Consider this passage about his collection of recordings:
I have everyone. Or, to be precise, I have something by everyone. I have music the Imperium banned a generation ago ... by musicians executed for singing the wrong lyric, in the wrong way, to the wrong person, by musicians who simply vanished. By musicians who had the good fortune to die before the Empire came to power.
I disliked only two or three stories in this book. Other favorite stories: “Play It Again, Figrin D'an: The Tale of Muftak and Kabe” (A.C. Crispin) and “Nightlily: The Lovers' Tale”) (Barbara Hambly).
“Tales of the Bounty Hunters”
Same format as “Mos Eisley.” To my way of thinking, the best one by far is “Of Possible Futures: The Tale of Zuckuss and 4-LOM” (M. Shayne Bell). It is an emotionally moving story about how a being’s choices shape his place in the universe. Most “Star Wars” stories are not places to find deep thoughts. This one is.
“Tales From Jabba’s Palace”
Probably the funniest of the short-story collections. The chef’s tale (Barbara Hambly) is especially good, with the protagonist (he works for Jabba, of course, and could be thrown into the Rancor pit at a whim) fretting over his ladyfingers and other desserts. The Gamorrean’s story also is good – just what goes through the mind of a half-witted brute as he makes his rounds of the palace?
An important point I need to make about the short story collections is that all of them are loaded with humor. The novels offer more serious themes than most of the stories you’ll find in the collections.
Author quality is critical to the “Star Wars” books. “Star Wars” has much fan fiction (I suspect “Harry Potter” has more), but the books you can buy are the product of professional authors who are well-known for their own work and have been recruited to expand the “Star Wars” universe.
The books show the sort of evolution one often finds in individual authors. The early works tend to be tied closely – often to the point of being unimaginative – to the original movies’ content. Because they were written before the majority of fiction set in Lucas’ universe, the reader is often well aware that no history yet exists beyond the events in the movies and the limited material outside the movies. When I read these early stories, I have images of great unfilled holes in the universe and a sense that the authors are not fully comfortable in their settings. Indeed, the authors seem to be concerned to include as many connections to the original movies as possible, lest readers lose the feeling that they are reading “Star Wars” fiction. The approach might have had value at the time – and I cannot say much about it, because I had read only “The Han Solo Trilogy” before the prequels appeared – but today it gives me a feeling of reading about a small, constrained, forced universe.
An example of the sometimes irritating derivative nature of the early works can be found in K.W. Jeter’s three-book “Bounty Hunter Wars” series.
Jeter himself is a well-respected author (and the coiner of “Steampunk”). His “Bounty Hunter” series also contains engaging original ideas such as Kud'ar Mub'at, a space-dwelling spider-like creature that spins not only its own enormous spaceship/home from its guts but acts as a sentient computer capable of creating semi-intelligent nodes to help it function. The notion of a giant distributed processing machine is delightfully enforced with the names it gives its nodes, such as Lookout for a node whose sole task is to spot incoming spaceships and Balancesheet, its accountant node.
Jeter also cleverly writes a “Star Wars” book in which apparently no one is a “good guy.” Each character throughout most of the series is merely less or more sympathetic than the other characters. It is an interesting approach.
And yet the book also contains a painfully derivative idea of the sort common to so many books written before the prequels (The first in the series, “The Mandalorian Armor,” was released in 1998): Shell Hutts.
Shell Hutts are Hutts who adopted armored shells. What the author has done is take an idea from the original movies and put a new, irritating paint job on it. A new species could have been introduced, the old Hutts could have been used ... but instead the reader is given a cosmetic change to a familiar kind of character. It would have been better to use old Hutts; readers could have learned more about their nature. Instead ... Shell Hutts.
The later works exhibit the traits of established authors familiar with their craft, their setting and their characters. They have a confidence lacking in the first books that comes with their subjects having backgrounds. The authors are more playful, and they take more liberties with settings and the introduction of characters. In fairness – and I hope I have been fair – they have a key resource the early “Star Wars” fiction authors didn’t have: the knowledge that their readers probably are familiar with many of the other works of fiction available and thus willing to follow the author in directions away from the original movies. They do make reference from time to time to events in previous books, but usually to good rather than grating effect.
The three short-story collections, by the way, also are pre-prequel (published in 1995 and 1996) and depend on events in the movies. Yet they “work” and don’t seem derivative because they overtly use a few events in the movies as jumping-off points for expanded storylines. The whole point of “Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina,” for example, is to follow bit characters whose screen time lasts perhaps a few seconds and to tell their stories. It’s something like “Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead” for the “Star Wars” set. “Eisley” also contains a loose familiarity in form to readers familiar with Arthur C. Clarke’s “Tales from the White Hart.”
Novels
If you find the topics interesting enough to continue, you might want to check out some novels next. Bear in mind that in addition to the “adult novels,” there are quite a few “young adult” novels out there, too. Many are by Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta as part of the “Young Jedi Series.” I can’t speak to their quality.
Here is a timeline of novels showing where they fall in relation to the movies: http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Timeline_of_novels
These “adult novels” are pretty good (to me, of course):
“Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith”
By Matthew Stover. Exceptionally well-written. Stover turns a CG blockbuster and turns it into a psychological thriller and morality tale. For everything but special effects, it’s better than the movie. Seriously.
“Legacy of the Force” series.
The first of the nine novels takes place about 40 years after “Star Wars,” but Luke, Leia and Han are major, if aging, characters. The first is titled “Betrayal,” by Aaron Allston. “Bloodlines” is a good one, in that it is written by another good author, Karen Traviss, and deals with Boba Fett and his family problems – Beach reading-turned-soap opera for SF fans.
“Republic Commando” series.
Four books; the first is “Hard Contact.” Written by Karen Traviss. Deals with a squad of four clone troopers. Great adventure, and much of the gallows humor you can expect from pre-1965 war movies. A real sense of the troopers’ comraderie and science-fiction police work, But they also includes much about the commandos’ conflicted, tough sergeant, their (sometimes woefully inadequate) Jedi generals, the ethics of human cloning and more.
The Commando series is the first I noticed in which the ways of the Jedi are seriously questioned. The ethical problems makes for good reading in this series, but in the latest series, “The Fate of the Jedi,” I fear the writers have gone too far and removed much of the mysticism and mystery that makes “Star Wars” as a whole work.
“Outbound Flight.”
Takes place between “Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” Great introduction of an imperial military genius and his previously unknown race. Plot-powered by a Jedi of tall ego.
“Darth Bane: Path of Destruction.”
Takes place a thousand years before the movies. The most important thing to know is that the protagonist is an evil Sith lord, and there is never any redemption of the sort Darth Vader receives. If you can accept that in novel, it is an interesting book. A sequel followed, and a third book is due next year.
Like it/dislike it:
“I, Jedi.”
The only “Star Wars” Jedi story written in first person. It’s convoluted, and I think the writer tries to force it sometimes, but it’s entertaining in some ways. This might be the first book that gives some detail about lightsaber construction.
Worth avoiding:
“Death Star.”
Published late last year, it has a promising title, but it takes the idea of turning minor movie characters into protagonists in the wrong direction. The “Tales” short stories worked in part because they gave the minors their own story-worthy plotlines; their interaction with major characters was limited to what you saw on the screen and their influence on movie plotlines was usually negligible if at all present. “Death Star” gives the minor characters major influences on the plot. The approach might work in a parody, but it’s annoying in “Death Star.” The heroes aren’t allowed to do heroic things – they are “helped” by characters we might not even see in the original movie. One of the most grating scenes is of a Force-influenced stormtrooper who takes too many paragraphs to run down a corridor. The scene is a poorly executed attempt to explain why the stormtroopers chasing Han & Co. were such bad shots. But then, the entire book is a poorly executed attempt to explain such problems in the first movies (including why the gunner kept saying “Stand by” just before Luke blew up the Death Star).
Again, this is merely an introduction and hardly meant to be an exhaustive list or review. It can’t be, because I still have plenty of “Star Wars” books on my reading list. Happy reading.
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