Star Wars, Geek Culture, and Power Converters
People have asked me what my favorite Star Wars book is before. They’ve asked me what the best Star Wars book is. Those ideas always change for me, depending on what I’ve read most recently and what the newest Tim Zahn book is.
But if anyone ever thought to ask me which Star Wars book was the most fun, the answer would have to be Starfighters of Adumar, hands down. Click on the jump for more from our final X-wing retrospective as we gear up for Mercy Kill.
Here I come again with another post that has nothing to with Star Wars. For that matter, this post has nothing to do with Science Fiction, either. Really, this post is about a geeky book. You’ve heard of it and if you’re curious like I was, you might appreciate having a review of it.
Up front, I’d like to reiterate that this is a review of the book, not the movie. I have not seen the film and I’m likely to wait it out until the DVD hits. Either that or see the Asylum’s version, Abraham Lincoln Versus Zombies. Because, come on, if Honest Abe is going to fight one brand of the undead, why not take all comers?
So, now we’ve reached the end of the initial run of the X-Wing series. The Bacta War is the capstone to Mike Stackpole’s work on start of the series and it represents, to me, some of the highest points of all four books. The tone of these books is different than the books in the past have been and for very good reason.
After we were left with the end of The Krytos Trap, many of us were on edge, disbelieving what happened and completely ove awed by the possibilities. Please be aware, once you cross this jump, you are deep into spoiler territory.
For those of you that have looked at my reviews in the past, you know that I have a propensity for hyperbole. And snark. Lots of snark. Kevin J. Anderson is a writer that I’ve thrown a lot of flak at in the past. Really, he’s been one of my favorite targets, and I’ll say this, he really does seem to bear a good bit of it. At a time not so far back, I’ve referred to him as being a kind of nemesis to me.
But to be honest, that was before I read some of the SWEU material that I was steered around the first time I was going through the Bantam/Spectra era books, which has been a long time ago. You know that the last review I did was for Children of the Jedi in a series of posts that went on for a bit too long. Barbara Hambly is likely not as bad a writer as she came across in that book, but it really seemed like she was pretty far outside her wheelhouse.
That book gave me a big dose of perspective for the concept of bad Star Wars. I had held that Anderson’s books were bad Star Wars up to a point, but something else has come to my attention. There’s a difference between bad Star Wars and not good Star Wars. Children of the Jedi was bad. Darksaber isn’t bad Star Wars; in fact it fits in with my usual prerequisites for being pretty good, but it has a pretty long list of bad features that throw it out of that.
I can say something good about Kevin J. Anderson up front. I swear, just watch. The Jedi Academy Trilogy established some very important aspects of the Expanded Universe at large. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like the way it was written, but for anyone who is coming into the EU from the start of the Bantam/Spectra era, it’s pretty much required reading. For anybody who is wondering where the Academy came from, it’s important. Let’s be honest, if you’re looking at anything except the core of the New Republic Era, anything later pretty much encourages you to read it. The characters and concepts that get to be important later on have their sources there.
Now, you don’t want to read this; it isn’t the funny bit. Me talking about the stuff that’s wrong–that’s what you want. So, here’s where we stand, I’m going to break this down into just two parts, I’m not running a page by page analysis, you’re going to get the problems at large as I see them. For me, Darksaber has two fronts of problems. There’s the distinct storytelling issues and there’s the technical issues.
For today’s post, we’re going to focus on the former of the two. Hit the jump to see the story elements of this book that crawl under my skin.
(In England, anyway.)
The following review, while spoiler-free, has explicit spoilers for Thor as well as potential implied ones for Iron Man 2 and Captain America. That said, if you’re reading this review and haven’t seen those yet, go watch them and then come back here.
The thing about The Avengers—or Avengers Assemble, which only about ten people actually call it—is that it was pretty much guaranteed to be at least decently good. Obviously, until it came out, there was no gauge of exactly how good it was, but like macaroni and cheese or chocolate, for it to actually be bad, something would need to have gone pretty spectacularly wrong.
(And it’s not, strictly speaking, a sequel to anything, so I’m going to avoiding pointing out that, often, things do go spectacularly wrong for sequels.)
Ready for another aspect of geek culture? Here’s a book you might want to look into: Lizzie Stark’s Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role-Playing Games, published by Chicago Review Press and out in bookstores Monday, May 1st.
Full disclosure: I received an advance digital copy of this book for reviewing purposes.
Leaving Mundania was one of the more interesting books I’ve read in a while. Being a geek myself, I’m familiar with live action role-playing games. Many of my friends in college played, and while I never made it to an actual LARP event, I knew the basics of how to play, had my own boffer sword (think a homemade Nerf sword–a pool noodle carefully duct-taped around a PVC pipe), and enjoyed practicing beating the crap out of my friends with it.
I never went to a LARP event, because when you got right down to it, it meant camping and tromping through the woods, and well, I didn’t want to go. I’ve always been much more of a table-top gaming girl myself (which I loved doing with these same friends). In the intervening years, the LARP that I knew has gone under, unfortunately, so my husband and his brother don’t spend weekends “playing whoop-ass” (as my mother-in-law likes to refer to it).
I hate horror movies.
Loathe them. I am easily the world’s biggest wuss when it comes to watching scary movies. The last one I saw was The Ring, and after that I had a hard time sleeping for a week. Heck, I wouldn’t touch our TV for a few days just because I didn’t want some stringy-haired ghost girl to reach out of the set and suck the life force out of me. So yes, horror and I do not get along well, which is why I surprised myself by even considering seeing The Cabin in the Woods, a horror film from Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon.
While I hate horror films, I love the works of Joss Whedon. His brand of wit, awareness, and genre savvy has always resonated with me, be it Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Firefly. If you’ve spent even five minutes listening to the podcast, you’ve probably heard me gush about how well Whedon develops his characters and crafts dialog. You can see my dillema.
My trust in Whedon eventually won out and I finally went to see the film last night. Thankfully for horrorphobes like myself, Cabin in the Woods is one of the few films in the genre I can heartily recommend.
Our own Nanci has a new review over her other gig at EUCantina. This time around, she takes a look back at Timothy Zahn’s Survivor’s Quest.
As a self-contained story, Survivor’s Quest doesn’t add much to the main storyline. As a standalone novel, it could easily be passed over if one is trying to catch up with the main storyline.
However, skipping the book entirely would be a grave disservice.
SQ is a must-read for fans of the Chiss, the Empire of the Hand, the Fels, and the 501st Legion. In fact, SQ is the novel that first canonized the 501st, named for the fan costuming organization. We meet two new prominent Chiss, Formbi and Drask, and learn more about Chiss culture and hierarchy. This novel first identified the Empire of the Hand, the government established by Grand Admiral Thrawn in the Unknown Regions.
Check out the rest of Nanci’s review at EUCantina.
Part II of our Fate of the Jedi review looks into new characters, the authors, loose ends, and gives a score for the series as a whole. Be sure to read the first part here.
To the jump!
I’ve spent a lot of time dealing with what Luke and company have been doing so far in this book but there’s a whole other half to this. Leia and Han, and the story seems to be largely from the perspective of Leia, are off trying to find where the titular young’uns were, and maybe still are.
More after the jump. Continue reading