The ultimate guilty pleasure: Alyssa Rosenberg delves into the Star Wars expanded universe.
As a kid, I remember tearing through the extended universe novels. A few years back , I idly skimmed over my battered paperback collection. And you know what? A lot of those books were bad. A few – The Thrawn Trilogy, The Black Fleet Crisis – hold up reasonably well as competent space operas, but most didn’t have much going for them beyond the Star Wars license. What’s worse, a few decidedly mediocre authors seem to have made entire careers out of repurposing other people’s ideas (I’m looking at you, Kevin J. Anderson). Fan fiction or authorized sequels can be fun, but in the long run, they’re probably a crutch; it becomes too easy to lean on someone else’s imagination in place of something more interesting.
Timothy Zahn’s an amazing author – I started with the Thrawn Trilogy (the later Hand of Thrawn duology is even better) and have now read practically everything he’s written. Kevin J. Anderson is a joke; the ridiculously incompetent villains are the worst part of his novels.Report
That, and the fact he’s awful at writing!
I’ve got a real soft spot for Zahn, though.Report
Totally in agreement. I read them when I was in middle school, mostly. Zahn’s SW novels blow away pretty much all of the others IMO.
I think the Conquerors trilogy was even better though, but I haven’t read it in years, so I could be wrong.Report
Agreed on Zahn, though I was and remain something of a fan of the Rogue Squadron books.Report
I read the first Zahn trilogy and enjoyed that, and I can’t help but give a shout out to the “Dark Empire” graphic novel by by Tom Veitch and Cam Kennedy, but man when I started to dip into other stuff, I quickly lost interest. It’s amazing the degree to which something you read at the right time in your life can seem so immediate, but when you revisit it — just awful. You really can’t go home again.Report