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my rating |
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0345511565
| 9780345511560
| 0345511565
| 4.32
| 23,821
| Dec 01, 2009
| Dec 08, 2009
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 19, 2025
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not set
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Jan 21, 2025
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Hardcover
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0345511131
| 9780345511133
| 0345511131
| 4.18
| 5,158
| Jan 01, 2008
| Oct 27, 2009
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 02, 2025
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not set
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Jan 02, 2025
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Mass Market Paperback
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0345508998
| 9780345508997
| 0345508998
| 3.88
| 2,559
| Jan 01, 2009
| May 19, 2009
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 10, 2024
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not set
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Dec 11, 2024
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Paperback
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0345477588
| 9780345477583
| 0345477588
| 3.85
| 2,252
| Jan 27, 2009
| Jan 27, 2009
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 2024
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not set
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Dec 02, 2024
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Mass Market Paperback
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B0094EZCEC
| 3.88
| 3,210
| Dec 09, 2008
| Sep 30, 2012
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 14, 2024
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not set
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Sep 14, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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0345506189
| 9780345506184
| 0345506189
| 4.27
| 6,101
| Sep 01, 2008
| Sep 16, 2008
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it was ok
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For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy,
For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: the fourth book in the Republic Commando series, Order 66 by Karen Traviss. SOME HISTORY: Order 66 was the first and only Republic Commando novel to get a hardcover release, perhaps because Del Rey and Lucasbooks were banking on the name recognition of that infamous contingency order pulling more attention than normal. However, the first four Republic Commando books did get Science Fiction Book Club releases in two omnibus editions; Imperial Commando: 501st did not, presumably because its sequel was canceled. Order 66: A Republic Commando Novel by Karen Traviss made it to number twelve on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of October 5, 2008. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: As with the rest of this series, I had never read Order 66 before. I was intrigued to do so, though, because a number of people told me that they liked the Republic Commando series up until Order 66--and since I feel like Hard Contact was the best of the bunch thus far, that made me very curious to find out why. A BRIEF SUMMARY: As the Clone Wars wage on, Sergeant Kal Skirata continues his efforts to prepare a better future for his clone sons and a way out from the Grand Army of the Republic. But as Skirata prepares an exit strategy, Palpatine has plans of his own brewing—leading to the unfolding of his new Galactic Empire… THE PLOT: Order 66 has the same problem as a lot of Star Wars books, where the blurb doesn’t match with the actual plot. The key thing you should note is that Order 66 itself only makes up a very small part of the book. My paperback copy was 467 pages, and Order 66 didn’t start until page 375 and concluded about 30 pages later. The novel mostly consists of Kal Skirata making his preparations for when and how he’s going to pull his boys out: they’re acquiring funds and resources, and the work done by Bessany Wessen, the Treasury auditor, starts to show up on Intelligence’s radar. Bessany’s pulled to safety, Skirata realizes that they need to spring three separate people from secure facilities, and Etain finally tells Darman about their child. Skirata adopts even more boys, and those boys get married in very nonchalant Mandalorian fashion. Skirata finally sets a date for their withdrawal: 1,090 days after the Battle of Geonosis. In the background, we have the Battle of Kashyyyk, the Battle of Coruscant, Palpatine’s abduction by General Grievous, Grievous fleeing back to Utapau, and Palpatine issuing Order 66. The remaining chapters of the book are the fallout of multiple decisions made during that time, and a lot of plot threads are left hanging for book #5. CHARACTERS: Oh boy were there a bunch of characters in this book. For Omega Squad, we got Darman’s viewpoint; for Delta Squad, we got Scorch’s. We continued to follow along with Bessany and Ordo and Kal Skirata and Etain and the former Jedi Bardan Jusik—and then Traviss introduced a bunch of new characters, but fortunately they weren’t added to the POV bloat. As with the previous books, Etain irritated me more than anyone else in this story. On the plus side, she finally told Darman that they have a child, which was a plot point I took great issue with in Triple Zero and True Colors. Darman was surprisingly happy to learn about Kad’s existence, they later got married via text (apparently that’s legal for Mandalorians?), only for everything to go completely haywire towards the end. Etain continues to struggle with her feelings about the Jedi Order: she does not want them to steal her child (more about that later) but she also wants to help the clones and advocate for their welfare, so she doesn’t leave the Jedi like Jusik did. She encounters Callista and other renegade Jedi trained by Master Altis, and since they don’t follow the rules against attachment she’s interested in learning if she could coexist within their group. Etain is with Delta Squad during the Battle of Kashyyyk— a deviation from the video game, because Etain was not their commanding officer—but Kal Skirata’s Wookiee friend Enacca pulls her out and spirits her away to Coruscant. She sends a message that she’s leaving the Jedi Order, but right as she lands on Coruscant Order 66 is issued. This is the thing that bothered me the most. Multiple characters are like “we’ll pick you up, Etain” but Etain will have none of that. Etain will walk to the rendezvous point with two lightsabers in her bag DURING ORDER 66! She thinks that they won’t detain her because she’s resigned—and I was expecting some confrontation to occur because she has two lightsabers, but no, what happened to Etain was even dumber than that. She’s walking up to a checkpoint with a bag check, and Darman and Niner and even Ordo are waiting on the other side for her, when three padawans pull their lightsabers on the clone troopers. Etain puts herself between a clone trooper and a padawan, and the padawan slices her to death. When I got to the end of this three-page chapter, I closed the book and my only thought was “Etain, you idiot.” I guess she died protecting the clones that she loved, but if that clone knew she was even a former Jedi, he would have murdered her. I suppose it’s in keeping with Etain’s character, because she was always making dumb decisions, but what a way to go! Omega Squad updates: Fi’s replacement Corr makes a lot of snarky comments about political stuff; Atin marries his Twi’lek lady; Niner struggles with following orders as their leader, especially when that conflicts with Kal Skirata’s agenda. He only seems to go along with Skirata’s withdrawal to Mandalore because all the other Omega guys want to, but during the silly checkpoint confrontation he falls and breaks his spine. Darman stays behind with him, and as the book ends they’re both stuck on Coruscant, conscripted into Palpatine’s new Empire. I feel especially bad for Darman, who finally found out he had a son only for his wife to die and his kid end up on Mandalore while he’s trapped on Coruscant. Delta Squad is going through some similar issues. Since we’re in Scorch’s head, we see how much the war is affecting him, and how much he’s falling apart under the constant pressure of being deployed into conflict after conflict after conflict without any break. We also see how their training under Sergeant Vau made them into a very different unit from Omega Squad, as they realize they’ve lost Sev in their withdrawal during the Battle of Kashyyyk but they all agree to pull out and leave him behind. Sev’s fate is left up in the air: is he dead? Or captured? We never find out. I thought they were going to get pulled into Order 66 on Kashyyyk, but instead we don’t see Delta Squad again until the second-to-last chapter of the book, where they’re also recalled to Coruscant and still questioning the decision they made. We see pretty much all the Null ARC troopers in this book—one is keeping an eye on General Grievous, one is still running around sabotaging droid factories, and the rest are coming and going at will—but we’re really only in Ordo’s head. Ordo serves as Kal Skirata’s man on the ground; he’s on Coruscant, so he kills an intelligence agent trailing Bessany then marries Bessany then pulls Bessany out of her treasury job and sends her to Mandalore. He’s also involved with several of the recovery mission, where they spring Bessany’s colleague Zilka from wrongful detention, locate Kal Skirata’s daughter Ruusaan, and retrieve the Separatist Dr. Uthan during the confusion of the Battle of Coruscant. Ordo and the other Nulls definitely have some trauma surrounding their upbringing, and they’re decidedly renegade because in the end, their allegiance isn’t to the Republic but to Skirata. When Order 66 is issued, they don’t participate, but they have a decidedly cocky attitude and some of their dialogue troubled me—more on that in the Issues section. Kal Skirata adopts even more boys (and even adopts Etain after she died), and seems to be aiming for the largest family in existence. I did like that Order 66 emphasized that Skirata is not a good or lawful guy, he just really loves the dudes under his charge. So much of what bothered me in books 2 and 3 was how Skirata was held up to be the best of the best, and while that wasn’t lessened here, I liked anyone admitting that Skirata had some bad points. Skirata has a very charismatic personality that draws people into his orbit; he finds damaged people and absorbs them into his group. That’s an admirable sentiment, but it also feels somewhat cult-like, and that’s the part that worries me. Sergeant Vau also continues to soften up as a character, which I wasn’t crazy about. I liked the differences between him and Skirata, both as people and as trainers, but it seems like everyone who interacts with Skirata becomes more like him. They end up sounding like this hive mind where everyone thinks the same and talks the same, and I miss the variety of voices that we got in previous books because it’s very same-y now. This book also seemed to turn Traviss’s rhetoric against the Jedi up to 11. Bardan Jusik left the Jedi Order at the end of book #3, and is now wholly sucked up into Kal Skirata’s Mandalorian world. It felt like he exchanged one stringent code for another, which doesn’t sound like the healthiest approach. Most of the characters are extremely dismissive of the Jedi, and I think that most came across in how they treated Jedi Master Zey. It seemed like Zey was truly trying to work with Skirata and was actually worried about the welfare of the clones. I don’t think he chose to be the head of Special Operations but is still trying to do it to the best of his ability, yet the amount of detest and hatred spewed about Zey isn’t balanced by the few times that someone admits he’s an okay guy. We’re told that Jango Fett agreed to be the template for the Clone Army because only Jango’s family are strong enough to kill Jedi—where is this coming from?? I thought Jango knew nothing about Order 66??? We get little epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter where the clones are talking about the Jedi with an incredible level of disgust and hatred. I never got this sense of immense hatred towards the Jedi from the clones who served under them. I will be the first to say that the Prequel Era Jedi have distinct problems, but this seemed a bit much! ISSUES: My first issue with Order 66 was that this book is absolutely mistitled. Order 66 is such a small part of the book, only 30 pages total, and none of the characters carry it out. They just happen to be on Coruscant when it occurs, and Etain’s death isn’t even because of Order 66! She’s not found out as a Jedi and executed, she’s in the wrong place at the wrong time and tries to step in-between a desperate Jedi padawan and a clone trooper. More than anything, Order 66 is about the last six months of the Clone Wars, yet so little of the story is actually focused on the Wars and instead on completely unrelated things. I’m not sure why they called this book “Order 66,” other than name recognition, because you don’t get any insights into it or the reasoning behind it. It’s just an order, and most of these characters ignore that order. My second issue was how Traviss depicted the clones’ attitude. Besides their immense hatred for any Jedi who aren’t Etain or Bardan Jusik, Ordo and the Omega Squad guys started calling non-clones and people outside of Kal Skirata’s group “mongrels.” There’s a lot of emphasis on the superiority of the clones—how they’re the best warriors, the best men with a superior genotype—and that combined with calling normal people “mongrels” gave me this weird eugenics vibe. I don’t know that I would have gone as far as denigrating normal people! I could see how some of the clones might have that viewpoint, but the fact that it went unremarked by others made me a little uncomfortable here. Similarly, I found it upsetting that Traviss reiterated over and over how they’re hiding baby Kad because if the Jedi Order knew about him, they’d forcibly take him away from Etain and Kal Skirata. That’s not how the prequel Jedi Order worked! I think if the Jedi found out that Etain had a relationship with a clone commando and then a child, they’d ask her to leave the Jedi Order, and it’d be her choice whether she wanted her child to be a Jedi. That’s clearly not her choice, so they wouldn’t steal her child from her! As in the previous books, Traviss seems to have this misconception that the Jedi steal children when most everything we’ve seen points to the contrary. I could buy Etain concealing her child because she doesn’t want to leave the Jedi Order (like Corran Horn’s grandad Nejaa Halcyon), but the Jedi are not going to abduct her baby. Absolutely not! But my biggest problem with Order 66 was that the book just wasn’t structured well. Part of that ties into my feelings of this book being mistitled, but it also felt like the majority of the book was Kal Skirata’s preparations and then character introductions and development, with the meat of the previous books (the Clone Wars battles) falling by the wayside. The little bits of the Clone Wars we saw were interesting and exciting, but because Traviss has introduced so many characters and relationships to this series, I felt like Order 66 got bogged down by interpersonal stuff. That’s probably why Hard Contact remains my favorite, because it felt lean and fast-paced in comparison to the books that followed. For Order 66, the end is solely focused on setting up plotlines for the sequel and that definitely affected the pace for me. IN CONCLUSION: Order 66 continues the adventures of Kal Skirata and his many clone lads. Very little of the book involves the actual Clone Wars, though, as most of the plot is Skirata’s personal plan about getting his boys out at the chosen time. I think if you're very invested in these characters, there's a lot of developments here, but I also think it was a mistake to title this “Order 66.” The contingency order is such a small part of the book, and mainly seemed like an excuse to deal with Etain. Additionally, not many things are concluded at the end, and there are a lot of plot threads left dangling for book number five, Imperial Commando: 501st. Next up: a standalone novel by Matthew Stover set a year after Return of the Jedi, Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/Yd2YWLvJV3s ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 04, 2024
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Aug 10, 2024
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Aug 11, 2024
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Hardcover
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0345477545
| 9780345477545
| 0345477545
| 3.82
| 2,433
| Aug 26, 2008
| Aug 26, 2008
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it was ok
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2.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter 2.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: the second book in the Coruscant Nights trilogy, Streets of Shadows by Michael Reaves SOME HISTORY: Glen Orbik made the cover art for all three books in the Coruscant Nights trilogy, and I think that was a great choice as Orbik was known for his noir-style art. If his artwork looks familiar to you, it may be because he illustrated some Batman covers for DC Comics, or because he created the cover art for more than two dozen of the Hard Case Crime novels—I particularly remember two by Stephen King, The Colorado Kid and Joyland. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: As with the previous book in the Coruscant Nights trilogy, I never read Street of Shadows before. In fact I kept getting the title wrong! “Streets of Shadows” sounds better to my ear, but no, it’s singular “Street.” All I knew going into it was that Jax finally had a team, but the rest was unknown. A BRIEF SUMMARY: Having decided to stay on Coruscant for the time being, Jax Pavan and his pals continue to work for the Whiplash resistance movement. When a Zeltron stunner named Dejah approaches Jax about getting her artist partner Volette and herself off Coruscant, everyone is shocked to find the Caamasi artist murdered in his studio. But while Jax and co. investigate who killed the artist, Darth Vader continues to search for Jax—and he's employed a famous bounty hunter to do so… THE PLOT: In Street of Shadows, Jax Pavan is investigating something even if I wouldn't call him a private investigator per se. He and his team are working for Whiplash as part of the Underground Mag-Lev ferrying people off Coruscant, and after the world of Caamas is destroyed they’re approached by Dejah Duare about getting her Caamasi artist partner offplanet. Unfortunately, Jax and Dejah arrive back at Volette’s studio to find that he was murdered, so Jax and company start investigating whodunit and why. The narrative’s focus on the murder mystery ebbs and flows throughout the story. Meanwhile, Captain Typho of Naboo has arrived on Coruscant, in search of Padme Amidala’s killer. In the course of his investigations, Typho comes to the conclusion that Padme and Anakin Skywalker were killed by Darth Vader, so he sets up a confrontation with the Sith Lord. Vader still wants to find Jax Pavan, so he hires legendary bounty hunter Aurra Sing to track Jax down. Everything culminates in Typho facing off against Vader, Jax and I-5 revealing the identity of Volette’s murderer, and Aurra Sing ambushing Jax in a spaceport—but he gets away in the end. CHARACTERS: I had issues with Jax's attitude in the previous book when he didn't want to be a Jedi, so fortunately he’s more committed to his role here. He’s actively helping people and taking a leadership position, even if it doesn’t seem to come naturally to him. His two main plot points boil down to Jax wanting to build a new lightsaber after he lost his at the end of Jedi Twilight, but not having much luck tracking down a new energy crystal, and Jax trying to learn more about his heritage by having Rhinann dig into his father’s past. Meanwhile, Jax investigates a murder in a very haphazard manner; he gives the police his actual name, which seems like a bad move for someone hiding from the authorities. Den Dhur buys a fake police ID and when he’s caught, calls Jax to bail him out. When Jax is finally ready to pull the Agatha Christie reveal, he invites the police along too. Jax, if you’re trying to stay on the down-low, this is not the way to do it! He approaches the energy crystal search in an….interesting way. He straight up asks the Vindalian Baron if he can have an energy crystal from one of Volette’s sculptures. The Baron says no. Then he tasks Den Dhur with finding an energy crystal, but he never asks Dejah if she could help. If Volette used energy crystals in his art, why didn’t Jax pursue that angle? Instead Den Dhur asks every Joe Schmoe on the street, and most of Jax’s murder investigation follows this sloppy approach. He interviews the Baron, but doesn’t use the Force to sense what the Baroness was feeling. He makes no progress until Den Dhur finds a thief, but that conversation doesn’t produce any clear suspects. Then next thing we know, Jax says he has the solution and accuses the innocent Baroness, leading to their protocol droid confusing rather like “the butler did it.” Jax investigated diddly squat here. Jax’s lightsaber problems are likewise solved by Captain Typho sending him one of Aurra Sing’s lightsaber, so the energy crystal search is moot. Jax learns from Rhinann the events of Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, that Lorn Pavan was probably killed by a Sith. Jax confronts I-5 about keeping this from him. I-5 finally shares that he’s been carrying around this vial of bota since the Battle of Drongar, that Barriss Offee gave it to him to bring to the Jedi Council on Coruscant, and that since the Jedi are fallen he’s meant to give it to Jax. Maybe this is why Vader is pursuing him? Perhaps. (But we won’t find out until the conclusion of book number three.) Jedi Laranth Tarak is still very skilled with her blasters and doing the strong and silent routine, except she seems to be going through some emotional issues. As the reader, I thought it was very obvious, but Laranth doesn’t reveal them until the very last chapter. She quits Jax’s group and wants to go solo because she was jealous of Dejah the Zeltron and has romantic feelings for Jax. Jax (belatedly) realizes that he feels the same, but we won’t get any resolution on this front until the next book. I felt sorry for Laranth; she’s the first to face off against Aurra Sing, and she’s successful, but then she’s badly wounded during Sing’s spaceport ambush. I don’t think the prequel Jedi Order prepared Jedi for the situation she’s in now, what with No Attachments and all, and I think Luke’s Jedi Order took the right approach of ending that rule. It must be hard to cope with those kind of feelings when you were told they were un-Jedi-like and you were never given an emotional framework to work through a problem like that. Den Dhur is still not working as a reporter, but he got to do a little bit of investigating. I liked seeing him wander around buying parts for Jax’s lightsaber, and while the fake ID was a very bad idea, it did progress the mystery plotline further. Of Jax’s group, Den Dhur is the most insistent that they leave Coruscant, and I don’t blame him! He’s just a little guy, and they get into some dangerous situations. The Elomin Rhinann is also not happy about staying on Coruscant in this partnership, and I half expected him to betray the group to Vader. Instead, he starts to dig into past things like the bota, and I expect his inevitable betrayal in book #3 to be related to that—a surprising number of people talked about bota in this book, and it has to be a Chekhov's Gun. I-5YQ is also here, being sassy and helping with Jax’s murder investigation by…uh…listening into private networks and hacking stuff? He shows a lot more forthrightness and wherewithal than droids are expected to have, and I liked the reminder that I-5 has been carrying around this vial for bota for months now. His relationship with Jax was very rocky in the first book, but they’re on much better footing now. I found the presence of Captain Typho interesting. I liked that we had a member of Padme’s security team who saw her body and didn’t accept the explanation they were given. He knows that she was strangled, and he wants to find out who did it. He comes across Aurra Sing in the remains of the Jedi Temple and out-maneuvers her; he finds Jax Pavan much faster than Vader has managed to; he looks at what happened on Mustafar and comes to an understandably wrong conclusion. He sets an ambush for Vader by informing him that he knows Jax’s location, and when Vader arrives he tries to kill him. He fails, obviously, but as he’s dying he tells Vader that he did it for Padme. This really throws Vader, because I think he’s too close to the events of Revenge of the Sith. Vader continues to look for Jax Pavan, but he’s not looking for Jax himself. Like in the previous book, he has someone else do it, so he pulls Aurra Sing out of prison to find Jax and company. While I liked what Captain Typho added to the story, I felt like Sing tended to pull the focus away from Jax and the murder mystery, and it just dragged out a confrontation that I knew wasn’t going to happen until the third book. Every time we would focus on the mystery, or Captain Typho’s activities, the story would cut away to Aurra Sing and her meandering assignment. Perhaps Sing is too well known of a character, and that’s why it felt like she pulled focus so much? Her fate is also left ambiguous at the end, as she falls into a construction droid, but I’ve read the Legacy of the Force books—I know that she’s alive decades later, so that was obviously not the end of her. ISSUES: While I felt like the noir element was developed a bit more here than it was in Jedi Twilight, I still don't think that either of these books approach Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter’s gritty noir atmosphere. That’s a little strange to me, because this trilogy has a lot of potential for being like a hardboiled detective story set within the Star Wars galaxy. Some of the elements were there, like the murder mystery with the seductive dame, but none of the locations had that grimy pulpy quality. This is set in the Underworld of Coruscant, but it certainly didn’t feel like it. Some of the dates were very wrong in this book, particularly when Rhinann is investigating Lorn Pavan’s past. He finds a message from Bariss Offee to Luminara Unduli about the bota, and he says it's from twenty years ago. No!?! Jedi Healer took place two years into the Clone Wars, and this book is maybe six months to a year after Order 66. Rhinann says that the Trade Federation embargo of Naboo was twenty-three years ago, but that was 32 ABY and this is around 18 ABY. The Phantom Menace was fourteen years ago! Then Rhinann says that the Zabrak Sith (Maul) killed a Hutt in a nightclub eighteen years ago. That’s wrong, but it’s a different wrong date from the earlier one when those events happened in the same year! I wonder if Michael Reaves originally intended for the Coruscant Nights trilogy to be set closer to the Battle of Yavin instead of not long after Order 66, because otherwise the math just isn’t adding up here. My biggest issue with Street of Shadows, though, was how the mystery plotline felt poorly executed. We have a Caamasi artist who’s upset about his planet’s destruction, so he creates this piece of art to serve as a cairn for his people. Meanwhile, his business partner finds Jax and tries to hire him to smuggle Volette and herself off Coruscant. They head back to the studio, and find his dead body. First, what happened to that art piece? I initially thought that his murder was connected to the destruction of Caamas and that potentially seditious artwork, but no, the droid did it. Then I wondered if he was murdered because he created sculptures out of energy crystals, which the Empire might crack down on, but no, it’s not related to that either. Jax never pursues either line of inquiries. He talks to Volette’s sponsor but does a half-assed job, then they talk to undisclosed people and learn nothing. Den Dhur makes a breakthrough with his fake ID and they find out about a thief, but that’s it. Suddenly it’s the end of the novel and Jax has to wrap this up, so he accuses the Baroness and gets the droid to admit guilt. This murder mystery could have added a ton to the missing noir atmosphere, but it felt like huge chunks of the book would forget about the mystery and focus on Captain Typho’s quest or Aurra Sing’s search and then be like “oh, yeah, the murder mystery… There’s no progress.” This plotline could have been executed so much better, yet it ended up being the biggest downside of the book for me. IN CONCLUSION: Street of Shadows continues the Coruscant Nights trilogy by showing how Jax and crew are helping the Whiplash resistance movement—except in this case, they also get dragged into a murder mystery. While they solve the mystery and Jax defeats Aurra Sing, presumably Vader will not give up his hunt and will eventually confront Jax in book number three. There were some weird timeline errors here, the noir atmosphere could have been better, and the mystery plot line was rather slapdash, but I'll be interested to see how the trilogy concludes—especially as I suspect that bota will play a key role in it. Next up: the fourth book in the Republic Commando series, Order 66 by Karen Traviss. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/O8EbZwxOFWo ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 23, 2024
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Jul 27, 2024
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Jul 23, 2024
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Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0345499026
| 9780345499028
| 0345499026
| 3.78
| 5,127
| 2008
| Aug 19, 2008
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it was ok
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Maybe 1.5 or 1.75 stars? It is very much a *video game novel* For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published bet Maybe 1.5 or 1.75 stars? It is very much a *video game novel* For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: another video game novel, this one about Vader’s secret apprentice Starkiller: The Force Unleashed by Sean Williams SOME HISTORY: In the conceptual stage of The Force Unleashed video game, LucasArts threw around a whole bunch of ideas, from playing as a bounty hunter to playing as a Wookiee, until George Lucas narrowed it down to Underworld and the Rise of the Rebellion. LucasArts thought about making the protagonist a Rebel Jedi, then one of the Emperor’s Hands, before finally settling on the protagonist being a dark Jedi trained by Vader to help him overthrow the Emperor—or so it seems. As with other multimedia projects, Starkiller’s story was told in different formats, and the novel was written by Sean Williams, author of the Force Heretic trilogy in the New Jedi Order series. The Force Unleashed by Sean Williams made it to number one on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of September 7, 2008, and was on the NYT list for four weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: I think I saw a commercial or gameplay video of the game when it was released in the fall of 2008, but Starkiller looked so overpowered that I never sought out the novel until this year. A BRIEF SUMMARY: Trained by Vader since childhood, the nameless agent called Starkiller knows nothing of his past, and his future is devoted to overthrowing the Emperor and ruling by Vader's side. In carrying out missions for his Master, he will travel to disparate worlds and make unlikely new allies that will cause him to question his tasks as well as his destiny… THE PLOT: The video game of The Force Unleashed has different endings depending upon the final choices you make, but the novel follows the Light Side ending. (The Dark Side ending concludes with Vader and all the Rebels dead, and Starkiller now serving the Emperor.) In Part One, Vader tasks his apprentice Starkiller with tracking down and killing three different Jedi. Starkiller isn’t alone on these missions, though, as he’s accompanied by the droid Proxy and his pilot, Captain Juno Eclipse. Juno was a TIE fighter pilot, but now she pilots Starkiller’s ship the Rogue Shadow. Starkiller is dispatched to Nar Shaddaa, where he blinds—but probably doesn’t kill—General Rahm Kota. He heads to the junkyard world of Raxis Prime, kills another Jedi, then heads to Felucia to kill Shaak Ti. He returns triumphant, only to be betrayed and presumably killed by his Master. When Part Two opens, we find out that Starkiller isn’t dead; Vader only pretended to kill him, and now tasks him with stoking up dissent against the Empire so he can maneuver all the Rebels together in one place, and somehow that will lead to Vader and Starkiller overthrowing the Emperor. At least, that’s what Vader tells him…So Starkiller saves Juno Eclipse from imprisonment and goes to Cloud City to pick up General Kota, who’s now a sad sack alcoholic. Next they head to Kashyyk to aid Princess Leia Organa, and Starkiller crashes a skyhook and sees a vision of his past—and maybe his future too. They go to Felucia in search of Bail Organa, and Starkiller fights Shaak Ti’s fallen apprentice, Maris Brood. Starkiller destroys a shipyard on Raxis Prime, then they finally end up on Corellia for a meeting between Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and Garm bel Iblis. The Empire gatecrashes this secret meeting, captures the Senators, and brings them to the in-construction Death Star orbiting the world of Despayre. Starkiller and Juno make their way to the Death Star, where Death Star learns that this was all a ploy between Vader and the Empire to root out the Rebels and destroy them. Starkiller fights Vader but shows him mercy and doesn’t kill him, and Starkiller ultimately sacrifices himself so that the Rebels can escape. As the book ends on Kashyyk, we learn from General Kota that Starkiller was really Galen Marek, the son of a Jedi, and the Rebels adopt Galen’s family starbird symbol as the emblem of the Rebellion. CHARACTERS: There are only two viewpoint characters in The Force Unleashed: Starkiller and Juno Eclipse. Of those two, I liked Juno better, because she felt more like a real person than Starkiller. She was raised to believe that the Jedi were bad and the Republic had to be replaced with the Empire, and that the Empire is doing good things and keeping order. It’s not until she attends the Imperial Academy and joins the Navy as a TIE fighter pilot that she starts to question those beliefs. Juno seemed like a competent young-ish adult, but then the text seemed to be hinting that she was a teenager—she was the youngest person ever at the Academy on Corulag, and she seems to be the same age as Starkiller and Leia Organa. After looking this up on the Star Wars wiki, I’m not sure I accept that Juno was a fourteen-year-old cadet and a sixteen-year-old Captain, but whatever. I did buy her backstory of the Bombing of Callos, though. Juno told Vader that she didn’t think they should keep attacking after the world had surrendered, so Vader ordered her to disable the reactor core—and when her fighters carried out their bombing run, it had severe toxic effects that ruined the planet. These were Juno’s first realizations that the Empire isn't just about order, but also about control and power and fear, so when Starkiller starts meeting with Rebels Juno actively aids him in his tasks. She doesn’t know he has a secret agenda, and she thinks it’s the right thing to do because she’s seen the horrors of the Empire very well. Her romantic subplot with Starkiller worked less well for me, partially because Starkiller is a stereotypical blank slate video game protagonist. He doesn’t know his past or his heritage, and all he knows is what Vader taught him. I don’t understand what Juno sees in Starkiller, because she’s a much more fleshed out person than he is. Starkiller is flat; I guess that makes sense for a video game player character, since you’re going to project a bit on them as you’re playing, but it doesn’t make for an interesting book character. Starkiller doesn’t even know his own name, and we don’t learn that he was Galen Marek, the son of two Jedi Knights, until Rahm Kota tells us at the very end. Starkiller is very strong in the Force, which is why Vader snatched him as a child, but his Force abilities are so far beyond anything we’ve seen in the books. I think that something fun to play in a video game may not necessarily make sense in a book, and I think that applies to all of Galen’s Force feats. He destroys absurd numbers of droids, kills a bunch of people, pulls down a Star Destroyer on Raxus Prime. It’s very over the top! He also periodically has visions of the past and the possible future, and doesn’t side with the Rebels until he finally realizes that Vader has set him up. He’s not a particularly compelling hero. Starkiller faces off against three Jedi in those initial “level” chapters. The first is General Rahm Kota, who seems to know who Starkiller is and what he was doing but pretends to be a sad drunk and declines to get involved until the very end. Kazdan Paratus was a Jedi engineer who fled to the trash world of Raxus Prime, and descended into madness. His fight with Starkiller was very silly, involving droid versions of the Jedi Council. Finally, Starkiller confronted Shaak Ti on Felucia, and I found her death very sad. She was supposed to die in Revenge of the Sith but those scenes never made it into the film, so it felt like the video game latched onto adding her as a big draw. I like seeing Shaak Ti, and her comments before her death were the initial cracks in Starkiller’s understanding of himself and his purpose, but I wish they hadn’t thrown her away in one chapter of a video game novel. I also thought that Shaak Ti’s apprentice Maris Brood was going to play a larger role in the story, but we briefly see her in a Force flashback, Starkiller fights her on Felucia, and she runs away after he shows her mercy. Leia Organa, Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, and Garm bel Iblis are here, but they feel like NPCs—especially Leia, who’s on Kashyyk and dispatches Starkiller to rescue her father on Felucia. It’s nice to see them, but you don’t get any sense of their characters. They just exist to direct the protagonist to his next mission. Vader talks with Starkiller about overthrowing the Emperor, but I don’t think he’s ready to commit to that yet. I always got the sense that he talked a good talk, but he didn’t seriously consider overthrowing the Emperor until he found out about Luke’s existence. In The Force Unleashed, he’s still Palpatine’s creature. I do find it interesting that LucasArts didn’t think Palpatine was scary enough to be Starkiller’s Master, and made him Vader’s apprentice instead. Palpatine may look innocuous, but he scares me more than Vader. Vader is visually and physically imposing, whereas Palpatine is just evil for evil’s sake. ISSUES: The Force Unleashed felt more like a video game than a novel. I know, it’s a video game adaptation, but Hard Contact and Shadows of the Empire didn’t have the same problems for me. Hard Contact took the world of the Republic Commando game but told a different story; Shadows of the Empire felt more like a novelization than a book that was trying to hit all the beats of the video game, probably because the novel and game are two different adaptations of the same base story. The Force Unleashed just feels like a video game written down. Part One is just three consecutive missions that Vader assigns to Starkiller, and while they’re all a little different, they each have the same objective. Part Two uses that video game trick of returning to worlds we’ve seen before, so they go back to Felucia to rescue Bail Organa and go back to Raxis Prime to destroy the shipyards. It was a little too obvious that each plot event was a video game mission, and the novel itself felt like the bare bones of the game plus some additional insights. I liked Juno’s character, but I didn’t understand why Starkiller needed a hacker pilot—if Vader had a secret apprentice, it would make more sense if he flew his own ship. But in a video game, it makes sense to have a character that gives you information as you run through a level, thus Juno’s hacker skills (which seem strange coming from a TIE fighter pilot). Starkiller’s Force powers are probably really fun to play in the game, but didn’t work for me in the novel. He’s pulling off Force feats that we have rarely seen before, and his skills felt beyond what even Vader or Luke can do. I questioned the reality of Starkiller redirecting a falling Star Destroyer, especially when it took the combined effort of all the Jedi in Darksaber to push away Daala’s Star Destroyers and still led to Dorsk 81’s death! He also used Sith lightning a lot, which makes it more difficult for me to believe that other characters believed he was a Jedi. But my biggest issue with The Force Unleashed was the way that it depicted the formation of the Rebel Alliance. Contrary to what we’ve seen in other books, like Rebel Dawn or “Interlude at Darknell” from Tales from the New Republic,The Force Unleashed depicts Starkiller as the originator of the Rebel Alliance. And even worse, it was all a ploy by the Emperor and Vader to root out the Rebels and destroy their group. What’s the point of having Mon Mothma and Bail Organa and Garm bel Iblis join forces together, if it was only in service of a plot twist? And I think having Starkiller as the instigator takes away all the credit from Mon Mothma and the Organas and others, and makes them into good people manipulated by evil. It makes for some fun video game levels, but I don’t want it to be the official explanation at all. I also hate the fact that the final fight is on the Death Star; I’m meant to believe that Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and bel Iblis were all held on the Death Star?? That they saw it?? I don’t like it! I don’t like the implications! IN CONCLUSION: The Force Unleashed is a novel adaptation of the video game, and carries a lot of the video game’s quirks. The novel is heavily focused on Juno Eclipse and Starkiller/Galen; I enjoyed getting to learn about Juno, but Starkiller was a little bit too much of a blank slate for me. The plot unfolds like a video game, with Starkiller visiting different worlds for each of his missions and then returning to earlier worlds for new missions. I don't like the twist that this story puts on the formation of the Rebel Alliance, or that they’re all on the Death Star at the end, and I feel like Starkiller’s Force powers are just way too much for a book. Cool to play! But when you read it, he comes across as really overpowered. Next up: the second book in the Coruscant Nights trilogy, Street of Shadows by Michael Reaves. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/WP4-mP90xIE ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 09, 2024
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Jul 13, 2024
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Jul 09, 2024
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Hardcover
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034550898X
| 9780345508980
| 034550898X
| 3.82
| 4,425
| Jul 26, 2008
| Jul 26, 2008
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it was ok
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For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy,
For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: the novelization of the Clone Wars movie, Star Wars: The Clone Wars by Karen Traviss. SOME HISTORY: Unlike the novelizations of the prequel films, in which the authors got to directly talk with George Lucas and get his ideas behind the film, Karen Traviss didn't get any insider access to Lucas or the Lucasfilm Animation team when working on the novelization of The Clone Wars. She was given the script, and just told to go from there. Star Wars: The Clone Wars by Karen Traviss made it to number thirteen on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of August 17, 2008, and was on the NYT list for two weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: I saw The Clone Wars in 2008 and wasn’t particularly impressed by it, so I made no effort to seek out the novelization. Like a lot of the books in this year’s reread, I am approaching this one for the first time. A BRIEF SUMMARY: Jabba the Hutt's son, baby Rotta, has been captured by Count Dooku's Separatist forces, and it’s up to Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, his new Padawan Ahsoka Tano, and the men of the 501st Legion to rescue the baby Huttlet and return him to his father. However, Count Dooku has decidedly other plans in play… BEHIND THE SCENES: Jumping back to the mid-2000s, The Clone Wars movie took a lot of people by surprise, including the staff of Lucasfilm Animation! They were working on a new 3D animated show that was due to come out in 2008 when George Lucas said “Hey, why don't we turn this into a film?” So they took an episode that was supposed to occur later in the season (a flashback episode) and made that the first part of the movie—the Battle of Christophsis, in which Anakin and Ahsoka first meet. Then they took a three-parter about Count Dooku kidnapping Jabba's son, and added that as the last three-quarters of the movie. If the movie feels like a number of TV episodes smooshed together, that's because it basically was. The novelization is a (slightly) different beast. It's the same plot and the same dialogue we see in the film, just fleshed out by insights into the characters and greater details into some aspects of the story. THE PLOT: If you haven't seen The Clone Wars movie, here’s the plot: we start smack dab in the middle of the Battle of Christophsis, when Ahsoka Tano arrives on a ship from Coruscant and says that Master Yoda sent her as Anakin’s new padawan. Anakin and Ahsoka don’t get along super well, but in the end they’re able to work together and defeat the Separatist forces. They’re not on Christophsis long, though, before they’re told that Jabba the Hutt’s son has been kidnapped and that he contacted the Republic for help. Obi-Wan heads to Tatooine to negotiate with Jabba, while Anakin, Ahsoka, and the 501st guys head for the world of Teth, where the baby Huttlet is being held within a monastery. They’re immediately under attack by Separatist droids, a lot of troopers are killed, but Anakin and Ahsoka get inside and find the Huttlet—only to learn that it’s a trap, and Asajj Ventress is trying to frame (and possibly kill) the Jedi. Anakin faces off against Ventress, then he and Ahsoka escape to Tatooine with the Huttlet while the few remaining members of the 501st are rescued by Obi-Wan and his troops. On their way to Jabba’s Palace, Anakin is attacked by Count Dooku while Ahsoka gets to the Palace with the baby, and while Jabba is really mad and wants to kill everyone, Anakin proves that they helped him and gets Jabba to grant the Jedi passage through the Hutt Outer Rim. Dooku’s ploy fails, but Sidious reminds him that they have other plots in place. CHARACTERS: My favorite character in this book was Captain Rex. I had wondered how Karen Traviss was going to depict Rex because she really likes clones, and turns out he’s probably the best character in the whole book! He comes across really well. He’s our sole clone viewpoint character, and he’s loyal and smart and willing to do a lot for Anakin because he knows that Anakin is willing to do a lot for the 501st. Rex even outsmarts Ventress, for goodness sake. The 501st suffer a lot of casualties on Teth, and by the end they’re down to Rex and five other guys. Despite the odds against them, they have some very cunning ploys and manage to hold on until Cody’s troops relieve them. If other characters are more gray, Rex is unabashedly a good guy the whole time. We also got Jabba’s POV, which I didn’t expect because while he’s a character in the film, he felt more like a quest-giving NPC. Jabba’s a gangster, but he’s also a fair bit smarter than he appears. He can understand Basic, he just prefers to let his droid translate everything into Huttese and keep that separation between himself and his supplicants. Traviss also expands on why Jabba has dancing girls when he’s a giant slug: he’s trying to present an image of strength to humans and other humanoids, so he has slave girls and musicians and bodyguards even though Jabba as a Hutt doesn’t care for that stuff. (And in fact, it reflects badly on Hutts if they do!) I felt a little bad for Jabba, as he seems to really love his baby slug and just wants him back—but he’s not going to give anything away for free. Anakin is the Hero without Fear, his men love him, everyone loves him, but he didn’t feel right to me in this book. I think that comes down to two things: the first is that Anakin is constantly right on the edge of boiling anger. In the novelization he sees the ghosts of the Tuskens that he killed, he remembers the blood carver that he killed in Rogue Planet, and he can’t forget the blood and death of so many others by his hands. Anakin is obviously haunted by his mother’s death and the circumstances surrounding it, but I felt like his fuse was a little too short for a story set six months into the Clone Wars. We’ve got a fair bit to go before Revenge of the Sith, yet he seems very close to boiling over. I don’t think Anakin would be there yet, and I think we need the other 2.5 years of the Clone Wars, Padme’s pregnancy, and the Jedi Council’s distrust of him to get him towards that point. The second is that Anakin always refers to Obi-Wan as “Kenobi” within his internal thoughts, and has a lot of resentment towards his former Master. That level of resentment works for Revenge of the Sith, but I always saw the Clone Wars as the time when Anakin and Obi-Wan connected as friends because they were now on more equal footing. Even when Anakin becomes Vader, he still calls Obi-Wan by his first name! Other characters call Obi-Wan “Kenobi,” like Darth Maul or Ventress, but I don’t think Anakin would—his issues with Obi-Wan are very personal. I was surprised that we didn’t get the viewpoints of Obi-Wan, Padme, or Ahsoka in this book. In fact, I felt like Obi-Wan and Padme were perhaps sidelined for other characters like Anakin and Rex, as they’re doing things (Obi-Wan negotiating with Jabba, Padme investigating Ziro the Hutt) but we only see their actions through other viewpoints. Padme’s big sequence where she confronts Jabba’s uncle on Coruscant is entirely off page, and we only learn about it when Count Dooku contacts Ziro. I would have liked Ahsoka’s POV, though, despite her annoying dialogue. Anakin’s internal thoughts about her are weirdly fixated on the fact that Togruta are predators with sharp teeth? I’m sure they are, but that’s strange for Anakin to focus on. Ahsoka is less irritating than she is in the film, but she definitely benefits from future developments in the TV show—this is not the best introduction to her character. As opposed to Episodes One and Two, where I felt like the films were trying to hide the fact that Palpatine is Darth Sidious, the novelization does not conceal Palpatine’s evil nature, especially as we get his internal thoughts in scenes with the Jedi Council. (He despises Master Yoda.) I was surprised that Palpatine personally took the call from Jabba the Hutt, though. I would have thought that the Supreme Chancellor is far above a Hutt gangster, and that’s a task you’d delegate to someone lower down the Senate totem pole. I don’t doubt that Palpatine would get involved in this situation, since he’s pulling strings left and right on both sides of the conflict, but I don't think that he would talk to Jabba himself. The two villains carrying out the Separatist plot are Count Dooku and Asajj Ventress, who are slightly at cross purposes here. Dooku has Ventress kidnap Jabba’s son so that they can blame the Jedi and nudge Jabba into siding with the Separatists, but for Dooku’s plan to work they need to return the Huttlet to Jabba intact. Ventress wants to kill the Jedi, and wouldn’t mind killing the baby as well. Ventress also felt a little off to me in the book, perhaps because of the sheer repetition in her internal monologues of how much she hates the Jedi because they abandoned her master on Rattatak. I’d agree that’s a pivotal part of Ventress’s backstory, but I’m not sure that she would constantly dwell on it over and over again. She also has a close connection with the spy droid that Ahsoka destroys, but without seeing them together on missions or learning about their extensive history—Traviss bypasses all of that—her strong feelings of rage and regret at its destruction fall a little flat. ISSUES: I remember hearing from different people that The Clone Wars movie is not very good, but that The Clone Wars novelization is so much better than the film. While I would agree that the novelization is better than the movie, I don’t think it’s better than the three prequel novelizations—and is decidedly not in the same tier as the Revenge of the Sith novelization. After all, it can’t differ too much from its source material…an animated film composed of episodes of a TV show intended for children. Even with Karen Traviss’s framing device that shows us Rotta’s kidnapping and Jabba’s response from the very beginning, it feels very episodic. The Battle of Christophsis is there to introduce Ahsoka, and establish the testy dynamic between Anakin and her. When we shift to Teth, I didn’t feel like the world was fleshed out in the way I would expect from an adult novelization. What kind of monastery is this? It sounds like Hutts took it over, but which Hutts? Is it Ziro, because he’s conspiring with Dooku in this kidnapping? Wookieepedia has answers to those questions, but the novelization itself does not. The novel is more focused on the beats of the story than any worldbuilding, and the way the plot unfolds feels like a TV show to me, with each subsequent dangerous situation resolved until we get to the final climax. Second, a lot of my issues with The Clone Wars movie and TV show and novelization revolve around the fact that during this period of the Expanded Universe (2008-2012 or so), Lucasfilm was adamant that it did fit within the existing EU. That takes a fair bit of rejiggering and hand-waving, like shifting the Clone Wars Multimedia Project to the six months before The Clone Wars begins. I wish they had instead taken a multiverse approach, where the CWMMP was one version of the Clone Wars and The Clone Wars is another version, because the two don’t fit together without a whole lot of retconning. For the novelization, I’m not just talking about the presence of Anakin’s previously unknown padawan, but also the fact that Anakin is knighted immediately after the Battle of Geonosis instead of six months before Revenge of the Sith like in Jedi Trial. If this was its own separate continuity, I think my problems with The Clone Wars would have been mostly solved. I also wish that the reason why the Jedi are helping Jabba had been tackled a little differently. I like getting the two perspectives of Anakin and Ahsoka towards baby Rotta. Anakin lived under Hutt slavery, and he can’t even smell Hutts without becoming angry. Never in a thousand years would Anakin willingly help Jabba the Hutt—help someone who created this culture of enslavement on his homeworld, whose wealth comes from the suffering of others. The Jedi Order tells him to find the kidnapped Huttlet, but Anakin is not happy about this order. Yet Ahsoka looks at Rotta and sees a sick, scared baby, and doesn’t care at all that he’s a disgusting slug. I can see where both of them are coming from! But then I start to think deeper, and why are the Jedi helping Jabba track down his kidnapped son? It’s not out of the goodness of their hearts, and I understand: Hutts are gross and immoral and live outside the confines of the Republic. Apparently, it’s because the Republic wants to move around the Outer Rim and needs permission/official hyperspace routes to do so. (I say “official hyperspace routes,” because Palpatine displays a holomap in his office.) But if the Hutts are outside the Republic, why do you need their permission at all? This would have made more sense to me if the Republic wanted secret hyperspace routes that the Separatists didn’t have access to; then it becomes not just an issue of “we should help find a kidnapped baby because we need their permission for travel within their territories” but “there is a key strategic reason why we should help the Hutts, and the Separatists are doubtless looking for the same info.” The Clone Wars was not originally meant to be a grand sweeping theatrical event, but a television show. And it feels small in scale because that’s how it was intended. I'm not sure this was the best way to kick off The Clone Wars 3D animated show, because the animation style was very contentious at the time—George Lucas wanted the animation to be stylized and non-realistic, like the Thunderbirds TV series from the 1960s. People saw Revenge of the Sith in theaters in 2005, and three years later Lucasfilm released this as a theatrical film. The Clone Wars film is not the same caliber as RotS, and I think it’s unfair to The Clone Wars to present it as if it were. IN CONCLUSION: Like the film, The Clone Wars novelization kicks off this new, very different era of the Clone Wars. Compared to the film, we get more insight into the characters since we’re inside their heads, and I really liked what Traviss did with Rex’s character. I was less impressed by her portrayal of Asajj Ventress and Anakin, because they felt off to me. I think the novelization suffers from the same problems as the film: it doesn’t feel sweeping or novelistic, it feels episodic—which I should have expected, considering this is basically four TV episodes smooshed into a single film with some connecting scenes added. I think that the novelization is better than the film, but it doesn’t rise to the level of some of the other Prequel era novels. Next up: another video game novel, this one about Vader’s secret apprentice Starkiller: The Force Unleashed by Sean Williams. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/ZkFmG6H1-8k Leland Chee on the Clone Wars novelization (August 2008): https://web.archive.org/web/200812260... ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 17, 2024
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Jun 23, 2024
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Jun 17, 2024
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Hardcover
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0345477502
| 9780345477507
| 0345477502
| 3.78
| 3,335
| Jul 01, 2006
| Jul 01, 2006
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it was ok
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2.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter 2.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: the first book in the Coruscant Nights trilogy, Coruscant Nights I: Jedi Twilight by Michael Reaves SOME HISTORY: The first book in the Coruscant Nights trilogy, Jedi Twilight, was originally planned for 2007, so Michael Reaves finished book #1 and it was edited (but not typeset) by April 2007. However, it wasn’t published until June 2008—presumably because Michael Reaves and Steve Perry’s Death Star was already on the release schedule, and so the whole trilogy could be released in the same year. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: I have never read the Coruscant Nights trilogy before. I liked the droid I-5 in Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter and the Medstar duology, but these books flew under my radar back in 2008. The Coruscant Nights book also never received official audiobook adaptations, which may have contributed to my lack of knowledge about them until fairly recently. A BRIEF SUMMARY: Jax Pavan is one of the few Jedi Knights who survived Order 66, and he has been hiding in the slums of Coruscant ever since. When his old Jedi Master is killed, Jax is tasked with completing a mission for him: tracking down a droid that has pivotal information for the burgeoning resistance on Coruscant. But Jax will encounter a number of individuals along the way as he attempts to complete this Mission including an old friend of his father, the droid I-5YQ… THE PLOT: The back cover blurb of Jedi Twilight is a little misleading; rather than helping people, Jax has been operating as a bounty hunter on Coruscant for the last few months. When one of his bounties goes awry—he’s not paid by Rokko the Hutt because the bounty self-terminated, and Jax uses the Force against Rokko’s bodyguards—Jax decides to get the heck out of Dodge…er, Imperial City. Unfortunately, the plot has other plans for Jax. His old Master Even Piell is killed at the beginning of the book in a confrontation with stormtroopers, but before he dies he tells Nick Rostu (last seen in Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover) that there’s a droid with vital information for the local resistance, Whiplash. Nick tracks Jax down right before he is attacked by stormtroopers, so Jax heads off in search of the vital droid. He picks up a Jedi colleague, a Twi’lek woman named Laranth Tarak who was a Jedi Paladin, and they come to an arrangement with Rokko the Hutt. Meanwhile, Den Dhur the Sullustan journalist and I-5YQ left Dronghar at the end of Medstar II: Jedi Healer because I-5 recovered his memory, and they’re trying to track down Lorn Pavan’s son. They’re at Rokko’s HQ at the same time as Jax and Laranth, and after some shenanigans they all flee together. Jax doesn’t want anything to do with I-5, but they’re all along for the ride. They pick up Nick Rostu, who has been threatened and terrorized by Vader into becoming a double agent, and they track the droid down to Prince Xizor (originally of Shadows of the Empire by Steve Perry). There’s a big kerfuffle, the droid is destroyed, the factory is facing imminent destruction—and then Vader shows up. CHARACTERS: Jax is the son of Lorn Pavan, the Corellian man killed at the end of Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter. His father initially worked for the Jedi Temple, but when Jax was taken in by the Jedi Lorn lost his job and ended up working as an information broker with the droid I-5YQ. Jax was raised in the Jedi Order, and Anakin Skywalker and he were padawans at the same time. He never felt the urge to search for his family, so when I-5 shows up claiming to have information about his father and his past, Jax is decidedly not interested. Jax isn’t particularly powerful in the Force, but he has an interesting ability that I hope Reaves elaborates on in the next two books. Jax can see ties between people and events, which reminded me a little of Mace Windu’s shatterpoint ability but less about vulnerabilities and more about sensing overall connections. Besides struggling with his attitude (atrocious) and his role as a Jedi on the run, Jax also struggles throughout the book with his ability to touch the Force. Rather than his Force senses waning, Jax periodically is unable to access the Force at all. I thought this was an intriguing development, someone actually losing their Force ability—but no, it’s more that Jax has been actively hiding for so long that it’s harder for him to access the Force when he needs to now. (I like the idea of the former more than the latter, alas.) As the book ends, Jax decides that instead of running away he wants to stay on Coruscant and help the burgeoning resistance. Jax has some interesting traits, but he’s not my favorite protagonist—more in the Issues section. Jax teams up with Twi’lek Jedi Laranth Tarak, a Jedi Paladin. I was more familiar with paladins in the Dungeons and Dragons sense, where they have a religious aspect to their role (they’re warriors serving some sort of divine being), so I’m not sure if “paladin” was the best choice of word for Laranth. She’s more like a Jedi who fights differently, who doesn’t use a lightsaber and is instead highly skilled with her blasters. I could understand a group of Jedi who don’t want to use any weapons, lightsabers or otherwise, and just immerse themselves in the Force, but blasters-only Jedi? Not so much. Laranth sounds more like a renegade Jedi, so it surprised me that she was based on Coruscant itself—Djinn Altis and his rogue group were much more nomadic. Laranth’s skills were interesting, though, and I felt like she embodied the role of a Jedi much more than Jax did. She seems like a good person to have by your side, even if I still have quibbles with the fact that she’s a Jedi Paladin. There’s another Force sensitive in Jax’s group, Nick Rostu of Haruun Kal. After the events of Shatterpoint, he joined the Army of the Republic and served until the Imperial switchover, when he joined with the resistance group Whiplash. (Nick can sense things and people, but his Force ability is otherwise weak and untrained.) Vader captures Nick, threatens Nick’s people, and blackmails him into tracking down Jax Pavan. Nick is a very reluctant double agent, and he’s wounded during the fight against Xizor. I appreciated that no one blamed Nick for what happened with Vader, though, as Nick’s betrayal was pretty understandable given the circumstances! Jax’s group run into the Sullustan journalist Den Dhur and the droid I-5YQ, who have been trying to track down Lorn Pavan’s son. Den Dhur feels a little conflicted about the situation: he wants to help his buddy I-5 achieve his quest, but he also feels a little jealous, as though his role as I-5’s best pal will be supplanted by Jax. I liked getting to check in on Den Dhur and see how this quippy guy has been faring, but he isn’t especially useful here. In the Medstar duology, Den Dhur’s job as a journalist shaped his plotline, but in Jedi Twilight Den Dhur is not working as a journalist and seems to be a liability in all these fight scenes. (He’s a writer, not a warrior.) I-5 remains the most fascinating (to me) of the characters that Michael Reaves created. Like C-3PO and R2-D2, I-5 is a droid who seems to have achieved sentience. He’s a character in and of himself; besides his intelligence and sarcasm, he also seems to feel actual emotions. When he tracks down Jax and sees that he’s not interested in learning about his father, I-5 is obviously hurt. He’s finally achieved his quest, only for Jax to totally disregard him. I-5 also gets them out of some difficult situations, and he proves a valuable member of Jax’s unofficial team. Jax and co. aren’t the only people looking for the bug-eyed droid; Black Sun also has an interest in tracking it down. The Underlord dispatches Prince Xizor (currently not even a vigo of Black Sun) to find the droid, and since Xizor is very ambitious he finds the droid and outmaneuvers almost everyone. Xizor felt less like an impressive opponent and more like a bored rich boy in Shadows of the Empire, so fortunately he comes across as fairly competent here. Xizor is vying against Kaird of the Nediji, who we last saw narrowly escaping death at the end of the Medstar duology. Kaird is tasked by the current Underlord with killing Prince Xizor, since he’s obviously aiming for the top of Black Sun, but he doesn’t succeed in his task. (Besides being a skilled fighter, Xizor is also working on human replica droids, which will play a bigger role in Shadows of the Empire.) Kaird just wants to go back to his homeworld, so after getting [picked up by Jax’s group he gives them all his money and leaves. OK… Kaird, why were you even here? Turns out, Vader was the one who started this rumor about the bug-eyed droid, and it was all a ploy to capture Jax Pavan. We can guess why, because Vader was Anakin Skywalker and Anakin was friends with Jax, but the characters have no clue about the connection. Vader is served by Haninum Tyk Rhinann, an Elomin aide, who hates humans and thinks very highly of himself but also defects to Jax’s team as soon as he gets the opportunity. When the bug-eyed droid falls into the factory and is destroyed by feral droids, Rhinann is the one who tells Jax the good news that the droid was a useless trap anyway. Hurray? ISSUES: My first issue with Jedi Twilight was how the entire plot just felt like excuses for Jax to acquire a crew. By the end, Jax has met Den Dhur and I-5 and Haninum Tyk Rhinann, and he’s not going to run away from Coruscant anymore—but they lose the vital droid they were searching for, and eventually find out that it had no vital information anyway. When we first learned that Even Piell died so that Jax could track down the bug-eyed droid, I thought this was very shades of A New Hope. But by the end, what was the point of them searching in the Underworld if the droid wasn’t even useful? What did Even Piell die for, if his info was worthless? Again, it felt like an excuse to get the gang together so they can have further adventures in books two and three; I expect the first book in a trilogy to contain a fair bit of setup, but I guess I didn’t expect the setup to be so overt. I usually love all the different lore and continuity bits that Michael Reaves pulls into his books, but Reaves referenced multiple aliens here that didn’t really fit with the six-months-post-RotS timeline. Den Dhur constantly makes jokes about Noghri, but should he even know about their stealthy existence? They came from a very minor world devastated during the Clone Wars, and Darth Vader and Thrawn definitely used them as secret commandos—before Leia gained their loyalty in the Thrawn trilogy, the galaxy at large had no idea that they existed. Similarly, Nick Rostu plays a strategy game against a Yevetha in a bar, and the Yevetha tries to kill him with his dewclaw when he loses. We don’t meet the Yevetha until 10+ years after Return of the Jedi, and Leia would never have tried to negotiate with them if it was commonly known that they’re violent, blood-obsessed lunatics. These aliens shouldn’t be commonplace or common knowledge post-RotS, and every time we got a reference like this it pulled me out of the story. But my biggest issue with Jedi Twilight was how much I didn’t like Jax Pavin. I know that protagonists change and grow, but we got 45 chapters of Jax acting like a jerk and trying to run away from his duties and only one chapter of him deciding to behave like a Jedi. Jax is rude to a lot of people, and he’s especially rude to my fave I-5. You’d expect that a Jedi Knight like Jax would be the leader, but it takes most of the book until Jax is willing to commit to that role. In the end, I just didn’t enjoy reading about a Jedi who’s rude and self-serving; thus far his dad Lorn has been vastly superior to Jax, and he better step up for books two and three or I’ll be annoyed! IN CONCLUSION: Jedi Twilight starts off the Coruscant Nights trilogy with a wild goose chase, but at least Jax Pavan acquires a crew during the search. I was very happy to see one of my favorite droids (I-5!) return in this book in a very emotional plotline; unfortunately, I wish that the object of his emotions was not such a blah dude. There were perhaps too many cameos from past Reaves stories—why is Kaird of the Nediji even here??—and while some elements of the Coruscant Underworld were well done (like the feral droids), I think that Michael Reaves did that SW noir vibe better in [book:Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter|413043]. In the end, Jedi Twilight was an OK start to the trilogy, but it didn’t particularly wow me. Next up: the novelization of the Clone Wars movie, Star Wars: The Clone Wars by Karen Traviss. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/a2xxpaCw7FI ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 2024
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Jun 08, 2024
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Mass Market Paperback
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B009AT7I1Q
| 4.24
| 26,946
| Dec 26, 2007
| Oct 31, 2012
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liked it
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For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy,
For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: the second book in the Dark Bane trilogy, Rule of Two by Drew Karpyshyn. SOME HISTORY: Shelly Shapiro from Del Rey called Sue Rostoni from Lucas Licensing “late last week” (Sue’s post was on June 18, so between June 13-16, 2007) to suggest another hardcover novel for fall 2007. They asked Drew Karpyshyn if he would write another Bane novel, and he agreed—and Bane #2 was announced mid-June with a release date of December 26, 2007. Six months from concept to publication is a ridiculously shortened amount of time! Darth Bane: Rule of Two by Drew Karpyshyn made it to number twelve on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of January 20, 2008, and was on the NYT list for two weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: As with the first Darth Bane novel, Path of Destruction, I've heard a lot about this trilogy over the years but never read them. After my pretty good experience with book #1, I was excited to tackle this one and see what the middle book had to offer. A BRIEF SUMMARY: After the Sith Brotherhood of Darkness was wiped out from the thought bomb during the Seventh Battle of Ruusan, the last surviving Sith has instituted a harsh new policy: the rule of two. One master to embody the power; one apprentice to crave it. Darth Bane has taken the young girl Zannah, formerly known as Rain, as his apprentice, and together the two start Bane's quest to eliminate the Jedi and dominate the galaxy. But not all Jedi believe that the Sith were wiped out at Ruusan—in particular, the padawan of one of the great Jedi Masters who was killed there… THE PLOT: While Path of Destruction was broken up into three parts, Rule of Two contains two sections, set ten years apart. Part One takes place immediately after the Seventh Battle of Ruusan, dealing with the consequences of the thought bomb and following our four main characters (Darth Bane, Zannah, Darovit, and Johun Othone) through the immediate aftermath of those events. Part Two picks up ten years later, so we skip most of Zannah’s training and instead see what Bane is doing to keep the Jedi’s awareness away from his activities. Zannah riles up some wannabe Separatists on Serenno, then heads to Coruscant to look into the orbalisk parasites that are both Bane’s armor and his weakness. Bane meanwhile heads to Tython in search of more information into Sith holocrons, and a dramatic Jedi vs. Sith showdown ensues there. Part One consisted of the Prologue through Chapter Nine, around 126 pages in the paperback edition; Part Two is the final two-thirds of the novel, from Chapter Ten onwards. CHARACTERS: If Path of Destruction was Darth Bane's bildungsroman, Rule of Two is more about Zannah than it is about Bane himself. Bane finds Zannah on Ruusan after she lost the bouncer alien who saved her life and she believes that all her family is gone. Zannah is strong in the Force, and she also has this latent anger about her situation that Bane is able to teach her to channel. Zannah isn’t alone, though—her cousin Darovit survived the thought bomb, and they find him down in the cave system. He recognizes Bane as a Sith lord and attacks him, so Zannah destroys his hand. While it’s a shocking act of violence, it’s also an act of mercy, and spares Darovit’s life. After finding a notebook belonging to Qordis in the Sith camp, Bane gives Zannah an ultimatum: he’s going to the Beast Moon of Onderon in search of Freedon Nadd’s tomb, and she needs to find her way to Onderon in one week or he’s leaving her behind. Zannah is taken in by some members of the Army of Light, freaks out when she realizes they’re taking her back to Farfalla’s fleet, and kills them all. Thank goodness for autopilot, or Zannah would not have made it to Onderon at all. When the novel picks up ten years later in Part Two, Zannah is serving as the public side of Bane’s plan to gain power and weaken the Republic without the Jedi noticing. (Thanks to his orbalisk armor, he is very noticeable; Zannah may be an attractive young woman but she’s also capable of being inconspicuous.) We get a series of quests that Zannah is sent on: first on Serenno, stoking up Separatist dissent and manipulating them into trying to assassinate retired-Chancellor Valorum. Next, seeking out the Separatist’s leader Hetton and bringing him to Bane for some more attempted murder shenanigans. While Bane heads off for Tython in search of Belia Darzu’s holocron, Zannah leaves for Coruscant to find more information about orbalisks in the Jedi Temple library. While there, she runs into her cousin Darovit, finds the orbalisk information, and rushes back to Tython pursued by a team of five Jedi. There’s a big showdown between Jedi and Sith, and the Sith are victorious. Bane is a nigh-unkillable fighter with his orbalisk armor, and while Zannah isn’t physically strong she’s good at Sith sorcery and strategy. This fight scene was probably the best part of the whole novel, because Karpyshyn writes action scenes in an enthralling but understandable way. Sith sorcery was such an interesting concept, and I wish we could have seen more of it because it felt rather underutilized/underexplained here. I like the idea of separate Force traditions like the Witches of Dathomir and the Nightsisters casting spells instead of accessing the Force as the Jedi do, but Zannah’s sorcery seemed to be waving her arms around and driving people mad. Part of that may be because by jumping straight from ten-year-old Zannah to young adult Zannah, we see very little of Zannah’s training. She’s proficient in what she does, but Karpyshyn doesn’t spend much time on explanations here. Unfortunately, while Bane and Zannah kill all five Jedi, Bane gets hit with electricity and his orbalisks are dying—ergo, Bane is also dying. Zannah rushes him back to their headquarters on Ambria, and tries to threaten Caleb the healer into helping her master (again). Caleb won’t budge until Zannah sends a message to Coruscant that there’s a Sith on Ambria, but she sends it and he heals Bane with Darovit’s help. The Jedi arrive to find Caleb grotesquely killed and Darovit maddened, and they kill Darovit and return to Coruscant convinced that they found the loose Sith. Zannah and Bane remain undetected. Most of Zannah’s arc has the undercurrent of “is she going to be a real Sith? Is she going to murder people and turn on her own family?” Surprisingly, the answer is yes! While Zannah shows mercy to Darovit in Part One, by Part Two she destroys his mind and sets him up to be killed and misidentified by the Jedi. Zannah shows that she is ultimately not merciful, and she’s a cunning, talented schemer. Besides diverting the Jedi’s attention from her master and her, she also puts the initial doubts in Bane’s mind that his orbalisk armor is a hindrance and not a benefit. If Zannah wants to make a play against her master in book 3, he’s a lot more physically vulnerable now. Bane’s story is almost wholly holocron and orbalisk-motivated. He heads off for Dxun because he seeks knowledge, and he finds Freedon Nadd’s holocron. He’s also bitten by some orbalisk parasites, and while there are some benefits from that living armor (boost his ability to touch the dark side and make him pretty much unkillable) there are definite downsides as well (he can’t remove them without dying, and since they’re eating him they do weaken their host). Bane got good armor, but at what cost? When we pick up in Part Two, Bane is obsessed with making his own holocron. He’s tried and failed several times, and we see his last failed attempt causes him to lash out and destroy their camp during a blood rage. When Zannah tells him of the possible existence of another holocron, he runs off after it—and going to Tython and the Jedi fight afterwards works well for Bane (despite almost dying), because he got Belia Darzu’s holocron and had the orbalisks safely removed. Bane is a very cold Master: he’s taught Zannah what she needs to know, but there’s no warm feelings between master and apprentice. It’s not a friendly relationship, like some of the Jedi have with their padawans. Bane only cares if Zannah lives or dies because then he’d have to find and train another apprentice. Zannah’s cousin Darovit was interesting, especially in Part Two. After Zannah attacked him and left him on Ruusan, he became a hermit in the forest. He tries to help others by serving as a healer despite his limited Force ability, but when the Jedi start to build a monument to the fallen members of their Order he sabotages it again and again. He doesn’t want the Seventh Battle of Ruusan to be remembered, because while it destroyed the Sith it also decimated the planet as well. Johun convinces Darovit to come to Coruscant to tell the Council about Darth Bane, and that puts him on a collision course with his cousin. Zannah seems to have some vague sense that Darovit could heal Bane, but it’s mostly Caleb in the end. I feel sad for Darovit, because he believed that his cousin would be kind to him and leave the Sith—but she didn’t, and the Jedi killed him thinking he was the Sith that Johun was talking about. I wish I felt sad about Johun's death, but I didn’t because the Jedi come across as dumb and unobservant in Rule of Two. Johun questions the Sith mercenaries and learns that there’s a Sith lord still alive after the thought bomb, but Farfalla doesn’t believe it and convinces Johun likewise. Darovit tells Johun the same thing, but before he can testify before the Jedi Council he runs off with Zannah. Instead of alerting everyone, Johun and Farfalla hurry off to Tython with a team of five (!!!) Jedi and get absolutely decimated by Bane and Zannah. Sure, they brought a weapons master and another highly-trained fighter, but they also brought an Ithorian skilled in battle meditation and left him exposed in the open room? That's a bad strategy! The Jedi are far too willing to let things slide here. They want the Sith to be gone, so they’re not willing to investigate anything that contradicts that. It’s easy to brush questions aside when those questions are raised by a padawan or a young Jedi Knight. I do wonder how this plot thread would have changed if Farfalla was the one looking into the Sith, because Lord Hoth seemed to view him as a highly-placed hothead in the previous novel, but in the end the Jedi were easily outmaneuvered. ISSUES: Unlike Path of Destruction, where I felt bogged down in the second section on Korriban, I found Rule of Two to be a pretty fast-paced read. However, Rule of Two felt much looser-structured than the preceding book in the trilogy. Part One seemed primarily focused on tying things up from the final battle, as well as incorporating events from Kevin J. Anderson’s “Bane of the Sith” and the Jedi vs Sith comic into Karpyshyn’s version. That’s over a third of the book devoted to continuity nods, almost as though Path of Destruction spilled over into a second book. (But as I found with book one, Karpyshyn less follows the previous stories and more incorporates them into his own third version of events.) When we pick up in Part Two, there’s a fair bit going on: Zannah manipulating the Serennians, Bane trying to build a holocron and then looking for a holocron, John trying to build a monument to the Seventh Battle and meeting Darovit, Zannah looking for information on orbalisks, then everyone (Jedi and Sith) coming to a head on Tython and the fallout afterward on Ambria. The overarching theme of Rule of Two seems to be Zannah developing as a Sith—Zannah progressing to the point where she has no mercy, and will sacrifice her cousin’s life and sanity to ensure that she and Bane remain hidden. That works as a theme, but the novel felt less like it had an overarching plot and more like I was reading a series of episodes, with it culminating in the fight on Tython and Bane being cured on Ambria. Rule of Two just didn’t feel as cohesive as the previous novel, which very well could have been a consequence of Karpyshyn’s hyper-rushed timeline. Side note: this goes back to “Bane of the Sith,” but I don’t understand how Bane can mount a beast and fly it from Dxun to Onderon? I know he’s using the dark side to make an air bubble, but no matter how close the moon is to the planet there has to be a point where you leave the atmosphere and hit zero gravity space, and I just don’t get that! (In the short story, his ship was destroyed and he had no other way to get from the moon to the planet, but Anderson also cut away before the transit happened…) My third issue with Rule of Two was that I noticed how 1000 BBY is not much different than the Prequels or even the Original Trilogy. Star Wars technology has truly stagnated, if a thousand years before A New Hope there’s really no discernable difference between then and now! We have just had the Ruusan Reformations (a way to make sense of Palpatine’s statement in AotC), but ten years later there’s already Separatist sentiments on Serenno. Blasters, ships, droids are remarkably similar to what we see in the films, which I found very surprising—I would have expected the galaxy at this point to look somewhat different from the waning years of the Republic, but that’s not the case. Herein lies the dilemma: how to make it look and feel like Star Wars no matter when it’s set, but the more I thought about it the more it bothered me. IN CONCLUSION: Rule of Two is a fast-paced read, and is more about Zannah than her master Bane. I feel like the middle book in a trilogy often has a rough time, because you’re bridging the gap between books one and three so you have to sustain the reader’s interest without truly concluding anything. I think where Rule of Two suffers is that the disparate subplots and loads of continuity nods add up to a very effective theme but a more loosey-goosey plot. Because of the ten-year time jump, I felt like we missed out on seeing more of Zannah’s training and her very unique abilities, but I still found her an interesting character. I also appreciated that Zannah was allowed to be a female villain who’s not redeemed or returned to the light side—she’s an evil woman and I’m fine with that! Next up: the first book in the Coruscant Nights trilogy, Jedi Twilight by Michael Reaves YouTube review: https://youtu.be/04wbGnXusko “Sith Rules: An Interview with Drew Karpyshyn” (December 2007): https://web.archive.org/web/201003292... ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 19, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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0345477421
| 9780345477422
| 0345477421
| 3.85
| 4,444
| Oct 16, 2007
| Oct 16, 2007
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it was ok
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For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy,
For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: Death Star by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry. SOME HISTORY: In Kevin Smith's 1994 film Clerks, one of the titular characters argues with his buddy that since the second Death Star in Return of the Jedi is under construction during the film, it's not just populated by Imperial goons but by innocent contractors as well. Michael Reeves and Steve Perry took that idea as the starting point for their novel Death Star, showing the Empire's greatest weapon from the point of view of people who are initially allied with the Empire but slowly come to realize that perhaps this is not the cushy job they were promised. Death Star by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry made it to number fifteen on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of November 4, 2007. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: I own a hardcover copy of Death Star, primarily because the cover art is by John Harris and I love his artwork. (He also did the cover art for the Dark Tide duology in the New Jedi Order series.) However, I had never read it until just this year. (I might have read it sooner if I knew that Uli Divini appeared in it!) A BRIEF SUMMARY: The Death Star was created for a single purpose: to obliterate planets in the blink of an eye and ensure the Emperor's iron-fisted rule of the entire galaxy through fear. But before Luke Skywalker blew it up with a proton torpedo in A New Hope, it was a construction site—home to countless individuals, from Imperial officers to architects to archivists to bartenders to convicts… THE PLOT: We know that the implementation and the construction of the Death Star took a while, as the plans were in existence as early as Attack of the Clones, but Death Star really only covers a three year span from three years before the Battle of Yavin right up through the events of A New Hope. The dramatis personae lists thirteen characters, and eleven of those listed characters are viewpoint characters in the novel. The book is divided into two sections: Part I - Construction, which deals with (you guessed it) the construction of the Death Star over the prison world of Despayre and the necessary setup to get all these disparate people onto the battle station, and Part II - Shakedown, which shows the Death Star nearing its completion and Tarkin beginning to test its potential—until the Death Star plans are stolen by the Rebel Alliance, and everything cascades from there. Since Part II covers a lot of the same beats as A New Hope, it contains a fair bit of dialogue and scenes verbatim from the film. CHARACTERS: 1. Atour Riten, archivist Why does the Death Star have a librarian on board? Why not, it’s certainly big enough! Of all our viewpoint characters, Atour is listed first but appears last, as he doesn’t get introduced until Chapter 25 / 75. Atour serves the Empire because it serves his own self interests, as he’s not above blackmailing people to get what he wants. The Rebels get a copy of the Death Star plans because Atour stashed it in his own private archive offworld, and he starts questioning his involvement in the Empire after the destruction of Alderaan. He comes up with the plan for escaping the station, but has to remain behind to give the authorization for their ambulance shuttle. 2. Celot Ratua Dil, Zelosian prisoner Ratua was a smuggler imprisoned on Despayre for an incident not of his own doing, and he bribes his way into a cargo shuttle headed for the Death Star and ends up running around willy-nilly with forged documentation because the station’s absurdly big. Ratua is another one who’s only out for himself, but he falls in love with the Twi’lek bartender onboard and the destruction of Despayre makes him throw in his lot with the other would-be defectors. 3. Admiral Conan Antonio Motti Admiral Motti was originally meant to be given the first name of “Zi,” but George Lucas went on Conan O’Brien’s talk show and promised to name a SW character after him. So Motti became Conan Antonio Motti, and before publication every instance of his original first name had to be changed (and they missed one, around Chapter 40 or so). Motti is very ambitious and politically minded, and he views this post on the Death Star as a stepping stone to something even more important—but he’s also dumb enough to pick a verbal fight with Vader, and we know how that went. 4. Darth Vader Vader sees the Death Star as useful, but (obviously) nothing compared to the power of the Force. He’s initially brought in because of Rebel sabotage attacks on the station, but that plotline never goes anywhere as they never root out who the saboteurs are. After Vader captures Princess Leia, he brings her back to the Death Star and the events of A New Hope unfold. It was interesting to get Vader’s viewpoint once he realizes Obi-Wan is aboard, though—he knew his old Master was alive, he’s confident about their eventual confrontation, but when Obi-Wan vanishes into the Force he is deeply thrown by what just happened. He brushes it off, though, and while he senses Luke Skywalker’s potential he has no idea about Luke’s connection to him. 5. Dr. Uli Divini A welcome return from Jedi Healer! Uli was conscripted into the Clone Wars as a young prodigy surgeon, and since doctors are valuable the Empire won’t let him quit. Twenty years on, he’s bitter and resentful about his forced continued service. The Star Wars radio drama had a doctor treating Princess Leia after the torture/interrogation, and Uli has been retconned into the role. That experience leads him to throw in his lot with the others who want to leave. 6. Memah Roothes and Rodo, Twi’lek bartender and human bouncer Memah originally owned a bar in the Coruscanti underworld, but after it’s destroyed in a fire she accepts the Empire’s offer of running a bar in this new battle station and brings her bouncer Rodo with her. Memah’s a good egg who’s good at her job, and she falls in love with Ratua. While Rodo is listed in the dramatis personae, he’s never a viewpoint character; he fights off troopers and is killed while the other defectors escape. 7. Sergeant Nova Stihl Stihl was a guard on the prison world of Despayre, who’s transferred up to work on the Death Star. He’s somehow both one of the troopers when Leia and co. get out of the trash compactor, and a guard in the conference room scene when we find out that Dantooine was abandoned, which is a little odd but he seems to be filling in wherever needed. He’s also Force sensitive, which we see through several dreams of future events—and the destruction of Alderaan seriously effects him. Like Rodo, Stihl sacrifices himself so that the others can escape during the Battle of Yavin. 8. Teela Kaarz, architect Teela is a political prisoner down on Despayre who’s brought to the Death Star to work in her original field of architecture. She’s a Mirialan like Luminara Unduli or Barriss Offee, and she recognizes that the thermal exhaust port is unnecessary so close to the main port—but in typical contractor fashion, it’s not written down and gets built anyway. The Rebellion probably thanks Teela for this design flaw, and Teela is only further disgusted by the Empire when they destroy Despayre and Alderaan. 9. Lieutenant Vilian Dance, TIE pilot Vil Dance is gung-ho for the Empire, but some of his assignments—destroying a ship of escaping prisoners, attacking Rebel ships who make no moves to defend themselves—shake his confidence in the Empire’s cause. He starts a relationship with Teela, and ends up being the pilot on their getaway ambulance. 10. Chief Gunnery Officer Tenn Graneet Tenn Graneet is the guy who ultimately fired the Death Star superlaser, destroying the prison world of Despayre and the peaceful world of Alderaan. A career gunner since the Clone Wars, he thinks the Death Star will be the capstone of his career, but realizing the capability of the battle station eats at him inside. He realizes that he’ll be considered the villain who killed two billion plus people, doesn’t want to fire it anymore but knows someone will do that job, and freezes during the Battle of Yavin so that Luke Skywalker’s torpedo will succeed. Poor Tenn. 11. Grand Moff Tarkin (and Admiral Daala) Tarkin has had a vision for the Death Star from the beginning, and sees it as the perfect way of enforcing the Empire's will on the galaxy. The Empire will rule by fear, and once the Death Star blows up a few measly Rebel bases no one will challenge his authority. Tarkin recognizes that the Emperor and Vader have power which he does not understand, but he still thinks the Death Star will be greater than any magical dark side. The continuing Rebel sabotage disturbs him, though, and in a circuitous route of self-justification brings his mistress aboard the battle station. Daala is listed in the dramatis personae, but like Rodo we never get her POV. We get some Revelations about Daala’s past, and I’m not sure how I feel about them. She’s very young and bright, and she’s eager to dig into this sabotage business, but during a Rebel attack on the station her ship is hit and she’s injured by shrapnel. The surgeons are able to remove it from her head, but she has memory loss of the last year and it’s also implied that the impulse-control part of her brain may have been affected as well. I’m not sure I like “brain damage” as the explanation for why Daala is hyped up as the youngest, most amazing Admiral ever in the Jedi Academy trilogy only for her battle record in that trilogy to be absolutely atrocious. None of the later books, like Legacy of the Force or Fate of the Jedi mention this at all! I think that Death Star makes it very clear that Tarkin likes Daala because she is an attractive young woman, and he fast-tracked her career as a result of their (frankly worrisomely) romantic involvement. However, he would drop her like a hot potato if it looked like she would impede his career. Daala was good at simulations, but never got the chance to hone her skills in real life and instead was locked away in the Maw for years on end. There’s an uncomfortable power dynamic at play here that I don’t think Daala ever picked up on; everyone makes jokes about the Moff’s girlfriend, and I don’t think they would have openly made those comments if she wasn’t obviously promoted beyond her abilities. ISSUES: Death Star has a lot of interesting ideas—I like the concept of learning about the normal people on the Death Star and not just the Imperial superiors—but I couldn’t help feeling that the novel was somewhat half-baked. That feeling partially came from the overwhelming amount of setup that unfolded in Part I: Construction. We meet each character, one by one, then we see how they end up on the Death Star, one by one—by the time we got into Part II: Shakedown, the book took off for me, but there were a lot of pages to turn before it got to that point. Although Part II ended up with a separate problem thanks to all the A New Hope scenes: there’s lots of dialogue directly from the film, just with the addition of a character like Vader’s viewpoint. They didn’t really add anything to my existing knowledge of the film; I was expecting behind the scenes stuff or the conversations Tarkin and Vader were having before the film scene, but most of it was just verbatim movie stuff. Despite gaining some additional insights from Motti and Vader, it mostly felt like rehashing things I already knew. Death Star also has a lot of viewpoint characters and chapters for a 360-odd page book. There’s eleven viewpoint characters, and 75 chapters total. I ended up keeping a cheat sheet of which character POVs we got in each chapter, and found that despite each chapter being on average 5 pages long, sometimes you’d end up with seven different viewpoints in the same chapter—especially in the latter half of the book. With such short sections, I felt like we learned surface level details about most of the characters but didn’t always get the chance to dig into these character’s heads and gain deeper insights. But my biggest issue with Death Star related to how there was an overarching theme to the novel (there were good but misguided people on the Death Star, Vader and Tarkin and Motti not included) but not much actual plot. Rebel saboteurs bomb things left and right, but that’s never resolved—Vader comes in and questions people with no results, none of our viewpoint characters are Rebel saboteurs, and while Daala says she’s looking into it we never find out the result of her investigation because of her head injury. Rebels launch a weird attack on the nearly-finished Death Star while it’s orbiting Despayre but this does nothing other than wound Daala? I’m not sure why this was here other than for Vil Dance to feel bad about making double ace while killing Rebels who made no attempts to defend themselves, because it was such a silly strategic move. I guess that failed attack explains why Tarkin is so dismissive of the Rebel starfighter runs during the Battle of Yavin? If there’s any plot at all, it’s that many of these viewpoint characters are perfectly happy to work for the Empire until the destruction of Despayre but especially the destruction of Alderaan. But I’m not sure Reaves and Perry achieved their message of “there were good but misguided people on the Death Star” either when a big chunk of the viewpoint characters ran away and defected to the Rebel Alliance during the Battle of Yavin. I can understand Lucasbooks and Del Rey wanting a book about the Death Star because who doesn’t want to know that story? It’s just a pity that the end result was inexplicable Rebel sabotage, a whole lot of bureaucracy, and limited insight into these characters. (Side note: Vader chasing our escaping heroes during the Battle of Yavin was very silly. I know, I know, he and his wingmates were the only starfighters out there and probably would have queried a random ambulance ship launching, but I think the ridiculousness of their escape is further highlighted by the fact that they escaped from both the Death Star and Vader in his TIE Advanced.) IN CONCLUSION: I think your enjoyment of Death Star will probably come down to how much you like these characters, and how much you sympathize with them. (I like Uli Divini thanks to Jedi Healer, but I felt more lukewarm about some of the newer ones.) I felt like Reaves and Perry were trying to do too much with Death Star—there are interesting insights into Tarkin, Motti, and Vader, but the rest feels like they took an interesting concept and themes but ended up with a rather half-baked and lackluster execution of them. Reaves and Perry have an amazing track record (Shadows of the Empire, Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, and the Medstar duo) so Death Star isn’t poorly written; it's just aimless and rather plotless in the end. Next up: the second book in the Darth Bane trilogy, Rule of Two by Drew Karpyshyn. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/wc-CiqV2V5E "I've always thought that Luke felt pretty bad for a few days after it was over"- Interview with Michael Reaves (November 11, 2007): https://web.archive.org/web/201904131... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 29, 2024
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May 03, 2024
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May 02, 2024
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Hardcover
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0345498003
| 9780345498007
| 0345498003
| 4.26
| 6,700
| Oct 30, 2007
| Oct 30, 2007
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it was ok
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2.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter 2.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: the third book in the Republic Commando series, True Colors by Karen Traviss. SOME HISTORY: Greg Knight made the cover art for all the Republic Commando books, but Knight is not traditionally a cover artist; instead he worked for LucasArts from 1998 to 2008 as a concept artist, and his artwork for the Republic Commando covers are based on concept art he created for the video game. Knight has had an interesting career, doing a number of different things, and is now working for Lucasfilm again. I'll put a link to his sketchbook Instagram and ArtStation at the end because he has some cool artwork! MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: I was fairly certain that I read the previous two books, but I’m not so sure about True Colors--it didn’t have the same air of familiarity that Hard Contact and Triple Zero had. A BRIEF SUMMARY: Nearly two years into the Clone Wars, the secret special ops missions of its elite clone warriors have never been more critical—or more dangerous. During the assault on Gaftikar, the members of Omega Squad make a shocking discovery that shakes their loyalty. Meanwhile, Kal Skirata’s personal vendetta against the Kaminoan scientist Ko Sai comes into conflict with Delta Squad’s newest mission direct from Chancellor Palpatine himself… THE PLOT: As the story opens, Delta Squad and Walon Vau are on Mygeeto, robbing the Vau family bank vault. During their getaway, Delta Squad escapes but Vau falls into an ice tunnel—so Kal Skirata and Ordo take a break from their investigation into Ko Sai’s whereabouts to get Vau out. Once Vau’s rescued, he joins their team, searching for this renegade Kaminoan scientist who’s the best hope for fixing the clones’ advanced aging. Meanwhile, Jedi Etain Tur-Mukan is helping clone troops evacuate the human settlers from Qiilura, and she’s also hiding her quickly developing pregnancy from the rest of the Jedi Order. Omega Squad is dispatched to the world of Gaftikar where they help the Republic-allied lizards (Marits?) to fight against the Separatist-allied humans, but they also discover what happens to clone deserters…and then a very traumatic accident occurs. Back on Coruscant, Delta Squad is tasked by the Chancellor’s office to find Ko Sai, and they’re told not to tell Kal Skirata or the Nulls about their assignment. Finally, Besany Wessen starts digging into the finances figures and budgets to try and figure out what's really happening behind the scenes in the Clone Wars. VIEWPOINTS: Triple Zero got into the heads of Etain, Kal Skirata, Fi, and the Null trooper Ordo. True Colors has even more viewpoint characters: Walon Vau, Kal Skirata, Jedi Etain, Darman of Omega Squad, Sev of Delta Squad, Ordo the Null ARC trooper, and Besany Wessen the Republic Treasury auditor. If I’m not missing any, that’s seven viewpoint characters! (And interestingly enough, we don’t get any enemy POVs in this book either.) CHARACTERS: Let’s start with Omega Squad. After bouncing around to different squad members in different stories, we’re back in Darman’s head in True Colors. Darman has no idea that Etain is pregnant, and despite speaking with her regularly he’s out of the loop of her activities on Qiilura. Instead, Darman and Omega Squad’s plotline is more about realizing how the Republic treats troopers when they encounter a deserter ARC trooper named Sull. Niner comes down on the law & justice side, but the other three want to try to help Sull, and with the aid of A’den the Null they get Sull to safety. While cleaning out Sull’s apartment, though, Darman is attacked by two men who turn out to be covert ops troopers. Omega Squad realizes that you can’t desert, and this shakes their confidence in this mission and in the Republic. Their confidence is even further shaken when Fi is grievously wounded during the final assault on Gaftikar, and his clone status threatens any possible treatment of his brain injury. Fi is ultimately healed by the Jedi Bardan Jusik, but he won’t be the man he once was and the Republic thinks he’s dead. Omega Squad needs four troopers, though, so his place is taken by Corr from Triple Zero. It’s a very sad development for Fi; I liked Fi’s sense of humor, his increasing recognition of what he was missing out on as a clone was poignant. I didn’t want any of the Omega guys to get hurt, but especially Fi. (Also, Darman was also at the door but he’s fine?) We finally get a Delta Squad viewpoint in this book with Sev, the unit’s sniper. Delta Squad are still not my favorites, and despite being told that Sev is the creepy sociopathic one he doesn’t sound any different from any of the other clone guys. He’s afraid of failure, and he thinks death is inevitable, so he didn’t stand out to me compared to others. The more I read about the clones, the more I feel sorry for these guys. Ordo’s here again, acting superior and condescending about others but also really awkward around Besany Wessen. I don’t know why, but he’s not my favorite. I’m glad that Kal Skirata verbally adopted him because it made him very happy, and I’m glad he’s found a girlfriend in Besany even if their relationship is confusing. Two other Nulls, Mereel and A’den, are here as well, but they’re honestly not any different from Ordo. The more I read about Besany, the more I feel bad for her. I think that Skirata and the Nulls have put Besany in this impossible situation, where they use her skills and insider knowledge but leave her very vulnerable on Coruscant. A blaster is not enough protection, especially when she doesn’t know how to use it! She puts herself to a lot of risk here, and I get the sense that Besany is an immensely lonely person. We don’t know her background, but she seems to have no family or friends around. It feels like the people who get swept up in Kal Skirata’s orbit (Besany, Bardan Jusik, etc) are people seeking a sense of family and belonging. I’m glad that these guys fill that need for community for Besany, but she’s putting herself in danger for very little in return. Besany pulls a blaster on hospital staff, and doesn’t get arrested only because the cops know Skirata! Yikes yikes yikes! Jumping over to Etain…she uses the Force to speed up her pregnancy, so that in three months she has a six-month fetus, but that almost leads to a miscarriage so she has to take it at normal speed for the next three months. I know that Tenel Ka used the Force to slow down her pregnancy in the Dark Nest trilogy, but the opposite sounds like a bad idea—and I don’t understand how she can speed up her baby’s development and have a bigger baby for the time elapsed, yet not look visibly pregnant? Taller/bigger people sometimes don’t have a super visible bump due to their physique, but Etain is small and thin! I also have to completely side-eye her continuing decision to hide this from Darman, culminating in Darman meeting their son and making a stupid comment about not being ready to be a dad because HE DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT ANY OF THIS! Etain, you only have yourself to blame here! Etain gives birth to her son, hands the newborn over to Kal Skirata, and then goes back to being a Jedi. This development is juxtaposed with Bardan Jusik, who leaves the Jedi Order at the end of the book. I’ve been worried about Jusik since the previous book, because he seems so enthralled by the Mandalorians and their culture and I’m not sure that’s the right approach for a Jedi to take? Jusik has Mandalorian armor and hangs off Skirata’s every word, and after healing Fi and seeing how the Republic treats their clone troopers he decides that he’d rather not stay a Jedi. (He tries to get downgraded to non-combatant medic, but then just leaves with his lightsaber.) Jusik’s another one of the lonely souls like Besany sucked into Skirata’s orbit, and I couldn’t help feeling like we’re meant to like Jusik’s decision and tsk tsk at Etain’s—another example of “good Jedi, bad Jedi.” Sergeant Vau seems to be going through a softening phase, as he steals all these valuables from his family vault and then donates them to Skirata’s clone fund. He isn’t as demonstrative in his feelings as Skirata, but he still wants the best for the guys he trained. What I found interesting about Vau in book 2 was how he seemed to be a cold methodical person with a totally different training method; by book 3, he’s loosening up and repeating a lot of the same sentiments as the other characters. Kal Skirata is dading it up all over the place; he adopts Ordo, then Fi, then Darman, and he probably adopts some others as well. He’s on a mission to save his boys! As with the previous book, I like what Skirata is doing in giving the clones a sense of family and community, but he’s a bit much at times. It also worries me about what will happen to everyone he’s drawn into his cult of personality—I’m sure he had plans in place for getting his guys out when the war ends (and those plans also include more tangential people like A’tin’s Twi’lek girlfriend), but will he try to save more than just Omega Squad and the Nulls? Is Mandalore big enough to hold them all? (Side note: I still don’t understand how Kal Skirata has all this power. He’s basically running his own unsanctioned operation in this one, and he can order the Nulls around at will. How does this work? I don’t understand! This man is a force, and no one can stop him!) As with Triple Zero, we don’t have any enemy viewpoints in this one. In fact, there’s not really an enemy per say other than the Republic’s general neglect and Ko Sai. She’s a cold fish, apparently similar to other Kaminoans: convinced of the superiority of her species and the inferiority of everyone else, and only intrigued in the clone aging issue from a theoretical standpoint. She likes science for science’s sake, and isn’t concerned about the personal human aspect at all. She makes a little progress on the genetic front, is interested in Etain’s son, but kills herself out of despair. If Skirata wants to make any more progress, he’ll need another scientist… ISSUES: At 450 pages, True Colors is 50 pages longer than Triple Zero, but it only has 20 chapters like Hard Contact as opposed to the previous book’s 25 chapters. (This has a point, a swear!) The page for the first 130 pages—the Prologue through Chapter 5—was pretty darn slow, and I found it a struggle to keep reading because not much was happening beyond Vau falling in a hole. I forced myself to keep reading, and once I hit Chapter 6 the pace definitely picked up and I didn’t mind these longer chapter lengths. But then I noticed a separate problem: the biggest climactic events (Kal Skirata and Mereel finally confronting Ko Sai, and Fi being wounded during the assault on Gaftikar) happened in Chapter 11, but I still had nine chapters left to go. A lot of things happened in those remaining chapters, from Fi’s frustrating treatment to negotiating with Ko Sai to Etain’s baby, but it felt like denouement stuff rather than continuing action. I could help feeling like the climax was oddly placed, considering there were 150 more pages to slog through afterwards. Part of that was due to my second issue: too many viewpoint characters! This has been a continuing problem since Triple Zero, as the first book was tightly focused on Omega Squad, Etain, and Ghez Hokan, but the second book opened up Traviss’s world to a bunch of new characters. What with adding in Delta Squad and the Nulls and the two sergeants and civilians like Besany, it’s getting a little crowded here in the Republic Commando series. Did we need seven viewpoint characters here, especially when Ordo and Skirata and Vau are all on the same mission? I think the increasing number of viewpoint characters only adds to that page count bloat, and I’m not sure all their POVs were necessary here. Oh boy was there a lot of melodrama in this book. Some of it worked for me (Fi) and some did not (Etain’s secret pregnancy). I do not understand why Etain will not tell Darman about the baby, even after Venku’s birth, and I would not have included this plotline. It’s way too much drama! But even Fi’s plotline tipped over into the realm of melodrama. When Besany has an armed standoff at the hospital over their decision to euthanize Fi, how did she get out of that scenario with absolutely no repercussions? I like Fi and I didn’t want him to die, but I’m not sure how Besany can hold a blaster on medical staff and not suffer any personal or professional consequences for it. The Republic Commando books are strong enough that they don’t need to dip into all this soap opera stuff. But my final issue with True Colors was that despite sympathizing with the plight of the clones here, I feel like Karen Traviss pushes her authorial opinions way too much. This novel is the opposite of subtle, and statements are repeated over and over again until I get frustrated and annoyed. I agree with Traviss that the clones are mistreated, but I don’t need to be told 50 bazillion times that the clones aren’t citizens and the clones are treated as property and the clones are not considered human by the Republic at large. Once or twice is enough, I don’t need it hammered into me multiple times and for characters to constantly harp on this injustice in their internal monologues. This repetition is another culprit of that page bloat, and it’s just not necessary. IN CONCLUSION: True Colors picks up a few months after Triple Zero, and after a slow start rockets off on two dueling plotlines: the search for Ko Sai and Omega Squad’s mission on Gaftikar. Unfortunately, I felt like the climax built a little too early here, and the book slowed back down after Chapter 11. I like Omega Squad and I feel so bad about Fi, but Traviss’s non-subtleness rubs me the wrong way—and I still don’t like anything about Etain’s secret pregnancy! I never read Order 66, so I’ll be interested to see where the fourth book picks up and whether Kal will be able to save all his boys once we hit the events of Revenge of the Sith. Next up: a novel about the Empire’s greatest weapon (up to A New Hope, at least): Death Star by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/eVqJBg46pf8 Greg Knight's ArtStation: https://www.artstation.com/gregknightart Greg Knight's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knight.sketch/ ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 22, 2024
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Apr 27, 2024
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Apr 27, 2024
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Mass Market Paperback
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B0DV71XPFK
| 3.81
| 151
| 2006
| 2006
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it was ok
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For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy,
For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: a short story that appeared in Star Wars Insider magazine, “Odds” by Karen Traviss. Intro: “Odds” is a short story written by Karen Traviss that appeared in Star Wars Insider issue 87 in April 2006. Featuring illustrations by Robert Hendrickson, it’s set a couple months after the end of and features Atin of Omega Squad and the Null ARC troopers Prudii and Mereel. It was also included at the end of the paperback of True Colors, but again, I wish they had put it at the beginning since it takes place before that novel! Summary: While Atin and Prudii sabotage a Separatist droid factory, Mereel downloads secret info from Kamino to try and trace the scientist Ko Sai’s whereabouts. The Good: One thing I really appreciate about these short stories is how Traviss takes the opportunity to highlight members of Omega Squad that have felt underdeveloped in the Republic Commando novels. In Omega Squad: Targets that was Fi, and in “Odds” it’s Atin. Atin is more reserved than the other guys in Omega Squad, and Triple Zero showed that he had some issues with his training Sergeant Vau. In “Odds” he’s very cautious, but he’s also interested in these factory sabotage missions that Prudii has been carrying out and trying to make sense of things happening in the Clone Wars. We’re also introduced to Prudii, one of the absent Nulls from the previous novel. Prudii isn’t blowing up factories; instead, he’s introducing problems into the droid fabrication process so that they’ll crank out defective droids and be unaware of any greater sabotage taking place. We also got to jump into Mereel’s POV, after briefly meeting him towards the end of Triple Zero. His voice didn’t sound significantly different from Ordo, but that probably makes sense since the Nulls were raised and trained together by Skirata and all have the same genetic tinkering. Mereel has a lot of hatred towards the Kaminoans, like Kal and Ordo probably all the other Nulls (perhaps understandable since the Kaminoans wanted to terminate them), and I liked the idea of people starting to dig into the nitty gritty details of the Clone Wars and question the Republic’s response, even if the actual execution of that belonged more in the Meh section. The Meh: There’s not much to the story here beyond Atin & Prudii and Mereel learning some insider information about Palpatine and the Clone Wars, and compared to "Omega Squad: Targets" this story was lacking in action scenes. I guess that the revelations from Kamino are important to know going into True Colors, but this just wasn’t exciting to read. But my bigger issue with “Odds” was that the numbers of clone troopers and battle droids really don’t add up. It’s hard to get a handle on the number of clone troopers running around, because no one gave us an exact number. When Lama Su tells Obi-Wan in Attack of the Clones that there are 200,000 units ready and a million more waiting, does he mean there are 1.2 million troopers total before the Battle of Geonosis? Could units be like battalions, which would add up to many millions of men? We just don’t know! But “Odds” comes right out and says that there are 3 million clone troopers, and that felt too small for me. No wonder Palpatine wants to get his own cloning facilities up and running if the Kaminoans have only produced that many guys! Other books in the multimedia Clone Wars project only further complicate this—for instance, The Cestus Deception said that a year into the Clone Wars a million clones had died. Books like Jedi Trial showed vast volunteers or conscripts fighting in the Clone Wars in addition to clones, but that still doesn’t seem like enough to cover the whole galaxy. Because that’s another problem I had with “Odds”: it seems to shrink the Clone Wars down from “hundreds of battles occurring on hundreds of worlds simultaneously” to “a bunch of little conflicts that could be resolved if only the Chancellor would take decisive action.” When Atin and Prudii hack into the Separatist droid factory, they find that the factory only produced a million droids in the past year. They say “hmm, Republic Intelligence must be wrong and they don’t have quadrillions of droids after all.” Except Star Wars: The New Essential Guide to Droids did say that there are millions of droid factories, since I think the number (while exaggerated) would still be closer to quadrillions than what “Odds” presents. Palpatine is pulling the strings of the Clone Wars for his own benefit, and Traviss wants to show characters like Kal Skirata realizing that there’s a hidden agenda at play. I think that’s a cool idea! I just don’t like how it plays out here. I feel like Traviss shrinks the galaxy-wide aspect of the Clone Wars into something much smaller and localized, and I don’t think that was Lucas’s intention at all in Attack of the Clones. In Short: “Odds” lets us hop into another member of Omega Squad’s head and see how the Republic is trying to countermand aspects of the Separatist threat, while Kal Skirata and the Nulls get a little closer to tracking down the scientist Ko Sai and learn some dangerous secrets in the process. There’s not much here, though, and the numbers really don’t add up in “Odds”—there is a strong whiff of retconning about the whole story. Next up: the third book in the Republic Commando series, True Colors by Karen Traviss. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/YqwndA5ZKzU “Odds” by Karen Traviss: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gPZ0... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 20, 2024
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Apr 21, 2024
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Apr 27, 2024
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Unknown Binding
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B0DTTF1MJ9
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| 3.84
| 49
| unknown
| unknown
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it was ok
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2.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter 2.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: two short stories by Karen Traviss about Vader, “In His Image” and “A Two-Edged Sword.” Intro: In His Image" is a short story written by Karen Traviss for Vader: The Ultimate Guide, a souvenir magazine that debuted at 2005’s Comic-Con International and was afterwards sold online. “A Two-Edged Sword," originally incorrectly printed as "Two-Edged Sword,” is a sequel short story, written by Traviss with illustrations by Chris Trevas, that appeared in Star Wars Insider issue 85 in November 2005. Both stories were later reprinted in the paperback edition of Legacy of the Force: Betrayal. Summary/Timeline Disclaimer: “In His Image” takes place in 19 BBY and details the creation of Force-sensitive stormtroopers while Vader evades an assassination attempt orchestrated by Palpatine. “A Two-Edged Sword” takes place a year later in 18 BBY and follows Darth Vader and Palpatine training the new clones for the stormtrooper corps, further exploring Vader's thoughts of betrayal and paranoia. The Good: I’m always interested to see early Vader, who has a lot more Anakin Skywalker in him than Vader would admit. The Vader in these two Traviss stories is ruthless, but also values loyalty and initiative. He doesn’t trust Palpatine, and rightfully so as Palpatine sends an Emperor’s Hand after him. (Does it count as a assassination attempt when Palpatine knows that Vader will win and he’s just trying to teach Vader a lesson about emotions? Probably.) The Vader of “In His Image” is emotionally dead, and doesn’t feel a lot of anger or passion or really anything. The assassination attempt serves as a wakeup call, that if he wants to proceed in alliance with Palpatine he’ll need to channel the dark side more. Both stories are also set in that post-Clone Wars post-RotS era, where elements from the Prequels still come into play. They’re phasing out the Fett clones from Kamino, but they’re still focusing on clones to fill out the new stormtrooper corps (only these ones are from the Arkanians). By the Original Trilogy, it seems like most stormtroopers were volunteers/enlisted men, but a few months out from the formation of the Galactic Empire Vader and Palpatine are still thinking “hey, this individual has some cool skills, let’s clone him and make a bunch more.” Both stories are pretty action-filled, with an assassination attempt in the first story and a revolt led by Force-sensitive clones and an Emperor’s Hand in the second one, and they were fast-paced reads. The Meh: The timeline felt a little funky here. I’m pretty sure that “In His Image” is set before the climax of Dark Lord - The Rise of Darth Vader, yet Vader seems much more set in his prosthetics and his mindset than he is in Luceno’s novel. I also would have expected more roiling anger coming off of Vader, instead of the emotional blankness he displays in the first story. There are multiple references in both stories to Padme’s betrayal and to Kenobi, but Vader doesn’t dwell on them as much I would have thought immediately post-Revenge of the Sith. Similarly, both stories feature Emperor’s Hands: Sa Cuis in the first story, who tries to assassinate Vader and then becomes the template for future Force-sensitive stormtrooper clones, and Sheyvan in the second story, who revolts against the Emperor with the Cuis clones. That feels like a lot of Hands for very soon into the Empire’s lifespan! A key component of the Hands was that they didn’t know about the existence of other agents—Mara Jade thought she was a unique operative, and felt very betrayed by the reality of other Hands—and the second story does touch on this a little, since Sheyvan’s revolt is prompted by the realization that he’s not the only Hand. But this still felt like too many Hands running around a little too early in the timeline. Most importantly, Palpatine is a very passive puppet-mastering villain in these two stories, which led to Vader contemplating how he could overthrow him multiple times. Obviously with the Sith Master/Apprentice relationship there’s this tension between “I want to learn from them” and “I want to supplant them,” but I’m not sure that Vader would be coming down on the latter idea so soon after Revenge of the Sith. I think for Palpatine, he gets a huge amount of satisfaction from having bent Vader to his will, as Vader is not the man that Anakin once was, and despite crediting his survival to Palpatine, Vader feels this constant resentment towards him. I’m just not sure that Vader would be constantly thinking about overthrowing Palpatine this early on—I thought that Vader’s offer to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back was the boiling point where Vader was finally ready to overtly move against his Master, and that’s not for another 21-22 years! (Side note: Lekauf’s fate at the end of “A Two-Edged Sword” felt rather mean-spirited. He hasn’t seen his wife and family in months, then he’s badly burned and sent back to Coruscant to recover—and he’ll never be the man he once was. It was interesting to meet Lekauf after already reading about his grandson in the Legacy of the Force books; it explains why Lekauf senior had good memories of Vader, because Vader comes off as kinder and more rewarding of loyalty than I would have expected.) In Short: “In His Image” and “A Two-Edged Sword” are an interesting look at Vader almost immediately after Revenge of the Sith. We see some elements from the prequels carried over—like cloning—and we see Vader coming to terms with his new self and his new position within the Galactic Empire. I'm not sure it totally syncs up with the timeline and existing stories like Dark Lord - The Rise of Darth Vader, though; Vader seems much more at ease with himself than I’d expect so soon after RotS. Next up: a standalone novel set in-between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, Allegiance by Timothy Zahn. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/Rtss8fRwkbw “A Two-Edged Sword” by Karen Traviss: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cthS... ...more |
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1
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Apr 07, 2024
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Apr 07, 2024
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Apr 10, 2024
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Unknown Binding
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B0DTTBZ81C
| 4.02
| 47
| unknown
| Jul 2005
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liked it
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For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy,
For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: two short stories by Karen Traviss about Vader, “In His Image” and “A Two-Edged Sword.” Intro: In His Image" is a short story written by Karen Traviss for Vader: The Ultimate Guide, a souvenir magazine that debuted at 2005’s Comic-Con International and was afterwards sold online. “A Two-Edged Sword," originally incorrectly printed as "Two-Edged Sword,” is a sequel short story, written by Traviss with illustrations by Chris Trevas, that appeared in Star Wars Insider issue 85 in November 2005. Both stories were later reprinted in the paperback edition of Legacy of the Force: Betrayal. Summary/Timeline Disclaimer: “In His Image” takes place in 19 BBY and details the creation of Force-sensitive stormtroopers while Vader evades an assassination attempt orchestrated by Palpatine. “A Two-Edged Sword” takes place a year later in 18 BBY and follows Darth Vader and Palpatine training the new clones for the stormtrooper corps, further exploring Vader's thoughts of betrayal and paranoia. The Good: I’m always interested to see early Vader, who has a lot more Anakin Skywalker in him than Vader would admit. The Vader in these two Traviss stories is ruthless, but also values loyalty and initiative. He doesn’t trust Palpatine, and rightfully so as Palpatine sends an Emperor’s Hand after him. (Does it count as a assassination attempt when Palpatine knows that Vader will win and he’s just trying to teach Vader a lesson about emotions? Probably.) The Vader of “In His Image” is emotionally dead, and doesn’t feel a lot of anger or passion or really anything. The assassination attempt serves as a wakeup call, that if he wants to proceed in alliance with Palpatine he’ll need to channel the dark side more. Both stories are also set in that post-Clone Wars post-RotS era, where elements from the Prequels still come into play. They’re phasing out the Fett clones from Kamino, but they’re still focusing on clones to fill out the new stormtrooper corps (only these ones are from the Arkanians). By the Original Trilogy, it seems like most stormtroopers were volunteers/enlisted men, but a few months out from the formation of the Galactic Empire Vader and Palpatine are still thinking “hey, this individual has some cool skills, let’s clone him and make a bunch more.” Both stories are pretty action-filled, with an assassination attempt in the first story and a revolt led by Force-sensitive clones and an Emperor’s Hand in the second one, and they were fast-paced reads. The Meh: The timeline felt a little funky here. I’m pretty sure that “In His Image” is set before the climax of Dark Lord - The Rise of Darth Vader, yet Vader seems much more set in his prosthetics and his mindset than he is in Luceno’s novel. I also would have expected more roiling anger coming off of Vader, instead of the emotional blankness he displays in the first story. There are multiple references in both stories to Padme’s betrayal and to Kenobi, but Vader doesn’t dwell on them as much I would have thought immediately post-Revenge of the Sith. Similarly, both stories feature Emperor’s Hands: Sa Cuis in the first story, who tries to assassinate Vader and then becomes the template for future Force-sensitive stormtrooper clones, and Sheyvan in the second story, who revolts against the Emperor with the Cuis clones. That feels like a lot of Hands for very soon into the Empire’s lifespan! A key component of the Hands was that they didn’t know about the existence of other agents—Mara Jade thought she was a unique operative, and felt very betrayed by the reality of other Hands—and the second story does touch on this a little, since Sheyvan’s revolt is prompted by the realization that he’s not the only Hand. But this still felt like too many Hands running around a little too early in the timeline. Most importantly, Palpatine is a very passive puppet-mastering villain in these two stories, which led to Vader contemplating how he could overthrow him multiple times. Obviously with the Sith Master/Apprentice relationship there’s this tension between “I want to learn from them” and “I want to supplant them,” but I’m not sure that Vader would be coming down on the latter idea so soon after Revenge of the Sith. I think for Palpatine, he gets a huge amount of satisfaction from having bent Vader to his will, as Vader is not the man that Anakin once was, and despite crediting his survival to Palpatine, Vader feels this constant resentment towards him. I’m just not sure that Vader would be constantly thinking about overthrowing Palpatine this early on—I thought that Vader’s offer to Luke in The Empire Strikes Back was the boiling point where Vader was finally ready to overtly move against his Master, and that’s not for another 21-22 years! (Side note: Lekauf’s fate at the end of “A Two-Edged Sword” felt rather mean-spirited. He hasn’t seen his wife and family in months, then he’s badly burned and sent back to Coruscant to recover—and he’ll never be the man he once was. It was interesting to meet Lekauf after already reading about his grandson in the Legacy of the Force books; it explains why Lekauf senior had good memories of Vader, because Vader comes off as kinder and more rewarding of loyalty than I would have expected.) In Short: “In His Image” and “A Two-Edged Sword” are an interesting look at Vader almost immediately after Revenge of the Sith. We see some elements from the prequels carried over—like cloning—and we see Vader coming to terms with his new self and his new position within the Galactic Empire. I'm not sure it totally syncs up with the timeline and existing stories like Dark Lord - The Rise of Darth Vader, though; Vader seems much more at ease with himself than I’d expect so soon after RotS. Next up: a standalone novel set in-between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, Allegiance by Timothy Zahn. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/Rtss8fRwkbw “In His Image” by Karen Traviss: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NeRh... ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 06, 2024
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Apr 06, 2024
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Apr 10, 2024
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ebook
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0345477383
| 9780345477385
| 0345477383
| 4.00
| 9,410
| Jan 30, 2007
| Jan 30, 2007
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liked it
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3.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter 3.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: a standalone novel set in-between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, Allegiance by Timothy Zahn. SOME HISTORY: Allegiance is set not long after the Battle of Yavin, and features the earliest chronological appearance thus far of Mara Jade. Zahn said that he found writing Allegiance relatively easy because it was set in between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back: he had a definitive starting point for characters like Luke and Han and Leia, as well as knowing where they needed to end up by the beginning of TESB. He was able to extrapolate how far Luke is on his Jedi journey, how much Han wants to commit to the Rebel cause, and how far Han and Leia's relationship has progressed. Allegiance by Timothy Zahn made it to number ten on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of February 18, 2007, and was on the NYT list for two weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: I preordered Allegiance when it was released in 2007, and I remember enjoying it but also not really retaining anything from it afterwards. A BRIEF SUMMARY: The destruction of the Death Star by the Rebel Alliance was a decisive blow against the Empire, but Palpatine and the monstrous Darth Vader still remain a looming threat. When Princess Leia Organa, Han Solo, and Luke Skywalker are dispatched to the Shelsha Sector to try and incorporate different Rebel groups into the burgeoning Rebel Alliance, little do they know that the sector is also teeming with Mara Jade, the Emperor's personal agent; five rogue stormtroopers; pirates; and eventually even Vader himself… VIEWPOINTS: Allegiance is a fast-paced read, even for a Zahn novel. It's just barely over 300 pages, and keeps the story focused on the original trio of Luke, Han, and Leia; Mara Jade, the Emperor’s Hand; Daric LaRone and the other four renegade stormtroopers; and various bad guys, including Vilim Disra of Hand of Thrawn duology fame, Captain Ozzel (not yet an admiral), a bunch of pirates, and eventually even Vader himself. Viewpoint-wise, we obviously get Han, Luke, Leia, and Mara Jade, but for the stormtroopers we only get LaRone’s POV. Disra is the main baddie that we follow and the key part of deciphering what’s going on with all these feuding co-conspirators, although we also learn about the other baddies through the viewpoints of characters like Mara Jade and LaRone. THE PLOT: Mara Jade uncovers evidence against a Moff, and tracing stolen artwork leads her to the Shelsha Sector, where she starts tracking some sneaky pirates who are expanding their presence there. Meanwhile, three Rebel groups in (you guessed it!) the Shelsha sector reach out to the Rebel Alliance about differing plans, so Leia is sent to negotiate with them while Luke and Han are dispatched to investigate all the pirate activity in the sector. Meanwhile Captain Ozzel and the ISB personnel aboard the Reprisal order the straight-up massacre of a town on the world of Teardrop, and Trooper Daric LaRone and his buddies privately question this action. When an ISB officer confronts LaRone, he shoots him in self-defense and the five troopers flee with an ISB ship stockpiled with goodies. They end up taking vigilante action across the sector, and also stumble onto all the pirate activity. Finally, the bad guys are ostensibly directed by Disra, stealing stuff so that the Shelsha sector can declare its independence from the Empire…but it’s a lot more complicated than that. CHARACTERS: Luke is definitely a fledgling Jedi here; he's got a lightsaber and nebulous “feelings” about situations and people, but that's pretty much it. Obi-Wan talks to him at times, like he did during the Battle of Yavin, giving Luke little bits of advice or prompting him in the right decision. According to an interview on the Star Wars website from 2007, Zahn originally had Obi-Wan interfering even more but the editing made him scale that guidance back. Zahn then tried to keep it closer to what we see in the film: Obi-Wan doesn’t tell Luke “you need to do this and that,” but instead prods him towards certain things. When Luke and Han run into the Hand of Judgment troopers, Luke’s perception of them in the Force is primarily what convinces Han to work with them. I really like how Zahn writes Han in all his books, so I loved his portrayal here as well. Han intervened at the Battle of Yavin to save Luke, but he’s not officially a member of the Rebel Alliance—and paradoxically, people pointing that fact out really rubs him the wrong way. Chewie would side with the Rebel Alliance in an instance after how the Empire treated the Wookiees, but Han’s not quite there yet. Compared to The Empire Strikes Back, Han isn’t concerned about paying Jabba off since they haven’t run into the bounty hunter(s) from Ord Mantell, so while he wishes he could take a paying job in the midst of all this Rebel stuff it’s honestly not a priority for him. Han is definitely interested in Leia, even if he’s not willing to admit it, and their interactions feel in that antagonistic/tension-filled TESB mode where Han is being difficult (purposefully or otherwise) and it culminates in Leia storming off in a huff. I also liked that Luke and Han’s interactions with the Hand of Judgment troopers tied into Han’s Imperial past. He was a good officer and pilot (he received the Corellian bloodstripes, after all), and he left the Empire because of how they treated nonhumans (specifically, enslaved Wookiees). The Hand of Judgment are on a similar trajectory, but whereas Han became a smuggler and is only now moving to the Rebel cause, the troopers are on a different path. Leia is still mourning the loss of Alderaan, but she’s sidestepping her grief a bit by focusing on her duties for the Rebellion. Her negotiations in the Shelsha sector show how good she is at the key aspects of diplomacy: truly listening to people, consulting others, maintaining a polite poker face, and coming to immediate decisions when need be. When Disra outs her identity and she’s forced to hide, she’s willing to step in and do something new (working as a server), and even when she’s not good at it, her respect and concern for the people around her means that others respect her likewise. But moreso than the OT trio, the book is really focused on Mara Jade and the Hand of Judgment stormtroopers. Mara is only eighteen, a fervent believer in everything the Emperor says and everything the Empire stands for. She’s not an assassin like later books portray her (*cough* Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice *cough*), more like the Emperor’s personal investigative agent. If Palpatine says “I suspect this person of treason,” Mara will collect her evidence and present her findings. She’s killed people, but she also tries to intervene for the people she thinks are loyal Imperials—she speaks up in defense of a general who helped her in a potentially unsafe situation, and she doesn’t report the Hand of Judgment guys because she recognizes that they’re trying to do good. But Mara is also extremely naive: she sees that there’s corruption and rot in the Empire, but she can’t trace it back to its true source. Despite Mara’s competence, there’s an innocence to her character that she’s lost by the Thrawn trilogy. Mara's Force skills did feel a little overdeveloped, though, especially when we compare her to Luke. Luke can’t do much of anything besides sensing things, but Mara is flying her lightsaber alongside the speeder into the pirate stronghold and jumping up three story buildings. Obviously Mara’s skills regressed after the Emperor’s death, but I wasn’t expecting her to be quite so proficient in the Force—I had thought that the Emperor had handicapped her to a certain extent, but apparently not. The Hand of Judgment troopers were perhaps my favorite part of the whole book. They’re just five regular dudes, and they think the Rebels are bad and unlawful but they’re also disturbed by the destruction of Alderaan, a peaceful planet of billions. When they’re ordered by the ISB to fire on civilians on Teardrop who are obviously not Rebels, Daric LaRone and his buddies ultimately run away rather than keep following their orders.They recognize where the Empire has gone wrong, but they think that they can fix things themselves. They’d be prime Rebel candidates if it weren’t for the fact that they still believe in the Empire’s mission statement and believe that you should work within the system rather than overthrow it entirely. On the bad guy front, Captain Ozzel is an ambitious idiot who’s willing to kill the Emperor’s Hand (at the prompting of the ISB) to keep the secret of his deserting stormtroopers from leaking. Mara Jade is very cautious around Vader. He views her as a threat who will interfere with his search for Luke Skywalker, while Mara has no idea why he’s so obsessed and doesn’t even think she’s in the same wheelhouse as Vader. The pirate scheme involves Disra using Caaldra as an intermediary to order the pirate gang around; we never learn Caaldra’s backstory as he’s killed by Mara, and the pirate leader is an absolute nut job who’s killed in Ozzel’s pirate base attack. The entire Shelsha independence plot was ultimately orchestrated by Disra, who in typical fashion only set this plot up so he could turn in his superiors and move a little higher up in the Imperial hierarchy. ISSUES: Allegiance is slight. It’s not a major Zahn novel that has huge impacts on the galaxy at large, so I think you need to temper your expectations when starting it. When it was released in 2007, I was slightly disappointed by Allegiance because I was expecting it to cover a lot. But really, it’s a snapshot of the state of the galaxy—or more specifically, the state of the Shelsha Sector—a few months after A New Hope. Luke makes a little progress on his Jedi journey, Han is a little closer to mentally aligning himself with the Rebels, and we see Mara at the height of her competency, before she became bitter and jaded and regretful about her past. It’s not essential reading like the Thrawn trilogy, though, and I think that’s due to its slot in the timeline. Allegiance just can’t have huge consequences for the Star Wars galaxy, because we already know the beginning and the end of these characters’ arcs from the films and from other books. That ties into my second issue with the book, where I was never truly concerned about the main characters here (Luke, Han, Leia, and Mara Jade) because I already know what happens to them. Leia is not going to be captured by the Empire when she’s outed because we know she’s not; Han is not going to outright side with the Rebellion because he’s still wavering on the issue in The Empire Strikes Back. Luke won’t display any truly amazing Force skills because he hasn’t trained with Yoda yet, and Mara is not going to figure anything out about the nature of the Empire because the Emperor doesn’t die for another three years. I didn’t even think that Disra would be caught in his deceits, because he’s alive and scheming in the Hand of Thrawn duology! There’s little urgency here, because I ultimately know the characters’ fates. But then again, I have read many Star Wars books, and maybe Allegiance is geared more towards people who haven’t. Finally, there are a lot of coincidences in Allegiance. Similar to the Clone Wars multimedia project, where Anakin can never encounter Grievous because of one line in Revenge of the Sith, there’s a lot of maneuvering to keep Mara from encountering the OT trio even though they’re in the same sector (and by the end, on the same planet!) at the same time. Mara can’t see Luke until Return of the Jedi, and Han/Luke/Leia have no idea about Mara’s existence until the Thrawn trilogy, so the Hand of Judgment troopers almost become a buffer between the two groups. Zahn has to work overtime to keep certain people away from others, and I think that’s one of Allegiance’s weaker points. There are all these interesting characters thrown into the mix, but because of timeline issues they cannot interact. It almost becomes farcical at times how much Mara has to be kept separate from the trio, and is an issue that I remember growing stronger in Choices of One—so I am interested to re-evaluate when I reread that book. IN CONCLUSION: Allegiance is a fast-paced standalone adventure, set pretty soon after A New Hope. We see Luke beginning his Jedi journey, Han struggling with his nonexistent position within the Rebel Alliance, and Mara at her peak as the Emperor’s Hand. My favorite part here was the Hand of Judgment guys, because they see what's wrong with the Empire but are fixated on trying to tackle all these problems themselves. Allegiance can’t do too much because of its post-ANH/pre-TESB time slot, so the stakes are low and the contrivances build up towards the end. But I still found it a fun read, and I enjoyed revisiting it after all these years. Next up: a short story that appeared in Star Wars Insider magazine, Odds by Karen Traviss. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/nBVBcif1Vyc “Timothy Zahn: Pledge of Allegiance” (January 2007): https://web.archive.org/web/200702020... ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 02, 2024
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Apr 09, 2024
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Hardcover
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0345477367
| 9780345477361
| 0345477367
| 4.34
| 35,499
| Sep 26, 2006
| Sep 26, 2006
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liked it
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3.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter 3.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: the first book in the Dark Bane trilogy, Path of Destruction by Drew Karpyshyn. SOME HISTORY: After being name dropped in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace in 1999, Darth Bane’s backstory was fleshed out a little more in Star Wars: The Essential Chronology in 2000 when the New Sith Wars were linked to the Valley of the Jedi from Dark Forces II. The comic Jedi vs. Sith and the short story Bane of the Sith told two different stories of the Seventh Battle of Ruusan in 2001; 2006’s Path of Destruction tells a third. Darth Bane: Path of Destruction by Drew Karpyshyn made it to number eleven on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of October 15, 2006, and was on the NYT list for two weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: I never read any of the Bane books before, but I have heard a lot about them! A BRIEF SUMMARY: Path of Destruction tracks Darth Bane's development from a impoverished cortosis minor named Dessel, to a sergeant in the ranks of the Sith Army, to a Sith acolyte in the Brotherhood of Darkness. But as Bane learns more about the Sith, the more he comes to realize that the Sith must change—and that he must be the one to do so… THE PLOT: Path of Destruction is broken up into three parts; the first introduces us to Dessel, an angry young miner on Apatros who kills a Republic officer and then runs off and joins the Sith army. We see him during one battle (the Battle of Phaseera) countermanding his superior officer’s orders and leading his unit to victory. Instead of being court martialed, he’s picked out as someone with Force potential and sent to the Sith academy on Korriban. Part Two details his time on Korriban: Dessel is now calling himself Bane, and he fights several duels with different students and learns a lot about the nature of the dark side. Part Three opens with Bane leaving Korriban behind to seek out new knowledge, and realizing that the current Sith are doomed and that they can only survive through the Rule of Two. He returns to the Brotherhood of Darkness and their ongoing battles on Ruusan, and engineers their downfall through the thought bomb that created the Valley of the Jedi in the second Dark Forces game. CHARACTERS: We spend the most time with Dessel, as he becomes the titular Darth Bane. When we first meet him on Apatros, he’s a loner—his father has died, and he has no friends apart from the Nemoidian bartender of the only cantina in town. He’s attacked by a fellow minor, but even when defending himself we can see he’s ruthless; during the lengthy sabacc game against Republic officers, we see how much Dessel hates the Republic. Mining cortosis is dangerous (and Apatros is not a healthy environment) so while Dessel would love to get the heck of Dodge he sees no way of doing so until he kills a Republic officer in self-defense, and his Neimodian friend gets him off Apatros and into the Sith Army. We then (briefly) see Dessel as a sergeant in the Sith Army. He’s good to his troops, but he also knows that his commanding officer is an idiot and countermands his orders. We see more hints of his latent Force ability in the way that he knows things before they happen and makes multiple impossible sniper shots during the Battle of Phaseera. This catches the eye of the Sith Lord Kopecz, who tweaks Dessel’s sentence from a court martial or worse to a one-way ticket to the Sith Academy on Korriban. Dessel adopts a new name, Bane, transforming an insult that his father used to call him. That brings us to Part II, the biggest section of the novel. There are many teachers on Korriban, but the two primary ones are Qordis the headmaster, who does not want Bane to succeed, and Kas’im the blademaster, who thinks that Bane has great potential and teaches him even when he’s not supposed to. The Sith have been united under the leadership of Lord Kaan, who formed the Brotherhood of Darkness with the idea that the Sith tendency to kill weak links is bad for the longevity of the Sith order. No one calls themself “Darth” anymore, they’re all equal Lords, and the stronger students are not allowed to target the weaker ones. There’s a little wiggle room there, though, and Part II becomes primarily a series of multiple duels. Bane wins the first, loses the second, and loses all his confidence in the dark side. No one will teach him and Bane is struggling until newcomer to the Academy (Githany the Jedi turned Sith acolyte) allies with him for strategic reasons and teaches him in secret. Bane reaches out to Kas’im as well, and progresses very quickly but keeps it hidden from others. He also spends a lot of time in the archives (unlike everyone on Korriban) and learns about past Sith like Darth Revan and Darth Malak. Bane challenges Sirak the Zabrak again for duel #3, argues with Qordis and storms off to visit the Valley of the Dark Lords, and finds that nothing from the past remains—they’ve been emptied and pillaged and desecrated by the Jedi and other Sith. After killing the Zabrak cohort and breaking ties with Githany, Bane leaves Korriban in search of more knowledge. Thus Part Three: Bane heads to the Unknown World, part of the former Rakata Empire, and finds Darth Revan’s holocron. Bane studies the holocron intently, and comes to the revelation that the Brotherhood of Darkness is weak and unviable, and he should form a Rule of Two—one Master, one Apprentice to learn from them, rinse and repeat. Bane heads to Ruusan, which has been the site of numerous battles between the Jedi’s Army of Light and the Brotherhood of Darkness’s forces. On the Sith side, Lord Kaan is descending into madness, and on the Jedi side most people are doubting the leadership of Lord Hoth. Bane comes to Lord Kaan bearing a Trojan Horse: he gives Kaan the ritual for a thought bomb, and Kaan in his madness thinks that the Sith could set off this ritual and not kill themselves in the process. Hahaha no. The Sith descend into the caves, carry out the ritual, kill themselves and the Jedi, and trap their spirits on Ruusan for the next thousand years. As the book concludes, Bane finds his apprentice: a young girl named Rain who takes the Sith name of Zannah. I think that Karpyshyn walks a careful tightrope with Bane here, because he’s writing a book about a villain but he doesn't want to make him entirely unlikable even though he does commit villainous acts.Path of Destruction more shows how someone can be susceptible and fall to the dark side, and become more and more justified in their decisions as a result. Bane thinks that the Jedi and the Republic are wrong, but his experiences on Korriban show him that the Sith are wrong as well, and he needs to destroy them to create the perfect Sith order. Bane is a bit of an anti-hero here, because he’s a loner fighting against everyone in the end. I think that Path of Destruction is a good introduction to Darth Bane, especially if you've never experienced any of the earlier media that he appeared in. It felt like “Portrait of the Sith Lord as a Young Man”: you see what his upbringing was like and where he came from, how much he’s able to accomplish without any knowledge of the Force, and then his time with the Sith, realizing that the past needs to die and then burning everything to the ground. Of the (mainly) Sith characters, Githany is more interesting than she initially appeared to be. She’s a Jedi padawan who betrayed her people to the Sith, and I was worried that her character wouldn’t have any attributes beyond her physical beauty. But we get to see both Githany’s scheming side as well as her inherent weaknesses by the end. She’s ruthless and strategic, but she’s not a leader, and her inability to believe Bane’s vision for the future leads to her downfall. The other Sith lords like Qordis and Kas’im and Kopecz are stuck in their ways. Kas’im killed his master, but he’s not willing to go against Lord Qordis. Kopecz is concerned about Kaan’s trajectory, but he only undertakes small futile rebellions. Qordis doesn’t understand why Bane would be interested in learning about the past, since the Brotherhood of Darkness is solely focused on the present. And Lord Kaan has a rare ability (battle meditation), he goes crazy by the end. The Sith may have superior forces, but they’re unable to evolve and change. ISSUES: But I did have some issues with Path of Destruction! The biggest was that Karpyshyn spent way too long on the Sith Academy on Korriban, which felt a little too much like Dark Side Hogwarts for my taste. We don’t see many examples of what he learned in classes and most of his knowledge is gained from Githany or Kas’im or the archives, so instead this large middle section is taken up with a series of duels. The first duel against Fohargh builds Bane’s confidence, until he recklessly challenges Sirak and fails. He wallows in defeat for a while, until he builds his confidence and knowledge back up for the successful duel against Sirak. And then he storms off for the Valley of the Dark Lords, finds nothing, and comes back feigning remorse for his actions, only to be ambushed by Sirak and the other Zabrak, quarrel with Githany, and ultimately leave Korriban. This section of the book definitely dragged for me, and felt like a step backwards maturity-wise for Bane. I was interested in his time in the Sith Army, but we saw one battle and then jumped into a school sub-plot. Perhaps if the Korriban Sith Academy had felt more essential to Bane’s journey I wouldn’t have minded this long middle section, but instead Bane learned most things on his own or from Darth Revan’s holocron. I definitely struggled with this (big) part of the book, and felt my interest flagging at times. My second issue was possibly an ebook formatting quirk, but there were a few times that there was nothing format wise (like a large gap) to indicate a switch in character viewpoint, and that kind of head hopping is confusing and sloppy. There’d be nothing to indicate that we were jumping to another POV until I realized after a few sentences that we had jumped from Bane to Githany. I wish an editor had caught those, and had them rewritten to eliminate these random head hops in the middle of a scene because they were confusing. Finally, the continuity of the Seventh Battle of Ruusan got a little wibbly-wobbly. I’m not a continuity hound, but instead of uniting the two different stories that Bane of the Sith and Jedi vs. Sith told, Path of Destruction basically tells a third separate story of those events—shades of “I’m going to do my own thing and I don’t care about the rest.” I would have preferred that we got an in-universe explanation for all these discrepancies. Perhaps “Bane of the Sith” was a nightmare and Jedi vs. Sith was propaganda and Path of Destruction is telling the true story? But instead of establishing a reason why this is different from the others, you have to just accept it and move on. IN CONCLUSION: I'm glad that I finally started the Darth Bane trilogy with Path of Destruction, because I found it intriguing—and I wasn't sure if I was going to. For the most part, I'm not interested in Sith characters because I don't like rooting for the bad guys, but I think Path of Destruction worked because Karpyshyn took an unlikable character (with a few good traits) and showed how that kind of person could fall to the dark side and become a villain like Darth Bane. I did have a few issues with the book, primarily that the Sith Academy section was just way too long, but I'm interested to see how the story unfolds in the next two books. Next up: two short stories by Karen Traviss about Vader, In His Image and A Two-Edged Sword. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/qE5mPQw0Y1c “Drew Karpyshyn: Blazing the Path of Destruction” (September 2006): https://web.archive.org/web/200702161... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 17, 2024
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Mar 25, 2024
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Mar 18, 2024
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Hardcover
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0345490096
| 9780345490094
| 0345490096
| 4.22
| 7,897
| Feb 28, 2006
| Feb 28, 2006
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it was ok
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2.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter 2.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: the second book in the Republic Commando series, Triple Zero by Karen Traviss. SOME HISTORY: Karen Traviss finished her manuscript of Triple Zero in a mere five weeks. Using bits of the Mandalorian language that featured in the Republic Commando video game, she developed more of the language; she also developed extensive backstories for characters. Instead of taking place on a remote planet, the majority of Triple Zero is set on Coruscant—Omega Squad and others are not directly fighting Separatists, but instead trying to uncover a Separatist bombing plot. Traviss said that her first readers found the story very emotional, so you could say that Karen Traviss was very invested here! MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: As with Hard Contact, I'm pretty sure that I read Triple Zero but I didn't remember any of its details. I knew that this was the Coruscant one about bombings, but otherwise retained no memories of it. A BRIEF SUMMARY: A surge in Separatist bombings has been linked to a Separatist terror cell embedded within the Republic's capital, and it's obvious that they're receiving information from a mole within the Republic Army—so Omega Squad, Delta Squad, and others are dispatched to Coruscant to identify and destroy the Separatist terrorists. But this mission is unlike any they've carried out before; it will require new talents and skills, and victory is not assured… THE PLOT: If Hard Contact was fast-paced and tightly-focused on the four commandos of Omega Squad and a Jedi Padawan, Triple Zero is considerably more complex. As the novel opens, General Jedi Etain Tur-Mukan and her forces are trying to rescue battalions trapped on the world of Dinlo, while Omega Squad is investigating Coruscant terrorist bombings by tracking the ships linked to the explosives. Etain’s forces are successful but suffer many casualties, and Omega Squad is trapped when their getaway vehicle is destroyed. Multiple groups rush to their aid, including Etain’s forces and Delta Squad, the protagonists of the Republic Commando video game. That’s the first 100 pages or so. We then move into the main focus of the novel, which is the investigation into these Separatist bombings on Coruscant. Sergeant Kal Skirata is assigned to investigate this terrorist cell, and he taps Sergeant Walon Vau (sadistic Mandalorian who trained Delta Squad and Atin), Omega Squad, Delta Squad, Etain, Jedi Bardan Jusik, and a Null ARC trooper named Ordo to assist with the investigation. Their investigation is fairly long and convoluted, but culminates in them posing as mercenaries selling bombs to the separatist cell so that they destroy all the terrorists. (A fair bit of interpersonal drama unfolds as well.) VIEWPOINTS: Hard Contact’s main viewpoint characters were Niner, Darman, Etain, and the villain Ghez Hokan; Triple Zero gets into the heads of Etain, Kal Skirata, Fi, and the Null trooper Ordo. This felt a little less balanced than the previous book, because Fi and Ordo are heavily influenced by Skirata (the font of knowledge), and even Etain seeks his approval. CHARACTERS: After griping about their armor in the previous book and short story, Omega Squad finally got new armor that isn’t blinding white or silver. Unfortunately, it’s black, which really only helps for night missions. Fi continues to crack a lot of jokes, but since we get his viewpoint in this book we see how much he yearns for a normal life and a family. Atin comes face to face with his former Sergeant Wau, and we finally get the story behind his scar. He tries to cope with his feelings by fighting Wau (again), but at least he has a Twi’lek girlfriend now! Darman and Etain reunite, and immediately jump into a romantic relationship (I have thoughts about that). Niner is not in charge of this investigation, but he’s still a good sergeant to the squad. Delta Squad seem like…jerks. I have not played the Republic Commando game so I’m not familiar with these guys, but they don’t feel as likable as Omega Squad. In particular, Sev seems like a baby sociopath—I know he’s the sniper, but his behavior was questionable at times. Fans of the game were probably very excited by their appearance here, but I was not. Speaking of jerks: Ordo the Null ARC trooper has a very strong personality, and it took me a while to warm up to him. Initially, he felt very rude and dismissive of anyone who wasn’t another Null or Skirata. He likes Fi as well thanks to the events in Omega Squad: Targets, but he doesn’t seem to like anyone else. He had some awkward interactions with Bessany from the Republic Treasury department, but otherwise I got from Ordo this sense of superiority and almost condescension towards others, particularly civilians. I don’t know if this is a general Null trait or an Ordo-specific trait, but it was off putting to read. I had similar feelings about Kal Skirata. I liked how we were introduced to him in “Omega Squad: Targets” as he seemed like an interesting but good guy. But in Triple Zero we got a lot of scenes from Skirata’s viewpoint, and the more we saw of him the more I didn’t like him. A lot of his character traits are admirable—training the commandos, forming a connection with them—but it seemed like Kal Skirata had this cult of personality surrounding him that sucked people into his orbit, and it gave me weird vibes. How does he have so much power in the Republic Army? He’s just a training sergeant! I can understand why the Nulls and the men he trained listen to him, but he seemed to have more power than he should at that rank. I appreciated what he’s done to foster this sense of community and family among the troopers, but it seems to be developing into this cult that could become unhealthy and restrictive. Of the two Jedi characters, Bardan Jusik hero worships the Mandalorians and Skirata, which felt like a worrisome attitude to adopt. At times it felt like there was this good Jedi/bad Jedi dichotomy where Jusik was the good Jedi because he respects Skirata and wants to be a Mando, and Etain was the bad Jedi because she’s indecisive and constantly seeking approval of others and struggling with her place in the Jedi Order yet still aligning herself with them. I’m not crazy about Etain’s character, because she falls into that “weak Jedi woman” typeset too much, and I think that arc works better for characters like Scout from Yoda - Dark Rendezvous and Lorana Jinzler from Outbound Flight because they have qualities that Etain lacks. Scout knows her limitations and tries so hard regardless; Lorana is weak and doubts herself but has this underlying sweetness and kindness to her character. Etain comes across as bratty at times, and her utter determination to have Darman’s secret baby is such a terrible idea. On the bad guy front, we never get into the head of these Separatist terrorists like we did with Ghez Hokan in Hard Contact, so they felt like a more nebulous enemy. They’re blowing things up, which is bad, but we never find out their exact reason for doing so. The leader is probably from Jabiim, the site of a series of Clone Wars battles; one terrorist also has family from Jabiim, another is doing it for money, and a fourth is doing it for no discernible reason. They never explain their motives, and they’re all killed at the end, so they never developed into fully-fledged characters. ISSUES: Hard Contact had really toned down the Britishisms that Traviss tends to use, but they’re back in Triple Zero in full force. Kit instead of gear, “recce” instead of reconnoiter, Kal Skirata calling everyone “lad”... (Side note: do all Mandalorians have Kiwi accents, or is that just a Jango Fett/Temuera Morrison thing?) Second, Triple Zero felt bloated in comparison to Hard Contact’s standalone-esque svelteness. The Coruscant terror cell investigation doesn’t really kick off until 150 pages into the book, and even then it feels slow-moving. There was not the same sense of urgency as there was in the previous book, and the climax happened super quickly—they killed everyone, when I thought that they’d want at least one survivor to question. I don’t mind when series mix up the type of missions from book to book (the X-Wing series did this very well!), but this terrorist investigation wasn’t always fun to follow. A portion of that bloat also came from the increase in characters; for instance, including Delta Squad is a cool nod to fans of the video game, but did they need to be here? We can already see the difference between how Vau and Skirata trained commandos in Atin’s story, so I don’t think we needed to throw another four guys into the mix. And oh boy, Etain and Darman’s romantic relationship comes out of left field in this book! I have somewhat squeamish feelings about a relationship between a Jedi and a clone (power dynamics and all), but my bigger problem was that there was no buildup here. Darman and Etain parted at the end of Hard Contact, where their dynamic was friendly with a tiny romantic undercurrent. They meet again after a year apart in Triple Zero, and after one (!!) conversation they’re sleeping together, culminating in Etain finding out she’s pregnant at the end of the book…and she doesn’t tell Darman but she does tell Kal Skirata?? I would have preferred that this whole romantic thing develop slowly over the course of the book instead of the way it played out here. I would have kept ratcheting up the tension between Etain and Darman until they chose to get together romantically at the very end, because as it stands we don’t see any of that tension between them—and the baby revelation felt like too much IMO. My biggest issue with Triple Zero, though, was how much Traviss’s biases peeked through in the story. I know that Karen Traviss loves Mandalorians and hates Jedi, and I would have known that without even reading her interviews! It feels like Bardan Jusik is presented as the good Jedi because he wants to be a Mandalorian, and thus Etain is the bad Jedi because she wants to keep Darman from his own child. There are multiple references to how the Jedi were wrongfully taken from their families, but I don’t agree with that. They’re not forcibly taken because the parents have to choose to give their children to the Jedi Order, and I think a lot of people confuse Anakin’s situation (a nine-year-old child whose mother is left in slavery) as the Jedi’s usual modus operandi. The Jedi don’t have any understanding of family because they’re not raised that way, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing—the prequel-era Jedi have a ton of issues, but they do not steal children! Triple Zero also seems to be the origin of super Mando clone troopers (this might be carryover from the video game, but I suspect not). I can see why some readers really like this aspect of the books, but I had some questions. I’m not sure I buy that Jango Fett would recruit all these Mando mercenaries to train the clone troopers, because I never got the sense from Attack of the Clones that Jango felt any responsibility for them. He’s the progenitor of the clone army because it was a very well-paying job, and he got a son out of the deal—he feels no other connection to the clones. And then this widespread clone sense of their Mando heritage: I can see the 100 commandos that Skirata trained and the Nulls being very Mando-heavy, using Mando’a words and embracing their Mandalorian heritage, but this seems to have spread significantly through the clone ranks. I’m not sure about that. I think that also adds to that feeling of “Mando good, Jedi bad.” Look, Traviss loves the clone troopers and thinks that they are mistreated and the Republic is bad to even deploy them. I agree, because they’re not droids, they’re men! But I also felt that she took it too far at times and became outright preachy: the troopers are the best and most civilians and Jedi are scum and Kal Skirata is the best father-figure in the world. The Mando worldbuilding can be cool, but I also felt like yelling “stop pushing my buttons Karen! The Mandalorians are not always right!!” IN CONCLUSION: Triple Zero continues the story of Omega Squad and Etain that began in Hard Contact, but adds a whole lot more characters too. It's a completely different kind of mission here—investigating terror cells—and we learn a lot more about the clone troopers, their upbringing, and their Mandalorian heritage. Those developments bring the series into “your mileage may vary” territory, but they also set things up for future stories, what with Etain’s secret baby and the Nulls’ quest to track down a Kaminoan scientist and fix the clone’s aging problem. Next up: the first book in the Dark Bane trilogy, Path of Destruction by Drew Karpyshyn. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/9E-JZNZJ05s Karen’s Traviss’s Amazon blog: “Next Up” (December 2005): https://web.archive.org/web/200902280... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 04, 2024
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Mar 10, 2024
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Mar 04, 2024
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Mass Market Paperback
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B0DLTBKMP1
| 3.80
| 157
| 2005
| 2005
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liked it
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For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy,
For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: a short story that appeared in Star Wars Insider magazine, “Omega Squad: Targets” by Karen Traviss. Intro: “Omega Squad: Targets'' is a short story written by Karen Traviss that appeared in Star Wars Insider issue 81 in March of 2005. Featuring illustrations by Robert Hendrickson, the story is set at least one month after the events of Hard Contact, since Atin mentions that he was a bacta tank for a month after being hit by a Verpine shatter gun in the previous novel. “Omega Squad: Targets” was also included at the end of the US release of Triple Zero, that came out in February 2006, but not the Orbit imprint versions published in the UK and Australia (or the ebook version as well, as far as I can tell). I wish they had put the story at the beginning, though, since it takes place before that novel! Summary: A group of terrorists has taken a senator hostage on Coruscant, and it's up to Omega Squad to defuse the dangerous situation. The Good: Like most Insider short stories, “Omega Squad: Targets” is really focused on one key event: the hostage situation on Coruscant. Taking into account the number of illustrations scattered throughout, the story is really only about six pages long. But there were definitely some good things here. The entire story is told from Fi's point of view, and I was glad to spend some time in his head after I felt like he got the least amount of development in Hard Contact. He seemed to be a jokester, using humor to cope with everything going on around him, so it was nice to see how he approaches situations and how his humor developed. He’s fascinated by Coruscant, and seems the most intrigued about his surroundings of the four Omega guys. He’s also willing to put himself at risk to save others, as demonstrated by him jumping on a bomb that the terrorists send out. (He’s fine, their armor was upgraded after Atin’s injury in the previous book.) We also see where a lot of his humor originates from, in the form of their training sergeant Kal Skirata. He’s on Coruscant for some reason and present during this hostage situation, so it was cool to meet Skirata and see what he’s like—he’s the source of many of Fi’s pithy remarks, but you can also see that he cares a lot about the troopers he trained. Terrorists from (supposedly) Haruun Kal have taken a Mon Cal senator and others hostage—as the story concludes, this seems to have been a Separatist plot although Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover made it clear that the Korunnai sided with the Republic and against the Separatist-allied Uplanders. They send in a Jedi to negotiate, and he’s killed when the terrorists realize they’re being recorded. Skirata goes in, and then Fi and the rest rush in to take out the terrorists. There’s a bit of trickery, as one of the terrorists has switched places with a hostage, and Fi almost shoots him until he realizes what’s going on. The Meh: It was strange to have the story end on a more downer note—why even have Skirata tell Fi that he might have to shoot him to complete the mission if actually Fi needed to trust him despite appearances? Why even include that initial exchange? It definitely made the story more dramatic, but it seemed like a misfired Chekov’s gun. When Skirata gets into the place where the terrorists are holding the hostages, he repeats over the com that one of the hostages is from Mayro (a planet in the Corporate Sector)—and when Fi thinks that one of the terrorists has grabbed the sergeant, Skirata repeats that he’s “CorSec.” I was like “what do the Corellian police have to do with this? Do they have someone undercover here?” But no, I think that Traviss meant to say “CorpSec” for the Corporate Sector and got the abbreviation wrong. This caused a fair bit of confusion to me as the reader! In Short: “Omega Squad: Targets” was a fun short story, and gave some insights into one of the lesser-developed characters from Hard Contact. It does have a small but significant error, though, that threw me out of the story, and I’m not sure why Traviss set up the whole scenario of “you might have to kill your Sergeant to carry out your job” just to completely side step it. If you’re reading Triple Zero, read this story first! It’s referenced several times throughout the novel, and explains why Ordo and the CSF like Fi. Next up: the second book in the Republic Commando series, Triple Zero by Karen Traviss. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/2tEG7ZXOZf8 “Omega Squad: Targets” by Karen Traviss: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WamK... ...more |
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Feb 27, 2024
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Mar 09, 2024
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Feb 27, 2024
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4.32
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Jan 21, 2025
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4.18
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3.88
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3.85
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3.88
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4.27
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it was ok
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Aug 11, 2024
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3.82
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it was ok
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Jul 27, 2024
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3.78
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it was ok
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3.82
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it was ok
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Jun 23, 2024
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3.78
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it was ok
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Jun 08, 2024
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4.24
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May 25, 2024
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3.85
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it was ok
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May 03, 2024
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May 02, 2024
|
||||||
4.26
|
it was ok
|
Apr 27, 2024
|
Apr 27, 2024
|
||||||
3.81
|
it was ok
|
Apr 21, 2024
|
Apr 27, 2024
|
||||||
3.84
|
it was ok
|
Apr 07, 2024
|
Apr 10, 2024
|
||||||
4.02
|
liked it
|
Apr 06, 2024
|
Apr 10, 2024
|
||||||
4.00
|
liked it
|
Apr 09, 2024
|
Apr 03, 2024
|
||||||
4.34
|
liked it
|
Mar 25, 2024
|
Mar 18, 2024
|
||||||
4.22
|
it was ok
|
Mar 10, 2024
|
Mar 04, 2024
|
||||||
3.80
|
liked it
|
Mar 09, 2024
|
Feb 27, 2024
|