How does Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster rank? I got it as a kid, and still have it, but have never read it. I THINK I’ve heard good things about it, but don’t remember.
Foster is a pretty established sci-fi writer, so as a teen I was happy enough with his other work (like the Flinx series).
Nightwatch, did you not read Tales From Mos Eisley? Now I’m feeling like an outcast for liking it seeing what the general opinion of Andersen is around here.
Actually, Tales from Mos Eisley was pretty good. Anderson didn’t write it. He only edited it.
What they said, but here’s a peculiarly in-depth examination/rumination on Mary Sues in history.
And the Mary Sue litmus test.
That’s what I thought. I’ll check out some of the recommended books here. There is such a glut of them it’s nice to get some opinions first on the titles.
I have read it, but to be honest I can’t remember if I liked it or not. I probably did, if for no other reason than I like filling in characters’ backgrounds with the tales.
Thanks for the replies all. As for the movies, I thought that the Phantom Menace was ok, a fluff action flick just barely deserving the Star Wars name, but that Jar Jar, and Anakin, and a lot of the dialogue, were absolutley awful. Still, Liam Neeson is hard not to like, and I liked Darth Maul and Ewan McGregor as Obi Wan. Attack of the Clones, however, was a massive disappointment. Hayden Christiansen is a fucking wiener, and not at all a good choice to play the future Darth Vader. Bad, bad, bad casting. And the story had such incredible potential, but such poor delivery.
Anyway, with that out of the way, I should say that I would be reading these books for fluff action value too. I certainly wouldn’t expect to get Moby Dick in space, or Great Expectations with X-Wings, just something fun to read fast and give me some Star Warsy action that won’t make me roll my eyes too much. As an example, from a fantasy perspective I like the RA Salvatore books, because even though they are fairly trite, the action is good and the pacing is well done. Also, the characters are fairly likeable, if somewhat old and over-used now. So if the Star Wars novels (at least some of them) are anything like that, then good enough for me. I guess I have some good ratings to go on. And I promise to avoid Kevin J Anderson if at all possible.
Oh, and Tales from Jabba’s Palace is in the same vein as Mos Eisley.
I’ve never read Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (or anything else by Foster). Maybe some day.
It takes place between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, somebody’s arm gets sliced off by a lightsaber, and Luke and Leia get closer than brothers and sisters ever should.
It’s okay. Han Solo at Star’s End, taking place shortly before Solo takes a spice-running job from Jabba (as well as meeting Luke and Ben), is also pretty good.
In short, I would say they’re worth trying out. As others have already said, they are pretty light reading, but I don’t think you should expect great literature from these books because that’s not what they were intended to be.
If you’re not looking simply to kill time, I’d recomend starting out with something by either Timothy Zahn or Michael Stackpole and seeing how you liked those before investing in any others. Really, you should probably start with the Heir to the Empire trilogy because those were the first three novels written, so there shouldn’t be anything in there that you won’t get because it was included in a different set of novels.
As far as individual books and series go, I’ll add my version of a Nightwatch Trailer-like List and use his scale… Ewoks=Stars? Very nice
Shadows of the Empire - Not the greatest SW novel I’ve read, I give it 2.5-3 Ewoks on the Nightwatch Trailer Ewok Scale.
Tales from Jabba’s Palace - it’s a collection of short stories, so it’s somewhat hit and miss, but I generally liked it and give it 3-3.5 Ewoks.
Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina - another collection of short stores, but I didn’t like it as much as Jabba’s Palace so I’ll give it 1.5-2 Ewoks.
Tales from the Bounty Hunters - I liked the concept of bounty hunters in the SW universe and I particularly like Boba Fett, so I may like these stories a little more than the average fellow and I give it 3-3.5 Ewoks.
Tales from The Empire - third collection of stories (more on par with Jabba’s Palace) with a nice collaborative story written by Timothy Zahn and Stackpole earning it a 3-3.5 on the Ewok scale.
Tales from the New Republic - I don’t remember much of anything from this collection of stories, so I’ll give it a solid 2.75 Ewoks (2.5 if you’re a purist).
The Courtship of Princess Leia - Ehh… I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it a horrible mess, but it certainly wasn’t that good - 1.5 Ewoks.
The Jedi Academy Series (of which I only read Jedi Search and Champions of the Force - I liked Jedi Search (novel 1) more than CotF (novel 3) and didn’t bother reading the second novel in the series so I’ll give it 2-2.5 Ewoks
Darksaber - I haven’t considered it good enough to re-read that much, so I give it 1.5-2 Ewoks.
Crystal Star - I have to say I liked this one, possibly because I read it while I was pretty young and wasn’t too discriminating. 2.5-3 Ewoks.
The New Rebellion - It’s a little off from the other novels and it helps if you’ve read some of the earlier ones because as I recall some of the characters featured in this one came from there, but certainly not bad. Another 2.5-3 Ewoks.
Children of the Jedi - I concur with Nightwatch Trailer’s assessment in that it didn’t have as much of the Star Wars feel as other novels, but it wasn’t too bad - 1.5-2 Ewoks.
Planet of Twilight - I believe this is the worst SW novel I’ve ever read, one of the few things I remember distinctly about it was that the whole thing felt odd and once again, not so much of that Star Wars feel. .5 Ewoks
Heir to the Empire Trilogy (Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command (as Nightwatch Trailer pointed out, a Zahn series) - These are some of the best SW novels, imo, I give them 4.5-5 Ewoks.
The Corellian Trilogy (Ambush at Correllia, Assault at Selonia, and Showdown at Centerpoint) - Pretty good, I give the novels 3-3.5 Ewoks. Note: It’s helpful to have read these if you decide to read through the New Jedi Order series.
The Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy (Before the Storm, Shield of Lies, Tyrant’s Test) - Only second to the Heir to the Empire Trilogy trilogy, a very solid 4 Ewoks.
The Bounty Hunter Wars (The Mandalorian Armor, Slave Ship, and Hard Merchandise) - Another good trilogy, I put it in the 3-3.5 Ewok range.
The Hand of Thrawn Duology (Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future) - As with Zahn’s other works, these are two of the best SW novels I’ve read - 4.5-5 Ewoks.
Survivor’s Quest - Another Zahn novel, but I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I did his others but it was still good and it picks up towards the end. 3.5-4 Ewoks.
The Han Solo Trilogy (Paradise Snare, The Hutt Gambit, and Rebel Dawn) - I think these are geared toward people in their early to mid-teens, but as I was in that age-group when I read them and thought they were good, I give them 3-3.5 Ewoks.
There are also the Young Jedi Knights books, but these are definitely geared to young adults. That in mind, being a young adult when I first read them, they were pretty good, but probably not a good place to start reading SW novels.
As far as the New Jedi Order series goes - I have to say I didn’t like the idea of this as much as I did the earlier novels. Still, there were some good novels in there, but the drawback is that you do have to read most of them to follow the plot. Again, this is probably not a good place to start reading SW novels.
Of course, all of this is IMHO and YMMV and I also started reading these books when I was in second grade, so I did not have (nor do I now, I suppose) really discriminating tastes - I was just looking for something entertaining to read and I believe that overall, the books met that goal.
I realize that my ratings are fairly arbitrary and I apologize if that detracts from their usefulness, but I haven’t read most of these novels in some time (between several months and a few years) so I don’t precisely recall the parts I did and did not like. That having been said, the books really aren’t all that vastly different from one another - a crisis appears and the gang from the movies cleans it up, so my ratings are simply a reflection of how much I enjoyed the novels and that will be fairly subjective.
I absolutely hated The Bounty Hunter Wars. The one dude that had his upper torso replaced with a heavy blaster was fucking awesome, but beyond that we had two stories: One in which we see that Boba Fett is apparently clairvoyant and foresaw the actions he’d undertake years prior and set up an “out” for it, and another in which absolutely nothing happens. Yeah, the instigating spark for the whole series of books, that causes this entire galaxy-spanning mystery, turned out to be NOTHING.
Fett flying a Star Destroyer was pretty cool, though.
Back in '98, I read all the Star Wars books in my local library. A couple of them stand out.
I enjoyed Barbara Hambly’s Children of the Jedi, especially for her characterization of Leia and her new character, Callista (?). Her Planet of Twilight, I really can’t remember anything about that one, except that I was upset that Luke and Callista split up. I also rather liked Stackpole’s I, Jedi.
I see that Nightwatch Trailer mentioned The Han Solo Adventures. I haven’t really read those books since I was about 13, but I remember them being fairly well-written and somewhat interesting as they were in a completely different section of the universe.
I liked Shadows of the Empire a lot. It was a fun, quick read, and that’s basically the best you should expect from a SW novel.
I tried to read the first Zahn trilogy when it first came out all those years ago – damn, I was excited! The first new SW stories in years! – but those Force-nullifying worm thingees made me throw the book across the room. However, ten years and a few Midichlorians later, they suddenly didn’t seem as stupid as they did, so I finished the books and enjoyed them quite a bit.
I also tried to read I, Jedi off and on for about a year, but I just couldn’t get into it. As someone above said, Corran Horn is an incredibly boring character, and the fact that he’s the narrator doesn’t help.
The Han Solo Trilogy I thought was a lot of fun. Good dialogue and characterization, as these things go.
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye is so bizarre and counter-continuity now that you just gotta read it.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was written before Empire Strikes Back ever came out. It was one of the first spinoff novels, if not the first. Thus it has a lot of continuity issues, since Lucas didn’t tell anyone about the little details like Luke and Leia being related…
Well, I think I will definitely finish the trilogy I’ve started (the Heir to the Empire one) and then check out the Han Solo trilogy and the X-Wing series. It’s just fun seeing something about the Star Wars galaxy other than the movies, because there’s so much possibility with it that doesn’t get explored. Plus I’ve seen all the movies a million times already and although the original trilogy is timeless (minus the retarded ewoks), there’s only so many times I can watch them in a row. I need some other escape.
Have you tried the comics? A lot of them are pretty good, especially Star Wars Tales.
Seriously. I read that book over the summer and it’s kind of funny how little sense it makes compared to what came after (which, to be fair, was 99.9% of the SW universe). Plus, Darth Vader comes off looking like a total chump.
Now, that I’ll second. The first Star Wars Tales TPB has one of the funniest Star Wars spoofs I’ve ever read: “A Death Star is Born.” That story alone is worth the price of the entire book.
You are not wrong.
Alan Dean Foster was a busy boy that year – he’d ghosted the *Star Wars * novelization for Lucas, wrote the first authorized SW original novel, Splinter, almost immediately after the movie came out, and wrote a treatment for *Star Trek: The Motion Picture * titled *In Thy Image * around the same time, which later wound up being the sort of skeleton that the rather mangled story got based on… he was a bit bitter about that, since he wound up having to go to court to get a writer’s credit on that one.
I also rather liked the Brian Daley *Han Solo * novels, although they’re so removed from the *Star Wars * universe that they’re nearly generic. They’re a fun read, though.