Monday, September 7, 2015

Star Wars EU/Legends Reread (SW REUread) Project Kick-off


or "Hitting the Snooze Button before The Force Awakens".

So I've been meaning to start writing a bit more and actually, you know, USING this blog space for something. Turns out that young kids, house, job, baseball, football, and random squirrels outside the window have all been great writing de-motivators. Thus, I have been sort of searching for some kind of project to write about that would actually force me to start writing semi-regularly on the blog. Also, in an unrelated dxevelopment, I also decided that I need to be more useful with my free time given that the list of to-dos keeps piling higher and somehow "Lay on the couch, drink beer, and surf the Internet" is not on the list (stupid to-do list - let me just scratch that "Build dining room table" out and replace it "Lay on the couch, drink beer, and surf the Internet."  There - much better!)

Well, I've arrived at that project, and it's so fabulous that it's making me grin just thinking about it. Here's a hint...

One of my many nerd badges - a whole shelf of SW novels!


As you may have heard, there's a new Star Wars movie coming out this year. And as you may also have heard, I am deeply, deeply invested in Star Wars geekery (also, henceforth I'm not gonna be consistent with the italics on Star Wars and may abbreviate as SW - it's way too many keystrokes!). Like, disturbingly so. I made my parents buy Star Wars Trivial Pursuit despite the fact that it is not, in fact, any fun to play a trivia game in which you know pretty much all of the answers. The only consolation was that my sister and I could duel over who was the bigger SW nerd (and yes, the winner of that fight was the bigger nerd, not the lesser one). It also led to some of my proudest high school moments, when my friends played it just to see if I could actually win Trivial Pursuit on the first turn (spoiler alert: yes, yes I could). Unlike many, however, my childhood happened to fall in just about the worst time to be a Star Wars fan for a kid in history (short of, you know before 1977 when there WAS no Star Wars): being born in 1983, I was too young to remember the films in the theaters and only became a huge Star Wars fan because we didn't have cable and my parents' VHS (look it up kids, but get off my lawn first!) collection essentially consisted of the Star Wars Trilogy, the Indiana Jones movies, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves with Kevin Costner, and My Fair Lady.  Well, you can imagine what my sister and I chose to watch (side note: I will fight anyone who disrespects Prince of Thieves as a bad Robin Hood movie). By the time The Phantom Menace came out in 1999 I was 16, which is entirely too old to really appreciate that film (need to be about 6 I figure...). Thus, unlike at pretty much every other era in history between 1977 and now, there was no new Star Wars film or TV content coming out during my formative years.
You may have overlooked them because the covers are AWFUL.
In the beginning, Zahn created the EU...

But you know what there were? Books. Lots and lots of glorious, cheesy, ridiculous, and sometimes quite good Star Wars books. It's hard to imagine now, especially with the Disney marketing machine behind Star Wars (yes, I am EXTREMELY bitter that there were no Star Wars Lego sets to buy when I was growing up), but there was a time when it was legitimately hard to find licensed Star Wars items of pretty much any kind in stores, and most especially in bookstores. That all changed starting in 1991, when Lucasfilm Ltd. began licensing authors to release new Star Wars novels published by Bantam.  The first of these, Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn marks the beginning of what eventually became known as the Star Wars Expanded Universe (or EU, for short). I distinctly remember how much of my childhood then became eagerly running to the Waldenbooks in the mall whenever Mom went to JCPenney's, sifting all the way to the back corner where the SciFi/Fantasy section was, and seeing if there were any new Star Wars novels to read. (This was before the Internet made such a statement obsolete). I read pretty much everything published from 1991 through the Legacy of the Force series that concluded in 2008, with some caveats (detailed below). By my quick count, that amounts to 86 novels. It was HUGE part of my childhood and I thus have many of the feels all tied up in the EU.


The "B Team" shelf of SW books - not good enough to merit viewing as you walk into the room,





































































However, if you're really a nerd (or married to one, like my wife), you may know that the EU as I know it no longer exists, officially. In preparation for the new movies coming out, last year Disney announced that the old EU was officially being transitioned to Star Wars Legends and would not be considered "canon". Basically, the approach was to clear the decks for the new movies: the new officially recognized Star Wars canon would be the 6 theatrical films, the Clone Wars TV series, and any new content put out beginning in 2014 (ie, many of the newer novels, the Star Wars Rebels TV show, the new movies, etc). The new content was free to recycle and cherry-pick characters, ideas, and other minutia from the old EU, but the officially recognized story moving forward would directly contradict the previously published content.

And nerddom freaked out. I mean, seriously, just google Star Wars EU Legends and sift through how many articles talk about how pissed everyone got in Star Wars nerd circles.

You'd think I'd be pissed too, seeing as how I also have deep emotional ties to these books - I mean, at one point in middle school, I seriously had a crush on Jaina Solo (one of Han and Leia's kids in the EU novels) based pretty much on a few books and an artist's picture on the cover (I don't miss middle-school hormones one bit). However, I pretty much think it was, as Darth Vader once said, THE ONLY WAY. Look, I loved (and still love) these books, but the stories themselves were very inconsistent in quality, tone, characterization, etc and IN NO WAY filmable. So, should they have tried to pick and choose or fit more stories in around the originals?  Absolutely not, in my mind, and that's not even discussing the idea of spoilers for the new movies in this day of information proliferation. The only way to make the new movies good Star Wars MOVIES was to give the writers and directors free reign to make a good Star Wars movie, and the only way to do that was to nuke the previously established EU timeline entirely. So, I'm actually glad that they did that instead of trying to shoehorn into what was already there, as much I was looking forward to seeing Mara Jade and Jaina Solo and Grand Admiral Thrawn and Wes Janson on film.

Instead of getting pissed, I decided to vent my energy in a (debatably) more productive manner: trying to reread all of my previous Star Wars EU novels before the new movie comes out and these stories officially fade into Legends. My very own Star Wars EU Reread, or SWEUread (the U is silent). Obviously, I'm never gonna get through 86 novels in that time, but I'll try to give it my best. With each book, I'll attempt to do a short book review, as another motive for this endeavor was because I have at times tried to find good reviews of the existing novels and not really been satisfied. I haven't really settled in on the format for the reviews, but I will not do plot synopses - that is why Al Gore invented the Google, people. What I am more interested in is the actual quality of the book itself and how "necessary" it is to the greater EU/Legends fabric - I read all of the books on blind faith and was a young, impressionable child, so I'm interested to see just how bad some of the novels are as an adult.

Anyways, that's a plenty long enough post for now. Next up I'll tackle the fairly complex problem of what order to read these in.  Wish me luck - I'm gonna need it!


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