Is My Heart Too Broken?

Tinian on Trial

Author: Kathy Tyers

Medium: Short story

Publication date: November 1994 in Star Wars Adventure Journal #4

Timeline placement: 1 BBY

 

“Tinian on Trial” introduces Kathy Tyers’s OC Tinian I’att, a character Tyers must have loved because she kept bringing her back, even ruining her Bossk story in Tales of the Bounty Hunters in order to do so. Nowhere near as obtrusive here, 17-year-old Tinian (another redhead) lives with her grandparents on the planet Druckenwell and is the heiress to their weapons manufacturing company, I’att Armament. Her boyfriend, Daye Azur-Jamin, has recently helped her grandfather invent a new type of personal energy field that renders stormtrooper armor impervious to blasterfire, as opposed to vulnerable to blunt objects.

 

 

As our story begins, the I’att clan, including Tinian’s Wookiee protector, Wrrlevgebev, is trying to sell this new technology to the Empire, in the person of Moff Eisen Kerioth. Lacking a volunteer to wear the force field-enhanced armor and expose themself to blasterfire, Kerioth demands that Tinian be the subject of the demonstration, because like all adult men he gets off on bullying teenage girls. Despite the  protestations of her grandparents, boyfriend, and Wookiee, Tinian goes along with the moff for the good of her family’s company. Upon seeing that the technology does indeed make stormtrooper armor not completely worthless, Kerioth has his troops murder Tinian’s grandparents and seizes control of the factory. 

Daye and Wrrlevgebev both sacrifice themselves for Tinian, Wrrl giving his life so she can get away and Daye becoming horribly maimed and disfigured when he blows up the factory so it doesn’t fall into the Empire’s hands. Tinian escapes still wearing the stormtrooper armor with the only working prototype of the new energy shield. There’s a gratuitous scene where she hides in a cantina and disguises herself as a singer in the band by getting glammed up and wearing a slinky red cocktail dress made with advanced space technology that automatically enhances her bust and curves. When stormtroopers barge in, the babe onstage is so much hotter than the plain Jane they’re looking for that they don’t give her a second glance, causing Tinian to self-pityingly launch into a performance of Kasey Chambers’s “Not Pretty Enough.” Not the time, girl. 

Later, some guy comes in and announces that no one survived the explosion of I’att Armament. Everyone she loves having been violently killed in a single day, Tinian leaves Druckenwell with the disassembled energy field generator, vowing to dedicate her life to getting revenge on the Empire. But actually that guy was sent by Daye to greatly exaggerate the reports of his death! Daye is going to join the Rebellion and dedicate his life to getting revenge on the Empire, and he decides that it’s kinder for him to allow Tinian to believe that everyone she loves has been violently killed in a single day than to let her know he’s alive.

What.

 

My only previous exposure to this character is the aforementioned Tales of the Bounty Hunters, which made me dislike her for upstaging Bossk in his own story. She’s much more likable and sympathetic here, though, so I’m tentatively looking forward to her appearances in Kathy Tyers’s further Adventure Journal stories. Like many modern YA romance heroines, she’s self-deprecating and insecure about her looks, yet has every male character ready to get themselves killed to protect her, and when she cleans up she’s a knockout. I have a feeling some people might read something uncharitable into that, but it’s fine.

 

All Your Bass Are Belong to Us

Rebel Bass

Author: Kathy Tyers

Medium: Short story

Publication date: September 2001 in Star Wars Gamer #6

Timeline placement: 2 BBY

 

"Rebel Bass" tells the story of 16-year-old Ryley Ancum and his garage band Far Cry, which uses their music to send coded messages to undercover Rebel Alliance operatives, or something. Like most stories written in publications for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game, it's a "slice of life" narrative about random nobodies in the Star Wars galaxy who have no relevance to the core saga and will never appear in another story. And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact it makes perfect sense for the RPG, where you yourself take on the role of a random nobody in the Star Wars galaxy who has no relevance to the core saga. The sourcebooks and other publications released for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game, especially when West End Games held the license, were responsible for most of the nitty-gritty worldbuilding that transformed the loose fantasy rules of George Lucas's movies into a grounded, verisimilar sci-fi universe.

 

But as much as I appreciate the detail and thoroughness of that level of setting construction, by and large the "man on the street" viewpoint isn't the appeal of Star Wars for me. Star Wars is big, bombastic, epic in its literal definition. There are intimate personal stories that can be told, but those moments of emotional poignancy are usually expressed between flashes of a lightsaber blade or the scream of a starfighter's laser cannons. I'd rather read this story than most of the ones published in the Adventure Journal, because 1) it's much shorter, and 2) it's written by an actual published novelist rather than an amateur cutting their teeth and therefore isn't completely painful to read, but it's still so fucking boring. I understand why it was written but reading it as a standalone story divorced from the broader context and culture of the Star Wars RPG, it has nothing of value or interest to offer me. 2 out of 5 Death Stars.

Drake Does It All for the Wookiee

When the Domino Falls

Author: Patricia A. Jackson

Medium: Short story

Publication date: August 1994 in Star Wars Adventure Journal #3

Timeline placement: 2 BBY

 

Drake Paulsen returns, this time in a story that feels like two stories crammed into one. Drake helps a female Wookiee named Nikaede evade Imperial slavers in an okay adventure that primarily exists to flesh out Patricia Jackson's supporting cast of OCs. Meanwhile, in a completely unrelated twist, Drake's father dies off-screen and Drake has to come to terms with that in a tacked-on ending. Nikaede then swears a life debt to Drake because if you invent a Wookiee character they have to owe someone a life debt, I guess. The Essential Reader's Companion places this story the year after its predecessor, but a full year can't have passed because Drake is still 15. 

 

Better than the previous Paulsen parable, but I still don't find any of these characters particularly compelling. Drake Paulsen is a nice kid, I guess, but why do I want to read about him? 2.5 out of 5 Death Stars.

Into the Grave

Out of the Cradle

Author: Patricia A. Jackson

Medium: Short story

Publication date: May 1994 in Star Wars Adventure Journal #2

Timeline placement: 3 BBY

 

First appearance of Drake Paulsen, another of Patricia Jackson’s recurring OCs. Also features not one but two Corellian YT-1300 light freighters, as well as a repeat of the old smuggler’s trick of hiding illegal weapons in a shielded compartment meant for irradiated space tools that Jackson already used in “The Final Exit.” And like Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross before him, Drake spends a lot of time nervously thumbing open his holster’s safety strap, with no mention of it being fastened again between unsnaps.

The main purpose of this story seems to be RPG worldbuilding for the Coynite species of the planet Coyn. Did you know that, in the Coynite tongue, la’chu means “little fox” (wait why are there foxes), but chu’la means “cunning little fox” or “the fox who cannot be caught”?

Han Solo and the Ambiguous Cameo

Passages 

Author: Charlene Newcomb

Medium: Short story

Publication date: August 1995 in Star Wars Adventure Journal #7

Timeline placement: 3 BBY

Chapter two of Charlene Newcomb’s Alex Winger saga. 

In “Turning Point,” we were introduced to Alex, a Force-sensitive little girl adopted by the governor of Garos IV after her family was killed by the Empire. She doesn’t appear in “Passages,” but we do find out that that backstory wasn’t entirely accurate. Alex’s father, Matt Turhaya, is a former Imperial pilot who went AWOL after the unexpected death of his wife. Alex was staying with relatives at the time of the Imperial attack and Matt believes that she died in the bombardment. He’s spent the years since then drinking and gambling his life away like a true alpha male. 

Finding himself 150,000 credits in debt to the DC Comics supervillain Metallo, a mechanical murderer with a kryptonite heart, Matt becomes his indentured servant, accompanying him on his travels to keep his spaceship operational. During a stop on the planet Kabaira, a random Imperial officer recognizes Matt as a deserter and has him arrested, along with some of the planet’s Rebel cell. The “Rebel Alliance” is mentioned but, as with its appearances in the Droids cartoon ten years earlier, it shouldn’t formally exist yet. Early EU lore had the unfortunate habit of deciding that much of the status quo presented in the original trilogy only recently came into being. The Rebel Alliance had only existed for two years. Bib Fortuna had only been Jabba the Hutt’s majordomo for four years. The A-wing wasn’t invented until after the Battle of Yavin. The Mon Calamari species had only been discovered during the reign of the Empire. Then someone who doesn’t know all the lore minutiae comes along and writes a story set further back in time and you run into problems. 

Anyway, Metallo teams up with the local Rebels/rebels to spring their crew mates, and Matt and Metallo end up joining the growing resistance movement against the Empire. Will this new path reunite Matt Turducken with his long-lost daughter? 

And what of Hans Solo, Prince of the Southern Isles? Early in the story, there’s a brief scene where the characters are at the Mos Eisley Cantina on Tatooine, playing cards with a Corellian smuggler with a “cockeyed grin” and a Wookiee copilot. Thankfully, Han and Chewie are never mentioned by name so we don’t have to worry about how this cameo fits into their timeline. There’s probably no reason it couldn’t be them, but maybe it was some other sarcastic Corellian smuggler-cum-card sharp traveling with a Wookiee and Han is actually just a giant cultural stereotype.

I Am Ashamed That You Care to Remember Me

The Final Exit

Author: Patricia A. Jackson

Medium: Short story

Publication date: November 1994 in Star Wars Adventure Journal #4

Timeline placement: 5 BBY

 

Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, Corellian smuggler and captain of the YT-1300 freighter Kierra (inhabited by an overly feminine droid intelligence also named Kierra), gets more than he bargained for when he agrees to Uber thespian-turned-murderer Adalric Brandl back to his home planet for an awkward family reunion.

 

Patricia Jackson's dark, almost gothic saga of Adalric Cessius Brandl and his tortured relationship with his son, Jaalib, is one of the highlights of the Adventure Journal's original fiction. It's weird and sad and confusing and completely unique as far as Star Wars literature goes. I'm still not sure if it's even actually good, but I've been thinking about it, on and off, for 25 years.

 

Jackson writes dialogue in a heightened, theatrical style, evoking Brandl's history as a dramatic actor. Brandl himself gets a slew of juicy, overwrought lines to deliver as he broods over his damned soul, but there's a disconnected, almost dream-like quality to the way every character speaks; the things they say don't quite follow naturally from what they're responding to.

 

This feeling of disconnection extends beyond the characters to the story itself and its place in Star Wars canon. "Adalric Brandl is a Jedi Knight," Ross deduces of his mysterious passenger. Quite a leap, you think, given that this story is set only a few years before A New Hope, when the Jedi are extinct and the Force is disregarded as "hokey religion." Plus Brandl is clearly a psychotic murderer who uses the Force to kill.

 

Prior to the prequel trilogy and the subsequent proliferation of Sith in the Expanded Universe, dark-side Force-users were typically termed "Dark Jedi." Here, though, Brandl is repeatedly referred to in both dialogue and narration as a Jedi Knight. Ross could have said "Adalric Brandl is a Force-user" or, more specifically, "Adalric Brandl is an Imperial Inquisitor." But instead, he's a Jedi—or what passes for a Jedi in this dark-mirror vision of Star Wars. I'm not sure what to make of that. Maybe for the author it was just a term of convenience, but there's something subtly unsettling about it: more sense of broken or missing connections, of performance rather than life.

 

Brandl's lightsaber blade is white, a color that represents purity, but also a color that contains all other colors. What did the author mean by this? Maybe absolutely nothing, but the fact that I'm even asking the question says a lot. 4.5/5 Death Stars.

 

"I live my life in a whirlwind!" 

  

NB: Adalric Brandl's wife is a redhead so take a shot.

Wood Eye, Wood Eye!

Turning Point

Author: Charlene Newcomb

Medium: Short story

Publication date: February 1995 in Star Wars Adventure Journal #5

Timeline placement: 6 BBY

The unfortunately named Dair Haslip has been accepted to the Imperial Academy on Raithal, a lifelong dream of both himself and his best friend, Joss Whedon. Dair’s friend will not be accompanying him to the academy, however, due to Joss Whedon’s father recently having been revealed to be a member of the underground resistance movement on Garos IV. Nevertheless, Dair Haslip and Joss Whedon remain huge Empire stans, until for no reason they decide to sneak around the woods and spy on a couple of Imperial scout troopers, who shoot Joss Whedon in the back. Dair murders them in return, then confesses his crime to his grandmother, who reveals that she is also part of the resistance movement. Dair decides not to reject his academy acceptance and to use his position to fight the Empire from within.

This story is all a big nothing, with one exception that I’ll mention in a moment. We all know that the Empire is evil, but all these Adventure Journal and Galaxy and Gamer stories were written to promote Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, the point of which, I thought, was that you could be anyone in the Star Wars galaxy you wanted to be. So why do so many of these stories go the predictable route of having their protagonists end up joining the Rebellion? “I love or am indifferent to the Empire! Oh no, the Empire fucked me over in the most horrible way, I guess they were evil after all.” This same arc plays out so many times these stories end up feeling like white noise. How about an Imperial protagonist who doesn’t switch sides at the end? We’ve got the TIE Fighter game, select issues of the Empire comic, and…?

But on the plus side, “Turning Point” features the earliest chronological appearance of Alex Winger! She’s only six here, but we will watch her career with great interest. Sadly the same cannot be said about our already forgotten hero, Das Hairlip.

Cleanliness Is Next to Impossible

The Great Heep

Writer: Ben Burtt

Medium: Television

Air Date: June 7, 1986 

Timeline Placement: 15 BBY

 

A 45-minute TV special set between the second and third story arcs of the Droids cartoon. We're now entering the portion of the series that I have no familiarity with and no childhood nostalgia for. Despite owning and having watched the DVD that cobbles together the four Mungo Baobab episodes into a terrible "film," I remember absolutely nothing that happens in them. The Great Heep is a prequel to those episodes, but does little to set the stage for them. The special begins with R2-D2 and C-3PO already in the service of their new master, the space merchant Mungo Baobab, heir to the Baobab Merchant Fleet. We don't even get to see how they met!

 

That's okay, though, because once it gets going, this special is awesome. If you've been reading my Droids retrospective up to this point, you may have found yourself thinking, "This all sounds like dumb kiddie bullshit, why would anyone waste their time watching this crap in the year of our Lord 2025/26?" To that, I say: if you only ever watch a single episode of Droids: The Adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO, make it The Great Heep.

 

This has it all: fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles. R2-D2 gets a girlfriend, and it's the cutest thing ever. Would you believe me if I said that there is a non-zero chance that known Star Wars fan Takashi Yamazaki, writer-director of Godzilla Minus One, ripped off the ending of The Great Heep for his Oscar-winning kaiju film? Would you believe me if I told you that C-3PO, a mechanical automaton, sheds a tear, and it not only makes sense but is a genuinely moving and artful scene?

 

Wuv, twue wuv, will fowwow you foweva.

 

For the most part, the animation in the special is only slightly better than that of the regular series, the same low-detail designs and stiff character movements suggestive of low-budget Saturday-morning '80s fare. I say "for the most part," because about halfway through the special, for no reason at all there is a single shot of Admiral Screed's face reflecting the flames from an explosion that looks like it was animated by an entirely different studio or dropped in from a real animated movie. It looks awesome and it's bizarre seeing it in this cartoon. 

 

In summary, The Great Heep rocks, go watch it. But now let's talk about the Great Heep himself, and his weirdly significant place in Expanded Universe canon. Countless aeons ago, in another galaxy, lived the Yuuzhan Vong, arch-villains of the 19-book New Jedi Order series published by Del Rey Books between 1999 and 2003. A key cultural trait of their people was their species-wide religious technophobia, a prejudice developed when they were almost wiped out in a galactic war waged between the two advanced droid races of their home galaxy: the starfish-shaped Silentium, and the evil Abominor, massive mechanical monsters of varying shapes and sizes.

 

The war nearly destroyed everything, but ultimately the Yuuzhan Vong  drove the two robotic factions out of their native galaxy. Like the Yuuzhan Vong themselves eventually would, some of the surviving Silentium and Abominor ended up in the Star Wars galaxy. The former appeared in L. Neil Smith's 1983 trilogy The Lando Calrissian Adventures, while EU lore mentions eighteen known Abominor encounters, although only two were ever depicted in fiction. One was Ronyards from the Alan Moore Devilworlds comic Rust Never Sleeps, a junkyard world populated by droids who believed their planet was the body of a living god. The other was the Great Heep himself!

 

When the Great Heep arrived in the Star Wars galaxy, his batteries were dead and he ended up in a museum on Coruscant for 300 years until he was found and reactivated by Admiral Terrinald Screed of the Imperial Navy, with their subsequent partnership kick-starting the events of the Droids TV special. It's fun to watch this goofy '80s cartoon and think about R2-D2 and C-3PO fighting an ancient evil machine from another galaxy, the progeny of whose warmongering would arrive to trouble them forty years later, and being none the wiser to the broader significance of their adventure.

 

The war to end all wars.

 

(It should be noted that all of this is pure retroactive continuity established in The New Essential Guide to Droids (2006). The words "Silentium" and "Abominor" never appear in The Lando Calrissian Adventures, The Great Heep, or Rust Never Sleeps, nor did the authors of any of those '80s stories intend them to tie in to a book series that wouldn't be written for another two decades. But this is the connective, reinforcing beauty of EU continuity. Some fans balk at the esotericism of retcons like these, but my feeling is that as long as the original stories aren't being diminished or compromised in some way, they don't do no harm.)

Colby Jack and the Prisoners of the Lost Universe

Coby and the Starhunters

Writers: Joe Johnston and Peter Sauder

Medium: Television

Air Date: November 2, 1985 

Timeline Placement: 15 BBY

 

Prince Coby, the young son of Mon Julpa's erstwhile rival Lord Toda, is leaving Tammuz-an for the Imperial Academy. I'm not sure why, since he's like ten, and also a filthy alien, but that's where we are. Jann Tosh and droids tag along to make sure the headstrong prince makes it where he's going, but during a layover on the planet Chuzalla (why are they taking public transportation?), Coby's pet lemur, I mean "tessellated arboreal binjinphant," is stolen by an outlaw gang called the Starhunters, proprietors of an illegal zoo. Coby buys a Blackhawk Destroyer from a nearby spacecraft dealership to pursue the crooks and Artoo pilots it like he's drunk, foreshadowing the great scene in Shadows of the Empire where the droids fly the Millennium Falcon. 

 

The Starhunters flee to the planet Dandelo, also known as Joe Collins, where they keep their menagerie locked in cliffside caves they eminent domained from the native Fuzzums, which are Ewoks if they were birds. Coby and the droids run out of fuel and crash in the jungle, where the displaced Fuzzums capture them and announce their intentions to turn R2-D2 into a stew pot and Coby into the stew that goes in it. But when C-3PO explains that they are on a mission to save Coby's pet, the animal-loving Fuzzums are moved to renounce cannibalism and help our heroes out.

 

Threepio hides in the woods and imitates the mating call of the rare spotted juggalo, luring the Starhunters away from their base so Coby and Artoo can save the lemur. They find him sharing an enclosure with another zoo animal, a man named Greej. Artoo picks the lock but is attacked by the Starhunters' patrol droid, but Coby's character arc has transitioned him from annoyance with his robotic babysitters to genuine fondness for them, and he picks up the patrol droid's own weapon and blasts it into the abyss. Artoo seems deceased but Greej thinks he can fix him.

 

That will have to wait, however, for a real spotted juggalo has answered Threepio's mating call and, blinded by its insatiable lust for the golden droid, inadvertently dragged all the Starhunters back to their camp in the very net they planned to use to catch it. The Starhunters get loose and manage to turn the tide against Coby, Greej, and the Fuzzums, but Jann Tosh comes to the rescue, reminding the children watching at home that he is still a character on this show. The poachers are locked up in their own cages, and are presumably eaten by the Fuzzums after the episode ends.

 

True to his word, Greej repairs R2-D2, then explains how he used to care for all the creatures in the menagerie before the Starhunters deposed him and turned his animal sanctuary into the least profitable zoo of all time. He wishes he could return all the animals to their natural habitats, but he can't afford the space-bus fare. Coby's rich so he decides to drop out of the Imperial Academy and make his way in the universe by traveling around with this old guy he just met. 

 

Jann takes this moment to announce that he has been accepted to the Imperial Academy as well, a lifelong dream that he has talked about many times before, apparently. However, droids are not permitted at the academy, which means, after five long episodes of overthrowing a crime lord, restoring a monarchy, defeating a pirate gang, and joining PETA, it's time to say goodbye. "Once we were droids and master, Threepio, Artoo. We're friends now, and forever," says Jann. He then leaves the droids stranded on Dandelo while the Fuzzums reenact the Ewok victory celebration. The droids are sad to lose their master, but Threepio promises Artoo that they'll look after each other now.

 

Dead lovers salivate, broken hearts tessellate tonight. 

Contrary to my expectations, I really enjoyed this episode. I like Jann Tosh from the early Mon Julpa episodes, but this arc was starting to overstay its welcome. Pairing the droids up with the new character of Coby, a young kid bringing a different dynamic to the table, managed to shake things up a bit before we head into the final story arc of the series. The entire sequence of Coby and the droids chasing the Starhunters across Chuzalla and into space was a lot of fun.

 

But since no one can ever leave well enough alone, the story doesn't end here, but with The Droids Re-Animated revealing that Jann was shot in the back by Rebel terrorists one week after graduating from the academy, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down and confined to a hoverchair. Discharged from the Imperial Army, he's sent back to Tyne's Horky, where he lives with Uncle Gundy until the latter's death ten years later. Plus he never even got to bang Jessica Meade. 

 

So really he would have been better off never leaving home and having this whole adventure to begin with. 

 

Jesus Christ. 

The Blue Man Cometh

Mist Encounter

 

Author: Timothy Zahn

Medium: Short story

Publication date: August 1995 in Star Wars Adventure Journal #7

Timeline placement: 19 BBY

 

Our story begins one week after Emperor Palpatine's Declaration of a New Order, an arbitrary date that ruined everything. If you're reading the EU in chronological order, "Mist Encounter" sticks out like a sore thumb among post-Revenge of the Sith stories that were written after Revenge of the Sith existed. Those stories maintain the visual iconography of the recently ended Clone Wars, with the early Empire employing the same or similar vehicle, vessel, and equipment designs that the Republic used during the war. "Mist Encounter," by contrast, clearly came out in the mid-'90s Bantam era, where all Star Wars tie-in material was extrapolated from the narrative tone and design aesthetic of the original trilogy. 

 

The presence of TIE fighters and Victory Star Destroyers isn't a hard continuity error, as there's nothing to say TIEs couldn't have been in service this early and this is the era you'd most expect to see the Empire using the Victory-class. But since they don't show up anywhere else in this time period, it feels weird. The illustrations accompanying the story show OT-era stormtrooper armor when they should still be using the Episode III-era clone trooper design, but the artist also accidentally drew a stormtrooper instead of a TIE pilot so you can take that with a grain of salt.

 

What doesn't fit is the reference to Darth Vader, who we're told has already recruited the Noghri by this point. During the '90s, Star Wars authors were generally restricted from mentioning details about the Clone Wars, but A Guide to the Star Wars Universe (2nd ed.) gave the definitive canon date of the wars' end as 35 BBY. Pre-prequel EU continuity commonly assumed some passage of time between Anakin Skywalker's fall to the dark side and the duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi that left him in the Vader suit, so Zahn probably wrote "Mist Encounter" with that assumption in mind. Once George Lucas compressed the timeline for the prequels, however, the end of the Clone Wars, the rise of the Empire, the destruction of the Jedi, the birth of Luke and Leia, Anakin's fall, and his maiming by Obi-Wan now all had to take place more or less simultaneously. All of this is to say that in post-prequel EU canon, Vader didn't make his first public appearance (in Republic #78) until two weeks after Revenge of the Sith. We could always choose to throw out that date instead of this one, but the dude just got fished out of a volcano, give him some time to figure out how his robot legs work before you send him off to enslave the Noghri, jeez.

Anyway continuity quibbles aside this story was really good. 4 out of 5 Death Stars.

 

Zahn isn't much of a stylist, but his prose is streets ahead of the tedious sludge you can expect from a Denning, Karpyshyn, or Anderson. More, there's a strong sense of conviction to his writing, a verisimilitude in his depiction of military procedures and engagements. Here's a man who clearly knows his WEG sourcebook lore. For instance, Zahn knows that, contrary to how most authors use them, stormtroopers are not part of the Imperial Army. The Stormtrooper Corps is a distinct military branch with its own chain of command.

 

This is an Imperial Army trooper:

 

You even see General Veers wearing this armor in The Empire Strikes Back, but no one ever wants to use them in stories because they look goofy. Stormtroopers are iconic, which also makes them overused and devalued. Zahn's characters understand that ships and men and materiel don't grow on trees. It takes time and money to build fleets and train soldiers. This approach to the universe can sometimes set Zahn's work at odds with his colleagues', but that's okay. It's called the Expanded Universe for a reason; the world is wide enough for both.

 

Zahn does start to lean into some of his more regrettable habits as an author toward the end of the story, as Thrawn explains his plan to the Imperials and Captain Parck can't stop gushing over how smart and cool he is. We already think that, we read the story! This guy doesn't need to blow Thrawn in front of everyone to drive the point home. 

 

Oh yeah I guess Thrawn is in this story. Welcome to the Empire, (future) Grand Admiral Thrawn. We're all glad to have you back.

 

I Wish You Would Step Back from That Precipice, My Friend

Precipice

Author: Chris Cassidy

Medium: Short story

Publication date: April 23, 2008 on StarWars.com (republished on Unbound Worlds)

Timeline placement: 22 BBY

 

Do you remember that scene in Attack of the Clones where Obi-Wan is captured by the bug guys and he's floating in that electric thing for some reason and Count Dooku comes in and talks to him for like two minutes? This story is just that scene again, with the same dialogue from the movie and everything. I have no idea what the point of writing it was.

 

There is a new element added where Dooku is mind-raping Obi-Wan while they mindlessly repeat George Lucas's dialogue, psychically rifling through his memories and telepathically reiterating everything he's saying out loud, but it's completely pointless and contributes nothing besides making you wonder why this didn't come up in Obi-Wan's internal monologue in any of the novelized versions of this scene. The writing is kind of uncomfortably suggestive so maybe the author was working through some things with this one, I don't know. I appreciate the little Jedi Apprentice references but Dooku/Obi-Wan slashfic doesn't do it for me. 

 

0.5 out of 5 Death Stars.