It began four months ago, when I blew the dust off of a sealed box in my parents' attic: my Star Wars library. I will now recount in brief my re-immersion into that story of Skywalkers and Solos, lightsabers and lightning, of light and of dark...
What follows is roughly three months of books packed into a post. Pace yourself!
As I cracked that ancient case, the first face to stare back at me was that of a grotesque Yuuzhan Vong warrior, daring me to take up the challenge of his story.
And indeed I saw it as a challenge. Though I had previously read Vector Prime, it took me no less than 3 tries to finish it first go-around. I had no such trouble this time. What an incredible story! I exalted at the promise of a new generation of heroes and grinned in fond recollection at the exploits of the previous. Every single character took on new depth and I was hooked.
Death Troopers was just fun. An impulse buy made while cruising local book stores for the Thrawn Trilogy, it ended up as my travel companion on an international flight. Indeed, as I flew over the Atlantic it was not hard to imagine the derelict interior of a forsaken Star Destroyer floating through space.
This story is an image - zombie Stormtroopers - rolled out into a story. This is okay with me. I read most of it half-asleep and its simplicity and shallowness was just what I needed - no characters to care about, nothing new to know. Also, it was nice to be see Star Wars sans Jedi - those walking deus ex machina's.
Masterpiece. This is my one-word review of Outbound Flight by the eminent Mr. Zahn. It ties in Thrawn, the Trade Federation, Palpatine, and the Yuuzhan Vong invasion in a way that single-handedly hooked me into each one of these stories. And as if that wasn't enough, we got a half-sane gray Jedi playing hardball politics, a massive expedition of 6 Dreadnaughts tied together to explore outside the fucking galaxy, and in my opinion one of the coolest Star Wars reveals next to family Skywalker: that Palpatine's massive Imperial arms buildup had a purpose other than subjugation.
Sorry to go all fanboy about this, but Outbound Flight is, in a word: awesome.
Heir to the Empire / Dark Force Rising / The Last Command
On a list of all-time most effective villians, Darth Vader is hard to top. Powerful, ruthless, intimidating - the voice of James Earl Jones. A slave boy risen to power, fallen to tragedy, and redeemed by his lost son, its hard to imagine another nemesis that can capture the imagination as he does.
Enter Grand Admiral Thrawn: a soft-spoken, blue-skinned art critic whose machinations and cunning will captivate a galaxy, and Star Wars fans everywhere. This trilogy about Thrawn at the apex of his power, set some 5 years after the events of the movies, are the first words out of my mouth when asked about Star Wars books by anyone curious. This is space opera.
Finish catching up with me in the next post!
No comments:
Post a Comment