I’m well aware of the vastness of the Star Wars galaxy and my tiny place in it. The films hold a special place in my heart, since I really got to know the guy who became my lifelong best friend when we hopped a train to Boston together to see the first Star Wars the week it came out, and had to wait in a blocks-long line. I didn’t see the more recent trilogy until a couple of years ago, when my daughters expressed interest and we got them out of the library. But I always knew I’d get around to them when I had six free hours.
Star Wars books are a more daunting task. There are hundreds of them, starting with the novelizations and evolving into whole independent series. Some fill in gaps in the movie narratives, some elevate minor characters to their own adventures, some move into future generations.
I’ve read dozens of these over the years, from the series about the twin offspring of Princess Leia and Han Solo to the offerings from big-name science fiction authors Timothy Zahn and Alan Dean Foster.
Currently, I’m down to two series—one of them steady, the other slight and culty. Aaron Allston’s Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi books are breezy, true to the romantic adventurous of the original films, and don’t get bogged down in all the mechanics, dialects and geographics reserved for readers much more fanatical than I am. Allston uses the most famous Star Wars faces—Luke, Leia, Han—but treats them as wise elders who must look after younger, more impetuous force-wielders, including their own children:
Luke killed the repulsors, allowing the shuttle to settle don on the stony surface of the slope. The shuttle began to rock, pushed by the winds.
“Fun flight, dad.”
“Quiet, you.”
(from Star Wars Fate of the Jedi: Conviction by Aaron Allston, Ballantine Books 2011)
Straightforward space tales neatly told, they also adapt beautifully to audiobook, with the series’ regular reader Marc Thompson doing as good as job differentiating the many voices in the narrative as Jim Dale famously does with the Harry Potter audiobooks.
Allston is the mainstream Star Wars writer I can get a handle on. The Star Wars books of Joe Schreiber are the cult ones I connect to. Schreiber is a horror writer foremost, and he brings a darkness, bloodthirstiness and unruliness to a genre that tends to be clinical and neatly uniformed. He reminds us that evil is more than a sleek black mask. Schreiber’s Star Wars output is slight, but his Red Harvest has stayed with me longer than any other Star Wars book I’ve read. He uses few well-known characters, plumbing the war-is-hell-and-hell-is-good consciousness of the Sith Lords and the often horror-struck, up-for-anything opponents:
Drawing on the Force, gathering it inside, as he’d been taught duringh hundreds of hours of training, he jerked the vent fixture from its housing. It came loose with a hollow metallic pop, bolts rattling free, opening a rectangle of cold space that fed into an open air shaft above. Still dangling from the open shaft, Scopique turned the vent fixture over in his free hand, evaluation its immediate utility as a weapon. It was thin and aerodynamic, with sharp edges—it would serve the purpose well enough.
He looked down at the thing that had been Jura.
“Whatever you are,” Scopique muttered, “say goodbye to your head.”
(from Star Wars Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber, Ballantine Books 2010)
Both Allston and Schreiber revel in the campy fun of B-movies, as the very first Star Wars did; they just prefer different genres. Between them, they provide all the Star Wars I need just now.