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Steve
read and liked
Chad's
review of Omen (Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi, Book 2):
"Bleh. I don't even know where to start with this thing. Its a twaddling mess for a variety of reasons, and a depressing continuation of a downward trend in quality for the Star Wars EU over the last few entries. Below, I'll try to put my frustrati...more
Bleh. I don't even know where to start with this thing. Its a twaddling mess for a variety of reasons, and a depressing continuation of a downward trend in quality for the Star Wars EU over the last few entries. Below, I'll try to put my frustrations into words. There are some spoilers below, if such a threadbare plot is capable of being spoiled...
Okay then.
1. Christie Golden apparently had it in her head that she was writing a Young Adult novel for teenage girls. There are a few moments where the maturity level bobs it head above water, but 80% of this work comes across as unnecessarily melodramatic. There is no subtlety to anything that happens, and there is lots and lots and lots of over-reacting and over-emoting and most of the cast are in a constant state of exaspiration. Also, there are no less than FOUR plucky teenage heroinnes whose earnestness and naivete are challenged by the cruelties of the real world. Fortunately, one of them just gets a few pages of face time near the end, and another is carted off to jail by GA soldiers, but the other two, Yaqeel and Vestara, are actually the focus of a significant amount of the book. And to be fair, I honestly can't recall exactly how old all of these girls were, but they were all written to ACT like over-dramatic teenage Disney Channel stars, so that's how I'm remembering them. They should appeal nicely to the Hannah Montana set.
2. The scale of events is made to feel so tiny. Gone are the days when the adventures were high stakes chess games with each player in the struggle (The Galactic Alliance, The Jedi Order, The Imperial Moffs) deftly trying to manipulate and out-maneuver one another on planetary and political scales. Instead, Golden over-simplifies every situation every character is in, so that only the bare minimum number of players are present to move each plot device forward. In the war being waged between Daala and the Jedi, Daala and her aid are the only GA castmembers present for any of her 'plotting', and Kenth Hamner, Cilghal and a few token Jedi are the only one representing their august body in most of their scenes. I think back to how brilliantly Karen Travis and Timothy Zahn and Michael Stackpole have been able to tell their stories by utilizing the rich tapesty of characters that make up the EU. Golden either doesn't want to, or doesn't know how to, tap into all of that, focusing instead on broad characterizations of a tiny number of characters to get her points across (except for the FOUR teenage girls she created). An analogy: it would be like if you tried to remake "Lean on Me" as a 22 minute episode of "Saved By The Bell". You might get your ideas across, but the production values are inferior and instead of filming the big graduation scene in an actual high school auditorium with a thousand graduates, you film it on the tv soundstage, which only has room for about fifteen extras. That's kind of what big chunks of this book felt like.
3. In case you didn't catch it the first time, things are stated and re-stated over and over and over and over again. I almost started laughing at one point. Probably the incident that gets mentioned the most is the harrowing account of Jysella's freak-out and capture. To begin with, the incident itself doesn't get resolved for over 30 pages. But in case you missed it, or nodded off while reading it the first time, any character who wasn't present has to have the entire scene summarized for them. So we get exciting recounts when Luke is told, and when Daala is told, and when a reporter does a news story, and when some other Jedi pop up, and on an on. The Jysella freak-out was the most glaring overly-repeated summary, but Golden also pads her word count with repetitions of Jaina's distasteful musings about an annoying reporter, the Skywalker's fascination with the Aing Tii's use of the force, and any other 'important' happening that the author felt you might not have picked up on the first time around. Some advice: if you ever have Christie Golden over for tea, keep your dead horses locked up, or she will find them and beat them.
4. Very little happens! Actually, things actually do happen, but nothing of much consequence. At the very least, not enough happens for the second part of a multi-novel series. As stated above, there is a lot of restating of the few things that do happen, but most of this novel is padding. Consider the plot points one at a time:
a)the JEDI/DAALA conflict: Daala tells the media the Jedi are bad. The Jedi respond by telling the media, "No we're not." Repeat seven times. Not only was this repetitive, that was pretty much the same exact thing that happened in THE LAST BOOK! But even "Outcast" threw in the somewhat interesting idea of government supervisors being thrust into the Jedi Temple. But since Aaron Allston cut that plot off at the knees in his book, Golden doesn't even have that to work with.
b)the SKYWALKERS IN EXILE plot: Luke and Ben have now traveled to two worlds in two novels, and their visits basically resulted in them getting a clue as to what world to go to in the next novel. This is not exciting. If anything they did on those worlds had any bearing on the overall plot, then it might be interesting. But twice now, the Skywalkers have shown up, met the locals, learned about their exotic cultures, gotten a clue, then left.
c)the SECRET SITH SOCIETY plot: this is arguably the place where the most progress is made, essentially serving as an introduction to new bad guys with one of the FOUR plucky teenage girls as our point-of-view character. We get to follow her as she is accepted into a sort of evil Sith Hogwarts, and you'll never guess, but [SPOILER:] she's THE CHOSEN ONE!
5.Press conferences! Press conferences are apparently Christie Golden's shorthand answer to the intricate plotting of other, far superior EU authors: why watch all the plans of these master strategists slowly play out in all their epic grandeur, when you can have a press conference and explain your intentions in a fraction of the pages!
6.Christie Golden has a weird sense for what is actually interesting. She spends an oddly inordinate amount of time with her the plucky Sith girl, and reiterating the scene where the plucky Jysella freaks-out, and with press conferences, but one of the most interesting ideas Golden drops into this work is glossed over in a few pages. She does this once, then brings the idea back and glosses over it again! The idea is this: The Aing-Tii monks have an exotic connection to The Force, which had led them to think they must collect artifacts from around the galaxy that are somehow related to 'Those Who Dwell Beyond The Veil'. In exchange for telling them about their dealings with Jacen Solo, Luke agrees to help them gather some of these artifacts, which the Aing-Tii have trouble gathering themselves because to touch the artifacts themselves would defile them. Neat idea.
In my opinion, Luke and Ben journeying to collect one or two or three of these artifacts would have made for a moderatly interesting subplot. Instead, the collection of said artifacts is relegated to a few paragraphs. Basically: "They went on some journeys and found some stuff." Lest you think I'm exaggerating, look at the bottom of page 187 then read to the middle of 188, and what is later described as months of traveling is reduced a few generic paragraphs.
Now Golden gives herself a second chance to tackle this little bit of side-plot when the Skywalkers agree to study all of the artifacts for the Aing-Tii (remember, they can't touch or study them themselves) to help them sort out a prophecy they're having trouble interpreting. Do we get interesting descriptions of any of the artifacts that give cryptic hints to other strange worlds or any clues as to what all of this has to do with Jacen Solo? Not so much. To quote page 214, "The process was hardly a swift one, but it went fairly quickly." The process, as it turns out, is all wrapped up by the end of the day. Keep in mind, the Aing-Tii have spent millenia collecting these artifacts. It is one of the primary functions of their entire species. And what they've amassed over the course of a couple thousand years, the Skywalkers sift through and study in an afternoon. And they're so certain of their thoroughness, they go back to the Aing-Tii big-wigs and announce that they haven't found anything about the mysterious philosophy. Sorry.
That Golden would spend so much of her word count on repetitive scenes and overblown melodrama, and make these the conduit through which to move the plot sluggishly forward, but would pay the barest of lip-service to an idea that could potentially have given meaning and weight to what turned out to be a pointless subplot is beyond forgiveness.
7.Lots of things just don't make sense. Little things that bothered me as a devoted fan of the Star Wars EU:
* The Sith on Kesh are a space-faring people who crash-land on a planet where they are cut off from the rest of their people. And in 5,000 years, even though the entire society seems obsessed with getting off the planet and back into the mix, they can't figure out how to fix their space-ship or build a new one? Hell, once humans on Earth figured out how to build an airplane, it took us less than 100 years to get into space. And the Sith are supposed to be all awesome and evil! What gives?
* There is many a moment where a character makes an odd leap in logic, only to have another character point out how odd a leap in logic that is, only to have the first character justify said leap by saying that they just have a feeling. Then everyone accepts that logic as truth. Example #1: Cilghal posits than Jysella must have been 'flow-walking' when she escaped the Jedi Temple and held off being captured by predicting what her opponents were going to do next. Luke points out that that's what Jedi do: use the Force to feel what's going to happen next. Cilghal's reply: "No, but this was super-special predicting!" Luke's response: "Yes, I see what you mean." Example #2: The Sith plan to attack Luke, whom they feel is the mightiest force for the Light Side in the galaxy! He's so mighty, in fact, the mission leader says she will only take a small strike team. Another Sith points out that if he's so powerful, shouldn't they maybe take more people? The first Sith's reply: "There was something about his presence--I do not think so" (p. 232). The second Sith's response: "Cool."
* I thought Jedi's lightsabers were their weapons of choice and went with them every where they went. Not in this novel. Every time you turn around the Jedi seem to leave them lying around and have little internal debates about whether to take them along on their missions. Like you might consider carrying an umbrella because you heard in might rain. There's actually a scene where Jaina leaves hers behind, but at the last minute picks it up and throws it in her purse!
* Jagged Fel is the worst head of state in the history of states. He spends the entire novel going to dinners with Jaina and having romantic trysts with her. When Jaina asks what he's doing about the scheming Moffs, he basically tells her not to worry, I got it all under control babe. Also, I won't spoil it here, but he makes a decision at the end of the book that makes no rational sense and is not in character at all, and only makes sense in the Disney Channel sense, where cheap melodrama trumps rational thought.
* Golden called Cilghal's hands 'flippers' about five times in the span of 20 pages and it really started to bug me.
Okay this is getting too specific...moving on to my final point:
7.It's too freaking short! The novel clocks in at a whopping 236 pages, and as stated above, most of that is spent on Jysella's freak-out, summarizing Jysella's freak-out, press-conferences, everyone railing against how much they hate the the crack-reporter who keeps following them all around, and Luke and Ben finding their clue to the next novel. And in the end, not much has happened. Part of this is Christie Golden's fault. You almost get the sense that she doesn't know what else to do with these characters. She picked a few characters (the wrong ones, in my opinion) to act as mouth-pieces for each major player to move their schemes forward, and in the broadest of strokes, achieved that objective. She invented two new characters (Jysella isn't really new, but Golden is the first to give her any kind of personality) and gave them lenghty detailed plots and that was half the book. Outside of that, its like she wasn't comfortable exploring anything else.
The other big person to blame, however, is Del Rey publishing, who seem to have made a conscious effort to pull back the scope of the latest books by trying to keep each novel self-contained. This fundamentally ties the hands of any author who might have story ideas that they then can't really play with. The Legacy of the Force storyline caught some flack from some of the fans for their darkness, but each of the nine novels in that arc told one big story with an intricate plot that never let up until the last novel. On top of that, each of the three contributing authors had their own corners of the EU they wanted to expand upon in their three entries, the best example being Karen Travis and her fetish for the Mandelorians. It was nine novels, but it was one big story, and there weren't any superfluous one-and-done adventures thrown in to fill some pages.
The first two chapters of the new Fate of the Jedi arc seems just the opposite. Small stories, anecdotes almost (Han and Leia fight cave spiders on Kessel; Ben and Luke meet mysterious aliens; Han and Leia take Allana to the Stock Show [seriously:]) that seem truncated and over before they started, with an overly repetitive and plodding through-line of the Jedi freak-outs and the media war, which really hasn't seen any new developments over the course of two novels.
I didn't like this novel, but I'm beginning to feel a little depressed about the overall tone and direction of the series itself. I don't think everything has to be dark and depressing and filled with angst, but I'd expect the authors to aim for a more sophisticated audience than teenage girls.
The fact that Troy Denning (author of the atrocious "Invincible") is writing the next installment doensn't give me any hope. As a matter of fact, I think I may stop buying the hardcovers new at all. Up to now, I've always chosen to pick them up on the day of release at full price (well, new, sales price anyway) as a way to show support for the line. But I'm not paying $30 for a book of this low quality and page-count. I'll still read them, but I fear I'll be waiting a few months until I can find them super-cheap at Half Price Books.
Sorry I rambled. I think this review may actually be longer than the novel itself.(less)
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