A brave new world, and a somewhat flawed older one

Well, here we are two weeks later, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the response I’ve gotten. I don’t know if it’s a case of encouraging the new guy, but I’ve been gratified that people have actually commented. I’m starting to see how this whole blogging thing works — people leave comments on your sight, and you leave comments on theirs. Kind of like e-mail, only slower, less personal and open to lots of people.

By the way, I want to publicly thank Thora, who’s partially responsible for getting me into blogging in the first place, for listing my blog on her blog. I promise to return the favor as soon as I figure out how.

A while back, I got a free audio book copy of Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Betrayal. Now anything that has three titles should be treated with some suspicion, and any book named Betrayal is pretty much guaranteed to be a downer. Also, I’ve done some research — Legacy of the Force is a nine-volume series, of which Betrayal is the first of the series. My guess is that Legacy was made available for free as a way to pull you into buying the other eight. Clearly, George is now employing a former crack dealer as his marketing director.

Nevertheless, a free audiobook is a free audiobook, and I do spend a lot of time in the car. I spent the weekend doing technical things with my iBook (I’m a rabid Mac junkie, by the way), trying to convert and combine the various MP3 files into a single file for my iPod (yep — total iPod geek, too. Had one before I had my Mac). I succeeded, and by this posting, have listened to about an hour and a half out of six.

To my chagrin, I haven’t had the time or desire to read much of anything lately. So I suppose there’s some little bit of embarrassment that the first thing I pick up in months is a Star Wars novel. After all, when you have a limited time to read, you should make your time count. There are limitless volumes from the wellsprings of human wisdom that should be occupying my attention. Instead, I pick up a space opera pastiche.

But at the same time, I am a firm believer that while expanding your tastes is a noble goal, you should also not turn your back on that which is merely fun. And, at the moment, Star Wars is very fun for me. I only wish Star Wars fiction were of a better quality.

The book I’m “reading” now is deep in the established canon of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Now, I don’t care for the EU canon, and never have. I know that Timothy Zahn’s novels, which are the cornerstone of the EU, have Clone Army-sized legions of fans, and reports I’ve read have said he is a terribly nice man; a very good thing in my book. But that does not alter the fact that I dislike his creation intensely, and rue the fact that it has come to dominate the EU.

There are, to my knowledge, few if any EU novels that don’t have Zahn’s fingerprints on them, and Betrayal is no exception. I intensely dislike the character of Mara Jade, yet she is Luke’s wife. I am indifferent to the Solo children, and to Luke and Mara’s own progeny, yet the Legacy series seems to largely be about them. As a side note, Leia is still protected by the Noghri bodyguards, another of Zahn’s creations, although they play little part in the story so far.

In fact, I have recently learned that Zahn had originally conceived the Noghri as the Sith race, and Vader’s breath mask was to be a stylized representation of the Noghri’s general facial features. Thankfully, Lucas had more in mind for the Sith than this, and shut the idea down cold.

This lamentable tendency among some of the early EU authors to try and carve off huge slices of the film’s canon to serve their own creations is one symptom of what I dislike the most about the Star Wars EU novels — many have an overly exaggerated opinion of their own importance. For instance, I realize that, dramatically, a great hero requires a great villain, and that a new ancillary character needs to at least be on a par with our heros for them. But I was never able to make myself that Prince Xizor, painted as one of the most powerful men in the galaxy, was anywhere near in the same class as his supposed rival, Vader; or that Zahn’s Grand Admiral Thrawn was remotely as nigh-omniscient as his creator made him out to be. And I resented the way that Steve Perry kept inventing ways to make Dash Rendar vitally important to the established Star Wars characters in Shadows of the Empire.

I could go on about my objections to the EUs, but it would quickly become as tiresome as I find some criticisms of the prequel trilogies. The fact is that millions of fans love the EU books. While I am not one of them, you shouldn’t lightly slam someone else’s tastes.

There seems to be a growing tendency among Star Wars fans to complain about any new story in our chosen universe, even when it comes from Lucas himself. I unabashedly plead guilty to that. Sturgeon’s law, created (or at least popularized) by science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, holds that “ninety percent of everything is crap.” While I think that’s an overly harsh exaggeration, it makes the point that not everything can or should be expected to be at the same level as the best of its breed.

That sounds like a rationalization, and probably, it is. The bottom line is that I’d rather enjoy Star Wars than not enjoy it. By the same token, I'd rather enjoy life than not enjoy it. My natural tendency is to pick something apart until I reach the point where I wondered what I ever saw in it in the first place. There comes a time when you have to overlook the flaws, glaring as some may be, and try to find the good things. This holds true for movies, music, books, painting, sculpture, dance, television shows, and most especially, people.