Dark Disciple

Dark Disciple by Christie Golden and Katie Lucas (4/5)

Without appearing in any of the feature films, Asajj Ventress has become one of the more fascinating and nuanced characters in the prequel era. Originally developed by the Lucas brain trust for Attack of the Clones, Ventress would go on to appear in the original 2D Clone Wars series and a number of comics during Star Wars’s days at Dark Horse. Throughout The Clone Wars she became a more rounded character, especially after a story arc finding her abandoning her apprenticeship with Count Dooku to strike out on her own. Star Wars is a world of light and dark, but it has always managed to find the complexity these two poles. And it’s that in-between space that Ventress best represents.

For fans of Ventress, it was a pleasant surprise to see the novel, Dark Disciple, take the focus off of Obi-Wan and Anakin to explore the character of Ventress. Taken from unfinished Clone Wars storylines, Dark Disciple showcases what that series did best: explore the moral Catch 22 of war. Believing the toll of the Clone War has become too great, the Jedi Council decides, with some desperation, that it would be better to assassinate Count Dooku rather than let the war linger. Mace Windu is the chief proponent of this plan, but he manages to get the rest of the counsel to go along. Obi-Wan recommends that Quinlan Vos, a rebellious and unorthodox Jedi, carry out the assassination plot.

Vos knows he won’t be able to take out a Sith Lord by himself, so he’s told to recruit Asajj Ventress as an aid. The fact that she had previously attempted to kill her former master makes her an ideal ally. Knowing that Ventress would never trust the Jedi, Vos goes undercover as a fellow bounty hunter. He arranges a “chance” encounter with Ventress by going after the same bounty as her, and in the tradition of Marvel comics, after they squabble with one another, they soon become partners, Vos’s exuberant personality complementing Ventress’s guarded, no nonsense approach to everything.

For a time, Dark Disciple follows the time-honored narrative of the undercover cop ingratiating himself with criminals, but [spoilers] that thankfully doesn’t last too long. There are plenty of twists and turns throughout the novel, and you can tell it had been expertly plotted before being transformed from a series of 22 minute episodes into a book. I also won’t spoil anything else for you. The person who developed the original story was none other than Katie Lucas, daughter of the Maker himself, George. Here she’s helped by author Christie Golden. In a postscript, Katie Lucas writes about how she was drawn to Ventress because she’s a strong female character. I also feel as if the inclusion of Ventress and Ahsoka in the series speaks to the necessity of including female creators and artists in the world of Star Wars. Would these character be as rounded and complex if someone like Katie Lucas wasn’t there to influence the creative process?

What drew me to The Clone Wars cartoon was how it handled some of the moral entanglements hinted at in the prequel films. For all their flaws, the prequels had some legitimately interesting ideas that were, unfortunately, poorly executed. The idea that you could win a war and still lose seems particularly relevant today considering America has been waging a seemingly endless war on terror for fifteen years, and yet somehow global acts of terrorism have actually increased. But there are other ways to lose a war. Dark Disciple, and much of The Clone Wars, suggests that we lose by blurring the line between the “good” and “bad” guys. By engaging in assassination, the Jedi Council have lost their purity. But this isn’t an easy decision. You could see how the Jedi might come to the conclusion that engaging in what’s considered an immoral act, even during wartime, would be their best option, even if it is ultimately an abandonment of their principles. And in the process they have sacrificed the welfare of Quinlan Vos, who must struggle with the Dark Side during his mission.

Not everything about Dark Disciple is completely successful. Maybe it’s because I’m a bit older and more cynical, but at times it seems as if the romance between Vos and Ventress seems driven more by the plot than by the characters. But because the novel focuses on secondary and tertiary characters, there can be real consequences. Dark Disciples feels like more than just another adventure in the life of these characters. And the novel reminds us that even in a world with a light side and a dark side, it’s not always easy to know which side you’re on. Like Star Wars itself, this is a lesson that is both of our time and timeless.

I, Jedi by Michael A Stackpole

I, Jedi by Michael A. Stackpole (2/5)

It’s not clear whether the title of Michael A. Stackpole’s Star Wars novel, I, Jedi, is an allusion to Isaac Asimov’s short story collection, I, Robot, or Robert Grave’s work of historical fiction, I, Claudius. What’s more, I’m not sure which allusion would be more pretentious on the part of Stackpole, since the novel doesn’t come close to the quality of either work.

As a preteen devouring Star Wars novels, I always liked Stackpole’s X-Wing books the best. I vaguely remember his novels as great page turners that made something new out of the Star Wars Universe. I liked that only George Lucas’s perpetual survivor, Wedge Antilles, made his way from screen to page as a major character in Stackpole’s novels. After reading I, Jedi, I’ve come to think that perhaps twelve year old me may not have had great tastes in books. Either that or I, Jedi is a massive step down from Stackpole’s X-Wing series.

I, Jedi follows Corran Horn, a Rogue Squadron pilot who also served as the de facto protagonist of the X-Wing series. Here Stackpole writes in the first person as Horn, which was the first time a character not from the films was given a first person point of view. In the earlier novels, we learned that Horn is Force sensitive, but at the start of I, Jedi he has undergone no formal training. After returning from a mission with Rogue Squadron, he learns that his wife Mirax has been captured by pirates while on an undercover mission. Instead of rushing out to save her, Horn decides that he must first join Luke Skywalker’s newly founded Jedi Academy to cultivate his nascent Force powers.

The novel is split into two halves. During the first half, Horn trains with Luke and other Force sensitives at the new Jedi Academy on Yavin 4, the planet where the Rebellion launched its attack on the Death Star in A New Hope. This inaugural class, however, is tormented by the risen spirit of Exar Kun, an evil Sith Lord whose ghost has apparently been waiting thousands of years for the right time to pounce. (This subplot made me wonder why we haven’t gotten a full on Star Wars ghost story yet. Get on it, people!)

As I read this portion of the novel, something seemed off. It was as if sections of the narrative had been carved out of the novel, like we were only getting part of the story. One of the Jedi trainees, Kyp Durron, is seduced to the darkside by Kun and steals a superweapon called the Sun Crusher or some such nonsense. But none if this is all that well developed. Even the final confrontation with the big bad, Kun, occurs off stage.

A little dip into the internet makes it clear that these events are covered in The Jedi Academy Trilogy by Kevin J. Anderson. This section of the novel appears to require some familiarity with The Jedi Academy Trilogy in order to have any real impact on the reader. If anything, I, Jedi, is exhibit A for why Disney was right in wiping out the Expanded Universe. When a reader must be intimately familiar with the larger expanded web of Star Wars novels in order for the story to be satisfying, the author just hasn’t done his or her job. Sure, the idea of covering the same territory as another novel from a unique perspective has potential, but the execution is way off.

The second half of I, Jedi is more engaging. Horn goes undercover with the space pirates who have taken his wife and must infiltrate their ranks. It’s a well worn narrative, but it’s fun to see it applied to the world of Star Wars. The first half of the novel does deflate some of the story’s urgency. Why doesn’t Horn run out to rescue his wife the moment he finds that she’s missing? And it doesn’t seem like his time at the academy was all that well spent. Horn ultimately finds his Jedi training unsatisfying and gives Luke a kind of douchey speech about how he’s had tougher training before and he doesn’t really need the weak sauce that Luke is serving. It’s largely self-aggrandizing and makes Luke, who should be the galaxy’s preeminent expert in the Force, look like a fool.

In general, I found Horn to be an unlikeable character. There’s one aspect of the character that conspicuously pops up again and again: his goatee. The man is always thinking about his goatee. He’s stroking his goatee or dying his goatee or finding some way to insert his goatee into the story. The man is obsessed with his own facial hair. This does lead to one of my favorite lines in the book: “I laced my fingers together and pressed the index fingers against my moustache” (306). I don’t think I have ever read of a more seductive dance between digits and facial hair.

The obsession Stackpole has with Horn’s goatee seemed a bit odd. Sure, it might just date the novel to the 90s when this sort of outlandish facial hair was marginally more acceptable. But I had a feeling that Horn’s goatee signified something deeper. I googled Michael Stackpole and found his picture, and sure enough, there it was: a stupid-looking goatee clutching the author’s mouth and chin.

There’s a distinct Mary Sue quality to Horn, which is only aggravated by the novel’s first person point of view. For those who don’t know, a Mary Sue is a term for a character who is amazing at just about everything and is often the surrogate for the author. The most obvious example is Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Despite feigning difficulties here and there, in this novel Horn is just the best. He defeats Luke Skywalker in a duel and then lectures the Jedi Master on what he’s not doing right at his academy. Later, he’s so irresistible that the female leader of the space pirates tries to seduce him. But, you know Horn. He’s a standup guy, and, besides, he’s married. Also, he has killer facial hair.  

After spending over five hundred pages with this guy, I couldn’t wait to get away. The novel also made me think that Disney made the right choice. When it comes to the Expanded Universe, maybe they were right after all to burn it to the ground and let something else grow in its place.

Splinter of the Mind's Eye

Splinter of the Mind’s Eye by Alan Dean Foster (⅗)

Imagine a world where Star Wars wasn’t a genre-busting, blockbuster-inventing megahit.  Imagine if Star Wars were merely one in a long line of 70s sci-fi films beloved by a cult audience but mostly forgotten by the general public, such as Logan’s Run, Omega Man, Soylent Green, Silent Running, Rollerball, or even George Lucas’s own, THX 1138.  In this world, the dark challenging sequel, Empire Strikes Back, is never made, and instead, Lucas and Fox opt for a quick follow up to A New Hope by making a small scale movie that takes place on a single planet and includes only about half of the original cast.

We came much closer to this world than many realize.  Alan Dean Foster, author of countless movie adaptation novels, was first enlisted into the Star Wars universe after being commissioned to ghostwrite the first film’s novel adaptation.  Lucas also provided Foster with details regarding a possible sequel and asked him to write the novelization.  When Star Wars blew up, Lucas was able to fund Empire himself and no longer needed the compromised continuation, so Splinter of the MInd’s Eye was published in 1978, essentially becoming patient zero in the Star Wars expanded universe.

As Splinter of the MInd’s Eye begins, Luke and Leia are racing to Circarpous IV to convince the local populace to join the Rebellion when a giant energy storm forces them to crash land on Mimban, a fog-enshrouded swamp planet and a clear influence on Dagobah.  While looking for a means off the planet, Luke and Leia encounter an old woman in a bar who senses Luke’s Force sensitivity and tells him about the Kaiburr Crystal, a New Agey mineral that enhances its user’s Force power.  The old woman, Halla, is herself Force sensitive, but is only able to slightly move objects after a great deal of physical and mental exertion.  

Mimban is being used as an imperial mining operation, so Luke and Leia have keep a low profile, which becomes difficult after they become embroiled in a fight with the locals.  Halla manages to avoid capture, but Luke and Leia are taken to an imperial prison.  They’re lucky enough to become cell mates with Hin and Kee, two ferocious and furry Yuzzem, creatures who share more than a few similarities to Chewbacca.  With a little help, Luke and Leia perform a prison break and head into the Mimban wilderness in search of the Kaiburr Crystal.

Because Splinter of the Mind’s Eye sprung from ideas intended for a cheapie sequel, the novel at times feels restrained.  Foster had originally planned to open with a large space battle that would have grounded Luke and Leia, but this was deemed too expensive for the proposed sequel and excised from the novel.  The decision to make Mimban a foggy swamp planet had less to do with creating atmosphere than limiting the need to build more sets.  And, more conspicuously, Han Solo and Chewbacca are absent from the plot altogether (although Han is alluded to a couple of times).  When writing began, Harrison Ford had not yet signed on for any sequels.

While it’s unfortunate that Foster wasn’t able to fully indulge his imagination like most novelists, in other ways the novel benefits from the more limited scope.  Foster had the right idea initially to begin with a space battle, because, quite honestly, the story takes some time to gain momentum (for whatever reason, it takes days to get anywhere on Mimban, which may have been realistic but saps some of the energy from the plot).  Still, once events start rolling, the focused plot speeds our characters along, and I would have much rather read about Luke and Leia uncovering an archaeological MacGuffin than have them contend with yet another super weapon.  After escaping from the imperial prison, Luke and Leia are constantly on the run, often chased by aggressive indigenous life forms, including a giant worm, a cave-dwelling water creature, and a deadly giant lizard.  During the last half of the book, the two descend further into the caves of Mimban in what appears to be an echo of Edgar Rice Burrough’s second John Carter novel, The God’s of Mars.

Foster spends much of the novel detailing the sexual tension between Luke and Leia, a decision that has a certain ick factor considering that they are later revealed to be brother and sister.  Of course, it’s likely Lucas hadn’t come up with this plot twist yet, or he may have thought it a possibility but didn’t want to implement it in a world where the first Star Wars sequel is Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and not The Empire Strikes Back.  And even if Luke and Leia doesn’t go to the same length as King Arthur and Morgan le Fay and even if incest is a common theme in mythology, it’s still pretty damn creepy.  It doesn’t help that every now and then Foster offers up lines like this: “Even when bothered, to him that voice was as naturally sweet and pleasing as sugar-laden fruit.”  Most people can look past the chaste kiss between brother and sister in Empire, but I think produce metaphors are just a bridge too far.

The relationship between Luke and Leia is characterized by the difference in their social standings as, respectively, farmboy and princess.  This speaks to Foster’s understanding of the archetypal cutouts that form Lucas’s characters.  He even refers to the late Ob-Wan Kenobi as a “wizard.”  Unfortunately, Foster too often presents Leia not so much as royalty as stuck up.  There’s a sense throughout the first half of the book that she needs to be taken down a notch, which happens when Luke unilaterally comes up with a cover story for the two, which involves Leia being his slave.  In order to make the cover story work, Luke even slaps Leia around a bit.  (Yes, Luke actually slaps Leia in this book, or as Luke says to a local, “[S]he’s kind of amusing to have around, though she tends to get out of line at times and I have to slap her down”).  There’s an undercurrent of misogyny here, like a latter day retelling of The Taming of the Shrew or, if you prefer, an earlier version of Overboard.  Luke is the typical geek in the sense that he both elevates and resents the object of his affections.

Of course, the films themselves have always had difficulty using Leia.  The film that treats her with the most respect is probably A New Hope where she gets to bark orders to the men and handle a blaster.  Splinter of the Mind’s Eye does slightly make up for its earlier mishandling of the character by giving her a lightsaber fight with Darth Vader at the climax of the story.  The novel also deals with the PTSD Leia suffers from being tortured on the Death Star, something that Vader later brings up to taunt her and adds menacingly, “one can do some interesting things with a saber, you know.  I’ll do my best to show you all of them if you’ll cooperate by not passing out.”

The novel does pick up after some of these early missteps, and there are some interesting additions to the Star Wars mythos.  The Kaiburr Crystal was apparently detritus from an early draft of A New Hope.  Lucas decided that he wanted to make the Force more ethereal and mysterious, which I think most believe was the right call.  But I still like the implication that the crystal was used in healing rituals by the natives generations ago.  The novel also introduces the idea that even long, long ago there was a time even farther in the past.  The Knights of the Old Republic’s Korriban section also relies on the idea that Force related relics are buried throughout the galaxy, which makes George Lucas’s universe even more expansive.  

Hin and Kee, the Chewbacca stand ins, are also a great addition to Star Wars.  At one point they take a stormtrooper’s helmet to shield their hands while trying to break through a security door and also swing a droids body around to club stormtroopers.  The native Coway, who eventually battle with the Empire with the help of Luke and Leia, are also an interesting precursor to Return of the Jedi’s Ewoks.  The Coway are pulled directly from an H. Rider Haggard novel, and are presented alternatingly as savage and noble savage.  Naturally, Luke must fight one of their champions in order to earn their respect and avoid execution.

In an odd choice, Vader receives scant time in the story.  Perhaps Lucas didn’t want to overuse the character and instead treat him like Boba Fett, a mysterious figure of evil who is only more intriguing because we know so little about his backstory.  If this was the intention, then the prequels ruined it on both counts.  

It is interesting to see how Vader is represented prior to the shocking reveal in Empire.  Foster refers to Vader as a henchmen at one point, which is an accurate representation of his character in A New Hope before he started running through admirals at an alarming rate in Empire.  Tarkin is the main villain in the first film, and Leia describes as “holding Vader’s leash.”  Vader is still represented as an imposing figure, and is referred to as a “dark lord of the Sith,” a concept that I didn’t realize entered into the Star Wars mythos this early.  (Apparently, the term Sith is also used in Foster’s A New Hope novelization). In a weird continuity error, Vader accuses Luke of shooting him out of the sky during the Death Star battle, but we all know it was Han Solo.  Come on, Vader!  Luke was in front of you.  That doesn’t make any sense.

Reading Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, I couldn’t help but imagine how this might look as a low budget Star Wars sequel, and while I think we can all agree it’s good this never happened, there are

moments that might have translated nicely to the screen, especially when Luke and Leia float across an underground lake on a giant leaf.  It makes sense why Dark Horse would later create a comic book adaptation of the story.  At its best, the novel reminds me of another beloved fantasy story that takes place in a swamp and involves an old crone and a crystal: The Dark Crystal.  Splinter of the MInd’s Eye is not a lost masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a fun read (even the terrible moments are enjoyable), and for anyone who wants a different perspective on the Star Wars phenomenon, it offers a fascinating glimpse into a world that could have been.  Besides, without the novel we wouldn’t have had Ralph McQuarrie’s genuinely kickass paperback cover.

The Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton

The Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton (2.5/5)

With the exception of the books from the X-Wing series, as a kid my favorite Star Wars novel happened to be The Courtship of Princess Leia.  I don’t think this particular book gets a lot of respect from Star Wars fans these days, so in my bid to further explore the Star Wars Expanded Universe, I decided to revisit the continuing story of Han and Leia’s romance to see if my twelve-year-old self was onto something or if the general consensus was correct.  It turns out that there are some potentially interesting ideas in The Courtship of Princess Leia, but they’re mostly marred by poor execution.

Like most early Star Wars novels, The Courtship of Princess Leia begins by dealing with the detritus of warlords that have risen out of the destruction of the Galactic Empire.  While the New Republic has started to reestablish itself, it’s still looking at a series of lengthy and costly battles against these remnants of the Empire.  A possible solution presents itself by the arrival of a delegation from the Hapes cluster, a wealthy and powerful collection of systems that offers to aid the New Republic in its fight, but on the condition that Princess Leia marries the Hapan Prince Isolder.  Naturally, this doesn’t sit well with Han Solo.

Many readers might rightfully scoff at the idea that Leia would drop her affections for Han Solo to marry a dreamy prince.  The author, Dave Wolverton, does suggest early on that Leia might marry the Prince out of a sense of duty to the New Republic and the lives that might be saved by a potential alliance with the Hapan cluster.  But this tact is quickly dropped, and it appears that Leia is genuinely falling in love with the Prince because he’s totally hot.  In one of the novel’s sillier conceits, because of planned breeding everyone from the Hapan cluster are super attractive. (There’s a weird undercurrent of evolutionary psychology in the novel.  Later, Prince Isolder suggests that monarchy is a suitable form of government because it pairs the best and the brightest and their brood as rulers, something that struck me as really silly even when I was twelve).  The Hapans are also a matriarchal society, so if Leia were to marry Prince Isolder, she would eventually become queen of the Hapans. 

Out of jealousy and desperation, Han enters a high stakes card game in the bowels of Coruscant and ends up winning an entire planet, Dathomir.  I do kind of love that Han could win an entire planet from a card game, just like he apparently won the Millennium Falcon.  But when even this doesn’t win over Leia, he eventually abducts her and takes Leia to his newly acquired planet.  The kidnapping plot might, rightfully, leave a poor taste in many readers’ mouths.  While there is common trope of women falling in love with their captors (which may very well go all the way back to Tristan and Iseult), I think this cliché has become more difficult to justify in the new millennium. 

It’s when Han and Leia get to Dathomir that things get really bizarre, mostly for the better.  Dathomir is under the control of the Warlord Zsinj, making it impossible for Han and Leia to flee the planet after making their way through an Imperial blockade.  They’re followed by Luke Skywalker and Prince Isolder who have teamed up to retrieve the Princess.  On the surface of Dathomir, Han, Leia, Luke and Isolder have to contend with matriarchal clans of Force sensitive women.  In fact, there is a particular clan of witches that have been threatening other inhabitants of Dathomir and are seeking an alliance with Zsinj in order to leave the planet and wreak havoc across the galaxy.  Oh, and these clans of women not only ride Rancors, but they also appear to keep men like property.  This is the kind of pseudo-feminism that could have only occurred in the nineties.  When one of the women decides to keep Prince Isolder as a mate, the book threatens to turn into the Futurama episode “Amazon Women in the Mood.”  In other words, Wolverton’s idea of feminism not so coincidentally doubles as a male fantasy.  Still, the concept of Rancor riding Force witches is pretty damn cool.  And while it might diminish Luke’s unique status in the universe, the invention of the Witches of Dathomir manages to expand the fantasy/mythology aspect of Star Wars when so many authors at the time approached the world strictly through a sci-fi lens. 

I probably genuinely enjoyed The Courtship of Princess Leia as much as I rolled my eyes.  But Wolverton’s novel has contributed to the larger mythology of Star Wars.  The Witches of Dathomir have become a permanent, canonical part of the Star Wars Universe thanks to their inclusion in The Clone Wars TV-show.  And the one thing I remember enjoying about the novel was the fact that C-3PO does whatever is in his power to help out Han Solo win over Princess Leia, including uncovering Han’s supposed aristocratic ancestry and writing and performing a song about the greatness of Han Solo.  So if you ever wanted to read about C-3PO playing wingman to Han Solo, then this is the book for you.  

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers (4/5)

It sometimes seems as if Dave Eggers has made a career our of running away from his first book, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  Where Heartbreaking was a meta-memoir centered on a self-aware and self-conscious Gen-Xer, his subsequent books have mostly looked outward.  Eggers has made a concerted effort for his work to engage with the world around him and to avoid any of the navel gazing that pervaded his memoir.  While I thoroughly enjoyed Heartbreaking, I’m glad that Eggers’s concerns have turned towards the world at large.  One element that seems to appear again and again in Eggers’s writing is the impact and role of globalization on people’s lives.  This was certainly true in Zeitoun and What is the What whose protagonists found their to America from far off countries, Syria and Sudan respectively.  But in A Hologram for the King Eggers follows a middle aged American business man as he ventures to Saudi Arabia.  What results is an intriguing commentary on the economic and psychological effects of globalization on the American middle class.

The main character of Hologram, Alan Clay, is abusiness consultant who formerly worked for Schwinn bicycles before he was let go and they moved business overseas.  Through happenstance he now finds himself working for an I.T. company that plans on presenting a new hologram system to the King of Saudi Arabia.  We spend the entire novel with Clay who can be something of a sad sack.  Ever since leaving Schwinn, he has been a man adrift, attempting to start the manufacturing of a bicycle he has designed but unable to acquire the requisite funds.  He’s low on cash and struggles to pay for his daughter’s tuition, meaning she may be forced to take a semester or two off from college.  Clay wouldn’t necessarily be a fun guy to hang around, a detriment that Eggers attempts to sidestep by approaching the character with both empathy and a dark sense of humor. 

Clay is both a victim and perpetrator of his own miserable situation.  His company began looking for ways to cut costs, which at first meant moving manufacturing to less union friendly states within the U.S., but later it meant outsourcing jobs to China.  This didn’t affect Clay at first, since he’s a part of management, not labor.  But, as has been the case with globalization over the last couple of decades, outsourcing crept upwards, eating away not only those who toil in factories but also those who toil while wearing business suits.  While Schwinn was looking towards China for cheap labor, it turned out that the Chinese also had just as capable salesmen and managers, thank you very much.  In a somewhat roundabout way, Clay had become responsible for outsourcing his own job. 

All of this results in Clay making the trek to Saudi Arabia in order to present a new telecommunications hologram system to King Abdullah and hoping to wrangle his meeting with the King into something more long term.  Except Clay himself is mostly useless.  He doesn’t have expertise in computers, and it is suggested that his value lies only in his connection to a relative of the King’s he knew in college.  Clay and his team of young computer techs spend much of their time sitting in an un-air-conditioned tent without the requisite wi-fi needed to set up their presentation, problems that Clay is too ineffectual to resolve.  Even here he seems to have carried with him his own obsolescence.

The obvious literary influence here is “Waiting for Godot,” and like the characters from Beckett’s play, Clay is continually looking towoards a future event that may never come.  The presentation with the King is continually postponed, and the presentation does not guarantee that the King will grant them the contract or lead to any further business in the country.  And yet Clay continues to chase this meeting all the way to the end of the novel.  Eggers seems to be trying to answer the question, if the world of globalized capitalism has so decimated the middle class in America, then why do the victims continue to prop up this system?  The answer seems to be that a businessman’s present is always mortgaged on a possible future where he has made that one great pitch and secured that one sacred deal. 

In addition to other such literary influences—Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and Franz Kafka’s The Castle—Eggers also borrows from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Much like the titular Gatsby, Clay finds himself searching for the American dream.  Where Gatsby had to find the American dream through illegal means, Clay searches for the American dream outside of America.  One particular scene in Hologram owes a heavy debt to the description of Gatsby’s opulent parties.  Clay is invited to a gathering of foreign expats working in Saudi Arabia and when he arrives discovers a horde of middle age men and women imbibing more than they can handle and generally acting like teenagers.  At one point during the bootleg bacchanalia, a man decides to done an astronaut costume as a joke.  As he floats around the gather, he comes to represent an emptied out past, a mockery of what America was once capable of accomplishing.  One worker admits that he hasn’t built any major projects in the United States in some time.  As their own nations collapse under the pressure of global forces, this gathering of Westerners seems only capable of regressing towards childhood. 

Of course, even these displaced workers have it easy compared to the labor necessary to build the massive complexes that they are designing and pitching.  At one point Clay stumbles across a roomful of indigent laborers in a half-built condominium.  The men are living in squalor and are less than pleased about Clay’s intrusion.  (I couldn’t help but think of the moment in The Trial where K. discovers the two agents who served him being whipped by a superior in one of the rooms where he works.)  And Clay’s father was once a union-protected manufacturer.  Naturally, Clay would be responsible for outsourcing these kinds of jobs before losing his own. 

Hologram at times trades in a kind of pessimism that’s absent from most of Eggers’s output, but Eggers doesn’t view globalization as a monolithic wrong.  As you might guess from someone who has written about the possibility of helping others, he sees real possibilities in our ever shrinking world.  Clay strikes up an unusual friendship with his driver, a Saudi Arabian that spent some time in the States while attending university.  He also has a growth removed by an international collection of doctors, one of which is a female Saudi doctor.  There’s definite nuance in Eggers’s depiction of the lived experience of those experiencing global economic upheavals, for those willing to look, anyway. 

While not everything works in the novel—Clay seems too pathetic to strike up a relationship with two separate women—it still manages to evoke a sense of immediacy as it engages with our ever-changing world.  Hologram isn’t Eggers’s best book, but it points to how literature—a term that conjures up dust-gathering tomes on a shelf—can get in the ring and duke it out with other genres desperately trying to explain our world.  The novel is capable of representing economics with far greater detail than a sloppily written New York Times op-ed or better expresses the lived experience of those affected by godlike forces of the market than an academic paper.  If nothing else, Eggers’s work, as a whole, tells us that the written page and lived reality are constantly entwined.  

Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn

Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn (3.5/5)

By 1991 the Star Wars series had been in a carbonite type deep freeze.  Return of the Jedi had come out eight years earlier, and in the interim Star Wars fans were tossed mere scraps, including two laughable made for television Ewok films.  If you wanted a decent Star Wars story between 1983 and 1991, then you pretty much had to start writing fan fiction.  Aside from the actual quality of Heir to the Empire, I think its reception, then and now, is clearly colored by the fact that when published in 1991 the novel served as a veritable oasis at a time when fans of Star Wars had been trudging through the desert.  That might seem like hyperbole, but not only has Heir to the Empire made it on just about everyone’s list of best stories from the Star Wars Extended Universe, but the entire trilogy was also voted onto the list of NPR’s 100 greatest sci-fi and fantasy novels.  (It beat out Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man!)  While I’m not sure Heir to the Empire qualifies as one of the greatest sci-fi/fantasy stories of all time, I can understand why people hold the book in such high regard.  Zahn has a real talent for creating new characters who fit within the Star Wars galaxy while also writing old favorites in ways that make them believable simulacrums of our celluloid heroes.

But the story begins not with Luke, Han, and Leia; it begins with Grand Admiral Thrawn, a red eyed, blue skinned Chiss who, after the demise of Emperor Palpatine five years earlier at Endor, has taken over the remaining imperial forces in the outer rim.  In a retcon to the films, the Empire is represented as racist (speciesist?), preferring to promote only humans into the ranks of the upper echelon.  On the one hand, considering that the work of Leni Riefenstahl and the Third Reich form the visual template for the Empire, this makes a certain amount of sense.  But considering the vast diversity of species within the Star Wars Universe, and considering the films never hinted at this policy, it seems somewhat counterproductive.  Still, the fact that Thrawn achieved the Empire’s highest command despite this policy of discrimination tells us a little about his skill as a leader and tactician.

Questionable retconing aside, Thrawn is a wonderful villain for our heroes.  Where Vader was quick to anger and would execute underlings at a steady clip, Thrawn is reserved, mindful.  When not occupying the bridge of his Star Destroyer, he’s often in his quarters studying hologram images of art created by different species from a myriad of different worlds.  Of course, he’s doing this in order to better understand the culture of these people so that he can get inside their heads and understand how to defeat them.  In the tradition of the erudite villain, like Hannibal Lecter, Thrawn can appreciate both tactics and aesthetics.  Part of Thrawn’s scheme to reassert the Empire as the central power in the galaxy involves recruiting Joruus C’baoth, an insane cloned Jedi master.  In order to convince C’baoth to aid him, Thrawn collects a bunch of small lizard-like creatures, the ysalamirir, which have the power to dampen a Jedi’s use of the force.  He also promises C’baoth that he will deliver Luke, Leia, and the twins Leia is currently pregnant with.

Of course, all these machinations are unknown to Luke Skywalker and the now married Leia and Han Solo.  They’re busy attempting to rebuild the New Republic, which also appears to be teetering on the brink thanks to political infighting and a lack of resources.  Han Solo is tasked with recruiting smugglers into legitimate shipping operations for the new government, but because it’s not clear how long the New Republic will last, many of these illegal operators are wary of taking any sides so long as the Empire is still a power player.  Zahn does a wonderful job of capturing the voice of not only the three main characters but also of secondary characters like Lando Calrissian and C3PO.  Even Admiral Akbar and Wedge Antilles make appearances.  But he’s especially great at capturing Han’s sardonic charms, something that’s not easy to mimic. 

The book is well plotted and has the easy momentum of a snowspeeder on Hoth.  As the protagonists attempt to unravel the mystery of who is attempting to kidnap Luke and Leia, Thrawn is drawing them and the fledgling Republic into further traps.  I don’t want to give away too much plot, but Thrawn’s plans come to a head on Mykyr, the planet where he collected the ysalimiri and home to the criminal operations of smuggler Talon Karrde.  Karrde is another great creation by Zahn.  As a smuggler with a code—he appears to have a sense of duty towards anyone he views as his guests—he fits nicely within the Star Wars galaxy.  Likewise, Karrde’s mysterious underling, Mara Jade, appears to hold a burning grudge against Luke Skywalker for reasons that even Karrde is unaware of. 

Perhaps the only drawback during this section of the novel is that because of the ysalimiri, Luke is without the powers of the Force.  I can only imagine the disappointment of fans who waited eight years since Return of the Jedi in order to read about Luke swashbuckling across worlds as a full fledged Jedi Knight, only to have the author take away those powers.  The ysalimiri are a somewhat dubious plot device to begin with (they’re strangely reminiscent of the controversial midichlorians from the prequel films), but using them as Luke’s kryptonite somewhat deflates the novel’s action and adventure. 

There are a few other aspects of the book that are creakily constructed.  Despite C’baoth being positioned early in the novel as integral to Thrawn’s schemes, he does very little throughout the course of the story.  Leia does not get much attention, and she’s essentially shuffled off to the Wookie planet of Kashyyyk where she’s forgotten for a long stretch (a chapter following Leia even ends on a cliffhanger that isn’t resolved until much later in the story).  There’s a little more retconning here and there that, as someone who’s protective of the original trilogy, I could have done without.  For instance, the novel suggests that Emperor Palpatine used the Force in order to increase the performance of his men during the battle of Endor.  (Was he also doing this while simultaneously attempting to turn Luke to the darkside?)  The prose is mostly serviceable, and while this makes for easy, fast-paced reading, it would have been interesting to see how an author might try to remake George Lucas’s visual palette into language.

Still, for those hungering for Star Wars adventures beyond the films, Heir to the Empire may very well be the perfect place to start.  Zahn does more than give us adventures with our favorite characters in a galaxy far, far away; he adds invaluable characters, places and concepts to this world.  Without a doubt, Heir to the Empire shows what creative minds can further conjure beyond the original trilogy. 

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I would like to touch upon one issue that I remember having with some of the Expanded Universe novels when I was a kid and that reading Heir to the Empire really reminded me of.  In the sticky concoction of influences that make up Star Wars, the novels always include far too much science fiction.  In an article about Heir to the Empire, Ryan Britt argues that the novel brought science fiction into Star Wars.  He argues that the ysalimiri demystify the Force and that even though the Clone Wars were mentioned in the original trilogy, making C’baoth a clone feels more like hard sci-fi.  I don’t agree with all of Britt’s examples, but he has a point, especially about the ysalimiri. 

Zahn’s non-Star Wars work is in the genre of science fiction, and it shows in the novel.  There’s a lot of technobabble that belongs more in a hard sci-fi world like Star Trek than in Star Wars.  Kevin J. Anderson, the other major author of the Star Wars EU novels, also writes primarily in the genre of science fiction.  The problem is that Star Wars is only partly a world of science fiction.  I remember as kid starting to realize that Star Wars and Star Trek had very little in common with one another beyond similar titles.  This made me happy since I never had to choose between these two distinct series. 

While Star Wars has some elements of science fiction, mostly culled from the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs and the old Flash Gordon serials, the space setting is used simultaneously as a means of escapism and a mythical projection outward.  In other words, this unreal setting serves as a means for us to forget our surroundings and delve into another world for a few hours and a new version of mythology’s tendency to project us backwards and outwards.  Myths never take place at the time they are being told.  They always take place in the past in order to provide gravitas and to create a sense of continuity between the mundane now and the transcendent world of myths.  Using space as a setting for mythic storytelling has always been one of the genius aspect of George Lucas’s creation.

Star Wars is a collage of so many diverse influences, from David Lean’s epics to Akira Kurosawa’s samurai films, that it would be shame to overemphasize its sci-fi roots.  In fact, I would argue that Star Wars has more in common with fantasy than science fiction.  That’s not to say that science fiction authors shouldn’t work on Star Wars properties.  But I do hope that after this latest reboot of the Star Wars EU, Lucasfilm will decide to bring in a broader set of creative minds to work on the Star Wars novels and comic books.  It’s a big galaxy; let’s not make it smaller.