Recently read Timothy Zahn’s new SW Thrawn novel, which I enjoyed, and have always felt Zahn did SW the best out of all the EU authors. It’s great to see that his character of Thrawn got to survive the Disney purge and get expanded upon.
Following up with another SW novel that I picked up cheap at Goodwill, Cloak of Deception, a story which precedes Episode I and so far mostly follows Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan, but also touches upon Palpatine, Chancellor Valorum, and the Neimodians who appear to be taking over the leadership of the Trade Federation. Entertaining so far.
I need to signal approval of this while simultaneously adding the caveat that L. Neil Smith’s Lando Calrissian Adventures are a sheer delight from the before times.
Way back ages ago, I used to go to sci-fi and comic book conventions dressed up as Grand Admiral Thrawn, blue face paint and everything. Just for an indication of how much I liked those books.
I’ve been reading a series by Mackey Chandler sold for Kindle, called the April series after the first novel and the protagonist. I started with volume 12, just released, because it looked like a possible nominee for the Prometheus Award for this year. After finishing it, I went back and took a look at volume 1, published some years ago, and I’m currently midway into volume 11.
This series is something of an exception for me, in that the prose is frankly terrible; the author doesn’t know how to use an apostrophe and is inconsistent in spelling. However, I find the treatment of legal and economic issues interesting, and I enjoy the characterization.
The theme of this series as a whole seems to be emancipation: Both the emancipation of entire societies (new communities in outer space) from Earth, and the emancipation of children from adult authority. In some ways it reads like a series of juveniles, with people who by age are children or young adults doing amazing things; in particular, April and her two closest friends have access to fantastically advanced technologies that make them as powerful as entire nations, and that enable them to fight for the emancipation of their societies. In a sense they are almost superheroes, though without the usual appurtenances such as secret identities and costumes. But there are also at least five other emancipated minors in the series, both in orbit and on Earth, so this seems to be a running theme. And that gives the series a coherence that makes it interesting to me.
There’s also a subtheme of the contrast between Earth, where the United States of North America doesn’t treat people as fully adult till they’re 24, and outer space, where the independent orbital colony of Home can grant anyone adult status by a vote of the community, and where there are a lot of other contrasts in attitude.
I’ll want to reread volume 12 next, to see how it looks in the context of the earlier books.
The Kevin J Anderson Dark Apprentice series was good, as are the Rogue Squadron books (Michael Stackpole?). It’s great that my 13 year old is devouring all these books now.
He tells me that Disney are finally going to make the original Thrawn Trilogy into films. I desperately want that to happen.
There is some absolute garbage kicking around though. My friend and I still joke about The Truce at Bakura.
Truce at Bakura was fine in comparison to Children of the Jedi and Darksaber, IMO.
Dark Apprentice trilogy was okay, but Luke was kinda standoffish feeling to me. Of course, that was incorporating the aftermath of the Dark Empire comic series, I believe, where he turned to the Dark Side for a bit (which made no sense).
The X-Wing series was great! Stackpole started and Aaron Allston continued it, if I remember correctly, with Wraith Squadron.
I re-read Roger Zelazny’s The Last Defender of Camelot because I had forgotten some of the stories. The title story in the collection remains a gem that could make an excellent hour on HBO or Netflix. And the novella version of “He Who Shapes” remains superior to the version expanded into a novel.
Then I “re”-read The Doors of his Face, the Lamps of his Mouth only to discover that I can’t ever have read it before. I recognise a few of the stories including the title piece and A Rose for Ecclesiastes, but I’m sure I hadn’t read “Devil Car”, “This Mortal Mountain”, “This Moment of the Storm” and several others before.
My favourite Zelaznies remain “The Last Defender of Camelot” and the novels This Immortal, Isle of the Dead, Creatures of Light and Darkness, and Lord of Light.
The 2nd and 3rd book do focus on other characters. Worth a read, if not so good as his main series. The Trouble with Peace will not go out here in NZ till the 29th, and I am really looking forward to getting it, I really enjoyed A Little Hatred
I really need to read Lord of Light again. I loved This Immortal, was amazed that the same author wrote something as high-octane pulp as Damnation Alley, but although LoLight won the Hugo it wasn’t number one for me. I think I need to go back to that one, because I see only huge praise for it.
I’ve been reading a lot more SF this year, it’s a genre I’d only ever dipped into now and then over the years. So have read a few “classics” for the first time only recently, and this was one I’d seen mentioned quite a lot. Delighted I picked it up.
Yeah I’m only half way through at the moment, but unless he drives the whole thing off a cliff I think I’ll be adding a few more of his to my TBR list for sure.
Gradually working my way through these. Taking a break from the hard stuff (while some of the stories are actually remarkably good, many are just space shooty men fight other space shooty men)
Way to undersell an absolutely amazing book that’s a great read while also being incredibly good and important scholarship! It’s been a few years since I read it in full, but I draw on material from it all the time and it’s just solid all around.
Note: I have a PhD in American History. My own research has been a little more in colonial stuff but thematically I focus on political cultures of protest and dissent and on racial and ethnic identity formation and I teach at a majority Black university so I’ve done quite a bit of reading in areas related to Blight’s research and he really is top notch.
It’s been a few years since I read it in full, but I draw on material from it all the time and it’s just solid all around.