While this sounds like a better title for a story about the Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to my door this weekend trying to save me from ditches, beer, fornicating, and other things generally agreed upon to be fun, it is actually a title for the first book review in a series of reviews of everything I read. Yes, lucky you, you get to hear about a cool book this time, and yes you should read more.
And it is a cool book I’m beginning the series with; OMEN, a Fate of the Jedi book in the Star Wars series, written by the talented Christie Golden, while you might already want to debate this. Sure I could write a review about As You Like It, or Finnegan’s Wake, or some of the nerdy stuff I have been reading the past few weeks, but I don’t expect to say anything that hasn’t already been said about those books while there’s a lot to say about Star Wars.
For instance: there are Star Wars books. Lots of them. Hard to believe, I know, but they’ve been fleshing out the stories told in the movies with additional science fiction novels for a long time now. I don’t know when exactly the first in the series came out, I could look it up and seem wiser, but it had to be back in the 80s because for as long as I can remember these titles have been piling up and piling up and piling up. They are using the books to explore from 3500 years before the first movie, to about 35 years after the last movie - of course these movies were released out of order, so you are already confused - but if you’re with me, I don’t have to tell you, the Star Wars universe is big: bigger than future movies could possibly cover. There have to be over 100 books in the series now, heck, the list takes three pages of fine print to list, and everyone from Timothy Zahn to Terry Brooks has written one, it’s a very big clubhouse.
The thing is, the books can be very good. Sure, some of them are stinkers, aimed at young adults, or just fleshed out side notes on the Clone Wars that seem like strange footnotes in a long fictional history, but others are grown up, entertaining, page turners, that keep some of your favorite characters alive while illuminating aspects of the Force and the Dark Side for those infected by the story line and unable to get enough.
This review is specifically aimed at the uninitiated: so I will throw out a SPOILER ALERT right here, if you don’t want to find out that Luke Skywalker got married, had a kid, and then his wife died, and now father and son have been banished and are looking for lost force techniques previously studied by Jacen Solo, son of, yes, Leia and Han, who was the emperor of the galaxy for a short while before turning Sith and going bad, then you missed this sentence.
The books can seem busy, or they can flow, it depends on how many of the old ones you have read to some degree.
I loved OMEN, the second book in the Fate of the Jedi series, because they are playing off a schizophrenic symptom to create psychological drama. Specifically: certain Jedi are getting confused to the point where they think everyone around them has been replaced with fakes, replicas, or clones, while implying the Jedi are either infected, or insane. This book doesn’t solve the mystery, but it does throw a few Jedi into total insanity and I love it. Jedi need to go insane. They are pretty tightly wound bunch of psuedo-buddhists trying to save the Universe from the dangers of darkness, (look it’s a moral relativistic term, they still love Lando Calrissian and talk about him all the time. Darkness is dangerous not in a skin tone sense, but in a big black Darth Vader sense. Yeah, it is a little confusing). Before I get sued, let me say this: I love the books. You should read them. This is an advertisement for the Fate of the Jedi Series, (and I have no money if you are thinking of suing).
So: crazy Jedi, Sith, and it was short - I don’t think the book broke 300 pages - all made it an awesome page turner tour de force, ahem, and I think if you have not read anything in this series, and you think you love Star Wars, you are really missing out. If you need assistance, go to the bookstore and find the Star Wars books, (this is not hard, it’s near science fiction), and open any of the books and look a few pages inside the front cover. There you will find the massive chart of all eras, and get to decide where you want to start your exploration of a galaxy that is, without a doubt, one of the coolest.
For those who say, “hey, you’re just a crazy schizophrenic to like Star Wars, and what is going on in Joyce, and why didn’t you write about Shakespeare?” Let me allay you literary fears, these Star Wars books won’t bite you. Except perhaps in an infectious, vampiric, lust for the blood of these pulpy paperbacks, way. It is an addiction, to get involved with these different fantasy universes, (see comic book posts for more), as I know they will be churning out more books in the series even long after I am dead and gone. But that’s kind of the point: the Star Wars Universe is strong like the Force, it has been expanded, and there are a lot of us out here addicted so back off literary person! Read what you like, I say. And I do....
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