Books: Star Wars: Smuggler's Run By Greg Rucka (2015)

It probably does not matter if I read Star Wars: Smuggler’s Run second, rather than first, and read Star Wars: Weapon of a Jedi first than second, as neither impact each other. But like the Luke Skywalker tale, this Han Solo and Chewbacca story opens with a prologue set just before The Force Awakens. We have a much older Han Solo sitting in a cantina listening to a bunch of smugglers talk about fast ships. Soon, of course, Han must talk to them about the fastest ship in the galaxy, the Millennium Falcon, which then leads into a tale set just after the events of A New Hope. 

The destruction of the Death Star has put a dent in the Imperial war machine, but the Rebellion has no time to savor its victory. The evil Galactic Empire has recognized the threat the rebels pose, and is now searching the galaxy for any and all information that will lead to the final destruction of the freedom fighters. And Han wants to pay off his debt to Jabba. But before he and Chewie can leave Yavin IV, Leia comes to Han to ask him for another favor: a special-ops crew of Rebels, responsible for safeguarding the secret of the current and next Rebel base, has been discovered and five of six of them killed. She needs him to pick up that agent, Ematt before the Empire gets a hold him. Of course, the planet the rebel is on is in the Outer Rim, a lawless world by the name of Cyrkon. While Han still refuses, it’s Chewie who eventually convinces him that they need to save the young man (a good, well written part, by the way). Meanwhile, Ematt is trying to evade the clutches of Alecia Beck, a Commander in the Imperial Security Bureau. She is ruthless and very competent warrior with a scar and a cybernetic eye to show just how coldblooded she really is. She is also the personification of the brutality of what the Empire truly is: she sees everyone, including those under her, as mere fodder for the advancement of the Imperial fist. After their arrival on Cyrkon, Han and Chewie need to find Ematt, elude Imperial forces and four bounty hunters who’ve come to the planet in search of what will eventually be Jabba’s prize statue.

While the plot is a pretty standard find-the-hunted-man-before-the-villains-do narrative, what makes the book (despite being a Young Adult tale) good is author Greg Rucka’s wonderful, often hilarious relationship between Han and Chewie, as you sort of end up laughing out loud with the back-and-forth dialogue between them. You also kind of end up sort of respecting the villain somewhat as well. She’s very three dimensional here, which is something I like in this new unified canon –everyone seems to be drawn very carefully.

While these books are slim, they are well paced. The elimination of many sub-plots that would’ve filled out a much longer book, helped the keep the story focused, fun and exciting.

Like Weapon of a Jedi, another book in Disney’s Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, there is a slim connection to the film, which are the bounty hunters themselves. Han mentions several of them, including the ones who board his freighter in the film. After years of annoying them, is it any reason those dudes took such drastic action against the famous smuggler?

Books: Star Wars: The Weapon of a Jedi By Jason Fry (2015)

My exploration of the new Expanded Star Wars Universe continues...

Timeline ways, we’re not given the exact date as to when this prologue opens, though Threepio has his red arm we all saw I the movie. So speculation on my part, this begins just before the events of The Force Awakens.

Anyways, Star Wars: The Weapon of a Jedi by Jason Fry opens with a Resistance X-Wing pilot named Jessika Pava who meets C-3PO in a hangar and realizes who he is and what kinds of stories he can tell. 3PO’s mention of Luke prompts her to inquire about a Luke story not as well known as his other heroic exploits. So, in his own unique way, the protocol droid begins telling her a story set shortly after events of A New Hope, when Luke, 3PO and R2D2 go on a data retrieval mission. But the simple journey goes a bit awry, when they encounter some Imperial entanglements. This leads Luke to land on Devaron for repairs, which also coincides with recent visions he’s been having. It seems the Force is directing him there. In the town of Tikaroo, Luke requests a guide to take him to what is called the Eedit ruins; the place the Force wants him to go. But the remains, he is told, are off limits, mostly by Imperial edict (whom also has perimeter alarms around the temples), but also because the place is thought to be haunted. Eventually, Luke he ends up hiring a scavenger named Sarco Plank to take him into the forest. Plank is an eyeless insectoid member of the Melitto species, who is also a amoral scavenger, bounty hunter and arms dealer. After Luke’s visions help him locate a hidden cave entrance that gets him past the Imperial perimeter, he uncovers 3 training remotes and trains for a few days at the temple before the Imperials catch up with him and the time comes to put his training to use. 

There are some distant ties to The Force Awakens here, especially the notion of the Jedi Order temples we hear Han Solo talk about briefly in the film. While this is new to the movies, if memory serves me right, the Jedi temples were first mentioned in The Clone Wars animated series (unified canon, baby). And Sarco Plank appears on Jakku, but is given no real mention there. 

Also, it’s an easy read (well, it is for the 9-14 range), but for fans, this gives a wider look into the new timeline created, especially since these books are now considered canon. 

Not sure if it matters, but this YA title, Star Wars: Weapon of a Jedi is the second book in this Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens series. I was unsure if there was a certain order to them, so I started with the Luke Skywalker one first.

Books: The Buried Giant By Kazuo Ishiguro (2015)

I have never read a Kazuo Ishiguro novel before. I know his books are deep, thoughtful tomes on the human condition. I also know that to get what he’s trying to say, sometimes it requires a reader to restart from the beginning because he chooses to hide meaning and action under a cloud of beautiful prose. My decision to read this book, however, came about mostly because of its theme, the elements of fantasy I've been reading for three decades.

But while The Buried Giant is extraordinarily well written, it can be boring as well. Even as well read as I think I am, I can't help wonder if I missed some hushed imagery within the book. The story unfolds in a rather straightforward way, at times the characters seem emotionally detached from each other, despite the fact that the two main characters, Axl and Beatrice do love each other unconditionally. Is the author aiming this book –along with his other six- at group of smarter people who can comprehend some deeper meaning from the story?

“The Buried Giant is set after the end of a war between Saxons and Britons; they now live alongside each other, but warily. A widespread historical amnesia grips the populace, erasing both recent and distant memory. Axl and Beatrice, two elderly married Britons, call this forgetting “the mist.” Even memories only a month or two old fade away. Axl and Beatrice once had a son, who disappeared, but neither can quite remember him, or why he left them. They embark on a journey to visit him, a quest that occupies the rest of the novel. In the course of the journey, they encounter two knights: Wistan, a young Saxon warrior, and Sir Gawain, an elderly and slightly buffoonish nephew of King Arthur. There are adventures and battles with ogres, pixies, dragons, and menacing soldiers. There are some sinister monks. Along the way, Beatrice and Axl discover that “the mist” is actually the breath of a tyrannical she-dragon named Querig, and that the only way to restore the country’s stolen memory will be to kill Querig.”

The exploration of this memory loss over the land and especially with Axl and Beatrice becomes repetitive and annoying after a while, along with Axl calling Beatrice “princess” again and again. It was as if the author’s story was already too short of an idea, so he filled out the book with repeated notions that both were off to see this son (whom ultimately becomes the MacGuffin) that went away for some reason, that they both could not remember their arguments (or why they could not have a candle), and that Beatrice had some sort of limp, but it was no bother.

The book starts out well, and along the way the reader think this is a sly Arthurian themed tome, but the book quickly becomes sluggish and too repetitive to really enjoy and recommend. It’s not fantasy, though it contains fantasy elements, and readers of his previous six novels might be turned off by the idea that it could be a fantasy.

I appreciate authors whom can do something different in their writing, though. And while the author likes fantasy novels, when writer Ursula Le Guin wondered if his long-time readers appreciate this adventure, he said “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

That answer lies with them.

Books: The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards By Kristopher Jansma (2013)

One of things that I lost with Borders Books closing was discovering new authors. Sure, B&N has an area just for that, though it’s always set away from New Releases, which seems to me to bit short-sighted. Yes, it is hard (very hard) to get readers to try new authors. Most are very set in their ways, only wanting to read what’s on the best-seller list and their regular cadre of predictable tales that are never that complex, and are all solved by the final page. There are also some authors, say like Gillian Flynn, whom broke out of the basement of hidden talent with Gone Girl. While I’ve yet to read that book, I read her two previous ones and found them to be disturbing, nihilistic, and (frequently) unbelievable. But I will admit that those two books are worthy reads mostly because they’re dark, filled with unrepentant and unlikable characters. It takes a great talent to write books that feature these people, because the reader wants and needs a creature to identify with.

Still, Twitter has been my salvation though. After Borders closed, I began to subscribing to a lot of publishers and writers. So while many of my friends and families are following celebrities (well mine are writers), along with family and friends, I went with Twitter page of almost every publisher I can follow.

That, in a way, is how I found this book, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards. Someone had done a review of the writer’s newest book, Why We Came to the City, and posted a link to his page. That story got re-Twitted by the publisher and then the author. I read that review and so I decided to find the authors first book.

There is a saying in writing: write what you know. So it’s not a huge surprise when authors create characters that are also writers. In his debut novel, Kristopher Jansma tells a sort of Russian nesting doll tale of two long-time writer friends, whom are also each other’s chief rivals. There is also Evelyn, whom our unnamed narrator harbors an unrequited love for.  The tale, which spans more than decade, has our hopelessly unreliable speaker travel “from the jazz clubs of Manhattan to the villages of Sri Lanka”, always, it seems never far away from the gravitational pull of his said rival, one Julian McGann. The narrator lives in a world built on house of cards, unraveling a web of fact and fiction wherever he goes, quickly assuming new identities and telling stories and then shedding them as fast as waiters in a restaurant come and go. It has an unusual structure, reading like set of short stories along with a novella, more than a true novel, which then kind of morphs into a short story that exists within the novella within a novel (it sounds more complicated than it is). 

All of this, I guess, can considered a contrivance, as the narrator does have a tendency to run into people all over the world whom are somehow connected to McGann. But the prose is so great, with beautifully constructed sentences, and thoughts, and the dry, disarming humor so much fun, you can forgive the writer for using such a device.

It’s a strong first novel that now wants me to read his newest book. And thanks to Twitter, I hope to find a whole horde of new writers penning glorious and thoughtful literature.

Books: Star Wars: The Force of Awakens by Alan Dean Foster (2015)

As noted, Alan Dean Foster wrote the original Star Wars novelization back in 1977, even though the book was credited to franchise creator George Lucas. But with no knowledge of what the success of this film was to become, Foster fleshed out Lucas’ script so much, expanding the backstory of planets, races, the history, and technology with such detail, that they became canonical to the movies and books that would follow. In 1978, the author released Splinter in the Mind’s Eye, one of the first (though not known at the time) stories that became known as the Expanded Universe.  Foster's novel relied heavily on abandoned concepts (that were originally intended as a cheap-to-make-sequel had Star Wars bombed at the box-office) that appeared in Lucas's early treatments for the first film, although a lot of what happened in that book –like the bits dealing with some romantic energy between Luke and Leia- would be later contradicted by later movies. 

And while the prolific author has written well over seventy novels of his own, edited a bunch of anthologies, he’s also made a career out of the novelizations of movies, including the Star Trek Universe, the Alien Universe, Alien Nation Universe, Transformers, and Terminator franchise among others; he’s written well over fourteen other stand-alone film adaptations, including Pale Rider, Starman, The Black Hole, and Clash of the Titians.

But since Splinter, the author has written only one other book set in the Star Wars universe, 2002’s The Approaching Storm, a story set between Episode I and II of the film franchise. Now he’s been given a chance to expand the Star Wars universe again with this adaptation of The Force Awakens.

But I suspect, unlike back when writing the original novel, Alan Dean Foster was limited to what he could expand on in the script. But the book does give many answers that fans asked about after seeing the film, including (I hope) more scenes with the critically underused Leia. I’m hoping these scenes that appear here are ones written in the script and just deleted for time and flow. Abrams admits that a lot was filmed, and a good percentage will end up in the deleted scene section on the DVD/Blu ray. But there are no revelations here, but I do think that Rey is probably the granddaughter of Obi Wan (though my wild theory is she really is the reincarnation of Anakin Skywalker). Foster makes no direct correlation to Rey’s heritage (and does very little to expand on her past, though that was written about in Before the Awakening book), but there is an vague, sort of implied but not by dialogue, that Kylo Ren may know whom Rey truly is (because my belief is that when he probed her mind earlier in the film, he would’ve discovered if she had some familial aspects).