The Energon Pub

Posted: **Wed Sep 24, 2008 9:18 pm**

I just finished reading the Star Wars novel "Invincible", the last book in the Legacy of the Force series.

This is my review, so there will be SPOILERS if you have not yet read it but intend to. Without futher ado:

I think the Legacy of the Force series came to an appropriate conclusion in the tale of Jacen's Solo's fall to the Dark Side. I really liked the style of this novel: Each chapter began with a joke from Jacen Solo when he was 14 years old, and there were some sections written entirely in italics, remembering a time when Jacen and Jaina were younger and inseperable. There are some very good You-Tube videos in tribute to this series:

Jaina Solo - Cold Night:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP2xXND-rCw

Mara Jade Skywalker - Shadow of the Day: AWESOME:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw5_N1BqGCQ

Jacen Solo - What I've Done:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmlhIEQLpvs

The finale of this 9-book series offered a ton of action and showdowns. The battle between Jaina Solo and Darth Caedus (her twin brother, Jacen Solo) were very intense, but I felt the book could've done more. I was hoping for more dialogue between them, similar to the showdown between Obiwan and Anakin. There were no "you were my brother! I loved you!" lines like I feel there should've been.

The death of Prince Isolder I felt was unnecessary. We knew after Jacen killed Mara and tortured Ben that Jacen was bad. We didn't need him to kill Allana's grandfather, too. I also felt that Shevu's death was unnecessary. I was really starting to like that guy.

I was very shocked by who was chosen as the head of the new Alliance: Daala? Is no one worried that an Empire Admiral is in charge of the Galaxy? Does no one in the galaxy fear the rise of the Empire again?

The book also gave some foreshadowing to the end of the Jedi Order and the rise of the Sith. Now THAT will be a novel series I'll be looking forward to reading!

Overall, the series was tragic, but very good. I especially grew to like the characters Jaina Solo and Ben Skywalker. I definitely think Jaina has earned a Master title now!

Posted: **Wed Sep 24, 2008 9:48 pm**

The series was on a downhill slope ever since Sacrifice pulled a Buffy Season Six and killed off Mara just to create OMGDrama! to the thing. Not coincidentally, my interest in Star Wars Literature began to wante around the same time, and I only got the remaining books in the sereis because of my status as an obsessive collector of all things Star Wars.

In closing, I'll just do a copy/paste on the review I did over @ the TF.N board:

The Good

Jacen is Dead: As someone who has been advocating this since I finished "Sacrifice", I'm glad to see that Denning didn't cop out and have him get redeemed or some other such nonsense. Of course, this being LOTF, Denning has to muddy that line by having it get out there that the whole point of Jacen going dark was to unite the galaxy against him (forgetting for the moment the so obvious fact that after NJO, the galaxy was already unified, and looked to be doing pretty well for itself by the end of DNT ...). Still, regardless of how it happened, he's still dead, and I couldn't have asked for anything better.

The Mandalorians Being Put In Their Proper Place: I love the Mandalorians. I love Karen Traviss' work on the Republic Commando series. So why didn't I like Revelation? Because it spent far too much of its 410 page space glorifying them and making Boba Fett out to be something that he really shouldn't have been. Thankfully, some semblance of the status quo is given here, since we have Boba Fett (who, I should point out, is making his first "not-in-a-book-written-by-Karen-Traviss" appearance since 2003...I think) making a token appearance (and thankfully getting the other side of the whole "Clone Trooper" thing) and getting some sort of resolution to his plot thread, with his and Mirta's exile from Mandalore.

The Bad

299 Pages Is Not Enough: In this regard, the book drew unfavorable comparison to Vision of the Future, the unofficial end to the Bantam era and clocking in at a hefty 694 pages (I've never actually finished reading the thing, despite several attempts to do so), and The Unifiying Force, clocking in at 529. I would imagine that the vast majority of books, whether they be Bantam or Del Rey, have clocked in at at least 350 or more, with only young reader books being less. My point is that 299 pages cannot hope to resolve all the plot stuff this book needs to do. Which leads me to my next point...

Too Much Plot Resolution Either Happens Offscreen or Not At All: The book essentially ends on page 281, the last eighteen pages devoted to wrapping up as much of the plots that have happened vicariously throughout the series, no doubt setting up the stuff we see in the Legacy comics (Jagged Fel somehow descending to Roan Fel, the Imperial Mission, etc.). At the same time, the Confederation-Alliance war, which has alternated beteween being the A and B plots for much of the series, pretty much ends because it's the end of the series, and everyone has to make nice. Um...yeah. I don't really understand this. Would you want to immediately want to make nice with someone you've hated for that long?

Daala as COS of the Alliance: Everything that can be said about this topic has already been said by other people (most notably Trip), so all I will do is add my voice to those saying how ludicrous a plot point this really is (especially since her appearance in both books is so brief and equally obvious in Revelaton to be a deux ex machina, not to mention the dumbest idea this series has ever produced, and considering this includes killing Mara, Pelleaon and Isolder for no discernable reason, that really says something.)

Speaking of that...

Yet Another Pointless Death: I do and forever will say that Chewbacca's death in "Vector Prime" was a necessary evil to the world of Star Wars literature. It needed to happen. That being said, nearly every other death since hasn't had the same impact to me, mostly because next on the sacrifical chopping block was Anakin, whose death immediately nullified the point of Chewie's. Mara didn't need to die to make Jacen evil. Pellaeon didn't need to die to make Tahiri evil. And Isolder didn't need to die to crush any hope that Jacen can be redeemed. (Of course, I'm tainted in that regard, seeing as how any such hope had died when I finished reading Sacrifice, and nothing was going to change that.)

Tahiri: I never read the Junior Jedi Knights series. But I have read the Force Heretic Trilogy, and her character development in that is probably the best I've seen in any SW literature I'd recently read. So to see that get flushed down the hole from Fury onwards wasn't exactly the greatest thing ever. (Then again, being aware of what's happened before has never been this series strong point.) Of course, some half-hearted attempt is made to paint her as not as bad as Jacen and to explain her prior characterization, but in the end it makes her 180 degree turn in Revelation even more ridiculous than it already was.

And that scene with her and Ben? Ick. Just...ick. Speaking of ick...

Thinly Veiled References to the Sex Life of Han and Leia: I mean, seriously. How old are Han and Leia now? Do we really need to know what they enjoy behind closed doors?

Total Extermination of the Next Generation: In the acknowledgements, Denning states how much he enjoys the Young Jedi Knights series. Well, you wouldn't have known it if you had read his work. Of the characters who have appeared in that series, only Jaina, Tenel Ka and Lowbacca have gotten out of the chronological work that followed (though Lowie makes so little appearance in this that he might as well have gotten killed off). And who wrote the books in which they died/went MIA/disappeared? Denning. Anakin, Lusa and Lyric gone in "Star By Star", Raynar in "The Swarm War" and Jacen and Zekk here. I just find it ironic tht he can profess his love of a certain series of books, and then go out of his way to mutilate the stars of that series in his own work, is all.

Jacen is Dead: Yeah, it's here, too. And here we get to what is probably the biggest problem of this book, if not the series as a whole. Jacen had to die. That was a given from at least "Sacrifice", if not earlier. However, the books between "Sacrifice" and "Invincible" were so slipshod at developing his character that any sort of plot resolution in this regard anticlimatic. It's the ultimate catch-22: he needs to die to provide this series with any sort of ending, but no matter what happened, it wasn't going to end well. This is, I think, expressed most clearly in the following passage:

"Jaina, we don't have time for this."

"So die already."

You see? At this point it was so clearly obvious that Jacen was going to buy the farm that I couldn't be convinced otherwise if I was sitting behind Denning watching him write the thing.

Posted: **Thu Sep 25, 2008 8:54 am**

Wait a minute...

Zekk didn't die... he's just missing. Jaina would've felt him if he had died.

Maybe he'll turn up in the next book, Millenium Falcon.

Posted: **Thu Sep 25, 2008 9:01 am**

And it looks like the next series of books will be the best yet:

Among the titles launching in 2009 are the first three in a new Star Wars multi-book, multi-author story arc following directly in the footsteps of the Legacy of the Force series. The nine-book, three-author series, Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi, will break new ground by being the first multi-book Star Wars series to be published all in hardcover. The series, which will be published over the space of three years, will launch in April 2009 with Outcast, by Aaron Allston; the other two authors planning and penning the nine novels will be Christie Golden and Troy Denning.

Source: http://www.starwars.com/vault/books/news20080912.html

Posted: **Thu Sep 25, 2008 9:24 am**

Bar none. Troy Denning ruined this series. His novels were extremely pale in comparison to the other authors. His references to sex were utterly sickening and so out of place in a Star Wars story that I would forget what I was reading. The pace of his books is completely off, either being too fast or too slow. Things either happen at such a quick pace that you can't contemplate all that has happened or at such a snails pace that you forget what happened in the prior chapter.

The man is not good at storytelling. Especially battles. He leaves out descriptions of things or informs you of them in the most vague non helpful way imaginable. Not to mention that he seems to honestly forget to tell you things in the novels he writes. The Dark Nest trilogy was terrible for this reason.

Allston and Traviss really worked to add depth to the characters in their books. Denning worked to add confusion to what was stated in the prior book so he could go off on random tangents that barely dealt with the story at hand. I was so let down with Invincible. It was rushed, clumsy, sloppy and read more like a 6th graders English mid term than a novel by a veteran author. The fact that he tries to tie up like 20 loose ends in the last ten pages is a huge error in judgment. But I'm not surprised as he did the same thing with the Dark Nest. Oh hey, you want to know what happened to Zekk? Or how about Rayner Thul? Sorry. Can't help you there. I'm too stupid a writer to come up with a good conclusion for those plot holes!

The fact that he will be writing for the next series honestly makes me think of passing on it.

However, above all else that I hated in this book, was the cover. It's horrible! Jaina looks like her face is melting, Jacen is just some nondescript hairy thing with a jacket and the lightsaber blades are like 5 feet long!

Ugh. So much build up only to lead to such a huge letdown.

Posted: **Thu Sep 25, 2008 2:17 pm**

Dark Starscream wrote:Zekk didn't die... he's just missing. Jaina would've felt him if he had died.

Maybe he'll turn up in the next book, Millenium Falcon.

No, he's turning up in the new book, Blood Oath, which, like Millenium Falcon, is doing the job that Invincible should have done: ending the Legacy of the Force series in a manner that doesn't suggest it was done the night before the manuscript needed to be turned in.

(And, of course, I didn't know he wasn't dead at the time I wrote that review, so mea culpa there.)

Dark Starscream wrote:And it looks like the next series of books will be the best yet:

Among the titles launching in 2009 are the first three in a new Star Wars multi-book, multi-author story arc following directly in the footsteps of the Legacy of the Force series. The nine-book, three-author series, Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi, will break new ground by being the first multi-book Star Wars series to be published all in hardcover. The series, which will be published over the space of three years, will launch in April 2009 with Outcast, by Aaron Allston; the other two authors planning and penning the nine novels will be Christie Golden and Troy Denning.

Source: http://www.starwars.com/vault/books/news20080912.html

Well, after the disaster of LOTF, there's nowhere to go but up, I guess.

Iron-Man wrote:Bar none. Troy Denning ruined this series.

Actually, I felt that "honor" belonged to Karen Traviss. Yes, Denning didn't do that great a job with Invincible, but that could be chalked up to the fact that the series as a whole never got beyond average. And at least he and Allston tried to be respetful to the rules of SW canon. Traviss, in contrast, pretty much wrote the Mirror Universe of Star Wars (especially with Revelation, the plot of which basically exists for her to play with her Mando and OC toys while making her "Jedi are the biggest iditos of the universe; go Mandos" stance as blatant as it ever was; never has a SW book felt so wrong that I felt dirty reading it, and this include stinkers like "Children of the Jedi" and "The Crystal Star", both of which I've managed to enjoy on some level), and was pretty much responsible for two of the most blatant acts of fabricated drama any form of media has ever seen (the aforementioned death of Mara in Sacrifice and the totally unnecessary death of Pelleaon in Revelation.)

Posted: **Thu Sep 25, 2008 2:53 pm**

Personally I didn't find Mara's death a problem. And honestly I love her for expanding on the Mandolorians. From their point of view, Jedi are useless, so it worked for me. I liked the point she brought up through Fett that Jedi and their war with the Sith truly is the reason for every war in their galaxy. And the fact that every book she writes is from a clone or mando point of view, it fits well enough. The Republic Commando books come off straight enough when it concerns Jedi as far as I'm concerned.

If anything, at least she can write coherently.

Posted: **Thu Sep 25, 2008 3:15 pm**

Iron-Man wrote:Personally I didn't find Mara's death a problem.

Well, that's your opinion, and I won't judge you on it, but there is a fundamental problem with it from a narrative point of view: it was done to establish Jacen as a unfeeling, unsympathetic (I'm not sure I can use the word I'm looking for here; let's just say it rhymes with "mastered"), glossing over the fact that, in the minds of most fans for the better part of a decade in publishing leading up to that event, he was already that and much much more.

Iron-Man wrote:And honestly I love her for expanding on the Mandolorians.

Well, would you love her for doing that if you knew that she did it at the expense of everything written on the subject beforehand? (There's a couple of wingers in Revelation that go against an article Abel G. Peña wrote for Insider #80, done for no particular reason other than because she wanted to, and no one who could tell her no did.)

Iron-Man wrote:And the fact that every book she writes is from a clone or mando point of view, it fits well enough. The Republic Commando books come off straight enough when it concerns Jedi as far as I'm concerned.

There's a reason that she writes from the Clone/Mando POV in her books: up until she got the call to do the Republic Commando books, she had zero knowledge of Star Wars, and unlike the vast majority of authors who do work for the EU, she doesn't consult the Holocron (the database that basically acts as the bible for Star Wars writers) to maintain continuity. And the reason that her books have characters that dislike the Jedi is because she does too (there's direct quotes on the subject, but I don't have time to dig them out now), and the whole issue would be easier to swallow if it weren't coming out of an author with an obvious agenda. I mean, I can buy it in the Republic Commando books, because it's more or less acceptable given the time period they take place in (not to mention the Clone Wars novel), but you would think that by the time of the LOTF novel, which take place nearly fifty years later, that they would have gotten over it.

Posted: **Fri Sep 26, 2008 10:23 pm**

Pelleon's death I was okay with. He was in his 90's. Is it better that he died in battle or of old age? I think, for an Imperial Admiral, going out in battle is the preferable choice. I think it will be the preferable choice for all SW characters, save Luke. I'd rather he fade away like Yoda.

Mara's death was entirely uncalled for. I mean, this was Luke's love, and a fan favorite. She did not need to die this way. I didn't even believe it for a while. Even when she was on the alter, and the author said her face was covered but the red hair was hanging out, I was sure it was Lumiya up there and not Mara. Until her force ghost appeared to Ben... then I knew it wasn't a trick.

And again, the dialogue in the finale was terrible. Even Vader felt remorseful, and he never even knew his son. Jacen and Jaina never got to have it out. That's what I was looking forward to! That's the good stuff!!! We needed to see Jacen realize that his dreams were gone, and maybe feel a bit sorrowful for what he had done.

Oh well. Who thinks Luke will die at the end of the next series?

Posted: **Sat Sep 27, 2008 9:22 am**

Dark Starscream wrote:Pelleon's death I was okay with. He was in his 90's. Is it better that he died in battle or of old age? I think, for an Imperial Admiral, going out in battle is the preferable choice.

Except he didn't die in battle. He was murdered by a wannabe Sith Lord for no reason at all other than because another wannabe Sith Lord told her to.

The Energon Pub

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