#STAR WARS BEFORE THE STORM FULL#

#STAR WARS BEFORE THE STORM FULL#

Only a week before I read Before the Storm, I read Cast No Shadow, which I recognized as a Star Trek take on Tom Clancy The Black Fleet Crisis is very much a Star Wars take on Tom Clancy, full of military logistics and political details. This move didn't bother me in The Force Awakens, but that's because there Luke is no longer the protagonist, he's the Obi-Wan figure to Rey's protagonist: this Luke is supposedly a protagonist, and no Star Wars novel should have a wannabe-hermit as a protagonist! To be fair, I think most Expanded Universe writers who aren't Matt Stover neglected this. I get that Kube-McDowell is trying to grow the character, but I think this neglects what makes him appealing. Contrary to the stance Kube-McDowell takes here, Luke should be passionate, idealistic, and above all, active. The Luke of this book is a distant, cold, withdrawn figure, prone to using ostentatious illusions on the people who are supposedly his close friends, and that's not something I want to read about. Here, in Before the Storm, Luke begins to withdraw from the world, starting to wonder if inaction is preferable to action, if Yoda and Obi-Wan didn't withdraw from the galaxy not to hide their powers, but because the longer a Jedi is in the world, the more it asks of him what he cannot give. The most notable point of congruence is Luke's hermitage: in Episode VII, we learn that Luke has been living as a hermit for years. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan in Episode VII. I kept comparing the choices Kube-McDowell and other Expanded Universe writers made in building up their post- Return of the Jedi universe to that of J. Nothing in this book actually happened, even more than things normally don't actually happen in Star Wars. So here I am at 30 finally reading them, and let me tell you, it's a little weird: this is the first 'Legends' Star Wars fiction I've read since seeing The Force Awakens. But there's a contingent of posters on TheForce.Net's forums who consider these books the height of the Bantam era, and their comments began to wear on my mind and, starting to wonder if maybe I would like them more at 25 than I did at 11, I kept an eye out for used copies of Books One and Two with intentions of rereading the whole set. Thus I know I must not have liked The Black Fleet Crisis, as I only owned Book Two, and I am pretty sure I only checked Books One and Three out of the library once. I owned most of them (my favorites were the X-Wing novels by Stackpole and Allston), and what ones I didn't own, I would check out from the library multiple times (like Crispin's Han Solo Trilogy). When I was a kid, I used to devour the Bantam Star Wars novels again and again. Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis, Book One: Before the Storm

Star wars before the storm