Tyrant's Test

I really like this time of year...for the time off of work :)  I really get to play, and try to dodge the hunny-do list if at all possible.  Actually I don't even mind that too much because I have plenty of leisure time to get in my serious play time.

Tyrant's Test is the third book of a Star Wars trilogy written by Michael P. Kube-McDowell.  According to the "About the Author" page, this is actually the pen name of Michael Paul McDowell.  I understand why authors use different pen names to keep from being typecast with a certain genre but I'm not sure how they came up with the mouthfull for this one.  Oh well.  This trilogy take place about twelve years after the "Return of the Jedi" and was written in the still early days of the first group of Star Wars fiction.  Consequently, it suffers, I believe with having to rely on plot development, filling in the "what happened next" syndrome and just doesn't have to time to really expand on the characters.  Most of us know a lot about Luke, Leia, Han, Chewbacca, Lando, etc. but do we really?  The plot of this one is fairly straight forward.  Each of the main characters I just mentioned plus some bad guys have their own sub plots and that's really too many to fully develop in a 350 page paperback book, especially when all of the sub plots need to be wrapped up.  I thought Luke's plot was especially contrived because it turned out he was just being lied to the whole time and nothing came of it.  But somehow at the end, that experience had substantially changed him and his outlook.  Hmmm...  Han didn't play a big role throughout the trilogy, just uncharacteristically being captured and having to be rescued.  Didn't ring true.

All in all, this trilogy has some of the worst reviews I've seen for SW books.  It wasn't that bad in my opinion but still, I am glad to see it come to an end.

Louis L'Amour, on the other hand, once again provided a wonderful traditional western reading experience in his short story, "The Marshal of Sentinel".  This time we have a very serious protagonist, the marshal himself, who has to defend his town against an outlaw gang of bank robbers whose method is to use an inside man to assassinate the marshall up front and thereby leave the bank as easy pickins.  I'm sure liking this collection but unfortunately, only one more story to go in The Strong Shall Live.

Next up: finishing off yet another trilogy with Inkdeath, by Cornelia Funke.

Shield of Lies

Last night I finished the second book in the Star Wars "Black Fleet Crisis" trilogy, Shield of Lies, by Michael P. Kube-McDowell. I had read the first one back in mid-July and it just wasn't good enough to make me want to rush out and read the next one. But since I am a completest and I want to finish the trilogy by the end of the year I decided it was time to get moving on the second one.

Despite all of the negative reviews on Amazon, I actually like this one a lot more than the first. It suffers from the age old problem of being the middle book of a trilogy and Mr Kube-McDowell apparently chose to tackle that in a slightly different way. Part of the problem I had with the first book was its tendancy to quickly jump around from one group of people to another, with a different point-of-view character all the time. It tried to be about too many things. This time, the author chose to boil it all down to three main threads each of which gets its own section. Thus there is a section, about 100 pages long, about what Lando is doing and then we move to another 100 page section on what Luke is doing and finally we end up with the rest of the book about what Leia is doing (and how Han is trying to support her). So in a way it reads like three novellas; each section has very little to do with the others except that they are occurring at the same time.

For me that was easier to read. I could keep track of what was happening much better and I had a chance to get to know the lesser characters before jumping off to another part of the galaxy. The book still has some areas that were difficult for me to follow because they dealt with minor characters I had never heard of before, usually aliens of some kind and I wasn't sure how they related to the greater plot. Perhaps the very knowledgeable Star Wars fan would be better off than I, but it can be tough to read about a character named Fr'zu'lk who happens to be of the Mazzanik race and have the scene start off as if you already know who they are and what they look like. I'm making up that name and race because I don't have the book in front of me now but they might as well be the real names used in the book because I never did learn anything about Fr'zu'lk during his two paragraphs and we never return to him. I wonder if the author was just trying to add "realism" to the Star Wars universe or perhaps please the super fans but he failed on that score with readers like me.

Having said that, there are some intriguing plot points developing in this trilogy and the author does succeed at building a good setup for the final book. Luke, Leia, Han, and Lando are all deeply involved with their individual story arcs and I really expect they will all come together in the final novel. I won't wait as long to read that one either because I do want to know what happens next.

I also read the next essay entry in The Essential Ellison, a huge collection of Harlan Ellison's works. Following the essay on his father and how little he really knew him, Ellison presents "My Mother," originally a newspaper column entry. He reveals more about his childhood and how he was sort of the black sheep of the family. He includes the eulogy he gave at her funeral and the reaction he got from family members. There is no doubt about his writing ability; his essays are intresting indeed but I look forward to a return to his short stories.

Next up is a Vine program entry: House of Reckoning by John Saul

Before the Storm

I am a Star Wars fan. When the first movie came out I was just out of the 9th grade and was absolutely captivated. It is one of the few movies I have seen more than once in the theater and I actually saw it 5 times there, even taking my 85 year-old grandfather to see it. I've seen every one of the movies as soon as it came out and while I agree with most people that the second trilogy (prequel) was not as good as the first trilogy I still enjoyed them. I read the first few novels that came out as well (remember I am a completest) but thought them merely OK. I didn't read them for the great writing/characterization, etc. but rather to gain factual knowledge of that universe I loved.

But then more and more novel tie-ins started to come out and the quality was just not high enough for me to continue with them. I knew there would be an inexhaustable supply, too many to read unless I read little else and so I made the decision to stop reading any of them. I broke that decision once when RA Salvatore came to town and I bought a copy of Vector Prime so he could sign it and I could give it to my dad who also had been reading quite a few Star Wars books. Now cut to this year. For Father's Day my son gave me a computer game "Gold pack" of 5 older PC Star Wars games. I've been enjoying it quite a bit and it got me "in the mood" all over again. And I had one more Star Wars trilogy still on my shelf that my dad had given me and that I still had not read. So now was the time.

Before the Storm is the first book in the "Black Fleet Crisis" trilogy, written by Michael P. Kube-McDowell. I found this book to be a lot like all of those other SW novels I had read...that is it was OK but certainly did not set new standards for quality science fiction. This takes place about 12 years after the events of "Return of the Jedi". The New Republic has entered a time of relative peace and so, of course, a new threat needs to be invented. I found the writing to be pretty good throughout this novel; I could easily follow the plot and the author captured the voices of the major characters pretty well: Luke, Leia, Han, Lando, 3-PO, Admiral Ackbar, etc. The plot however was slow. There seems to be several main plot lines developing independantly of each other and I'll just have to wait to see if the other two books bring them together. The best plot line was Leia's where she acts as the head of state and allows her trusting nature to lead the New Republic into catastrophe with the bad guy race. Han's role was disappointing as he has settled down into his role as father to the kids although it looks like he might get some action in the next book. Luke's role was the most disappointing as he abandons everybody and goes off on his own (doesn't that always happen?). This trilogy was written before the second set of movies was filmed and so there are some major conflicts, most especially, Luke's mother.

So I guess I'm still where I was before...I'll finish out this series but am doubtful of reading more SW books, at least about this era. I have heard good things about some of the "origins" stories, about the beginnings of the Sith, etc. which I may look into one day.

Of course I also finished the next short story in Stephen King's collection, Skeleton Crew, "The Reaper's Image" about a mirror which shows the reaper standing next to the viewer. It's mostly the history of the mirror as told to an antiquities collector by a museum curator. The collector is skeptical until he sees it himself. This story is one of the shorter works in the collection and is more of a classic horror tale than the others, continuing to demonstrate King's versatility as an author.

Next up: a new author for me as I try David Gibbon's Atlantis which I just got free from Border's by doing on-line surveys. Hey, the first step is to acknowledge you have a problem and I fully acknowledge my addiction to acquiring books to read :)