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Lit The 181st Imperial Discussion Group: Death Troopers!

Discussion in 'Literature' started by Grey1, Nov 1, 2013.

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  1. Grey1

    Grey1 Host: 181st Imperial Discussion Group star 4 VIP

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    Nov 21, 2000
    The horror... the horror... Welcome back, last remaining survivors of the Lit forum! Since our discussion in November offers a vague Halloween connection, I'll start by saying I hope all of you had a happy Halloween.

    Now, the 181st Imperial Discussion Group basically tries to take another look at old, little discussed, maybe even little known books. This month will be a tiny bit different, since Death Troopers by Joe Schreiber is pretty new (I even had to go out and buy it, since it came out after I got burnt by SW books once too often); and since I wasn't around, I can't say how much discussion there was back then. But discussion has died down a bit; after its sequel, Red Harvest, there was not much more to say on the topics of Schreiber, horror in Star Wars, and that particular Zombie plot element introduced here. So, maybe we have a few strong opinions that still need to be revisited; and maybe we have a few strong opinions based on the fact that people who never wanted to read a Zombie gore novel soldiered through it for the good of our discussion group (thanks if you did exactly that).

    So, with this book being entirely new to me, there's lots and lots of stuff I'd love to talk about. We'll come to stuff like characters and plot just a tiny bit later. For now, we'll start with the concept of Death Troopers:

    - Genre. we can talk a bit about SW trying out new shoes by stepping into new genres. Is a horror story, with horror being very close to Fantasy and Sci-Fi anyway, such a huge leap for the genre that has devil-like characters with metaphysical powers, plus a huge assortment of Halloween mask aliens? Isn't a decidedly military take on a SW story basically the same - taking one aspect of the huge melting pot that SW offers and running with it, losing all other elements along the way?

    - Horror. Now, there has been horror in SW, most famously the Galaxy of Fear series for kids. Death Troopers was marketed as a different animal; title and cover image (compare the author's thank you note) were obviously chosen first, to create a book riding on the Zombie fun revival that gave us books like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and "Well-known Literature Classic #327 and Zombies" before spawning out into the vampire hype (by the way, where's the obvious SW Vampire book? Was that going to be Sword of the Jedi?). Does it work?

    - More importantly, should it work? The "elite audience" of SW novels wants a unified continuity, and they are completionists that want to read everything there is. Death Troopers, on the other side, strays very far into a territory that not everyone may want to venture to. Not everyone who loves the SW EU will want to read about mountains of rotting corpses and attempts of pulling moving gray goo out from under a living person's skin. Death Troopers was obviously created for new readers who want zombie/horror/gore stuff and happen to like SW; to expand the general audience by drawing new readers to the bookshelf. While it's nice to see that the publishers are finding ways of making enough money to keep the venture going - are we, the elite, happy with having gore stuffed down our brains where there was not that much gore before? Are we happy when SW publishing shows how it reaches for exploitation tactics?

    - All of that being said, and this is basically the most important thing, did you enjoy it? We obviously don't want a simple review thread, but I think it will help our discussion if we all know right from the beginning where we stand.

    Have fun, and don't get bitten!

    Furthermore, please take a look at the HQ thread so we can finalize our decision on what we'll discuss next month. And the year after that.
     
  2. RC-1991

    RC-1991 Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    Dec 2, 2009
    Right, so I'm about a quarter of the way through rereading this.

    First of all, genre stories can work great with Star Wars, as Havac elaborates in one of his ElevenThirtyEight columns. It's a big galaxy, with plenty of room for virtually any kind of story the author might wish to tell. I'd agree that horror isn't remotely a stretch for Star Wars, and Deathtroopers isn't even the first time that the EU has experimented with such- see the aforementioned Galaxy of Fear novels, not to mention the Peragus level of KOTOR II. And the vampire novel was clearly going to be the Kemp duology.

    As for how well this one actually works... eh. Schreiber has a good feel for atmosphere, but I wasn't overly impressed. Perhaps I've just never found zombies to be remotely frightening, but the whole horror bit never worked on me- I was just occasionally grossed out by all the gorn. In contrast, while it wasn't necessarily a horror novel, I found the "Mother" sections of Crosscurrent to be genuinely unnerving, not to mention completely out of the blue. That being said, for those who have read other zombie novels/other Schreiber novels, was the horror supposed to work, i.e. is a zombie novel actually meant to give the reader a creepy tingle in their spine?

    Oh, and the inclusion of Han and Chewie utterly tanked the suspense, but that's a conversation for later in the thread, methinks.
     
  3. Grey1

    Grey1 Host: 181st Imperial Discussion Group star 4 VIP

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    Blast, I had planned to introduce Joe Schreiber as "the author of 'Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick'", whatever that novel is.

    Okay. First, this isn't a Trek forum, and second, lizard bashing will only lead to Saba bashing will only lead to Denning bashing.

    Yeah, I knew that one would pop up immediately. I'm actually working towards it...
     
  4. RC-1991

    RC-1991 Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    Dec 2, 2009
    Oh, and there's a very brief Triclops cameo early on. It's kinda neato.
     
  5. Grey1

    Grey1 Host: 181st Imperial Discussion Group star 4 VIP

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    Yeah, it's one of those nice little things that officially don't mean anything but could go either way, whether you want to put Triclops in there or whether you want to not overstuff your books with continuity nods. This is actually the kind of continuity nod I'd liked to have more of in Kenobi, and less plot-standing-on-other-old-plot. Schreiber definitely got a bonus point with that one.
     
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  6. Revanfan1

    Revanfan1 Force Ghost star 6

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    Jun 3, 2013
    I didn't really feel creeped out at all when reading it. I felt more chills reading the Mother scenes in Crosscurrent as RC-1991 said. That was actually creepy, and well-done. This book just felt gratuitous. There was really nothing necessary about any of it, let alone including Han and Chewie. Especially since it never actually goes anywhere; what happened to all the zombies? Are they still out there roaming the galaxy on a Star Destroyer? Did they fall into a sun or a black hole? Did the Star Destroyer eventually blow up? No resolution, at all. It's like a suspenseful movie that ends with the good guy and his friend/girlfriend safe, and they kind of look back over their shoulders, and then there's silence...and the movie ends. What the kriff happened?
     
  7. Grey1

    Grey1 Host: 181st Imperial Discussion Group star 4 VIP

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    Nov 21, 2000
    That's actually the EU spirit I'm mentioning above at work - needing to know everything. As above, it doesn't allow to cherrypick stories; and with the stories itself, there's this need of closure. I must say I'm perfectly fine with a character-centric book not having a huge resolution for its plot. They could have added a self-destruct-this-can't-get-out-subplot. But even then, they would have needed an epilogue of Vader pondering whether he'll continue research or not. Actually, I like the idea of having the Star Destroyer just there, with some backstory we'll never see played out and with some resolution we don't see played out, because it's not really an object we need to know about; just as this plague is just one of a million things happening in the SW universe.

    Maybe it's a postmodern thing that such a story is immediately checking so many boxes in our brains that it can easily leave stuff out - we know how these things work anyway. I definitely thought of 28 Days Later a lot, mostly because I haven't watched a lot of zombie films.

    I'll agree that this is a different kind of horror, relying very much on the visuals of splatter cinema, but translating that in-your-face stuff pretty well to the page. Like I say above, it's quite postmodern of us to walk through this book and not be surprised by what happens, even if we just have a very basic knowledge of the zombie subgenre. To be brutally honest, I think the entire subgenre hasn't much going for itself anyway. I started watching The Walking Dead but never felt the need to continue watching the series, because there's so little themes to explore with this kind of setting. So let's splatter some more.

    But I liked the build up of the story - the strange discoveries on the destroyer, then the elliptical telling of the outbreak on the Purge.The atmosphere of that as it rushes towards its next phase, knowing that we understand pretty well what is going on.

    I'd be interested to hear what general horror novels look like, and how this one rates in that regard. I've one read something by King that always kept going back to what could only be described as a splatter scene, even though you could have described the results of the action leading up to the splattering much less graphical. The only other thing I've read by King, The Green Mile, great as it was, got graphical with the descriptions around the use of the electrical chair (and that wasn't a horror story). Is a certain kind of gore necessary for these books? So you can actually test how "hard" you are and how much your stomach can take?
     
  8. Jedi Ben

    Jedi Ben Chosen One star 9

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    Jul 19, 1999
    I think if the story is honest in its marketing - I don't think anyone could really buy Death Troopers and claim they'd been deceived in the description - I have little problem with it, although there is the issue that more widely, SW is perceived as an all-ages, family-friendly series thus doing a zombie story with a ton of gore does feel quite discordant.

    I quite like the idea that, in this book, space is big - so a Star Destroyer could go off the map, practically vanish, be encountered by chance and then is never seen again.

    Finally, I did enjoy how the book managed to convey the immensity of a Star Destroyer.
     
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  9. Revanfan1

    Revanfan1 Force Ghost star 6

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    Jun 3, 2013
    I remember when it was describing how huge the lower hangar of it was...it was awe-inspiring.
     
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  10. DigitalMessiah

    DigitalMessiah Chosen One star 6

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    Feb 17, 2004
    I like Schreiber's writing overall, but I feel like conceptually Star Wars would be better suited to a more cosmic horror story -- e.g. the aforementioned Mother from Riptide -- than by a run of the mill zombie story. I wonder if it was mandated that it be a zombie story, though. That angle was certainly played up.

    I think SW horror would be much more effective if it was approached from a weird fiction angle, since the Daley stuff and some other stuff already is emulating that pulp sword and sorcery style in a space opera setting with its Sith sorcery and alchemy and what have you, if you went and took that and started slanting it toward the weird fiction genre from that sword and sorcery overlap. Alien is a cosmic horror film inspired in more ways than one by HP Lovecraft. It just makes sense, but I think they wanted the "zombie demographic" since zombies were so big a few years ago.
     
  11. Havac

    Havac Former Moderator star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

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    Sep 29, 2005
    Yeah, I think Star Wars horror novels would be a lot better off looking at, say, Jedi archaeologists on Korriban being haunted by Sith spirits and tempted by the overwhelming presence of evil and hallucinating and passing through physically impossible rooms and being attacked by reanimated corpses of their fallen teammates and murdering each other and all that sort of psychological freakout atmospheric stuff. Zombies are generic; Star Wars horror should take advantage of being Star Wars, and that sort of thing skews much more to the strengths of the written horror format too. Describing brains is just words on a page; it's the construction of don't-look-behind-you atmosphere that books are good at.

    To that end, I think Schreiber was actually fairly good at creating an atmosphere of creepy foreboding, of dark hallways that could be filled with anything. Now, horror's not my bag, but I get the point of it, and as a non-enthusiast I thought it worked on me, and hit a good Star-Warsy balance of creepiness and action. It wasn't anything great, but it worked. Though I don't think Schreiber fully took advantage of having the horror-atmosphere goldmine of an impossibly vast abandoned (but not really) Star Destroyer to play around in. There was more premise there than in zombie-fighting around the smaller prison ship, IMO.

    As for genre, I'm all for it. You know where to go for pieces on the topic. Star Wars is built on genre fusion, and it's such an accommodating setting that just about anything can fit. There are so many elements existing in it to draw from that you can tell all kinds of Star Wars stories focused on a narrower aspect of the universe. Military, criminal, fantasy, hard sci-fi, Western, whatever. But Star Wars, due to the nature of space opera in general, is especially accommodating of anything pulpy. If it's pulp, if it's B-fiction, its DNA, its spirit, is somewhere in Star Wars, which is the ultimate space opera, and space opera is the ultimate distillation of pulp in general. And horror is right in there among the pulp genres. It's just a matter of tweaking the emphasis you put on the existing aspects of the setting. It's not my favorite genre, so I'm not going to clamor for too much of it, but it fits and I'm not going to complain.
     
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  12. timmoishere

    timmoishere Force Ghost star 6

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    Jun 2, 2007
    I never really got creeped out in this novel. The atmosphere is done well, but the horror is all just so bland.

    I will say though, that the Star Wars novel that was creepiest to me was Abyss, when the Sith are wandering around Abeloth's planet getting picked off one by one.
     
  13. RC-1991

    RC-1991 Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    Dec 2, 2009
    Another thought- I do think that Schreiber did a good job of writing little vignettes to characterize his OCs. It's an interesting, somewhat informal style. The vignette where he gives Zahara Cody's backstory was quite effective.

    Also, the early scenes of the outbreak on the Purge- where the Kale brothers are still stuck in a cell next to someone who absolutely wants to murder them and the inmates are starting to succumb to god-knows-what and holy crap we are trapped right here in the middle of it- was rather effectively written.
     
  14. JediAlly

    JediAlly Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    Oct 31, 2000
    The author's writing style was good. Too good. Why did I make that comment? Because I was barely able to keep in my dinner as I read it. Watching a truly graphic horror/slasher movie provokes the same reaction in me.
     
  15. Grey1

    Grey1 Host: 181st Imperial Discussion Group star 4 VIP

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    I found the book to be surprisingly entertaining. I came in with pretty low expectations - I'm not sure if I'd ever read it if it were not for our little club - but I was very entertained.

    I'm not really a fan of horror and especially not of gore/splatter/torture (I've actually perfected a technique of watching next to the screen when watching a movie that's going over the top - initially acquired at university when sitting through Cronenberg's The Fly). I watched the aforementioned 28 Days Later mostly because of its director, and partly because apocalyptic London sounded pretty cool. Watching The X-Files and Millennium regularly when they were aired I think I also saw a bit more than I would have chosen too, since these took a turn for graphic gross-out stuff. That being said, I'm sometimes surprised how much stuff I can actually stand or even ignore these days. Therefore, the gross-out stuff in Death Troopers never struck me as uncomfortable but rather as cliché. I'm still not happy that it is there, but I'm strangely indifferent.

    I think I actually prefer the apocalyptic feel to the "horror" shock feel. The vastness of an empty star destroyer and the elliptical virus catastrophy, that was great stuff.

    Now, about the characters...

    - RC already brought up a good point with the character vignettes. How close do we get to the characters? And does this proximity have an influence on their plausibility? Do you like the choice of characters? And yes, this does not yet include Han and Chewie, I'm only talking about original characters.

    - But one little thing about Han and Chewie... ignoring completely whether you like or dislike their inclusion, would you say that they are dealt with like all the other characters? Do we get less background for them because we already know more about them?
     
  16. Dr. Steve Brule

    Dr. Steve Brule Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    Sep 7, 2012
    While I haven't read Death Troopers, I have a few comments on it that I think are still relevant to the discussion here.

    I was really interested in Death Troopers when it was first announced, and looking forward to it. Then the revelation that Han and Chewie would be main characters completely killed my motivation to read it. Character shields are always present with the main movie cast (or any characters in works prior to their later appearances). But whereas, say, I knew Han, Lando, and Winter would make it through the heist in Scoundrels, or that Han and Chewie would survive the imprisonment/rescue mission in Tyrant's Test, that didn't bother me because those were a heist novel and political thriller, respectively. With horror, it's a different game. That's a genre where "who is going to die next" is absolutely central to what constitutes the genre, so having two characters as central, even if there were other cast members, just killed it for me in ways that I don't care in other SW works (although that being said, I still role my eyes whenever there's a book that tries to play up the risks being felt by our Movie Characters...I wish more authors would just not even try to have "death-defying" scenarios for them).

    On this topic, when the book came out I also remember an interview with Schrieber on the official site where he mentioned his zombie plague was partially inspired by the Captain Trips mega-virus from Stephen King's The Stand. A sort of "everyone is wiped out except a few survivors" type story would be a sort of Star Wars horror story I'd like to see. Could be set on a world undergoing Vongforming, or some Sith ritual draining all life like Nihilus or Vitiate - I feel like there are a lot of ways that would fit in-universe for it to happen. What's more, I feel like the plague survivors trope is a horror genre that is a lot less overdone than zombies (but then again, I suppose cashing in on that trend is why they did Death Troopers to begin with).

    Okay, need details on this, stat!




    Anyway, here's maybe another thing that can be brought up, the marketing for this book. Off the top of my head there were:

    -Star Wars Galaxies tie-in (and a bit more of a stretch, but the prequel tied in with TOR also)
    -Its own website
    -In-universe twitter feed
    -In-universe snippet things sent around to several prominent fan sites
    -A book trailer
    -I think there was even a soundtrack, possibly as a result of a competition?

    I thought at the time that that was all strange overkill, way more than any book that had come before, and more than any book that came since. Most if not all of those were unique to Death Troopers. What was the reason they were so worried about hyping this book? Did any of that marketing actually work to sway readers who were on the fence?
     
  17. Grey1

    Grey1 Host: 181st Imperial Discussion Group star 4 VIP

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    Nov 21, 2000
    Good angle. The soundtrack was something like a playlist that inspired Schreiber when writing this book, and while there was obvious hard rock/alternative stuff that's almost cliché for horror, I remember being dumbfounded by seeing a Coldplay tune in there between the "hard boys" stuff. And behold, the song title ("Death and all his friends") even became a chaper title. I think I remember CDs being given out as promotion, but knowing a bit about labels and publishing, this must have been a little nightmare in itself.
     
  18. Grey1

    Grey1 Host: 181st Imperial Discussion Group star 4 VIP

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    Okay, okay, I'll finally let the Han/Chewie genie out of its bottle.

    You know, I've seen the Han/Chewie complaint right from the beginning. Probably even before someone actually said that they were in the book. Not having read it, I was open to a cameo, and there's been some cameo stuff (Invasion) that others complained about that I loved, and then there was the Agent of the Empire thing with Han and Chewie (and Fett) appearing and I never heard a bad word about that. I do, of course, get where the Death Troopers situation is different - especially since I've now read the thing and they aren't simply around for a cameo.

    - Now, my basic idea is this - does this SW zombie horror novel really need to adhere to zombie horror parameters? As much as we invite genre into Star Wars, what does happen when we invite Star Wars into a genre? Would we allow the franchise to chew on the genre and change it? This is actually relevant to the discussion I've seen on Kenobi where people say the book isn't a "real" western. And I think it has an echo in your ideas, Doc, regarding SW horror that's using stuff known to the reader like the Vong or Sith (maybe Havac's Sith haunting). Are we talking about a simple setting for the stories, or is there more bleeding over into the genre?

    - Regarding a difference in dealing with the characters - can we make a clear cut between the "definitely surviving characters" and the "horror staple characters" - the horrible man, the idealistic woman doctor, the traumatized yet functioning kid? Or do we only make the clear cut because we know Han and Chewie are different from the original creations?

    - And now for the really strange part - as much as this book is a publicity stunt par excellence, why keep the movie characters out of the promotion? Why not put them center stage so that all Han-and-Chewie fans come aboard, too?
     
  19. RC-1991

    RC-1991 Jedi Grand Master star 4

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    Dec 2, 2009
    Dr. Steve Brule- Trig Longo mentions that he remembers someone sitting at a table down the hall from him, staring at him with an angry red eye coming out of the back of his head.

    I'll have more thoughts when I finish the book, but I feel that having Han and Chewie around kinda kills the suspense- you know that at least someone in the book is going to make it out alive.
     
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  20. DoubleGold

    DoubleGold Jedi Knight star 1

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    Nov 3, 2013
    I have never read death troopers, but when I went on Amazon, it gave a me a sneak peak of the book, so I was to read a few pages as a sample. Also, it said click here for an audio version sample. The sample version was excellent. Also, considering this is a horror, I wonder if anyone thought about getting the full audio book version of this, or if anyone has gone through the book that way, as I'm sure this book would be 5 times better listened to than read.
     
  21. Havac

    Havac Former Moderator star 7 VIP - Former Mod/RSA

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    Sep 29, 2005
    I don't think the "suspense" angle works any different in this than in non-horror works. Maybe it's because I'm not absorbed in the horror genre, but I don't feel like there's a sacred rule of "everyone has to be able to die" that absolutely needs to be adhered to. We know all the other characters are in danger, and in some way knowing that we already have two survivors may put them in greater danger -- we know somebody is going to survive, and now that we know Han and Chewie will, well, maybe we aren't guaranteed at least one of the kids will make it, or the doctor. Maybe the end is everyone but Han and Chewie dies. If the emphasis of the book had been different -- less "Okay, guys, let's fight our way out," more, "Oh my god run and hide and hope we don't all die" -- then it might have had more of an impact on the tone knowing that things would work out for at least some of them. But just adding Han and Chewie alongside a party of might-die OCs doesn't detract from the might-die status of those OCs, IMO.

    I actually enjoyed the way Han and Chewie kind of slid into the kids' story as these stray badasses who came out of their own story that we don't quite get into and helped them out. It's a nice ground-level view of the heroes, not as people we're following through their story, but as people whose adventures are also experienced by those around them. It's about the kids' story, rather than having the kids as Han's sidekicks. It's a nice way to feature the Big Three that doesn't get used as much. You can certainly imagine a story about a pilot in the YVW who finds out that the guy flying alongside him in the thick of things is Luke Skywalker, or the soldier who fights next to Princess Leia during the Rebellion, where it's the little guy's story and the big heroes are the cameos, not the stars.

    Dr. Steve Brule, I think the hype was related to the crossover factor. They were hoping that they could entice the horror readers who don't read Star Wars to read this Star Wars horror novel that was new and cool and tapping into the big cultural moment for horror that's ongoing. People who don't read Fate of the Jedi, but read zombie books and like Star Wars and will read a Star Wars zombie book. The stuff that tends to get the big marketing push is the stuff that's seen as potentially reaching outside the established tie-in-reading market that's reading everything anyway, and into the general population or at least some broader audience. Death Troopers, The Star Wars, that Jedi Academy kids' book, etc. Darth Vader and the Cry of the Lost Ghost Shadow Vortex Commissioner doesn't get an Entertainment Weekly article because Random Nerd Dad isn't going to buy a random run-of-the-mill Star Wars spinoff comic if he isn't already; The Star Wars gets an EW article because Random Nerd Dad might buy a one-time big-event comic adaptation of the original script to his favorite movie even if he isn't currently buying Dark Times.
     
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  22. Grey1

    Grey1 Host: 181st Imperial Discussion Group star 4 VIP

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    Nov 21, 2000
    This. I'll agree that their presence somehow screws up the balance, but I never felt they ruined the book (hey, it's Han and Chewie, how can they ruin a book?). Tim Zahn once said something like he prefers writing books that don't make you wonder whether the heroes will survive, but rather whether the heroes will succeed in their mission. And I'd like to add that SW' aim as modern mythology should generally lean more towards character "journeys" than towards live-or-die suspense. With "hero" stories, I think it's obvious most of the time that the hero will survive. You can only pull off something like the prequels or like the first volumes of those George RR Martin fantasy novels because people have a perspective for the downer story. They know (or hope if it's not a prequel) that this low is only a cliffhanger for the inevitable happy end.

    Now, with horror, it's obvious that while there's rules (the promiscuos girl dies first, the chaste girl survives), those rules can always be broken, so anyone can die. But there's no rule about how many people may survive - nobody says that while Han and Chewie obviously survive, the other characters are suddenly worthless.

    The missing balance, for me, comes from the fact that the survivor's mission isn't all that clear. They want to commandeer the star destroyer, which is all kinds of a bad idea, and which they simply fail to do. In the meantime the doctor and the kids play the survival game, and the Imperial snatches the real mission pretty late in the game. And then nothing really matters since the plague wants to send ships away anyway. So there's no mission for Han and Chewie. But as someone the kids should but can't really look up to, they are pretty interesting. They demonstrate the path you should take to survive, because we know they will; but then the kid doesn't have the guts to follow them (having them function like NPCs in a video game, for example). But thinking it over, I guess this lack of purpose for the characters actually helps the atmosphere and the menace, since this the star destroyer and the entire situation is too big to understand, too big to be fought (luckily, there's no "let's destroy the plague!" plot), and too big to actually find your heading in. And then you find a way out by chance, and that's it, you're just glad you made it.

    It's also interesting that while Han and Chewie generally do the good thing, they are so strange since they are really their Death Star versions, smugglers only out for themselves and with no friends in the rest of the cast. I think they are actually fan service in a special way since Schreiber probably wrote them in as a treat for himself. And only maaaybe as fan service for new audiences who find it pretty cool to have Harrison Ford and Chewbacca in there - but I can't decide if not promoting them as cast members helps sell a stand-alone book that doesn't threaten the reader with connections to all those other books with Han on the cover they've seen, or if it's a strange shot in the foot that might make this book seem pretty random and too unengaging for the supposed new audience. Blast, I wish we had someone around who began his EU career through his love for zombies.
     
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  23. Grey1

    Grey1 Host: 181st Imperial Discussion Group star 4 VIP

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    Nov 21, 2000
    So... how's the reading coming along?
     
  24. Grey1

    Grey1 Host: 181st Imperial Discussion Group star 4 VIP

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    Two more points I wanted to raise:

    - What do you think of the plague's origin? In here, it really seems to be a military - scientific - contraption. We know from Red Harvest that it's not just Imperial mad doctors, but that's not yet in this book here. But I think the Force connection is there anyway, in form of the immunity. While such an immunity is really not uncommon in this kind of story, it goes hand in hand with stuff like the kids somehow "persuading" the guards in the beginning, and I'm pretty sure Zahara did something subtly forcy as well. In addition, Han and Chewie aren't written as naturally immune, they have to depend on the blood infusion (and blood means midichlorians these days).

    - While we often hear about the good Empire of the common people, I loved how the Empire was really shown as fundamental problem in this book. There's good people in service, but there's some really nasty one as well. And we find out about a system in which sociopathic people chart well as good Imperial jailers, for example. not to forget Vader really going to town with this zombie plague. Zahara, on the other side, is an idealist who reaches her limits in the reality of the Empire, or of the galaxy during the Dark Times. I know that all of this boils down to the microcosm of a prison barge, but it does feel as if this is just symptoms of the larger galaxy. With the zombie plague finally reaching real zombie horror metaphor status by showing how the Empire turns the galaxy to the dark side, star by star.
     
  25. DigitalMessiah

    DigitalMessiah Chosen One star 6

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    Feb 17, 2004
    Are we sure that there's a connection between the disease in this and Red Harvest? If there is, why is Force sensitivity an immunity here -- I'm not necessarily convinced that it is -- if it wasn't in Red Harvest?
     
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