Has Del-Rey Made A Serious Mistake?

Having now read my way through the entire thread...yes that does take a while folks....there are many good arguments here both pro and con. This was mentioned before, but I would like to pull it a little clearer from the rest of commentary.

Remember LucasFilms has their hand in this every step of the way. If this series follows the rules of media tie-ins, all must be approved by LucasFilms. Who is to say that there was not a fabulous idea about the characters we care about that never made it past an outline stage? I am betting from my past experience with friends who write media tie-ins there were. I can tell you that it use to be in the Star Trek universe that if you played with the characters of a series that was on air or movies, you had to return the toys the way you found them. Spock could never permanently loose an eye or ear. Star Wars seems to offer a little more flexibility in that regard. So not all of this can be lain at the feet of Del Rey editorial.

 

How strange, Luke and Leia both get married, we don't see Veers ever again.

It would be a bit boring to have the Vong come from the UR. All thye would have to do is order an attack on the Vong terrriotory by the parallel Empire. To simple.

 

In the case of General Maximillian Veers, I believe that it is a good bet that he was aboard the Executor, thusly Veers along with all the other crewman aboard were incinerated.

What's so bad about characters getting married?

Yes, I agree with you that having the Vong come from the UR would present a simpler war from a strategic perspective. But looking at a map and planning axes of attack is a whole lot easier than actually engaging them in combat, especially given all of the Vong biotech weapons.

 

I just thought I'd interject a point that I was discussing with Dew a couple nights ago over ICQ.

Are any of you surprised that Luke, Jacen and the other pacifistic saps aren't also totally paralyzed with indecision at having to kill living weapons? I'm surprised they haven't become bogged-down in a debate over whether or not the Vong weapons are serving their lasters willingly or if they're slaves.

 

AniSS: "JF, you used the word SHOULD in describing what LFL and DR might have done..."

Upon reviewing what I wrote, I found that I did use the word "should". A Freudian slip perhaps? I am not totally opposed to the Vong coming from another galaxy, just so long as it is a near neighbor galaxy such as the Magellanic Clouds near the Milky Way, and not an Andromedia-like galaxy. But, then I suppose they'll never anwer that question. Given the way the Millenium Falcon has been zipping from Coruscant to Bilbringi, and Ruan to Fondor lately, space travel has gotten faster and the Kessel Run must be down to single digit parsecs by now. ;-)

Again, I think it would have been better had they come from the UR because it sews up an open plot thread that anyone who read VotF has wondered about. Two, the story is not just "...in a GFFA" anymore, its more like "...in two galaxies far far away." And three, the devoidness of the Force in the Vong takes away the essense of SW -- the Force -- and turns it into a background story.

Come to think of it, nothing about the Vong invasion so far would really preclude them from being Forceless. So far, they have advanced on sheer strength of numbers (and the stupidity of the NR leadership and military). One hundred Jedi still can't fight off millions of Force (or Forceless) imbued evil aliens bent on galactic domination. Only the one-on-one combat with the Jedi has really affected the story since it makes the duels more tense, but they haven't exactly had many of those have they.

AniSS: The definition I'm talking about is narrower, not simplistic. The two words are NOT synonymous."

Narrower; less broadly defined; easier for writers to follow and/or understand; simpler; simplistic. Close enough for me.

AniSS: "Yes, continuity is more than avoiding contradiction."

Thanks for agreeing that continuity is more than contradiction. ;-)

AniSS: "But with something like Star Wars, with many cooks contributing to one pot, the continuity gurus at LucasFilm emphasize making sure the facts don't contradict each other."

As they should. Personally, I would add that omission is just as bad as not contradicting, but that is probably more my own personal view than something more official.

AniSS: "Yes, they want to have thematic continuity, but something like that is ALWAYS open to interpretation."

You got that right. You (and many others) think NJO is right in theme with Star Wars. I (and others) think NJO is less thematic with Star Wars and more in theme with something like Starship Troopers.

AniSS: "Most importantly, though, continuity doesn't obligate Del Rey to pick up a plot thread from Bantam."

Again, not entirely true. They were obligated to pick up on Luke and Mara being engaged/married, the three Solo kids, peace with the Remnant, Pelleaon as Supreme Commander, etc. Obviously some things had to be there. I guess the LFL "continuity experts" decide what must be followed and what can be left hanging.

AniSS: I was talking about a definition of continuity, not whether your "facts" are in order!"

Sorry. :-( My misunderstanding.

 

Jades Fire--

On your discussion of the Vong's Forcelessness, though I'd disagree on some of the specifics, I think the key words are "So far..."

"Again, not entirely true. They were obligated to pick up on Luke and Mara being engaged/married, the three Solo kids, peace with the Remnant, Pelleaon as Supreme Commander, etc. Obviously some things had to be there. I guess the LFL "continuity experts" decide what must be followed and what can be left hanging."

And I repeat what I said to Aleja before. They are not obligated to resolve unresolved plot threads. For nine years, Luke and Mara have a relationship that's sometimes on, sometimes off. They finally get married. To me, that sounds like a plot thread that's been resolved, not something left hanging. Same with the war with the Empire. After Palpatine's fall, the NR fights the Empire for 14 years until a peace deal is signed. Again, I think the peace deal resolves a plot thread. I can't see what's been left hanging.

 

AniSS: "And I repeat what I said to Aleja before. They are not obligated to resolve unresolved plot threads."

No, not absolutely OBLIGATED but it makes a great deal of sense for serial storytelling ... which is the point.

 

The HB-PB relation is now clear with Bp's publication.

At the start of the book, the very first two pages, is a summary of the preceding books. It is enough to familiarise the reader with the events beforehand but doesn't give the whole story, e.g the Imperial prescence at Ithor and Chewbacca's funeral is omitted.

Whether that summary will be included in the PB version I do not know, but it seems like this is how DR has met its claim of the HBs being the main arc, with the PBs being minor filling out of details and providing a few key sequences.

Best wishes

 

Bror...
"No, not absolutely OBLIGATED but it makes a great deal of sense for serial storytelling ... which is the point."

For all we know, the hanging plot threads _HAVE_ all been taken care of in the interim period, we just haven't been privy to them. However, knowing the EU, if there's a story to be told, they'll tell it.

 

The gap between the end of the Bantam line and the NJO simply indicates that DR is not interested in the notion of serial story-telling, unless of course one happens to be talking about their own books.

I still believe that a book that takes place before VP is required to proerly set-up the NJO. In this book we could see what sort of political maneuvering Borsk had to pull-off to become President, how all these Counselors with smuggler ties were elected. When did the Senate develop such an anti-human bias? When did Luke suddenly lose control over his students, especially when he kept rather tight leashes on them?

My thinking as to why the five year break in terms of story-line takes place is so the insufferable Solo brats could be seen as plausible main characters. The only trouble with that is that, unless you read the YJK or JJK books--which I haven't and never will--you have never seen the Solo brats as major protagonists (unless you happen to remember the dreadful Crystal Star). Jacen, Jaina and Anakin are being shoved in our faces to be seen as hero's, but most of us probably know next to nothing about them so we take offense to this effort of DR's as they push the hero's--that we've all come to know and form attachments to--out of the way and relegate them to becoming mindless zombies dependent upon the words of a fifteen-year-old and two sixteen-year-olds for guidance.

The Solo brats have not earned the designation of "hero" yet, while those who we definitely see as heroes are being relegated to the sidelines or have come down with inexplicable cases of heavy moralizing or just outright stupidity or indeciciveness.

Let's see more of Luke, Mara, Leia, Han, Pellaeon, Kre-Fey, Gavin and other folks in actual positions of political or military power instead of seeing these insufferable brats that I guess we're all suppose to take an immediate liking to.

 

Hmm. I happen to like the Solo kids. And I certainly don't feel the main characters are being pushed back.

 

But Luke does absolutely nothing in JE.

Han does nothing but help that Droma thing find its clan-mates or whatever.

At least Leia got the Hapans to assist with the war effort . . . too bad her son had to be so stupid.

What has Luke done in the post-Onslaught NJO besides give speeches and send his Jedi out on missions?

Since he had nothing better to do, why not accompany Anakin and Jacen to Centerpoint, especially given how much of a coward Jacen is?

 

Ani --

"Should" is a matter of opinion. Should I go to the party? Should I wear the green sweater? Should DelRey have utilized the plot threads set up in the Bantam books? Answer yes or answer no -- it's open for debate.

"Required" is not. Am I required to go to the party? There's only one answer, EITHER yes or no.

See how it works?

So Jade's Fire can argue "should" all he wants -- it's his opinion of what they SHOULD have done. Not what they are REQUIRED to have done.

Although I'm not really surprised to be discussing semantics with you.

As for plot threads: yes, I consider Luke & Mara's relationship to be a thread. Obviously, so did LFL & Dark Horse because they published UNION and LFL & DelRey is continuing to evolve their relationship. After all, DelRey could have treated L&M as they initially treated Lando and Tendra...

Stackpole picked up the thread of the Chiss/Imperial Remnant. Luceno picked up the thread of Karrde, Intelligence Liason as well as some threads so obscure most forgot they existed. I can't wait for Balance Point as it sounds like Kathy Tyers filled spool after spool with dropped threads. So DelRey CAN do it. And we can continue to debate SHOULD they. Once more, it's OPINION -- there's no right or wrong, just well-argued and badly argued points.

I think they should, and that they should have. But it looks like the most recent books in the series are turning out to be a "should" camp member's delight...so I'll stop rubbing it in :-D

 

is the concept of "in media res" lost on some people?

That's how A New Hope started...

 

Aleja:

We are only talking about opinions here. That's all. I don't care whether we use the words obligated, required, should or could. We are ONLY talking about opinions.

In the context of opinions, someone arguing that person A SHOULD do B if they want to show that they care about C is saying that A has an obligation to do B. As I told JF already, that's how I read the use of the word SHOULD. So I read an obligation as roughly the same as a requirement in one of my posts. That doesn't change my argument in any substantial way.

My position is that Del Rey CAN pick up unresolved plot threads, not that they should. I don't consider them to be under some sort of obligation (for reasons of continuity or otherwise) to me as a reader to reveal Tendra's fate, for example, or the menace in the Unknown Region. If Del Rey editors or authors choose to pick up unresolved plot threads from Bantam, then bully for them. I'm perfectly happy either way.

 

Like the child who wanders in in the middle of a movie, I say: Yeah, in media res!

quote: "The gap between the end of the Bantam line and the NJO simply indicates that DR is not interested in the notion of serial story-telling, unless of course one happens to be talking about their own books."

Seriously, GAW, did you complain like this when you were a wee lad and HTTE was published, taking place all those years after ROTJ? What happened in all those years between?

 

Anyeuman

You left out the fact that the five year gap between ROTJ and HTTE was eventually filled-in by TAB, COPL, the X-Wing novels and probably a few that I'm forgetting.

It doesn't look like DR is the least bit interested in going back and filling in the gap between VOTF and VP.

No, I wasn't concerned about the gap between HTTE and ROTJ but that probably has a lot to do with the fact that HTTE was the first EU novel published (not counting Daley's Han novels and the novels about Lando).

 

And Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster. And yes, GAW, they ALL count (as do Marvel's 100-odd EU comics, the Goodwin and Manning newspaper strips, etc.). Heir to the Empire was the EIGHTH EU novel published, not the first. Not the first by 13 years.

 

I agree with G.A.W. that there needs to be something to go between the Bantam books and Delrey's NJO. Like he said, the 5-year gap between the last movie and Zahn's 1st book was filled in by the X-wing series and many other books.

 

I'd like to add my voice to the people who think DelRey 'should" have paid a little more attention to the history of the EU and the unresolved story lines of the Bantam books when they started the NJO.

I'd like to point out to anyueman that the gap between RotJ and HttE is not the same as the gap between VotF and VP. When HttE was written there WAS no written SW history (other than that published between ANH and EBS) to ignore.
VP ignored uncounted pages of SW history.

Perhaps we will see in the future, the missing 5 or 6 years filled in and some of the dangling plot threads picked up, but the long term fans would have been more pleased with the NJO had those missing 5 years and unfinished stories been at least acknowledged in the first novel.
The long term fans would have been happier with VP if certain inconsistencies had been avoided. Just as the non-mention of Cilghal was fixed in HT, perhaps some future author will explain how and why the shield ships changed. And why Kyp is so down on smugglers when it was the Empire that sent him and his parents to Kessel and the policies of the Imperial toady that ran the place that brought about his parents death. Maybe someone will remember that Lando had a girlfriend named Tendra.

The NJO would have been better served by having a kick-off book that didn't alienate so many loyal fans.

 

A question for Anakin SkySolo:
Did anything in HttE ignore or contradict anything in Splinter of the Mind's Eye or the Han or Lando books (that wasn't taken care of in the movies that came after those books)? Not to my relection of the early books and HttE, but I could have missed something.
Also, Anakin says "And yes, GAW, they ALL count (as do Marvel's 100-odd EU comics, the Goodwin and Manning newspaper strips, etc.). "
Sorry I didn't consider these when I said there was no SWU history to ignore. As a reader of novels I had remained blissfully ignorant of the content of comic books until I was forced to read them in order to attend Luke and Mara's wedding.

So, were there a lot of unresolved plotlines from the comic books that HttE ignored or got wrong? Never having read the Marvel comics I have no idea.

 

As far as SOTME goes . . . is there any indications that anything that happened within it had any bearing whatsoever on ESB? I don't remember any mention in The Annotated Screenplays of Lucas or Kasdan or anyone else saying anything like: "Well, foster mentioned this in Splinter, so we made a reference to it in Empire/Jedi." Foster's books were forgotten about.

As for the comics, I remember only one plot-line . . . Leia being rescued by a stormtrooper. I remember purple people, and that's it. All this nonsense that Vader had an apprentice is utter drivel, since we have no mentioning of such a woman in the films AND thast flies in the face of GL's two Sith rule. I seriously doubt that LFL exercised much editorial oversight over these comics, so they don't add up to much in my eyes.

 

"is the concept of "in media res" lost on some people?

That's how A New Hope started..."


Yes, but A New Hope didn't have 22 years of comic books, video games, novels, role playing handbooks and film sequels behind it...

 

Is there any indication that SOTME has any impact on ESB? That's mainly a matter of opinion. I see clear connections between SOTME and ESB--many thematic and some specific plot elements.

But I don't think that it's relevant to the discussion. Splinter has no more bearing on ESB than Shadows has on RotJ. We were talking about the connections between different facets of the EU, not between pieces of the EU and canon. Two Bantam books, Truce at Bakura and Shadows of the Empire, overlap with the Marvel comics and, at least at first glance, ignore much of the continuity established by Marvel (read Marvel #81, which seems to begin on the same morning as Truce). Shadows also ignores SOTME. One might think that, in the many times Vader reflects on his clash with Luke in ESB, that he would give at least a fleeting thought to his battle with Luke in SOTME. But no such luck...

And Podkayne: I can't see any major difference. So the X-Wing novels and comics and Courtship filled some of the gap between RotJ and HttE. That's true. But those books and comics were written years after HttE. At the time HttE was written, we had little documentation of the war between the New Republic and the Empire in the intervening five years. To repeat, we had little understanding of how the New Republic snagged 75% of the former Empire. That's a pretty significant gap.

With VP, at least we have the YJK and JJK novels providing some documentation for the "missing" six years. The New Republic was also at peace (more or less) between VotF and VP, which I suspect provides substantially less story material than a New Republic fighting a war for five years would. So I wouldn't expect as much backstory.

 

HttE was able to start with a fairly clean slate, (side note to AniSS, the majority of the movie fans hadn't read the Marvel comics and many people still do not consider comics as important in the scheme of things as the movies and novels)
Vector Prime had 20 years of documented EU history to call upon, but for what ever reason, LFL and Delrey chose not to use much of it. Rather silly of them, in my humble opinion.
If they had given it more thought, they could have started the NJO with a book that would have made the old fans feel welcome and brought the new fans into the fold.
I'm beginning to believe that DelRey really was jealous of Bantam. That makes as much sense as them being so short sighted that they thought they could ignore the established fans in an effort to draw in new fans.

AniSS's comment about HttE coming 13 years after the first SW novel also supports the notion that the RotJ/HttE gap and the VotF/VP gap are totally different. Just how long WAS it between the last SW novel (I'm not sure which one, but I think it came out before the RotJ) and HttE, the first Extended Universe novel? Year and years, right? And how long between VotF and VP? Just a bout a year. THAT makes a world of difference.