Lit Most Underrated EU Novels

I did some browsing and didn't find this particular thread. There is the "Unpopular" thread, which I guess is the same thing. But I want some fresh perspective. If the mods see fit to close this down I won't be hurt.

I've only read the Thrawn Trilogy, the Jedi Academy Trilogy (which gets my vote as underrated) and Kenobi. So that's a whopping 7 books out of hundreds.

There is such a varying degree of opinions on this forum, I'd like to know what people find to be underrated in the EU to broader my approach.

 

The Cestus Deception and The Darth Bane Trilogy for me.

 

The Approaching Storm. I know it isn't the best novel, but it's not bad or boring like a lot of people say. The characterizatiins of Anakin and Obi-Wan are good. I'd rather they not fight as much, but Anakin'so reflection on their arguments highlights his compassionate nature and desire to be good. Also Bariss Ofee and Luminara are handled well. The setting is fun and it has some good scenes during negotiations. I think the book has great dialogue too. Sure there's not much action but it has a good fun plot. Action isn't that important

 

Rogue Planet is wildly underrated. Also Millennium Falcon; nobody ever talks about it, but it was quite good. Black Fleet Crisis doesn't get nearly the respect it deserves. Survivor's Quest is also unfairly overlooked.

 

I rather enjoyed the MedStar trilogy. (Or was it a duology?) Anyway, I thought the MASH-esque look at the Clone Wars shed new light on the impact the war had/has on the people who fight it.

 

Yoda: Dark Rendezvous. I liked Scourge a lot. And Black Fleet Crisis is a bit divisive for its hard sci-fi trappings, but I dug it.

 

You think it's underrated? I've gotten the impression it's consistently been one of the most well-regarded Clone Wars novels around the JCF.

 

Scourge

A brilliant little gem.

 

Yep Scourge is definitely criminally overlooked. The three Lando novels sadly also often go unnoticed despite being all kinds of brilliant pulp sci-fi and having great concepts and dialog.

 

Although the majority of the TOR tie-ins were god awful, I was always surprised how much I enjoyed Fatal Alliance and Red Harvest.

Fatal Alliance has a bad rep due to it looking on the surface like your cliche, cookie-cutter tie-in that has a cast of characters each based after one of the video game classes, but I actually thoroughly enjoyed the story and found it had some interesting ideas... and having recently played through Knights of the Fallen Empire, I've just suddenly had some ideas spring into my head of possible connections... interesting (though I won't go into those, to not spoiler the new expansion).

As for Red Harvest? It's definitely very much love-hate, and I listened to the audiobook, which came complete with lots of silly horror movie sound effects, so I don't know whether the novel itself is as effective or not, so its poor rep could well be fully justified. But the audiobook was a good laugh, and I enjoyed some of the ideas it explored. I guess I had fun for the same sort of reason as why I can sit down and watch a truly, truly dreadful low budget zombie film, and just find the terrible SFX amusing.

So, yeah, it wasn't meant to be a black comedy, but approached that way I found it rather fun.

 

BlackFleet-trilogy.
Roger McBridgeAllen's Corellia-trilogy.
Shadow Hunter.
Jedi Trial.
Bounty Hunter-trilogy.
Scoundrels.

 

He's been drinking the tea again.


Also I second Fatal Alliance. I didn't hear much about it when it was originally released and thought it was a dud for years. When I finally read it I felt sort of bad. Probably I contributed to the problem by not saying how great (not BEST NOVEL EVER but better developed than most) it was upon reading it. I would have liked to see those characters again sometime.

 

Darksaber.

 

I completely agree on the BFC. By far the most mature approach to Star Wars in the Bantam era, probably only surpassed by Stover.

Jedi Trial was terrible but I give it props both for being one of the few books to show how a battle would be more than just a few X-wing dog fights for an hour and then the entire planet captured, as well as being I think the only Clone Wars book to at least try to incorporate not just one, but several Bantam-era Clone Wars references.

And I'll actually also add that Darksaber isn't great by any stretch but I think it's better than the reputation it has. It's definitely not to the depths of something like Ruins of Dantooine or Planet of Twilight.

 

I think Dark Journey is kind of underrated (but you shouldn't read it as a standalone anyway). It has a glaring problem in that it would have needed the ending to actually be a complete third part (with 100 to 150 additional pages) instead of a simple quick ending, and this might come from deadlines or format restrictions (most if not all books around that time had a similar page count, so it almost looks like a contractual thing). Criticism, however, concentrated quite a bit on the fates of characters and on something that I'd generally sum up as "eww girls". And then people got the idea that this novel can be reviewed as a foil to Traitor, and from that point on it can only lose. I found it an engaging, quick read, though, with a lot of good focus on Jaina.

 

I'm one of the few who actually greatly enjoyed Jedi Trial. I know it's not perfect, and the best word I can think of to describe it is "campy," sort of, but I originally read it when I was like 13 or 14 years old so it was just an exciting war novel. Erk and Odie's names are terrible in retrospect, and the romance between them can come off as pretty forced, but overall I don't think the book as a whole is as terrible as some make it out to be. The biggest problem for me is that, from what I recall, there are quite a few grammatical or spelling errors. But then, MedStar had those (Jos Vondar, Jos Vandar, Jos Krondar, etc.) too.

Speaking of which, I absolutely adore the MedStar books.

 

Jedi Trial, the KJA books, Jedi Trial, the Cornelian trilogy, The New Rebellion. etc.

 

Tarkin and Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter.

Neither are what I would call great books but they still had some good elements. I loved how Luceno portrayed Tarkin as well as his past. I also found the plot interesting enough to keep reading.Reaves portrayed Maul as a cool assassin as he should be, but I liked how he made me actually care for the secondary characters who were practically the stars of the book.

 

Over the years, I've read most of the old EU books. I've been going back and acquiring/reading the ones I missed out on (just now embarking on the X-Wing series!), and I'd like to second whoever said The Cestus Deception earlier as being underrated. It's an immensely fun book, plus I love some good Obi-Wan action. I also have a soft spot for Tales of the Bounty Hunters, as it was one of the first Star Wars books I read outside of the Jedi Apprentice series in my younger days.

 

Croscurrent and KJA.

 

Crosscurrent and Riptide needed at least one sequel - too many threads left hanging.

I enjoyed Scourge - once it got going it was a good read.

 

I enjoyed Fatal Alliance right up until it fell apart in the third act. The premise was pretty good, but then it went in the wrong direction and completely blew the landing.

I agree that Dark Journey is underrated. It's not a masterpiece, but I don't buy most of the criticism directed at it. The complaints of "Dark side PMS" pretty much sum it up -- "Jaina had a brush with the dark side that wasn't galactic in scope, how terrible, and ew romance girl stuff!" It obviously wasn't what people wanted immediately after the enormous scope of SBS, but with the larger picture now in hand, I think the choice of a smaller-scale breather that let Jaina struggle with the dark side in a very personal way and just have her own moment to resolve the issues SBS introduced, focusing intimately on the ordeal of the strike team rather than trying to address the whole galactic situation, was the right move. Especially since Enemy Lines handled it so well, taking on the galactic situation and picking up the ball from DJ by integrating its cast into the scenario about a quarter of the way through its bigger story.

The Truce at Bakura is another book that isn't a masterpiece, but is better than its rep. It's endearingly quirky in that early-Bantam way, and has a lot to recommend it even if it never weaves its better elements into a pulse-pounding pulp adventure or reaches the heights of the era's best material. Balance Point is the same way -- everybody tends to dismiss it but there's a lot of good in there. Even Children of the Jedi (and to a much lesser extent, Planet of Twilight) has a lot of really good stuff and just fails to nail the process of cohering it into something that doesn't feel just a little too dull.

I'm seeing what's perhaps a pattern of female authors who write books that have a lot of quality material but are for whatever reason just a little too languid, maybe a little too internal, to click with the fandom and their material ends up decried as missing the mark perhaps much more widely than it actually did.

No, Coop, I haven't deciphered the issue enough to write you an essay about it.

 

There's absolutely too much love for Jedi Trial around here. The book gets a mission statement, ignores it to set another mark, and then misses that mark. It's the book that made me learn that you can't actually give zero points in the review threads.

BTW, was Medstar truly underrated? I can only remember positive things being said about it. Maybe fewer read it since it doesn't have a movie main character as a hook, but I think the books got a pretty good deal by their audience. I think that when we revisited them in the 181st, I was surprised that they were so beloved in spite of obvious shortcomings, but I'd have to look that up again.

Mentioning "zero points in the review thread" made me remember someone whose name didn't yet come up as having written underrated novels. I think you should work Karen Miller into your observation, and maybe then you'll have that extra bit of perspective to make an essay out of it (since you can then subtract the quality material aspect).

 

Well, if we wanted a masterpiece of loathing and bile that fractures Hav's writing mind in the process leaving him a gibbering wreck in a way not even FOTJ did ... Yeah.