Books STAR WARS: A NEW DAWN (September 2014)

It's not about the minions, though. The minions are replaceable supporting characters. It's about the one who made it by being tougher than the toughies and smarter than the smarties, and who made it square.

Until he sold it all to the Devil, that is.

 

In that case, I'm now extra excited to read it! One of my favorite reads ever was Edvard Radzinsky's biography of Stalin. The prose was beautiful and it's worth your time.

As for the rest, I agree with you on everything except the Tarkin book; I'm EXPECTING that one to be the opposite of short, tight, bright and fun - after all, Luceno's reputation now precedes him. For this subject, from this author, that's actually what I want out of this book. As long as it doesn't contained a pound of shoehorned references to other EU sources, which in my opinion was the one weakness of the Darth Plagueis novel.

 

In case anyone is interested, IGN did a review on the book. There are spoilers in it, mind you.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/08/30/star-wars-a-new-dawn-review

Spoiler

It gave it 8 out of 10

 

IGN gives just about everything 8 out of 10 unless they are paid for 9es or 10es.

 

Pfluegermeister Had to look it up but yes I read Edvard Radzinsky's Stalin bio many years ago! Have you read Young Stalin by Simon Montefiore?

 

I totally have, and it was a fantastic supplement to Radzinsky's book. The sad thing is that I have Montefiore's previous book, "Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar," but haven't read it all the way through. It's not the fault of Montefiore; I just hadn't made the time yet.

Most recently I gave William L. Shirer's "The Collapse of the Third Republic" a thorough reading. Anybody who wants a little insight into how, as the PT depicts, a Republic can suddenly be made to commit suicide through the connivance of those entrusted to lead it, needs to read this book.

 

Alright, I'm 40 pages away from finishing so all I will say for now is it's a great novel, Kanan and Hera are written great and while it's not as good as Kenobi it's still one of the best SW novels I've read.

 

I found Kenobi a little boring and not as focused on Obi-Wan as I expected. Actually, I felt that it didn't have a very SW feel to it at all. Does A New Dawn at least say "Star Wars universe?"

 

Could you elaborate on that? Shirer's book states that it was a "freakish birth," but doesn't hint at any treachery. It says that it was the failure of the monarchists to agree on who should sit on the throne after the fall of Napoleon III that gradually brought the National Assembly - by a margin of just one vote - to choose a republic as the least worst second option.

 

Just finished it and it does have a SW Universe-feel to it and feels a little more larger-scaled then Kenobi as there is more locations than Kenobi's Tatooine. It IS focused more on each "team" with The Rebels having more focus than The Empire.

I give A New Dawn an 8.5 / 10. It is written great and the new characters as well as the established characters are well written and given thought, along the way you grow to love these characters and care for them. What a way to start the New Canonized Universe of Star Wars!

 

I feel like I need to swear off this thread until I get to read the book.

 

Well...

1) Is it stylistically very different to Kenobi, Knight Errant and Lost Tribe of the Sith? In other words, do you think JJM had to change his style because of a new "disneyfied" storytelling approach that DR has to adhere to?

2) Is the word/page count dramatically different from all those 292 page books DR has put out since the millennium, and the 250 page books that apparently came out a bit more often lately?

3) Is it very different from earlier efforts like Death Troopers or, well, maybe Knight Errant or Hard Contact, or the entire TOR run, that didn't connect too much to the EU except if there was a medium they were piggybacking on (just as the new book lives and breathes only because of that TV show it ties into)?

4) Were you critical of stuff like Kenobi, Darth Plagueis or even the ROTS novel back when they were released, too? Because the idea I had of this forum is that most people loved books that had a tiny bit more substance, maybe a tiny bit more pages than 292, and made sense in the continuity. Saying that this book is cool for dropping the deadweight continuity doesn't sound like a good adevrtisement, then.

And finally, while I'm suggesting that I have a hard time believing that this new book is the first in "a new universe, with a new style and a new approach", I'd like to finish with the thought that this is very much a tie-in that had to be delivered on time, and that doesn't seem to have had as much preparation time as regular novels (I might be wrong about this, of course), so there's a good reason for stuff like a "reasonable word count".

 

I've heard nothing but good things about this book and I really hope Rebels does not ruin it.

 

1. Style/content is typical of JJM but it's far less wordy, every scene gets to the point faster than in his other novels and there are far fewer side characters plugging up the works.

2. As I said in my post, Lucasbooks/Del Rey started moving in this direction with books published in 2013, they announced it in 2012. More stand-alone books, fewer titles and shorter books in general. I'm pleased to see that they're doing that now - it's what I've wanted from the start. The decision to discontinue the old continuity just made it easier for them. I wasn't interested in reading more books about Han/Luke/Leia, the early years, however. New Dawn, Tarkin and Dark Lords are at least a little more interesting to me.

3. In general EU books had gotten to a point where you needed a spreadsheet to follow the story. I support this new effort to make the books easier and more enjoyable to read.

4. Most of the longer SW books I've read could have used trimming IMO. I'm re-reading the Darth Bane trilogy, which I like, but if I'd been editor on those books I would have been a lot more stringent about structure and content. My opinion on this goes back to the early 1990's when they decided to bounce off of the Thrawn Trilogy and start cranking SW books out like sausages. I've never personally felt that the adult SF novel was a good model for SW fiction. I would have looked to classic adventure stories, classic juvenile SF from the 1950's, 1930's space opera, westerns, historical adventures and epic fantasy. SW got mired in a literary genre that didn't reflect its style very well, IMO. Yeah different authors have used those elements but the adult SW line read too much like very poorly written SF instead of imaginative fantasy. Anyway, I think that fewer, shorter books is the best direction and I hope they never get back to releasing multiple novels within the same month again, because the quality was getting abysmally low.

5. JJM actually had more time than usual the write A New Dawn due to the internal shake-up of the regime change, I believe. Because licensed fiction usually pays a flat fee with no royalty or an extremely tiny royalty, authors aren't inclined to put more than the allotted time into them. So even if they had a year to write a movie novelization or a video game tie-in (instead of 4-6-12 weeks), few authors would actually spend an entire year on such a project. However, drastically reducing the number of adult SW novels published per year should allow the authors and editors at least a little more time to work on the manuscripts prior to publication. I hope this means that in general the quality will go up.

I like A New Dawn. It's not a story line I would have green-lit if I were editing these books but I like JJM and I'm enjoying how fast-moving and unencumbered the book is; it harkens back to the Brian Daley books. I like what I read of Tarkin and Lords of the Sith. I didn't like the sample of the Luke Skywalker book. But overall, things are looking up.

 

I'm actually all for more entertaining books, and my one huge complaint about Kenobi was tying it to the Hett comic too much, and too openly. But while I haven't read any other new books since the "new approach", I'm not really sure if there is so much as a new approach or simply authors of varying quality/in different circumstances. And didn't the approach thing refer to the Empire & Rebellion books with their "let's go back to Episode 4" context?

As for JJM's timetable, as I said, I know nothing about that; but I got the impression that some of these new book projects came out of the blue; I'm pretty convinced that Kemp's new novel has nothing to do with the secret duology he originally talked about, for example. I don't know at which point they would have asked an author for a Rebels tie-in, and at which point - if that is indeed the case, again, only my impression - positive buzz for the Kenobi book would have made JJM the author to go to if you try to start a new novel line without alienating previous fans. The way I see it, Hearne was writing his book anyway, Kemp and Golden had unfulfilled contracts, and Miller and Luceno were chosen specifically they promise quality and "sellability", since they are fan favourites.


And just out of curiosity, since we had this discussion a while back - what do you think of KJA's work? He aimed to be a bit more flashy and a lot more pulp-sci-fi-inspired than other quthors that are generally held in higher regard today.

 

Not a KJA fan. Stover does space opera really good, though. My template for SW fiction would be: Robert Louis Stevenson, C.S. Forester, L. Frank Baum, Louis L'mour, E.E. "Doc" Smith, Edmund Hamilton, Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rafael Sabatini. That gives you an idea what my ideal SW prose fiction would be like. There's an article in the new SW Insider about the process of publishing A New Dawn which is worth reading.

 

I still want to know what the Kemp duology is about!

 

Thanks but still not helpful.

 

No, no, a thousand times no. There maaaaayyyy be slightly fewer offhand references to specific EU planets and such than JJM has done historically, but not to the extent that you'd notice if you weren't primed to look for them the way all of us are. But "disneyfied"? Not remotely. In many ways it's more "adult" than Kenobi or KE.

I'm reading a digital ARC and I'm not totally sure how long it actually is, but while I agree with EH that it's a lighter read than the "typical" EU book, overall it feels quite a bit over 300 pages. It's just got a million short chapters, which is something JJM does a lot.

He was working on it well before the reboot announcement, so while there was apparently some retooling necessary in the middle, I don't get the sense from his comments (or the book) that it was any more rushed than normal.

Seriously--I'm far less bothered by projects being cancelled than most people here, but it drives me nuts when something that's not going to happen is still subjected to total secrecy. I didn't want to rant at Gabriel Hardman in the Legacy #18 thread, but the fact that they can't, or won't, just come out and tell us AG's story makes me crazy.

 

Is it really that hard to tell us what would have happened? Yeah they will probably tell us since its not coming out, why does it matter if we don't tell you? We waited for the Kemp duology for 2 years. And what did we find out? Nothing. Since its not coming out, why does it matter if they tell us? Are they lying that this duology happened or don't want to give us EU fans another reason to hate the change to the Disneyverse?

 

Just proves what I said all along, that the Kemp Duology traveled back through time, and had already been released in the past, and we were simply awaiting [are still awaiting?] its being written in the future, and falling into that wormhole.