Lit The 181st Imperial Discussion Group: Death Troopers!

Oh, good point. I simply thought it was force business, and since I didn't read the second book yet...

 

Well, it could be. It's ambiguous whether the diseases are the same.

I didn't catch the implication. I'm not altogether fond of the way that the EU has, as you put it, made this correlation between midi-chlorians and blood. It's a blood test! People take blood tests for a lot of things which aren't related to hematology!

 

So, let's turn our attention to the splatter element, everyone. Bodily substances and parts are described in various unbecoming circumstances, and graphicly so. But as we already mentioned, the "Mother" sequence of Crosscurrent is a punch in the stomach as well. And then there is Troy Denning, whose development from Anakin's fatal wound over Aleema's tally of mutilations and Jacen's loss of mint condition recently climaxed in Crucible with stuff I'm still pretty sure you all made up because nobody actually read the book. Compare this to Stover, whose books are pretty tame in comparison even if they can't hide that he's putting all kinds of unmentionables in his original work (if you enter the Caine novels with a weak stomach, you come out without a stomach at all).

But looking at current must-watch and must-read pop culture, hasn't this become fairly normal in our age of "dark and gritty means it's realistic" fiction? If a station is too tame to use the sex part of exploitation, it's still diving head first into the gruesome body horror of realistic wounds. For example, I just had a look at Hell on Wheels, and while its prostitutes need to wear a lot more clothes than your average Game of Thrones character, it has gratuitious scenes of scalping and of sawing an arrow wound shut. The Walking Dead is a given in this discussion. In film, many movies seem to take their visual take on wounds directly from Amnesty International reports (whether that's cynical or really mind-broadening is in the eye of the beholder, I guess). And I just read the heart-warming Rivers of London book, which features great british comedy and style paired with the gruesome effects of the magic thrown around by ghosts. The latter part being best described as Ghostbusters imagined by Denning.

So, especially with Game of Thrones on the throne of genre entertainment these days, is it only logical to have a grown-up exploitation version of Star Wars? If not for those who spent the last two decades obsessing about details of the EU, then for those who are on the pulse of today's pop culture, having grown up with films like Saw available as adolescent dares? And Tarantino movies as high art/perfect popcorn entertainment?

 

just thought I'd brought this back up, because I just got done listening to the audio book. Maybe I missed it, but I didn't hear anything about the Star Destroyer being destroyed? Was is just left out there in space?

 

It was indeed. I like this a lot. Stories like this tend to have the protagonists as the people who save the universe. But here, they just try to survive, and this thing really is bigger than life. I think the biggest compromise in regards to the admittedly very open ending (this book really is asking for a sequel, not for a prequel) I would have enjoyed would have been the obvious Vader cleanup scene in which the larger-than-life villain finds the pathetic remains/destroys the failed experiment, but has another idea to use this evil contraption.

But I can understand that the choice to not resolve the existence of the plague is, for all its setting-up-the-sequelitis (that hasn't worked yet and possibly never will), jarring for some if not most readers. I wonder, though, if this is specific to EU readers, since EU normally tries to hit a status quo, and the audience obsesses over the "definitive" status of events in the imagined galaxy far, far away.

Open question to everyone - do you feel like you "need" a sequel? Would you want one?