Reviews Books The JC Lit Reviews Special: CRUCIBLE (spoilers)

So I finally got around to reading Crucible. It's hard to avoid taking the opportunity of writing a review, simply because the book is such a microcosm of everything Denning has done to Star Wars since he essentially seized the reigns during Dark Nest (if not before).

Crucible is, rather obviously, terrifyingly flawed. It is, on the balance, a very poor novel. This is doubly so because it does has some good potential points. The book begins in an interesting place, with an entirely new plot involving supposed economic warfare with new villains and a somewhat relaxed atmosphere. Denning's writing remains engaging and highly readable, and he can put together effective action sequences when he chooses, though unfortunately he then takes them in all the wrong directions. Unfortunately the novel never even comes close to living up to the potential of the few opening scenes.

There are numerous problems, such as poor characterization, dropped plot threads, and a general tendency to have far to many things going on for a single novel. Luke, Han, and Leia stopping the Qrephs from taking over Lando's mining operation would have been sufficient for a full novel, instead Denning attempts to cram far too many events and concepts in at once. The reason becomes fairly clear quite quickly: Denning isn't interested in any of these ideas. The Rift, the Nargons, why there are Biots instead of ordinary clones, the Qrephs own motives, what the monolith is ultimately for, none of these things are addressed because Denning simply isn't interested in those things.

Troy Denning is interested in one thing and one thing only: hurting his characters and seeing where that takes them.

Crucible wants to be Pages of Pain, in space. Both novels ultimately boil down to a small group of characters moving through a series of strange, chaotic environments and engaging in combat set pieces that progressively leave them in various states of physical and mental damage. Pages of Pain is actually good: but that novel is set in the dark, gritty, and grimy Planescape universe, involves the titular source of all pain in that universe, and is completely and totally disconnected from outside plot events. Crucible is nominally set in the Star Wars galaxy and involves actual people and a consistent set of sci-fi physics. Denning is fighting this the whole way, and at the end, he simply cuts the chord completely and drops the Big Three into a Force-based mindscape that he doesn't even bother to justify and it is so obviously what he wanted to do all along that it's painful to read.

It is possible to build a good story using Denning's methodology: Inception, would be a good example. It is not possible to build a good Star Wars story this way, especially when Denning bulldozes through everything in the setting to do so. That ranges from the big things: like completely unexplained ruptures in space time the size of a nebula, to small things, like a complete failure to properly describe how Star Wars weapons work in order to hurt characters more.

To illustrate, there's one sequence that stood out to me: the part during the escape from the sabacc game when Han takes a vibroblade to Mirta Gev's leg. He is described as sticking the knife in, twisting, and then cutting down and back up. If you did that with a plain old fighting knife you would inflict a horrible but probably survivable wound unless the femoral artery gets cut. That's basically what happens to Mirta. The problem is - Han's using a vibroblade. The result should carve everything on her leg off, chip pieces off the bone, and leave her to bleed out in a matter of minutes. She should be in shock and unable to function, and yet she keeps fighting Han during and immediately after he has done this.

Star Wars fights are clean in part because of the PG rating of the original films, but also because the advanced weapons of the GFFA are so hideously powerful that you don't get wounded - you just die. Yet Denning proceeds to write Star Wars fights like medieval brawls, with even the victorious combatant cut up all over and in agony. It just does not fit at all.

Ultimately I give Crucible a 3/10 and only that much because ultimately, it inflicts no real damage on the universe as a whole - Force philosophy is cheap, anything that has been said can and will be reinterpreted in about two weeks - and at the end of the novel the Big Three do finally arrange for a stage exit, as the novel promised from the outset. This is not the send off I would have wished for the OT mains, but it could have been worse.

 

Average score: 133.45/28 = 4.77

 

This started well, thats the best thing I can say about it really. I liked the idea of the Qrephs going head to head with Lando in an attempted economic takeover of not only Lando's holdings, but obviously a larger plot that would have seen them use their considerable wealth and power to make an attempt at taking over the galaxy.

Economic war could be just what the Star Wars Universe needed. It felt fresh, interesting and new and I found myself really sucked in and impressed by the basic premise.

I liked Omad Kaeg, despite him being Han Solo 2.0. I liked Denning using Mirta Gev and even found her decently written throughout the novel. I liked how he included Vestara at first, telling readers who she is without saying her name. I even liked Luke training Bhixen. All that worked. The set up was by and large very good. But then we get past page sixty or so and it is virtually all downhill from there.

I just don't think I have the words to describe it in adequate fashion. We suddenly shift from a somewhat interesting political thriller, to explosions, death, chaos and just a lot of general non sense. Han, Leia and Luke are put through a grater for lack of a better term - they get blown up, shot, broken, stabbed, scalped, scarred, burned, mind probed, concussed, more. Han gets a new eye, Leia gets her eyes repaired, Han gets a cane to hobble around on. So on.

Then later we get to visualize Luke and Leia with burns to like 50% of their bodies(its alright, they are Jedi) and Leia with her face half burned off, with half her hair left(I can't recall if it was the left half or the right half) - a scenario which lasts for basically the rest of the book from that point on. She was turned into some kind of visual monster that no one would want to look at much less visualize - and Luke wasn't in any better shape.

Then Han gets given a Wookiee leg and Leia grows scales.(No, this actually happens, though arguably as a part of some kind of pseudo world where up is down and down is up). Anyway the scales go well with Leia's new hairstyle.

At least both Gev & Vestara escape so that another author can maybe have the opportunity to do something with their potential. And they do so without being forced through the house of mirrors, a bonus to be certain.

1/10

 

Yeah this was a horrible book. The fact that Luke is retiring at the darkest time maybe in history second to the empire's reign.. maybe if not worse than that. It is ridiculous.

 

Average score: 134.45/29 = 4.64

 

This book is on my to read list. I 'multi-task' my reading ... often a few books at a time. Currently reading the authorised biography of Neil Armstrong whilst on holiday, I have started 'Kenobi', that is at home.

Just checking in here, to see what the average score is like ... the current average score is a TERRIBLE indication of what I am to expect. Such a shame...

 

A typical Denning novel, Crucible is a huge disappointment. Whether it be Luke's god-awful handling of the kid in the beginning, the violence-for-violence-sake orgy scenes, severely rewriting characters to fit an overly sexualized version of women, or just plain retconning the retcons of retcons--all Denning seems to do--this book fails to deliver on its initial promise: to have a good, economic war or spat. It does retire Han, Leia, and Luke, but then, it does little else, except have Luke "discover" what Vergere and Jacen told him in The Unifying Force. Essentially, we're back to the same place we were at at the end of TUF, only we lost more interesting characters. 1/10

 

Average score: 135.45/30 = 4.52

 

to me all of Dennings books are much better than this one. This was just awful

 

The only Denning books I will read from now (after my Post NJO readthrough) on are Star By Star, Recovery and maybe Tatooine Ghost.

 

A terrible, terrible note on which to effectively end the Star Wars Expanded Universe, Crucible is a mess of bad ideas, stupid plotting, poor characterization, and general sloppiness. Denning has a few good ideas here and there, but they're consistently drowned out by badness. I'll start off with what I liked: there were a couple effective action scenes, but mostly I liked the fact that Denning used Vestara and Mirta as recurring villains. I'd rather see Mirta as an ally than a villain, but she slotted into the villain role without a ton of trouble, being an all-business mercenary who has the potential to slip from ally to antagonist and back again fluidly, and the main thing is that I just like having supporting characters actually stick around in the cast. But having recurring villains is just a great way to help build out an era, and while that potential may never be used now, it was a good idea at the time. The sabacc sequences, and the idea of question sabacc, also had some good concepts, but suffered from being deployed in ways that didn't make any particular sense.

Now on to the much longer list of the bad. The villains are stupid. Everybody spends the entire book fawning over how brilliant they are, but aside from the book repeatedly lecturing us on their literal and metaphorical giant brains, it's never actually shown. Their plans are stupid and dependent on brute force and they never give the sense of being multiple steps ahead of the heroes, probably because Denning doesn't craft intelligent plots well. He's basically dependent on stomping on the story until it fits into the box he wants it in, which is rarely that interesting of a box anyway. Also the entire nature of the villains as a threat is stupid; the idea that a couple crooks are going to corner the entire galactic economy is a total joke, and never has anything to even really do with the actual plot aside from giving them a reason to bother Lando. But as soon as Han shows up, that entire plot is out the window and they just nab him and ignore Lando. Some multitaskers, these geniuses.

That's symptomatic of the plot in general, which doesn't flow so much as it jerks spastically from event to event without Denning ever really even caring about the connective tissue. A good example is the question sabacc that goes on for a chapter without making a whole lot of sense why they're playing sabacc, but at least there's a set of rules set up and we understand what's going on. But then when we come back, it's torture sabacc and there are a bunch of new people in the room and everything is different, but there's absolutely no explanation of why any of this has changed or what the point is. And then a chapter or two later, there's an offhand mention that they changed to torture sabacc because one of the new guys wanted to, but we still never learn what the **** the new guys are doing there or why the masterminds would have changed it to suit him. It's just haphazard and dimwitted plotting all around.

This all leads up to the finale, which is stupid. Denning doesn't know how to write dream-logic bizarro-worlds, so setting it in one is an obvious mistake. The whole idea of the monolith as the central McGuffin of the book is just stupid, because in no way does it provide a satisfying anything and Denning isn't even willing to commit to anything about it or its significance; it's just an excuse to be weird and some vague nod at the big deal he made of Mortis without being at all interesting in itself. But the ending is just a total mess of stupidity and half-baked Force philosophy, a subject at which Denning is absolutely terrible, leading abruptly and wholly arbitrarily to an announcement of retirement without that having any actual logic behind it in the narrative itself. Denning can't structure a book to build up to anything or around anything, to have ideas or a theme, and he can't write atmosphere at all. So when he tries to mimic the cheer-after-an-ordeal communal warmth and optimism of TUF and VOTF, it falls flat because he can't bring out any larger sense of genuine emotion. And it's weird because I recall how effective an author Denning could be with SBS, and it's like it all just . . . went away.

Of course, one of the problems with nailing any sense of atmosphere or emotion is that Denning can't nail the characters. Everybody feels flat and off. Denning only hits the one note of worry about his awesome, mighty villains, and skips any other kind of characterization, really. But Luke and Leia both once more come off as heartless, vengeance-obsessed jerks, everything about them completely missed and mangled. And it's clear that Denning is trying to make Han the emotional heart of the novel, but it just doesn't land because he can't do anything genuinely interesting with him (and it's constantly undermined by Denning's refusal to give non-Force-sensitives any kind of role in doing anything and his constant amazement that they're even able to breathe the same air as Jedi [remember when the leader of the Jedi squadron in SBS was a non-Force-sensitive who just happened to be a badass pilot and volunteered to lend a hand? {seriously why have we never seen Rigard Matl ever again?}]). Denning refuses to give anyone else, even Lando, much of a role in the novel. Ben's got about one nice chapter, but otherwise everyone else is really an extra. Sidelining Lando here is just awful, but it's not as hilarious as how badly Denning handles Omad Kaeg. Denning keeps deliberately setting up Omad as the new Han Solo -- the point of out-and-out having characters remark, "He's just like Han!" to themselves constantly, but he's not even interested enough in him to do anything beyond that. Omad's irrelevant to pretty much everything that happens and never gets any kind of starring sequence to show off why he might be the new Han, to establish himself as a memorable character to take seriously. Denning's trying to set him up as some kind of major contrast/complement to Han as his younger version in a novel that's theoretically about the big three retiring while simultaneously completely ignoring him as much as possible. That's really all you need to know about the total incompetence with which the book is constructed.

The book just doesn't function; it doesn't come together into anything. It's not good at characterization, at plotting, at prose, at action, at universe-building. It's outright bad at most of them. It's narratively a mess, thematically empty, reliant on incredibly stupid villains. It's full of bizarre creepiness that serves no purpose and pointless carnage handled with all the gravity of the characters eating breakfast. Pretty much every new idea with which it comes up is stupid and silly. I will say that I went in expecting stupidity and miserabilist universe-wrecking wretchedness on the level of Apocalypse, and didn't find it, but that's the best defense it's got. As an ordinary one-off Star Wars novel, it would be an embarrassment. As the end of an era, both for the big three and the EU, it's a crushing disappointment, a massive missed opportunity, and a reminder of just how badly the universe has been squandered in Denning's hands.

1.3/10

 

Average score: 136.75/31 = 4.41