People who read Bantam and then the NJO: what do you think of it now?(spoilers welcome)

for u pple... who were reading NJO after reading batham's SW bks.... wat do u think of NJO now?
well at first i thought that NJO SUCKED! Esp Vector Prime... i believe that lot's of other pple who read that might agree with me... but now after reading traitor & DW i find that the NJO series now is damn gd...



Cleaning up the title. While it's not against the rules to use AIM talk (or whatever you want to call it) most people here really don't like it.

 

ugh, the AIM talk!! get it away, get it away!!!


and batham? do you mean bantam? anywhoo, i enjoyed it. theres not really much of a difference.

 

Well I grew up with the bantom books and absoultly loved them (minus BFC, but thats another topic).
I also didn't like VP, but after I read the dark tide duology I became hooked.

 

I absolutely like Bantam-era books even more now that I see the alternative.

Give me Troy Denning & Matt Stover writing in the Bantam sandbox any day!

 

ugh, the AIM talk!! get it away, get it away!!!

Yeah, I hate people who can't spell right, either...or use proper capitalization.

 

I started reading Star Wars during the Bantam era, and I liked those books. I continued reading the NJO and I enjoy it as well. They are different but they are both Star Wars to me.

 

I like the Bantam books a lot. I grew up with Bantam liking all of them excluding Planet of Twilight and The New Rebellion.

I hate using the character map, but I can't make much noise right.

 

I liked the Bantam range and like many others grew up reading them, but IMO the line got a little stale towards the end. The NJO, far from perfect as it is, took SW lit in a fresh new direction and I enjoy it just as much as Bantam in it's heyday.

And with Clone Wars round the corner the future looks promising too.

 

I loved the bantum books. Especially the X-Wing novels, and anything by Tim Zahn. When I first read VP, I was ready to quit reading Star Wars books. But after reading the next several books, I decided that as a whole I like the NJO better. While the writing may not be up to par (although when you include Crystal Star, Darksaber, and Children of the Jedi, it brings the Bantum books down a bit) I like the fact that the entire story arc has been planed out from the start. I gives you the feeling that your reading a grand scale epic, rather than a bunch of stories forced together in a timeline.

 

I started reading the Bantam series in '91 or '92. The early ones were really great. I read virtually all of them up till '97 at which point I quit reading Star Wars altogether because it seemed like every book was terrible.
Move forward to december 2002. I see that they started the New Jedi Order so I try it starting with Vector Prime. I havent looked back since.

Conclusion:
Early Bantam books were great, later ones really sucked. NJO revived my interest. It's great....except for killing my favorite character (anakin).

 

Bantam:

1990-1994: Mostly very good.

1994-1996: Went off the rails with stories of various quality. XW a rare gem in this period.

1997-1998: Bought it all together with excellent stories and link ups, primarily by XW and Tales series. Thus creating a roughly coherent arc story of the Civil War.

NJO:

Promised much, delivered little. Each author seems to do their own thing without reference to the others, which begs the question of what was the point? I was actually looking forward to a well-planned, well-executed sequential story, each segment building on the next, I haven't got this.

Clone Wars:

I'm looing forward to this as being what NJO should have been, with DHC showing how a comic epic can be integrated into the main story like KJA did with TOTJ/JAT but on a much bigger scale.

Conclusion: Given the amazing flexible continuity in NJO, Bantam is looking equal to NJO in terms of character consistency. As for the complaint Bantam is all about the Empire, one response is that is not wholly true - BFC, CT, POT, the other reply is NJO is all about the Vong, so what's your point?

Jedi Ben

 

Nyax, Vergere (and Zonoma Sekot) or the Peace Brigade aren't Vong. Neither is the Dark Side and the conflict it causes Jedi like Jaina. So, that NJO criticism of the NJO being "all Vong" falls equally flat.

 

So I've got 3, you've got 3, all we've got is a mutual cancel out which was the original point I was making!

Jedi Ben

 

To me: Star Wars is Star Wars is Star Wars.

It all seems the same, essentially. The NJO is a series. Obviously it's going to be different than stand-alone novels no matter who publishes them.

I don't think we can judge the difference until some Del Rey stand-alones come out.

And besides, it's the same authors (mostly), the same LFL crew, so really, I don't predict a whole lot of differences.

 

Well put Lexu, we have nothing to judge the PT novels against, and until we get some stand alones we don't have too much to judge the OT on. I haven't read Tatooinne Ghost, but I'd still like to have more than one novel to go on before I say 'The new Del Rey stuff sucks next to the Bantam line' or anything like that.

 

Bantam = Ok, except for the standout X-Wing series, which I love.

NJO = Pretty flat at the beginning, very nice now. The books have definitely been going on an up curve.

PT = Meh.

 

I LOVE THEM ALL!!!

 

Ballantine's Del Rey and Bantam aren't that different. It's just a couple of different guys saying "change this sentence!"

 

I liked the Bantam books - most of them anyway - even if they were very formulaic. However, I'm slowly developing a dislike for the NJO.

 

I liked the Bantam books alot, but the NJO swept me of my feet. I now love the NJO more than all the Bantam books combine.

 

I have read maybe half of the published novels, and am only missing three of the already published NJO.

Being that the individual authors of the post-ROTJ era weren't working with anything beyond the broadest timeline, they didn't do too badly, although how many times can Leia or the kids get kidnapped in one lifetime?

I agree with others who have said that Zahn's books and the X-Wing novels by Stackpole and Allston were the standouts of that era of SW publishing. Working with the same characters (heroes and villians) and a closer, tighter timeline, and not being limited by which characters they could kill off gave the X-Wing series more depth that most of the other Bantam novels.

They had to time to develp original characters and make the reader care about them, only to sacrifice them later in the story: a case in point being Ton Phanan.

It also allowed the author(s) to create more complex plots and resole issues from one novel a few books later, which I really enjoyed.

Actually, the Zahn stories and the X-Wing series sort of read like a vision of the future of SW publishing, a precursor to the way NJO would be done, with a tighter, longer storyline, and authors less constrained not to knock off popular characters, which elements of realism I appreciate as a fan of literature.

Outside of those books, I'm very fond of Kube-MacDowell's Corellian trilogy, which contained the seeds of Anakin's destruction in SbS. Pretty cool, tying that story into the NJO.

Yeah, sorry about the long-windedness. I'm a writer.

*Derisa*

 

I like the Bantam era and NJO the same. Even though NJO has a darker tone to it, it's a nice change of pace.

 

Do we have a list of how many times the kids were kidnapped? I know for sure in tCS, and a few unsuccesful attempts in TTT. In the corellian trilogy, they weren't kidnapped by thrackan as much as they were confined. But everyone was seperated or in a bad way at that point in the trilogy, so i don't see it as too gratuitous. In the JAT the only one I can remember is when the caridans go after anakin. Any more? (so far there is only one actual kidnapping to my knowledge)

 

how about NJO? Jacen was held by the vong ...
Besides The Crystal Star i can't remember any other novel where the solo kids were clearly kidnapped...