Domenic Denicola
This book was getting some hype on Twitter so I tried it. I don’t know if that was a great decision.
To start with the positive, after I pushed myself through the first 25% I was sufficiently hooked that I powered through the rest in one day. The character concepts are good, and the setting and realism are solid. The structure of the novel being focused tightly around three characters is enjoyable.
But the writing… It feels very “young adult”. A first-person narration where the narrator character is constantly expositing robs the setting of any mystery. And the way he keeps voicing his same thoughts to the reader, over and over, is tiresome. He’s constantly horny, mean, arrogant, self-loathing, oblivious… and just finding more and more ways to tell us this. This is what makes the first portion of the book so frustrating, as until the other two characters get introduced and given some depth and agency, you’re just struggling to care about his moping internal monologue. Which, to be clear, continues being ridiculous through the whole book! There’s just more going on to pull you along as a reader through that narrative sludge.
And yet, I became sufficiently attached to the characters and setting that I’ll probably pick up the forthcoming rest of the series. I just might kind of hate myself while doing so.
Having finished this first real attempt at post-Return of the Jedi stories in the new canon, I am predictably disappointed.
This new universe doesn't have room for the kind of expansive tales that the now-Legends universe of my childhood did. It's clear that the main characters (Luke, Leia, and Han) are off-limits to the author; they can do nothing notable since their past is reserved for the movie-script-writers. There are no new or innovative villains, but instead simple ones vaguely gesturing toward the future threat of the First Order. There can be no exploration of the nature of the Force, the establishment of a new Jedi order, or exotic alien threats. All of that would interfere with the backdrop for the new movies, and is thus outside the realm of the new EU.
Instead, we get a story about a new set of nobodies pursuing short-term objectives, and accomplishing foregone conclusions. The author tries to make them sympathetic and interesting, but in the end they're not our Star Wars characters from the movies; they're the author's inventions, who we know will not be carried forward unless this particular author writes yet more novels. This can be done well (see the now-Legends Rogue Squadron novels), but in this case it wasn't, perhaps due to Wendig's young-adult-novel writing style.
Given this precedent, I don't see a way forward for the new canon to achieve anything like the breadth and depth of the Legends Universe. The filmmakers clearly want to be unrestricted, leaving the books to fill in their wake instead of interleave into a single shared universe. Books in the new canon may provide an interesting diversion, but they won't recapture what we had.
As such, for fans like me who want an expansive Star Wars universe, it's best we return our attentions to the old Legends universe. We can re-read the stories it provides, while accepting the fact that its timeline will not continue indefinitely as we'd hoped.
Having finished this first real attempt at post-Return of the Jedi stories in the new canon, I am predictably disappointed.
This new universe doesn't have room for the kind of expansive tales that the now-Legends universe of my childhood did. It's clear that the main characters (Luke, Leia, and Han) are off-limits to the author; they can do nothing notable since their past is reserved for the movie-script-writers. There are no new or innovative villains, but instead simple ones vaguely gesturing toward the future threat of the First Order. There can be no exploration of the nature of the Force, the establishment of a new Jedi order, or exotic alien threats. All of that would interfere with the backdrop for the new movies, and is thus outside the realm of the new EU.
Instead, we get a story about a new set of nobodies pursuing short-term objectives, and accomplishing foregone conclusions. The author tries to make them sympathetic and interesting, but in the end they're not our Star Wars characters from the movies; they're the author's inventions, who we know will not be carried forward unless this particular author writes yet more novels. This can be done well (see the now-Legends Rogue Squadron novels), but in this case it wasn't, perhaps due to Wendig's young-adult-novel writing style.
Given this precedent, I don't see a way forward for the new canon to achieve anything like the breadth and depth of the Legends Universe. The filmmakers clearly want to be unrestricted, leaving the books to fill in their wake instead of interleave into a single shared universe. Books in the new canon may provide an interesting diversion, but they won't recapture what we had.
As such, for fans like me who want an expansive Star Wars universe, it's best we return our attentions to the old Legends universe. We can re-read the stories it provides, while accepting the fact that its timeline will not continue indefinitely as we'd hoped.
This is exactly the genre of science fiction that I like to read: using the future to explore themes of identity, consciousness, artificial intelligence, and the nature of reality. It wasn't as “deep” as some works in this vein (like those of Greg Egan), and sometimes the characters rushed too readily to conclusions which I thought warranted more investigation. But it was a page-turner, keeping me engaged all the way through with cliffhanger chapter-endings that repeatedly rushed from crazy scenario to new revelations.
I'd only caution that the opening chapters, in particular, are fairly gross, with unnecessarily-gory or fetid descriptions of the protagonist's unpleasant situation and the ways he has to cope with it. If you can get past those, you'll likely enjoy the rest.