Book 46: The Last Command by Timothy Zahn

Time to finish off another series.  Seems like I've been doing a lot of that lately.  This one will mark the end of my Star Wars reading for a while.  It's been fun and I'm looking forward to the ending, so here we go.

467 pages makes 67 pages per day.


REVIEW:

This was a great finale to a great series.  Finally all of the various plotlines from the first two books are resolved.  The things that were great about the first two books are here as well: characters are written well, stories are complex and interesting, battles are exciting, dialogue is well-written and meaningful.  Some of my favorite parts of this book are the Jedi battles.  In this slightly-expanded Star Wars universe there are already several Jedi or Jedi-in-training: Luke, C'boath, Leia, Mara Jade.  Between them there are at least 3 lightsabers (one of which has a cool history!).  So the final battle between the good Jedi and the bad is exciting and engaging.  This, coupled with the ending of the other plotlines made the conclusion of this series quite satisfying.

The only part of the ending that I thought was not perfect was the space battle.  It built up and built up into a huge event, but eventually ended quite abruptly, with some major events happening "off-screen". This made it a little less satisfying, but still not bad.  The good part about having a well-written ending is that you could easily stop reading here and be finished with Star Wars.  It provides a nice resolution to the film series as well as this series.  Unfortunately, for me, I'm even more interested in the other Star Wars books now and I would actually like to continue reading these.  I know that at some point they become a little silly and I would like to stop before then, but I might give the next few books a try sometime.

Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys Star Wars and, more inclusively to anyone who enjoys science fiction.  There is enough here to engage even those people who are not really into Star Wars and it can be enjoyed as much as any other Space Opera type book.

8 out of 10.

Book 36: Dark Force Rising by Timothy Zahn

What's this?  A Star Wars book?  Yes, I felt it was time for a bit of fluff.  I like to read a few of these kinds of books now and then just for fun.  The series (this is the second book) starts about 5 years after The Return of the Jedi and continues the story from there.  Other than the original films, these are the best Star Wars stories I know of.  Instead of the prequel trilogy, Lucas should have filmed these.  I've read this set a long time ago and wanted to re-read them.  Before my little project here started I read the novelization of the prequel movies, the original movies and these seemed like the logical place to go from there.

At 440 pages it's only 63 pages per day.  Shouldn't really be a problem.


REVIEW:

This is the second of the Thrawn trilogy of Star Wars books.  It picks up where the last left off.  Leia and Chewbacca are on a mission to try to recruit a mysterious species for the New Republic while Luke, Han and Lando are searching for a long lost fleet of starships that could turn the course of the conflict between them and the remnants of the Empire.

The best part of these books are the characters.  Zahn writes the heroes exactly as you remember them from the movies.  Their personalities fit perfectly.  His new characters, especially his villain, Grand Admiral Thrawn, are well fleshed-out and believable with realistic personalities and motives.  Thrawn as a villain is way above what you would expect from a Star Wars novel.  He is well-cultured, subtle, intelligent and devious.  There are plenty of times when the heroes are one step ahead of him, but many other moments that he outwits them.

There are plenty of plots and counterplots to weave, on both sides, in this book.  It reads as a kind of treasure hunt.  Both sides are looking for the same thing, the Dark Force, a fleet of 200 powerful dreadnoughts, and they bounce around the galaxy following leads and false-leads.  As the end of the book approaches it turns into a race, the victor of which may tilt the balance of power in their favor.

Another thing that I particularly like is the level of detail included in Zahn's universe.  Zahn describes things like spacecraft controls, weapons effects and even Luke's Jedi powers in very believable and engaging ways.  It makes the experience much more immersive when these details are done right.

Overall, the book is a lot of fun.  The characters are accurate and familiar, the villain is sufficiently devious and challenging and the action is non-stop.  If they would make this trilogy into movies it would be many times better than Episodes 1-3.

9 out of 10.

Book 25: Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov

Back to some good, old-school sci-fi.  This is the second of the Foundation series and I really enjoyed the first.  This one is supposed to be about the meeting between the Foundation and the old Galactic Empire.  For being such a famous series (in sci-fi circles, at least) I know very little about these books.

What I do know is that it's only 272 pages.  So that's a very easy 40 pages per day.

REVIEW:  As mentioned, this is the second volume of the series and I found it to be quite a bit weaker than the first.  Part of the concept of the series is that the founder of the Foundation predicted, mathematically, the fall of the Galactic Empire and, to forestall some of the worst of the resulting chaos, established the Foundation to harbor the most advanced of the Empire's technology and plant a seed to rebuild society at an accelerated rate.

Because the founder has predicted, scientifically, the future path that his new society will take, it just remains for events to unfold and for the Foundation to grow and overcome challenges that present themselves.  This leads to a bit of a problem though, as far as a story goes.  Because the future has been decided the actions the Foundation takes and the results of those actions start to feel like destiny and there is no real need to do anything as a feeling of "it will all work out in the end" pervades.  Even the characters in the book seem to feel this way and it becomes a little boring.

Now it could be that the first half of the book is written this way to set things up for the second half, which picks up the pace considerably.  But, even given this, you're still stuck with a boring half-a-book.  For some reason, Asimov even has the climax of the first part of the book take place off-screen.  There is a big conflict building but, just as it is about to unfold, you see what happens... from the point of view of some characters that happen to be half a galaxy away... watching it on the news.  No spaceship battles, no planetary invasions, just a ticker telling what happened.

The second half was much more interesting and seemed to take things in a different direction, so that kept things interesting, and it seems to lead directly to the third book in the series.  So, I suppose I'll continue on with the story for one more book.  Overall, though, this one was significantly less interesting than the first book:  6 out of 10.

Book 12: Hellstrom's Hive by Frank Herbert

Time for a bit of weird science fiction.  I know it's going to be weird because it's Frank Herbert and, while his Dune series is very well constructed, his other works of fiction tend to be decidedly odd.  From the back cover:

"A team of government operatives is sent to invade the site of Dr. Hellstrom's secret Project 40.  What they find are specially bred scientists with huge heads and stunted legs who develop weapons that hum with deadly insect venom... chemically neutered workers capable of poisoning the world ... hidden tunnels immune to atomic fission ... hormones for ecstatic sensual pleasures ... and the vats -- where everyone finally ends to nourish future generations of Hellstrom's horrifying hive."

Sounds like good stuff!  312 pages in this one which makes about 45 pages per day.

REVIEW: Lots of nudity, crazy cultists, selective breeding, experimental human societies and secret government agencies, in short, almost everything you could want from a good old classic sci-fi book. There are a number of themes that this book has in common with Herbert's masterpiece, Dune, particularly, the secret human colonies and selective breeding programs. After getting used to his writing style again, I found myself getting more and more into this book. Most of it reads like a government spy thriller. A secret government agency has discovered some evidence of strange goings-on at a remote farm in Oregon, they send agents to investigate who never return so they become more and more invested in trying to uncover their secrets until a major conflict is imminent. It was very tense and very interesting. Herbert has a way of making even his most unusual ideas seem, not only pausible, but realistic. I'm a big fan of this author and this was another great one from him. The ending was a little abrupt however and you wish it would go on for another 50 pages or so... even so, I'd give this one a 9/10.   

Book 1: "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov

For a science-fiction book published in 1951, this book was surprisingly not-dated.  The only part that felt a little out of date was the over-optimism about atomic power.  Asimov seemed to feel that nuclear power was the answer to most of humanity's problems and their key to the future.

Again, I'm reading a book that is the first in a series.  In this case it's a much more extensive series encompassing at least 7 novels, more if you include other authors writing sequels.

This book was so good, in fact, that I finished it in 3 days.  Leaving some extra time for my next, dreaded, book... Dickens.