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.