I am a child of the 1980s and 1990s, and like many, the first
movie I remember seeing is Star Wars: A
New Hope. I was that kid wore my VHS copies of those movies out, I played Star Wars with my friends, I had action
figures, I had Empire Strikes Back sheets
on my bed, etc. Later in life I read all the books in the Extended Universe
(through the whole Yuuzhan Vong thing) and somewhat tolerated Lucas’ shenanigans
with updating movies and the whole prequel thing.
But I had largely given up on Star
Wars. Part of it was age and simply moving on in life. Part of it was
realizing that all that came after just couldn’t live up to the magic of
original. But then something unexpected happened: my children started watching Star Wars and loving it. Suddenly I was
experiencing the wonder of Star Wars
through them – yes, even the prequels are wondrous to young kids. We’ve watched
the Clone Wars together and Star Wars Rebels, and my oldest and I
went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens
together. That was it, that was when I decided that Star Wars was back for me – in part because I wanted to support my
kids’ love of it, but a large part was that it reawakened that wonder for me as
well.
Of course life now is a lot crazier for me, so it’s a slow
process, but I have copies of audiobooks for several of the new canon Star Wars books and I started listening
to the Star Wars Aftermath Trilogy by Chuck Wendig.
First, I have to comment on the production of the audiobooks,
because it really impacts how I reacted to these. It is terrible in all the
worst ways of audiobooks. The voice acting narration by Marc Thompson is so
overdone that it’s nauseating and then they top that off with sound effects and
alien language, making the whole experience rather horrible. I barely made it
through the first chapter before stopping and swearing I couldn’t continue
because the production was just that awful. But Star Wars and all that…so I gave it another shot.
I learned to tolerate the production. That was the best I could
do. Sometimes I simply rolled my eyes at it, and sometimes I had to take long
breaks because it is really bad.
All this is very unfortunate, because I know that it influences
what I feel about the content of the stories. I can’t help but wonder how much
more enjoyable I would have found them if I read the books rather than listened
to the audio. But I can’t get that back, just know that my opinions of the
stories are heavily influenced by audio and not in a good way.
Basically, the books play out with a major imperial remnant in the
Outer Rim gathering its power and other remnants for a final confrontation with
the New Republic. Through this we see the liberation of a few planets, we see
the fledgling republic forming up its government, and we see old favorites like
Wedge, Han and Leia. We see that Palpatine had plans for the eventuality of his
death and how those come to shape, and we see a few very big battles. And
through all of the imperial happenings, a strong sense of mystery is present. I
believe that we get many hints of what is to come and how things shape up for
new movies we are getting now. We see some of the origin for the First Order
and maybe even the Knights of Ren. We see a lot of unrelated interludes that
don’t add anything to the actual events of the trilogy, but seem to setting
Easter Eggs for fans to feast upon. We notably do not get any hints of Luke
Skywalker and what he’s up to.
And of course Aftermath
introduces us to a new group of characters through which we see the end of the
imperial remnants after the events at Endor. My first reaction is that I found
it a bit hard to really become very emotionally invested in any of them – would
I have cared if they didn’t survive? I chalk this up mainly to the audio
production that I mention above. How can one become invested with such horribly
over-read dialogue and annoying sound effects?
Norra is a character that was always hit or miss with me through
the trilogy, Temmin is mostly an annoying teenager, but its overall a good
origin story for him and I hope we see something focused on him in the future. Mister
Bones is genuinely amusing and perhaps the one place where sound effects weren’t
absolutely horrible. Sinjir and Jas really steal the trilogy as the most
interesting pair – the way their friendship develops and plays off of each
other was by far my favorite parts of these stories.
I guess there is some controversy over the books among the insecure
Dudebros of the world and their objection to having a diversity of sexual
identity for the characters in these stories. I have zero sympathy for that
position and I’m very happy to see Star
Wars start to take its problematic misogyny, xenophobia, and shocking lack
of diversity for such a vast creation more seriously. The new movies take
things further, though there still remains a long, long way to go – hopefully the
movies can finally man-up with a nice LGBTQ star and relationship.
Overall, I enjoyed the further exploration of the Star Wars journey through this trilogy
as I loathed the audio production of it. In terms that I deal with, I would
place Aftermath as pretty decent
quality in relation to old Expanded Universe – better than a lot of it, but not
as good as the best of it.
I do plan to continue exploring the books of the new canon as I
have audio copies of several. I’m currently listening the audiobook of Bloodline by Claudia Gray and I plan on
either Thrawn or Ahsoka next. The audio production Bloodline is much better if still annoying at times. The audio
narration is orders of magnitude better, the sound effects are still there to
drag things down. So I think that this production will be less of a barrier as
a result.
Star
Wars Aftermath Trilogy
Aftermath: Amazon
Life Debt: Amazon
Empire’s End: Amazon
Other
Star Wars Books I Mention
Bloodline: Amazon
Thrawn: Amazon
Ahsoka: Amazon
