The Best and Worst Novels of the Old Star Wars EU

[WillieMorgan]

I'm not sure how many people will have read these or even care much anymore but I'll try this anyway.

So, the old SW EU is dead. It was doomed even before the ink dried on Disney's acquisition papers. This was a shame in many ways. Some of it was pretty damn good and, as I'm sure we all know, investing years of your life and good money on a fictional reality only to have it taken away from you does not feel nice. On the other hand, some of those novels were rubbish. Little better than fan-fiction sometimes. So what are your favourite, and least favourite, novels of the old SW EU and why? Obviously much of it was published in trilogies and the like so series of books count also.

Best - Cloak Of Deception by James Lucerno.

This was a prequel novel to The Phantom Menace that I vastly preferred to The Phantom Menace. Not difficult I know. Lucerno did a good job here in making the book fit in well with the original post-ROTJ EU.

Worst - The Bounty Hunter Wars trilogy by K.W. Jeter

Not one of the obvious turkeys, I know. This was so dry and laborious to read though that I abandoned the series midway through the second book and chucked them away.

[sunofdarkchild]

Best...I'd again have to go with the original Thrawn trilogy and the Jedi Academy trilogy. I also really liked certain individual books from the New Jedi Order series, the best being Traitor. All had great villains and interesting plots that moved the franchise forward.

Worst...The Courtship of Princess Leia and the entire Legacy of the Force series. Despite introducing Hapes and especially Dothamir, Courtship is a surprisingly lousy story. Han somehow becomes the owner of a planet and kidnaps Leia there to make her fall in love with him. I thought the movies established that she already was, making the entire book unnecessary even if the story had been any good. The characterization is off. The dialogue is terrible. Legacy of the Force is even worse because someone decided that what the EU needed was to remake the prequels of all things while killing off half the cast and retconning the best parts of their last epic years-long story to be the opposite of what they originally were, thereby taking the whole franchise backwards.

[Jekyll]

I am interested in some recommendations. I have tried several Star Wars books and have not finished a single one because they have been very slow/dull/ uninteresting.

The Thrawn Trilogy I heard such good things about it and I gave it a try and just could not get through it.

Obi Wan Kenobi is my favorite character and I tried several books with him and again they were just dull.

[ChrisIII]

Regarding Obi-Wan, the best is probably "Kenobi", one of the last books released before the canon overhaul. Basically it deals, in part, with Obi-Wan's early years on Tatooine where he befriends a local family.

Most of his other appearances are Clone Wars or prequel related, and are a bit of a mixed bag.

[BeastieRunner]

The only ones I've revisited and still do are Shadows of the Empire and Shatterpoint.

I have a fondness for Children of the Jedi because it's so weird and different.

I enjoyed the Rouge Squadron stuff with Wedge because he's my favorite but I wouldn't call it the best.

The rest is either too fan fictiony or just recycled OT plots with new moving parts.

[ChrisIII]

Prequel-era, the Republic Commando novels were pretty good (although it was some of the first continuity to be bulldozed by "Clone Wars" long before Disney) as are Cloak of Deception and the first Darth Maul books are good lead-ins to TPM, and help the plot make a bit more sense.

Outbound Flight was also pretty good and tied Zahn's backstory for Thrawn with more of the prequel continuity, although I didn't agree with Zahn's choice to make C'aboth just as nuts as his later clone.

Yoda: Dark Rendevous was also pretty good. The Medstar series is OK, but it helps to read it with the Maul book and the later Coruscant nights series, as they deal with many of the same characters.

Rogue Planet just seemed a bit strange, I guess it was trying, in part, to tie in with the NJO with the living starship stuff.

There's quite a few bad ones. The Approaching Storm is based on Mace's line about a "border dispute on Ansion" and it's pretty much as boring as it sounds. It's by frequent movie novelist Alan Dean Foster (Who ghost wrote the original Star Wars novel, and also more or less launched the EU novels in the first place with Splinter of the Mind's eye) but it's kind of dull.

The Cestus deception is an attempt at an Obi-Wan solo story set during the Clone Wars but just seemed kind of meh. Same with Jedi Trial, although it does attempt to explain how Corran Horn's grandfather could be a Jedi.

[WillieMorgan]

Other good stuff:

I enjoyed all the Timothy Zahn novels, especially the Thrawn trilogy. Outbound Flight was a good read also.
I enjoyed the Corellian Trilogy way more than expected. It started out slow but got interesting for me. The way the Correllian system was fleshed out was quite clever.
I only read the first two Republic Commando novels, but they were both quite worthy. I read the first of the series, Hard Contact, whilst staying with my Dad and his second wife in the French countryside. The main planet in the novel, Quilura, reminded me of my real world surroundings at the time. Really tranquil.
The two Barbara Hambly novels have a bad reputation but I found them perfectly adequate. They were quirky and different.

Other bad stuff:

They're an easy target but all the Kevin J. Anderson novels are pretty poor. Badly and very quickly written, with overly familiar plots and what I'd describe as lowest common denominator, cookie-cutter Star Wars.
The New Rebellion by Kristine Kathryn Rusch is outright terrible. Kueller has to be one of the poorest villains in the entire saga.
Ditto Prince Xizor. Any novel with him in it is pretty crap to be honest.