Review: Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis: Tyrant's Test by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

Mass market paperback, 366 pages
Published 1997
Acquired August 2010
Reread January 2016

Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis, Book Three: Tyrant's Test
by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

It all sort of fizzles out in Tyrant's Test. The last book ended with the promise of action; in this one, Han Solo spends 250 pages in space jail while Leia wrings her hands a lot and weathers an impeachment crisis. Then war is declared. C'mon, this is Star Wars; if you write a Star Wars trilogy where war isn't declared until page 250 of Book Three, you have grossly misunderstood the genre you are meant to be working in. I couldn't even explain to you what the 250 pages were filled with; nothing happened.

And once we get the war, it's not terribly exciting, because the New Republic succeeds through Luke suddenly turning up because the mysterious Force adepts he's been seeking the whole time are completely coincidentally from the same region of space the Republic is invading. Like, really? The Force adepts do all the day-saving, undermining what could otherwise be cool scenes, and making Luke come across as a condescending windbag to boot.

Even the initially interesting Lando plot just sputters to a conclusion, with the day-saving all done by characters who aren't Lando.

There are some good moments in this trilogy, but there's not enough of them to fill one book, much less three. Next time the boffins at TheForce.Net suggest some book I know I didn't like in 1997 is actually quite good, I'll stick to my initial impression and not expend effort rereading it to confirm what I already thought!

Review: Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis: Shield of Lies by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

Mass market paperback, 340 pages
Published 1996
Acquired 1996/97(?)
Reread January 2016

Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis, Book Two: Shield of Lies
by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

There are probably lots of Star Wars novels that follow three (or more) groups of characters having adventures in different parts of the galaxy. This is, as far as I know, the only one to admit that they are so unrelated that instead of bouncing from focal character to focal character, the book handles each character in one go. Of the book's 340 pages, the first 100 are in a section called "I. Lando," the next 100, "II. Luke," and the last 140 are "III. Leia." I can kind of imagine why you might want to do this-- even though the stories are happening simultaneously, they impact each other minimally at best-- but it has a negative effect. Jumping from plot to plot gives your story an (admittedly, artificial) energy, while sticking with each for a long stretch highlights just how little happens in it.

The Lando section was my favorite, but that maybe says more about how much I didn't like the other ones than how much I liked it. I mean, Lando continues to be the only interesting and active protagonist in this series, and reading about him at work is always enjoyable: I like how Kube-McDowell shows his slippery gambling mind in action. His repartee with Lobot is nice, Kube-McDowell has a good handle on the droids, and the mystery unfolds reasonably well: except that it's sooooo slooooow. I would be hard-pressed to explain how Kube-McDowell stretches wandering around a spaceship to 100 pages.

Luke's part was my least favorite. His search for his mother with Akanah has the potential to be interesting from a character perspective (even if we know that, as this book was released pre-Revenge of the Sith, he can never actually find her) but instead we are presented with the world's slowest search, accompanied by Akanah moralizing at Luke a lot. And many of the seeds for the Jedi pacifist morality that ruined the early New Jedi Order books were apparently sown here.

Finally, there's Leia's part, which continues the implausibly out-of-character depiction of her from Book One. Except that, while there she was making bad decisions, here she decides to make no decisions. Again, it's hard to account for how Leia constantly not making up her mind about things can somehow be made to last 140 pages. There's potentially something interesting here, about how you transition from being a group of terrorists to being a functioning state: as Rebels, Leia and company could attack whoever they needed to get the job done; as the New Republic, they don't have that luxury. But whatever is interesting here is buried, very deep. Though I did like the idea that the government of the New Republic has to be purposefully inefficient, because of the fear of the Emperor. (Kube-McDowell was right in 1996 about the fact that Palpatine would assume power by legitimate means.)

Kube-McDowell write good space battle scenes-- there are a couple here featuring the Fifth Fleet, as well as the one that opens Before the Storm-- with the choreography, logistics, and tactics well worked out, but his insistence on political realism undermines them, as none of our protagonists participate in them, all being back on Coruscant. Sure, that makes sense, but this is Star Wars, and these space battles would be ten times as good if someone I cared about was in them. Weirdly, the pivotal action scene that closes the book, the kidnapping of Han Solo, is over in about half a page, and none of it is seen from Han's perspective.

There is one saving grace to the whole Leia plot: Admiral Ackbar. Ackbar is a total badass here, the only character who knows what needs to be done and does it. The scenes where he befriends Plat Mallar, the only survivor of a genocidal Yevethan attack on the planet Polneye, as he recovers and then decides to enlist in the New Republic Navy, are a real highlight of the book, one of its few.

One final observation: "Leia was able to hold the meeting down to two hours" proves that Star Wars is fantasy if nothing else does.

Review: Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis: Before the Storm by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

Mass market paperback, 309 pages
Published 1996
Acquired June 2010
Reread December 2015

Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis, Book One: Before the Storm
by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

When I was a kid, I used to devour the Bantam Star Wars novels again and again. I owned most of them (my favorites were the X-Wing novels by Stackpole and Allston), and what ones I didn't own, I would check out from the library multiple times (like Crispin's Han Solo Trilogy). Thus I know I must not have liked The Black Fleet Crisis, as I only owned Book Two, and I am pretty sure I only checked Books One and Three out of the library once. But there's a contingent of posters on TheForce.Net's forums who consider these books the height of the Bantam era, and their comments began to wear on my mind and, starting to wonder if maybe I would like them more at 25 than I did at 11, I kept an eye out for used copies of Books One and Two with intentions of rereading the whole set.

So here I am at 30 finally reading them, and let me tell you, it's a little weird: this is the first "Legends" Star Wars fiction I've read since seeing The Force Awakens. Nothing in this book actually happened, even more than things normally don't actually happen in Star Wars. I kept comparing the choices Kube-McDowell and other Expanded Universe writers made in building up their post-Return of the Jedi universe to that of J. J. Abrams and Lawrence Kasdan in Episode VII. The most notable point of congruence is Luke's hermitage: in Episode VII, we learn that Luke has been living as a hermit for years. Here, in Before the Storm, Luke begins to withdraw from the world, starting to wonder if inaction is preferable to action, if Yoda and Obi-Wan didn't withdraw from the galaxy not to hide their powers, but because the longer a Jedi is in the world, the more it asks of him what he cannot give. I mean, maybe this is true... but how boring and how un-Luke-ish. The Luke of this book is a distant, cold, withdrawn figure, prone to using ostentatious illusions on the people who are supposedly his close friends, and that's not something I want to read about. Contrary to the stance Kube-McDowell takes here, Luke should be passionate, idealistic, and above all, active. I get that Kube-McDowell is trying to grow the character, but I think this neglects what makes him appealing. To be fair, I think most Expanded Universe writers who aren't Matt Stover neglected this. This move didn't bother me in The Force Awakens, but that's because there Luke is no longer the protagonist, he's the Obi-Wan figure to Rey's protagonist: this Luke is supposedly a protagonist, and no Star Wars novel should have a wannabe-hermit as a protagonist!

Only a week before I read Before the Storm, I read Cast No Shadow, which I recognized as a Star Trek take on Tom Clancy; The Black Fleet Crisis is very much a Star Wars take on Tom Clancy, full of military logistics and political details. Kube-McDowell has really thought out the way the New Republic might actually work, which I think is why the TFN readers like this book-- that's the kind of storytelling they're all into. But these details don't mean anything if they don't support a good story, and in this volume at least, they do not. Much of the book focuses on Leia's attempts to negotiate with the xenophoic Yevetha, and Leia is written as horrendously foolish. I get that Leia is an idealist, but as of when this book is set, she's been President of the New Republic for five years, and in politics for around eighteen; she wouldn't be this naive, nor could she have gotten this far ignoring the counsel of her trusted advisors as she repeatedly does here. It's poor writing to contrive a political crisis, and it makes the whole plot about the Yevetha and the Black Fleet fall flat. I did like the depiction of Han Solo, the ex-smuggler and ex-general, now stay-at-home dad. Han doesn't come across as put-upon or anything ridiculous like that; he's a former scoundrel doing his best to raise a family. The bit where his general's commission is briefly reactivated really worked, too. (And thank goodness that Kube-McDowell dispensed with the nonsense of earlier EU writers in having the Solos pack their children to be raised by strangers on distant worlds!)

The one thing I did like here was Lando. Despite his awesomeness, Lando rarely got good parts in EU novels, but this one puts that to rights-- and Kube-McDowell does understand what makes Lando tick, unlike Luke and Leia. I enjoyed almost everything Lando did, from breaking into a top-secret office just to ask for a challenge, to "stealing" R2-D2 and C-3PO from the Jedi Temple and his reflection that being trustworthy makes it easier to be a con man than ever! Him, Lobot (!), and the droids forming a little team trying to figure out the mysterious ghost ship that is the Teljkon vagabond is the best part of this book.