I’m probably “preaching to the choir” here so-to-speak (I couldn’t think of a better expression), but I’ve noticed something weird while reading the Hand of Thrawn duology from the late 90’s. There’s the obvious flaws of the books, which is simply that they’re not as well written as the Thrawn trilogy, the plot is somewhat cluttered, not to mention a bit confusing at times, and the pacing is very slow. But one thing which really stands out to me is how many times the story just comes to a grinding halt in order to reference something from other EU stories. F.ex. there’s several pages where Luke and Mara Jade simply discuss the events of the Dark Empire comics. It has little to nothing to do with the overall plot, but it takes up a surprising amount of time. And that’s just one example, it also includes several characters from Stackpole’s X-Wing series, as well as a lot of references, mostly names, that barely have anything to do with the story. It probably made sense to fans who read these books back in 1997-1998, but now it’s very jarring. I’m assuming that this isn’t very unusual for books like these, but it suddenly occurred to me that the Thrawn trilogy does not do this. And other stories from the early 90’s that I’ve read does it to a much smaller and subtler degree. It makes sense that the Thrawn trilogy would’t reference anything but the OT movies as there wasn’t really any EU to reference yet. But even Dark Empire has very few references. Thrawn is briefly mentioned in the “opening crawl” in the first issue, but it’s not confusing. I had not read any Thrawn book when I first read Dark Empire, but I felt that the crawl sufficiently explain anything I needed to know, which was basically that; some Imperial named Thrawn caused a lot of trouble after ROTJ, then he was defeated, and shortly after the Empire re-took Coruscant. Simple, short, and I was up to speed on the current lore while still being allowed to focus on the story I was currently reading without having to go read something else first. With the Hand of Thrawn books that came out 7 to 8 years later on the other hand, I feel like in every other chapter I have to stop reading, pull out my phone and look up some name or event on Wookieepedia. I am well aware of the convoluted nature of the EU, but this is really the first time it has been so apparent to me while reading a novel. I honestly expected references to be subtler or more naturally incorporated into the narrative.
Is it just Zahn who did this in his later SW-related books, or is this common in the other books as well? I imagine this is the biggest problem with EUs in general, when they get cluttered you loose the space previously reserved for interesting and original stories and instead have to focus on putting them into an elaborate timeline in which multiple people have contributed to.
How is this in the new EU? I’m curious as I have not bothered to read any of the new material.
I’m also kind of surprised that I haven’t noticed this before, hence why I’m wondering if the Hand of Thrawn books are an exception. (I’ve read a handful of novels and comics, as well as played a lot of the games from the early 2000’s, but apart from planets being references to previous stories, I can’t remember any of them referencing EU characters, unless of course they’d been in the previous books/comics/games.)
