logo Sign In

star wars Bantam Books VS Random House Spoilers

Author
Time
 (Edited)

 

Is it just me or do Star Wars books start getting depressing after they went to Random House?

I have enjoyed most of the Bantam Books that I got like all the Timothy Zahn books the X-wing books the Han Solo trilogy and the JedI Academy all good.

But Random House.

Cloak of Deception

was boring. The Approaching storm boring. Darth Maul Shadow hunter ok but the other mane character Dies. Rogue planet ok but the living ship Dies. The new Jedi order Chewbacca Dies!!!!!!!!!!L L L L L L .

I should have stopped there but I did not believe that Chewbacca was truly dead , I thought the he was going to come back.

Then to make it worse Anakin Solo who Chewbacca died to save gets him self killed!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! At that point I threw the book at the wall and gave up on Star wars books. The only one I got after the was Tatooine Ghost I liked that I almost did not get it but it had Chewbacca on the cover so I thought it would be good. Is was good but not as enjoyable as some of the Bantam Books. What happened?

Author
Time
 (Edited)

The Bantam books are far from perfect, but I'll agree they're better than the books Del Rey puts out; the lack of the PT's existence during Bantam's run has something to do with that =D

The PT fanboys and their zealous obsession with forcing prequelisms into each and every era is one reason the Del Rey books suck - for me, at least. I can understand it if the story takes place during the PT timeframe, but anything beyond that is bullshit (the comics suffer from that too, though; it's not just a fault of the newer novels).

I will say, however, as one of many who loathes the New Jedi Order series, I did like the Yuuzhan Vong and their organic technology; a good idea that was realized very poorly.

Author
Time

I tend to blame the changing face of Star Wars more so than the change of publisher, as Duracell more or less put it.

There were some real stinkers by Bantam.  Most of them were written by Kevin J Anderson.

Althought, at this point in time, I'd probably rather have any of those hacks write the prequels than the ones we've got.

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!

 

Author
Time

It's really nice to read SW books that are not bogged down with prequelisms.  Even though some of the Bantam stuff isn't that great, it has a large advantage over anything more recent because of this.  Although, the New Jedi Order suxxor'd for quite different reasons; as the OP said it was depressing and stupid and weird and just didn't feel like 'Star Wars' at all.  That was definitely the place where I gave up on the novels.  Apparently, what came after that was even worse.

Also, the Vong were completely ripped off from Species 8472 from Star Trek: Voyager, who were much cooler.

Author
Time

I also find that I enjoy the earlier novels over the Del Rey.

The yuuzhan vong books were the first EU I read.

I thought it was so bad that I didnt read any others for over a year.

But, I did finally pick up the Thrawn trilogy and enjoyed that very much.

Author
Time

 Well for Kevin J Anderson I like the Jedi Academy.

Dark saber not so much.

As for combining PT with OT Tatooine Ghost was the best.

I will point out that Most of my SW books are on tape and CD

So they are abridged but I am a vary slow reader, and it cake forever to get threw book just reading them.

Now the tapes I got of Dark Empire that was good.

Author
Time

I gave up on SW novels several years into the Del Rey tenure. It just isn't Star Wars-it's some random other sci-fi book franchise now. Where's the spirit of the Daley books, the energy of Zahn? Even the worst of the Bantam books still remotely felt like they were in the SW universe.

VADER!? WHERE THE HELL IS MY MOCHA LATTE? -Palpy on a very bad day.
“George didn’t think there was any future in dead Han toys.”-Harrison Ford
YT channel:
https://www.youtube.com/c/DamnFoolIdealisticCrusader

Author
Time

red5-626 said:

 Well for Kevin J Anderson I like the Jedi Academy.

Dark saber not so much.

As for combining PT with OT Tatooine Ghost was the best.

I will point out that Most of my SW books are on tape and CD

So they are abridged but I am a vary slow reader, and it cake forever to get threw book just reading them.

Now the tapes I got of Dark Empire that was good.

Word to the wise: While I enjoy a lot of audio books and find some superior to the actual "text" version... the Bantam 3 hour abridgements of Star Wars books really suck.

I read and liked the Thrawn trilogy when it originally came out.  Then SW started to suck and I started to get tired of it.  Then I couldn't remember whether Thrawn was actually good, or if I was just drinking the Kool-Aid(TM) at the time, so I got the audio books.  I found them to be mostly terrible, but I know sharp abridgements can have that problem.  So I convinced my wife to read aloud (in the car, or whatever) the Thrawn books with me and I enjoyed them as well as I did in the early 90s.

So... give the actual books a try sometime.

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!

 

Author
Time

Ya I have been told that the abridgements can really suck.

But at the time I got my first audio books it was the only way I could ever have enjoyed them. I read slower then a first grader. It would take me forever just to finish a Junior novel. And I was a teenager at the time. and reading a action seen slow is really boring. So reading has never been that much fun for me I love Stories but reading no I even gave a text to speech program on my computer to read long documents. I can read when I have to but as for reading novels I am still so slow they suck. The words get in my way.

An audio book you turn it on close your eyes and watch the movie on the inside of your eyelids. A Book you have to look at words all the time.

Imagine watching the gout with the sound off and instead you have words like the opening crawl telling you all the dialog as will as the action, composted over top of the hole movie. And Imagine that if you stop looking at the words the movie will stop.

Author
Time

red5-626 said:

So reading has never been that much fun for me I love Stories but reading no I even gave a text to speech program on my computer to read long documents. I can read when I have to but as for reading novels I am still so slow they suck. The words get in my way.

An audio book you turn it on close your eyes and watch the movie on the inside of your eyelids. A Book you have to look at words all the time.

It's weird how someone can come to such different conclusions on some things.

I myself loathe audiobooks - I can't immerse myself into the world being described, and my mind just wanders, the reading becoming background noise to me. I've only been able to "read" two audiobooks, and that was by forcing myself to pay attention - to close my eyes as tightly as possible and turn the volume up as much as was necessary to drown out any outside sounds.

Good ol' fashioned books are far less daunting for me. I can get into them with a minimum of fuss and read them at my own pace. 

Author
Time

I think I told this story in another thread here, but after I gave up on Star Wars books mid 90s, I went to go work at Barnes and Noble where the entire staff, minus myself, were into "The Wheel of Time" series.  Peer pressure being what it is, I started reading them too.  I really enjoyed the series, but it was still being written (still is!) and so I never finished it.  Each book is about 800 pages in hardcover, and approaching or over 1000 in paperback.

5 years later my wife and I are about to go a 16 hour round trip road trip and we go to the library to see if there are any good audio books to take with us.  I see "The Eye of the World" which is the first book in the series and so we grab it.  It's abridged to 2 90 minute tapes- so 3 hours.  It's a long book, but I don't have a sense of how abridged this will be.  Most of my other experience with audiobook abridgements are from the 2 tape versions of the Star Wars bantam books I read in the mid 90s and then listened to later.  (It's amazing when you listen to an abridgement just how much they are able to shorten it without noticably losing whole scenes or chapters). 

To make a long story short (too late!), the 2 hour tape version was terrible and I found myself apologizing to my wife for having so strongly recommended it.  It made me think, "have my tastes changed so much in the past few years?"  Upon returning it to the library, I saw that they had a 27 disc, 30+ hour version of it on CD.  I started to listen to it on my commute to work and found everything I had ever loved to still be in the book, albeit only in the unabridged version.  3 hours from 30+, meaning the 2 tape version was a mere 10% of the length of the full version.

IT'S MY TRILOGY, AND I WANT IT NOW!

"[George Lucas] rebooted the franchise in 1997 without telling anyone." -skyjedi2005

"Yeah, well, George says a lot of things..." a young 1997 xhonzi on RASSM

"They're my movies." -George Lucas. 19 people won oscars for their work on Star Wars (1977) and George Lucas wasn't one of them.

Rewrite the Prequels!

 

Author
Time

xhonzi said:

To make a long story short (too late!)...

+1 for Clue reference.

Author
Time

Of all the Bantam novels I bought, the only ones I bothered to keep were the five Thrawn books (the trilogy and the Hand of Thrawn two-parter) and the Han Solo trilogy by A.C. Crispin.  Everything else was more or less forgettable, or at least not worth the effort to preserve for future reading.

The only Del Rey books I bothered with were Outbound Flight and Survivor's Quest (because they addressed the Outbound Flight thread from the Thrawn novels).  The latter book didn't suffer from as much "prequelitis" as the former, which was set during the prequel era (as it was established that Outbound Flight had been launched during that period of time).  I'm really only keeping them because of their ties to the Thrawn novels.

There are 10 types of people in this world: those who understand binary, and those who do not.