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Mandalore76 on 29 December 2017
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NightlyPoe said:
Mandalore76 said:

Agree to disagree on the Stackpole books.  I was reading all the EU books back then, because it was before the prequels, and it was the only Star Wars out there.  I read the X-Wing series up to "The Bacta War", and I didn't care for it much.  It was full of ridiculously contrived nonsense like mentioning an Alderaanian War Frigate "Another Chance" which was said to be "loaded with all of the weapons of Alderaan".  The Frigate was supposedly a "legendary myth" and then Rogue Squadron finds the Frigate a few pages later and adds it to their fleet.  After that, "The Phantom Menace" was out, and I could see Star Wars in the theater again.  The Kevin J. Anderson and Roger MacBride Allen books are total garbage.  I'm pretty sure that one of those 2 authors bragged in the Foreward that he wrote one of the books in a ridiculous short amount of time like it was some impressive feat worthy of bragging about.  The novel read like it was hastily written too.  Bantam Books didn't even bother to edit it.  I found a mistake on almost every page.  At one point, they interchanged the name of a planet with one of the main characters stating that the Millenium Falcon landed on her.  Another one of the books hopped from planet to planet that were used in the original trilogy to make the reader say, "oh cool it's Endor again!"  While back on Hoth, Luke encounters a one-armed Wampa.  Yep, the one he cut the arm off of in Empire Strikes Back.  In the intervening years, the one-armed Wampa had been teaching the other Wampa's guerrilla tactics and was leading them like a general in battles against big game hunters who had been coming to Hoth for trophies.  The only time I want to see Luke encounter the Wampa whose arm he cut off is on Robot Chicken.  Because at least RC isn't trying to pass itself off as serious.

  

You seem to have a faulty memory.  Wedge says immediately that the Another Chance had been found and its weapons added to the Rebellion years earlier, during the time of the Original Trilogy movies.  For the record, the Another Chance story was taken from a West End RPG story back in the early 90s before Zahn even started his work.  The transponder one of the pilots was using only happened to find one of the support ships waiting in Alderaan's debris field.  Contrived, perhaps, but they didn't stumble onto a legendary vessel.  The legend itself not living up to itself.

You're also conflating Darksaber (the whole Callista cycle was a debacle) and Champions of the Force.

I liked Zahn's work as well, it's up there among my favorites of the Star Wars novels.  It's not like there's a zero sum game where I can only like one author.  I just liked Allston's more humorous and adventurous take myself.

It was many years ago that I read them, so I don't doubt that I have confused some of my issues with them, or the specific book titles themselves.  The Callista escapade was indeed from "Darksaber" as you correctly pointed out.   However, "Darksaber" was written by Kevin J. Anderson who also wrote "The Jedi Academy" Trilogy of books that I pictured.  I just happened to confuse one of his shoddy works for another.  I singled out Zahn, because he was the only author of a licensed work that I was so enthralled with that I also began searching for and reading his original works.  Other Star War authors like Kevin J Anderson, Roger MacBride Allen, and Barbara Hambly ended up putting me off reading fiction entirely.  I've spent the least several years reading history books in my leisure time.  Another thing that became absurd to me at the time was the fact there were so many different authors working on the same property that portrayal of characters ended up becoming incongruous from one series to the next. 

One specific example would be (and you might remember the specific books and authors than I do at this point) how different authors seemed to be arguing in print whether or not Lando Calrissian and Mara Jade were sleeping with each other.  I could be wrong on this, but I seem to remember their coupling originally insinuated in a novel by one author.  Only to be laughed off and refuted in a following novel by a different author.  And then completely reversed back with an exclamation point by Barbara Hambly in her "Children of the Jedi" book where she depicted Mara wearing Lando's gold chain and shirt and sporting post-coital hair with Lando standing behind her as she answered a holo call from Han and Leia.