Star Wars: Aftermath (Star Wars: Aftermath #1)

So disappointing; I want my money back and I deserve twice what I paid for for having to have read it. It makes you wonder if the author ever read or followed the storyline of ROTJ. For example, Jas Emari, a Zabrak bounty hunter, who managed to be on the planet Endor to assassinate Princess Leia, who no one knew was going to be there, not even the Rebel command, that is, until she volunteered just before the attack. Jas was sent by the Emperor or Empire higher up to kill Leia despite the fact the Emperor didn’t tell anyone – not even Admiral Piett, that he had set a trap for the entire Rebel ground force “with an entire legion”. Vader didn’t even know Luke would be on the Endor moon, but Jas knew where and when Leia would arrive. Like I said, Disappointing. Then there are all the analogies that I couldn’t get a picture of, e.g. Bala-bala carts, panicked tree loormors, Nuna hens, etc, etc, etc. In order to understand what a panicked tree loormor acts like, one must have a point of reference to what a panicked tree-loormor is. Then the gratuitous way LGBT issues were handled, as if a science fiction story of this magnitude needs to address LGBT issues to begin with. For almost forty years no one cared if Obiwan, Yoda or Luke were gay and they still don’t. When the author has to force sexual preference into a major theme in a popular science fiction story it does more damage to the LGBT community than good; it takes away from Lucas’s universe, reducing it to a sub-author’s personal PC petty issues. Just because Wendig could, didn’t mean he should. The problem is these quote-quote authors hijack wonderful universes, e.g. Star Wars, Star Trek, LOTR, then, in the name of selling books, disrupt the flow of the story and corrupt it with their own view, without doing the hard work of creating the universe to begin with; piggybacking onto someone else’s (Lucas’s) great ideas and reducing it to a Harlequin novel. Wendig and the other quote-quote Star Wars quote-quote authors have ruined one of the best franchises to rise from cinema since Buck Rogers in the mid 1900s. And let’s not forget one thing: unlike LOTR, these were movies first, novels second. Let’s not delude ourselves into thinking that Star Wars began as a great work of literature. It was a MOVIE! So very Disappointing!!! I will NOT be reading the sequels; I’ll watch the grass grow first.

Star Wars Aftermath. So many sentence fragments. Fragments everywhere. Hard to follow. Weak verbs drained of potency. Pounds of dialogue to establish simple facts. Can’t finish. Maybe Cliff’s Notes. A tear rolls. Down.

Reading the online summaries of the story, I’m not sure how anyone could think that this was a better followup story than Zahn’s excellent works. I wouldn’t feel right donating it, will probably just recycle. Swing and a miss.

Space Diapers

Star Wars: Aftermath kind of follows Nora Wexley, Snap Wexley’s mom. I say it kind of follows her because even with her being roughly the main character she’s only maybe in about 60% of the book. The rest of the book is random one-off chapters following characters we either don’t care about or have literally never met before, who pop in for a chapter on some remote planet and then disappear again. However, you can count on them resurfacing randomly later in the book to shut down any momentum that might actually give the book a sense of energy. It’s all in this attempt to show how the different edges of the galaxy are handling the fallout of Return of the Jedi and the last remnants of the Galactic Empire trying to keep control over a widely-revolting empire that is crumbling beneath them as the Rebel Alliance builds the beginnings of the New Republic.
All of this SOUNDS interesting, all of this SHOULD be interesting, but it isn’t.

First, the book spends three (approximation) chapters following Wedge Antilles being kidnapped, and you think he’s going to be the main character of the book but once he gets kidnapped you never hear from him again. By this point weve basically burned three chapters of inconsequential action and set up for payoff that won’t come until the last couple chapters of the book. I use the word payoff loosely since Wedge gets rescued off-screen.

However, Chuck Wendig didnt seem to care too much about the actual plot of the book, so neither will this review. The world building of this book is spotty which isnt too much of an issue since the good thing about a shared-universe book is that world building isnt as important. Except, Chuck Wendig butchers the Star Wars universe at every opportunity. He squeezes in one-liners from the movies that felt organic in their time, but don’t make sense for another character mentioning them for no reason. Wedge says “Oh no they’re on me, I gotta do what my pal Han Solo always says and Fly Casual.” Han Solo said that once, and it was never a motto, infact he just pulled it out of his ass. Also, Han Solo never talks to Wedge Antilles in the films so I don’t know why we’re pretending they are best pals.

Perhaps Chuck Wendig thought that if were suspending disbelief that every dramatic problem in the galaxy focuses on one Skywalker family, that we wont mind characters quoting characters theyve never met before. Wrong. Dont even get me started on Chuck Wendig slipping an Admiral Ackbar Its a Trap meme in the middle of his Please take this seriously book. To top off all the terrible call-outs, Chuck Wendig then has a fan-favorite ruthless bounty hunter, Dengar, unironically use the term Space Diapers. What makes a diaper a Space Diaper? Does it defy gravity? Does it hold in excrement even in the vacuum of space? Why did the word diaper need to have space in front of it other than a cheap attempt to make something mundane sound cool and sci-fi?

Anyway, the story bounces around so much that you end up asking what the hell is going on and why we keep getting parts of the universe told from the viewpoint of random characters. But the thing that really chafes me, that set me off and offended me as a reader and as a writer is that he recycles the same dramatic element of the story twice within 100 pages. Nora Wexley on two separate occasions steals a TIE Fighter (With no real explanation of how, she just easily stole one) On both occasions she gets in a dogfight, on both occasions she loses control and decides to Kamikaze her TIE Fighter to save everyone and on both occasions she says “Atleast I saw my son again!” right before the TIE Fighter eats it… and then ON BOTH OCCASIONS SHE JUST MIRACULOUSLY SURVIVES.

TIE Fighters have no shields, are cheaply made by the empire to have mass-produced ships and are known to blow-up at the smallest firepower, but somehow Norra Wexley survived not one, but TWO explosions of her TIE fighter and she has never even flown a TIE Fighter before.
“Space Diapers” was terrible.
Describing TIE Fighters with the same Wasp analogy every time one of them is flying around was terrible.
Constant call-outs to popular fan quotes was terrible.
But literally reusing the same fake-death sequence for the same character, that inexplicably survives within 100ish pages of one another isn’t just like not knowing the Star Wars universe, it’s terrible writing, terrible plotting and lazy as hell.

HOW IS THIS THE MAIN TRILOGY THAT THE NEW CANON WILL BE BASED AROUND?
WHO THOUGHT THIS PERSON COULD BE TRUSTED WITH THIS?

Meanwhile Claudia Gray is writing the best Star Wars books I’ve ever read but the majority of the fandom’s only interaction with the new canon is Chuck Wendigs “14 year old writes terrible rambling fan fiction in one draft that no editor ever looks at twice before sending to print.”

I give Star Wars: Aftermath 2 Stars. One star for the turncoat imperial officer who helps the main characters and is actually a very interesting character and one star for me finishing this book and knowing I never have to read the probably equally-terrible sequels.

The frustrating part of this book is that there is a decent story hidden inside. Aftermath is NOT a story of what happens after the fall of the emperor, but it is based in that time. The “main story”, is decent.

In addition to the main story there are multiple 2 or 3 page interludes. A bit confusing since the characters mentioned in these are irrelevant to the rest of the story. I find this distracts the reader from the main story. But seeing that there is an aftermath sequel, it seems the interludes will come into play later.

The main problem with this book is the consistent use of real world “Earth” references. The author consistently uses animals such as cats, dogs, moths, monkeys….. It pulls you out of the Star Wars universe. It also leaves the impression that the book was not edited.

I hardly ever leave web reviews, but here I felt I had to. If you care about quality of writing, this is one to avoid.

The story itself is fine I’m glad to find out more about what happened after the original Star Wars trilogy. But they really should have found somebody better to write it. Chuck Wendig writes in a very basic, hugely distracting way that reads like a child wrote it.

For starters, his idea of detail means hammering in similes every other sentence. I can count how many there are in just two paragraphs: 11. Similes are of course useful, but Wendig demonstrates the restraint of a schoolboy. Somebody’s arm goes up like a Corellian slot machine? Surprise hits somebody like a galeforce wind?

When he’s not spamming the similes, Wendig often just repeats himself. When he’s not content with one adjective, he’ll follow it up with another and another, and you can almost hear him flick through the thesaurus. The book reads as if this is your first book and big words need to be explained to you. For the reader, this can be frustrating.

Then there’s his writing style, which is somewhere between pretentious and awkward. When he is not mixing up his tenses, jumping between past and present tenses), the book reads like a screenplay. Often, you don’t even get complete sentences, just a location and a noun. There are any reasons to write in short, sharp sentences, often for effect. But when you only do that, this just comes across as pretentious, as if Wendig wrote the book’s outline and decided it was good enough to publish.

As much as it pains me to miss out on canonical Star Wars tales, I will not be picking up parts two and three of Aftermath. I barely made it to the end of the first.

It’s a great shame, because Disney’s grand plan for the franchise beyond the original trilogy is clearly full of great ideas and characters. Sadly, Wendig is not the one to deliver this vision. Disney has used far superior writers for the other Star Wars books check out Bloodlines by Claudia Grey or Phasma by Delilah Dawson. They’ll show you how it is done.

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