I didn’t want to review this book.
Hell, I didn’t even want to finish it.
Star Wars: Crucible, billed as one last hurrah in for the Big 3 (Luke, Han, and Leia) in the expanded universe is nothing short of a boring, weird descent into things I just didn’t care to see in a Star Wars novel.
For the most part, the novel is harmless. It’s easily ignored and I would recommend that unless you’re hellbent on reading every book in the Star Wars EU, you just skip this one entirely.
And I apologize in advance, but there will be spoilers for the rest of this piece.
Crucible starts with Han and Leia Solo, two of the most important people in the galaxy, showing up to an asteroid field to help Lando Calrissian deal with some pirates in his mining operation. Small potatoes for a last hurrah, right? But more is going on that it seems and there’s some Mandalorians involved, and some guys from the roleplaying game, and a weird force nexus thing that means Luke Skywalker needs to come help with Lando’s mining dispute.
And some people (not me) thought the taxation of trade routes to outlying star systems was bad…
The story meanders from there, it’s bland and I’ve tried hard to lose the details since I read the book, but it’s many of the small details that stuck with me and made me just despise this book.
For one, there is plenty of prose that just isn’t that good. There were instances where Luke would say something like, “May the Force Be With Us.” And then the very next line of text would be something like, “But the Force wasn’t with them and torpedoes exploded around them.” That’s not an exact quote, but it’s pretty close. It’s just… things like that, little details that make me feel like the whole thing is tone deaf to Star Wars. With Luke as the main point of view character for that chapter, even though it’s written in third person, there’s no way “the Force was not with them” would fly. How could something like that get by a Star Wars fan of any stripe?
Another particularly bad part of the book is when they suddenly need disguises to visit a casino and Luke and Leia just happen have passable make-up and Mission: Impossible quality disguise kits to instantly transform them into a Twi’lek and a Devaronian.
“But Bryan,” you’re saying, “That’s absurd. How would anyone buy Leia as a Twi’lek? Even with make-up, her lekku wouldn’t move.”
But the answer is simple. She spends the entire time in disguise twitching them manually with the Force. But even that would have been harder because inside the lekku was wear they were hiding their lightsabers from casino security.
I know, right?
It doesn’t make sense to me either. This ranks up there among Construction Worker Wedge finding weird shock paddles to discover Force ability and Bus Driver Admiral Ackbar, both from Jedi Search.
You know what else rubbed me the wrong way?
Creepy Leia.
In a spectacularly silly plot development right out of Blade Runner, there are replicant-like bio-clones in the book. And, since subtlety is no longer required in licensed tie-in fiction, anyone can easily guess that when the replicant character starts stealing Han and Leia’s blood, we’ll be seeing Han and Leia clones before the book is done.
And Han does. He sees a “creepy” clone of Leia.
And starts calling her in his head Creepy Leia. It seems far too contemporary a term or usage of the word to fit in Star Wars, and seeing Han use it in context was laughably bad.
And the Blade Runner like replicants? They all had problems. Like Jurassic Park and Deep Space Nine level problems. Remember the Lysine contingency in Jurassic Park? Remember the Ketracell-White from Deep Space Nine? Both the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park and the Jem’Hedar in DS9 needed an exterior application of certain protein sequences and chemicals to survive. It was a way to control them and keep a handle on what they were doing.
Well, no surprises here: if it was good enough for Jurassic Park and Star Trek, by the Force, it’s good enough for the “creepy” clones here in Star Wars.
After dealing with explosions, pirates, Mandos, replicants in need of Lysine, and weird RPG based threats, Luke, Han, and Leia enter a Wonderland of the Force that may or may not be related to Mortis from The Clone Wars. Inside they morph and die and come back in a trippy sequence where they only song I could think to score it with was not John Williams based, but instead Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds. It was an LSD trip to Nth degree.
After they escape their deaths, they all come out and vow to take some time off and retire, riding off into the sunset of space one last time, and then talking about their retirement more and their need for it in case we didn’t get the hint.
And why in the world would I want to read page after page of Han Solo being tortured?
I would argue that this book is the single best reason we can give for hoping that Episode VII forces this Expanded Universe timeline into full, alternate timeline status.
It just wasn’t good. I’m sorry. Troy Denning seems like a very nice guy, but this book was simply not good. And for that, you just shouldn’t buy it. Or read it. Or even acknowledge its existence.
Zero Stars.
A copy of this book was provided by Del Rey/Random House for review.