Apocryphail Phriday: The Crystal Star

Worse than Hitler. Apparently. According to fan sites.

While doing a bit of research for today's Apocryphail, I discovered an odd thing. Apparently The Crystal Star is perhaps the most hated Star Wars novel of all time.

That annoyed me. I had wanted to save the worst Star Wars novels of all time for a few weeks. I remembered reading The Crystal Star as a kid, and I did not like it much, but it was nothing near the horror that was, say, the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy.

So what's the deal? Well, I read this book for the first time in well over a decade so that we could find out together.

First of all, Vonda N. McIntyre is a fine author. Her prose fits together tightly, she juggles three plotlines very well and brings them all together in the end, her writing is descriptive, and not bogged down by exposition. I definitely have no problem with her authorial skills. And while I have not extensively read her other novels, they are generally considered very good.

So why is this book considered the worst of all time?

Well... it's not. Sorry, other internet reviewers! It's just not. Oh, it's bad, but it's far from the worst drek the Star Wars Expanded Universe has ever expected us to swallow. McIntyre's good writing and good pacing shine through, and make this a fairly gripping story and a quick read.

Except... there are these things. Little things, mostly. But they keep accumulating, until they are too great to ignore. The biggest one being... why is everyone except for the Solo children so terribly incompetent?

A guide for authors.

We are not talking about the teenage years, where arguably the Solo kids were pretty cool (under a good author, at least when you are also a teenager as I was when I read and quite enjoyed their adventures). No, this is just after Dark Empire.Jacen and Jaina Solo are five. Anakin Solo is three.

And I realize I just lost some of you. All right. A quick recap.

Back in the distant past, before there were prequels or midichlorians, back when the Jedi were zen monks rather than crazy authoritarian ninjas, before George Lucas decided to ignore and spit on all the great authors who had helped expand his universe, most Star Wars novels extended the movie timeline into the future. One of the results of this was Han Solo and Princess Leia Organa finally getting married, and Leia becoming the new Chief of State of the New Republic after Mon Mothma retired. She and Han first had twins, Jacen and Jaina Solo, both heirs to the Skywalker legacy and thus force-sensitive. Then, two years later, Anakin Solo was born.

There are pretty strong opinions on which
Anakin is better. Hint: Not the SAND one.

Because naming a child after one of the worst mass-murderers the universe had ever known in a magical galaxy where names have importance sounded like a good idea at the time. Anakin was a special child, having the strongest connection to the force of anyone.

I am really not sure if George Lucas ripped off the novel Anakin to make his Anakin, or if their eerily similar beginnings were just a coincidence due to mythical archetypes.

So, the Solo children were born, and until they grew up they became the great MacGuffins of the Star Wars universe. Every villain in the galaxy wanted to capture the Solo kids. And so they got kidnapped. Again and again.

McIntyre does us the courtesy of delivering us a novel with the Solo children already pre-captured, snatched away before the first chapter opens. One can only admire McIntyre's efficiency in recognizing that her plot was already old hat, and that we did not need to be subjected to the details. This also cleverly allows her to handwave how a bunch of ultimately horrible incompetent wannabe darksiders managed to swipe three of the most well-protected children in the galaxy, wounding Chewbacca in the process, without Leia's knowledge.

This is the less useless woman. She's
not actually a scenester in the book.

McIntyre tries to make it more plausible by saying that Winter, the child's normal nanny/special ops bodyguard, is on vacation, and Luke and Han are investigating the titular Crystal Star on a secret mission. So presumably Leia and Chewie are just useless. A first impression that, sadly, will be born out as Leia first wastes a lot of time dithering around and getting drugged on planet before finally doing the sensible thing and listening to Artoo, who tells her to look for the kidnapper's hyperspace trail, obviously. Then she almost gets them captured leaving the planet, not by villains, but by the planet's own security force because Leia failed to properly clear her takeoff. Again, Artoo saves her. Then Leia does one of the most pathetic jobs of going incognito in her career, loses the trail of her children, and wanders about aimlessly before finally running into another, far less useless woman who tells her right where they are.

Meanwhile Chewbacca spends all but the last bit of the novel being injured, while Leia deals with her anger toward him at "letting" her children be kidnapped, which is finally dealt with in a single sentence where she decides not to be angry at him anymore. Because that is a thing that real people totally do.

Not that Han and Luke are doing any better. Han received a strange message suggesting that something force-wonky was going on at an old Imperial research station orbiting the titular Crystal Star, which is some kind of white dwarf orbiting a black hole and slowly freezing into a crystal and you know what, screw physics, it's Star Wars.

So Luke has come hoping to find new Jedi for the Jedi Academy, while Han has come to get away from diplomatic responsibilities and recapture some of that old smuggler charm he used to have. Which, to Han, apparently means drinking, gambling, and generally acting like a grouchy dick to everyone.

Poor Luke never escaped his destructive Midichlorian habit.

Not that he has no reason. It turns out the message has come from an old ex-lover of his, Xaverri, which leads Luke to flat-out accuse Han of cheating on Leia, because did I mention that Luke is turning into a drugged-out stoner with mood swings? Because throughout this novel Luke is a drugged-out stoner with
mood swings.

And now you begin to see why this novel is so bad. Leia and Chewie are useless, Han is running around grousing and getting drunk and generally ignoring the plot, and Luke is seriously not Luke. Okay, eventually they find out that the quantum nature of the crystal star is sending out resonances that is making anyone with Force powers go a bit wonky, but for everyone except Luke that just means using the force becomes unreliable. It is only Luke that suddenly becomes a weird, stoned, contrarian cultist.

Oh, did I mention there's a cult? Yes there is. A cult to a strange, alien being from another universe, who runs on a kind of anti-force.

Okay, it's just the Sarlaac, but a guy can dream!

All right. Full disclosure. Normally if you put anything even remotely Lovecraftian into a story, I love it. And the alien creature is definitely Lovecraftian, though it foregoes tentacles for melty golden scales and dripping, oozing ichor. But with a book that already seems so not-Star Wars, a book that already warps and twists the characters, adding a Lovecraftian being only further emphasizes how wrong this is.

And then there's the children. Again, let me reiterate, the Solo children are five, five, and three. They are put with a bunch of other children. Anakin is taken away, because he has the super-strong force powers and the generic-wanna-be-Emperor villain intends to feed him to the Lovecraftian alien in exchange for ultimate force power or something. It was a little vague. He's in a cult, babies need to be sacrificed to the hideous elder god, Ia! Ia! Cthulhu! Fhtagn! I buy it.

What I do not buy is Jacen and Jaina, being all of five years old, being the only heroic characters in the story.

They are heroic! They daringly escape from their cells! They free the other children! They tame dragons! They use Home-Alone-In-The-Woods-style tactics to defeat quasi-trained darksiders! They send a force pulse to their mother, but by the time she arrives all she really has to do is pick them up, because they've already beaten the generic "Empire Reborn" baddies and have them sinking in a swamp.

No! Not Boxxy, Boxey! It's completely different!

Except... they are five. Which makes this entire novel nothing but a goddamn Boxey and Muffit story! Or, if you prefer, a goddamn Wesley Saves the Enterprise story! I hate those! And I could handle it if this was but one of three good plotlines, but with all the Star Wars heroes acting like idiots, this really begins to look like a novel written for children about children saving their useless parents.

Which it might be... except for Han staggering around drunk, getting accused of extramarital hanky panky with Xaverri, and musing on how sex with a Ghostling will kill them.

Oh, and did I mention that in the end Luke, Leia, and Han are saved by the power of love? Kind of, at least. They are sinking into the alien entity, but then Leia remembers her children, and... yeah. The less said about the sappy ending the better.

Now here's the thing. I am not going to call a book terrible just because it gets the characters a bit wrong. I enjoy 2009's "Star Trek" even though it is a completely unrelated movie that just happens to be called "Star Trek". I would have enjoyed Star Trek: Into Darkness... except that movie kept reminding me of the original and much better movie that it ripped off.

If The Crystal Star had been a stand-alone science-fantasy book with characters who just happened to share the same names as the Star Wars cast, I might be forgiving. It's got nice Lovecraftian elements, Luke's struggle with his force powers acting up might actually be gripping if he wasn't Luke, and McIntyre is a talented author. Except McIntyre will not let me forget that it is Star Wars. The whole plot only makes sense if it takes place in the Star Wars universe. The backstories of the villains are entirely tangled up in the last days of the Empire, and many character interactions are contingent on Han, Luke, and Leia being the heroes that they are. This cannot be a stand-alone novel, it is entirely a Star Wars novel, pointless without its anchor in the Star Wars universe.

And that is what makes it terrible.

What Apocryphails do you want to see in the future? Leave comments below with your suggestions!

This is nothing. Wait until you see what R. A. Salvatore does to you.