lyore

Fair warning - I am in a grumpy mood today. So grumpy, in fact, that I have a whole stack of fic open in tabs that I am resolutely not reading, since I don't want my lousy mood to pollute my enjoyment of the stories.

So, with that in mind, I decided now was a good time to post my feelings about Allegiance, by Timothy Zahn. Yes, I was disappointed - TZ is one of the very few SW EU authors I like, and this book, while not a bad read, completely failed to live up to it's potential. Forget any thought of this actually being about Luke, Leia or Han (despite the blurb) - it's basically the Amazing Adventures of Mara Jade and The Good Imperial.

Note to Timothy Zahn - just because you 'bookend' the novel with scenes of L, L & H doesn't mean the book was in any way about them. If their section of the story finishes 50 pages* before the climax, chances are they aren't being used in a way that is particularly central to the plot.

Ok, that may be a little snide, but you really could remove L, L &H from the story without any effect on the plot. Chewie is a non-entity. Actually, so is Luke - I think he gets to perform one useful 'parlor trick' the entire story, and apart from that just hangs around. Leia and Han fare a little better, but even then there is so little impact on the overall plot of the novel that you could literally pluck that section out and not affect anything else.

Oh, and Vader gets maybe three scenes, all with Mara.

Frankly, I'm not even sure why they were IN this novel, unless TZ thought that he couldn't get approval to write a story set in the OT timeframe without them. TZ, if you want to write a story about your OC's go ahead - it worked well in Outbound Flight, after all. But stop advertising the story as about the original characters if all you are going to do is have them play second fiddle to your ~~Mary Sue~~ Original Characters - and, even worse, shoehorning them into a side plot so disposable that it would have been cut had it been about anyone else.

This may not be such a dealbreaker for anyone else - but I read the EU for the original characters (err... as in original trilogy characters - I'm going to call them 'real' characters from now on, to stop myself getting so confused) first and foremost. Despite what some people say, I'm actually fairly tolerant of 'new' OCs, as long as they don't start diminishing the 'Real' characters. I just don't think there are that many EU authors out there who can maintain the balance for any length of time. And fair enough, from an author's point of view - there are more places to go with 'new' characters, especially when you are writing in such a constrained period, and there is also less chance of writing something that is going to be 'Jossed' by GL/the next author. But don't expect me to be all that interested, unless you can suddenly come up with a character I care about as much as the 'Real' characters - and Mara isn't it (although to be fair, she's better than the alternatives).

The other 'new' characters are the Stormtroopers, and I think that Zahn did a much better job of creating them as well-rounded characters - they have flaws, and despite an uneasiness about the empire, they defected out of necessity and almost by accident, they cling to the memory of an Empire that probably never existed, they still hate/blame the rebels and better yet, not one of them is some kind of amazing anything - they were created with restraint.

My other major dislike in this book involved Mara, but possibly not the way you think. I think I've finally figured out why I have such a knee-jerk dislike of her when I'm actually reading TZ's books, but don't mind her when considered objectively, or when reading L/M fanfic.

It's TZ action description of her that really annoys me. The step-by-step walkthrough that happens every time Mara fights someone - every step, every move, counted, described, in a completely dry, 'She rolled twice to the left and then she did this and she did that, and then she did this' way... just a catalogue of moves and steps. And since Mara fights people a lot - that's a lot of annoyance.

I can't give any examples straight from the text, since I've leant the book to

necromage, but I remember one passage which literally involved the description of how she did a back summersault - but ironically, I couldn't figure out that what she had actually done was a back summersault until it was mentioned later in the paragraph. I was too busy trying to figure out why it was significant if she ended up exactly two feet to the right.

I don't notice this with his action description with any of the other characters - whether or not this is because they don't tend to fight hand-to-hand, or because this style of writing is just meant to emphasise Mara's fighting ability, I don't know. All I know is that it bugs the hell out of me, and is probably one of the main reasons (besides the lack of 'real' characters) that I didn't enjoy this book as much as I thought.

After all that - the book really wasn't too bad. It just wasn't what it was advertised as, and not as good as I was expecting from TZ, so I felt a bit miffed at paying $55 for it. Ironically, this weekend I borrowed The New Rebellion from a friend and enjoyed it more - very unusual for me, given the era it was set in.

* this is an estimate - no, I didn't actually count.