An entertaining “Star Wars” fandom debate broke out recently, prompted by FANgirl’s provocatively titled blog post “Luke Skywalker Must Die.” Jason at The ForceCast podcast blasted her post a couple episodes ago (May 20) and then he and his […]
There is no sword in “Gideon’s Sword” (February 2011, hardcover). There’s probably some literary reason for the title, but still, I kept expecting a sword to figure into the plot. That’s the only criticism I […]
I found “Star Wars: Red Harvest” (December 2010, hardcover) to be a disappointment both as a “Star Wars” fan and as a horror fan. Despite short chapters that should’ve made it an even breezier read […]
You hear a lot about how women always go for the bad boy, but in “Vortex” (November 2010, hardcover), the sixth in the nine-book “Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi” series, it’s Ben Skywalker who […]
Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” books don’t get mentioned enough as influences on “Star Wars.” In addition to inventing a planet named Korellia, only one letter off from Han Solo’s home world of Corellia, Asimov outlined interplanetary […]
The fictional franchises I like most are the ones that have an ongoing, non-contradictory, canonical storyline — “Star Wars,” “Buffy” and “The X-Files” being my big three. These are franchises that aren’t driven by remakes, […]
In a Sedalia bookstore, they have a shelf full of vampire books. Not just a section labeled “vampires”; I mean a full standalone bookshelf with four or five shelves on it. I asked the proprietor […]
George Lucas conceived the phrase “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” so that “Star Wars” — like “Lord of the Rings” before it — would not be confused as taking place […]
With the prequels and a lot of the fiction that has come out since the prequels, we’ve been conditioned to think that anytime a Jedi feels attachment he’s in danger of going to the dark […]
“Fever Dream,” the latest Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child novel, opens with FBI Special Agent Pendergast and his wife, Helen, hunting a lion in Africa. I thought, “Uh oh, I don’t really want to read P&C’s […]