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A review by neilrcoulter
From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back by Elizabeth Schaefer
3.0
This is the second collection of Star Wars stories that take the reader through a whole movie, start to finish, through the eyes of minor characters. I enjoyed the first one and found it a fun way to relive A New Hope. This volume, however, for The Empire Strikes Back, didn’t work nearly so well. Some reasons? The second film in the trilogy is a more tightly focused narrative, so there’s much less room for interesting (or even amusing) side plots happening just outside the frame. Also, ESB is more serious than ANH, so the flippant tone of some of these stories feels wrong.
The main problem is that the editors are attached to the idea of forty stories, in honor of the film’s fortieth anniversary. What this book shows is that there aren’t forty minor characters in the film who can be given interesting stories. Ten good stories would be a stretch; but forty? As a major character says near the end of the film: “That’s impossible!”
Fifteen of the first stories in the collection are centered on Hoth, and most of them are tedious. Several stories give the histories of various Rebels in the Hoth base, but the stories are entirely interchangeable. The backstory of a Rebel soldier could as easily be switched with one given to a snowspeeder pilot. It just doesn’t matter, and it adds nothing significant to the movie. It feels like authors drew plot outlines from a jar and then picked a character in the background to assign it to.
The book ends with twelve stories about Cloud City, and though they’re not quite so bad as the Hoth section, they’re mostly mediocre. All the usual Star Wars boxes are checked: appearance by an unexpected random character (Jaxxon); stormtrooper developing a conscience and defecting; pondering a humorous detail about Vader (What/How does he eat?); double-crosses and double-double-crosses; observations about Lando’s capes. This highlights the main problem with Star Wars right now: It needs to get away from itself. Stop the endless self-referencing, parodying, using lines from other movies in new stories for comedic effect, using the word “hope,” connections to Skywalkers...just stop. Find some era or corner of the galaxy that hasn’t been thoroughly mined, and create something new that doesn’t depend on fans who have every detail of every movie memorized.
So if you were going to pick up this book and not read all forty stories (547 pages!), which ones are worth trying? Here are a few that I liked, though it’s entirely subjective:
The main problem is that the editors are attached to the idea of forty stories, in honor of the film’s fortieth anniversary. What this book shows is that there aren’t forty minor characters in the film who can be given interesting stories. Ten good stories would be a stretch; but forty? As a major character says near the end of the film: “That’s impossible!”
Fifteen of the first stories in the collection are centered on Hoth, and most of them are tedious. Several stories give the histories of various Rebels in the Hoth base, but the stories are entirely interchangeable. The backstory of a Rebel soldier could as easily be switched with one given to a snowspeeder pilot. It just doesn’t matter, and it adds nothing significant to the movie. It feels like authors drew plot outlines from a jar and then picked a character in the background to assign it to.
The book ends with twelve stories about Cloud City, and though they’re not quite so bad as the Hoth section, they’re mostly mediocre. All the usual Star Wars boxes are checked: appearance by an unexpected random character (Jaxxon); stormtrooper developing a conscience and defecting; pondering a humorous detail about Vader (What/How does he eat?); double-crosses and double-double-crosses; observations about Lando’s capes. This highlights the main problem with Star Wars right now: It needs to get away from itself. Stop the endless self-referencing, parodying, using lines from other movies in new stories for comedic effect, using the word “hope,” connections to Skywalkers...just stop. Find some era or corner of the galaxy that hasn’t been thoroughly mined, and create something new that doesn’t depend on fans who have every detail of every movie memorized.
So if you were going to pick up this book and not read all forty stories (547 pages!), which ones are worth trying? Here are a few that I liked, though it’s entirely subjective:
“Eyes of the Empire,” by Kiersten White. I liked the opening story, about an Imperial worker who built and controls the probe droids scouring the galaxy for the Rebel base. It’s an interesting idea, that there’s this person watching the data and dreaming of visiting different worlds. Including Dagobah at the end was overreaching, but until that point, it was a decent story. (In general, stories about Imperials have much more potential to be good than stories about Rebels. Good guys are boring.)Forty stories, and there are four that I remember with any fondness. That’s about par for Star Wars these days.
“The Final Order,” by Seth Dickinson. This is a story about the Imperial captain commanding a Star Destroyer in the search for the Millennium Falcon in the asteroid belt. Most of the story is inside his thoughts as he extrapolates what the Empire will become if it is victorious. Star Wars authors often do this trope of “What if an Imperial decided the Empire was bad,” but this story gets into the psychology much better than other stories have done. Very clever and thoughtful.
“Tooth and Claw,” by Michael Kogge. Bounty hunter stories have a lot of potential, but this is the only one in this collection that I thought did something worthwhile. The story is about Bossk just as he receives the summons to come to Vader’s ship for a new job. By drawing on existing lore about the enmity between Trandoshans and Wookiees, the story subverts the expectations and becomes about choices characters make, and what it takes to move from hate to compassion. Most stories in this book didn’t surprise me at all, but this one did.
“There Is Always Another,” by Mackenzi Lee. My favorite story in the previous book was the one that focused on Obi-Wan on Tatooine. This book includes a story from the point of view of Obi-Wan’s ghost as he visits Luke and Yoda on Dagobah. Lee’s writing begins with the wrong tone—too forced-comedic. But it grows into an unexpectedly touching meditation by the end, as we listen in on Obi-Wan’s thoughts about Skywalkers, and his own failures, and his need to keep growing and learning even after death. And okay, it is kind of funny to read Obi-Wan thinking, “I don’t know why I am defending Anakin—even in my own head—especially after he killed me. Old habits” (349).