I dunno, I read the Thrawn stuff and it was better than Episodes I-III.
It is a big old Universe, heck its a fecking humumous Galaxy. If the Empire only covered 1% of a Milkyway sized Galaxy it would contain 3 Billion systems. There is a lot of latitude there for all kinds of nonsense. So long as the EU doesn’t directly connect with the plots of the films (past and future) I’d say pretty much anything goes.
Arguably better than Episode VI, too, though I’ve gotta say I reread them recently and didn’t like them as much.
Anyway, this’ll be great news for JJ Abrams, who can now turn Episode VII into a retcon story. Just think what a better universe Star Wars would be if a Death Star travelled through a time vortex and blew up Naboo before Episode I even happened!
I always thought there were canon and non-canon elements to the extended universe, and that the Thrawn trilogy was almost up there with the films. I don’t see why they have to throw all of it out just so that they can make a new series, but at least it isn’t a reboot.
Incidentally, I’m not sure about the art quality for Mara Jade’s portrait, but a short Google image search for Derek Herring’s art shows that he’s not short of practice in similar subject matter.
Dude, The Black Hole was better than Episodes I-III.
“because almost all of it was crap.”
I don’t think it’s crappier than anything Disney could invent for the new movies or we saw in the last ones (Midi-chlorians? Jar Jar Binks?)
Well, I just hope that The Mouse is ready for the backlash from all those fanboys who have a significant portion of their free time and disposable income invested in the EU. I’m imagining something comparable to the hue and cry when J.J. Abrams rebooted Star Trek continuity. (And I’m not implicitly arguing for what some people call “JJTrek”; it’s got its problems, especially the last movie, but Trekkies didn’t give up on the old continuity when Star Trek V came out. It’s major change that they fear.)
What about the games?
Damned by faint praise.
… whereas the real thing was praised with faint "damn"s.
If the process of culling the expanded universe is as simple as removing planets from the Jedi database, we’ll all have forgotten about it in a matter of weeks.
I can’t tell if this is a joke or not.
Yeah – but it does. You’d think that EU writers would have a whole galaxy to play with, but no, they generally only care about Luke, Leia, and Han and how they are getting on. If any of these characters get used again in the official works, they are guaranteed to be in conflict.
I’m not sure why they even care. I’m not familiar with the EU, but I had always assumed it was not canon, but no one felt the need to say so explicitly. Seems like making any of it canon would create problems, if they cared about being consistent. But Lucas never cared much about being consistent - the three original movies aren’t consistent with each other, and the three prequels contradict them as well. I guess with the expected increase in the number of Star Wars movies, they feel the need to coordinate somewhat to prevent it from spinning completely out of control, so maybe it’s just about that.
The headline is misleading, no one knows what they are keeping and getting rid of yet. They are simply getting rid of the insane levels of Star Wars cannon and making it only two, cannon and non-cannon. For those who don’t know there have been 6 layers of cannon that all overlap and are all argued over. The people who are paid to keep track of it never even seemed to agree on just how many layers there were and how they affected each other.
Huh, called it.
Also let’s stop holding up the Thrawn books as any sort of menaigful example of the EU. They were the first 3 books we all loved them.
How many of us managed to keep reading the hundreds of books that followed. Man it went downhill fast.
I am a big fan of the Star Wars series of novels (of which there must be close to 100 by now). IMHO many are very good books. They started off a bit slow when they first started being published but once Lucas Films started having good sci-fi authors write them they got better and better. The last 5 years of them have been quite good in fact. They went to great lengths to not contradict earlier stories and just kept building the overall universe. Some of the writers were military sci-fi types but the were also folks that wrote from biological and social aspects. This move makes little or no sense to me since they were taken as a whole very coherent with the original movies. If they discontinue the novels they are making a big mistake as most are pretty good sci-fi. I had always heard George Lucas set high standards for the books and you had to be invited to write one (at least if Lucas Film published them).
My mom entered some contest in the 90’s and actually won a prize. A collection of Star Wars books. Which she gave to me. I think there were about twenty books in there. Some were crap, but I’d rate many of them as better stories than the movies. The X-Wing series by Michael Stackpole and Aaron Allston was particularly enjoyable.
