Oh wow, I bailed on the EU well before that stuff, didn’t realize how close it ended up getting to the larger plot of the last couple Frank Herbert Dune books.
>how close it ended up getting to the larger plot of the last couple Frank Herbert Dune books.
My understanding is that Sci-Fi writing for established franchises during the 80s - 90s was kind of a small circle of people. The influence would have been unavoidable. And they also often wrote for multiple franchises too.
Many of the authors didn’t seem to understand Star Wars at all, and got the feel all wrong—in fact, in a lot of cases I wonder whether they’d just touched up a failed manuscript or partially-finished-but-not-promising draft with Star Wars colored markers, and sent that to the publisher. Stackpole was a rare exception, and Zahn kinda.
But even those relatively bright points suffered terribly from Star Wars being almost intrinsically a visual beast. It’s so tied into pastiche of other visual media that it’s remarkably difficult to get it right in print, while the formula for making a decent Star Wars film or show is easier than damn near any other franchise ever: pick one or two things, at least one of “genre” fiction, rip them off completely, and put Star Wars lipstick on it. That’s the whole deal for making a pretty good Star Wars thing. It’s all The Mandalorian did and it worked better than nearly any other efforts at Star Wars since the original trilogy. Frankly, it’s incredible that so many screenwriters and directors seem to to struggle with this (hell, even Lucas).
Star Wars books, though? That’s hard mode.