Finally getting ready to start reading the EU novels, I'm faced with a conflict, do I read them in order of publication or is there a better way?

What do you say? Do you have a reading order guide or a link to one that doesn't include Disney Wars shit?

Quote from: GeekyBugle on April 28, 2023, 04:40:40 PM
Finally getting ready to start reading the EU novels, I'm faced with a conflict, do I read them in order of publication or is there a better way?

What do you say? Do you have a reading order guide or a link to one that doesn't include Disney Wars shit?

    It's ... messy. Publication order is the safest if you aren't interested in cherry-picking and want to avoid spoilers. The only real issue then is that you want to read the Dark Empire comic series after the Thrawn Trilogy but before the Jedi Academy Trilogy, since the latter makes heavy reference to plot points therein. (There's also a Dark Empire II and Empire's End series, but those didn't come out until years later and have very little relevance to the overall plot.)

   So, to start: Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, Last Command, Truce at Bakura, Dark Empire comics, Jedi Academy Trilogy, Courtship of Princess Leia ... then we hit another problem. The Crystal Star is almost universally agreed to be the worst Star Wars novel ever written, and is also almost completely irrelevant to anything else ever written. This is also the point where the publication order starts jumping all over the "New Republic" section of the timeline, meaning that things start to feel more disconnected, and a lot of the novels aren't really that important or very good. Courtship and the Jedi Academy books aren't that great either, but they do set up a lot of important stuff for other, later works. 

   Personally, after you finish up the JAT, I'd jump ahead a couple of years in publication order to the X-Wing books, which are definitely a cut above, as well as I, Jedi, which is sort of a combination X-Wing novel and fix-it fic for the Jedi Academy Trilogy. After that, if you're a fan of the 'fringe' of Star Wars, A.C. Crispin's Han Solo trilogy and K. W. Jeter's Bounty Hunter Wars can be worth a read. Timothy Zahn's Hand of Thrawn duology makes a fine capstone (Vision of the Future is a personal favorite of mine), and while there will be references you won't understand if you haven't read every novel, you can probably get by with Wookieepedia summaries of the others.

   That takes you up to the release of Episode One and the transfer from Bantam to Del Rey ... and then we get into the really messy parts.  Let me know if you dare go deeper down the Kessel Maw.

@Armchair Gamer: writing that down.

Also, Alan Dean Foster's Splinter of the Mind's Eye is not a part of any continuity. It was written before Empire Strikes Back was released, and without knowledge of Luke and Leia being brother and sister.

Probably a pretty obscure point by now. I'm surprised the book is still in print.

Brian Daley's Han Solo Trilogy books are great space adventure romps.

Because the movies were still coming out, and George Lucas was not giving out information about upcoming story lines, Daley avoided continuity issues by setting his stories in their own corner of the Star Wars universe, the "Corporate Sector," and they were kind of their own thing.

Andor may have borrowed some ideas from Daley's Corporate Sector. Also, I believe they were the first books to mention the Z-85 Headhunter starfighter, though its description is more like a spacegoing F-14 Tomcat than its later official appearance.

Quote from: Lurkndog on April 29, 2023, 05:36:13 PM
Also, Alan Dean Foster's Splinter of the Mind's Eye is not a part of any continuity. It was written before Empire Strikes Back was released, and without knowledge of Luke and Leia being brother and sister.

Probably a pretty obscure point by now. I'm surprised the book is still in print.

  It was folded into the Expanded Universe, but after a rerelease that reportedly edited out a lot of the Luke/Leia stuff. Thus, if you're curious about it, try to find a 70s/early 80s printing. It shouldn't be too hard.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on April 29, 2023, 07:39:39 PM
  It was folded into the Expanded Universe, but after a rerelease that reportedly edited out a lot of the Luke/Leia stuff. Thus, if you're curious about it, try to find a 70s/early 80s printing. It shouldn't be too hard.

I have the original edition from back in the day. It took me a long time to actually get to see Star Wars in the theater, as my parents just couldn't be bothered with it. So I read the adaptations and whatever spinoff books I could find.

Did they get Alan Dean Foster to do a rewrite, or was it done by some editor?

The only thing from Splinter of the Mind's Eye that got reused was the name of the book's McGuffin, a Philosopher's Stone knockoff called the Kaiburr Crystal.

That term is now used for lightsaber crystals in the larger Star Wars universe.