Hey, so Stovers novelization is, in my opinion, easily the best EU novel, and my personal favorite book, and this seems a fun exercise to introduce it to new readers. This got some traction at /r/MawInstillation so I thought I'd try it here. Below is my review of RotS, containing some demonstrative quotes to get the ball rolling.Why is Revenge of the Sith by Matthew Woodring Stover my favorite novel of all time?Stover shows that the underlying story of RotS had enormous potential, and that it's shortcomings lie in the technical transition. Stover changes nothing from Lucas' work - indeed, he was in consultation with Lucas who read over the manuscript - and yet the experience is utterly different. This is not a novelisation in the normal sense of the word, where the script is taken and embellished so it can be quickly published alongside: rather, it is its entire own creation. For instance, the opening crawl from RotS is entirely missing. This is the opening passage:This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.It is a story of love and loss, brotherhood and betrayal, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. It is a story of the blurred line between our best and our worst.It is the story of the end of an age.A strange thing about stories —Though this all happened so long ago and so far away that words cannot describe the time or the distance, it is also happening right now. Right here.It is happening as you read these words.This is how twenty-five millennia come to a close. Corruption and treachery have crushed a thousand years of peace. This is not just the end of a republic; night is falling on civilization itself.This is the twilight of the Jedi.The end starts now.This beginning sets the tone of the work to come. Stover approaches this clear-eyed to the fact that few of his readers will have this as their first experience of the storyline, and so we are told of the tragedy that is to come with a weighty sense. You know what has happened, Stover is saying. I am here to help you experience it. All of Stover's works are deeply philosophical, and this is to begin something that will be expanded upon in depth.I'll be quoting a lot. Purple prose is Stover's bread and butter, and yet with Stover it works. The needle is threaded between the epic and the pretentious, and every line feels like poetry.In the movie, we then jump into a space battle. Stover does not begin there. His tale is not about the events, the spectacle. It is about the characters, and most notably, it is about Kenobi and Skywalker - their friendship and their journeys. And so instead the Introduction chapter is titled 'The Age of Heroes', and begins with the trillion-odd citizens of Coruscant watching in horror as war has come to their doorstep.Across the remnants of the Republic, stunned beings watch in horror as the battle unfolds live on the HoloNet. Everyone knows the war has been going badly. Everyone knows that more Jedi are killed or captured every day, that the Grand Army of the Republic has been pushed out of system after system, but this—A strike at the very heart of the Republic?An invasion of Coruscant itself?How can this happen?It's a nightmare, and no one can wake up.…Because they know that what they're watching, live on the HoloNet, is the death of the Republic. Many among these beings break into tears; many more reach out to comfort their husbands or wives, their creche-mates or kin-triads, and their younglings of all descriptions, from children to cubs to spawn-fry.But here is a strange thing: few of the younglings need comfort. It is instead the younglings who offer comfort to their elders. Across the Republic—in words or pheromones, in magnetic pulses, tentacle-braids, or mental telepathy—the message from the younglings is the same: Don't worry. It'll be all right. Anakin and Obi-Wan will be there any minute.…All the younglings watching the battle in Coruscant's sky know it: when Anakin and Obi-Wan get there, those dirty Seppers are going to wish they'd stayed in bed today. The adults know better, of course. That's part of what being a grown-up is: understanding that heroes are created by the HoloNet, and that the real-life Kenobi and Skywalker are only human beings, after all. Even if they really are everything the legends say they are, who's to say they'll show up in time? Who knows where they are right now? They might be trapped on some Separatist backwater. They might be captured, or wounded. Even dead.Some of the adults even whisper to themselves, They might have fallen.…The adults know that legendary heroes are merely legends, and not heroes at all.These adults can take no comfort from their younglings. Palpatine is captured. Grievous will escape. The Republic will fall. No mere human beings can turn this tide. No mere human beings would even try. Not even Kenobi and Skywalker.And so it is that these adults across the galaxy watch the HoloNet with ashes where their hearts should be.Ashes because they can't see two prismatic bursts of realspace reversion, far out beyond the planet's gravity well; because they can't see a pair of starfighters crisply jettison hyperdrive rings and streak into the storm of Separatist vulture fighters with all guns blazing.A pair of starfighters. Jedi starfighters. Only two.Two is enough.Two is enough because the adults are wrong, and their younglings are right.Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.This establishes so much - establishing a framework for how the Republic sees Palpatine, the Jedi, and our leads; setting up our stakes for the first setpiece, and so on. But I want to talk about what it does tonally. You see, unlike the film, the attack on Coruscant takes up the first third of the book, and is given enormous weight under the title 'Victory'. This is our high point, a chance to show Anakin and Obi-Wan as characters working together with a relatively simplistic goal: save the day. Be the heroes the younglings know they can be.And yet, everything is read in the light of the ominous undertones of these opening pieces. We know Anakin will fall. We know their friendship will be torn asunder. And so as we read their victory, as we watch their cunning and skill and bravery, this undercurrent is always there: we know Anakin's fate before we even know there is an Anakin.And ultimately, this is a heavily internal, character tragedy. We spend those 30% above Coruscant so we can see Anakin and how he operates, watch his good soul and genuine love for Obi-Wan, and also see a microcosm of how important Obi-Wan's influence is in controlling his rage and tamping down on his worst instincts. I'm going to finish this with a quote of the type that comes many times throughout, our first "This is Anakin Skywalker".(But go read the book. Do it now.)This is Anakin Skywalker:The most powerful Jedi of his generation. Perhaps of any generation. The fastest. The strongest. An unbeatable pilot. An unstoppable warrior. On the ground, in the air or sea or space, there is no one even close. He has not just power, not just skill, but dash: that rare, invaluable combination of boldness and grace.He is the best there is at what he does. The best there has ever been. And he knows it.HoloNet features call him the Hero With No Fear. And why not? What should he be afraid of?Except—Fear lives inside him anyway, chewing away the firewalls around his heart.Anakin sometimes thinks of the dread that eats at his heart as a dragon. Children on Tatooine tell each other of the dragons that live inside the suns; smaller cousins of the sun-dragons are supposed to live inside the fusion furnaces that power everything from starships to Podracers.But Anakin's fear is another kind of dragon. A cold kind. A dead kind.Not nearly dead enough.Not long after he became Obi-Wan's Padawan, all those years ago, a minor mission had brought them to a dead system: one so immeasurably old that its star had long ago turned to a frigid dwarf of hypercompacted trace metals, hovering a quantum fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Anakin couldn't even remember what the mission might have been, but he'd never forgotten that dead star.It had scared him."Stars can die—?""It is the way of the universe, which is another manner of saying that it is the will of the Force," Obi-Wan had told him. "Everything dies. In time, even stars burn out. This is why Jedi form no attachments: all things pass. To hold on to something— or someone—beyond its time is to set your selfish desires against the Force. That is a path of misery, Anakin; the Jedi do not walk it."That is the kind of fear that lives inside Anakin Skywalker: the dragon of that dead star. It is an ancient, cold dead voice within his heart that whispers all things die…In bright day he can't hear it; battle, a mission, even a report before the Jedi Council, can make him forget it's even there. But at night—At night, the walls he has built sometimes start to frost over. Sometimes they start to crack.At night, the dead-star dragon sometimes sneaks through the cracks and crawls up into his brain and chews at the inside of his skull. The dragon whispers of what Anakin has lost. And what he will lose.The dragon reminds him, every night, of how he held his dying mother in his arms, of how she had spent her last strength to say I knew you would come for me, Anakin…The dragon reminds him, every night, that someday he will lose Obi-Wan. He will lose Padme. Or they will lose him.All things die, Anakin Skywalker. Even stars burn out…And the only answers he ever has for these dead cold whispers are his memories of Obi-Wan's voice, or Yoda's.But sometimes he can't quite remember them.all things die…He can barely even think about it.But right now he doesn't have a choice: the man he flies to rescue is a closer friend than he'd ever hoped to have. That's what puts the edge in his voice when he tries to make a joke; that's what flattens his mouth and tightens the burn-scar high on his right cheek.The Supreme Chancellor has been family to Anakin: always there, always caring, always free with advice and unstinting aid. A sympathetic ear and a kindly, loving, unconditional acceptance of Anakin exactly as he is—the sort of acceptance Anakin could never get from another Jedi. Not even from Obi-Wan. He can tell Palpatine things he could never share with his Master.He can tell Palpatine things he can't even tell Padme.Now the Supreme Chancellor is in the worst kind of danger. And Anakin is on his way despite the dread boiling through his blood. That's what makes him a real hero. Not the way the HoloNet labels him; not without fear, but stronger than fear. He looks the dragon in the eye and doesn't even slow down.If anyone can save Palpatine, Anakin will. Because he's already the best, and he's still getting better. But locked away behind the walls of his heart, the dragon that is his fear coils and squirms and hisses.Because his real fear, in a universe where even stars can die, is that being the best will never be quite good enough. via /r/StarWars http://ift.tt/2yVMdEd
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