If you’ve read this blog before you might have noticed, that when it comes to SciFi I’m a Star Trek fan. I love the universe, I love the tech. But after reading all these Star Trek books for the last couple of years I somehow wanted to try something different. Then I remembered that there were also some books in the Star Wars universe taking place after the movies.
So first I read the Thrawn-Trilogy (Heir of the Empire, Dark Force Rising and The Last Command) by Timothy Zahn which I will hopeful come around reviewing within the next couple of weeks. But first I want to write a little bit about the first book of another series: Rogue Squadron of the X-Wing-Series.
To me this books (and probably also the rest of the series) looks somehow like the SCE-series in the Star Trek universe simply because it introduces tons of new characters with one or two reference characters known from the movies which were only side characters there. In this case this would be Cmd. Wedge Antilles.
This book takes place a few years after the destruction of the 2nd Death Star and Wedge has orders to rebuild the Rogue Squadron. Therefor new pilots are recruited, among them the former Corellian Security agent Corran Horn, who is basically the main character of the book. And since every main character has his adversary, Corran has with Agent Kirtan Loor someone on the payroll of Imperial Intelligence who can’t stand him.
Rogue Squadron also introduces quite a lot of other characters who are for example other pilots of the squadron, pilots in other squadrons, the command crew, Wedge’s “sister” etc. Some of them are reeeally interesting like the Wedge’s XO Captain Tycho Celchu who managed to get on the “blacklist” of some of the higher-ups in the command structure of the Alliance (for reasons classified) and there are some that at least appeared to me quite interchangeable. There is also a distant relative of C3PO assigned to Rogue Squadron ;-)
After introducing the characters the book is filled with tons of dogfights and other sorts of action like Valley runs (remember the attack on the first Death Star?) and some ground action. And mostly dogfights.
And here is also my sole problem with this book: There are too many gaps in the plot. Ok, the book is focused on the pilots and what they do. No problem with that. But if the fighters are flying support for some ground operations, it would be nice to also read some more details about the ground troops. It somehow feels like if the pilots do their job, the battle is won, no matter what the ground troops do.
Another strange thing are some of the statements when Admiral Ackbar talks about Luke Skywalker. For some reasons he never stroke me as the person who would start talking with Luke using just his first name. *shrugs*
Over the years I've written quite a few reviews 🙂 You can find them at /reviews/.
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