Star Wars: Champions of the Force (The Jedi Academy Trilogy, #3) in The Expanded Universe

Apr 06, 2008 Keith rated it did not like it

Shelves: star-wars

Stars: 1
Re-Read: No
Recommend to: Only people wanting to reading all EU books.

The trilogy started off decently with Jedi Search, which was flawed but still enjoyable. Dark Apprentice was ridiculous, and things went even worse with Champions of the Force. Anderson pretty regularly in this trilogy starts off with a strong foundation of characters and plot, but he squanders it every single time. Characters do things that don't make sense. Events happen that don't fit the universe. All of the villain Stars: 1
Re-Read: No
Recommend to: Only people wanting to reading all EU books.

The trilogy started off decently with Jedi Search, which was flawed but still enjoyable. Dark Apprentice was ridiculous, and things went even worse with Champions of the Force. Anderson pretty regularly in this trilogy starts off with a strong foundation of characters and plot, but he squanders it every single time. Characters do things that don't make sense. Events happen that don't fit the universe. All of the villains are complete jokes. Anderson can't help but create ridiculously powerful weapons that the characters either just don't use or they forget about them. This really is Disney levels of incompetence.

The things I liked were mostly on the conceptual level that Anderson didn't make work:
- The Maw.
- The general plot in theory of Luke building a Jedi Academy. Sadly, this was more of an afterthought in the story.
- The Kessel plot, particularly in the first book, is good. I really like the Kessel spiders.
- Carida. I like that they have a primary stormtrooper training facility that has harsh conditions (weather and more gravity) to make the troopers more powerful.
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- Anderson carried over Momaw Nadon from the Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina story.

Things I didn't like:
- Anderson has the bad habit of taking lines from the OT and re-using them. I'm sure it is a form of tribute, but it's really bad. In the last book has Ackbar say "It is a trap." Han is always telling people not to tell him the odds. In this one, Leia says, (view spoiler) Another one is (view spoiler)
- Anderson doesn't seem to understand that, the bigger the ship, the more ponderous it is likely to be. He routinely describes their movements like they are x-wings dogfighting. (view spoiler)
- Anderson gets way too comfortable with inventing things the Force can do. (view spoiler)
- Anderson is incapable of writing an intriguing villain. (view spoiler)
- The repercussions for certain actions in the story are laughably bad. (view spoiler)
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- Nobody seems to care that (view spoiler)
- Anderson has no self-control when deciding how powerful to make something. The Sun Crusher is obviously the most powerful thing in existence and can only be destroyed by a black hole. It can destroy entire star systems with a single missile. It doesn't matter that this doesn't make any sense whatsoever. How was it constructed? How would you cut the materials? How would you fasten them together? How would you make something like a screw out of this material if you weren't able to cut it? We see more items like that in this book. (view spoiler)
- The laziness of Anderson is pretty incredible. He doesn't want to put in the work to create realistic scenarios that have the characters where he wants them, so he just has them make some decision to do what he wants. A good example is (view spoiler)
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- Anderson had the chance to create some interesting and conflicted characters, but he was too cowardly to go through with it and gave them an easy way out. (view spoiler)
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- This one drove me nuts. (view spoiler)
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- What a mess this book made for future books. (view spoiler)
- The biggest missed opportunity was (view spoiler)

First Reads: 3 Stars. (2001/2008)
Again, I have some problems with this book. The biggest of the three problems is that there is no definitive plot throughout the book. Stuff just keeps happening to the characters that isn't necessarily connected to anything else that happened. Perhaps one of the most annoying things for me in this book is the complete incompetency of every villain in this entire trilogy. They are all ridiculously dumb. A lot of the actions of the characters were stupid as well. The trilogy could be improved greatly if the main characters possessed a shred of intelligence. ...more

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