Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine in The Expanded Universe

May 08, 2022 Keith rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: star-wars

Stars: 2.5
Reread? Maybe at 49%
Recommend to: People who played Galaxies or want to read everything in the EU. It works okay as a moderately entertaining standalone.

I came into this book ready for a complete disaster after seeing people gripe about it on goodreads for years saying how it is among the worst or the worst EU books. I disagree with that pretty strongly. A good percentage of the prequel books were worse for sure. I'd say that I was pretty entertained through much of the book, but it wa Stars: 2.5
Reread? Maybe at 49%
Recommend to: People who played Galaxies or want to read everything in the EU. It works okay as a moderately entertaining standalone.

I came into this book ready for a complete disaster after seeing people gripe about it on goodreads for years saying how it is among the worst or the worst EU books. I disagree with that pretty strongly. A good percentage of the prequel books were worse for sure. I'd say that I was pretty entertained through much of the book, but it was really harmed by being constantly annoying.

The biggest annoyance by far was that the primary character is a woman who whines incessantly about how she is treated differently because she is a woman. It is constant "I didn't get the promotion because I'm a woman", "he looked at me that way because he's never seen a woman in charge", and "he only reacted that way because I'm a woman". It was beyond annoying and at many times absurd. For example, (view spoiler).

There were plenty of other annoyances that were to a lesser degree:
- The love story is absurd. If it wasn't written by a woman, I would think it was written by a man who had no idea how a woman thinks or feels. (view spoiler)
- Certain elements of the plot and characterization were done very poorly. (view spoiler)
- There a somewhat regular contradictions within the book. One that comes to mind is when Finn details the times he knows Dusque sabotaged her own work because she didn't want the Empire to benefit from it. Then, one or two pages later, her partner is talking about how great she is because she never makes mistakes and Dusque is crying about sexism and how she doesn't get promoted when she so obviously is better than the men. And I'm sitting there in the Twilight Zone wondering how the author forgot about how she contradicted this on the last page.
- A good portion of the plot centers on a holocron, but apparently Roth doesn't understand that normal people don't use holocrons and wouldn't be able to operate one. But whatever.
- Too many instances rely on characters or factions behaving way out of character. (view spoiler)
- EU authors are obsessed with listing planet names from the movies when they don't make any sense for the plot or are just very unlikely. So where had Dusque been previously? Tatooine and Yavin 4 of course.
- I hate the obsession with the OT characters that EU authors have. Just create your own. It isn't necessary to include them. (view spoiler)
- Since I haven't played the game, I don't know if the missing backstory is explained there or not. (view spoiler)
- (view spoiler)
- Dusque is a bioengineer, and boy is that a job that apparently comes in handy all the time. She knows everything about every species on every planet. I guess her job is to go around and get samples from creatures, which doesn't seem difficult for the Empire. I would think they would just go in and kill whatever animal they wanted sampled, but no. They send in a team of two people to get living samples I guess. This also means that her credentials will get her into all kinds of places. It also means that her bosses apparently don't pay much attention to what she does.
- She goes from never using a blaster to being extremely talented and able to use it under extreme circumstances with one cringe worthy training session. (view spoiler) (view spoiler)
- There's a scene at the end (view spoiler)
- There's a casino where they have identical games to Earth casinos, but they have to call them something different. So slots are lugjack and roulette is spinnerpits. I don't know why they have to do this.

I thought the plot was alright and moved along at a decent pace. It definitely wasn't great, but I can for sure think of 10-20 EU books that were worse.

That cover is hilarious. ...more

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