4thofeleven | The Jedi Academy Trilogy are Not Very Good Books (Reply)

The Jedi Academy Trilogy are Not Very Good Books.

All right, so that might not come as much of a shock to most people. Still, I recently reread them, and I was surprised by just how bad they were. I mean, I remembered that I never thought very much of them, but I’d forgotten just how terrible they were.

I started reading them a while back because, well, I hadn’t read them in a decade or so, and I wanted something light to read on the train. I thought, ‘hey, Kevin J. Anderson has written a ton of books; he must be at least a competent writer, if not a particularly inspiring one.’ I was wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong.

See, it’s not that Anderson’s a bad writer, or that he has bad ideas (though he is, and does). His main failing is that he’s terrible at plotting. At times, the main plot starts to feel like a minor sub-plot. In turn, the sub-plots start to feel like irrelevant background details. Coming full circle, the irrelevant background details start to look like the main plot, because if they’re not relevant, then why are entire chapters being devoted to, say, blob-racing*? I am wondering if the trilogy was originally written as a single volume and hastily padded out to three – you could cram the Jedi Academy/Exar Kun plot into a single volume, easy, and still have room for most of the Admiral Daala plot…

To be fair, this casual, laid-back approach to plot development does occasionally unintentionally work out very well. For example, book two ends with Kyp Durron using the Sun Crusher** to destroy Admiral Daala’s fleet. Now, in a normal story, you’d immediately realise that the author’s not going to kill off a major villain when there’s still one book to go and she still hasn’t really done anything. But with Kevin J. Anderson, you’re so used to plots not going anywhere and abruptly fizzling out, it actually comes as a surprise when Daala turns out to have survived halfway through book three! And then, packing surprise on surprise – Daala proceeds to not do anything important for the rest of the series after all!

The Daala plot really suffers worst from the bizarre story structure of the series. In any coherent storyline, she wouldn’t even appear – as it is, she captures Han early in book one, he escapes, and after that she has no interaction with any other main character for the rest of the trilogy. Her half-assed raids on outlying systems never present any real threat to the New Republic; her fleet barely survives any of its engagements. I can only assume that Anderson felt he needed to have an Imperial villain, couldn’t work out how to tie her into the Jedi storyline, but then stuck her in anyway. That still doesn’t explain why she’s presented as hopelessly incompetent; I’m assuming we’re not meant to assume her superiors were right about her lack of ability after all, and that she only reached admiral by sleeping her way to the top, but as written she never exactly comes across as the tactical genius that the narration insists she is…

Seriously, I recommend rereading the series, just to get the full impact of how bizarre the plot structure ends up being. There’s at least four or five major plot threads, none of which have more than the most minor connections to each other. I’m truly shocked that this actually got published as written – there’s plenty of crap in the EU, but most of it at least has a story, if not a particularly good one. The Jedi Academy trilogy reads like fanfiction as written by a hyperactive five year old who keeps loosing interest in his own story…

* Actually, the blob-racing chapter is probably the most entertaining in the whole trilogy. It’s just a shame that it doesn’t, you know, tie into anything anywhere else in the book.

** Ah, the Sun Crusher. Remember that? The star fighter sized super weapon that can destroy stars, is made of invulnerable armour, and was designed and constructed by a tiny research facility in the middle of nowhere that had been cut off from the rest of the galaxy for more than a decade.

Even as a kid, I always thought it was weird that nobody realised that the invulnerable armour aspect of the Crusher was a far more useful technology than the anti-sun torpedo aspect…