Interesting Failure: The Crystal Star

Time for Day 2 of the book meme...posted on Day 3. Oh well.

2. A book that was an interesting failure

What does it mean for a book to "fail"? Does it just mean the book is bad, or is there something else to it? Is it based on what the author intended to accomplish by writing the book, and if so, how do we know that, and how do we judge it? Can a book have a purpose at which it can succeed or fail independent of authorial intent? Can an excellent book nevertheless be a failure?

My answer for this is Star Wars: The Crystal Star by Vonda McIntyre. The Crystal Star is McIntyre's only Star Wars novel, and it's almost universally disliked by Star Wars fans. The thing is, The Crystal Star isn't an awful book; it just doesn't work as a Star Wars book. McIntyre's worldbuilding is interesting, but doesn't mesh well with the established Star Wars universe, and her characterization of existing Star Wars characters is shaky. As what it is – a Star Wars novel – The Crystal Star fails, but if McIntyre had written a book with largely the same elements outside the constraint of a pre-existing canon, I think it could have been good.

The only time I can remember seeing elements from The Crystal Star used in a fanwork is in "Alter of Waru" by Jedi-lover, an excellent Luke/Mara story published on FFN back in 2012. Otherwise, fandom has largely ignored it.

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Book with a Shadow: Chalice

Day 3 of the October book meme:

3. A book where you really wanted to be reading the "shadow" version of the book (as in, there are traces of a different book in the work and you would have preferred to read that one)

Chalice by Robin McKinley

I absolutely loved reading Chalice. Many of the elements that most intrigued me, though – How do the elemental priesthoods work? What is it like to become a priest of Fire, and to live as one? – were left sketched out rather than fully developed. That's not a criticism of the book: Chalice is Mirasol's story, so it makes perfect sense that we only have a vague sense of things she doesn't have personal knowledge of. But if Chalice is Mirasol's story, its shadow is Liapnir's story, and the shadow does interest me a little more. Well, that's what fanfic is for....

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Six Sentence Sunday

For Six Sentence Sunday, here are six sentences from another Star Wars WIP, this time some in-universe meta on the Niman lightsaber form:
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