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A review by elisetheninth
The Force Awakens by Alan Dean Foster
2.0
Never rises above the level of merely serviceable. I'm not sure what they were thinking by digging up Foster for this project, although I suspect they wanted to evoke nostalgia and a sense of legacy by conscripting the man who ghost-wrote the novelization of 'A New Hope' in the seventies. Foster, though, is a far cry from Matthew Stover, whose 'Revenge of the Sith' not only knocked it out of the park but all the way to the moon.
Maybe the author was working from an old or incomplete script, but he appeared to have no understanding of what connective tissue was needed to make the story work in novel form, and his reworked dialogue lives on a spectrum of clunky to excruciating. He also seems to have absolutely zero understanding of Kylo Ren or why Ren works as a character - at times Foster actually describes Ren's emotional reaction as being the exact opposite of what Adam Driver displays in the movie.
Foster also apparently decided that what this universe needed was more science and accordingly inserted entire pages of technobabble on how Starkiller Base works. That might have worked for a 'Star Trek' story, but on Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, 'Star Wars' is as squishy as a wet sponge. I would have gladly traded entire chapters of this book for a single paragraph of Stover meditating on the Force.
There was a part with General Hux that made me laugh out loud, and it was nice to put names to some of the more minor roles. I'll also say that Foster knows what he's doing with Leia; the problem is that he doesn't know what he's doing with anyone or anything else.
Maybe the author was working from an old or incomplete script, but he appeared to have no understanding of what connective tissue was needed to make the story work in novel form, and his reworked dialogue lives on a spectrum of clunky to excruciating. He also seems to have absolutely zero understanding of Kylo Ren or why Ren works as a character - at times Foster actually describes Ren's emotional reaction as being the exact opposite of what Adam Driver displays in the movie.
Foster also apparently decided that what this universe needed was more science and accordingly inserted entire pages of technobabble on how Starkiller Base works. That might have worked for a 'Star Trek' story, but on Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness, 'Star Wars' is as squishy as a wet sponge. I would have gladly traded entire chapters of this book for a single paragraph of Stover meditating on the Force.
There was a part with General Hux that made me laugh out loud, and it was nice to put names to some of the more minor roles. I'll also say that Foster knows what he's doing with Leia; the problem is that he doesn't know what he's doing with anyone or anything else.