Star Wars Aftermath Afterthoughts

My review of Aftermath has been written and posted to SFFWorld, but here I’ll rant briefly about the bullshit “Raid” against the book, Chuck Wendig, and the general anger towards the new Canon from Disney/Star Wars.

There’s been a lot on social media about not just Chuck’s book, but the whole new initiative Disney is leading for the Star Wars universe. If anything has become fact in genre fandom, it is that nothing is permanent. Back in 1986, DC Comics rebooted their entire universe with Crisis on Infinite Earths … That lasted less than a decade because that reboot was polished a bit in 1994 with Zero Hour and more recently, DCU was rebooted with “The New 52” and most recently, that New 52 was jettisoned yet again not even five years later.

Look, these things exist side by side peacefully
I enjoyed them all and my sanity remains intact

Marvel Comics is in the process of rebooting their universe, primarily to streamline 50+ years of canon and to get the comics universe to be least a bit more consistent & parallel with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

How many actors have portrayed James Bond? Wasn’t the Daniel Craig full reboot met with great success?

They close minded people behind the “Raid” don’t see it that way. (Borderline hate campaigns are lead through that link and the events are erased from the page after they happen). They see the destruction of the Expanded Universe as Disney taking something away from them. While it is understandable that people loyal to the EU would be upset, those stories still exist. They cannot take away a reader's experience of reading those stories.

I wasn’t a fan of DC’s New 52, on the whole, but I still own all my Flash comics Mark Waid wrote featuring Wally West. His storyline “The Return of Barry Allen” still remains my favorite superhero story even though the Wally West in that story doesn’t exist any longer. Those stories still have weight.

Taking the disappointment and frustration of “losing” the EU and twisting this emotion to hate leads to … (come on everybody, say it with me) the Dark Side. This line of thinking, while not yet at the level of “frustration” that the Sad/Rabid Puppy movement is at, begins at the same place and for some, is leading down the same road and already has been coined Sad Bantha by John Kovalic of Dork Tower and Munchkin fame.

Folks giving Chuck Wendig's *terrific* "Star Wars: Aftermath" one-star reviews because it has gay characters: I dub thee "Sad Banthas."
Posted by John Kovalic on Monday, September 7, 2015

“Oh no boo-hoo” my fandom is evolving. It isn’t like Disney is deleting those reading experiences from your memories, or taking those books off of your shelves. The Sean Connery James Bond movies still exist. It is one thing to be unhappy with the direction the thing is going, but to actively fall short of smearing what is new? That’s just counter to everything the Force symbolizes.

My point being, these reboots aren’t always a bad thing. If anything, a reboot like this could prove even more successful for many reasons. As much as Disney wants fresh start in their handling of Star Wars it is impossible if for no other reason Coruscant was named by Timothy Zahn. OK, that one is obvious. The new show, Rebels revealed that not everything pre-Disney buyout was going away. A very popular character created four years before the Disney takeover/absorption made an appearance and that same character was hinted at in Wendig’s Aftermath. Whether a popular character like Mara Jade with such a long EU history and legacy are introduced in the new encompassing DSW (Disney Star Wars) canon remains to be seen. However, the people who are in charge of continuity, Lucasfilm Story Group can look at what was successful in the Expanded Universe and bring some of those characters/story elements, etc, forward into DSW in a new “storytelling approach.”

And the people bothered by one of the protagonists in Aftermath being gay? Really? Again, that whole acceptance thing which is a major tenet of the Force and Jedi should be adhered to with this as well. Chuck, of course said it best last week:

And if you’re upset because I put gay characters and a gay protagonist in the book, I got nothing for you. Sorry, you squawking saurian — meteor’s coming. And it’s a fabulously gay Nyan Cat meteor with a rainbow trailing behind it and your mode of thought will be extinct. You’re not the Rebel Alliance. You’re not the good guys. You’re the fucking Empire, man. You’re the shitty, oppressive, totalitarian Empire. If you can imagine a world where Luke Skywalker would be irritated that there were gay people around him, you completely missed the point of Star Wars. It’s like trying to picture Jesus kicking lepers in the throat instead of curing them. Stop being the Empire. Join the Rebel Alliance. We have love and inclusion and great music and cute droids.

(By the way, the book also has an older woman, a mother, rescuing a man. So if that bothers you, you might wanna find a bunker for hunkering down. And I dunno if you noticed, but the three new protagonists of the movie consist of a woman, a black man, a Latino man. The bad guys all look like white guys, too. So many meteors. So little time to squawk at them.)

Bottom line, people need to be more open-minded and accepting, but that line of advice is far from new.

Reviewer Rant - Electronic Advance Reading Copies (eARC)

This post may come off as a pedantic rant with an air of entitlement.

As an SFF book reviewer/blogger, I wasn’t sure whether or not I should write about this issue. However, I’ve communicated with a few of my peers in the SFF reviewing community about the issue and I know I’m not the only person to be frustrated by this position/situation.

Badly formatted electronic advance reader copies (eARCs).

We book reviewers are accustomed to ARCs being formatted differently than the final book, but this usually comes down to a generic cover and lower paper quality used in the manufacture of the ARC. For the most part (in my experience), nearly every physical Advance Reader Copy I’ve received passes snuff as a better than decent readable copy. In other words, aside from the often boilerplate cover, the book could very easily rest on a bookstore’s bookshelf. To the strongest extreme, the ARC I was sent for Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings looked better from a finished standpoint than some published books I own.

Electronic Advance Reader Copies, well, that’s a different kettle of fish. To put it mildly, formatting on the files for some of these books is not up to the same level as many physical ARCs I’ve read and received. This should be a simple thing, to just to layout the text in a readable file, right? Not so. I realize I spent a decent portion of my career proofreading, formatting, and line editing text so my eye for such things may be more sensitive than most. Or to use one word, you might say I can be pedantic. However, for a decent number of eARCs I’ve received, the text formatting looks like a seven year old got a hold of the file and formatted the text like a serial killer’s ransom note. eARCs like this have paragraphs broken at irregular intervals, letters in the middle of words are capitalized, while other instances proper names or the first word of a sentence are not capitalized. I’ve got more than one electronic ARC wherein the formatting looks something like the text below, which I’ve pulled from my Derek Jeter post on Monday:

I have been a fan of the New York Yankees my entire 

life, I may 

have been three yEars old when my paRents took me to my first 

game and

I recall going to 

Helmet 

day 

during a 

very rainy day as one of my first bASeball memories 

and memories overall. if I was tHrEe years old, then that puts 

my first Yankees game in 1978, when they were in the midst of their second Championship season in a row. 

it was a loNg time before they would return to the 

World 

Series 

and win it in 1996, the intervening years were not that great, to put it mildly. there were some highlights, for sure. dave righetti’s no-hitter against the Boston reD sOx

If publishers want reviewers to read their eARCS, then the publishers need to make the product they are offering to us not give rise to migraine headaches due to the formatting. What is surprising is that a recent eARC I read (or tried to read) was from the publisher whose parent company makes the leading eBook device. I think this specific book may have been a one-time blip because other eARCs I have from this publisher are just fine. But other publishers, a couple of them with a significant place in the SFF market, have the formatting problem I’ve highlighted on multiple books.

When publishers make this awful, painful formatting their feature rather than a blip on the radar, my decision on which book to read becomes all the easier. I won’t request eARCs or read books from the publisher in electronic format any longer when multiple files I’ve had are that painful for me to read.

I won’t go into too much of a side rant about reading PDFs on my kindle except to say that I have to zoom into every single page in order to read the file. So no more PDF eARCs for me.

I realize I might be doing a disservice to the author by using the file formatting as one of my criteria to eliminate their book from my reading queue. In the end, though isn’t it incumbent on the publisher to make that connection between author and reader as few barriers as possible?

With that negativity pointed out, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention, Angry Robot Books as a publisher whose eARCs are usually the best formatted and most readable files I get as a reviewer.

Any other reviewer/bloggers experience this “ransom note format” issue and if so, have you contacted the publisher or gone the passive aggressive route I’ve so glibly outlined above?