Black Fleet Crisis Book 1: Before the Storm by Michael P. Kube-McDowell (1996)

Before the Storm

How do I write these again?

After whining about kid's books for a couple months, back to trying to do these properly. I'm not sure if Black Fleet Crisis can actually sustain a blog entry each, but I wanted to do one so here we go.

Summary: Leia is doing negotiations with obvious bad guys. (They have a secret Imperial fleet.) Lando chases after some weird alien space ship. Luke goes to try to find his mom since Padme doesn't exist yet.

Introduced:

The Yevetha: They kinda look like the Tarkata from Mortal Kombat. They can learn super quick and manage to steal a fleet from the Empire. They're negotiating with Leia, but not really cause conspiracy? They drive "thrust ships" which look kind of like Battletech dropships. 

"The Vagabond": A giant space ship that talks in DNA.

The White Current and The Fallanassi: I think this is our first "they do The Force different", save for a little stuff way back in Splinter of The Mind's Eye. Less telekinesis, more aura-reading.

Commentary: I'm calling it now that this is going to turn into a trilogy that should've been two separate books. I just can't buy Kube-McDowell pulling all his plot threads together in a satisfying way in the end. As you can see from the summary, there are three different lines going through here, with only the Lando/Leia plots having any serious chance of intersecting if "The Vagabond" can somehow tie into the Yevetha. We're more in a Battletech Military Sci-Fi w/ Politics mode here. He does okay with it, but the connections to the rest of the series are thin. Rieekan needs more to do, and Borsk Fey'lya (whose only job is to be a political foil for Leia) is basically absent. As such, all the political gamesmanship just feels kind of fiatish. 

I want to push back on The Black Fleet as a concept a bit. 1. It's too close to "The Dark Force" which was already used for The Katana Fleet. 2. At this point, the New Republic appears to be reasonably well set up militarily (they just commissioned a whole new combat fleet), and everyone seems extremely concerned about a few dozen out of date Imperial ships. Thrawn, Daala, and Palleon were all slinging around far larger fleets with the New Republic in worse shape. We'll probably find out later that half the fleet is Super Star Destroyers or something.

Luke's in full overpowered Jedi mode, doing stuff like reshaping coastlines at a molecular level, which I'm never a fan of. He goes off on an awkward quest to find his mom and we get some awkward philosophy about killing and loyalty to the Republic. I don't really think we can get a pay off here, since he can't find Padme (she doesn't exist yet) and he's more or less reached the end of his character arc already.

In general, most of the OT crew feels vaguely out of character, leaning into being kind of angsty/angry.

It does have this quote:

“Sorry,” Luke said, dropping gracefully into a cross-legged meditation posture. “Sit where you like, and I’ll put an air cushion under you.” He waited until Han was comfortably settled, then went on. “As you see, I can hide well enough, even from Leia. But I’d rather be left alone. I hope that you’ll go back and ask her to accept that. If she doesn’t—well, she’s not going to get what she wants. She’s only going to drive me away from Coruscant.”

Which is important for not other reason than that it's burned into my brain from listening to the audiobook as a kid. Why Luke putting an air cushion under Han was something 8 year old me had to remember I'll never know. I always thought it was from a Dark Empire adaptation for some reason. 

Review: 2/5 There's nothing wrong with it, but it feels like it's the prologue to a book that's never going to go anywhere. Passable on the Mil-Sci-Fi side of things.