People's New Republic

24 - Darksaber

We return to Kevin J. Anderson, the Expanded Universe's evil puppet master, for his 1995 piece of shit Darksaber. This book is bad in all the ways you'd expect a KJA book to be, but also in plenty of new ways! It also foreshadows the ways that Star Wars will be bad thirty years after this because KJA and Dave Filoni have way more in common than is comfortable. Topics include Han Solo being a "where's my hug?" guy, Kevin J. Anderson's constant racism/misogyny/fatphobia, if Kevin J. Anderson killed his transcriptionist, and Callista's insistence on not giving Luke disgusting half-breed children. Content warnings include misogyny, racism, fatphobia, and eugenics. -- MEDIA --

23 - Showdown at Centerpoint

We finish up Roger MacBride Allen's Corellian trilogy with 1995's Showdown at Centerpoint. Does Roger stick the landing? Did the ending of this book get rushed due to page count limits from the publisher? Does the New Republic handle its crisis of legitimacy in a way that allows for future sedition in the exact same way? Listen to find out! Topics include the dropped ball of Gaeriel Captison's daughter, the evolutionary origin of humans in Star Wars, Han Solo's cultural chauvinism, and Lando marrying a woman he's spent a total of four hours with. Content warnings include racism, xenophobia, colonialism, and mentions of suicide. -- MEDIA --

22 - Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina

We get something a little different with 1995 short story collection Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina. Some of the stories are genuinely very good! Some of them are very bad! And all of them make up a book that's one of the prime suspects in the franchisization of Star Wars. Topics include if it's necessary for every weirdo in the cantina scene in Star Wars to be doing something of galactic importance, the Force being more mystical and unexplainable in some of these stories, and the exciting and deserved fate of the disgusting misogynist pickup artist with the big cones on his head. Content warnings include sexual assault, misogyny, racism, references to ethnic cleansing, and general physical violence. -- MEDIA -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxpz3Lp-PCk [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxpz3Lp-PCk]

21 - Assault At Selonia

We return to Roger MacBride Allen's Star Race Wars with 1995's Assault at Selonia. It's fine! It's better than the previous one but Roger still has the annoying tendency to elaborate in excruciating detail about stuff that really just does not matter to the plot. Topics include the proper way to anthropomorphize mustelids, why everyone forgot that they've been working with Mara Jade for like 7 years at this point, and who takes credit for false flag terrorist attacks. -- MEDIA -- [libsyn is not letting me upload this today. I will try again soon!]

20 - Children of the Jedi

We go long on Barbara Hambly's 1995 heater Children of the Jedi! Luke falls in love with a ghost in a machine who ends up inhabiting the body of one of his students so they can be together (it was a different time). Hambly is one of the first authors we've read on here that uses Themes and is also very good at putting sentences together, so we actually had a great time with this one. Topics include identity as a result of one's material conditions, Orientalism in Hambly's ex-husband's 1986 cyberpunk novel When Gravity Fails, and what all was actually involved in being an Emperor's Hand. -- MEDIA --