In some parallel dimension, there’s a world that was cursed with this, George Lucas’s original screenplay for Star Wars. And as much as the prequels sucked in this dimension, this pulpy SciFi Star Wars may actually be worse.
It’s hard to look at this book objectively, either. There are ghosts of the iconic Star Wars that we all know (and love!). The “you’ll be dead” dialogue from the Tatooine cantina is almost verbatim the same, but the characters and circumstances are different. Ever get a really jarring deja vu feeling? It’s like that the whole way through. Some things are familiar, but very, very wrong.
There’s really no way to begin to describe the plot because it takes the original Star Wars story, adds in a bunch of uninteresting and barely explored subplots and then throws in the Trade Federation storyline of Episode I because people love having dry bureaucratic debate scenes in their space operas. And there are about ten too many characters, but at least some of them die off. Of course, there’s no time to for the reader to actually connect with any of the characters, so there’s no emotional impact when someone gets digested by a sarlacc pit. (Just kidding, no deaths are that exciting in this book.)
It is an interesting read to see just how the idea of Star Wars evolved into the hit it is today. Much like the theory that troupes of actors collaborated with Shakespeare to write his plays, I wonder how much of Star Wars can be attributed to Lucas and how much was influenced by the talents people working on the movie.
I had no idea this existed. You might be interested in the book I just reviewed, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe. There’s a long section about how the Star Wars script evolved.