Chronicles of the Shadow War

[Starbeard]

Has anyone read these three books? How do they stack up?

Before anyone says, it's not as off-topic as you'd think.

The 1988 movie Willow was George Lucas' stab at fantasy. It was made right in the middle of that lull in new Star Wars media, but it was George's story and a Lucasfilm production. Starwars.com once even made an April Fools' databank entry for Willow, pretending that it was a canonical movie about a primitive planet in the Star Wars galaxy—though according to Leland Chee Lucasfilm once actually considered the possibility.

Lucas also continued with three more stories in that world, which Chris Claremont adapted into novels between 1995 and 2000 for Bantam. So not only is the book series related to Star Wars, but it's related to 90s Bantam-era Star Wars!

[Falconer]

I’ve long been curious about this as well. They enticed me from the shelves of bookstores in the 90s, but for some reason I never picked them up (same for the Thrawn Trilogy… at the time). Maybe because I was never super in love with Willow. Though I like it now.

Imagine if the Thrawn Trilogy had not been such a huge hit. It might have been the “Chronicles of the Shadow War” of Star Wars, and that would have been it!

[Starbeard]

That would have made things different! Imagine a 90s where the craze was all around the Willow EU instead!

Apparently there were also twenty Bantam Indiana Jones novels in the 90s, 8 of them written by Wolfgang Hohlbein in German. Honestly I've always figured that there would be Indy novels, but they've always been completely off my radar. I haven't heard of any of these.

The Hohlbein books, and the first six English books by Rob Macgregor, were published at the exact same time as Zahn's Thrawn novels. The 90s weren't just a Star Wars renaissance, they were a Lucasfilm renaissance into small media—books, comics, video games. I guess the small screen was still considered too expensive for at the time for anything but the one Young Indy show.

I've caved in and ordered the Chronicles, but with everything else it might be a while before I can devote the time to read them.

[rafael]

Liked the Willow books, but didn't like the direction they were taking. IIRC, the entirety of the movie's story went to the gutter, and all main characters were removed from the action. ...And especially the last book in the series is almost parodistically terrible. You might get the notion just from reading the novel's three-line Wikipedia summary.