The Crystal Star.

For fans of Star Wars literature, the mere mention of the name stirs up opinions as diverse as "it's the worst Star Wars novel ever written" on one end of the spectrum to the more flattering "actually, it only sucks really bad" on the other. Written by Vonda N. McIntyre and published in 1994, few works of Star Wars literature have been so universally panned. It has earned a place among the ranks of infamy alongside the likes of the Star Wars Holiday Special and The Glove of Darth Vader. And yet, even those atrocities have their fervent defenders. But few are willing to put their sense of aesthetics on the line for The Crystal Star.

The novel is simply odd. It has been accused to being too Star Trek-like and not "Star Warsy" enough, both descriptions which imply that there are not enough fantasy elements in the novel. At first glance, something seems to ring vaguely true about these judgments. McIntyre, after all, had previously written several Star Trek books and, damningly, enjoyable ones at that. But there are plenty of fantastical and magical elements in The Crystal Star. The problem is, you just don't buy 'em.

But first, let's give credit where credit's due. One of the things I think The Crystal Star does really well is the way McIntyre captures the logic of children. Unlike most Star Wars novels that showed the development of Han and Leia's young children, Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin, The Crystal Star characterizes the children with incredibly little deviation from plausibility. They act their age, and McIntyre seems to indulge in these scenes. So much so, however, that there seems to be too much time devoted to realistically getting the kids from their initial elementary thought processes to the sorts of conclusions they are needed to get to in order to propel the story. In other words, while incredibly realistic characterizations, the time spent on the kids slows down the plot to detrimental effect.

The label of detrimental might be too harsh, though, or at the very least displaced. McIntyre introduced many elements in her book that seem to have no comparable precedent in Star Wars, including centaurs and wyrwulfs (painfully pronounced "werewolves," I imagine) and, in my opinion, she does not spend enough time on these elements to make them readily intelligible or attractive. Two of the biggest culprits are:

Waru -- a golden trans-dimensional being with anti-Force capabilities (take a moment to try understanding what that means or exactly entails);

Weird Luke -- Luke acting completely unlike himself in no subtle way. This seemingly has to do with the "anti-Force" associated with Waru. Perhaps it also has to do with the nearby crystallizing star that gives the book its title, which is presumably acting on super-Force-sensitive Luke in a correspondingly antithetical way, though this conclusion never seems to be adequately suggested, either overtly (as in the narration or dialogue) or thematically, and Luke just seems like a plain weirdo.

(Incidentally, it's been suggested to me by more than one person that Luke's "weirdness" in The Crystal Star could be a manifestation of a denial of his misery over losing his true love Callista, a character originally introduced in Barbara Hambly's Children of the Jedi, which chronologically precedes McIntyre's novel. I thought this was an excellent fix following on the heels of Callista's disappearance in Darksaber (1996), though less air-tight following the reconciliation between she and Luke in Planet of Twilight (1997)--a book which in my opinion cleanly usurped from The Crystal Star the title of worst Star Wars novel).

Unlike "Weird Luke," the novel's bad guy, Hethrir, sadly does have a precedent. He's simply a bad villain, characterized so un-dimensionally as to be on par with the baddies from the infantile Glove of Darth Vader series. However, this is particularly disappointing after reading the opening chapters of The Crystal Star and the excellent execution of Hethrir's potential for duplicity, exhibited when convincing the Solo kids that their parents are dead and that he is their "hold-father" (akin to a godfather). To watch Hethrir degenerate from here to a narcissistic Emperor wanna-be is incredibly painful. You find yourself praying the cartoon villain dialogue will prove to be a clever ruse and that the potential-Hethrir we briefly glimpsed will reemerge sooner rather than later. Instead of sooner or later, we get never.

Waru I think was an excellent concept that was badly realized. Waru seems to be a badly developed take on the paradox issues that come to dominate the later New Jedi Order books, which was there handled deftly. However, The Crystal Star also handles the character of Han Solo much better than many of the NJO authors (James Luceno clearly excluded). I often felt that Han was the only guy with whom I could empathize in Vonda's wacky world of Warus, centaurs, and wyrwulfs.

Although, Leia's no square either. For the first and perhaps only time during the run of Star Wars books of the 90s do I feel Leia acts with truly motherly instincts and logic. While the characterization isn't perfect, I would say McIntyre errs on the side of bringing that repressed mother-part of her personality to the fore. In my opinion, The Crystal Star and the Black Fleet Crisis excellently split the two sides of Leia's post-Return of the Jedi personality between them, with most everything else coming up a poor second.

Lastly, one of the novel's shining moments is the end battle with Waru. Luke and Leia are trapped in the abstract netherverse literally inside of Waru and are being lulled toward a black hole (infinite power, infinite love, goodness, happiness, what-have-you) therein. Han, the only completely rational one of the bunch, looks at his children, all of which have just been saved from slavery and death at the hands of Hethrir, then toward the Waru-mass where his wife and brother are dooming themselves to a fate worse than death. "Take care of the kids," he speaks plainly to Chewie. Then to his children, "I love you." Now he turns and runs straight at Waru, that Moby Dick of the Star Wars universe, and dives face first into its golden stuff to save Luke and Leia. The narration is compressed, the exposition sparse, and the effect is breathlessness. The peril and sense of potential loss in that moment is perhaps the most I ever felt in the Bantam series. For however brief an instant, I believed in the possibility that in Vonda's wacky world, perhaps heroes do die.

In the end, I think the book's downfall is a case of too much too fast. While I'm not convinced that given more pages, or even a trilogy, McIntyre would have written a better Star Wars book, I think the book has some really good ideas that could be fleshed out to great effect. However, I think the author's natural predisposition for expressing those ideas is, like the anti-Force theme, at irreconcilable odds with the predispositions of a majority of fans of the Star Wars universe. One thing's for sure, The Crystal Star is a one-of-a-kind Star Wars read. ~ Abel G. Peņa

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