From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back
Ratings28
Average rating3.5
The story selection was lacking compared to the first one. A lot of these were boring and a real slog to get through. Over 25% of the book is stuck on Hoth. Thankfully the stories after Hoth get a bit better.
This felt really slow for a Star Wars book. It was easy to put it aside and come back to it as it is a collection of short stories. There are stories that I liked a lot and some that weren't for me at this time. One thing that I do have a strong opinion about is that I don't like sex and swearing in Star Wars. It feels out of place for the Star Wars storytelling feel to me. I don't recall there being much of either and the sex is only innuendo. It just feels out of place in a story that was fun without it.
This is about exactly what you would expect from the premise, which is simply taking background characters and small moments from The Empire Strikes Back and fleshing them out into short stories. Have you ever wanted to see the scene between Luke and the medical droid fixing his arm that must have occurred before the scene in the movie actually starts? Do you want to know what the citizens of Cloud City thought about the Empire's occupation of it? Would you like to get inside the head of the wampa that captured Like on Hoth? This book is for you.
It was generally pretty fun. Having a whole bunch of different authors (and narrators in the audiobook) made for a good variety of stories told from different points of views from both rebel and empire characters all the way to animals like the aforementioned wampa, the tauntauns on Hoth, and that big monster on the asteroid whose mouth the Millennium Falcon flies into. It wasn't quite as drastically varied in tone and style as I would have liked, it all feels of a piece of the movie, but it was still fun.
There are some drawbacks to having these all as completely disconnected sorry stories though. They are presented chronologically in line with the movie, so the conditions on Hoth are described in detail at least a half dozen times. Same with Han and Leia's open secret romance dynamic. There are FOUR stories that prominently featured the scene where Vader force choke kills that one Admiral while video conferencing with him early in the movie. Some of it just stuck out strangely reading these all back to back.
Still I liked this well enough and there's something fun, though cheesey, about realizing when a scene from the story starts to become a scene that was in the movie and recognizing specific lines and whatnot. There is another book like this about A New Hope, so I'll probably get around to that eventually as well (I just listened to this one first because it was available sooner via the library).
Like the previous book centred on A New Hope, this is a collection of forty stories taking place in and around The Empire Strikes Back that run alongside or at right angles to the plot of the film. Also like that book, it's a mixed bag at best. I really liked some of the stories, and strongly disliked others. Obviously there's no way you're going to get a consistent level of quality across forty stories, and my favourites could well be someone else's hates and vice versa. I am slightly perturbed that my favourite stories tended to be the ones that put you in the head of an Imperial. I don't know what that says about me, but the bottom line is that this is a fun if undemanding read, and one every Star Wars fan should get at least some enjoyment out of.