Star Wars: Tales from the Empire

I got this short story collection as a gift way back around when it came out over a decade ago, but never got around to reading it until now. I probably wouldn't have been able to fully grasp it when I was ten, but reading it now was a pretty good experience. Not only were most of the stories very entertaining, it actually reminded me why I like Star Wars in the first place. The disappointment of the prequels and utter banality of the recent animated film and series left me nearly ready to give up on the franchise, but Tales from the Empire proved how interesting the setting and universe can be when the stories aren't aimed directly at children, and I'm now pretty strongly considering reading some of the more popular novels.

I actually have a bit of experience with Star Wars in the written form already, having read part of Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire a while ago, and his stories in this anthology are among the best. Michael A. Stackpole's known for the X-Wing series, in the proud tradition of basing books on video games, and he also has some good work here. There are a bunch of stories from less famous authors too, of a pretty high standard of quality. Given that these were all culled as a sort of greatest hits from a quarterly publication and only writers who are at least competent in the genre are allowed to write Star Wars stories, it's not much of a surprise. I can only recall one appearance by a character from the films in any of the tales, and even characters from other novels are generally secondary ones getting expanded upon, but in a way that actually helped prevent any of them from relying on recognition and forced the stories to stand on their own. As a way of just checking out the expanded universe of Star Wars fiction, it probably wasn't a bad choice.