1313: What Never Was

I'm not the biggest Star Wars fan out there but I can still enjoy the series, and I damn sure respect it. I sort of see Star Wars the same way I see the Beatles: I'm a huge Beatles fan, and considering they were together for less than a decade, the shear amount of quality music they put out is crazy. People can choose not to listen or even enjoy them, sure, but they have to at least appreciate and respect what they did. I see Star Wars in the same light. I happen to be a fan of the genre, but personally I've always been more of a Star Trek kinda guy. All that being said, what makes Star Wars so fantastic is its extended universe. There's a stupid amount of novels released for the series and it's pretty impressive how they've never really slowed down. There is so much source material there for anything: games, movies, TV shows, comics... not sure what else you can turn it into, but you get the point! Some of the best stuff doesn't even have a Jedi involved.

For instance, the recently canceled Star Wars: 1313 was going to be about the Coruscant underworld; bounty hunters abound and scum of the earth running rampant. The E3 demo video they had released before Disney purchased Lucasfilm was pretty crazy, and to say that Disney's decision to cancel the game was a disappointment would be an understatement. In any case, the way that Disney is handling the control of Marvel is reason enough to have some hope for the Star Wars franchise and hopefully its future games and not just movies / TV shows.

There is still Battlefront 3 to look forward to though, and considering DICE is handling the development, you can expect it to be good. I know I haven't been the biggest fan of the Battlefield franchise of late, but with a fresh coat of Star Wars paint on it, who knows, maybe it will be better by proxy...at least I hope so.  Unfortunately not much is known about Battlefront 3. Last E3 there was a teaser for it, and DICE released a dev-blog type video for it, where they went on to express their enthusiasm for working with this franchise, but not much else.

Back to the books. Just to give you a little bit of an idea for how many novels comprise the expanded universe of Star Wars, have a gander at this photo:

That's not even all of them. There is another page I did not bother capturing that shows all the novels that take place years after the original trilogy. While I have not actually read any of these novels, I do know some shit does go down. It's also really cool that the novels come with a timeline. There is just so many books, and for anyone just starting out, it's kind of intimidating / daunting to figure out where to go. Speaking of which, I actually picked one of these up the other day. I decided to start with Scoundrels, since it's the first novel after episode IV that actually has characters I know in it...all those "Tales From" books are anthologies of short stories, which I knew I did not want to start with. Let's see how into this I become.

For curiosities sake, has anyone read a handful of these? Where did you start and why?