Thirty Years of Waru
Thirty years ago, it was 1994, a big year for Star Wars books. Heir to the Empire had kicked off the "Bantam Era", a rough decade of Star Wars publishing from Bantam Spectra, in 1991. Two sequels came in the two following years, but it all broke loose in 1994. Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy trilogy was released mere months apart that year, as well as Dave Wolverton's The Courtship of Princess Leia and Vonda N. McIntyre's The Crystal Star. Throw in Kathy Tyers's The Truce at Bakura from December of 1993, and you'll see a big shift from Star Wars novels coming out rarely to Star Wars novels coming out almost too fast to read. I feel like there's a parallel between Star Wars then, on the page, and Star Wars now, on the screen: Star Wars went from dormant, to yearly, to something every few months. In both cases, the audience fell off, and quality didn't quite keep pace with quantity. Today, while Zahn's Thrawn trilogy, the X-Wing books, and, to an extent, Courtship are still remembered fondly, much of the Bantam Era is now poorly remembered, or worse, remembered poorly. Easily the book most remembered poorly, of this or any era of Star Wars publishing, came out thirty years ago today, on December 8th, 1994: The Crystal Star.
Now, if you're ever on Family Feud, and they say they asked 100 Star Wars readers to name a bad Star Wars book, you go ahead and say "The Crystal Star"; that'll be the top answer. It's highly arguable whether it genuinely is the worst Star Wars book of all time (and I'll get to arguing whether it is in just a bit) but it has earned an all-time reputation as the bad Star Wars book. Honestly, very few people today have read the book, or even really know what it's about, but they've heard of it, and they know it's bad. That's where I was at the beginning of the year, when I decided to give the book a thirty-year retrospective, similar to what I did for Heir to the Empire a few years ago. Of course, this would be a very different sort of project, since that was really about the anniversary of Thrawn, who's become and enduring part of Star Wars to this day; this is about something that has endured only as a punchline, that didn't leave nearly the same impact on the broader world of Star Wars, but which left perhaps a greater impact on Star Wars in becoming the first Star Wars project to be universally disliked, the first of many.
What did I just read? A review of The Crystal Star
Author Vonda N. McIntyre, it should be said, was a respectable get for Star Wars. Like Timothy Zahn, she was an award-winning sci-fi writer, having taken the Hugo and the Nebula for her 1978 novel Dreamsnake. She had also written many books for Star Trek, so she had experience with franchise fiction as well. And, having now read The Crystal Star, I can say that McIntyre is a talented writer. The Crystal Star is not a badly written book, at a prose level; it's not purple and abstruse the way Barbara Hambley's writing could be, nor is it tedious and repetitive like K. W. Jeter's, nor is it as cheesily declarative as Michael A. Stackpole's often becomes. The problems with The Crystal Star are problems of what was written, not of the writing itself.
So what's written? At its core, The Crystal Star is about the kidnapping of Han and Leia's children – Jaina, Jacen, and Anakin – by Hethrir, a secretive figure who has reemerged onto the Galactic scene with a plan to restore the Empire. This starts right from the beginning; the first line of the book is "The children had been kidnapped." A few pages later we get "Leia had seldom worried about the safety of Jaina and Jacen and Anakin," which I laughed at because the Solo kids are constantly getting kidnapped. One of the big complaints about The Crystal Star is how stale of a premise this was, even in 1994. Now, in fairness to McIntyre, she would have been writing this book at the same time Anderson was writing the Jedi Academy books (wherein the Solo kids get kidnapped) so she would have been, at best, aware that Joruus C'baoth had tried to kidnap the twins (basically as soon as they were born) in 1993's The Last Command, and I doubt she even read that because the Solos' Noghri bodyguards are notable by their absence in this book. (They didn't appear at relevant points of Anderson's books either. These sort of inconsistencies were relatively common in the Bantam era; different authors often avoided including too much from each other's works, which left Star Wars books a lot less interconnected than they would become later on.)
But here's the interesting thing: while "The children had been kidnapped" was the last thing Star Wars fans wanted to read when they opened a new book in late 1994 (or, indeed, when they read the first chapter as printed as a sample at the end of Champions of the Force), The Crystal Star is easily the best Solo kids kidnapping story. This is largely because them being kidnapped is actually central to the plot; that's what this book is about. The other kidnappings were generally thrown into the third act to raise tensions, with the children themselves not really characterized. Here, the kidnapping is the story, the instigating incident. The children are actual characters; young Jaina is the perspective character through whom we meet Hethrir. She's pretty well realized; she's an odd five-year-old, but then she would be odd, wouldn't she, given the family she's been born into. She does feel properly like a small child. The lack of real shock she exhibits at being stolen away was the thing that stood out most to me; this was, in a way, something she expected, something she was – not exactly prepared for, totally, but something she'd been coached on. She isn't blindsided, or in shock, the way a five-year-old girl really ought to be in her situation, but, again, this wasn't her first time. We see less of Jacen and Anakin, but they seem similar. They're all quite certain that their families will find them, and even still they take it upon themselves to do what they can to free the other stolen children. It's weirdly fascinating that this old, poorly-remembered book is the first story to really be about the Solo kids, who would go on to be such key figures in the Del Rey era of Legends publishing. Things like Jaina's mechanical aptitude and Jacen's empathic abilities are first established here, and would go on to feature in future stories.
Leia is pretty well characterized in The Crystal Star, although weirdly for parts of it. Without Luke or Han around (more on where they are in a moment) or the aforementioned Noghri, Leia and Chewie have to go after the kids by themselves, and they do so by posing as bounty hunters. They do this because they're worried about being recognized while infiltrating an Imperial loyalist stronghold. Leia gets...very into character for a while, to a degree that seems unnecessary, but which might be read as Leia going a bit mad with worry. Out of all the times her kids get kidnapped, Leia seems the most genuinely upset here. This is, mainly, because the situation is more desperate here: it's unclear, for a long while, who kidnapped the Solo kids; Leia was visiting a world, trying to bring it into the New Republic, where ritual kidnappings of negotiating parties' children is simply an established part of the local culture, so when the kids are initially kidnapped, that's what everyone thinks is happening. So rather than being able to call on a whole army to rescue her children, Leia is isolated. Her fears aren't taken entirely seriously, and she's advised to just wait for a ransom. When none is demanded and she and Chewie set out after her children, she's not entirely confident that she will find them, and that comes through in McIntyre's writing:
Hyperspace glowed and writhed around her. Somewhere in its patterns she would find a trail. She must find it.
She thought she saw it, she grasped for it, it eluded her and disappeared.
Relax, she said to herself. Relax, and maybe you can find them.
That was like ordering herself to stop worrying: it was impossible.
She abandoned her quest for detached calm. She discarded her pretense of composure.
Instead, Leia loosed her rage and terror and pain. Tears sprang to her eyes, blurred her vision, and rolled down her cheeks. Anger spiced the terror. She pounded her fists against her pilot’s chair. She began to sob, to groan, to mutter the basest curses of Han’s roughest smuggler friends.
Leia screamed.
Rage and terror and pain all shattered around her, and disappeared. The force of her love and grief broke through into a brilliant blue-white reality.
I appreciated this aspect of the book, how the kidnapping is handled, quite a bit.
Jaina, Jacen, and Anakin were taken by Hethrir, a mysterious figure who sold out his people fore a place of power in the Empire, who is now, after the defeat of Palpatine, the reborn Palpatine, and Thrawn, trying his own hand at reviving the Empire by raising an army of brainwashed children. He almost works as a villain. He's creepy enough, and evil enough. His plan to conquer the Galaxy with an army of children sems a bit silly but, if you accept that the army wouldn't still be children once he launched his attack, he actually prefigures Brendol Hux, and seems a bit less silly. Then again, he is, at least as far as we see, the only adult in his Imperial revanchist movement, which turns things implausible again. His plan to disguise his abduction is almost clever enough to work, but for much of the book, it still seems that he's taken a tremendously foolish risk in taking these particular children. But we eventually figure out his real plot, which is where the kidnapping story intersects with the story of Waru.
Waru comes into the book in Han and Luke's plotline, which is very much the weak point of the book. Basically, Luke has caught wind of strange goings on surrounding a reputed healer on a space station orbiting the titular Crystal Star (a star so old and cold that it has solidified, somehow). He thinks it might be a Force-user, someone he might recruit to join his new Jedi Order. He and Han go to Crseih Station in disguise, along with Threepio. While they're there, Luke mysteriously falls ill, while Han gets distracted playing cards in the bar. There's a subplot about them running out of money that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Eventually they run into an old girlfriend of Han's who shows them the healer, the being known as Waru. I'll let the book introduce him for itself:
The voice was rich and full and clear and very, very soft. It filled the chamber with a whisper, insinuating itself past the pleading of the congregation. Xaverri stepped forward, and the crowd parted for her. Han followed without thinking; all he knew was that he did not want her to approach the strange being alone. He pulled himself free of Luke’s restraining hand.
As Han neared the altar, he got a better look at Waru. It was a complex construct of chased gold shields. But beneath the shields, visible from certain angles and at certain movements of the being, lay a slab of raw, uncovered tissue, like chunks of meat. Fluid—blood?—glistened between the massive shields, oozed out, and fell by drops and fine streams onto the stage, where it coagulated into a crusted pool. The blood ran off the stage and formed stalactites that hung nearly to the floor of the auditorium.
So yeah, that's Waru, our other villain in this work. He's a giant, golden-scaled cube of goo with the ability to take or give vitality. On the station, he's founded a cult of people seeking healing. Sometimes he provides healing, but occasionally, the sick person will instantly die, instead. Waru pretends not to have any control over this, but, in reality, as Han can immediately discern, he's "eating" the life force of those who die to sustain himself. Where did such a strange creature come from? Why, from another universe, through a nearby black hole. Waru comes from the realm of the Anti-Force and uses that power in his healing.
Waru is, I'll say rather controversially, not a bad notion for a space fantasy villain. He is quite out-of-step with the world of Star Wars (which hasn't featured trans-dimensional beings, before or since) which is the big criticism, but he is, taking him in a vacuum, an effective villain, once he finally shows up. If Waru had featured in one of McIntyre's Star Trek books, I think he'd have found a nice place in that franchise. Now, I had heard of Waru before actually reading this book, so I was less shocked than readers in 1994 might have been.
Now, pairing him up with Hethrir doesn't work, which hurts the book. They're entirely different sorts of villain, and their goals are, to put it generously, tangentially related: Hethrir wants to restore the Empire with himself as ruler; Waru just wants to go home. Somehow the two have met at some point before the book starts and have struck a bargain: Hethrir will bring Waru a Jedi child to consume, which will provide Waru with enough energy to return to his own universe and also to grant Hethrir a boon, making him as powerful as the Emperor had been. At least, that's what I surmise from a scene after they're both defeated, when Luke tries to explain what was going on to Leia, who is essentially functioning as a proxy for the reader, who is at this point quite thoroughly confused about what was going on the whole time.
But no, my problem with the Crseih Station scenes is that they drag on so long before anything happens. This book has an issue common to a lot of multilateral plots wherein one plotline has less happening in it than the others, and so it gets padded out to get it to a comparable page count. So while we see Jaina's experience with her brothers as Hethrir's captive, meeting other captured children and plotting their escape, and Leia's experience going with Chewbacca to try to find them, and finding Hethrir's ex along the way, who provides clues about what's happened to the kids, we also have to see Han just kind of hanging around for half the book. Han's not badly done, exactly, but he has so little to do for so many of his scenes.
Luke is badly done. As I mentioned he gets sick upon reaching the station, and spends most of the book in a sort of delirium state, coming under Waru's influence when he really ought to know better. After Waru and Hethrir are defeated, it's revealed that the crystal star is resonating under the influence of the black hole and that's somehow disrupted the Force's presence in the region, and that's why Luke's been sick. The two bodies are apparently just about to collide, which kicks off a tacked-on-feeling scene of having to evacuate Crseih station before everything explodes. The book, which honestly started pretty strongly, ends in a farcically spectacular fireworks finale seemingly designed to purge the story's weird events from the Galactic stage.
The worst ever? An appraisal at The Crystal Star's legacy
Is The Crystal Star truly the worst Star Wars book of all time, as its reputation suggests?
No.
While I was reading this book, I was thinking of other Star Wars books that I hadn't liked, and The Crystal Star was comparing favorably to all of them. The ideas in the book, while often strange, were executed well (up until the ending), and were at least fresh and interesting, which put it ahead of a lot of the post-NJO EU novels. The characters in the book, new and old, were drawn distinctly, which put it ahead of the phase 1 High Republic books I'd read. It was better written than Last Shot or Lords of the Sith. But then again, The Crystal Star acquired its reputation quite quickly, so saying it's not as bad as books from years or decades later isn't really fair in assessing that reputation. When I got done reading The Crystal Star, I realized how little I actually knew of the state of Star Wars novels during the '90s. I'd read the Thrawn trilogy, and the first four X-Wing books, and a couple others, sporadically, but there was a lot of Star Wars books from that era I hadn't read. These were mainly books that no one speaks of anymore, not even to complain about. So, I decided to read them, too, to get my bearings on how The Crystal Star ranked among books of its day. I spent 2024 reading through three trilogies of novels, each of which I reviewed separately in my "Road to Waru" series, along with Michael A. Stackpole's I, Jedi, which isn't forgotten or hated, but rather polarizing. (It's a lot of people's favorite Star Wars book, but lots of others call it "worst than The Crystal Star".) I ran out of time to review I, Jedi – which I still plan to do early next year – or to read Shadows of the Empire, but I still gained a greater understanding of the Bantam era and how The Crystal Star fits into it.
Read "The Road to Waru"
After that reading project, I'll say that The Crystal Star is much worse than The Black Fleet Crisis (which was actually quite good), better than The Bounty Hunter Wars (which were an interminable slog to read), and maybe not quite as good as the books of the Callista trilogy (definitely worse than Planet of Twilight, though I'd say just a bit better than Children of the Jedi). I found The Crystal Star pretty readable, which puts it ahead of The New Rebellion in my personal appraisal, though I'm not sure I'd argue it's truly the better book. Actually, a lot of the flaws of The Crystal Star showed up in these books, to a lesser extent: Black Fleet Crisis has the same issue where Leia's story just has a lot more going on than Luke's story, so Luke's gets stretched out; Barbara Hambly, in her entries of The Callista Trilogy, also felt a need to somehow hamper Luke's Force abilities to keep him from winning too quickly. The Bounty Hunter Wars also had too many villains with barely-connected stupid schemes. (The Crystal Star seems merciful, looking back, in giving only two villains; BHW had, like, four or five.)
I would not, at all, argue that The Crystal Star is good, or has been unfairly described as among the worst of Star Wars books; everything I did like of it came early, and it grew worse and more baffling as it went on. But it simply isn't indubitably the worst Star Wars book of all time.
Arguably it's not even the worst Star Wars book of 1994. I did not like the Jedi Academy Trilogy; you might remember that Champions of the Force caught some stray fire in my review of The Rise of Skywalker. I did not re-read those books at this time, but I have read them and, like many other readers, I found the story of Kyp Durron going on a mass-murder spree and then walking free after telling Luke he was vewy sowwy was an insultingly stupid take on the redemptive theme of Star Wars. Reading I, Jedi reminded me of that, and reading Darksaber reminded me of how the rest of those books felt so derivative. I think the key to understanding why The Crystal Star is remembered as the Worst Star Wars Book is to look at how it differs from the Jedi Academy trilogy.
The Crystal Star is not remembered as the worst Star Wars book just based on its own quality, but also because it was the first universally poorly received Star Wars book. Why was it received so much worse than Jedi Academy? Because it was so weird. Say what you will about Anderson's books, about Kyp Durron, about the Sun Crusher, about Daala, you can't say that they don't feel like Star Wars stories. Anderson matched the tone and theme of Star Wars – arguably in a very derivative, uninteresting way, but whatever – better than any other Star Wars author of his era. If you pick up one of his Star Wars book you can be assured of getting a Star Wars book. The Crystal Star doesn't feel very Star Wars-y for large parts of it.
Not feeling Star Wars-y is the common theme among widely-hated Star Wars projects. Star Wars-iness is a difficult quality to define, and indeed means different things to different people, so I'll give some examples of what I mean: First, there's Waru himself. He's something too strange to really be called good or evil, which undercuts the moral drama inherent to Star Wars. He's compared to antimatter, his power that of the "Anti-Force", in a way that undercuts the mysticism inherent to Star Wars. He is, quite literally, not of the world of Star Wars, not just in his origins but in his pursuits; if he had come to the Star Wars reality with the desire to conquer, that might have worked better; he'd still be weird, but the Yuuzhan Vong were weird, and they fit in because they made themselves a part of the Galactic story. Waru doesn't, because as much as he does kill people, he's doing so to get back out of the Galactic story. He's a self-solving problem. That's not to say that our heroes aren't sufficiently motivated to stop him; they have to save little Anakin, after all, but that conflict is very flat and surface-level. He has no particular quarrel with our heroes. Again, he'd work well as a Star Trek villain, since Star Trek is more about going out and finding something weird someplace. In Star Wars, he's out-of-step.
Besides Waru, there's a lot of classic fantasy elements incorporated into The Crystal Star. Now, Star Wars is often described as "space fantasy", but it still has an otherworldly sci-fi skin on it. So when McIntyre features a character (Lusa, one of the other children held captive with Jaina) who she describes as a "centaur", that's going to be a little jarring. Lusa isn't merely centaur-like – that could be forgiven – she is called a centaur. It's jarring in the same way Luke drinking hot chocolate is jarring. Jacen, for his part, befriends a dragon, who helps them escape. The presence of familiar fantasy creatures is a petty complaint, but it's the kind of complaint that can be made and spread easily without much context needed. It's difficult to really complain about the Jedi Academy trilogy without re-capping events and explaining things; to complain about The Crystal Star you can just say "there was a centaur and a dragon and a big slab of tuna from another dimension" and you'll have made your point.
And there's just not a lot to recommend the book. Not being entirely terrible, even doing some concepts better than they're usually done, doesn't make it worth reading. So even if it's not truly the very worst Star Wars book ever written, it has no fans or defenders to take up for it. The Crystal Star was the first big misstep for Star Wars, at least of this kind: too weird to fit smoothly into the franchise, and not good enough to get away with sticking out. I think you can trace a pretty clear line from The Crystal Star to more recent Star Wars duds like The Acolyte, in this way. Novelty and fresh ideas are something for creators to be proud of, and something weary critics and reviewers will appreciate, but that's rarely what established fanbases are looking for. Do anything too different and you're likely to be taken either as a failure who tried to make Star Wars but couldn't, a critic who doesn't like Star Wars and is trying to fix it (not absolutely always a bad thing but a very risky posture to take), or else a mercenary attempting to cash in on the Star Wars brand to sell a story that isn't sincerely Star Wars. If you stick to the basics, at worst you'll be forgotten.
A franchise like Star Wars has an identity, for good and for ill. Deviating from that deliberately is a risk that might pay off; doing so carelessly is a mistake; doing so in 1994 is not out of the ordinary. The Bantam era had a lot of weird ideas; even enduring classics like the Thrawn trilogy and the X-Wing books had some weird ideas, some of which were woven into the greater Star Wars tapestry until they weren't weird anymore, others of which get overlooked nowadays. Bantam was not nearly as choosy with what they published as Del Rey would be in the coming millennium, nor was Star Wars publishing as coordinated as it is now. Indeed, a lot of present-day Star Wars publishing is built to prevent another Crystal Star from happening: working more closely with authors, enforcing more of a brand identity, typically building a stable of regular writers rather than pursuing big award-winners. And, thus far, it has been successful: The Crystal Star remains, thirty years on, the worst it's ever gotten in most fans minds. In recent times, Jedi: Battle Scars might come up as the Worst Star Wars Book Ever, but I think that's just recency bias (not having read it, I should mention). It's not the new Crystal Star; the new Ruins of Dantooine, maybe. I don't think there can be a new Crystal Star, really; it's become too much of a byword for bad Star Wars novels to be unseated, even by books that are genuinely worse.
What now?
While I don't recommend The Crystal Star to other readers, I am, personally, glad I read it. Reading it prompted me to read several other books. Some became new favorites; all gave me a better idea of where Star Wars books came from before I started reading them. This has been an interesting year of reading for me. I have a decent idea what my next big Star Wars reading project will be, but right now I'd like to spend some time reading some things that aren't Star Wars and that are generally regarded as quite good, just as a nice change of pace, so it might be a while before you see that next one. Say, five years?