Review — From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi

A collection of short stories exploring the worlds of the minor characters seen on screen in the third movie of the original trilogy. 

This may be hard to believe, but once upon a time, there wasn't much Star Wars content. 

After the original trilogy came out, there was a quiet period. Then, there was Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire, the first installment of what would become the Expanded Universe — and it was like cool, clear water to us fans dying of SW thirst. 

But what really cemented my obsession with all things Star Wars was a compilation book called Tales From Jabba's Palace. In it, different writers chose a background character — Max Rebo, Malakili the Rancor handler, Salacious Crumb — and crafted an entire backstory around them. 

It was intoxicating, and I can stil remember a ton of them, actually. 

If this intrigues you as a Star Wars fan, then that's exactly what From a Certain Point of View is like. Also available are versions for A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back, which were both published in the past few years.

What Worked for Me

40 different authors contributed to this compilation, including sci-fi heavyweights like Charlie Jane Anders, Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar, and Alyssa Wong. With this many, of course, some were bound to be more engaging and better-written than others. Here are a few of my faves:

Sy Snootles, the long-legged, long-lipped singer in Jabba's palace. We get her take on everything that goes down when Luke comes to rescue everyone, and it's a fun, different take on what goes on behind the scenes working in the employ of a Huttese crime lord. You also learn cool little details, like the fact that she pressed the tiny, needle-like stingers of a local insect to get her lips plumped (an outer rim collagen filler dupe, naturally). 

Obi-Wan's force-ghost tale is sweet — we get an annotated version of the very brief exchange we see between him and Luke on Dagobah in ROTJ. This line crushed me:

"There was a great deal of Anakin in him, but he had inherited mainly Anakin's best qualities. Obi-Wan hadn't killed Anakin Skywallker, but neither had Vader. The best of him lived on in Leia and Luke."

We get to hang out with Wedge again! As as fan of the X-Wing series in the EU, I love me some Wedge Antilles. He's the Horatio Hornblower of the Star Wars universe, all luck and diffidence and hard-working stubborness. The story is also filled with teeny-tiny Easter eggs that made me chuckle, like the idea of getting Lando "a victory cape for the ages" or how the climate on the Mon Cal ship Home One is kept super humid because Admiral Ackbar & his species are water-loving and need it. 

What Didn't Work So Much

I'm not a big fantasy fan, so any of the chapters with Ewoks — and there are more than you'd think — were definitely skim-worthy. 

One chapter attempts to ret-con the concept of "jizz music," which is a style of play that was first popularized in Tales From Jabba's Palace, specifically as played by Figrin D'an and the Model Nodes. Now, understandably, this is a deeply silly and potentially offensive term. One understands what the original creator of jizz was trying to do — create a vaguely similar, but spacely-different term for jazz — but it's gross. In one chapter of From a Certain Point of View, the music is described as "jatz" music. I refuse this change and will forever be a fan of jizz music!

And while I love the idea of Max Rebo ( the big, blue, elephant-like alien that plays the keyboard at Jabba's palace), it turns out I don't need to know anything about him. Why he falls by the wayside and Sy Snootles doesn't, I'm not sure — it could be the writing, or the characterization, or the chosen backstory. I guess it all comes down to what resonates with you in the Star Wars world.

I hate to say it, but you can definitely tell who really loves and deeply understands Star Wars in these chapters. Here's an example of a sentence that made me roll my eyes: 

"I set out a spread with something for every one of my expected guests. Alderaanian biscuits, colo claw fish, and blue milk from Tatooine."

It's probably the pedantic nerd in me, but there's no way I ever believed blue milk was created and marketed from the tiny backwater planet in the Outer Rim. Blue milk is a given in the Star Wars universe, like how oatmeal is brown in ours — it's not something to be commented on to give detail.  Okay,  I seriously apologize for that, it's maybe too nerdy of me. 

But overall, this book is fun, and if you like spending time in the Star Wars universe, you'll definitely have fun reveling in at least a handful of chapters — but probably more. 

--

The Math

Highlights: This is licensed and sanctioned fan fiction! It's fun.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Reference: From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi (Star Wars) by Olivie Blake, Saladin Ahmed, Charlie Jane Anders, Fran Wilde, Mary Kenney and Mike Chen [Penguin Random House, 2023]

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, Vidalia onions, and growing corn and giving them pun names like Anacorn Skywalker.

Star Wars Subjectivities: Return of the Jedi

For most of my life, I proudly stated “Return of the Jedi” when someone asked me what my favorite Star Wars movie was—both out loud and in my heart.

Then, somewhere along the way in my early 20s, I started saying Empire Strikes Back. I heard it parroted so often how good it was, how dark, how complex. It was more serious, more artsy.

I would nod in agreement, and I did it so often that I came to believe it myself, I think.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Empire. But it was never my favorite—how could a young Haley love a movie in which the bad guys lose miserably, on multiple fronts?

Today, I am here to renounce my claim that Empire is my favorite. I will be replacing on its throne Return of the Jedi. In so doing, I will be paying homage to my youthful fervor and obsession, and I’m incredibly okay with this.

Star Wars, for me, is very much location-based, so I’ll discuss some of my favorite set pieces in ROTJ and why they’re great.

Jabba’s palace

For the first time in Star Wars, we return to a previously visited location—everyone’s favorite desert planet. Jabba’s palace is a former B’omarr Monastery. Wait, how do I know that, you ask?

We have to take a detour into part of the reason I love ROTJ so much. One of the first Expanded Universe novels that made me fall even more in love with the Star Wars universe was Tales from Jabba’s Palace, a collection of short stories told from the point of view of various side characters.

As I read these tales —about the rancor’s keeper, about the monks roaming in their mobile spider-mobiles, about Bib Fortuna, Jabba’s majordomo— I pictured them vividly in the palace.

So yeah, I dig the opening act of ROTJ. We also see the return of Luke, all grown up. How he orchestrates everything so perfectly is truly chef’s kiss. And who amongst us hasn’t played Luke Skywalker while jumping off a diving board into a pool and pretending to grab it on the way down?

Sidenote: It's a truth universally acknowledged that the original "Lapti Nek" song is far and away better than the Special Edition's "Jedi Rocks" replacement.

Endor

Man, people hate Ewoks. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized just how much people really think they bring the movie down. Granted, I first saw ROTJ when I was a child, so my perspective is of course skewed.

Lucas originally wanted to use Wookiees in place of Ewoks, but legend has it was switched to Ewoks to make it more marketable to kids. Honestly, I’m fine with that. They are cute! And I love the idea of an evil empire receiving their comeuppance by underestimating a native population they perceive as no threat.

Endor itself is really gorgeous, too. Filmed in northern California, it’s lush and green and the very Platonic ideal of a forest clime. Whenever I have friends visit the Redwoods, to this day I always comment, “Oh, so you went to Endor!”

The Rebel fleet vs. the second Death Star

This is the first (and last) great space battle in the original trilogy. Yeah, I said it.

In A New Hope, the technology just isn’t there. Sure, the X-wings look great speeding along the trench in the final moments, but they’re not loose. They’re not wildly careening and barrel-rolling around medical frigates. They zoom along straight lines, but there’s no seat-of-your-pants thrill. I don't think a single ship goes upside down once, which is strange for space dogfights.

In Empire, we notice the Falcon start to zip and zang around as she evades Star Destroyers and asteroids. But there’s not one big battle to really bring it into focus.

Above Endor, though, we finally get the goods. We see X-wings, A-Wings, B-Wings, TIE fighters, TIE interceptors, and they’re roiling around each other like dogs in heat.

Throw into the mix about a hundred Star Destroyers, the entire Rebel fleet, and a Death Star, and you’ve got glorious, glorious chaos.

Tying it all together

ROTJ is just my comfort film. I like the joyous way it ends, and I also think it has some of the best humor in the entire franchise. I think another reason I dig it so much is that it’s the most 80s-esque of the trilogy, and this makes sense as it came out in '83, while ANH and ESB were '77 and '80, respectively.

So yes, let it be known, internet and the great wide galaxy beyond: Return of the Jedi is indeed my favorite Star Wars film—now and forever.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo-nominated podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, Vidalia onions, and growing corn and giving them pun names like Anacorn Skywalker.

Tales From the Borderlands - Episode I: Zer0 Sum

[Tales From the Borderlands - Episode I: Zer0 Sum, Telltale Games, 2K Games, 11/2014]

What-tale Games?

I'll be honest, until The Walking Dead, I'd never heard of Telltale Games, yet now they seem to be dominating the market on some of the biggest titles in all types of entertainment across the board. From The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us to Borderlands, Game of Thrones, and the upcoming Minecraft series, none of which has yet to receive anything below an 80 on Metacritic, Telltale has put together what may be the most impressive library of titles in recent memory. They're making EA look like a small, indie production company that just figured out how to make Hexic into a high definition game for the PS3. On top of their plethora of quality releases, Episode 1 cost a whopping $2.50, which is quite possibly the best deal in gaming since The Orange Box. 

Choose Your Own Adventure...Wizard or Warrior?

One of the new gameplay additions that makes this Borderlands game different from the others is the ability to affect the outcome through decisions you make throughout the game. Unlike other games where your decisions can alter the plot, your decisions about how to respond to situations immediately effect how other characters feel about you and parts of the story as immediate as the following scene.

Is This REALLY a Borderlands Game? 

While making game-altering decisions is a great new addition to the gameplay in Borderlands, Episode 1 just didn't feel like a Borderlands game without the massive arsenal at your disposal, discovered and earned through hours of tireless grinding and mission completion. Although it's pretty clear the future episodes will contain plenty of the old-style FPS game mechanics that made the first three games so much fun to play, but they were sorely lacking in the first go-around in Telltale's 

Borderlands product. It's good, don't get me wrong, but it just doesn't have the feel of the Pandora we've all come to know and love. 

So If It Doesn't Play Like a Traditional Borderlands Game, How DOES it Play?

It honestly did remind me of those old Choose Your Own Adventure books, except you couldn't go back and switch to the other outcome if you didn't like what happened as you could with the books. Once you'd spent that ammo or made that other character angry, you were stuck with the repercussions. On top of that, you didn't get much time to consider your responses, like maybe five seconds, tops. Not only does this add to the sense of immediacy each time you are presented with a challenge but it raises the replayability significantly. This is due to the fact that you want to find out what would have happened if you had just been nicer to that one character or showed more of a spine with another. Although it felt as though many of the "choices" were just going to end up with you getting insulted no matter what response you chose, there were plenty that definitely affected how the game progressed. It will be interesting to see if they carry over your decisions from the first episode into the next four or if the decision-making effect is limited to each episode. Hopefully it's the former. 

A Little Bedtime Story

As usual, I don't want to get too far into the story line so as not to spoil the game for those who have yet to play it. I have to supply a little bit of backstory, but to give away the ending would probably get my figurative Interwebbian head chopped off by crazed jihadi gamers. To that end, I'll just give you the setup and some critique and let you decide if it's worth a play or not based on that. You start the game as Rhys, a lower-tier suit-and-tie at Hyperion who has dreams of middle management. However, instead of the raise and promotion you were expecting, you quickly learn that your former boss has been "Blown out of the g@&&^m airlock," to borrow a phrase from Aliens, and replaced somehow, repercussion free, with your arch-nemisis Vasquez. 

Needless to say this doesn't do good things for your career, with you ending up as Vice President of Janitors. You and your sidekick, Vaughn, come up with a quick plan to get back at Vasquez by stealing a deal he has set up to purchase a vault key for $10 million. Things get a bit off track from there and you end up trying to salvage what you can from the leftovers. 

At the same time, Fiona is a con artist that lives on Pandora alread. Rhys is lucky enough to at least live on the space station where there are working toilets and people don't eat one-another's eyeballs. Fiona is working with some other shady characters trying to set up the deal for a Vault Key planet-side. However, all hell breaks loose and you're being dragged through the desert that looks strangely like the male version of Princess Leia's bounty hunter from Jabba's Palace in Return of the Jedi. You know, the one that's holding a thermal detonator and says, "Yoto, yoto." 

"Where am I?"

"Jabba's Palace." 

"Who are you?" 

"Someone who loves you!" 

Anyway, sorry for the Star Wars flashback. Back to the game. While I will admit to being a bit disappointed with the lack of a real control mechanic and firefights, the place where this game really shines is in its story. Whereas Borderlands 1 and 2 seemed to be a bit disjointed at times when you got off on a side quest run for a few hours, Tales From The Borderlands never suffers from such side trips off the main course. Telltale Games was free to focus on creating a top-quality story set within the Borderlands universe, and they squeezed every ounce of goodness out of the opportunity. This game is fraught with the irreverent, sometimes dark humor of its predecessors. Where it lacks in control scheme, it more than makes up for with a hilarious and overwhelmingly engaging tale of Pandora and its unique and often freakish inhabitants. The only real problem I have with this game is waiting for the next installment to come out!

The Math

Objective Score: 9/10

Bonuses: +1 for having possible the best Borderlands story to come out yet and leaving me starving for more.

Penalties: -1 because, come on, Borderlands is a first-person shooter. I can count on one hand the number of times I fired a weapon in this game. Heck, I'd still be able to count the shots on one hand if half my digits got sheared off in a thresher accident at age nine. I know there are guns coming to the series from hints in the story, but I was a bit disappointed in the almost total lack of them in this episode. 

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10. A standout in its category. Very high quality. You should REALLY go buy this game, especially for just $2.50! If you don't like it, I'll personally refund your money. 

(But not really.)

Microreview [book]: The Tower Broken, book three of the Knife & Tower trilogy by Mazarkis Williams

Williams, Mazarkis. The Tower Broken. Jo Fletcher Books, 2014. Buy starting June 3rd.

The Meat

Trilogies are kind of strange, when you think about it. They’re especially odd creations in light of the need for authors to wow the audience with the first installment. Ideally, installment two should at the very least sustain readers’ interest, and the final installment should blow their minds. In other words, books (or movies) one and three have to do all of the real work, with book one as the attention-grabber and book three as the stunning conclusion complete with melodrama galore. Comparatively little is asked of book two, in order to allow expectations for book three to rise stratospherically high.

Exceptions to this pattern certainly exist, but I’d argue such exceptions thrive precisely because our expectations for the middle installment are much lower than for the first or last installments. The primacy and recency effects also help ensure the middle installment is the most forgettable, but any time it greatly exceeds our low expectations, the middle installment can capture our imaginations the same way a good underdog story is irresistible to most of us. The Empire Strikes Back just feels sooo much better than either A New Hope or Return of the Jedi, to say nothing of the prequel trilogy (another exception to the trilogy pattern, thanks to all the installments being so uniformly unnecessary and, despite being visually magnificent, such poorly told and conceived stories, though here too some can be heard saying Attack of the Clones is ‘better than I expected’). Of course, part of the greatness of The Empire Strikes Back comes retroactively, comparing quite favorably to its sequel, since Return of the Jedi is far from satisfying in most ways.

This is all by way of saying that expectations for The Tower Broken, final installment in Mazarkis Williams’ Tower & Knife trilogy, were quite high despite the slight disappointment of book two. But if Williams’ book two was no Empire Strikes Back, The Tower Broken definitely manages to surpass the underwhelming bar set by the Return of the Jedi model of trilogy conclusions (apologies to those of you out there who are still laboring under the illusion that Return of the Jedi is a great movie).

"Admiral! We have enemy ships in sector 47!" "It's a trap!" The scintillating dialogue is just one of many reasons to find Return of the Jedi pretty silly...

I must confess I was deeply concerned by the direction Williams seemed to be taking her story, partly due to the childhood trauma of having read the Earthsea Trilogy and been quite taken with Ged, only to read Tehanu and find my hero emptied of all that made him heroic, transformed into an old man, depressingly ordinary. Would Williams drop-kick Sarmin, erstwhile pattern mage, down that same dark and hopeless hole into which Le Guin dropped Ged? Fortunately, the answer is ‘not really.’ True, Sarmin must struggle to face the ever-escalating threats assailing his empire without recourse to his own pattern magic, but Williams uses this power vacuum to explore another aspect of his world, namely elemental magic, and the result is impressive indeed. Moreover, about the Empress there had always been a certain promise of greatness, and Williams chooses this apocalyptic crisis as the moment to let Mesema shine. 

All in all, Williams manages to weave all the disparate elements of his story and his world into a very satisfactory conclusion, an effort worthy of the excellent first book and far surpassing the less impressive second installment. Would this reader have been even happier had Sarmin suddenly recovered his pattern-power and whipped up an intuitive solution to the crisis? Yes…but perhaps that’s just the unhealed wound of Ged’s magical emasculation reopening again.

The Math

Baseline assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for making elemental magic kind of awesome (though it all ends in a T.S. Eliot vein, without much of a bang), +1 for developing characters like Mesema into a position of greatness

Penalties: -1 for pulling a Le Guin-like trick on Sarmin (it’s bad, but not Tehanu-bad!)

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10   Which, as a score here at Nerds of a Feather, is 'a bit of all right', as my Australian friends say!

This review brought to you by Zhaoyun, sf/f book and movie aficionado and main cast member of Nerds of a Feather since early 2013. 

Mobile: Zen Pinball HD

small ball

If it wasn't obvious from the title, we're going small this week in the gaming sector. Handheld, to be specific. Zen Pinball HD is a mobile game available for free in both the Apple and Android Play Stores. Pinball is a game that is tailor-made for mobile control schemes. It's easy because there are only two buttons, left and right. There's no getting shot to death while you try to find the 'right' button with your thumb. Tap the screen in the bottom left corner, the left flipper(s) go off. Tap the screen in the bottom right corner, the right flipper(s) go off. Simple, right?

freebie

Zen Pinball HD comes free with a pretty fun game called Sorcerer's Lair (seen above). If you manage to get a ball up to the sorcerer, he vaporizes it with, I'm assuming, sorcery. There are multi-ball portions once you've plugged enough balls into a particular hole (I know, I know, but you think of a better way to say it!). Ghosts appear at one point that you must defeat in a period of time for a bonus by rolling them over with the pinball. There are even some mini-games that I only half understand. Something about gears and a green ball? Anyway, for a free game, I haven't played a better mobile pinball app. 

this is how they getcha!

Although I'm sure it came as a great shock to you, dear readers, they also offer add-on tables for $1.99 each. I'm a Star Wars nut and I was unable to withstand the Dark Side. I was born the same week Star Wars Episode IV came out so I really didn't have a choice in the matter. I'm the definition of a Star Wars baby. Short story long, I bought the Episode V: Empire Strikes Back table and the Boba Fett table. All I've done is play these games for the last two weeks. I've turned off my 360 just to play this game, which is rare for me with mobile apps. Zen Pinball also offers Star Wars: The Clone Wars for fans of the newer movies. I probably enjoyed them more than most people, but even a die-hard fan like me knows the first three movies were better.

They also boast several tables based on Marvel characters including Thor, Wolverine, the Hulk (or the Credible In-Honk as I referred to him at the tender age of 3), X-Men, Avengers, Captain America, Ghost Rider, and then a few others I didn't recognize. My point is, you could end up blowing almost fifty dollars on tables if your habit is bad enough. I may end up grabbing Wolverine and Hulk once I've mastered Empire and Boba Fett.

episode V: the empire strikes back

The Empire Strikes Back table has tons of references to the consensus best of the Star Wars films. If you manage to put the pinball through a door in the middle of the table five times, one for each letter (V-A-D-E-R), Darth will rise up out of the table and roll off quotes from the movie. "Join me, and together we can rule the universe as father and son." If you hit the pinball at him, he quickly dispatches it with his light saber. 

If you manage to hit certain spots enough times, you're offered six different story lines that bring up memorable parts of the movie. One scene brings out asteroids and two tie fighters that fly around shooting at your pinball. Another has Yoda training Luke by doing a handstand while lifting rocks with the Force. A third brings out a storm trooper who fires at your ball with a blaster. For fans of the movie, each one brings back fond memories of George Lucas' classic film. On top of that, it's a top-notch pinball game that's as good as any real-world table that I've played. 

boba fett

The Boba Fett table could also be called Return of the Jedi, although there are a few quotes sampled from Episodes I-III. At the top of the table is the Sarlacc pit. Shooting three balls into Slave I, Boba Fett's ship, will bring on multi-ball. You start the game with one missile, but by increasing your score you can gain more. These are fired by Boba Fett at one of the "job" spots. By hitting these you take on a bounty and have to hit specific spots to complete the job. 

Boba constantly flies around the table using his jetpack. He does his best to avoid being hit by the pinballs. He also fires at your ball as it rolls around the table, but unlike Vader's light saber, it doesn't destroy the balls. As you can see above, one of the "spinners" on the table is Han Solo frozen in carbonite as he appeared as Jabba's finest decoration in his palace. Jabba sits in the upper-right corner of the table and also appears in a cutscene when you're given a bounty job, again drawing direct connections with Return of the Jedi. I still haven't managed to get the Sarlacc pit to pull Fett down as it is doing in the above picture, but I'm not going to stop until I get it to happen! 

the breakdown

I'm not the biggest mobile gamer in the world. I usually prefer my Xbox 360 to my GS3 for gaming, for obvious reasons. The Samsung has a nice, big screen, but it pales in comparison to my 50-inch HDTV, nevermind the difference in controller abilities. However, every once in a while a mobile title grabs a hold of me and won't let go. Zen Pinball HD, especially the Star Wars tables, have done just that. I'm a big fan of real-world pinball and I plan to have several tables in my house once I'm rich and famous. Until that day comes, Zen Pinball HD is a pretty good substitute. If you're looking for a fun mobile option other than Angry Birds and Temple Run, try out the Zen Pinball HD free table. But don't come crying to me if you end up spending a bunch of money on their other 22 pay tables. That's on you. 

the math

Objective score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for the realistic physics that recreate the experience of playing real-world pinball tables very well. +1 for such a large number of table options, especially the multiple Star Wars tables.

Penalties: -1 for charging two bucks for each new table. It's not that I don't think they're worth it. It's just a bit high when compared to the average price of most mobile titles, especially when you consider you can spend nearly $50 to buy all the available tables. I could see some mad parents out there reprimanding their kids when they get the phone bill.

Nerd coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attention.