A trend I have noticed: when I read a book and can’t make up my mind how I feel about it, I sit on it for several days without doing anything, in the hopes that my mind will clear up. In contrast, when I watch a movie and don’t know how I feel about it, I wait no longer than a day, and then if I’m still failing, I’ll tell a little story about some event that happened around the movie, and the haze will magically lift from my mind, and a reasonable review is sure to be born. It has occurred to me just now that perhaps there is a lesson there regarding how I deal with my book reviews. Which is easy to say, and all, but typically books take longer than movies, so it’s harder to encapsulate a relevant story from the timespan. Nevertheless, I soldier on, because the important goal to accomplish right now is the review; integrating stories can wait.

I think the biggest flaw in Outbound Flight that has kept me on the fence about it for so long is that it’s so much a vanity prequel. Sure, it’s Timothy Zahn, which means that it’s never less than competently written, and that it is frequently a joy to behold. (See the climactic tragedy of the final 50 pages, or any scene in which Thrawn is throwing his brain around.) But at the same time, there are great swaths of the story that I can’t convince myself matter to the overall Star Wars tapestry. Even worse, the inclusion of Obi-Wan Kenobi and his Padawan of Doom seemed so unnecessary as to be essentially a cheap stunt.

Ultimately, because of the author I’m going to rule it to be an okay book. But there’s a tightly plotted 80 or 100 page novella in here filling in the last missing pieces of a 15 year old jigsaw puzzle that would have been a horror to market and an absolute delight to read. I’ll say this, though: I’m lucky all my books are packed away, or I’d cave in to the compulsion to reread the original Zahn trilogy that kicked off the Star Wars resurgence. Not that it would be a truly bad thing (and in fact I’m sure it would be quite fun), but my backlog is much too large as things stand without that kind of digression.