Note: While the below text represents a brief review of this specific Star Wars: Galaxy of Fear entry, a greater retrospective on the entire series, complete with images and footnotes, can be found here on my site, dendrobibliography.

In 1997, LucasFilm contracted author John Whitman, an editor for radio dramas (and now one of the world's leading instructors in...Krav Maga?), to translate the Goosebumps formula to the Star Wars universe. Rather than relying on a vast array of popular characters, he was tasked with creating his own heroes with their own unique personalities. Twelve books were written in the Galaxy of Fear between '97 and '98, and they were amazing.

When I saw the covers for the first four books at a Scholastic Book Fair in '97, I was sold. Goosebumps was feeling pedestrian by then, and Applegate's Animorphs series was rolling out too slowly to feed my obsession. Galaxy of Fear was dark, brooding, funny, and too creative for its own good. It stood alone on its own characters, but was enriched by the Star Wars mythology peppering the background. This made spotting connections like krayt dragons fun, but never a detriment if it went over the reader's head.

Tash and Zak Arranda are two young siblings stranded by Alderaan's destruction in Star Wars: A New Hope. With their entire family killed in the attack, they've been living with their unusual Uncle Hoole for the last six months, tagging along with him (often to his annoyance) as he does anthropological 'research.' He's not good with the kids; quite awkward, actually, and a terrible parental figure in these early books given his personality and discomfort with children. In order to avoid the kids as much as possible, he's assigned the perpetually-salty and -snarky research droid DV-9 (or, DeeVee) to be their personal tutor and caretaker.

(Hoole's the single unoriginal character in the main cast, being a Shi'ido (i.e., shape-shifter) anthropologist devised a few years earlier, and included in the cast by request from LucasFilm. Despite his unoriginality, I believe this was still the first real story to feature him or give him a personality.)

Eaten Alive, the first novel in the Galaxy of Fear series, sees the whole gang -- and they feel like a 'gang' in the Saturday Morning Cartoon sense -- land on a 'new' planet called D'Vouran. D'Vouran has only just appeared on the galaxy's radar, which, of course, has our heroes asking Why? Especially since the intelligent locals, the Enzeen, and nothing but eager to have travelers touching down and even making a home for themselves. D'Vouran is beautiful and inviting in every way, and our heroes -- the force-sensitive Tash in particular -- feel things aren't as they seem.

Investigating the origins of D'Vouran, the family meet a number of faces new and old settling down on this apparent paradise. The Enzeen have opened their borders, so to speak, to free use of any resources the planet may have, which means the planet's getting a lot of roughneck visitors looking to capitalize on that sort of freedom. Smada the Hutt, an old acquaintance of Hoole's, plays the typical hutt in trying to blackmail and murder to get Hoole in his pocket; we also meet Bebo, who discovered the planet months earlier by crashlanding on it, losing his crew, his family -- and his sanity. Bebo gives us most of the mystery, as he wanders the spaceport streets screaming about invisible monsters and friends vanishing in broad daylight. The Enzeen ignore him, Smada and other unsavory characters would rather kill him, and meanwhile more people seem to be vanishing.

Since this is Star Wars, the rebel heroes from the original movies have their requisite cameos: Vader, Luke, Leia, Han Solo, Chewbacca, R2-D2, and C-3PO all show up to help our heroes solve the planet's mysteries. Later novels make use of other popular characters from the movies and Expanded Universe.

I loved this series as a kid, and I still feel that love for it 20 years later. It's thrilling, quirky, and far more complex than the Goosebumps length would have you expect. The mystery of the planet is clever, and not at all what I expected. Tash, Zak, Deevee and Hoole are all memorable, well-crafted characters who evolve tremendously over the course of the series and make for great heroes with their own tragedies to overcome. Reading it as an adult, however, I was put off a bit by the frequency in plotholes underlying everything, and the high number of misused scientific or ecological terms (but this is Star Wars, so that doesn't mean much). The cameos can be both satisfying or annoying: I loved seeing Chewie and Han and the whole cast as a kid, but sometimes they recycle their movie lines so frequently that their entire personalities have wasted away under surviving stereotypes, and the more prominent their characters were in the films, the more hammy the dialogue gets.

Still, this series is really fantastic, and only improves volume by volume. The first six even form a cohesive series of related conspiracies, building up into a singular plot around Project Starscream, a sinister series of experiments by the Empire. I really wish it as back in print, as it did something no other Star Wars story had done before or since, and it did it wonderfully.

John Whitman's Star Wars: Galaxy of Fear (1997–1998):
Start. | #2 City of the Dead ( )

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