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The Star Wars franchise has churned out thousands of publications during its five-decade run, including some fantastic reference books. The quality has unfortunately taken a big dive since the Disney purchase, with Kathleen Kennedy and her band of merry corporate PR robots and DEI creatives lowering the bar year after year and cynically sucking the life out of what once represented the pinnacle of sci-fi entertainment. The inevitable result is this monstrosity: a lame, lazy, low quality review of many of the franchise’s memorable (and very unmemorable) creatures from across the Star Wars galaxy.
The illustrations are handled by a single individual for consistency, and are of poor quality throughout, with a lazy, murky, low-detail style that does no justice to the often fantastic (especially 70s-90s era) design work that contributed so much to the movies’ success. Ralph McQuarrie-level artwork this isn't.
The writing side fares no better. Our “guide” sounds exactly like one of the low-personality, tow-the-line, nerd losers Western university science departments churn out by the tens of thousands, so it’s an accurate representation, but the gonzo-style field trip with our particular NPC is about as fun as being bitten by a gundark! (yes, that’s the level of humor we’re dealing with). Additional comments from the totally unimaginative droid sidekick B8 (Bait - get it?!) just add insult to injury.
An excess of exclamation marks, glaring anachronisms (burgers! wraps! metric tons!) and clumsy attempts to tie the references to their film/TV appearances also adds to the amateurish feel of the whole thing. The acknowledgements section by the “real” author gives a lot of insight into how bad the text turned out. A student could have put this together at the same level of quality in an afternoon with ChatGPT.
Now, while this may sound nerdy, there is a lot of really dumb stuff from a science perspective. Given that it presents itself as a scientific report, this is a valid criticism. For instance, there are many instances of creatures being “native” to multiple planets, which is obviously not possible. And while acknowledging it is all science fiction, creatures in the original trilogy were at least vaguely grounded in reality. Here we get sand whales that can fly through both the air and sand, only topped in stupidity by space whales.
Others are just so pointlessly lazy it’s laughable, like giant centipedes and meerkats. The unfortunate reality is that creatures associated with crap Star Wars (almost anything on film/tv after 1983, and in print/comics after around 2010) are inherently uninteresting anyway.
No value here for adults, and most bright children will find it ponderous and lazy. With such poor artwork it doesn’t even have value as a visual reference. I wouldn’t bother salvaging this insulting mess from a bargain bin.
