terça-feira, 29 de outubro de 2013

Death Star novel


At the moment, I´m reading my first Star Wars novel, "Death Star", a great piece of work by writers Michael Reaves and Steve Perry.

As a fan, without any particular reason, I must confess that I never read a single novel of the greatest saga of all time. True... but, it´s never too late and here I am, with "Death Star" by my side and loving every single page of it.
In the EU of Star Wars, I was always a comic book explorer. I follow almost every single one of them, have a huge collection, I know the release dates, but I always left the novels aside. Until now. Now I´m "doomed", as 3PO says, I have a loooooooot to catch up!

Back to the book, so far I´m at page 72, starting chapter 11. But there was a passage that I particularly enjoyed and I want to share, ´cause talks about hyperspace and a condition named "hyper-rapture". And Darth Vader is part of it...

"IMPERIAL-CLASS STAR DESTROYER DEVASTATOR, EN ROUTE TO HORUZ SYSTEM

Darth Vader stood on the bridge of his warship, staring out through the forward viewport at the kaleidoscopic chaos of hyperspace. The effect, even moving at the relatively stately speed of a Star Destroyer, was akin to tumbling down an endless tunnel of amorphous, whirling patterns of light—starlight and nebulae smeared into impressionistic blotches by the ship´s superluminal speed. He knew that even experienced spacers and navy personnel often hesitated to look out at it. Standard operating procedure was to keep the thick slabs of transparisteel opaqued while traveling through the higher-dimensional universe. There was something profoundly wrong about hyperspace, composed as it was of more than the three spatial and one temporal dimensions that most sentient species were used to. Looking too long into hyperspace promised madness, so the stories went. He had never heard of anyone actually succumbing to "hyper-rapture", as it was called. Nevertheless, the legends persisted.
Vader enjoyed staring into it.
(...)"


sábado, 26 de outubro de 2013

Star Wars and Shakespeare


  
“In time so long ago begins our play / In star-crossed galaxy far, far away.”
 
Author Ian Doescher put pen to paper to a very hard task, to give a Shakespearean vision of Star Wars. He was abble to finish the task to rejoice of many fans and curious alike, and the book is available for purchase since July.

Here´s a very interesting review from Maria Popova, in the Brain Pickings website.

The illustrations are from Nicolas Delort.







Gratitude to my friend Saki for sharing this book.