The clone army was far larger than that, and then there's all the non-clone troopers added to that.
Also to note is that the entire war was orchestrated by Palpatine to seize total control of the galaxy and wipe out the jedi. As the supreme commander of both armies, he deliberately made the two forces dance around each other, preventing one side from winning until the state of the galaxy reached the point where his plans could come into fruition.

In Episode II the Kaminoans say the first batch of 200,000 is ready with a full 1,000,000 for the whole order. It take so long to grow clones it seems like a big leap to suddenly have so many. It just would have been more realistic to say 200 billion instead, there are so many planets. But that isn't the point, the point is that there are just as many holes created by the new films as in the EU.

Also, if the rebels were serious about wiping out the imps then they should have simply commissioned more Dark Forces computer games, Kyle would have killed em all!

This is a cool thread.

I've read most of the EU and There are a few things that bug me of late. GL never intended the Jedi to be totally God-like, Indestructable. For ex Qui-gon took one lightsaber to the stomach and died at Maul's hand. In the Legacy series, JAcen Solo(Caedus) gets stabed by the lightsaber just missing his kidneys then takes a few more devestating blows, and recovers no problem. This is not even going into any detail regarding the crazy over the top powers that the new Jedi seem to have. They know everything and can do everything. That drives me nuts .

I downloaded the latest Legacy book and couldn't get past the 1st few minutes as Luke fights against a rancor with protective armor and a shield. Apparently The Rancors on that planet had evolved and had become more intelligent. Common... I think thats the last straw from me. When I compare the Writing styles of Stover (ROTS), and the wonderful job of describing the feelings of the characters, and compare that to the latest crap of series that has been released, It makes me wonder if these guys are just trying to wring my dry pocketbock of every last dime I have, or if they are trying to insult my intelligence .

I never ever thought I'd feel that way before. Ive been a loyal reader of almost every SW novel . I think they are trying to force me to try a different franchise!!!

Concerning the Jedi Survivors, Wookiepedia lists 99 jedi as having survived the Great Jedi Purge.

2 were in tree-form
3 were excommunicated Jedi
3 were not active members of the order
3 hid on Mandalore, which the Empire really couldn't do much about
23 fell to the dark side
1 was Obi-Wan
3 were in stasis
1 was Yoda
1 has not been confirmed dead or alive beyond 18 BBY
1 was a force ghost
1 lost his memory
1 was outside the galaxy with the Yuuzhan Vong
3 were spared by sympathetic clones
1 was spared by Starkiller
1 was left for dead by Vader
4 had resigned from the order
1 was in the Hapes Consortium, which is outside Imperial jurisdiction
1 was simply not considered a threat
1 was not part of the main order and was in the unknown regions
2 were members of the agricultural corps

That leaves 41 who were poorly explained.

Considering that there were 10,000 Jedi pre-purge, a 99% success rate is pretty good. Many of these simply did not pledge allegiance to the Jedi anymore (4 had resigned, 3 were excommunicated, 3 were not active members, 23 fell on the dark side, the one in the Hapes Consortium had no such loyalties either) or were unable to do anything to help the Order (such as training Luke) (2 were trees, 3 were in stasis, 1 was a ghost, 1 lost his memory, 1 was extragalactic, 1 was not considered a threat, 1 was in the unknown regions, 2 were part of the agri-corps and therefore not trained), so there were such few Jedi left that it would have been very reasonable for Yoda to consider Luke the last Jedi, especially since most of the remaining ones were not willing to come out of hiding.

ya , I agree. He's making money on it all, through LFL. He doesn't read nor does he care about any EU. He tramples on it even when he doesn't need too. He does pick and choose what he wants though. Take Aayala Secura. He liked her so he put her in his movies.

It's true that a few EU things make it into the official "canon". Along with Aayala Secura, here are a few others:

Coruscant was first mentioned in the "Thrawn Trilogy" and the name stuck.
Darth Maul's double bladed lightsaber (first appeared in the Tales of the Jedi wielded by Exar Kun)
Obi Wan mentions "Master Vos" on Boz Pity.
Apparently the "Outrider" appears in the special edition of "A New Hope".

However, more often than not George ends up stomping all over the EU rather than meshing with it. But, I don't have much of a problem with it. It gives the people at LFL something to do, trying to retconn and fit things together. How they were able to work out Boba Fett's origin after the Prequels must have been a monumental task. Now it's just a jumbled mess of Mandalorians, clones, etc. And now with the last two episodes of Season 2 of the Clone Wars coming up featuring an adolescent Boba Fett, things may need to be tweaked again. George is laughing all the way to the bank.

I can see him in a meeting with those involved with the EU and them trying to explain to him what a "Mandalore" is and the intricate warrior code of the Mandalorian culture. And he would reply "The Mandalorian supercommandoes are bad guys plain and simple. And Boba Fett dies in the Sarlacc Pit."

(NOTE: This post is written to everyone in general. Just quoted qvos here because it was the most recent comment in this line of thinking. So qvos, don't take this as a personal thing against you or anything. )

Wow. It never ceases to amaze me how people don't know how to truly critique something, or don't know how to properly give something a chance.

I guess you don't know anything about the Rancors of Dathomir, which probably means you never read Courtship of Princess Leia. Rancors with armor on Dathomir were COMMON OCCURANCES. The Dathomir Witches frequently tamed and trained rancors to be mounts or fighting beasts. Besides, if you stopped listening to the audiobook for Backlash after just the fight between Luke and the Rancor at the beginning...that was only the 1st chapter of the book!! How can you seriously dismiss and entire series based on 2 pages worth of one book???

Sure, Stover is one of my favorites as well. But I could certainly pull 1 or 2 pages from one of his books and when looked at all by itself, I might go "Ugh...this kind of sucks."


You should all be careful about giving advice to other people on what to read and what not to read unless you've READ it already. If you haven't read it, or you've only looked at small bits and pieces of it, then it's OK to say that, and to say that it didn't grab your interest right away. But it's not really fair to outright dismiss it and recommend people to skip those series altogether simply because you didn't like a couple pages.


All that said....

Don't just skip from the Darth Bane books to the Thrawn trilogy. There's plenty of good things in the Prequel era as well. If you like military fiction at all (Tom Clancy, etc.), then Karen Traviss' Republic Commando series is awesome. I personally thought Shatterpoint was incredible, and if you read Stover's other new novel, Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, then those two actually go together somewhat. Labyrinth of Evil is another great one, and leads right into ROTS which is cool.

And yeah, sure there's some parts of the NJO series that are tough to get through. Personally, I didn't like the first 5-6 books much at all. But there's a LOT of neat stuff in that series. Lots of cool discussions about the Force and such. Han's personal journey as he goes through the pain of losing his best friend is very neat, and has repercussions all the way up to the current FOTJ series.

And LOTF had some issues as well here and there, but it's also excellent, IMO. That could be said about all the book series. I still like the Jedi Academy trilogy, and yeah, even though it centers around a 'super weapon' for the most part, there's a lot of neat stuff in those stories.

Again, like I said....be sure to take everyone's opinions with a grain of salt. Even ones like mine that have good things to say about some of the books. Not everything is for everyone.

One last thought: Honestly, I wouldn't read the books in Chronological order. I would read them in order of publishing date. They will likely make much more sense that way, much like the difference with watching Episodes 4-6 first, and then watching 1-3, like they were originally released in the theater.

I actually like the idea that at any moment we could have a new book about a jedi that survived the Purge. It opens up a wealth of possibilites.

Completely different note-While I thought the Tales of the Bounty Hunters book was interesting and imaginitive, I absolutely hated the Bounty Hunter Trilogy. Fett's personality was completely flat and boring. He's a b.a.-I get it but is that it? I also hated what the author did to Dengar-completely ignoring the reason why his head is rapped up. And, Zuckuss, who was a calculating cool character in tales becomes a total buffoon in the trilogy. He definitely would not have made the bounty hunter list to go after Solo and Luke if that's all the better he was.

Probably the biggest discrepency between EU and the movies though has to be what was done to the Bothans. How they got the plans for the death star was utterly lame enough, but what Zahn did to them was imo even worse. Don't get me wrong, I loved the Thrawn trilogy but those poor Bothans, heroes in the movies, practically villians in the books. Zahn set the stage for everyone hating Bothans for many years to come.

PS- Ewoks are cool.

I'll tell you what, that is something I have never understood, and admittedly never been bothered to find out about. But it has always been a mystery to me how the Bothans were able to steal the Death Star plans from the racist/xenophobic empire. Bothans don't exactly blend in with humans very well, so these bothan spies must have been invisible or something?!

Glad somebody posted this b/c I forgot to and i totally agree. I think having Yoda and Obi being the last is extremely unrealistic-99% is a very good success rate. I am glad vader had to hunt down some of the Jedi because there is NO way the clones should have been able to kill as many as they did.