From a Certain Point of View: 40 Stories Celebrating 40 Years of Star Wars

3.5. This is a hit and miss mix of short stories celebrating Star Wars: A New Hope. With more than forty contributors (therefore, forty stories),it's hard to say that each story is a stand out. Some stories were sadly quite forgettable. However, for every lame story, you get an amazing one that expands and reimagines movements from the film through a supporting character's point of view (from both the original and new canon of characters). I loved how the best of these humanized supporting characters and even aliens within the film. My favorite stories: Gary Whitta's "Raymus" which bridges the gap from Rogue One and A New Hope through the eyes of Captain Antilles, Meg Cabot's take on Aunt Beru, Claudia Gray's study of an old Obi-Wan show more conversing with force ghost Qui-Gon, Kieron Gillen's amazing story about new canon character Aphra (please Disney make an origin story film about her, please!), and Time of Death by Cavan Scott. There is a story in this collection bound to please any Star Wars fan. Perhaps forty stories was a little much? Neat concept but not necessary. Give us the masterful ones, and that's enough. show less

While I don't generally like short stories (because they end to quickly), I LOVE this collection. In particular, the entire anthology highlights one truth: While the Chosen One is on their Quest, everyone else is living their life. And everyone is the center of their own story. Everyone's view of reality is changed and limited by what they personally experience or are capable of imagining.

People who have watched the movies, but aren't huge Star Wars fans, will still enjoy this anthology. It may inspire them to watch the movie again, and think about the story from the perspective of the background and secondary characters.

Loved loved loved this book! I don't usually like collections of short stories, even on a theme, as much as I do novels, but these stories were all equally well-written and this theme was clever: it retells the first Star Wars movie (A New Hope, ahem, Episode IV) from the points of view of a plethora of minor characters, many of whom we hardly see on screen at all. The stories go in order from the beginning of the movie's plotline to the end. So we get a story from the point of view of a stormtrooper, guarding Princess Leia on the first Death Star. We get a fun story told by a Jawa who finds a certain droid's holoprojector. There's a story told by the "mouse droid" on the Death Star involving a secret liasion by certain Imperials. I show more also loved the story from the diagnoga's point of view, so clever! (That's the trash compactor monster, for those 6 of you who aren't as into Star Wars as I am, haha!) We even get some Yoda and some Qui Gon Jinn stories, too, that cleverly tie in to A New Hope and I just love it! Plus, I got to read stories by many of my favorite YA authors and I met some adult sci fi authors I've never heard of before; that was a fun perk of the book. show less

Here's another one I probably wouldn't have experienced had it not been for my public library. I'm normally not really into short stories or anthologies (this is both), and I'm normally not into audiobook fiction. I've found that several of the newer Star Wars books are almost audio dramas with multiple actors voicing characters, background music & sound effects. In retrospect, I would even go as far as to recommend the audiobook over the print edition for this very reason. Some of the best stories in this anthology were made even better by superb voice acting & effects, and some of the mediocre ones were made more tolerable.

The GREAT:

Out of the 40 stories, there are a few that are so superbly written & voiced that I would recommend show more the book for these alone:

Wil Wheaton's Laina almost brought me to tears! I replayed it later and it had the same effect on the second listen. It's not often that a book, especially a short story containing all original characters has this kind of effect on me. I tip my hat to you sir - well done!

Claudia Gray has become my favorite author for the new cannon novels (for the uninitiated, these are the novels that have been published since Disney bought the rights to Star Wars). So far everything she does for the SW universe is GOLD. Here she contributes Master and Apprentice, in which the spirit of Qui-Gon is communing with Obi-Wan in the deserts of Tatooine.

Rae Carson's The Red One gives backstory to a certain red R5 astromech that makes him an unlikely hero of the rebellion.

In Not for Nothing Mur Lafferty writes from the perspective of one of the members of the band from the Mos Eisley Cantina (Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes), crafting a tale that was a lot of fun! Definitely one of my favorites.

Eclipse by Madeleine Roux follows Breha Organa as she and her husband Bail deal with the disappearance of their daughter following the interception of the Tantive IV in the opening act of Ep IV: A New Hope


The bad and the weird:

The longest story, The Kloo Horn Cantina Caper might be the one story that was adversely affected by being acted out. One of the main alien characters of the story is read in a squeaky voice that was like fingernails on a chalkboard. Halfway though the tale, I realized I really didn't give a rip about the characters or the story, making this the only tale in which I hit the skip button and did not finish.

The Baptist is all about the creature that lives in the trash compactor on the Death Star. [eye roll]

Palpatine by Ian Doescher is Palpatine's reaction to the destruction of the Death Star - sounds interesting, right? Well, I was really interested for as many seconds as it took to figure out that it's written in metre, using antiquated verbiage, as if to imitate Shakespeare. Um.... No, thank you.

Of MSE-6 and Men by Glen Weldon just pissed me off to no end. It was beyond ridiculous. In this story from the perspective of a mouse droid on board the Death Star, we find that Grand Moff Wilhuff Tarkin is basically passing notes back and forth via mouse droid with stormtrooper TK421 in attempt to have an illicit affair with him. Why, oh, why, are we retconning Tarkin to make him gay? Beyond that, him having an affair with a stormtrooper is the equivalent of the American Secretary of Defense being engaged in an illicit relationship with a private (ain't gonna happen). The whole thing was out of character for Tarkin. It was a train wreck, in the style of watching Jerry Springer. How this made it into the book, I can only imagine. We had a major character in Chuck Wendig's Aftermath trilogy who was gay, and Sinjir was actually my favorite character. If there's going to be a gay character, that's how you do it. You make a new character. You don't go and retcon it into the story of a character from the beginning of the saga via a short story buried in an anthology.

As for the rest of the stories that I've not mentioned specifically, there are many that are good and enjoyable to varying degrees. I'm not going to try to review every story. I'm only remarking on those that stood out for various reasons, good and bad alike. show less

Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View celebrates the 40th anniversary of the release of A New Hope with a retelling of that story from perspectives other than those shown in the film. Each of the 40 different authors offers their own take, whether about Stormtroopers and their day-to-day lives, or the inner lives of droids, or the actions of various officers on the Death Star, and the rebels on Yavin. Nnedi Okorafor even offers a particularly lovely story about the dianoga in the Death Star's trash compactor.
Some stories, such as Wil Wheaton's "Laina" and Madeleine Roux's "Eclipse," are particularly poignant and capture the heartbreak of war, while others, like Gary Schmidt's "There Is Another" and Charles Soule's "The Angle," show show more how the events of Episode IV affected characters seen in later films. Claudia Gray's "Master and Apprentice" helps continue some of the themes from Star Wars Rebels.
Occasionally, the stories get bogged down, such as all the different perspectives for all the different aliens on Tatooine, but each story is brilliant in on its own. This book does presume a knowledge of the events of A New Hope as well as the other films to fully appreciate some of the stories, but it's a great read and a nice way to celebrate 40 years. show less

This book celebrated the 40th anniversary of Star Wars in 2017 with a collection of 40 original short stories by 43 authors. Each story is told from the perspective of a different character in the Star Wars universe, hence the title cribbing Obi-Wan's famous line "From a certain point of view." The authors include a lot of well-known writers such as Rae Carson, Claudia Gray, Chuck Wendig, Wil Wheaton, Elizabeth Wein, Jeffrey Brown, Kieron Gillen, Nnedi Okorafor, Jason Fry, and Greg Rucka. I suspect that if you are a bigger fan of science fiction/fantasy writing, you will recognize even more of the authors!

No character is too small to be a point of view character, thus there are tales told by droids, Jawas, Tusken raiders, bounty show more hunters, rebels of various ranks, stormtroopers, Imperial officers, a numerous other sentient beings. A few bigger characters including Greedo, Obi-Wan, and Biggs get their stories as well as characters like Yoda, Palpatine, and Lando Calrissian who don't even appear in the movie! Perhaps the strangest story of all is "Of MSE-6 and Men" by Glen Weldon, told from the perspective of a Death Star mouse droid and written in some kind of machine language, that tells the story of an ill-fated romance between a storm trooper and Grand Moff Tarkin.

Some stories are better than others, and I like it when the author takes a small character and builds a whole world around their life before and after their appearance in the film's narrative. Other stories are less successful because they basically just have the scenes and dialogues repeated from the movie interspersed with the thoughts of the point of view character. The stories are arranged in sequence to the movie's plot and things really get bogged down with five different stories about characters in the Mos Eisley cantina, and again during the Battle of Yavin.

Some of my favorite stories include:

• "The Sith of Datawork" by Ken Liu, about an Imperial bureaucrat who is able to fix things in the records for the gunnery captain who failed to shoot at an escape pod.


• "Laina" by Wil Wheaton, which tells of a widowed rebel sending his young daughter away for her safety in a story which packs a lot of emotional punch.


• "An Incident Report" by Daniel M. Lavery, in which Admiral Motti files a formal complaint against Darth Vader for force choking him.


• "The Baptist" by Nnedi Okorafor is a life account of Omi, the creature that grabs Luke in the trash compactor.


• "Time of Death" by Cavan Scott details Obi-Wan's experience of joining with the Force immediately after his death.

I get why they wanted to go with 40 stories for the 40th anniversary, but this book could be improved with some judicious pruning. Nevertheless, this is a fun book and I'm sure Star Wars fans will find something in it they like. show less

The idea is cute and the stories are a bit of a mixed bag. Some are really good, some are just ok, and a few just seem pointless (why do we need a story from Greedo’s perspective right before Han kills him? What does that add to anything?). The narrations in the audiobook are great for the most part, although how the narrators decide to do alien voices is occasionally grating. Unlike the other fully audio produced Star Wars book I listened to, the music and sound effects generally contributed to the story instead of overwhelming the narration.

This review does sound like damning with faint praise, I know, but I really did enjoy it and definitely recommend it if you like Star Wars.