A Failed Review of the Ultimate Alien Anthology

 

 

"Boots off the counter, sir!"

I have, by hook and by crook, come into possession of another copy of the Star Wars Ultimate Alien Anthology (the first RPG book I ever owned, and then sold). For old times’ sake I wanted to give it a read and write something about it for the blog; it’s legitimately terrible. I say that with some amount of affection but that doesn’t stop it from being bad on just about every criteria you can judge it on. 13-year-old me didn’t care, of course, I barely knew what TTRPGs were when I got this as a birthday gift. 

I’d considered for a moment doing a Marsworms-style alien-by-alien review series, but abandoned that very quickly when the double whammy of Star Wars’ bedrock dependency on “stock-character-as-species” combined with a book that is trying to convert all that into RPG material without the page space or editorial leeway to expand on anything would result in a review where most of the entries would be “they’re just a type of guy and there is fundamentally nothing interesting or engaging about them.”

Then I considered taking advantage of that type-of-guy-ness and reverse engineering all those aliens to Mothership NPCs, but that fell prey to a similar issue; Star Wars aliens are already stock characters, so translating them into stock characters is redundant. I could do it, and probably pretty easily, but I don’t think the end result would be all that interesting.

Then I was was spurred by an aside of Austin Walker’s in A More Civilized Age, where he talks about how Star Wars is historically and presently disinterested in portraying culture. That aside lives rent-free in my head, because I suffer from a particular kind of cognitive dissonance where the cantina scene in A New Hope is simultaneously my canonical conceptualization of What Sci-Fi Is and one of the most egregious examples of what I hate in the genre. But it got me thinking - if I were to compile the scraps of Star Wars cultural world building that exist (for example, in this book), could I remix them into a single actually interesting fictional culture (or group of neighboring cultures)? Even if I couldn’t, what patterns would I find in the corpus? It would be an interesting look (well, for a given value of interesting) as to what gets classified as the Other in Star Wars when one strips out “stock-character-as-species” from the equation.

Well, that fell apart swiftly as well, for similar reasons: there’s only the barest crumbs of material to build with in this book, which means that any sort of transformative synthesis is more work than it’s worth. Source material that doesn’t support that sort of reading filtered through a book that doesn’t have the space to do it justice even if it did. Everyone knows Star Wars doesn’t give a shit about this sort of stuff, Austin was stating a truism that we all, to some degree, already know. But man, it really sinks in when you try to read a Star Wars book and you’re specifically focusing on those details. It’s like watching the rubber pseudoflesh rot off the animatronic.

So, in lieu of all that, I’m just going to do a regular-ass ol’ review of a book from over 20 years ago that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.

The Regular-Ass Review Portion

The UAA was published as part of the Star Wars Saga Edition RPG, being the adaptation of D&D 3.X. It was released between Episodes 2 and 3, and so doesn’t include aliens from Revenge of the Sith, Clone Wars, or the tail end of the old EU books. Still, it includes over 200 species from the films, novels, some games, and some ported over from the WEG RPG. Not all of them are created equal.

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What in the actual hell is Kit Fisto doing on the cover. What is this stance? Who approved this? 

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I’ll give the book credit for having art for all 183 aliens, split into lineups of 4-5 species at a time. I appreciate that the artists have distinct enough styles that, if you showed any two lineups side-by-side it’d be clear that they were made by different people without being particularly distracting. They don’t get a lot of room to play around, all the poses are pretty stiff, and many of the designs are aggressively mid even by rubber mask alien standards, but still.

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Layout is what you’d expect for the era: two column with small text and standardized templates for each species: overview, personality, physical description, homeworld, language, example names, age grades, adventurers, species traits, and commoner stats. Then there are some prestige classes and feats at the end.

Age and commoner stats are 3.X-isms I am exceptionally glad people stopped wasting page space on. Like at the very least if you're going to have all this cruft, have the decency to use standardized keywords like MtG.

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Overviews are very inconsistent in terms of length, with some species getting over half a page and some getting barely a paragraph despite the book being long enough (223 pages) that you could conceivably dedicate an entire page to each if you were smart about your spacing and cut out the cruft.

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If there is a recurring theme to be had in the species overviews, it’s that first contact scenarios tend to go absolutely belly-up in Star Wars. Everyone’s getting conquered by their neighbors, or destabilized by rapid technological advancement via contact with the greater galaxy, or exploited by offworld economic forces, or enslaved by the Empire, so on and so on. It’s the antithesis of Star Trek and its Prime Directive, not only in content but in how much focus is given to it. This all comes with the territory of Star Wars as a Wagnerian Western, no surprise there, and I point it out primarily for how good it serves as a teaching example of how narrative focus and bias can elide or silence themes that are explicitly in the text.

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In a turn of opinion that would likely shock and appall 13-year-old me, rereading this book has brought me round to the idea that Star Wars shouldn’t have aliens at all. Or at least you would lose nothing with an all-human cast. 

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It's an odd experience to go through this and see everyone put on the same level of importance vis-a-vis their positioning in the galaxy: extras in the movies, big players in the novels, weirdos from comics no one remembers and some more weirdos from WEG modules are all treated with more or less the same amount of attention, to the point where if this book was the only exposure someone had to Star Wars, they'd probably be disappointed in how many entries are one-offs in the actual franchise.

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Playing as the Yuuzhan Vong get an entire appendix (entire = 3 pages); I still remember being shock-and-awed by feelings of "oh shit there's this huuuuuuge thing going on after Return of the Jedi!", because when you're 13 getting that info from secondhand sources like this or the Essential Guides series it sounds so, so much cooler than the actual content. Got a real oral history type thing going on, severed from the EU novels.

Anyway, the YV are what happens when you have a potentially good setup and then coward out: they should have been fucked up modular fleshbeast chimeras bearing no resemblance to anything else in the franchise, and that version of them absolutely should have shown up out of nowhere during the Takodana battle in Force Awakens. 

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Instead of the usual shotgun-commentary on the aliens themselves since there are so many of them, I'm just going to do 12 that I like (from this book specifically) in no particular order. You could get a solid fantasy setting out of these ones, I think.

Ithorian - Fucking iconic. Instantly recognizable silhouette, they live in giant floating cities above the planetwide jungle they worship as a god. If Ithorians aren’t in your top tier we cannot be friends. 

Caamasi - They have a one-note deal as the super-nice empath guys who are friends to everyone (and are predictably fucked over by the Empire), but to the point of other species using their name just to denote far-away friends, and this one works for me. The empath thing is sufficient justification for Star Wars: yeah, if you can feel other people's negative emotions you're going to try and avoid being a jerk.

Togruta - Canonically (according to this book), Ahsoka (who did not exist at the time it was written) has echolocation, eats live alien rats by snapping their necks with her teeth, and has to deal with microaggressions insinuating that she is venomous. Stop being cowards, Disney! Let Ahsoka eat alien rats! Anyway, striking design, the rat thing is a fun bit of weird, there's some broad motions at a collectivist society and having to avoid major predators on their homeworld, which are not developed but are at least something.

Kel Dor - Yes, they look like a shriveled ballsack with a gas mask; No, I do not care. I’m with Filoni on this one, Plo Koon is sick. Picked Kel Dor as my PC in Jedi Academy. Sure, they don't have a whole lot going for them from a lore perspective but they are cool fucked-up guys in space and sometimes that's enough. Also apparently they're related to the Tognath from the Disney films i.e. those two cool motherfuckers that Saw has in his crew.

Jawa - They deserve better. They’re weird little guys who love garbage, they should have some incredible goblinmode fits, not just uniform brown robes. Obvious squandered potential. Gimme the garbage goblins. Star Wars is nearly 50 years old, and the idea of having the signature Weird Little Technically Savvy Guy alien pop out of a maintenance hatch and go “No can do, bossman, the flim-flam’s been shmeckledorfed” is still fully beyond the series’ imaginary. What are we even doing.

T'surr - Deepest of the deep cuts, these guys first appeared in some kid-focused books published by Scholastic which I had never heard of before looking up where they first appeared right at this moment. They're big fucked up blue bad guys and you know what, why not. Fucked up space orcs. The color and the being huge give me vibes of the Koloss (though they would not come later and this is me projecting into the past like it's fucking New Sun), which are one of Sanderson's creations that I really like.

Arcona - These guys actually have enough material to qualify a basic fantasy culture: communities of large extended families, men acting as primary domestics, group decision making, common use of noisms in even casual speech, and a society that was nearly destroyed by the introduction of highly addictive drugs by outside forces looking to economically exploit them (a la opium in China) - there's stuff here to work with, and they're not Just One Thing. Welcome surprise, I wouldn't have put them on the shortlist before now.

Hutt - As far as giant space slugs go, not a great design compared to the wild shit that earth slugs can get up to. As far as coding, not the greatest. But they do have a lot of interesting parts: an ancient space empire that's not a particularly great place to live but has remained functional for longer than anyone else, mafia-style inter-clan politics, profiting off of the dysfunction of their neighbors. Yeah they're "what if the idea of a drug lord was also a slug", but they're closer to the drug lords in House of the Scorpion - they're so well-established and so entrenched that they can operate in the open and no one else can do anything about it. Good antagonist fuel.

Noghri - God, could you imagine if Leia rolled up in Force Awakens with a couple of Noghri bodyguards? People would lose their shit. And for good reason, Noghri are cool. They have a good gimmick (planet was fucked by space battle during the war, Empire rolled in and basically extorted service for ecological aid that never came), they give Leia something cool to interact with that's specific to her, you can easily get some good comedy out of them (they are serious little guys, good to play off of), they're all-around solid. 

Ortolan - Apparently, Max Rebo is supposed to be playing the organ with his feet, but you can’t see it because of how he’s positioned. Anyway, a fat little blue alien elephant guy is a fun muppet alien and you gotta have one good muppet in the crew.

Duros - I love that they’re just Gray-ass Grays. They have a very vintage 70s sort of vibe, inherited from back when Star Wars drew from sources that weren’t Star Wars - “here are the Grays, they were one of the first species to start exploring the galaxy and they absolutely obliterated the environment of their homeworld so nowadays it’s basically just a giant radioactive dump.”

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So there we go. Not a good book, Star Wars is fucking weird, sometimes you have to go through four drafts before something clicks. I'll save the one-by-one reviews for a better book.