Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Crosscurrent is just so many bad premises rolled into one book, and executed with such an astonishing lack of skill, that it really makes me wonder about the people responsible for editing these books. I understand that most of the responsibility for a book should be laid at the foot of the author, but I would like to think that an editor's job, more than anything else, is to be a gatekeeper and exclude dreck like this.

So first of all, these books (Crosscurrent and Riptide are a duology, though for some reason that's not how they were marketed) are a vehicle for Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy PC Jaden Korr. Korr is among the weakest videogame protags in ages, and certainly the weakest character in the Dark Forces series. He has no back story, no traits to speak of, no friends, no quirks. All that could be a good thing in that it gives an author a clean slate to develop a character while taking advantage of cross medium marketing appeal. Unfortunately, Kemp seems to be something of a creative blank slate himself, so this is the image he gives Korr. Literally. Jaden is a white male human with a goatee. He IS Paul S. Kemp. It's hard to imagine what possible reason Kemp could have used to justify this choice, since before his books, Korr's species and gender were ambiguous � JA allows players to choose between human, Kel Dor, Rodian, Twi'lek, and Zabrak models.

Kemp's portrayal of Jaden has some potential in the abstract, but again, he doesn't really have the skill to pull it off. Apparently he was responsible for murdering some people in the Legacy series, a situation that was morally and politically compromising and caused him to question, in theory, the relationship between the Jedi and the Galactic Alliance, as well as the moral compass capacities of his intuitive sense of the dark and light sides of the Force.

If that weren't bad enough, we have not one but two totally bizarre and dumb sci-fi concepts included for no good reason and no good effect. The main hook references Thrawn's dabbling in cloning techniques in order to establish the most mundane and pointless diabolical lab-creations gone wrong trope. The best reason I can come up with to justify this decision is that Kemp wanted an opportunity to write about a bunch of gore and bodily fluids and gross stuff. There are at least five discrete vomiting events in the book, as well as two “exploded� noses, a shattered set of wrist bones, a room carpeted with scalp and hair, and a lot of blood. The closest thing Crosscurrent has to a female character is a personified cloning cylinder full of gore and severed body parts. Kemp has apparently married a woman, so theoretically he should know they exist. But if Mother is his idea of a female character, perhaps his author bio is concealing a darker truth?

Presumably because Kemp couldn't come up with a better way to make the story interesting for 300 pages, he threw in an extra elaborate sci-fi device: time travel. Crosscurrent picks up the other side of the space battle that launched John Jackson Miller's Lost Tribe of the Sith series. While the Sith crew of the Omen traveled from the time of Naga Sadow past the Legacy era just by hanging out and colonizing the planet, their counterparts on the Harbinger employed some quirk of hyperspace and relativity known only to purveyors of cheap plot devices. The whole point of hyperspace is to negate the effects of relativity and allow galaxy spanning stories take place in one coherent time frame. The alternative doesn't really make much sense � traveling at near light speed in real space, as the Harbinger does here, should employ far more energy than the ship contains. But of course none of that really matters � Star Wars has never been hard sci-fi, and I'm willing to suspend disbelief on plenty of things if they are more or less consistent, and even if they're not as long as there's a decent narrative reason for it. At this point in the review, you should no longer be surprised to learn that that is not the case in Crosscurrent. It's a gimmick and nothing more.

The Force is perhaps the quintessential cheap plot device, a flexible in universe mechanism to explain plot armor, sudden character development, and literally any plot movement necessary. As long as Jedi are involved, invoking the will of the Force is sufficient to explain anything the author wants to happen. Some authors try to regulate this with a clumsy attempts to systematize how the Force works � Michael Reaves is the worst offender in the Coruscant Nights series. Good authors use it like good magic: mystical flavor for the universe that causes as many problems for the protagonists as it solves.

Kemp, however, is either extremely bold, or, more likely, simply naïve enough not to see any problems with using it to achieve everything in the book from start to finish. It is written in such a transparent way that he must not have had any problem with it, either way. Jaden begins the book with a Force vision calling him to the place where the end of the book will happen. At several points throughout, he articulates to himself and his allies the ambiguous doubt that Kemp has provided as his only personality trait. Rather than discussing and developing this issue, Jaden chooses to simply reassure himself and others that, once he reaches his destination, the Plot will resolve his issue. And it does, though I'm really not sure how. Which is the problem, of course. If Jaden can't tell us what the issue is during the set-up, how can we expect the resolution to make any sense?

Even with all these gimmicks going on, Kemp couldn't find enough material to fill the story. He seems incapable of writing psychologically complex characters or interactions between them, and since all of his plot challenges are solved by the hand wave application of the Force, there is no way for him to maintain interest there either. We get a lot of action scenes, but none of them have any tension or flavor or interest. They are resolved by clumsy devices that telegraph their purpose from miles away. Anyway, the thing I was going to quibble about in this paragraph was Kell Douro, the Anzat who is basically a living seeker missile for Jaden. For some reason, I used to find some romance in the Anzati, but after reading this embarrassing portrayal, it's hard for me to remember how they could ever not suck. Apparently even Kemp couldn't bring himself to make Kell such an empty husk, so in order to justify his existence little bit more, he decided to bring in a further gimmick reference by making him an agent of the Legacy comics One Sith, who won't reveal themselves to the galaxy for like another century.