Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
I think the whole pulling a ship out of orbit thing was a bit over the top as it was presented, but it could fit in with the broader themes of the Force in a better written narrative.

There's a thread that runs through Star Wars that the Force can do almost anything if you have the ability to conceive of doing it. The main hurdle to Luke lifting his X-wing or Savage lifting obelisks is psychological, they don't think it's possible so it isn't. The idea that a Sith could be so arrogant that they fully believe they can pull a ship from orbit or a Jedi being so detached that they can conceive of the problem as no more significant than lifting a pebble isn't all that out there among the feats of Force Wielders in the EU.

It's a rather flashy use of the Force, but stuff like the 'battle meditation across the whole imperial navy' thing attributed to Palpatine is probably more conceptually out there. Or Nihilus eating the life force of worlds.
My big issue with the ripping the Star Destroyer down is more of a time frame thing. Galen Marek did that during a combat sequence, while he was concurrently blasting TIE fighters out of the sky and stuff. Much of the really big-time Force powers that have been let loose across the EU over time have respected a sort of fast-effects/rituals divide in which all the truly huge effects involve setup time, prolonged effort and possibly special structures, sacrifices, or other prep. This has actually largely been applied to technological powers as well. Gigantic, oversized and cumbersome machinery can blow up planets and build endless armies, and all sorts of other things that aren't actually any better justified than many force powers, but they consistently require huge amounts of investment in time and money.

Quote Originally Posted by Palanan
It’s also a little difficult to compare sales for the Han Solo books compared with the second flowering of the EU that brought Thrawn and Mara Jade. The Solo novels were clustered around 1979-1980, whereas the main pulse of EU novels began to expand in the mid-90s. That’s a fifteen-year difference in the markets, so that may well have had more of an effect on overall sales than what the characters could do inside those novels.
Even leaving the early books like the Han Solo adventures aside (I mentioned them because that's what this thread is nominally about), books not featuring movie lead characters have long fared poorly. Now, whether or not that's an accurate appraisal of the market or just what the publishers thought the fans wanted and influenced via marketing choices, it's definitely a thing that happened. For example, Bantam and Del Rey were pretty reliably able to get any book with Luke, Han, and Leia on the cover onto the NYT bestseller list - even late in the game as FotJ, when the gas tank was really empty - but books featuring other characters struggled to cross that threshold.

There is evidence from the comics side of things that this was perhaps driven by publisher choice, as a number of comics runs staring comparatively obscure or even brand new characters managed to find success (and still do, high Dr. Aphra!), but it's difficult to say how viable a cross-market comparison is.