I'm aware most of this board's population doesn't like to think of expanded universes as being part of the true canon, whether in Star Trek or Star Wars.
But I'll ask you this, inspired by something brought up in the recent Trek canon thread: "What if?"
If it were up to you to select authors and decide that all their work would be canonized, novels, comics, and all, who would you pick? Who would you avoid picking? In other words, which authors do you feel do the best and worst jobs of capturing the essence of Trek and Wars?
Bearing in mind that I did most of my ST and SW novel reading back in the 90s...
...I'll start off by saying I think that in Star Trek, Diane Duane and Peter David are great, and James Blish's adaptations of the original series are practically essential works for the TOS fan.
In Star Wars, I have a great liking for Alan Dean Foster's work - at least his first two Star Wars novels. Splinter of a Mind's Eye and Star Wars remain two of the closest novels to the original movies, IMO, and two of the ones with the most individual editorial attention by Lucas. I must admit I have yet to read his third SW novel yet.
But it's hard for me to decide about the rest of the SW EU. The Great Continuity Nightmare is still settling out. Stackpole, Allston, Zahn, and KJA all strike me as writing very similar SW EU. These, IMO, are the guys whose collective body of work got screwed over the most when the prequel trilogy came out, and they seem to get a lot of bad press from VS debaters on both sides of the fence.
I'm not sure it's entirely deserved, though, and I'm not quite sure what's going on with the new EU except to say that
if those guys represent the core of the old pre-PT EU, Karen Traviss will probably represent the core of the new post-PT EU in the years to come.
EU Novels: What if?
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Jedi Master Spock
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2046
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