Republic Commando: Hard Contact by Karen Traviss (2004, Del Rey)
For a guy who has a blog, I don&rsquo;t spend a whole lot of time online, especially compared to most. Still, it hasn&rsquo;t taken much poking around on message boards and elsewhere in the online Star Wars fandom to discover that Karen Traviss is the most divisive author in Star Wars fiction. In 2009, Traviss stoped writing Star Wars books, abandoning the Imperial Commando series she had just begun. This departure seems to have been primarily due to continuity conflicts and creative differences (most speculate that it had to do with the animated The Clone Wars series), but Traviss also frequently clashed with Star Wars fans online.
Most records of these arguments have been deleted by message board moderators, and Traviss&rsquo;s blog is now password protected, so I wasn&rsquo;t even able to dig up her explanation of the events. The whole debacle went down before my renewed interest in the expanded universe and the beginning of this project; virtually all of the info I could scrounge was second hand. Some of you probably know more about it than I do. Generally, though, it appears that the controversy revolved around what many fans believed to be plot points and characterization in her books that contradicted established canon. On the other hand, there are plenty of fans who enjoy Traviss&rsquo;s Star Wars books for their depictions of clone troopers and gritty, realistic descriptions of warfare.
Even with the well thus poisoned, I&rsquo;ve tried to go into this series unclouded by what others have said about it, and will assess the books on their own merits.
In this first installment, a squad of four clone commandos is inserted onto the planet Qiilura, where their mission is to eliminate a virus that targets Republic clones and to capture the Separatist scientist who eng