Book 33 of 2013: Star Warped by A3R Roberts (Adam Roberts)

On our trip to Oban for my birthday, Mr Click spotted Star Warped in the Oxfam shop. Knowing what a geek I am he pointed it out to me and as it’s from the same range as The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The Hobbit parody books I decided we should get it. Mr Click got to read it first but after listening to him chuckling through it (and refusing to actually share what was so funny most of the time) I obviously had to read it as soon as I was able.

It’s a parody version of the Star Wars films released to date; first are the longer parodies dealing with the original three films, then at the end are three shorter films which play around with the events of the most recent three films. In these films the dominant force in the universe is the Farce and Luke must go head to head with Dark Father (three guesses to work out what his relationship to Luke is).

It really was laugh out loud funny in places. I was glad to finally get to read it and see whether it really was as funny as my husband had implied. It’s obviously written for people who are fans of the films or who are at least well acquainted with them. I read it not long after watching the three original Star Wars films (for Star Wars Day) so I could kind of follow how the story was taking the mickey out of them.

One of my favourite things was the names. Especially some of the ‘extras’ who had names that were phonetic spellings of things like ‘Another British Actor’ and ‘That Guy From The Bill’. There were also the main characters like Wobbli Bent K’nobbli as well as the rebel force, called Rebelend. So it’s a little bit rude in places, but considering this is coming from the same mould as Bored of the Rings that was kind of to be expected.

I thought that the first three parodies were the best of the six, mainly because they were longer. They had actual chapters whereas everything in the prequels was sort of squished into one. Despite being a bit rushed they did help to tie everything together. I suppose there probably wasn’t enough to work with for the three prequel films, they are kind of funny on their own without even trying.

I’ll revisit this in the future, perhaps when we’ve got all of the films on blu-ray so I can have a little marathon. It’s also made me really look forward to reading the Tolkien parody books. They’re on the bookcase waiting for me, I just need to find a bit of time to actually get to them!