http://nerdvana.freedomblogging.com/2009/08/09/star-wars-canon-is-finally-shooting-itself-in-the-foot/26259/
(First off, the link above - glad to see I'm not the only one with this opinion.)
...a publishing event with the Thrawn trilogy, one Star Wars novel a year, quickly became an onslaught of books, comics, videogames, and now TV shows. Some of these stories have been good, most of them decent, and a handful of them appallingly bad (Kevin J. Anderson, I'm looking in your general direction) - but for some reason, someone thought that these hundreds of stories by dozens of authors across multiple forms of media should all coexist together. That should all be considered...canon (cue sinister music).
This would've been all well and good, if it hadn't quickly become clear that George Lucas wasn't done with Star Wars. I'm not a huge follower of the EU (Star Wars should end with Return of the Jedi - and it is a happy ending), but I know a good portion of the novels written before The Phantom Menace's release have been negated by the prequel trilogy - even Timothy Zahn's Thrawn novels. And as we see with Karen Traviss's departure from Star Wars, it's a problem that's only getting worse, now that there's a weekly TV show set during The Clone Wars, with another TV show, set during the period between Episodes III and IV, on the way.
After 1999, I thought we'd see a much firmer hand by Lucas and his editors in regards to the tie-in books, especially those set in the prequel trilogy: fewer books, published farther apart, with more attention paid to producing a cohesive universe.
But the release schedule for Star Wars stories - especially the novels - has only increased in this decade, and the canon has grown bloated, convoluted, and often inaccessible to casual fans. It's like Stars Wars is going down the road as...
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