The Complete Star Wars Encyclopedia (Star Wars) [Box set] [Hardcover]

Being a life Long star wars fan I was instantly drawn to the Complete Star Wars Encylopedia. I have never before seen such a comprehensive guide to the Star Wars Universe, whether its characters, alien species, planets, weapons, from the films or from the expanded universe. Yes the articles do vary from a few sentences to masses of information depending on the article but it doesn't matter this is the perfect way to satisfy any star wars fan's curiosity. It could be argued that as people continue to love star wars 33 years after the original release of Star Wars episode 4 A New Hope. People will continue to release new star wars material so this edition will become out dated like the previous Star Wars Encyclopedia did, but to be honest I love this book so much I would be happy to buy a new edition if one was released. In short this is a must for anyone who calls themselves a star wars fan. If you decide to buy this book I hope you enjoy reading it because I certainly have.

I know its really cheesy and I really need to get a life but as a star wars fan i have to say it...

"May the Force be with you"

Wow!What a book(s), this a wonderful addition to all Star Wars fan's bookshelves. It is informative, detailed and insightful into not only the film sagas, but the whole expanded universe that has been created and embellished by all the contributors to the Star Wars world since George Lucas invented it!
It is a very heavy book, split into three volumes in a lovely slipcase. All items are alphabetically listed and range from the mundane and little known, to all the favorites of the Star Wars cannon.
Essential reading and reference for all Star Wars fans and diehards, save up if you have to in the New Year, and these current economic climes and buy it. You will not be disappointed.

At a cursory glance-through to look at the nice pictures, this looks like an impressive reworking of an already impressive resource material. Several errors from the first Encyclopędia from 1998, like several characters' photos being put under the wrong entires, seem to have all been fixed. This new version is amazingly up-to-date, including entries from the first series of "The Clone Wars" GCI cartoon on TV. Its authors have crammed A LOT of info into three hefty volumes (from the A-10 Vigilance Interceptor variant to Zzzanmxl), with great pictures -- some of them brand-new for this project -- and it's an absolute must-have for "Star Wars" fans.

However, upon closer examination, this ain't perfect reference material. I got this set in the post from Amazon the day it was released, and I've managed to work my way through all three volumes. And I found typos in every tome; Volume 1's average of one mistake every fifteen pages or so drops considerably in Volume 2, and the typo count drops to negligible in Volume 3. The first error that sprung out at me, in the "A" section, was a reference to a character called Nen Yim. And just a little further down the same column of the same page in a different article, the same character is referred to as NEM Yim. Also, the table displaying the Aurebesh alphabet is typeset badly, with a few of the symbol names misspelled (based on previously-published material), and many of the symbol names are capitalised, and several of them are in lower-case (for no apparent reason). Near the bottom of one of the columns in the "C" section, four entries -- starting with "Croke" -- are duplicated on the next page. A creature known as Fenner's Rock is described as "toothsome" (pleasant to eat; tasty), when the writers actually mean it's "toothy," as in: it's got a big mouth filled with nasty big pointy white things . . . which are really soft cartilaginous growths used as a threat display to deter predators and not really teeth at all. Okay, this isn't end-of-the-world catastrophe stuff, but it makes you wonder where else some mistakes may be lurking.

Also, because there are now so very, very many published "Star Wars" products nowadays, a lot of which intersect and borrow from each other, the authors have done away with the source codes for each entry. While this may make it frustrating for anyone wishing to find out exactly which book a certain item appeared in, it at least cuts down the potential length of the book by a good hundred pages or so. I mean, can you imagine a list of sources at the end of (for example) the Han Solo or Luke Skywalker articles that lists every single work they appeared in? Exactly. Bad for researchers, but it saves paper and money.

Is this set perfect? No. Is it extremely good? Yes. Is it worth having if you're a "Star Wars" fan? Most definitely. Just be aware that it might not be 100% accurate (if 100% accuracy is what your going for). If you're an absolute stickler for that kind of thing, you might want to wait for a later edition. Or, if you're a typical sci-fi übergeek (like me), you can catch all the mistakes yourself and forgive a few typos, so long as you know what the authors are getting at. Besides, you just KNOW that ten years from now, they're going to have to do an even more colossal update, but this should tide you over until then.

I may refine this review later as I delve further into the volumes, but I figured someone should dash off a few lines for anyone sitting on the fence, wondering how this project turned out. So far: not perfect, but darned impressive. And with Amazon's current nice low price on this item, why not indulge yourself?