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0345478274
| 9780345478276
| 0345478274
| 4.24
| 10,937
| Oct 26, 2004
| Oct 26, 2004
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liked it
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3.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter 3.5 stars For 2024, I decided to pick up where I left off after 2022 and reread books published between 2004 and 2011—a hodgepodge of Clone Wars, inter-trilogy, and Original Trilogy stories, plus a smattering of Old Republic Sith. This shakes out to twenty-one novels and four short stories, mainly consisting of the Republic Commando series, the Darth Bane trilogy, the Coruscant Nights trilogy, five Clone Wars books written by the Karens, and four standalone novels. This week’s focus: the first book in the Republic Commando series, Hard Contact by Karen Traviss. SOME HISTORY: Before writing the first Republic Commando book, Hard Contact, Karen Traviss knew nothing about Star Wars beyond what happened in the films. So she worked closely with Ryan Kaufman from LucasArts to make sure that her novel fit within the prequel era. Hard Contact also had to stoke readers’ interest for the Republic Commando video game, which was scheduled to release in February 2005. The video game would focus on the exploits of Delta Squad, while Traviss’s novel followed a separate clone commando squad, Omega Squad, sent to Qiilura to capture an enemy scientist and eliminate a biochemical threat. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: I’m fairly certain I read Hard Contact before, but I honestly didn’t remember any of the details! A BRIEF SUMMARY: On a mission to sabotage a nanovirus research facility on a Separatist planet, four clone commandos try to survive under the very noses of their enemies—and matters don't improve when Darman, the squad's demolitions expert, gets cut off from the others during planetfall. Even Darman's good luck in meeting a Jedi Padawan vanishes once she admits to her woeful inexperience. For the isolated clone commandos and stranded Jedi, a long, dangerous journey lies ahead, through hostile territory brimming with slavers, Separatists, and suspicious natives… THE PLOT: Hard Contact is relatively short at just under 300 pages, and I appreciated that—there were a limited number of characters, and the plot was easy to follow. After Darman, Niner, Fi, and Atin live through the Battle of Geonosis and lose their respective squads, they’re put together to form Omega Squad and sent to the world of Qiilura to capture the Separatist scientist Dr. Uthan and destroy her nanovirus research. They’re also told that a Jedi and his padawan were dispatched to Qiilura weeks earlier, and haven’t been heard from since. Master Fulier is killed by the Mandalorian mercenary Ghez Hokan towards the beginning of the book, and his padawan Etain is hiding in the countryside. Darman is separated from the other three during planetfall, but runs into Etain—and Etain has the plans for the research facility that the commandos need. Darman and Etain try to rendezvous with the rest of Omega Squad with the help of a shapeshifter ally, while Niner and the rest focus on taking down the Separatists communication system. Once reunited, they’ll attempt to capture Dr. Uthan and destroy her work—since her nanovirus is intended to target clones—and hopefully make it out alive. CHARACTERS: Of the four clone commandos, I feel like Traviss spent the most time in Darman’s head, and then a lesser but still significant amount of time in Sergeant Niner’s POV. Poor Atin and Fi got significantly less development here; Atin has a distinctive scar that crosses his whole face, we don’t get the story behind it but he must have refused bacta treatment. While Niner, Darman, and Fi were all trained by a Mandalorian named Skirata, Atin was trained by someone else. He comes across as standoffish and closed off, but he’s lost two squads and you get the sense that he doesn’t want to lose anyone else. Fi uses humor as a coping mechanism, and comes across as the jokey one. But when the situation escalates and Darman and Atin are in trouble, he withdraws into himself. Each of the commandos has a different personality, and while they may all be from the same genetic template, they’ve developed very different ways of dealing with the world around them. Niner is the sergeant, so he’s In Charge. But since he’s only been through his training and the Battle of Geonosis he has moments of doubt: is he doing the right thing? Is this the right approach? However, he knows that he’s the leader, so he pushes through and tries to plan as best he can despite their limited intel. Darman is their demolitions expert, and he’s separated from the others during planetfall because he tries to save as much explosive material as possible—despite Niner’s order to leave everything behind. Darman is the first of the commandos to encounter the Jedi padawan Etain, and they form a friendship along their trek. Etain’s reluctance to be a Jedi Commander and take control of Omega Squad leads Darman to take charge perhaps more than he initially would. The clone commandos are a little different than basic clone troopers in that they have specialized training and a bit more initiative, but they’re also willing to obey an unfamiliar padawan simply because she’s a Jedi. All of the commandos, but especially Darman, view themselves as expendable and aren’t worried about it; they were made to serve the Republic, and they seem to view death as inevitable. When we were first introduced to Etain the woefully inexperienced padawan, I was a little worried. Would the clone commandos be condescending about her lack of experience? Refreshingly, they were not—although the shapeshifter Jinart was cruel and dismissive to her at times. I was sympathetic to Etain’s struggles, but she came across as passive and reluctant to take charge, especially once she met up with Darman and the others. Since we never see her interactions with her Master, I couldn’t get a sense of whether this was similar to Lorana Jinzler and Jorus C’Baoth’s padawan/Master relationship in Outbound Flight, where Lorana is kind and capable and compassionate but C’Baoth has done a number on her self esteem. I don’t think Fulier and Etain had the same dysfunctional dynamic, so maybe “weak and full of doubts” was just Etain’s natural personality. It was frustrating at times to read, but probably more realistic than I initially realized: Etain feels like a teenager, one blindsided by the existence of this clone army and completely unprepared to take any sort of military leadership role. I wish she had stepped up and taken charge sooner (much sooner), but I also prefer characters like Lorana, who are inexperienced Jedi but have a much sweeter nature. (Etain whines a lot.) The pairing of some newbie commandos who have lots of training but limited real world experience with an indecisive padawan worked well, and I think she learned a lot from them. We also meet some mammalian shapeshifters native to Qiilura, Jinart and her consort. They want the Separatists off their homeworld, and are willing to work with the Republic to achieve that end. Jinart felt a little too overpowered to me, though. I thought the idea of shapeshifters who could change their size was cool, shifting from big to small and bipedal to quadrupedal, but then Jinart could also look like a human. I think that size and general shapeshifting is cool and useful, but changing your species felt like a step too far. I’m not a fan of shapeshifters in general, however, especially when I don’t know the rules and limits behind their shifting. On the baddie front, we have the Mandalorian mercenary Ghez Hokan, the Separatist scientist Dr. Ovolot Qail Uthan, and a whole bunch of lesser baddies that I could not keep straight. Dr. Uthan is working on a nanovirus that would target only clone troopers, but it’s only in the preliminary stages and would have killed all the humans on Qiilura. I’m glad that it wasn’t deployed! She’s captured fairly easily by Darman and Atin, but I bought that because combat training or knowledge is clearly not in her wheelhouse. The Mandalorian Hokan thinks very highly of himself and his skills, and very lowly of his Neimodian employee—yet he’s still willing to take money from him. He takes Master Fulier’s lightsaber and uses it at various points, but doesn’t understand how it works or really use it effectively, treating the lightsaber as a threatening tool more than anything else. I was a little surprised that Hokan was killed at the end of the novel, because I know that there are more Republic Commando books and just assumed that he’d be an overarching villain. But no! Hokan is killed, his forces are pretty much destroyed, and Dr. Uthan is captured—so I’m not sure what will happen in future installments. Maybe more of a bad-guy-of-the-week setup? I’m pretty sure that when Lucasbooks and Del Rey commissioned Karen Traviss for the first Republic Commando book, they didn’t intend for it to be a multi-book series—after all, there were almost two years between the release of the first and the second books. So I like that this book feels self-contained and standalone with a satisfying ending, because I remember not enjoying the later Republic Commando books as much. ISSUES: My first issue with Hard Contact was more of a general military sci-fi complaint: I didn’t always understand the terms that Traviss was using. There seemed to be less Britishisms than her other SW books (characters actually talk about “gear” instead of “kit”), but some of the military terms were unexplained within the text. If you’re going to use “EP” for Extraction Point, please explain the term once before you start throwing the acronym around! I have also not played the Republic Commando game, so I have no base knowledge to draw from that either. I was floundering at times. Second, my sympathy for Etain ebbed and flowed as the story progressed, but really took a hit when she had a meltdown when Master Zey was going to leave with Niner and Fi. I appreciate the sentiment, but it felt a little overdone. I liked that Etain formed a connection with these clone commandos, and came to see them as separate individuals and actual distinct human beings—but I didn't like how it played out here, with Etain yelling about not leaving anyone behind and threatening the shuttle. Etain won’t take initiative or command, but suddenly she’s standing up for the commandos? Her character is all over the place in this book. This ties into my biggest issue with Hard Contact, which is that Etain senses Darman in the Force as a literal child. She asks him how old he is, and he says “I’m ten years old, ma’am.” HOLY BEJEEBUS BATMAN! Yes, I would agree with Traviss that biologically the clone troopers are only ten years old, but they also have this sped-up aging/growth cycle so that after ten years they’re physically adults. Yes, I would agree that they don’t have much experience beyond what they were trained for, and that they’re sheltered in the same way that a teenage padawan may be. But Etain sensing clones as children gave me the heebie jeebies like nothing else, perhaps especially because I remember that multiple characters form romantic relationships with these guys! I think this makes Etain’s indecisiveness even worse, because if I sensed that these soldiers were actually children I would have stepped majorly up as a Jedi and taken charge of the situation, not deny responsibility at any turn. IN CONCLUSION: I rather enjoyed the first Republic Commando book. I think it serves as a great standalone story, and I appreciated that Traviss humanized the four clone commandos. However, I did not have the same feelings about Etain as a passive, whiny Jedi Padawan, or how Traviss chose to approach the clone's sped-up aging... Next up: a short story that appeared in Star Wars Insider magazine, Omega Squad: Targets by Karen Traviss. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/dTQKLbKbTjQ “Giving Commandos a Human Side: Author Karen Traviss” (October 2004): https://web.archive.org/web/200502041... ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 12, 2024
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Feb 24, 2024
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Feb 12, 2024
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Mass Market Paperback
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B0DVBWJYZJ
| unknown
| 3.40
| 5
| unknown
| unknown
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it was ok
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Legac
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Legacy of the Force: Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: a short story about Jaina, Allana, and Tenel Ka: “Good Hunting” by Christie Golden. Intro: “Good Hunting" is a short story by Christie Golden that appeared in Star Wars Insider issue 142 in June of 2013. Featuring artwork by Joe Corroney, it starred Jaina Solo, Tenel Ka, and Allana on a “hostile wilderness world.” TheForce.net originally said that it tied into Troy Denning's novel Crucible, but it’s more accurate to say that “Good Hunting” is set in-between Apocalypse and Crucible. And as with the other short stories, “Good Hunting” was reprinted in Star Wars Insider: The Fiction Collection Volume 2 Summary: When Tenel Ka and her daughter Allana visit Jaina solo on the Jedi's new home base of Shedu Maad, Jaina suggests that they head out on an expedition together—and Allana requests that it be a camping trip. So the trio head to the remote Hapan world of Luuhar…but this won't be a calm, relaxing trip. The Good: In the Legacy of the Force series and in Conviction, we got to see Allana interact with her mom Tenel Ka—and in the Fate of the Jedi series, there were some instances where Allana interacted with her aunt Jaina. But we never really saw the three of them together, so “Good Hunting” is a little glimpse into their dynamic together. Jaina welcomes this opportunity to get away from the new Jedi Temple, Tenel Ka is happy to get away from the Hapan court, and Allana is having fun hanging out with her mom and her aunt. They head to Luuhar, Allana’s pet nexu Anji runs off, and then they’re confronted by first poachers and later by a Force sensitive hunter. Those last two encounters give Jaina and Tenel Ka the opportunity to pull out their lightsabers and have a little action scene. We also see Allana's similarities to her father here, specifically in her affinity with Anji. She’s fascinated by all the nature around her, and I have to think that seeing so much of Jacen in Allana is bittersweet for both Jaina and Tenel Ka. The Meh: I feel like “Good Hunting” suffers from some of the same issues as Getaway by Christie Golden: it's cute, but there's not a lot there. Jaina and the Djo family go camping, but Jaina and Tenel Ka sense that something is amiss, especially after Anji runs away. Then they’re attacked by poachers, who had no idea they were attacking the Queen Mother, and it turns out the poachers were led by a Force sensitive hunter who was creating the bad, fearful atmosphere that Jaina sensed. They’re going to face off against him, but rather anticlimactically Anji reappears and eats him. That’s it. It’s good that Anji didn’t go feral and escape, but I was a little surprised by how quickly Jaina jumped to that conclusion. Anji’s not a domesticated nexu (she has been tamed by Allana herself), but she’s loyal and loves Allana and is able to cut through that overpowering fear and save her owner. But by eating the dark side hunter, we never get an explanation into who he was or where he came from. The poachers appear to be Hapan, since they instantly recognized Tenel Ka, so does that mean the hunter was also a Hapan? However, I always got the sense that Force users were very rare in the Hapan cluster due to their dislike/avoidance of the Jedi, so that Teneniel Djo the Force-wielding Dathomiri witch was definitely an anomaly among the non-Force sensitive Hapans. So in a roundabout way: it’s great that Anji came back and rescued them, but it would have been very informative if they could have questioned that guy! In Short: “Good Hunting” is a little story showing Tenel Ka and Jaina and Allana spending time together, camping and facing off against bad guys. But as with Christie Golden's previous story Getaway, this one is very short and slight. While it's nice to see this little glimpse of Jaina and the Djo family having some good bonding time, that's pretty much it. I also ended the story with questions that are obviously not answered in the text itself (like what was going on with that Force sensitive hunter). Next up: taking a break from Star Wars for the month of January, then returning with the first book in the Republic Commando series, Hard Contact by Karen Traviss. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/7Ydys3VvGVg “Good Hunting” by Christie Golden: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Z17U... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 11, 2023
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Dec 12, 2023
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Dec 11, 2023
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Paperback
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0345511425
| 9780345511423
| 0345511425
| 3.60
| 3,092
| Jan 01, 2013
| Jul 09, 2013
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it was ok
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1.5 stars. Oh boy. For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force 1.5 stars. Oh boy. For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: the last chronological novel in the Expanded Universe,Crucible by Troy Denning. SOME HISTORY: Crucible by Troy Denning was meant to be a big adventure for Luke, Han, and Leia before they retired from “active duty” and passed the torch onto the next generation like Jaina Solo, Ben Skywalker, and Allana Djo Solo. It was also meant to bridge the gap between the Fate of the Jedi series and both Christie Golden’s Jaina-centric Sword of the Jedi trilogy and Troy Denning’s untitled trilogy. Crucible was released on July 9, 2013, and became the last chronological novel in the Expanded Universe before the April 2014 reboot. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: I didn't know anything about Crucible going into this read; however, multiple people told me that I would not like it, which made me a little intrigued to find out why… A BRIEF SUMMARY: When Han Solo and Leia Organa arrive at the Chiloon Rift to help Lando Calrissian with his struggling mining operation, little do they know that threats will escalate and Lando's business will suffer mass casualties. When Luke Skywalker joins them on the scene, the trio undertake to figure out what’s going on and what’s really at stake—and for this mission in particular, the outcome does not look good for our aged heroes… THE PLOT: Crucible starts out pretty simple—Lando's having trouble with pirates, and he asks Han and Leia for help—only for it to spiral out of control as the novel progresses. The Qreph brothers want to take over Lando’s business and control the Chiloon Rift, and they’re willing to kill a lot of people to achieve their unknown ends. The trio of old heroes becomes a quartet when Luke answers Han’s call for more help, but we also have Ben Skywalker and Tahiri Veila in the mix, looking for a Mortis Quest Knight named Ohali Soroc who vanished in the vicinity of the Rift. The Qreph brothers have hired Mandalorian mercenaries led by Mirta Gev, Boba Fett's granddaughter, to enforce their power grabs, and they've also hired a dark side Force user named Savara Raine who is actually Vestara Khai. It turns out that the Qreph brothers are buying up business to conceal their secret Rift base, which is located on a Celestial monolith. (Not Mortis, but similar.) Everything culminates in a freaky-deaky The Crystal Star-esque scene in which Luke and Leia and Han fight the Qreph brothers in a raw powered Force realm. It gets very metaphysical. CHARACTERS: Lando is the consummate businessman, so it makes sense that he has another mining endeavor since he’s been mining asteroids since Heir to the Empire. The asteroids in the Chiloon Rift are full of rare minerals and metals, so it also makes sense that he’d seek help with the pirates/hostile takeovers. Lando’s not a key part of the story, but he still feels quintessentially Lando: perfect poker face, loves his friends and family, not willing to retire at the end because Lando will always be running schemes. We also meet two of Lando’s associates. One is a young man named Omad Kaeg, a native of the Rift who helps the quartet navigate to the Qreph brother’s hidden base. He feels like a young Han Solo character, because he mostly runs off of bravado and luck. (Tahiri made a comment at one point that she wanted to meet him, but then we never really saw that meeting? It felt strange.) Lando’s second-in-command at the mining facility is a woman named Dena Yus, who ends up being a spy for the Qrephs and…a biot. (??) She’s a constructed being, she can’t disobey a direct order from the Qrephs but she also helps them kill 30,000 people (!!) on Lando’s base. I was cognizant of her situation, but she also never asks for help until after the mass casualties have occurred which makes it harder to sympathize with her plight. Han and Leia set out on this mission because 1) they wanted to see Lando again and 2) the Jedi Council was cool with the idea. I find it interesting that while Leia is one of the older Jedi Knights, she only became a Knight during the Dark Nest trilogy and thus has a lot less seniority than younger characters like her daughter. She’s a good fighter, but Luke and Jaina definitely have her beat. Han and Leia go through the ringer here, which becomes a running theme in Crucible: Luke and Leia are in their sixties, Han in his seventies, Lando even older, so they’re not young and reckless. But so many bad physical things happened to Han and Leia especially that it felt like beating our heroes up until they’re forced to retire. Han and Leia are grievously wounded by the asteroid explosions—Han is captured by the Qreph brothers and then they put probes in his brain and mentally torture him—Luke and Leia are badly injured during a rescue attempt—and that’s not even including the monolith stuff. There are multiple points in the story where Leia thinks that Han’s dead or vice versa, and they’re willing to wreak havoc to avenge the other. On the one hand, Han and Leia have developed such a great relationship and work so well together that I’m sure the loss of their partner would be devastating…but this constant talk of anger-fueled vengeance made me a little worried about them! Han has his normal sarcastic attitude for most of the story, but even the tone dipped towards DARKNESS at times. (Also, characters like Marvid Qreph just…reflect on Leia’s attractiveness in a creepy way. I have noticed this before in multiple Troy Denning books. I agree that Leia is a beautiful woman, but why does he constantly highlight this?) Luke shows up because he’s bored and he wants to see Ben again. (Is Luke Skywalker the best choice to come help Han and Leia in the Rift? Probably not, but he has itchy feet.) Luke ends up running interference between Leia and her constant revenge litany, but otherwise feels less focused here than Han or Leia. Luke is also looking for Ohali Soroc, a Duros woman who was one of the ten Quest Knights sent out into the galaxy to look for Mortis. She came to the Chiloon Rift, and was captured by the Qreph brothers. I’m not crazy about the term “Quest Knight” because all I can think of is the Arthurian overtones. Han encounters her on the Qreph’s base, and she’s OK in the end. Vestara Khai appears, still on the outs with the Lost Tribe of the Sith and working for the Qreph brothers under a pseudonym, and once the Skywalkers realize she’s there they all want to kill her. I can see Leia taking that approach, because Vestara tried to kill Leia's husband and grandchild in front of her, but Luke? Ben?? Even at the end of Apocalypse, Ben hadn’t given up on Vestara, and I don’t think his first reaction to finding her on the Qreph base would be attempted murder. In a 2014 podcast interview, Denning said that he didn’t think that Ben and Vestara were an endgame relationship, merely a teenage fling, and I get the sense that he doesn’t think Vestara is redeemable. I don’t like that—I didn’t think she was ready to fully embrace the light side after being raised as a Sith in the Fate of the Jedi series, but I would never come out and say “this character is permanently evil.” That implies that people can be irredeemably bad, and (to me) completely contradicts RotJ’s message of compassion and redemption. It felt like Vestara went from being a nuanced character in Fate of the Jedi to a one-dimensional villain in Crucible. More on the baddie front: Mirta and her gang of Mandalorians are working for the Qrephs because they claimed that they could find a cure for the Fett-specific nanokiller that prevents Mirta and her grandfather from returning to Mandalore. They are lying to Mirta, and have no cure or progress towards a cure. Mirta and the Mandos end up leaving with Vestara in Ship, so perhaps they would have teamed up together at some point. I would expect that to be an uneasy alliance, because Mirta was not comfortable taking any orders from Vestara. The Qreph brothers want vengeance for their mother, who was an information broker that was killed on Ord Mantell (this harkens back to a choose-your-own-adventure written by Denning for the original Star Wars Roleplaying Game). Han was implicated in her murder, thus the brain probe torture. The Qrephs want power and wealth and galaxy-wide control, and they build the gate to the monolith because they want to become Force-sensitive as well. But they also look like little alien babies with giant heads, so it’s hard for me to shake that mental image. Their first appearance—attempting to intimidate Lando into selling his business—led me to believe that they would be farcical villains, but that was very much not the case. These guys are garbage who do not hesitate to kill thousands. ISSUES: I believe that everyone told me that I would hate Crucible because of the violence—and yep, that was my first issue with the novel! It wasn’t graphic, like Star by Star, but there were still a lot of dark and violent scenes here. Asteroids drop on Lando’s mining facility, thirty thousand people die, and Han loses an EYE! (I cannot get over that. It’s remarked on maybe twice and then forgotten for the rest of the book.) Luke and Leia crash land their way onto the Ormni, and they’re badly injured in the process—Leia burns half her hair off. They come out of their Jedi healing trances too soon to avoid Vestara, fight a bunch of Nargons, Leia’s back is all ripped up and Luke has a hole in his abdomen. But Lando pops them in some bacta, and they’re ready to get messed up during the final mystical monolith fight, and die, and come back again. It’s weird. If the New Jedi Order series was meant to conclude with the original trio passing the torch to the next generation, the books shifted gears from the Dark Nest trilogy onwards by keeping Han and Leia and Luke as pivotal parts of the Star Wars story. So I couldn’t help feeling that Crucible was relentlessly breaking our heroes down to prove why they needed to retire (although I’m not sure how long that retirement was going to stick). I wanted a fun final adventure, where no one was brutally wounded and healed and then crushed chapter after chapter. I wish the Mortis stuff hadn’t been brought into this story either. Obviously, Denning wanted this novel to bridge the gap between the Fate of the Jedi series and the continuing Abeloth arc and thus the existence of a non-Mortis Celestial monolith, but I wasn’t wild about those Abeloth revelations to begin with. If you had told me going into Crucible that we’d get a climax akin to The Crystal Star, I would have thought that you were crazy. But that’s precisely what we got: everyone fighting in this spiritual realm where Luke and Leia and Han are filled with light and the Qreph brothers are possessed by shadows. The brothers explode into nothing, then Luke and Leia are gone, and Han finds Leia but she’s TESB-Leia and he has to tell her everything that happened in the intervening years while she grows older before his eyes. It reminded me when Han had to go diving into Waru after Luke and Leia! I never thought that “fight to save Lando’s business” would lead to all this metaphysical stuff. Because my biggest issue with Crucible is that it’s trying to do way too much. It wants to tell an adventure story for the original trio, and bridge the gap between the Fate of the Jedi and future trilogies, and develop the Mortis mythos more. Despite the heavy emphasis on Jadok, James Luceno’s Millennium Falcon was a much more successful “standalone between series” for me. It set up the Jedi madness subplot with Seff Hellin’s brief appearance, but it was mainly about Han and Leia and Allana learning about the Falcon and growing as a family. And it was enjoyable to read! With Crucible, the initial adventure gets progressively darker and complex until it feels less like a standalone and more like a stepping stone to a bunch of canceled novels. I think you could have read Millennium Falcon without any knowledge of the Legacy of the Force series, but Crucible feels uber-connected to the series that preceded it. I think all the Mortis and Celestials and the Quest Knight stuff could have been cut, and in fact works to the novel’s detriment. IN CONCLUSION: Crucible provides the reader with one big (final) adventure for Lando and Luke and Han and Leia. Three of them are ready to retire at the end; Lando has a few years and business ventures left in him. Unfortunately, it's pretty dark, and really beats our heroes down as the story progresses—and the conclusion is very, very weird. Having read it, I have to agree with everyone who told me I wouldn't like Crucible, because I think it's too dependent on novels that never materialized and just wasn't fun to read. Next up: a short story about Jaina, Allana, and Tenel Ka: Good Hunting by Christie Golden. YouTube review: https://youtu.be/IaZ1m3muW5U Scum and Villainy Radio - BOMBAD EPISODE (EPISODE #18 FOR 3/28/2014 with Troy Denning interview): https://web.archive.org/web/201405130... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 11, 2023
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Dec 16, 2023
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Dec 09, 2023
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Hardcover
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B0DV2SQ3XH
| unknown
| 2.33
| 3
| unknown
| unknown
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it was ok
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: a short story about Jagged Fel and Jaina Solo’s honeymoon: “Getaway” by Christie Golden. Intro: Jaina Solo and Jagged Fel were married at the end of Apocalypse, the last book in the Fate of the Jedi series, after Jaina was promoted to Jedi Master and Jag stepped down from his position as the Imperial Head of State. This short story depicts their honeymoon, which ends up being far more dangerous than expected. “Getaway” by Christie Golden appeared in Star Wars Insider issue 134 in May of 2012, with artwork by Joe Corroney. It was also reprinted in Star Wars Insider: The Fiction Collection Volume 1. Summary: The newly married Jaina Solo and Jag Fel head to the Outer Rim world of Sakuub for their honeymoon, ostensibly to hike to the Sky Temple of Karsol but actually so that Jaina can evaluate if they’re old Jedi ruins. To Jag’s chagrin, the expedition turns into a deadly trap… The Good: I was a little disappointed by Jaina and Jag's wedding at the end of Apocalypse, simply because it was really short! Just one brief chapter, and we didn't even hear if any of Jag's family was there. (That does continue the Skywalker/Solo tradition of poorly-executed weddings, though, since Luke nearly missed Han and Leia’s wedding at the end of The Courtship of Princess Leia.) I was very happy to see that “Getaway” spent a little more time with Jaina and Jag and showed how they're settling into married life. I enjoyed that Jag is not on board with a hiking expedition, and would much rather have spent some time resting and relaxing in the Hapes Cluster. (Hiking for a mission? No problem. Hiking on his honeymoon, and sleeping in a tent? Jag has many unvoiced complaints.) I also enjoyed that “Getaway” is almost solely from Jag's point of view; we see how well he's come to know Jaina, so that without her even saying anything he senses when something's amiss. And in the final fight at the end, Jag doesn’t have Jaina’s Force skills but they’re still able to work together to take down their foes. The Meh: “Getaway” is short, around four to five pages. There were even more illustrations than in First Blood or Roll of the Dice, which lent to the feeling that there’s just not a lot of story here. J&J head to Sakuub, meet their guide Pharika, Jaina senses something wrong in the market, a lovey-dovey scene. We skip the bulk of their multi-day hike to their arrival at the Sky Temple of Karsol, where Jaina finds a holocron and they’re attacked by Pharika and her allies. Jag takes down Pharika, but she’s killed by the ship, and then that ship in turn is destroyed by a mystery ship piloted by the Hutt from the market. The Hutt tells Jaina that they’ve paid their debt to her, and now Jaina has to get Jag back down to the city. There’s not much there, and even though Jag was injured I was never truly worried about either Jaina or Jag’s safety here. Similarly, I felt like Jaina found the holocron way to soon—that’s supposing that the purpose of the story was “Jaina investigating if the Sky Temple is ancient Jedi ruins,” rather than “Jaina and Jag are finagled into a situation where there will be a firefight. She didn’t get to look around at the ruins at all, just instantly spotted the holocron and then immediately had to deflect blaster bolts in a meh action scene. I also found the conclusion unsatisfying: we never find out who Pharika was or her group’s aims because she’s dead and her buddies’ ship was blown up. Were they pirates hoping to sell the holocron on the black market, or did they have more nefarious aims? We don’t know! I liked the idea of the Hutts feeling that they owe Jaina and Lando a debt from their ruling on the Treaty of Vontor in Fate of the Jedi: Allies, even though the Klatooinians did uprise against the Hutts, but the Hutt intervention here felt like a way to rule out Hutt help from any future installments—like “we owed you a debt but it’s paid now buh-BYE.” In Short: “Getaway” is a short little story that shows Jaina and Jag's rapport while they’re off on their honeymoon. But there’s not a lot to the story, and the questions raised during their adventure remain mostly unsolved by the end. It’s cute, but it doesn’t fill the gap that the cancellation of the Sword of the Jedi trilogy left in a lot of fans (like me!). Next up: the last chronological novel in the Expanded Universe, Crucible by Troy Denning. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/YLw7-a76UP0 “Getaway” by Christie Golden: https://drive.google.com/file/d/17maf... ...more |
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Dec 08, 2023
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Dec 08, 2023
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Dec 09, 2023
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unknown
| 3.33
| 3
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| unknown
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liked it
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: a short story prequel to Mercy Kill, “Roll of the Dice” by Karen Miller Intro: After writing three Clone Wars novels between 2008 and 2010, Karen Miller was asked to contribute a story to the Star Wars Insider magazine based on Aaron Allston’s Mercy Kill (and she was given access to the novel prior to its release). "Roll of the Dice" appeared in Star Wars Insider issue 135 in July of 2012, with artwork by David Rabbitte. Starring Myri Antilles and her famous dad, the story takes place immediately prior to the events of Mercy Kill. Summary: Myri Antilles is on an undercover mission for Galactic Alliance Security, scoping out if Captain Oobolo is running a gambling ship or actually engaging in espionage. Of course, the mission does not go as planned… The Good: It’s fun to see Myri on a mission, using her skills—and in some cases, purposefully not using her skills by losing at sabacc. She plays the role of a dumb and ditzy girl while surreptitiously recording everything about her. When her mission's compromised, she doesn't lose her cool and keeps her facade going as long as possible—and when things look pretty dire for her dad, she's able to pull off a technically-impossible maneuver to save him. I just loved getting to follow along with Myri on an escapade, even a short one. I also enjoyed seeing Myri interact with her dad, because she realizes Wedge is there to extract her without dropping her character. Of course, things quickly escalate and the Antilles need to escape, and Myri and Wedge work very well together. (Myri may have feelings™ about her family legacy, but she loves her dad.) Since this is an undercover mission, we got fun details into Myri’s disguise and Myri’s fake persona. She’s got a crazy hairdo and an eye-catching outfit, and her facial gems that are actually recording devices; in typical Intelligence fashion, they are much less comfortable than the techs promised. The Meh: “Roll of the Dice” doesn’t break down the logistics of Myri’s mission, beyond “Captain Oobolo might be engaging in multiple kinds of espionage.” What kinds of espionage: military, political, commercial? We never find out! Myri captures an information handout between Oobolo and a gambler, but then Wedge shows up to tell her that she’s been compromised. The story is only five pages long, so I didn’t expect novel-length explanations, but we skip most of Myri’s mission in favor of the climactic ending with the Antilles duo in escape pods. Despite Karen Miller saying that this story is meant to be an immediate prequel to Mercy Kill, I didn't find that it completely synced up with Allston’s novel. Miller wrote “Roll of the Dice” in a short period of time, and while she had early access to Mercy Kill I’m not sure if she was able to study it in any great detail. In Mercy Kill, Wedge is 100% retired, so Myri summoning him for help on Vandoor-3 comes as a surprise to everyone. Second, Face Loran is waiting at the end of the story and tells Myri that he has another mission for her; however, Face retired after the Second Galactic Civil War, and wasn’t involved with Galactic Alliance Security again until General Maddeus asked him to look into Stavin Thaal. I also got the sense that Bhindi Drayson recruited Myri into the Wraiths, not Face, because she was surprised by his presence during the ploy at the beginning of Mercy Kill. My Verdict: “Roll of the Dice” is a fun little mission with Myri and Wedge; I liked the illustrations, I enjoyed reading it, but it doesn’t work as well with Allston’s novel as Miller perhaps intended. Still, if you’re interested in reading the story for yourself, I have a link to the PDF below! Next up: after thirteen years, a surprise tenth X-Wing novel! Mercy Kill by Aaron Allston. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/G5vRpPal4-g “Roll of the Dice” by Karen Miller: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EsTn... ...more |
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Nov 21, 2023
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B0DSZYJDSS
| 4.04
| 5,523
| Jan 01, 2012
| Mar 13, 2012
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it was ok
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: the final book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Apocalypse by Troy Denning. SOME HISTORY: Star Wars: The Essential Reader's Companion reveals that the threat of Abeloth was planned from the very beginning of the Fate of the Jedi series, but her exact origins were kept undefined. Abeloth was meant to be a chaotic dark side entity who was imprisoned on her world by the Celestials sometime in the distant past. But in planning her origins reveal for the final book, Lucas Licensing reached out to Troy Denning about incorporating something that had happened in the third season of The Clone Wars animated series in January and February of 2011. Three episodes revealed the existence of a world called Mortis, that was home to three powerful Force users—and Abeloth’s origins bring Mortis into the post-NJO era. Fate of the Jedi: Apocalypse by Troy Denning made it to number two on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of April 1, 2012, and was on the NYT list for three weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: All I knew going into Apocalypse was that somehow this book was going to resolve the conflict with both the Lost Tribe of the Sith and Abeloth, but I wasn’t sure how either of those confrontations were going to play out. A BRIEF SUMMARY: In the finale of the Fate of the Jedi series, Jedi and Sith face off with Coruscant as their battlefield. Teams of Jedi Knights take Sith infiltrators by swift and lethal surprise, but the tide of the conflict quickly turns against the Jedi and their allies—and Abeloth’s origins are revealed to be even wilder than anyone could imagine. THE PLOT: After letting the Sith take over Coruscant in Ascension, which I thought was an interesting move (≖_≖ ), Luke and the Jedi swoop back to retake the Galactic Alliance capital. There's a little detour in the beginning where Han and Leia and others rescue all the Jedi younglings and trainees from Ossus, but most of the book is focused on Coruscant and this fight to take out the Sith infiltrators, regain the Jedi Temple, and hopefully eliminate Abeloth once and for all. This proves to be much harder than originally imagined, and a lot of the book involves this unending attack on the Jedi Temple. Outside of the Jedi assault: Jag is still facing off against Daala, and they end up agreeing to a ceasefire so that they can hold a general election for the leader of the Imperial Remnant. Three Jedi are dispatched to an ancient Killik hive to learn more about Abeloth’s origins. Finally, Abeloth doesn’t stay on Coruscant the whole book, so there’s a final showdown on her planet between Jaina and Ship, Abeloth and Luke and an unknown Sith, and also Abeloth and Vestara Khai and Ben. CHARACTERS: Compared to previous books, there’s much less political stuff in this combat-heavy novel. At the end of Ascension, Wynn Dorvan was taken captive by Rokari Kem/Abeloth and her Sith goons, and in this book we found out that they have been torturing him to get essential information for the Galactic Alliance. Dorvan holds out pretty well here—his mental state is not great, but he’s only leaked minor details. He’s also the first one (in this book) to realize that Abeloth can split herself between different bodies. Abeloth maneuvers him into killing her Rokari Kem body because non-Force sensitive bodies fall apart faster, and she escapes into the Jedi Temple computer core. (A skill she learned from Callista perhaps?) This definitely makes the assault on the Jedi Temple more difficult, but Dorvan is rescued soon thereafter by the Horn siblings. As the book ends, he’s the new Chief of State of the Galactic Alliance, and a good choice: he’s boring but competent, he’s hopefully gotten some therapy after this series, and he’s able to work with others and negotiate. On the Imperial front, Abeloth commandeers the body of Lieutenant Pagorski (the officer who perjured herself at Tahiri’s trial) and shows up to support Daala. Tahiri senses that Pagorski/Abeloth is not what she seems, so Jag dispatches her to a moon linked with the Antemeridian sector Moff to take Pagorski out. He makes Tahiri a temporary Imperial Hand, which has a rather murky past but was still cool to see. Tahiri runs into Boba Fett, in search of the scientists who created the Fett-killer nanobots in Invincible, and they join forces. Tahiri kills Pagorski, fortunately before Abeloth is able to jump into her body, and Jag bombards the moon. This action leaks during the big Head of State debate, so Jag drops out of the race and Admiral Reige is ultimately elected Imperial Head of State. (There was a throwaway line at one point, where Tahiri said that Jag could have been Emperor and Jag was like “absolutely not.” I’m pretty sure the Legacy comic confirmed that Jag was the first emperor of this new Empire, so maybe we would have eventually seen that play out. As it stands, Jag is well-rid of that terrible job.) Most of the book focuses on the Jedi, though. In the beginning, they sneak back into Coruscant and strategically take out highly ranked members of the Lost Tribe of the Sith. However, the numbers are against them: there are 5,000 Sith on Coruscant, and considerably, considerably less Jedi. So after a rash of initial successes, we settle into this lengthy assault on the Jedi Temple. Admiral Bwua’tu provides the military brawn, and the Jedi provide their extra-sensory skills. Unfortunately Abeloth is prepared for them, and while the Jedi take out a lot of Sith it’s still disastrous for the good guys—and any civilians in the area. This was one bit where I wish we had seen more of the individual Jedi losses, because the only named character who gets a death scene is Bazel “Barv” Warv. It’s a sad, heroic ending, protecting Allana and the Solos against a Sith attack, and Barv keeps getting up and fighting on through gruesome, grievous injuries. I wasn’t super interested in the new Jedi characters in the beginning of this series, but Barv’s death was moving, and I wish we had seen more individual examples of fatal bravery like Barv’s to really drive home how many losses the Jedi suffered in this assault. Overall, the Jedi Temple assault was very lengthy and involved, and somewhat draining to read. The Jedi make their way inside, and are ambushed by Sith. Jysella and Valin and Ben make their way to the computer core, and they’re ambushed by Sith and Abeloth captures Ben. Luke and Corran and Jaina try to make their way towards the computer core, only to be ambushed by more Sith and Abeloth. They wound this body of Abeloth, but she escapes. Meanwhile, the Solos land the Millennium Falcon at the Jedi Temple because Allana had a vision of the Barabel hatchlings in danger, and they’re (you guessed it) ambushed by Sith. Jag rescues him, then Luke and Jaina chase after one Abeloth while Saba and Tahiri make their way towards the computer core. After that initial string of successes, which was exciting to read, the Jedi are on the back foot for almost the entire book, and it dragged for me. When Saba finally killed Abeloth in the computer core, I felt like yelling “it took you long enough!” As the book begins, Vestara continues to side with the Jedi because she wants the High Lords removed and…well, she still likes Ben. She’s captured during that first Sith ambush, though, and escapes only to run into another group of Sith. She tells them that Amelia Solo is Allana the heir to the Hapan throne, and this felt like such a betrayal on Vestara’s part. She figured this out on her own—she wasn’t betraying a confidence—but I was saddened by how easily she reverted back to her former self. It’s probably realistic for where Vestara is right now (for a raised-from-infancy Sith, I don’t think it’s as easy as saying “I want to be a Jedi now” and immediately switching sides) but I wanted so much better for her. Vestara’s best trait is that she recognizes Abeloth is pure evil and that she needs to be destroyed, but her actions were so frustrating to read. She loves Ben, but she’s willing to kill other Jedi for Ben, and she gives up Allana’s secret identity for a chance to save her own skin. Even when Ben and Vestara are facing off against Abeloth on her world, she’s drawn to the Font of Power despite its obvious dangers. You want Vestara to change and be redeemed, but there’s too much to overcome for her to do so. While this huge assault is unfolding, the Jedi Order sends Raynar Thul, Tekli, and Lowbacca to an ancient Killik hive to try and learn more about Abeloth’s past and her weaknesses. In the Fate of the Jedi series, Raynar has been a very minor character: he was deeply damaged by his post-Star by Star experiences leading up into the Dark Nest trilogy, but he’s finally clawed his way back to being an individual again. But in going to this Killik hive, Raynar agrees to stay behind and join with this hive mind so that Tekli and Lowbacca can return to Coruscant with the Killik info. This absolutely broke my heart! Raynar is giving up his separate personality, weird as it is, for Abeloth’s origin story, and it crushed me. What was Abeloth’s all-important origin story, then? She was a mortal servant to the Mortis trio of Father, Daughter, and Son, but as she aged she grew to covet their powers. So she drank from the Font of Power and swam in the Pool of Knowledge, and transformed into an eldritch chaos monster. After years of constant war, she’ll break out and wreak havoc across the galaxy until the Son and Daughter team up to imprison her again, but unfortunately the Father, Daughter, and Son are all dead after encountering Anakin Skywalker during the Clone Wars. The Son and Daughter had previously used the Killiks to imprison her on her world, but the Yuuzhan Vong invasion and Jacen’s downfall and the destruction of Centerpoint Station let her escape. If the Jedi want to destroy her, they won’t have the Mortis Ones to help. Abeloth absconds to her world with Ben and Vestara, hoping to create her own version of the Mortis family, and Luke and Jaina follow them. The final showdown involves Ben and Vestara fighting each other and then teaming up against Abeloth; Jaina fighting Ship in the Jade Shadow; Luke spirit-traveling to Abeloth’s world to fight her with the aid of a strange Sith; and Saba and Tahiri sneaking up on the Jedi Temple computer core. Luke and the Sith are able to spiritually wound Abeloth, which lets Saba destroy the computer core Abeloth, which culminates in Ben and Vestara killing the final body of Abeloth. Ben still loves Vestara, but she gives up on him and leaves in Ship (who cryptically hints that there are other Sith in the galaxy besides the Lost Tribe). Luke is very physically wounded after his spiritual battle, so Jaina brings Ben and him back to Coruscant. There, Luke dispatches ten Jedi Knights to try and find the Mortis obelisk, because Abeloth’s chaotic spirit is still out there and he wants the dagger of Mortis in reserve as an uber-MacGuffin for whenever Abeloth returns. ISSUES: My biggest issue with Apocalypse was that it concluded some things, but not everything. If you’re running the gambit from “nothing is resolved” to “everything is tied up,” Apocalypse is no The Unifying Force--a lot of things are left dangling for future stories. Abeloth is defeated for now, but we know her spirit is still out there; this is merely a lull in the Abeloth fight, not the finale. Vestara is not going to become a Jedi, as she’s now on the run with Ship. She’s not ready to embrace the light side, and who knows if she ever will be ready to do so. Luke sends a team of Jedi to bring Raynar back, but we never see him afterwards to make sure he’s OK. Jaina is promoted to Jedi Master and finally marries Jag, and Allana’s secret identity is now public knowledge. It’s a pity, then, that we only got Mercy Kill and Crucible afterwards; Christie Golden was meant to write the Jaina-centric Sword of the Jedi trilogy and Troy Denning was tapped to write an unnamed trilogy, but after the buyout those books were canceled. The Fate of the Jedi series feels so inconclusive because of all those cancellations, but Del Rey and Lucasbooks had no idea that would be the case. A minor quibble: the continuity flubs continued in Apocalypse, although less than in previous books. Wynn Dorvan said that Rokari Kem was from B’nish, but she was from Qaras. In multiple scenes, Tenel Ka is described as though she still has both arms, but she only has one. A few instances of names misspelled (like “Shryiiwook” instead of Shyriiwook). And now that we've gotten Abeloth’s backstory….I don’t like it. I didn’t enjoy the Mortis episodes of The Clone Wars because they felt too woo-woo to me. I’m meant to believe that there’s a planet of immortal Force users, and they want Anakin to take over as the Father so he will “bring balance to the Force” but Anakin has visions of the future that freak him out so the Father wipes his memory and then the Son kills the Daughter and the Father mortally stabs himself and Anakin kills the Son? I think the Mortis episodes work OK as a myth or a parable that shows Anakin’s internal division playing out in this mystical way, but I’m not sure that I buy them as fact. Except when Tekli and Lowbacca return from the Killik hive with this origin story, Luke goes “oh yeah, Yoda told me about that on Dagobah.” ??? (The Doylist perspective is that the Mortis episodes came out in 2011 so it’s just retcons all around, but alas.) Luke and co. say that Abeloth was the Mother, but why does there need to be a Mother? The Daughter is the light side, the Son is the dark side, the Father is the balance between the two—but then you add a Mother into the mix, and she’s corrupt and fallen and the embodiment of chaos? (≖_≖ ) I think I liked Abeloth better as this mysterious dark side entity that periodically broke out; I can see why they linked her with the Mortis trio for continuity reasons, but I don’t think it improves her story. I’m also not crazy about Luke dispatching Jedi on this MacGuffin search. If the Jedi get the dagger of Mortis, they can kill any immortal Force entity. That feels like a video game cheat code to me, and not a good precedent going forward—although I probably come down on the side of “no Force entities at all please,” so perhaps it’s best we didn’t get those sequels after Fate of the Jedi. IN CONCLUSION: Apocalypse starts off with a very suspenseful opening, in which the Jedi eliminate key Sith members left and right, but I found the endless assault on the Jedi Temple that followed a bit of a slog. (It’s a LOT of the book.) I was not thrilled about Abeloth’s origin story, and I wish that this final book in the series had been just a bit more conclusive. I'm glad that I finally read the Fate of the Jedi series, though, especially as I was able to read it with mostly unspoiled eyes. I liked aspects of it—primarily revisiting old worlds and old Force traditions—even if other aspects of the series did not work as well for me. Next up: after thirteen years, we got a surprise tenth X-Wing novel! So first I’ll be reading a short story prequel, Roll of the Dice by Karen Miller. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/43lkZ_l4I2w ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 06, 2023
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Nov 15, 2023
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Nov 06, 2023
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B0DV33XMGZ
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liked it
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: a short story prequel to the Fate of the Jedi series published in Star Wars Insider magazine, “First Blood” by Christie Golden. Intro: “First Blood" is a four-page short story set prior to the events of the Fate of the Jedi series, or more specifically after Ship tells the Lost Tribe of the Sith about the outside world in Omen. Written by Christie Golden with artwork by Brian Rood, it appeared in Star Wars Insider 125 in April 2011, and was later reprinted in Star Wars Insider Special Edition 2013 and Star Wars Insider: The Fiction Collection Volume 1. Summary: “First Blood” is the story of Vestara’s first mission off her homeworld of Kesh, as well as her first kill. The good: After the reveal in Ascension that “Kameron Sudar” from B’nish was actually High Lord Ivaar Workan of the Lost Tribe of the Sith, I wondered what the connection was between B’nish and the Keshiri Sith. “First Blood” maybe gives us an explanation: since the slave girl that Vestara kills was escaping from B’nish (Ship said the freighter was “enroute from Eriadu”) perhaps that’s how the planet got on their radar? “First Blood” also gives us more insight into how vital Ship was to the Lost Tribe of the Sith: he picks the people to go on this first mission off Kesh, he specifically targets this freighter, and he obviously has a connection with Vestara that will play out through the rest of the Fate of the Jedi series. But mainly, “First Blood” is a good (brief) glimpse into Vestara’s character around Omen. She’s excited to be chosen for this mission, she wants to be treated like an adult Sith, she senses things that the others don’t, but she’s also accepting of High Lord Taalon’s cool treatment of her because she’s just an apprentice. She wants to be able to claim a kill like the other Sith, but when confronted with the B’nish slave girl she offers a gentler death—and when the slave girl doesn’t take her up on that offer, she’s shocked by what she senses in the Force during her moment of death. She’s surprisingly upset by the situation, but it’s also one of her first steps on her Sith journey, and death will come much easier to Vestara as the series progresses. The Meh: Like Christie Golden’s other Vestara story, “Imprint,” it's hard to recommend “First Blood” as essential reading because it’s very slight. It’s more like an additional deep dive into Vestara’s character than new insights. “First Blood” is more about small connections: an introduction to Sith Saber Myal, who we see very very briefly in Apocalypse; a hint at how highly regarded Workan was before Ascension. The Sith are on A Mission, but we don’t get any specifics there—just that they need the unknown cargo of this vessel for their future expansions. In Short: “First Blood” illustrates one of the first steps of Vestara’s Sith training, and I can’t help feeling like she’s ill-suited to her culture. She’s eager to learn and experience more, she tries to make the slave girl’s death easier on her, but in the end she automatically obeys her Sith upbringing. It doesn’t impart any new/necessary information about Vestara, though, just builds on our understanding of her character from the Fate of the Jedi series—but after all, it’s only a four-page short story. Next up: the final book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Apocalypse by Troy Denning. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/D6d7gAhE-sc “First Blood” by Christie Golden: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YRi4... ...more |
Notes are private!
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Nov 08, 2023
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Nov 08, 2023
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Nov 01, 2023
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Paperback
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0345519590
| 9780345519597
| B009CVB4R6
| 3.94
| 5,595
| Jan 01, 2011
| Aug 09, 2011
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it was ok
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: the penultimate book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Ascension by Christie Golden. SOME HISTORY: Ian Keltie is a digital artist who lives in Newcastle, and he made the cover art for the nine Fate of the Jedi books. In an interview with Roqoo Depot back in 2011, he talked about his process for creating the covers: he uses a lot of layers in Photoshop, and Del Rey wanted a very specific look for this series. (Like ‘em or not, you will not confuse the FotJ covers for any other Star Wars books.) Keltie’s favorite covers were those for Outcast and Allies, which have a screen-printed-esque look compared to the later darker covers. Interestingly enough, he also revealed that he was provided with photos from photoshoots of the non-OT trio characters, which means they had specific models for characters like Ben Skywalker and Vestara Khai. Fate of the Jedi: Ascension by Christie Golden made it to number seven on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of August 28, 2011, and was on the NYT list for two weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: All I knew going into Ascension was that Luke and Ben and Vestara continued to look for Abeloth, and perhaps the Jedi were going to face some political difficulties after overthrowing Daala in the previous book. A BRIEF SUMMARY: As Luke and Ben Skywalker continue to chase after the dark side entity of Abeloth, the Jedi's removal of Chief of State Daala from power in the previous book has repercussions, as a power struggle ensues on Coruscant. Where is Abeloth, and what is she plotting? What’s going on with the Lost Tribe of the Sith? And with Daala on the loose, what will happen next for the Galactic Alliance and the Jedi Order? THE PLOT: The penultimate book in the Fate of the Jedi series has three main plot lines running through it. The first involves Luke and Ben Skywalker, Vestara Khai, and Jaina Solo searching for Abeloth and/or the Lost Tribe of the Sith. Vestara’s on the Jedi side but isn’t willing to divulge her homeworld, so the quartet go on a Sith Planets Greatest Hits tour. They visit Korriban, then Dromund Kaas, then a new Sith world called Upekzar that was the site of weird Sith hallucination-fueled rituals. This felt like a wild goose chase. The second plot line includes everything happening on Coruscant after Daala was removed from power. The temporary triumvirate now consists of Saba Sebatyne, Senator Treen of Kuat, and Wynn Dorvan, but Saba steps down after the Jedi decide to withdraw from Coruscant. Instead of electing Dorvan as Chief of State, though, Kameron Suldar (a newbie senator from B’nish) suggests Padnel Ovin of Klatooine—and it becomes increasingly apparent that the pro-Imperial conspiracy led by Treen and Moff Lecersen has newfound competition from Suldar’s faction. The third group we follow are the Lost Tribe of the Sith. Gavar Khai’s forces bring Abeloth to Kesh, but she attacks Grand Lord Vol and destroys millions in the capital. A portion of Sith led by Khai leave with Abeloth, while the rest of the Sith carry out a plan that is not immediately apparent. You’ll notice that Abeloth is only present in the beginning of the Lost Tribe of the Sith plot line. For the majority of the book, the reader doesn’t know where Abeloth is or what she’s planning—she’s MIA for a bit. CHARACTERS: After wondering in Conviction why Leia wasn't a part of this temporary government and getting a quasi-explanation that the Jedi don’t want the public to think that they’re permanently seizing power, Leia is heavily involved in political stuff here because of her past history. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The triumvirate also replaces General Jaxton (a member of the pro-Imperial conspiracy) with Wynn Dorvan (very competent but also very boring). Dorvan is sucked into a counter-conspiracy that consists of Lawyer Bwua’tu, the recently-awakened Admiral Bwua’tu, and Bwua’tu’s aide, who are trying to uncover the pro-Imperial conspiracy and also first notice that there’s a second group at play. That new group, led by Senator Suldar from B’nish, basically seizes control from Treen’s group and gets a lot of (anti-Jedi) stuff done in a short amount of time. After two-thirds of his wild goose chase has ensued, Lule returns to Coruscant and decides to pull the Jedi out of the capital. I think there was some good reasoning here—I haven’t felt great about the Jedi being embedded on Coruscant and working for the Galactic Alliance, as that seems like a carryover from the prequels. They don’t need to be Coruscant to operate, and that turned out worse for them during Daala’s paranoid reign than if they were still based on Yavin IV. However, this is just a ploy to draw out the Lost Tribe of the Sith! (Luke is becoming very Machiavellian in his old age.) With the Jedi pulling out and Saba off the triumvirate, the new senators elect Padnel Ovin who at least recognizes that he is not qualified to be Chief of State. The pro-Imperial conspiracy begins to fall apart: Lecersen is caught by Daala, Treen kills her memory-addled colleague, Admiral Bwua’tu’s replacement and General Jaxton are killed. Because spoilers! Kameron Sundar is actually High Lord Workan, and his associates are all Lost Tribe of the Sith. They have infiltrated places of power on Coruscant, set up their own broadcast network, arrested Leia, and taken over the Jedi Temple. (The Barabels in the depths of the Temple keep killing Keshiri Sith, but…we don’t talk about the Barabels.) Leia’s arrest leads to Han and Lando joining Bwua’tu’s counter-conspiracy club, and they break Leia out of prison right before she’s slated for execution. The Sith senators end up pushing for Rokari Kem of Qaras to be elected Chief of State in Padnel’s place, but Rokari Kem is actually…Abeloth. My biggest complaint with all the Coruscanti politics is that there’s a lot happening, and a lot of new names and developments to keep track of. And then there’s some throwaway lines like: the undercity/underworld has gotten a whole bunch worse—I think we’re meant to see this as Abeloth’s influence on Coruscant, but it’s never fully fleshed out. There’s a lot of confusion around the passage of time, especially in the political sections, but I’ll talk about that more in the Issues. On the Imperial side, Moff Lecersen goes back to the Imperial Remnant because he wants to become the Imperial Head of State, and Daala-on-the-run decides that instead of trying to take back the Galactic Alliance she’ll take over the Empire instead. (Why didn’t Daala do that back in the Legacy of the Force books?? Anyway.) Tahiri Veila is serving as Jag Fel’s unofficial bodyguard/advisor, because she thinks she can get a better trial and outcome in the Imperial Remnant after everything that happened in Conviction. (Girl, no.) Everything comes to a head when Daala rats out Lecersen, and then attacks Jag’s forces. Jag had some cards up his sleeves, like Chiss Empire of the Hand ship—which, I thought that the Empire of the Hand had disbanded by the Dark Nest trilogy but I guess not—and there’s ship explosions and moons exploding and everything ends on a cliffhanger for the next book. Jag felt somewhat off to me, though, less rigid and more Corellian than I expected. He tells Moff Getelles to just call him Jag? Um, no. It’s instances like this where Golden’s relative unfamiliarity with Star Wars peeks through, because while Jag has mellowed a bit from his “extreme focus on protocol and rigidity” heights, I can’t ever see him telling a hostile Moff to call him by his first name. Finally, Luke and co. have absolutely no idea where Abeloth went after she left Nam Chorios in Ship at the end of Conviction, so Luke wonders if she and/or the Lost Tribe might be on ancient Sith worlds. That’s as good a guess as any, but it doesn’t keep the Skywalker plotline from feeling like a wild goose chase. They find nothing on Korriban, and seem to visit it only so that Vestara can prove her newfound loyalty to the Jedi. On Dromund Kaas, they’re confronted by Gavar Khai and some Sith, clearly under Abeloth’s sway, and Vestara is forced to kill her father to survive. So then Vestara makes a decision that feels very motivated by grief: she feels marooned from the Lost Tribe, and tells Luke and Ben that she wants to train as a Jedi. Luke and Jaina are suspicious of her, but Ben accepts her and thinks she’s sincere. She also jumps right into a romantic relationship with Ben, because…teenagers. I felt like Vestara was moving a little too fast here, because while I want the best for Vestara I also think that sixteen years of Sith training are a lot to overcome. My uneasy feelings were confirmed when the Jedi headed out to that final Sith world, Upekzar. Luke sends Ben and Vestara and Natua Wan into the tunnels for information gathering while the rest of the Jedi head towards the city with the ominous storm cloud overhead. (The city is a trap, obviously.) In the tunnels, the trio encounter one of those mutated hallucinatory insects, and it attacks Ben. Instead of teaming up with Natua Wan, Vestara attacks her and lets the insect take her in Ben’s place. Ben doesn’t realize any of this, but Vestara knows what she’s done and now thinks she can never be a Jedi because of her actions. At times I felt like Luke and Jaina were being too mean to Vestara, but by the end I had to admit that Vestara isn’t a fallen Jedi. She’s been raised as a Sith since infancy. Sith culture is all she’s ever known, and she has a ruthless mentality that leads her to face situations in a very un-Jedi-like manner. I don’t think Vestara’s ready to become a Jedi right now—this is not a one-book change at all—and she’s on a much longer, difficult journey. Aside: Luke’s ploy to lure the Sith on Coruscant seems like a bad idea, no? I think that very bad things would ensue from letting countless Sith infiltrate the capital of the whole galaxy, but I’ll have to wait for Apocalypse to see if my assumptions are correct. ISSUES: My first issue with Ascension was a further continuation of proofreading errors in the latter half of this series. Names are spelled wrong (“Porak Vansyn” instead of Porrak Vansyn, “Dromand Kaas” instead of Dromund Kaas), character’s relationships are misattributed (Lawyer Bwua’tu is described as the Admiral’s cousin when he’s his uncle), Leia is described as a former Chief of State of the Galactic Alliance when she served under the New Republic. The editing process really should have caught these errors, but they didn’t. For me, the biggest problem I had with Ascension dealt with the book’s confusing sense of the passage of time. I’ve had this problem with other FotJ books to a lesser extent, but Ascension really dialed that temporal confusion up to 11. The Abeloth wild goose chase doesn’t seem to take very long: they visit Korriban, then Dromund Kaas, then return to Coruscant for a short break before they end on Upekzar. But the political events on Coruscant don’t seem to be occurring in that same shortened span of time. We see Abeloth on Kesh and the fallout from that, and then suddenly we have all these Sith secretly elected as senators and starting their own broadcast network on Coruscant. That takes time! I would have loved to see a timeline that broke down what was happening when, because it feels like the Sith plot line moves at warpspeed while Luke’s group moves at a snail’s pace. Something doesn’t add up here. I also think that the sense of uncertainty about time affected the pace for me. Luke’s search for Abeloth dragged, because I knew she wasn’t on any of those worlds. (There’s only two books left, and you’re going to Korriban? Why??) The political stuff, in comparison, happened very quickly, and so the overall pace felt too uneven. I don’t think that the way subplots were separated helped either: we got all the Kesh stuff in one block, and then didn’t see them again until their presence was revealed. There’d be huge chunks of political developments on Coruscant, and then we’d jump back to Luke on the Jade Shadow accomplishing nothing. I was hoping that Ascension would be fast-paced like the latter Legacy of the Force books, but it was lacking any sense of urgency. IN CONCLUSION: Ascension leaves a lot of things hanging for the next book: how will this confrontation between Daala and Jag resolve? The Sith have taken over Coruscant, and Abeloth is now Chief of State, which bodes ill for the Jedi. There is a lot going on here, especially on the political front, what with new characters and conspiracies and counter-conspiracies afoot. I wish that Luke's plotline hadn't felt so spectacularly useless, and that the pacing and internal chronology didn’t feel so uneven as we moved from subplot to subplot. But I am curious how this will end, as Abeloth is in a position of power going forward… Next up: a short story prequel to the Fate of the Jedi series published in Star Wars Insider magazine, First Blood by Christie Golden. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/nwrkRvgnbbQ Interview with Ian Keltie on Roqoo Depot (2011): https://roqoodepot.wordpress.com/inte... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 22, 2023
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Oct 29, 2023
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Oct 22, 2023
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Hardcover
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184605690X
| 9781846056901
| 184605690X
| 3.90
| 5,352
| Feb 09, 2012
| May 24, 2011
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it was ok
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: the seventh book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Conviction by Aaron Allston. SOME HISTORY: Conviction by Aaron Allston saw the return of two characters who hadn’t been featured since the Legacy of the Force series. One of those characters should not have been a surprise to anyone who saw the back cover of the hardcover edition of Convinction, but the other may have been. Tenel Ka—Queen Mother of Hapes and Allana’s mom—shows up in the last third of the book, and Boba Fett—leader of the Mandalorians and bounty hunter extraordinaire—similarly shows up in the latter third to rescue ~*~someone~*~ from prison. Fate of the Jedi: Conviction by Aaron Allston made it to number three on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of June 12, 2011, and was on the list for two weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: All I guessed going into Conviction was that we’d finally get the conclusion of Tahiri Veila’s long-running criminal trial, and that Luke and Ben and Vestara would continue to chase after Abeloth. A BRIEF SUMMARY: While the Jedi plan to remove Chief of State Daala from power, Tahiri Veila’s trial rushes towards its conclusion—and the Jedi may not be able to save Tahiri from her fate. Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker, his son Ben, and the Sith apprentice Vestara Khai follow Abeloth to the world of Nam Chorios: a dangerous world where any use of the Force has immediate, dangerous repercussions… THE PLOT: At the end of Vortex, I said that it’s great the Jedi are finally supporting Luke, and that he’ll have their aid going forward. Conviction squashed that idea flat by having most of the book involve Luke and Ben and Vestara alone trying to track Abeloth on Nam Chorios. She quickly suborns the Theran Listeners, Vestara lures the Sith to Nam Chorios as well, and the Skywalker team are undermined at every new development. (While this is all going on: the Jedi wake the Horn siblings from their carbonite slumber, and they’re still crazy. The Horns connive a way off Coruscant to Nam Chorios, and work under Abeloth’s sway until Luke’s able to re-collect them.) They finally manage to force a confrontation with Abeloth near the end, but they only manage to wound Abeloth and incapacitate the SIth before Abeloth escapes again. The Jedi extensively plan and then carry out a coup against Daala; they lock down the Senate, they arrest Daala, and now Saba Sebatyne is one of a triumvirate of leaders ruling the Galactic Alliance until they elect a new Chief of State. However, the Jedi are unaware of that pro-Imperial conspiracy, and install two of its conspirators (Senator Treen and General Jaxton) as triumvirate heads. That settled, the Jedi send Han and Leia to Klatooine to try and get various Freedom Fleet groups to join the Galactic Alliance, and they’re joined for negotiations by Queen Mother Tenel Ka of Hapes. The Sith try to assassinate Tenel Ka because they suspect she’s connected to the Jedi Queen that Lord Taalon saw in the Pool of Knowledge, but Allana foils the plot (good for Allana!) and the Klatooinians join the Galactic Alliance. As the title suggests, Tahiri Veila’s trial finally reaches its conclusion, and the Jedi overthrowing Daala does not work in her favor. Tahiri is found guilty and sentenced to death; her lawyer Bwua’tu plans to appeal, but when Boba Fett shows up to break Daala out of the very same prison, Tahiri takes the opportunity to escape. As the book ends, she’s hiding and waiting for the Solos to return to Coruscant—and Daala is on the loose, desperate to regain power. So we have two runaway felons on the run for the next book. CHARACTERS: Since she’s on the cover, I’ll talk about Tahiri first. Her trial felt like a lose-lose situation: Bwua’tu tried to show the jury that Tahiri was manipulated by a Sith Lord, but she did murder an old man, and they have an audio recording proving it. Her guilty verdict was not a surprise, but the death sentence was. Every time someone in Star Wars commits a heinous act (looking at you, Kyp Durron!), they seem to get away scot-free. Up until Daala’s prison escape, I was wondering how the series was going to deal with Tahiri’s sentence—I didn’t think they were actually going to kill Tahiri, but I wasn’t sure how she was going to get out of this predicament. Overall, though, I don’t think Tahiri’s trial needed to be dragged out over three books. The Krytos Trap covered Tycho Celchu’s trial in a single book, and I think restricting the trial to one book made it more thrilling and impactful. With Tahiri’s trial stretching across multiple books, I started to lose interest in the series ever reaching its conclusion. The Jedi/Daala tensions definitely reach their peak in this book. Seha Dorvald, former apprentice of Octa Ramis, sneaks Jedi into the Senate building in the build-up to the coup—but she’s later arrested, falsely accused of poisoning Moff Lecersen and General Jaxton and of attempting to poison the whole Senate. After the coup, Seha is released and charges are dropped. Her ordeal gets a member of Alliance Security pointed in the right direction RE: the pro-Imperial conspiracy, but otherwise the Jedi are completely oblivious to this far-reaching conspiracy who are prominently involved in their temporary governing situation. (I will get into this more in the Issues section, but while deposing Daala got her off the Jedi’s backs, I don’t think the coup was a good idea in the long run…) I was glad that Leia finally got to flex her diplomatic muscles in this book with the negotiations on Klatooine, and that Allana was able to reunite with her mom after seven books. I liked that Allana got a little adventure of her own, investigating the suspicious Sith, but I never thought that Tenel Ka was truly in danger—as with Tahiri, she’s a big character with a fan base, and I don’t think they’d be willing to kill her off for the shock factor. If there’s one thing I’m enjoying about the Fate of the Jedi series, it’s all the different worlds and Force traditions that we visit or revisit. In Conviction, that’s the Theran Listeners of Nam Chorios—way back in Planet of Twilight, I thought that Barbara Hambly excelled at creating atmosphere and memorable settings, and Nam Chorios is a cold, creepy, Gothic world. I was happy to revisit it here, bu8t we didn’t spend much time with the Theran Listeners before they fell under Abeloth’s sway. We meet Taselda again, Luke learns this technique of “mnemotherapy,” but the rest of the book is the Skywalkers being sabotaged for plot reasons. I wanted more! But Luke’s use of mnemotherapy finally gives us a bittersweet but final ending for Callista. It doesn’t change what happened to Callista in the intervening years—I assume before the Yuuzhan Vong invasion, Callista made her way to Abeloth’s planet, and it’s implied that Callista’s tiny bit of her soul within Abeloth was why she reached out to the younglings at the Maw Shelter. (I think Abeloth would have reached out to any Force users within her vicinity, as she did with the Mind Walkers, but Callista could have played a role.) When Luke and co. confront Abeloth towards the end, Luke is able to detach Callista’s spirit from Abeloth and let her pass on; in classic Callista fashion, she doesn’t say a word to Luke but you can sense her gratitude. It reiterated to me that Callista has been truly gone for a long time, this was the kindest ending she could have at this point, and Luke did this act out of love and regret. Now that Vestara’s officially on Team Skywalker, she’s starting to question more elements of her Sith culture—writing these diary entries to a loving father but realizing that she’s deluding herself. (I side-eyed this a little, because I felt like Omen established that the Khais had a surprisingly —for Sith—loving relationship, but Gavar is very ambitious for his daughter and does not have Luke Skywalker’s moral code.) Vestara is realizing that Ben had a very different upbringing than she did, and maybe she’s lacking something as a result. I don’t think her redemption will happen immediately, though, and I’m not even sure if we’ll see it by the end of this series. Vestara is ruthless in a way that Ben could never be: she carries a tsil crystal around for a good chunk of the book “just in case,” knowing she would kill a sentient creature in the process, whereas that idea of destroying one to wound/distract Abeloth and the Sith would never even pass a Jedi’s mind. Vestara’s redemption arc feels veeeerry slow burn to me. ISSUES: My first issue with Conviction was (again) a continuation of those editing errors that I've seen in the last few books. Those little editing errors surprised me, and made me wonder if Del Rey was rushing the Fate of the Jedi series to print. The events of the last book, Vortex, took place on the moon of Pyrdr, but Conviction consistently misidentifies it as Almania. On Nam Chorios we meet the centuries-old Jedi Taselda again, but her name is misspelled as “Teselda”--she goes by Sel now, though, so it’s not super noticeable. Finally, during the Jedi coup in the Senate building Corran Horn’s lightsaber is described as “gleaming with a purple light,” but Corran’s blade is (famously) silver. It was just a ton of little stuff like that, which the editors should have caught before publication. A bigger issue was just the existence of this “Jedi coup” plotline. On the one hand, I think it’s meant to hearken back to the prequels, when the Jedi Council was prepared to confront Palpatine and remove him from office—like, “what if the Jedi infiltrated the Senate building and removed Daala and talked to all the Senators, wouldn’t it be fun if they succeeded?” But we’ve already seen a successful Jedi coup before, when the Jedi overthrew Chief of State Jacen Solo in the Legacy of the Force series. I would think that the Jedi constantly intervening in galactic political affairs wouldn’t help their public image, but they also had no problem with Daala being elected Chief of State at the time so there are bigger issues here. More importantly, I feel like a Jedi coup and a Jedi member in the triumvirate of temporary leaders creates a very dangerous precedent. All the way back in the Bantam books, the Jedi have struggled with how much support they should lend to the government in power, and one of my biggest problems with Destiny's Way in the New Jedi Order series was how the Jedi directly intervened in the election of a leader and then seemed deeply integrated into the Galactic Alliance’s government. Obviously the Jedi need money to support their mission, but then you run the risk of the government using you as soldiers (the Clone Wars) and the government choosing the priorities of your order, all the way down to Daala having a personal vendetta against the Jedi because she can’t completely control them. I think a lot of these problems could be solved by the Jedi removing themselves from politics, but that may be a pipe dream at this point. (I had wondered “why not put Leia in charge?” instead of Saba, because of all her political experience, but the book explains that if Leia was a triumvirate member, people might think the Jedi wanted to remain permanently in charge. Since Saba is so obviously not politically-adept, no one will think that the Jedi are grasping for power.) But my final issue with Conviction is more of an entire series problem: now that I’m coming to the tail end of the Fate of the Jedi, I don’t think there’s been enough plot stuff to sustain nine books. We see that play out in Tahiri’s trial stretching across multiple books, and Luke and Ben investigating/pursuing Abeloth since book 3, and even that slave uprising subplot popping up out of nowhere in book 5. Legacy of the Force was a successful three-author nine-book series, but Legacy of the Force also had this sense of urgency and propulsion that Fate of the Jedi is lacking for me.I think that if Fate of the Jedi had been condensed down to one or two trilogy, it wouldn’t have felt so stretched thin. (Abeloth as the overarching villain doesn’t help either, because she’s this nebulous Lovecraftian dark side entity that could destroy the galaxy yet she’s only threatened individual Force traditions thus far.) IN CONCLUSION: Conviction finally gives us a conclusion to Tahiri’s trial, as well as that terrible situation between Daala and the Jedi. There's still that pro-Imperial conspiracy lurking in the wings, but at least they got rid of one of the big bads. (I do think that this Jedi coup is setting a dangerous precedent for everything—I would not have gone that route!) I liked that we returned to Nam Chorios because I found it so interesting and atmospheric in Planet of Twilight; I just wish we could have seen more of the Oldtimers and the Theran Listeners and their Force tradition before they immediately under the sway of Abeloth, and hinder Luke and Ben and Vestara are hindered every step of the way. Next up: the penultimate book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Ascension by Christie Golden. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/CdZZhPfO62o ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 09, 2023
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Oct 15, 2023
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Oct 10, 2023
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Hardcover
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034550920X
| 9780345509208
| 034550920X
| 3.90
| 5,651
| Jan 01, 2010
| Nov 30, 2010
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it was ok
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: the sixth book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Vortex by Troy Denning. SOME HISTORY: We last saw Akanah of the Fallanassi very briefly in the Dark Nest trilogy, as the Fallanassi were Jacen's last stop on his Force pilgrimage, but Akanah hasn’t played a major role in the books since the Black Fleet Crisis trilogy by Michael P. Kube-McDowell. In Vortex, Akanah and the Fallanassi fulfill a similar role to Circe in The Odyssey: when Odysseus’s men first landed on Circe’s island of Aeaea, they behaved like swine, so Circe turned them into pigs—except for Odysseus, who took the herb moly and was immune to her magic. In Vortex, the Fallanassi’s illusions make all the Pydyrians think there’s a plague outbreak, and once the Skywalkers and the Sith arrive on the Fallanassi’s island they fall prey to phantoms and hallucinations—all except for Luke, who has training in the White Current and is immune to its effects. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: All I knew going into Vortex was that Abeloth was not dead (as I suspected from the end of the previous book), because the back cover blurb gives it away! A BRIEF SUMMARY: After Luke Skywalker made an unexpected alliance with the Lost Tribe of the Sith and they defeated the dark side entity of Abeloth together, that truce falls apart with the revelation that Abeloth is not (in fact) dead, and Lord Taalon saw a Jedi Queen enthroned in the Pool of Knowledge. In pursuit of Abeloth, Luke and Ben and the Sith apprentice Vestara Khai, head to the Almanian moon of Pydyr, home of the hostile Fallanassi. Meanwhile, the Jedi on Coruscant face a difficult decision: should they stick with Daala’s Galactic Alliance, or send support to the Skywalkers and throw in their lot with the slave revolts breaking out across the galaxy? THE PLOT: Not to sound like a broken record, but Vortex continues most of the plotlines we followed in the previous book, Allies. Luke Skywalker and Lord Taalon’s uneasy alliance continues as they decide that three Sith (Taalon, Gavar Khai, and Vestara Khai) and the two Skywalkers will stay on Abeloth’s planet to try and uncover more information about her. The other Sith are (supposedly) sent home, as are Lando and Jaina—but while trying to return to Coruscant, Lando and Jaina are attacked by pirates who use the Force. The alliance breaks down the Skywalkers and the Sith discover that Abeloth isn’t dead—she switched bodies with Dyon Stadd—so Luke and Ben take off after Abeloth with Vestara in tow, to the Fallanassi’s refuge on the Almanian moon of Pydyr. Back on Coruscant, Kenth Hamner sends Jedi Knights to Blaudu Sextus to help with the standoff between protesting Octusi slaves and Daala-dispatched Mandalorian mercenaries, and after the Mandalorians kill protestors and the Devaronian reporter the Jedi jump and completely side with the slaves. This leads to a schism between Hamner and the rest of the Jedi Council, especially once they learn that Kenth was making secret deals with Admiral Bwua’tu. Jedi starfighters are dispatched to aid the slave uprisings and the Skywalkers, Booster Terrik takes a bunch of politicians hostage on the Errant Venture during a charity sabacc tournament, a team rescues Valin and Jysella Horn from GA imprisonment, and a big confrontation between Kenth and Saba Sebatyne ends in Kenth’s tragic accidental death. After Tahiri Veila’s trial went off the rails at the end of the last book, Lando gets her a second lawyer—a Lorrdian woman named Sardonne Sardon. Unfortunately, Bwua’tu esquire and Sardon have differing ideas about Tahiri’s defense, so Tahiri fires Sardon and continues on with just Bwua’tu. (Tahiri’s trial will apparently run through three books.) Thanks to Vestara, the Sith follow the Skywalkers to Pydyr, and they all end up on the Fallanassi’s island. Luke realizes that Abeloth is possessing Akanah, and a big fight ensues: Luke kills Akanah, Abeloth shows back up in Callista’s body, they wound her, she escapes, Vestara kills Lord Taalon, and the Jedi reinforcements arrive just in time. Luke and Ben once again take off after Abeloth—this time with a much friendlier Vestara along for the ride—and the book ends with the Jedi prepared to awaken the Horn siblings from their carbonite slumber. CHARACTERS: Luke remains distrustful of Vestara Khai, while Ben is confident that he can turn Vestara from the dark side. I can see both of their arguments here! Although Ben seems to be winning, because I’m not sure how many more times Vestara can help the Skywalkers and tag along with them and truly argue that they’re her enemies. Luke seems frustrated at times with Ben’s more trusting nature, but I think that’s just part and parcel of being a Skywalker: you meet someone using the dark side, you say “I can change them, I can make them want to be a better person,” and that feels like the epitome of being a Jedi to me. Yes, you’ll duel the bad guy, but you’d much rather talk to them and make them an ally instead of an enemy. (Side note: Luke and the Sith stayed behind on Abeloth’s planet to learn more about her, but they didn’t learn much. There seems to be historical precedent for her existence and her past rampages, but we don’t have a better grasp of her origins beyond she’s evil, and she’s ruined planets before. But at the same time, Luke and Ben now have tangible proof of why you should not drink from or bathe in any bodies of water on Abeloth’s planet, because Lord Taalon falls into the Pool of Knowledge or whatever and sees a vision of a Jedi Queen and gradually starts to transform into an eldritch monster like Abeloth.) Ben and Vestara’s flirty relationship continues, as she’s trying to get information from the Jedi about that Jedi Queen vision—but at the same time, she thinks Ben is cute. Ben doesn’t trust her, but he thinks she’s cute as well. We’ll see where this goes, but they’re both sixteen: this feels like the kind of scenario that plays out when you interact a lot with someone (cute) your own age, so while a romance may develop I’m not sure how long it will last because again, they’re sixteen. Jumping over to Vestara’s plotline, I don’t think she’s ready to drop her ties with the Lost Tribe of the Sith. She’s willing to spy for them, and while she’s not happy when Lord Taalon beats her, she seems to accept it as something an apprentice has to endure. However, I do see some cracks appearing in her complete acceptance of her culture: she’s willing to help the Skywalkers, she kills Lord Taalon because she recognizes he’s a threat to everyone, and she knocks out her father when he tries to apprehend her. That surprised me a little! Vestara and her dad appeared to have a loving relationship in Fate of the Jedi: Omen, but subsequent books have highlighted how ruthless even Sith family members can be. On the one hand, I appreciate Fate of the Jedi’s willingness to revisit things from the Bantam era, and seeing the Fallanassi was a one-two wave of nostalgia because their new home of Pyrdr is also from The New Rebellion. Of the worlds we visited on the Skywalker road trip, the Fallanassi on Pyrdr get the least focus here as it takes the Skywalker team a while to get to the Almanian system, and then once Luke and co. arrive, the Fallanassi are openly hostile to Luke. They’ve fallen under Abeloth’s sway, and that’s such a pity: I always thought their traditions and their use of the White Current are interesting, and I would have liked to see more about that. The slavery uprising plotline continues with the situation on Blaudu Sextus, where the centauriform Octusi are protesting their enslavement. It’s complicated: the Octusi are somewhat sentient, but they willingly agree to be enslaved. So is it slavery, or indentured servitude, or an actual job? Freedom Flight gets involved with the Octusi, so Daala has to jump in on the opposite side and send Mandalorian mercenaries. Of course, that ends badly when the mercs slaughter Octusi and kill that Devaronian reporter, and the Jedi show up just in time to throw in their lot with the Octuzi and arrest the Mandalorians. It felt a little heavy-handed here, because would Mandalorians really kill an unarmed reporter on a live broadcast? Regardless, this is the push the Jedi Order needed to throw in their lot against oppressors, and send Jedi Knights to different worlds to help with these slave uprisings. The Jedi situation on Coruscant is BAD. I feel like Kenth Hamner took his “let’s be diplomatic, let’s do nothing” approach a little too far, but I could see his point at times—and it felt like the other Jedi were being needlessly antagonistic towards him. Does no one remember what happened two years ago during the second Galactic Civil War?? You carried out a coup against Chief of State Jacen Solo, and now you want to depose another Chief of State? Daala is deeply misguided, but like with Kenth I can somewhat see where she’s coming from. It makes me feel bad for Kenth, who should have never been picked for this position. Kenth was ex-military and had diplomatic experience, but Kenth wasn’t willing to pick a side and ultimately died way out of his depth. I’m not sure that Saba is a better choice for temporary Grand Master, though, because she has that predator Barabel mindset and misses out on a lot of human nuances. When the Errant Venture hosted the sabacc tournament with multiple members of the pro-Imperial conspiracy, I thought they had finally been caught out—but no, they Jedi were just kidnapping prominent politicians as a distraction, and they didn’t realize what they had. And I got super frustrated with Daala, as she knows that she’s being manipulated and her words will be spun out of context yet she continues to dig her heels into the absolute worst positions. Why is she siding against the enslaved? Why won’t she release the Horn siblings? We started out the Fate of the Jedi series with Daala being anti-Jedi but understandably so, but she’s lost most of her nuance here. If Kenth was the wrong choice to lead the Jedi Order, Daala was the wrong choice as Chief of State. (On the plus side, Jaina and Jag seem to have worked things out off page and are re-engaged. Good for them! They still have issues to hash out, especially when she’s a Jedi and he’s the top Imperial, but well, we have three more books to go.) ISSUES: Continuing the issues I saw in Aaron Allston’s Backlash and Christie Golden’s Allies, there were a surprising number of editing errors in Vortex.For spelling errors, we got “Gallactic Alliance” in the very first chapter. (That’s a spell check issue.) Octa Ramis is described as “slender,” whereas the New Jedi Order series introduced her as muscular, like someone who lived on a high gravity world. Octa is built! When Jagged Fel shows up to talk to the Solos before the Horn rescue mission, he’s described as “tall;” Jag is not a tall man. (Jag may be taller than Jaina, but Jaina’s only 4’10.) Finally, Tahiri’s lawyer Sardonne Sardon is introduced as a Lorrdian woman, and Lorrdians are considered human or near-human. But in Chapter 30, Sardon is suddenly described as though she’s a Falleen, complete with claws and dorsal spines and pheromones. Maybe there was some confusion between Sardon and Mavari Zudan the judge, because Zudan is a Falleen? Regardless, all these little errors should have been caught before publication. Second, I found Vortex to have a little too much violence and torture for my taste, especially at the end. Abyss was mainly just kooky Force stuff, but Vortex brought back some Troy Denning staples that I haven’t been crazy about since Star by Star. When Luke fights Akanah!Abeloth, he’s cutting off her limbs and she’s crushing his throat and bones are snapping and it’s all too much for me. Luke kills Akanah, and then Abeloth waltzes back in Callista’s body and the Sith try to torture Ben and then Abeloth reverts to her Lovecraftian form and puts one of her tentacles in Lord Taalon’s mouth and it was really gross. I don’t do good with hyperviolence or torture, and these descriptions had me cringing. The Abeloth fight in Allies felt anticlimactic, and the Abeloth fight in Vortex took the complete opposite approach, for better or worse. Finally, I was surprisingly upset by how the authors chose to address the Bantam era books here. I always wondered what happened to Callista, and in Allies we found that she had maybe the saddest possible ending: she was still searching for the Force and her role in the galaxy, she found Abeloth, and she was consumed by her. In Vortex, we meet Akanah again, only to find out that she has also been subsumed into Abeloth and Luke has to kill her. She has one final moment as herself before she dies—she tells Luke that she’s sorry—and while Akanah was always a shifty character, I didn’t want that ending for her either. I like the idea of revisiting loose ends from the Bantam era, but not if it means killing everyone off! Is the rest of the series going to be Abeloth running around, finding more of Luke’s exes and eating them? (Probably fortunate for Luke that most of them—Jem, Shira Brie, Gaeriel—are already dead.) I wanted answers to questions that have been left dangling for years, but I didn’t want those answers to be “they were consumed by a dark side entity, sorry.” IN CONCLUSION: Vortex picks up the pace here with Luke and Ben desperate to confront Abeloth again—and going forward, they’ll have more Jedi to aid them. Vestara throws in her lot with the Skywalkers, and the Jedi finally rescue the Horn siblings. The Jedi also definitively come down on the side of the slaves uprising against their oppressors, and there’s probably going to be a confrontation with Daala in the next book. Vortex got pretty gross at times, which is not my personal taste, and there were weird editing errors like in the previous two books. I'm interested to see where the next book picks up, though—how will Tahiri’s trial end? Where will Abeloth go next? (Hopefully she doesn’t eat another Skywalker ex-girlfriend in the process!) Next up: the seventh book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Convictionby Aaron Allston. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/8F5hDNvAxCM ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 24, 2023
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Sep 30, 2023
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Sep 26, 2023
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Hardcover
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0345509145
| 9780345509147
| 0345509145
| 3.91
| 5,748
| Feb 09, 2012
| May 25, 2010
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it was ok
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: the fifth book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Allies by Christie Golden. SOME HISTORY: One of the best new characters to come out of 1978's Star Wars: Holiday Special was Ackmena the nighttime bartender at Chalman’s Cantina in Mos Eisley, portrayed by the fabulous Bea Arthur. She wards off the advances of a customer, and she gets everyone to leave for the Imperial curfew by breaking out into song and dance. That could have been the last we saw of Ackmena, but she appears (out of nowhere!) in Allies: she became a performer during the intervening decades, and now she’s returned to Tatooine and works for Freedom Flight, the GFFA version of the Underground Railroad. Fate of the Jedi: Allies by Christie Golden made it to number eight on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of June 13, 2010, and was on the list for two weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: Going into Allies, all I knew was that Luke and Ben Skywalker wanted to go back to the Maw to confront Abeloth, and the title “Allies” implied that they might find themselves on the same side as some unexpected folks. A BRIEF SUMMARY: As the difficult situation between the Jedi and the Galactic Alliance on Coruscant only continues to worsen, Luke Skywalker and his son Ben are confronted with strange new partners in the form of Vestara Khai’s people, the Lost Tribe of the Sith. The Sith say that Abeloth is also affecting their younglings, but can the Skywalkers trust these newfound allies? ODYSSEY ELEMENTS: I didn't notice anything new here in regard to Fate of the Jedi reusing elements from The Odyssey; the navigation to Abeloth’s planet in the mall is very difficult, so maybe shades of Scylla and Charybdis again…but we've seen that in almost every book thus far. THE PLOT: Picking up where the cliffhanger left off at the end of Backlash, the Sith fleet confronts the Skywalker as they try to leave Dathomir. But they don’t want to attack—they want to ally with the Skywalkers, as the Sith claim that Abeloth is affecting their younglings as well. Luke agrees that they can accompany the Jade Shadow to the Maw, but they need to meet up with Lando at Klatooine first so they can use his old asteroid buster ship for easier/safer navigation. Vestara meets back up with her dad, and he suggests that she seduce Ben Skywalker to the dark side. Ben and Vestara are maybe becoming friends, as Ben doesn’t yet know about her ulterior motives. Back on Coruscant, Daala’s attempt to open negotiations with the Jedi seems to have completely failed and we’re back to square one. Daala sends Mandalorian mercenaries to besiege the Jedi Temple, and they kill a Jedi apprentice who comes out to negotiate. Jaina runs to Jag seeking help from the Imperial Remnant, but instead they break up—and so she runs off to help her Uncle Luke instead. While the Skywalkers and Sith kill time on Klatooine, we get the first inkling of this left-field subplot about the galaxy rising up against the present horrors of slavery. In the case of the Klatooinians, they’ve been enslaved to the Hutts for 25,000 years because the Hutts agreed to protect the priceless Fountain of the Ancients. Dyon Stadd goes mad (since he spent time as a kid in the Maw Shelter), and runs towards the Fountain of the Ancients; fortunately Ben and Vestara stop him. But then the Sith get the brilliant idea to steal the glass from the Fountain, and chaos ensues on Klatooine. The Klatooinians ask Jaina and Lando to judge if the Hutts were to blame, and they rule no—but the slavery uprising still happens, and it spreads to other worlds as well. The Skywalker/Sith alliance finally sets out for the Maw, and they land on Abeloth’s planet. Luke and the Sith leaders mind walk to that river of the dead, Luke talks to Mara’s spirit again, and one of the Sith gets dragged into the river by vengeful spirits. Vestara lets Dyon Stadd go to lead them to Abeloth, and when they confront her, they find that Abeloth has taken the body (and spirit?) of Callista, Luke’s long-lost ex. A fight ensues, the Sith temporarily turn on the Skywalkers, Vestara is injured, but Luke is able to kill Abeloth. CHARACTERS: After broaching negotiations with the Jedi in the previous book and using Han and Leia as a go-between, Daala swings back towards not being a nuanced character and delivers an ultimatum: give me the mad Jedi, or these Mandalorian mercenaries will attack the Jedi temple. If Daala’s worried about her public image and is aware that people are twisting the narrative against her, why would she ever do this? They don’t just hold the Jedi temple hostage, they publicly kill a teenager and leave her body on the stairs! I was also surprised by Daala coming down on the side of “planets can continue to perpetuate slavery for now, I have bigger problems” when Daala in Darksaber was trying to open the Empire up to women and non-humans and be more inclusive. Having her be the viewpoint character for the pro-slavery side boggles me, and I would not have chosen her as the character to espouse those views. I thought the Jedi Masters’ behavior towards Kani Asari (Kenth’s assistant) was juvenile and rude. Supposedly Han started it by calling her “KP” (“Kenth’s pet), but then others like Kyp start doing it too. How old are you guys?? I can understand feeling anger and resentment towards Kenth’s overly cautious approach to the situation, but taking your frustrations out on a padawan who has no power over this situation is childish behavior, and I expected better of them. I feel like Kenth is stuck between a rock and a hard place, though. He can’t bring up any concessions without the other Masters jumping down his throat, and it reiterates to me that he’s the wrong person to lead the Jedi Order at this time. But is anyone other than Luke? They’re completely dysfunctional, and instead of stepping up and being leaders, they squabble and argue about everything. Jaina and Jag’s sudden break-up was super frustrating to me. If I know that Jag is Mr. Imperial Honor and is limited by his political role, why would Jaina ever think he would dispatch an Imperial fleet to the Skywalkers? To a certain extent, this felt like drama for the sake of drama, as charting the course of Jaina and Jag’s relationship over the books is they get together (New Jedi Order), they break up (post-NJO), Jag loses everything (the Swarm War), they become friends again (Legacy of the Force), they get back together (post-LotF), and now they’re in a committed relationship barreling along towards marriage but THIS is when Jaina realizes they have different priorities? (I thought Jaina knew this!!) In typical impulsive Jaina fashion, she runs off to help Luke but he doesn’t really need her help. Even Lando is side-eyeing her actions here. That slavery plotline really comes out of left-field. The only foreshadowing that we got seemed to be the Jedi Knight very concerned about the state of slavery in the galaxy in Backlash. Referring back to Star Wars: The Essential Reader's Companion, I found that this was not in the original plan for the series, but came up as something the Jedi could rally behind while the authors were working on the books. This definitely feels like a subplot added late in planning, but I’ll address that in the Issues. Over on the Jedi/Sith alliance: Luke agrees to an alliance immediately, but he tells Ben that he doesn’t trust the Sith and this is the easiest way to keep them under surveillance. Fair enough! I hoped that the Skywalkers working with the Sith would give the Jedi a chance to evangelize/show the Sith how much better the light side is, but that approach only seems to work on Vestara…and it’s working on Vestara very gradually. Most of the book is Ben and Vestara talking, and working together, and building an uneasy friendship. If push came to shove, I’m not sure that Vestara would be willing or able to kill either of the Skywalkers at this point, but fortunately it never gets to that point. Once Luke learns what Vestara and her dad discussed about Ben, he warns his son. Ben is much more standoffish with Vestara afterwards, and that clearly bothers her. Almost in a reverse of Abyss, we spend more time with Ben and Vestara until the alliance arrives on Abeloth’s planet—and then it’s all Luke-related revelations. We finally get an ending for Callista post-Planet of Twilight, and it’s the saddest thing I could have imagined. Callista was still searching for the Force and for meaning; she found Abeloth, and now she’s been consumed by this evil being. I think Luke wanting to return to the river of the dead also shows us how much he hasn’t gotten over Mara’s death. Years later, he still wants to talk with his wife one more time. The Sith have this vague idea that they can use Abeloth, but once Lord Taalon confronts her he has to realize that’s a no-go. She was trapped on her planet for a reason—Sinkhole Station, the Maw, and maybe even Kessel were designed to keep her hidden away, and she is so needy and hungry for power. She has this urge to consume and dominate, and I don’t think she’s dead at the end of Allies. That was way too easy, and I expect this eldritch monster to claw her way back to the land of the living somehow. ISSUES: There were so many editing errors in Allies! Characters' names were repeatedly misspelled, like “Dyon Stad” instead of Dyon Stadd and “Kyp Durran” instead of Kyp Durron. At one point Asylum Block was spelled “Asylym.” In Chapter Sixteen, Luke gets the translation of Vestara and Gavar’s conversation from Threepio, asks Ben for a private moment…then gets the translation from Threepio a second time. The slavery subplot details how the elephantine Chevin have been enslaving the humanoid Chev for years, but the name of the slavers and the slaves are constantly mixed up. This has happened before (Tresina Lobi was a Chev Jedi, but in Destiny's Way she’s described as though she’s a Chevin), but it’s very important in a subplot about the horrors of slavery that you know who’s oppressing who. Second, Allies had a young adult feel to the story, especially in the scenes with Ben and Vestara. It didn’t feel as teenage as Omen had, but I feel like the prominence of Ben and Vestara’s characters here (they’re sixteen-year-olds who maybe/sort of have feelings about the other) led to the story having a more juvenile tone. I wouldn’t want to do away with Ben and Vestara’s scenes, because I love Ben—he’s such a good kid!--and Vestara is the most interesting of these new Sith to me. She’s smart and eager, and reluctantly receptive to what the Skywalkers say, and I want the best for her. But their interactions do have a tinge of YA-novel tone to them. The climax here—the Skywalkers and Sith face off against Abeloth, and Luke apparently kills her—was incredibly anti-climatic, and also felt lacking in urgency like I noted in my Backlash review. There’s no way that was Abeloth’s actual death, because it was so underwhelming. But most egregious, that slave uprising subplot really got cranked up to 11 here. It hadn’t been effectively foreshadowed in any of the previous books, and I wish it had. If the slave uprising had been part of the narrative from book one, I think it would have worked a lot better for me. This is obviously a consequence of multiple authors working on a series, and someone goes “wouldn’t it be a cool idea if…?” and next thing you know, Freedom Flight is rescuing slaves and the Devaronian reporter is bringing this plight to the public view and the Jedi are considering whether to align themselves with the slaves and Daala is using Mandalorians to put down uprisings. Okay, but that makes Daala much less three-dimensional than other books, which tried to balance her crazy Law and Order stance with a little more nuance, and it really bubbles up out of nowhere. (Lack of foreshadowing notwithstanding, It works better for me than how Padme tries to stop slavery on Tatooine in Queen's Shadow--Padme, don’t buy slaves and free them! That’s just encouraging people to sell more slaves!) IN CONCLUSION: Allies sees the Skywalkers making new and surprising allies to confront Abeloth. She seems to be defeated for now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes back. Her apparent death leads to the young Jedi regaining their sanity, which was a welcome development as I felt like that plotline had gone on long enough! I like Ben and Vestara and the dynamic developing between them, and I hope Jaina figures out her relationship drama soon as Jaina and Jag’s on-again off-again rollercoaster is too much drama for me. This book felt like a combination of left-field plots (the slavery uprisings) and anti-climatic standoffs (Luke and the Sith vs. Abeloth), but I'll be interested to see how this stalemate between Daala and the Jedi Order is resolved. Next up: the sixth book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Vortex by Troy Denning. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/OCtyUp_VfsU ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 05, 2023
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Sep 15, 2023
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Sep 06, 2023
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Hardcover
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0345509080
| 9780345509086
| 0345509080
| 3.88
| 6,022
| Mar 09, 2010
| Mar 09, 2010
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it was ok
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: the fourth book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Backlash by Aaron Allston. SOME HISTORY: In 2008, eagle-eyed Star Wars fans noticed a new book listed on the Random House catalog: Blood Oath by Elaine Cunningham. More details started to emerge: it was going to be released in April 2009, it was set after Invincible and it was about Zekk and Trista & Taryn Zel (Tenel Ka’s Hapan cousins). Unfortunately the release date was pushed back to November 2009 and then April 2010 before the book was ultimately canceled. But that led to Zekk being missing from the narrative for the first few Fate of the Jedi books, only to show up in Backlash with an extremely abbreviated explanation of where he’s been and what he’s been up to. Fate of the Jedi: Backlash by Aaron Allston made it to number four on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of March 28, 2010, and was on the list for two weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: All I knew going into Backlash was that Ben and Luke were chasing after the Sith apprentice that they confronted in the previous book, Vestara Khai, and that…maybe…the Jedi madness stuff would continue? But otherwise I didn't have a clear picture in my mind of what to expect. A BRIEF SUMMARY: Repercussions from this mysterious plague of madness among the young Jedi continue to put Chief of State Daala and the Jedi Order at odds, and Han Solo and Leia Organa find themselves placed in an interesting position between the two. Meanwhile, Luke and Ben Skywalker’s chase after the masterless Sith Apprentice leads them to the wild world of Dathomir. The presence of dark side-using Nightsisters may give Vestara Khai the edge she needs to escape their search, and may also lead to the Skywalkers fighting not just for their quarry but also for their own lives… THE PLOT: Unlike the previous three books, in Backlash the Han & Leia plot and the Luke & Ben plot combine for part of the story! (Unfortunately, they split up again, as the Solos have to return to Coruscant.) Luke and Ben follow Vestara Khai to Dathomir—thanks to the blood trail Luke marked her with—so they contact Han and Leia and it’s a mini Skywalker family reunion. Han and Leia leave Allana behind at the spaceport, which leads to a kid-friendly adventure recovering R2-D2, and the Solos venture into the jungle to connect with Luke and Ben. The Skywalker/Solos join up with the group of Witches who took in Vestara and who want to join clans with a separate men’s clan, but there’s trouble afoot, as the local Nightsisters try very hard to prevent this clan union. Meanwhile, Daala sends Mandalorian mercenaries to attack the Jedi Temple and take the maddened Jedi into custody, and fortunately that fails thanks to Jaina and Raynar Thul. So Han and Leia and Allana rush back to Coruscant. They’re approached by Daala, who wants to work out an agreement with the Jedi because the political climate in Coruscant is not great. Turns out the political climate in Coruscant is not great because there’s a pro-Imperial conspiracy afoot to remove Jagged Fel from power, and maybe Daala as well. Back on Dathomir, the Witches and the men successfully repel the Nightsisters, and they become the Bright Sun clan. Luke and Ben finally figure out how Vestara got a message back to the Lost Tribe of the Sith, and they rush to confront her. In the meantime, the Sith land on Dathomir, steal a bunch of Nightsisters, and leave Vestara behind. As the book ends, Luke, Ben, Vestara, and Dyon Stadd (part of their Dathomiri group) are headed back to the Maw…when they are confronted by a bunch of Sith ships. ODYSSEY ELEMENTS: Continuing with the tradition of “each Fate of the Jedi book contains some allusion to Homer's The Odyssey, Allana faces off against a dockworker named Monarg while searching for the lost Artoo in Backlash. Definitely some parallels between Polyphemus the Cyclops and Monarg here, as both Odysseus and Allana have to outsmart a one-eyed foe. CHARACTERS: In the excitement of discovering there are Sith out there!, Luke and Ben have apparently forgotten that they’re supposed to be retracing Jacen’s Force pilgrimage to figure out why he fell to the dark side. (Maybe you could spin it that Jacen also went to Dathomir because he knew about the Nightsister blood trail trick, but that’s a thin line of justification.) Luke and Ben have a good rapport here, and I like the joke-y relationship they’ve developed, and how Luke often lets Ben take the lead, trusting in Ben’s insight and skills. And as with the previous books, they’re ostensibly following Vestara but instead get sucked into outside problems: in this case, the attempted union of the Raining Leaves clan and the Broken Columns clan into something new. Ben’s strategic mind helps them win against the Nightsisters, and the Skywalkers end up with a plot of land for a future Jedi Academy on Dathomir, which would be good. At the very end of The Unifying Force, Kirana Ti and Streen were headed off to Dathomir, and it would be nice to see a school there again after Luke withdrew everyone during Jacen’s civil war. And I enjoyed getting to revisit Dathomir, as it played such a prominent role in The Courtship of Princess Leia and introduced so many characters to the GFFA: Teneniel Djo, Kirana Ti, Tenel Ka, and more. The world and the wild Force skills of the WItches were my favorite part of CoPL, but then we never really returned to it. I liked seeing that progress that has happened on Dathomir in the decades after that first novel. We see the reverberations of Leia and Han and Luke and Isolder’s visit, that male slaves wanted freedom and formed their own groups, that Hapans came to Dathomir because of the example set by Teneniel Djo, and now we have Witches and men coming together to form something more diverse and inclusive. Their culture is changing, bit by bit. There’s also this slightly antagonistic relationship developing between Ben and Vestara Khai. He keeps trying to question her, and she won’t give him a straight answer—Ben, she’s a teenage girl! She’s actively trying to frustrate you! But at the same time, I think Vestara enjoyed aspects of her sojourn among the Dathomiri. She’s lying through her teeth and manipulating the Nightsisters to achieve her ends, but there’s this reluctant sense of camaraderie that develops between her and the Witches, and even Vestara and the Skywalkers at moments. They’re her enemies, but not always so. I liked that Han and Leia were able to reunite with Luke and Ben, but it was very brief. There haven’t been a lot of opportunities for the extended Skywalker/Solo family to work together (where is my book about the twins having an adventure together or uncovering family secrets??), and it felt like Han and Leia rush off to Coruscant just when things start to get interesting on Dathomir. I thought that Daala approaching them as a go-between was a good idea—Leia seldom gets to flex her diplomatic muscles anymore, and seems to aggressively disregard her old skills at times—and I thought Leia and Han’s good cop/bad cop act was fun. I wish they had brought Allana to the Dathomiri gathering, though, because it’s part of her heritage and I don’t think an eight-year-old should be left unattended (since she never knew about Zekk and Taryn). Speaking of Zekk: I know this isn’t Backlash’s fault, that he shows up after three books with a girlfriend and no explanation of where he’s been and what happened—no one could have guessed that Blood Oath would be canceled—but after a prominent role in the previous series, his sudden reentrance here is pretty clunky, and the lack of that standalone novel really shows. Back on Coruscant, that silly Solo family tension doesn’t carry over from the previous book. Instead, we have two assassination attempts against Jag, and the second one also seems to be directed at the Solos. Everyone suspects Daala, but the true schemers are a conspiracy of Senators and Imperials who…want to bring back the Empire? Whatever dudes. But they are the main culprits behind Daala’s bad PR, and I appreciate that Daala isn’t a two-dimensional villain here. You can see that she’s in a difficult situation, and she’s being pushed into making the worst decisions, but you can also see why she’s making those terrible choices. (Do I still think that Daala as Chief of State is bonkers? Yes! It would have made more sense for her to become Imperial Head of State after Pellaeon’s death, but we gotta work with what we have here.) She’s pushed into putting Cha Niathal on trial, but her head’s up call about the trial leads to Niathal committing suicide and public perception shifting against Daala even further. We see a little bit of Tahiri Veila: her trial is still going forward, since Nawara Ven can’t represent her she has a new court-appointed lawyer, he thinks she was a victim who was manipulated by Jacen Solo but also she should take the plea deal and inform on the Jedi, and Tahiri does not comply. She views herself as culpable for Admiral Pellaeon’s death, and I fall…somewhere in the middle here? I don't think Tahiri's case is clear-cut. I think she absolutely was a victim of Jacen’s machinations, but she did assassinate Admiral Pellaeon. Towards the end of Abyss, I got a little confused about what was going on with Abeloth. Not Abeloth’s nature, as she's obviously very evil, but the logistics of that ending bit. The Sith wanted to take her off her planet, so when they attacked the Skywalkers on Sinkhole Station I wondered if Abeloth was with them? In Backlash, I got the definitive answer of NO. Abeloth is still on her planet, but since Vestara sent them the coordinates there I guess the Sith remain interested in her. So the Abeloth the eldritch terror is not just one of Luke and Ben's one-off Force adventures, and presumably her threat will continue through the following books. ISSUES: Before I get into my issues with Backlash, I wanted to give a little bit of the real world backstory behind the novel: in March 2009, while on tour for Outcast, Aaron Allston suffered a heart attack and had to have quadruple bypass surgery. Despite all his health issues, Allston still had Backlash ready to go by March 2010. So while I noticed a number of issues in Backlash, I wonder if Allston was rushing towards his deadline and didn’t have enough time to work on the book? There was a lot of repetition in this book, and I would expect an editor to catch those parts…unless they got the manuscript later than expected. One of the most egregious examples I noticed involved two very similar descriptions of Jaina and Tahiri. In Chapter Two, Jaina is described as: A tiny woman and a delicate beauty, had Jaina not been famous because of her parents and her own exploits, she might have been mistaken for the type of athlete who won fame for some sports victory, then spent the rest of her professional career fulfilling lucrative product endorsement contracts. In truth, she cared little about her looks or money; her continued service to the Jedi was proof enough of the latter. (19) Jaina is Leia’s daughter, she clearly got her mother’s looks, and while I think that comparing her to an athlete who does endorsements is weird wording, I get what he’s going for. But then in Chapter Seventeen, these are Tahiri’s internal thoughts: She knew she did not look like a killer. Tall and blond-haired, attractive though she did not enhance her looks with makeup or glamorous clothes, bearing curious faint scars on her forehead from events a lifetime ago, she looked like the sort of athlete who’d won championships early and then return to a life of endorsing breakfast foods while smiling at the holocams. But it had been a long time since she’d smiled. (214) Twice? For two different characters? This should have been fixed during editing… My second issue with Backlash carried over from my issues with books one, two, and three: mainly, that the mad Jedi are primarily new characters. Sothais Saar goes mad while meeting with Wynn Dorvan; we just met him, and I didn’t find him a particularly likable or sympathetic character. Instead, his previous scene with the Jedi Council makes him seem like a pedantic bore. If you want me to have an emotional connection to these characters, I need to know them better than an introductory scene followed by mad imposter-fuelled rampages. But most crucially, I didn’t feel a sense of urgency from Backlash. Maybe you don’t need that in book four out of nine, but I read Backlash and finished it and didn’t feel like I immediately needed to pick up Allies to continue the story. I…liked it? I thought a return to Dathomir was cool, I wanted to see more of Vestara, but it wasn’t a page-turner for me. For a series dealing with Jedi madness and Luke in exile, the Fate of the Jedi feels meandering compared to the Legacy of the Force. Han and Leia meet up with Luke and Ben, but they don’t need to be there—and they scurry off back to Coruscant halfway through for the important plot. No further progress was made on solving the Jedi madness problem. In fact, Backlash contained a fair bit of setup with this political conspiracy against Jag and Daala, which was rather more setup than I expected for book 4/9! IN CONCLUSION: Backlash was a somewhat enjoyable read. We returned to Dathomir, which we had not revisited in many books, and I appreciated how complicated the political climate on Coruscant became with the addition of this pro-Imperial conspiracy. At the same time, I felt like there was something missing from Backlash—a sense of importance or urgency to propel me through the story—and I’m not sure if I should attribute that to the real life situations during which the book was written, or just meh editing and writing. Next up: the fifth book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Allies by Christie Golden. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/XXUFjrTZsrk ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 21, 2023
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Aug 26, 2023
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Aug 25, 2023
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Hardcover
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B004J4VZCK
| 3.90
| 6,569
| Aug 18, 2009
| Jan 18, 2011
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it was ok
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: the third book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Abyss by Troy Denning. SOME HISTORY: In Book IX of The Odyssey, Odysseus and his men are blown off-course onto an island inhabited by the lotus-eaters, and they soon discover that “those who ate this honeyed plant, the Lotos, / never cared to report, nor to return: / they longed to stay forever, browsing on / the native bloom, forgetful of their homeland.” Sound at all like the Mind Walkers in Abyss to you? (Although the Mind Walkers do not just forget about their home, but in separating their minds from their bodies run the risk of forgetting about their bodies left behind—and starving to death—as well.) Fate of the Jedi: Abyss by Troy Denning made it to number seven on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of September 6, 2009, and was on the list for two weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: All I knew about Abyss going in was that Luke and Ben went to the Maw, and…that’s it. I knew a little about Abeloth, but I didn’t know that this was the book where she first appeared. A BRIEF SUMMARY: On Coruscant, the war of wills between Natasi Daala and the Jedi Order is escalating as more Jedi fall prey to madness, and individual Jedi push back against Kenth Hamner’s wavering leadership. Meanwhile, Luke Skywalker continues his quest to find the reasons behind Jacen Solo's dark downfall, so he and his son Ben head towards the distant Maw Cluster to seek out the mysterious Mind Walkers. But little do Luke and Ben know how close they are to a Sith strike team that has uncovered an ancient evil and seeks to exterminate the Skywalkers… THE PLOT: Abyss continues with the same subplots as Omen: we followed Luke and Ben in the Maw; Leia, Han, Allana, Jaina, and the struggling Jedi Order on Coruscant; and Vestara Khai and the Lost Tribe of the Sith as they chase the Sith meditation sphere Ship into another part of the Maw. Luke and Ben have left the monks at the Kathol Rift behind, and travel into the Maw Cluster near Kessel because of “bad vibes.” It’s pretty perilous navigation to get there (again, shades of The Odyssey), and when they land at Sinkhole Station their ship needs repairs. They meet the Mind Walkers, who are not a particular Force sect but instead a whole bunch of different Force users who have drawn to the Maw and basically separate their minds from their bodies until they starve to death. Luke follows the Mind Walkers into this spiritual realm, and Ben slowly realizes that the Mind Walkers are trying to kill the Skywalkers. Ultimately, Ben goes through that metaphysical journey too in order to pull his dad out. Meanwhile, on Coruscant two more young Jedi Knights succumb to madness—these being Jysella Horn’s friends that we met in the previous book, the Bothan Yaqeel Saav’etu and the Ramoan Bazel Warv aka Barv. The Solos are able to capture them, but it leads to a standoff between Galactic Alliance forces and the Jedi. Jaina and Jag discover a journalistic bug, and Jag reveals that Daala wants to hire Mandalorian mercenaries—but Jaina cannot tell the Jedi, it’s confidential info. The Jedi find out anyway through Leia and Han, and now the Solos are on the outs with Jag for keeping information from them. Their plotline culminates in Leia and Han sneaking the young maddened Jedi offworld to safety in the Hapan Cluster while Jaina carries out a counter-offensive and brings the Horns to see the terrible spectacle of their frozen kids in the GA Detention Center. Finally, the Sith Strike Team follows Ship into the Maw Cluster and lands on a weird planet with carnivorous plants. They meet a beautiful woman named Abeloth, and only Vestara comes to realize that Abeloth’s true form is like something out of a Lovecraft story, and that the Sith are being manipulated here. CHARACTERS: Luke and Ben are definitely developing a good rapport, where Luke is not just Ben’s teacher, but they can both joke about things and talk through situations together. As soon as they get to the Maw, Ben starts to feel weird: he remembers coming there as a toddler, sensing a needy/evil presence and withdrawing inside himself, and the more time he spends on Sinkhole Station the more paranoid he becomes. (Of course, Ben’s paranoia is somewhat justified, because the Mind Walkers ARE trying to kill the Skywalkers.) But I felt like we didn’t spend as much time with Ben as we did with Luke’s spiritual vision quest. I usually find the esoteric aspects of the Force interesting, but I never was confronted with almost an entire book of Force woo-woo before! So of Luke and Ben’s stops on their Force pilgrimage in Jacen’s footsteps, the Mind Walker section worked the least for me. Each step (the pool, the font of power, the river with the dead, the mists in the distance) felt like really obvious traps Luke had to work through, and connected to Abeloth in some way? Especially after Luke sees her in the distance, and the Mind Walkers say “oh, that’s the lady in the mist.” This is some really kooky stuff, and it’s strange and unsettling. Luke and Ben jump back into their bodies just in time to flee from Sinkhole Station, because surprise! the Sith are attacking them. (My sense of time was very fuzzy here, and I wasn’t initially sure how the Sith got from Abeloth’s planet to the Station so darn fast, and how much time had elapsed while Luke was tripping the Light Metaphysical.) All the Sith are killed except for Vestara Khai, and Luke lets her escape so that they can follow her and investigate these newfound Sith. The only progress made on the “why did Jacen fall?” front was that Luke realized he saw a different thing in the pool than Jacen did (Luke saw Allana in a throne room; Jacen saw a Dark Man on the throne), so maybe Jacen’s fall was precipitated by seeing that vision. In Abyss, we spend more time with this lost tribe of the Sith, and get to see some more of their culture. They feel very old to me; there’s this archaic, courtly manner to their speech and behavior, but it’s like Machiavelli on steroids as they’re constantly scheming to get the upper hand on other Sith. Vestara is sort-of-friends with fellow apprentice Ahri Raas, but she can’t trust him because his master is at odds with Lady Rhea. The Sith follow Ship to Abeloth’s planet, where the deadly flora pick off the Sith until their shuttles are all destroyed and there’s only a single Sith ship left in orbit. The Sith are captivated by Abeloth, and only Vestara begins to see her as she really is: an eldritch horror, with tiny black eyes and a huge mouth and arms that end in tentacles. (Not sure if I want to google a picture of her or not, because that sounds freaky.) I think it’s pretty clear that Abeloth is the evil presence that Allana sensed on Kessel, as well as the needy presence that reached out to Ben—and somehow, she’s making the young Jedi mad and trying to call them back to the Maw. The Sith want to take Abeloth back to Kesh, but Abeloth wants the Skywalkers…thus the Sinkhole Station ambush. So Vestara’s on the run, scared and alone, and Abeloth remains to evilly menace in a future book. Over on Coruscant, Cilghal and Tekli finally realize what links the mad young Jedi: they all spent time in the hidden Jedi base in the Maw during the Yuuzhan Vong War. Of course, they don’t know about Abeloth, but this is progress! They don’t have a cure, though, other than noticing that the non-Force bubble from ysalamiri seems to calm them. Jaina and Jag may be officially engaged, but they’re still trying to figure out their relationship going forward—and it’s not helped by the fact that Han and Leia feel betrayed by Jag withholding information. This was a frustrating development to me, because everyone knows that Jag is Mr. Honor so why get mad when he’s a pedantic rule-follower? That’s who he is! Anyway, I also felt like Leia behaved recklessly at times in this book, by siding with all the anti-Kenth Hamner Jedi. As a former diplomat, you would think that Leia would understand the nuances that are at play here and have a little more sympathy for Kenth’s (bad) politicking, but she felt overly brusque at times. Kenth seems in way over his head, though. I don’t think that Kenth Hamner was a good choice to lead the Jedi Order, because he’s not able to bridge the gaps between all the different factions and get them to communicate. When confronted with Leia and Jaina disobeying, he lectures them which just makes them run amok even more! However, this seems like a Luke problem at its source, because I think “Luke as Grand Master” meant he made all the decisions and the Masters seldom had to step up into serious leadership roles. ISSUES: We got surprisingly little of the Sith plot line here. They chase after Ship to Abeloth’s planet, they become enthralled by Abeloth as she slowly picks them off, and then they ambush Luke and Ben on Sinkhole Station. That’s…not a lot, and as I was reading the book I kept wondering when the Sith would show up. Their first scene is in Chapter Eight (out of Twenty-Eight), their second scene is in Chapter Fourteen, and then their plotline doesn’t really pick up momentum until the last few chapters. After Omen set up the Sith and their culture I was expecting a lot more with them, but Abyss didn’t significantly use the Sith until the end, and they felt like the least of the subplots here. My next issue was (again) a continuation from books one and two: I still don’t care about the young Jedi who go mad, and the scene that moved me the most was when Jaina escorted the Horns to the detention center. Corran and Mirax seeing their kids being treated like wall decorations, and Mirax lashing out at a Galactic Alliance guard? Their grief was moving, and really contrasted with how I felt about Barv and Ya’qeel’s gradual madness. We just met that duo in the previous book, we’re told that Allana liked Barv but then only see them interacting together once. Ya’qeel…seems nice? IDK. But we know so little about them that their horrible fate didn’t affect me much. I found the novel’s sense of time hard to grasp: the end of Luke and Ben’s subplot comes with the revelation that Luke spent weeks and weeks with his mind separated from his body. They’ve been on Sinkhole Station for a while, and Vestara likewise talks about the Sith being on Abeloth’s planet for days and days. But when we cut over to the Coruscant plotline, I didn’t get that same sense of time passing. Jedi fall mad and Tahiri’s arrested and Han and Leia sneak Jedi off Coruscant, but I didn’t get that same sense of days and days passing as I did with the two Maw subplots. I almost would like a daily breakdown of what happened where, because I can’t correlate the Coruscant stuff with the spooky Abeloth/Mind Walker things—I don’t see how it fits together. But my biggest issue with Abyss related to how hard I found it to visualize stuff like Abeloth and Abeloth’s planet—and how disorienting the ending especially felt. To a certain extent, Luke and Ben’s time in the spirit realm is meant to be confusing, and Abeloth’s planet (complete with carnivorous flora and tentacle lady) is meant to be super weird. But like the timeframe issue, I ended the book somewhat befuddled about how the Sith got from Abeloth’s planet to Sinkhole Station because we didn’t see the travel process part of it, and from Luke and Ben’s POV they return to their bodies and then BAM! red lightsabers are cutting through the door. I’ve had this issue before with Denning’s books, where I can’t picture the action scenes, and that carried over to the final confrontation on Sinkhole Station. I’m swept along for the ride, but if you asked me to draw a storyboard of what happened…yeah, I can’t do that. IN CONCLUSION: Building on the wave of Jedi madness, Abyss pushes the Fate of the Jedi series into a creepy, Lovecraftian direction with the introduction of this dark side spirit, Abeloth. Luke and Ben are also aware of the existence of more Sith, and will presumably chase after Vestara Khai in the next book. I continue to not be super engaged in the plight of these mad young Jedi—because I don't know them!--and I wasn’t happy with the introduction of a conflict between Jaina & Jag and Han & Leia, but I guess everything can’t be sunshine and roses for the Solos. Next up: the fourth book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Backlash by Aaron Allston. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/sOgfPKAJqpI ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 30, 2023
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Aug 07, 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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0345509129
| 9780345509123
| 0345509129
| 3.87
| 6,942
| Jan 01, 2009
| Jun 23, 2009
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it was ok
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2.5 stars For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series af 2.5 stars For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: the second book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Omen by Christie Golden. SOME HISTORY: The original intention for the Fate of the Jedi series was that the three authors from Legacy of the Force would continue on and write this one as well. However, Karen Traviss decided that she was too busy with the Republic Commando books to agree to another series—and once season two of The Clone Wars came out and contradicted her Mandalorian worldbuilding, Traviss rage-quit Star Wars—so Del Rey contacted Christie Golden about filling that third author spot. By 2009, Golden had written a number of Star Trek novels as well as stories within the World of Warcraft, and she had experience with writing stories within the various realms of D&D like her fellow author Troy Denning. Fate of the Jedi: Omen by Christie Golden made it to number four on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of July 12, 2009. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: Since I never read this series before, I thought I would simply state what I knew about Omen going into it: not much! Based on the cover, I guessed that this was the book introducing the little Sith girl, Vestara Khai. A BRIEF SUMMARY: The Jedi Order is in crisis: two young Jedi Knights have succumbed to madness, Luke Skywalker has been exiled from the Galactic Alliance and the Jedi Order for ten years, and Chief of State Daala is stoking anti-Jedi sentiment. As Luke and Ben Skywalker travel to the Kathol Rift to learn more about Jacen's five-year Force pilgrimage, even more young Jedi begin to suffer psychotic breaks. And on a remote low-tech planet, Sith who have been stranded for millennia make their first steps toward venturing out into the larger galaxy… THE PLOT: As the second book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Omen is pretty darn short. My paperback copy was 275 pages, and there’s only 25 (shorter) chapters here. As with the previous book, Outcast, there's a limited number of subplots, and the pace moves at a pretty good clip. Luke and Ben Skywalker continue on their journey of “trying to figure out how Jacen fell to the dark side,” and they decide to head towards the Kathol Rift to talk to the Aing-Tii Monks (last seen/talked about in Vision of the Future by Zahn). As in the previous book, they learn a few skills and help the Monks with their own problems. Meanwhile, the Leia/Han/Allana plotline has merged with the Jaina and co. plotline, so we have the Jedi struggling with more young Jedi falling prey to delusions, Jaina and Jag dealing with relationship stuff, and a 4-H animal fair that goes dreadfully wrong. Far away on the remote world of Kesh—and two years before the rest of this novel—we meet a lost tribe of the Sith who have been marooned for 5,000 years, and the arrival of the Sith meditation sphere becomes the impetus for them venturing outside their isolated planet. Our viewpoint character here is fourteen-year-old Vestara Khai. CHARACTERS: Luke and Ben decide to visit the Aing-Tii monks because they know that was one of Jacen’s first stops on his Force pilgrimage, but it’s a difficult journey. The Kathol Rift is dangerous and you must navigate the right currents, plus it tends to make Force users hallucinate things. The Skywalkers are basically going off of decades-old info from Talon Karrde as well as surreptitious stuff passed along from Cilghal. (And the Kathol Rift section gives us the first of the series’ The Odyssey analogues, with Luke’s impossible navigation seeming very like how Odysseus works out the pass between Scylla the six-headed monster and Charybdis the giant whirlpool.) Once they arrive on the Aing-Tii’s planet, they find that everyone’s divided: the monks wander around the Rift collecting Force artifacts they believe are connected to “Those Who Dwell Beyond the Veil,” and a Aing-Tii prophet recently said that those god-like beings would return. The monks want the Skywalkers to tell them if the prophet was correct, and Ben wants to learn how to flow-walk through time despite Luke’s disapproval. Tensions build between father and son until Ben flow-walks back to Jacen’s time with the Aing-Tii and decides that his dad is right and you shouldn’t peer into the past or even peek into potential futures either. The Skywalkers examine the monks’ artifacts, and when Luke touches this pyramid-shaped thing called the Codex…a lot happens. Luke’s presence is broadcast out, the Sith on Kesh sense him, and Luke gets a Very Bad Feeling about the Maw by Kessel. The Skywalkers tell the monks that they weren’t able to sense Those Beyond the Veil, so the Aing-Tii are going to have to figure out their destiny on their own like everyone else in the galaxy. In Omen, Ben didn’t always feel like a teenager to me. Ben has gone through some very intense situations, and he’s obviously mature beyond his sixteen years, but his dialogue with Luke felt less like how a teenager would talk, and more how an adult imagines a teenager would talk. I also wasn’t sure about the conflict between Luke and Ben about flow-walking, because part of what I enjoyed about the previous book was the growing rapport between the two. Seeing the Skywalkers at odds, even temporarily, wasn’t a development I was crazy about, and I felt like Luke could have articulated his reasons against flow-walking a little better. It was cool to see the monks, though! In Vision of the Future, we just saw Jorj Car’das, and I think this might have been the monks’ first reappearance since The Darkstryder Campaign. The Aing-Tii are very strange, with their six tongues and their rock-armadillo-esque appearance and their esoteric Force skills, and I like getting to experience the stranger aspects of the Star Wars universe. Over on the Coruscant front, we have two more young Jedi succumb to madness. The first is Valin Horn’s younger sister, Jysella, and we get to spend a little time with Jysella before she falls prey to the imposter delusion. She has fellow Jedi friends her own age, she’s worried about her brother and current events, and when her psychotic break occurs she isn’t angry like Valin—she’s terrified. She demonstrates another Force skill that only Jacen knew (flow-walking), and that provides part of the impetus for Luke and Ben’s journey to the Kathol Rift. Jysella, like her brother, is arrested by the Galactic Alliance and frozen in carbonite. The Jedi continue to study Seff Hellin, madness victim #1 that Jaina and the Darkmeld team captured in the previous book, but Kenth Hamner knows nothing of this until that weasley journalist Javis Tyrr releases footage of Hellin in Temple custody, and Jaina, Tekli, and Cilghal have to apologize for their subterfuge. Daala seems like she’s going to respond super harshly to this revelation, but Leia talks her down to a more reasonable approach—and Daala’s chief of staff, Wynn Dorvan, also helps to temper Daala’s initial response. The second Jedi succumbs to madness while the Solo family is visiting an animal fair. This one is a Falleen woman named Natua Wan, and her unprecedented Force skill is the ability to throw her voice. She causes absolute mayhem at the fair but the Jedi are able to capture her, so now they have two Jedi to study. I felt like the reason given for the Solos to attend the fair was a bit of a stretch (Leia wants to get Allana an animal mount? Leia, you live in an apartment: where would you keep it??) but it gets the Solos to the right place at the right time when Natua Wan loses it. Jaina and Jag’s biggest relationship problem right now is constant press attention, which makes it hard to run off and carry out Darkmeld plots. At the end, Jag proposes marriage to Jaina, she accepts, and I guess we’ll see how that works out. After all, Jaina is currently very stuck on Coruscant and Jag is very stuck wrangling the Imperial Remnant and frustrating Moffs. And then we have the introduction of this lost tribe of Sith from the remote world of Kesh. Unlike the rest of the book (which is set 43 ABY), this section is set two years earlier, during the end of the Legacy of the Force series. Our viewpoint character is Vestara Khai, a fourteen-year-old girl who is present when the Sith meditation sphere lands on her homeworld. Ship wants to teach, and Vestara is very eager to learn. Vestara is a good introduction to these Sith, because they’ve been stuck on Kesh for 5,000 years and their culture feels very antique and ritualized. They’re a lot different than the Sith that appear in the Legacy comic series—they’re very concerned with beauty and aesthetics—and the appearance of Ship dramatically changes the trajectory of their culture. Vestara becomes the apprentice to a Sith master, but unfortunately we skip all her training to jump forward two years to the Sith ready to venture into the outside galaxy, the Sith sensing Luke Skywalker, and Ship abandoning them for a dark presence. Vestara’s an interesting character, and she reminds me of Emperor’s Hand-era Mara in that she’s been super isolated, she only knows her own culture, and she’s never ventured into the greater world. She’s so sure that what she’s doing is right, but she’s a Sith…I would have loved to see some of the details of her training, but alas. ISSUES: My first issue with Omen related to tone, as it felt surprisingly young adult at times. Maybe this was because of the prominence of Vestara’s plotline? I certainly wouldn’t market Omen as YA, because it’s obviously not meant to be so, but the overall tone felt a lot younger than the previous book. Even the scenes with Jysella and her friends (characters in at least their mid-20s) felt more teenage than I expected. My second issue was a continuation from Outcast, in that I don’t feel super sad or connected to the young Jedi Knights who suffer psychotic breaks, because I don’t really know them as characters. We spent one scene with Jysella before she goes mad, but she’s mostly only a name to me—and her friends are completely new characters. That’s not a lot of time to develop a connection with her, and when Natua Wan snapped I just felt like…ehhh. She seemed like a nice young Jedi, but I don’t know her at all! I felt most sorry for Corran Horn and Mirax Terrik, because it’s obvious that the situation with their children has deeply affected them. And I think that’s a failure on the series part: I should care deeply about the fate of these young Jedi, but instead I’m most torn up about two of the young Jedi’s parents. My final issue with Omen was just general Setup issues. Nothing important happened in Omen, and Vestara’s plotline especially seemed to exist just to introduce us to the Lost Tribe and show us what kind of person Vestara is. The Sith build their fleet off-page, and we don’t see anything with Vestara’s training or the Sith preparations or Ship’s instructions. Luke and Ben travel to the Kathol Rift and learn a little, but they’re mainly helping the monks with their own problems. (This is a slow road trip thus far.) The most plot things happen in the Coruscant plotline, what with Jedi succumbing to madness and Jaina and Jag’s engagement and Allana getting a nexu cub and the cliffhanger ending of Tahiri Veila being arrested for the murder of Admiral Pellaeon, but it still felt like the continuation of book one’s setup. Allston did tons of setup in Outcast, and now Golden did her setup in Omen; it remains to be seen whether Denning’s novel will contain Copious Setup as well. IN CONCLUSION: Omen was a pretty quick read (at sub-300 pages, it's relatively short for a Star Wars book), and I enjoyed meeting Vestara Khai, who may be a Sith but remains very likable. I wish we had more of a connection to the mad Jedi Knights, though--a problem that carries over from book 1, Outcast--and it was more Setup than I expected, but I'm interested to see what happens next, with Luke and Ben venturing into the Maw and these newly marauding lost Sith venturing out into the galaxy. Next up: the third book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Abyss by Troy Denning. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/Z46eC0bo3HM ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 10, 2023
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Jul 26, 2023
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Jul 12, 2023
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Hardcover
| |||||||||||||||
0345509064
| 9780345509062
| 0345509064
| 3.90
| 7,919
| Jan 01, 2009
| Mar 24, 2009
|
it was ok
|
2.5 stars For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series af 2.5 stars For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: the first book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Outcast by Aaron Allston. SOME HISTORY: When they were planning the Fate of the Jedi series, they originally called the project “Star Wars Odyssey,” so it’s fair to guess that the series will incorporate some ideas from Homer’s epic poem. But if you don't remember what really happened in The Odyssey, here's a very brief summary: after ten long years of war in The Iliad the Trojan War is finally over and Odysseus is keen to return home to Ithaca to his wife Penelope and his son Telemachus. Unfortunately, things don't go so well for Odysseus, and it takes him an additional ten years before he's able to return home. His men are difficult to control, he ticks off the god Poseidon, and he spends far too much time with random supernatural women. Fate of the Jedi: Outcast by Aaron Allston made it to number three on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of April 12, 2009, and was on the list for three weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: Moving onto the Fate of the Jedi series, I'm in unknown territory here: I never read this series and I'm trying to avoid spoilers, because while I know a little bit about what happens I still want to be surprised here. A BRIEF SUMMARY: Two years after the devastating civil war that ensued in the Legacy of the Force series, the Galactic Alliance is still in crisis. When Chief of State Daala orders Luke Skywalker’s arrest for Jacen's downfall and subsequent terror-filled reign as Darth Caedus, Luke negotiates his freedom in exchange for a ten-year exile from the Jedi Order. Setting out with his teenage son Ben, Luke hopes to figure out how Jacen fell to the dark side and why. But as tensions between the Galactic Alliance and the Jedi continue to grow, the Jedi will face something they have never dealt with before: multiple young Jedi succumbing to madness… THE PLOT: My mass market paperback copy of Outcast was around 350 pages, and the first 100 pages was Definitely Setup. Luke is arrested on Daala’s orders because she claims that he bears responsibility for Jacen’s fall and subsequent evil reign. At the same time, Valin Horn (the son of Corran and Mirax) suddenly suffers a psychotic break; he thinks his family has been replaced by imposters, and he goes through a rampage on Coruscant until the Jedi capture him. This does not help their situation with the Galactic Alliance at all! Luke negotiates with Daala, and instead of going on trial he admits that he was at fault. Once Luke departs on his ten-year exile, the book splits into three subplots: Luke and Ben head to the Kel Dor homeworld of Dorin, hoping to learn some skills from the Baran Do Sages but ultimately helping them out with their own problem. Han and Leia and Allana jet off to Kessel after the Calrissians contact them about mysterious earthquakes threatening Lando’s mining business. Back on Coruscant, the Galactic Alliance sentences Valin Horn to be frozen in carbonite because he’s not capable of standing trial, and the Jedi become aware of another young Jedi (Seff Hellin) who seems to have devolved into madness. So Jaina forms a secret team to capture Hellin and bring him back to the Jedi Temple so they can get to the bottom of this growing disorder. CHARACTERS: When we saw (the former Admiral) Daala in book 8 of the Legacy of the Force series, Revelation, she had a conversation with Boba Fett about how the Jedi are too powerful and they need to be dealt with. It’s a little more nuanced in Outcast: I don’t think that Daala outright hates the Jedi, and she does have some very valid criticisms of them in her conversation with Luke. Daala thinks the Jedi are running around without constraints, they go into crime scenes and jet off before they can talk to law enforcement, and while they’re helping the galaxy they’re a little too footloose for her taste. She thinks there needs to be more accountability about what the Jedi are doing and how they’re deployed, and while she rubs Luke the wrong way, he knows that Jedi aren’t very good at taking outside orders. Luke does not want to go on (very public) trial, as he does accept some guilt and responsibility for what happened with Jacen. I felt like Luke should have intervened sooner in the Legacy of the Force books and was kept from doing so by nine book-long plot stuff, so it’s interesting to see that there are consequences to Luke’s delayed actions. So Luke and Daala talk it out, and decide that he will be exiled from Coruscant and the Jedi Order for ten years. Even though Ben is not exiled, he wants to travel with his dad, so they both set out in the Jade Shadow to retrace Jacen’s five-year Force pilgrimage after the end of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion. Luke and Ben’s first stop is Dorin, homeworld of the Kel Dor. Dorin’s atmosphere is not amenable to humans, so they have to wear breath masks at all times. They talk to the Baran Do Sages, and Luke wants to learn about Jacen’s time there—particularly as Valin Horn has shown the ability to scramble his own brain scans, and they know that Jacen learned the same skill from the Sages. Of course, Luke doesn’t just learn some new party tricks; there’s something going on with the Sages, where they “die” and then hide out in an underground bunker to preserve their knowledge, and Luke and Ben eventually get the Sages to realize that isn’t a great long term plan for their order. And this plotline was…OK. It definitely felt like “First Book Setup,” and I didn’t expect Luke & Ben to learn anything super important in book one, yet I wasn’t entirely engaged with their subplot here. I did enjoy the way that Luke and Ben are starting to reconnect, that they’re trying to regrow their relationship as father and son that had been damaged in the previous series, and they had some nice interactions together. Leia is not fond of the constraints Daala has placed on the Jedi (mainly, each Jedi is followed around by a government-assigned observer), so when Lando calls about trouble on Kessel, she and Han book it there. Similarly to Luke and Ben’s plotline, I wasn’t sure what the point of this subplot was: there’s escalating earthquakes on Kessel, Lando’s mining business (which I forgot he bought in Champions of the Force) looks doomed, so Han and Leia head down into the tunnels to figure out what’s going on. Answer: there’s observation sites (??) with really old tech, and the life forms on Kessel are setting off these explosions that destroy the equipment and cause the earthquakes.(??) Allana also senses an evil presence out in space, and it scares her. So Han and Leia suggest detonating the sites one at a time to stop the earthquakes, and Lando calls in a bunch of favors/cameos from old pilots like Wedge, Kell Tainer, Rhysati Ynr (lawyer Nawara Ven’s wife), and even Maarek Stele from the TIE fighter games. They blow everything up and save the day, Lando’s business is OK, and Han and Leia return to Coruscant. I’m not sure how this fits into the greater plot, but maybe Allana’s evil presence means something? The plotline I found most interesting followed Jaina and company on Coruscant, dealing with the current restrictions on the Jedi and trying to capture Seff Hellin without the Galactic Alliance noticing. When we first saw Hellin in Millennium Falcon, I didn’t get any sense that he was suffering from this imposter delusion; instead, he seemed like an out-of-control young Jedi à la Kyp Durron. But he shows up on Coruscant thinking that everyone except for Valin are imposters, and he’s trying to break into the prison where Valin is being held. Interestingly enough, the delusion that people around you are imposters is a real life condition called Capgras Syndrome, although usually you think, say, your husband is an imposter rather than everyone. This outbreak of madness among the Jedi really does not help their issues with the Galactic Alliance, and Cilghal is unable to treat the affected Jedi because she can’t even diagnose what’s wrong with them yet. Jaina's observer is the little kid from the New Jedi Order series who looked like Anakin, except now he's grown up, and that freaks out Jaina but especially Tahiri Veila. Tahiri has left the Jedi Order and she’s turned her back on that Sith stuff; she’s trying to do her own thing but she seems a little lost. Jaina is reaching out to her and trying to include her in various schemes, and after I wasn’t crazy about Tahiri’s sudden about-face in Invincible, I’m hopeful that we’ll see Tahiri grappling with the consequences of her past actions like Luke. Jaina's also just dating Jag…I guess they got back together after Invincible, and maybe they’ve been dating this whole time? As a person who reads a lot of historical novels with romance subplots, I would have liked to see Jaina and Jag discussing things and actually restarting their relationship instead of being presented with them as a fait accompli, but alas no. Jag is still the head of the Imperial Remnant (apparently they want to be “The Empire” again), he’s still dealing with troublesome Moffs, and he becomes part of Jaina’s clandestine team to capture Hellin. This part was pretty fun! Jaina’s doing spy stuff, she has a little team called the Darkmeld, and even Winter Celchu and Mirax Terrick get involved—although they don’t tell Mirax about everything they’re doing, because she’s obviously very upset about Valin. (Mirax was also in maybe the funniest scene, where she wrapped her face in foil so she couldn’t be identified.) This subplot reminded me of the Wraith Squadron books (my favorite Allston novels!) because of all the intelligence escapades here. ISSUES: My biggest issue with Outcast was how very First Book™ it felt. There was loads of setup before Luke left for exile, and then also a ton of setup to set up the worsening relationship between the Galactic Alliance and the Jedi. Plus, we have the situation with Valin to show that the Jedi are facing internal problems as well. Maybe that First Book Syndrome contributed to my feeling of “meh” about both Luke and Ben’s episode on Dorin as well as Han and Leia’s time on Kessel? At this point, I can’t see how those two subplots relate to the greater plot, and I was more invested in the stuff on Coruscant with this delusional outbreak among Jedi and how that affects the political climate as well. Second, I know that we’re supposed to be upset about these Jedi succumbing to madness, but when Valin Horn went on a rampage I was more worried about his parents than about Valin himself. We don’t know Valin like we do Corran or Mirax, as he’s been a decidedly minor character up to this point. Seff Hellin, meanwhile, is a completely new character to me, and while we’re meant to think “oh man, what a pity, he was such a great guy,” I don’t know him at all! He showed up briefly in Millennium Falcon, and I don’t even have Valin’s tiny amount of previous appearances to gain an understanding of Hellin’s character. Maybe they’re holding off for later books, but I would have picked more prominent characters here. I don’t know where they’re going with this, what the common thread between Valin and Hellin is, but I don’t know these guys at all. Finally, I think that the Fate of the Jedi series could have benefited from more stories between it and the previous series. Chronologically, there’s two years between Invincible and Outcast, but in the real world the Legacy of the Force series concluded in 2008 and the Fate of the Jedi started up in 2009, so Del Rey was already planning for this series while the previous one was coming out. That explains why things were left so open-ended in that series, but there’s not many stories bridging that gap. Millennium Falcon leads directly into Outcast, there’s two side adventures about Jaden Korr, and that’s it. (Blood Oath by Elaine Cunningham was supposed to mainly be about Zekk and partially be about Jag Fel, but it was canceled due to stuff outside of Cunningham’s control.) I feel like in going from this galactic-wide civil war to a story that feels much lower stakes, I would have loved to see some stories in between the two, bringing me down from the intense tension of Invincible to something smaller and less galaxy sweeping. I think more stories to fill in that gap would have helped me adjust my expectations for Outcast. I’m sure things will build from here, but I would have enjoyed that story of Jaina and Jag getting back together, or the story of Tahiri Veila in the aftermath of Invincible. We jumped right from one nine-book series to another, and I wish we could have gotten more standalones in between. IN CONCLUSION: Outcast starts off the Fate of the Jedi series, and stakes seem to be much lower than they were in the NJO and Legacy of the Force: we don’t have extragalactic invaders or a galaxy-wide civil war, but instead escalating tensions between the Galactic Alliance and the Jedi Order. As the first book in the series, there was a lot of setup at foot, as though Allston needed to set up Luke’s exile and this spreading madness before really digging into the meat of the greater plot. I liked Jaina’s intelligence-tinged subplot, but I found that Luke and Ben didn’t accomplish a ton on their first stop, and Han and Leia’s Kessel adventure seemed somewhat pointless—but I’d be happy to be wrong! Next up: the second book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Omen by Christie Golden. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/Ju6-lsd0Tgc ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 05, 2023
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Jul 12, 2023
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Jul 05, 2023
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Hardcover
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0345507002
| 9780345507006
| 0345507002
| 3.82
| 4,576
| Oct 21, 2008
| Oct 21, 2008
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it was ok
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2.5 stars For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series af 2.5 stars For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: a standalone novel! Millennium Falcon by James Luceno. SOME HISTORY: In 2007, Del Rey approached James Luceno about writing a novel about the Millennium Falcon. They gave him a lot of freedom, and in fact initially suggested that it could be an anthology of short stories about the various owners that the Falcon had across its lifespan. Luceno decided to keep it a novel, but he did incorporate oral retellings of the Millennium Falcon’s past into the story. While it functions as a standalone novel, Luceno was part of the planning for the Fate of the Jedi series, and it was his idea to set Millennium Falcon two years after Invincible, the last book in the Legacy of the Force Series. Millennium Falcon by James Luceno made it to number fourteen on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of November 9, 2008. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: I never read Millennium Falcon before! Since I gave up in the middle of the Legacy of the Force series, I remember when it was released but I…skipped it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ A BRIEF SUMMARY: Two years after Darth Caedus’s reign of terror, his tragic downfall still looms large to Han and Leia. But Jacen's bright and loving daughter, Allana, offers a ray of hope for her grandparents. The inquisitive and Force-sensitive girl discovers a strange device aboard the Millennium Falcon, and Han decides to investigate it by backtracking into the Falcon’s past… THE PLOT: The plot of Millennium Falcon is fairly simple: Han and Leia and Allana want to uncover the Falcon’s past, so they start with Lando Calrissian and move backwards, talking to each previous owner as they try to find out about the chameleon device that Allana found. At the same time, we have a new character who piloted the Falcon (formerly the Stellar Envoy) during the prequel era; he awakens after sixty years in a coma, and starts uncovering the Falcon’s past from ROTS onwards. Of course they run into each other, and the climax involves the Clone Wars-era Republic Group and a secret treasure that they had hidden away. CHARACTERS: Characters-wise, the blurb is misleading here: you think that the plot is solely going to be Han, Leia, and Allana learning about the Falcon’s past, but HL&A don’t show up until Chapter 7 out of 32. Every time we check back in with the Solos, we hurriedly cut away to Tobb Jadak the prequel era character, who’s searching for what happened to the Falcon/formerly the Stellar Envoy. I think Luceno’s decision to set Millennium Falcon two years after Invincible was a good idea: seven-year-old Allana is more interesting than a five-year-old would have been, and she’s a little more mature than her appearances in the Legacy of the Force series. A two year time jump also means that Han and Leia aren’t stuck in the immediate aftermath of Jacen’s death, as Luceno didn’t want it to be focused on their grief like Agents of Chaos I: Hero's Trial did. Jacen’s loss lingers in the background, especially for Han, but they’ve had two years to reflect on it and move on. Allana is very good at compartmentalizing her feelings, like her mother, but she obviously still has lingering trauma from those events. Han can accept that Jacen completely changed, but he still feels regret about how everything ended. Leia gets the short end of the character-development stick here—she’s been able to cope with events better than her husband and granddaughter, so while she’s helpful and supportive she’s not as obviously affected by the past like the other two. The first stop on the Solos’ journey is Lando and Tendra, who now have a little boy named Lando Jr. He’s a cute kid, but he’s also a toddler so there’s not much personality there yet. Han and Leia have a nice little vacay, get the name of the previous owner from Lando (another instance of the Falcon being won in a game of sabacc), and then jet off to question that guy’s kids. They tell the story of how he lost a ton of money betting on a battle between the Empire and the Rebellion, then we learn he bought it from a circus; the circus bought it from a traveling doctor; the doctor was given the Falcon by a member of the Rebel Alliance. I like that the Falcon wasn't just involved with smugglers and soldiers, but brought two people in the circus together and investigated Force-sensitive longevity and almost bombed the shipyards at Bilbringi, but the pilot was a little too attached to his ship. Constantly interrupting the Solos’ journey is the plot line involving Jadak, who worked for the Republic Group (an offshoot of the Delegation of Two Thousand, who were opposed to Palpatine's growing power during the Clone Wars). Turns out you can spot the Falcon / currently the Stellar Envoy during the Battle of Coruscant because they were delivering something for the Republic Group, the Jedi install something on the ship, and then they were supposed to head off for Toprawa for something that would “restore honor to the Republic.” Only they’re chased off Coruscant by clone forces, they redirect to Nar Shaddaa, and they immediately crash. Jadak’s co-pilot is killed, and Jadak himself is stuck in a coma for 60 years, only to awaken on Obroa-skai and try to get his memories back. (This kept reminding me of that 90s movie, Forever Young, about cryogenically frozen Mel Gibson.) Jadak is obsessed with finding out what happened to the Stellar Envoy after the crash, so he goes back to Nar Shaddaa and connects with a young thief named Poste. They learn that the Stellar Envoy was fixed up and sold to a member of Black Sun, had a debacle with some buzz droids, and then sat impounded by the Empire for years until the Rebel Alliance stole it. Jadak is probably the only way to explain the ROTS element of the Falcon’s history, plus he adds that treasure hunting element here, but since he was a brand new character I wasn’t as interested in his story. Since we can’t have a story without an antagonist (and Jadak isn’t really one, especially once he teams up with the Solos), we have Lestra Oxic, a very old lawyer who wants to acquire pieces of “Republicana.” He was told the story of the treasure during a deathbed confession, and he’s been paying for Jadak to be kept alive for the past 60 years. He’s lurking behind the scenes, just waiting for Jadak to get his memory back and lead him to the location of the treasure. ISSUES: My first issue with Millennium Falcon was that Jadak seemed to overtake Han and Leia’s plotline. Possibly a blurb issue? A key part of the novel is Jadak trying to get his memories back and chasing after the Stellar Envoy, but there’s barely a hint of that in the cover blurb. If I knew that the book only followed Han and Leia and Allana for half the time, I might not have been so bummed about this, but I felt like I was promised a Solo family adventure only for Jadak to muscle his way into the majority of the narrative. My second issue was also Jadak-related, but more about that expensive rejuvenation clinic on Obroa-Skai. The scenes in/about the clinic threw me out of the story at times, because I would start thinking of the parallels to non-Star Wars media, and also the lifespan of humans in the GFFA (which I had not thought about in any great detail). If we have characters who lived through the events of the prequel trilogy as adults yet are still running around 43 years after the Battle of Yavin, why haven’t they shared their knowledge with others? (The Doylist perspective is that the prequel trilogy wasn’t made until the early 2000s, so people like Mon Mothma literally couldn’t know the Old Republic backstory until the movies were released.) The Yuuzhan Vong invasion would have been a very viable time to kill those oldies off, but whatever. I just started to overthink everything. Finally, the climax felt somewhat wonky here. Jadak is chasing this treasure that will “restore the honor of the Republic,” whatever that means; Oxic knows what it means, but doesn’t reveal it until the end. Jadak says the mnemonic and the Falcon reveals a set of coordinates that led to the planet where the treasure was hidden. Unfortunately, the Yuuzhan Vong seeded the planet with their biotech back during the invasion, and the planet is literally coming apart. The Falcon lands, finds out that Oxic followed them, and then discover that the treasure is the symbol of the Republic that used to be on the Chancellor’s podium. It was made out of priceless metals, and the Republic Group removed it during renovations and replaced it with a fake—except this emblem is also a fake, so it’s worthless. Oxic says “hey Jadak, help me find the real one and I’ll pay you a finder’s fee,” Jadak says sure, and they jet off and leave the Solos in imminent danger. After all the things that Jadak did to help the Solos, I expected better from him! Plus, the revelation that the treasure was a fake all along—while saying a lot about the corrupt nature of the old Republic—was a bit of a letdown. You expect an exciting climax, but it ends up being a whole lot of nothing. (Side note: the book ends with Leia hearing that Luke’s about to be arrested for the Jacen Debacle, and I was surprised that it took Daala two years to come to this decision. I don’t know if the Fate of the Jedi series was originally supposed to be set immediately after Invincible, like MF, but from what I know of Daala I expected her to move against the Jedi sooner.) IN CONCLUSION: Millennium Falcon is a fun side adventure into the Falcon’s past. We get the answer to what the heck the Falcon was doing during the Battle of Coruscant in Revenge of the Sith, and we also get to hear the personal stories of people who owned the Falcon before Lando and Han. I was really interested in Han and Leia and Allana's plot line here; however, while the blurb suggests that they are the key focus, they’re not—Tobb Jadak is. In the end, I felt like Millennium Falcon was good but not great, primarily because so much of the story is devoted to Jadak instead of Han and Leia bonding with their granddaughter. Next up: the first book in the Fate of the Jedi series, Outcast by Aaron Allston. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/Vo9R3ZvQvT4 “Star Wars Action News: Episode 166: You’ve never heard of the Millennium Falcon?” - https://web.archive.org/web/201612051... ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 26, 2023
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Jul 2023
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Jun 27, 2023
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Hardcover
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0345477464
| 9780345477460
| 0345477464
| 4.04
| 6,461
| May 13, 2008
| May 13, 2008
|
it was ok
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2.5 stars For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series af 2.5 stars For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: the last book in the Legacy of the Force series, Invincible by Troy Denning. SOME HISTORY: Jason Felix is a self-taught artist, and growing up he really enjoyed the artwork in comic books and Dungeons and Dragons. Before creating the covers for the Legacy of the Force series, he mostly created art and characters for video games. His LotF covers feature a different character on each book (maybe you can argue that Jacen on Betrayal and Caedus on Revelation are two different people at that point), and unlike Drew Struzan’s traditional paintings for the Bantam books, these works were all created digitally. I like getting to see the characters here, but the backgrounds are a little too vague and nondescript for me. Legacy of the Force: Invincible by Troy Denning made it to number five on the New York Times bestseller list for the week of June 1, 2008, and was on the list for three weeks. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: While I tried to go blind into my read of Invincible, I did know a few things were going to happen—I mean, the cover pretty much gives away the ultimate showdown between the Solo twins. A BRIEF SUMMARY: The rebel cause is losing ground after the assassination of Admiral Pellaeon of the Imperial Remnant and the murder of Mara Jade Skywalker. Darth Caedus and his Galactic Alliance forces seem unbeatable, and Luke Skywalker has seen a vision of the future which shows the galaxy enslaved under a tyranny to rival that of Emperor Palpatine. So the Jedi decide to make one last-ditch effort to eliminate Darth Caedus, and there's only one individual capable of facing him… THE PLOT: I was a little surprised by Invincible’s short length. As the series’ closer, I expected a hefty volume, but it was under 400 pages and only 20 chapters. We open with the Imperial Remnant attacking the Verpine homeworld of Roche, and the Mandalorians plus Jaina Solo failing to stop the invasion. Jaina heads back to the secret Jedi base in the Hapan Cluster, and the Jedi decide they need to make a final stand against Darth Caedus, formerly Jacen Solo. Ben Skywalker is captured by Tahiri Veila and the Galactic Alliance Guard during an intelligence mission on Coruscant, and Jaina learns that Caedus is on Roche. Jaina sneaks onto Nickel One, and she faces off against her brother. She manages to grievously wound him by cutting off his arm, but Jacen escapes. From there it's a madcap dash to the finale, as Jacen has marked Jaina with a Nightsister blood trail and will soon learn the location of the secret Jedi base. The Jedi and the Hapan fleet unite to stop Jacen’s forces, and Jaina faces off against him one more time. CHARACTERS: A key portion of the novel involves Jaina having to face down her brother and eliminate him, but she doesn’t want her parents to lose all their surviving children in one go so…she’s pretty conflicted here. The previous book Revelation was about Jaina finally coming to terms with the fact that she has to kill her brother, but one book later she’s still struggling with that decision. She knows the job that she has to do, that her brother won’t stand down or surrender, but he’s still her twin. And after training with the Mandalorians for an entire book, she has enough camaraderie with them that she worries about them becoming collateral damage during her fight. Jaina is outmatched by Jacen in Force skills, but she has trained very hard and she’s persistent. She wounds Jacen during their first showdown (partially because Luke is using the Force to focus Jacen’s attention on him to the extent that Jacen doesn’t even realize Jaina there), and she triumphs in their second duel because Jacen is pretty distracted by the Hapan situation. Of course, this wouldn’t be a Troy Denning novel without some weird stuff, so we learn that concussed Jaina propositioned Jag and Zekk for a threesome after that first showdown with Jacen. I did not need to know that! It seems that spending time with the Mandalorians has led to the last vestiges of Jaina’s connection with Zekk fading away, which is for the best. Since Jaina is not interested in Zekk that way, he’s presumably going to be paired off with a Hapan relative of Tenel Ka in a blatant bit of sequel bait. (Another bit of sequel bait: Zekk is MIA after the final battle, and while Jaina didn’t feel him die, we don’t know what happened to him.) Jagged Fel is still hanging around with Leia and Han on the Millennium Falcon, but after Jacen is defeated Luke puts his name forward Admiral Pellaeon’s replacement, the next leader of the Imperial Remnant. The Moffs are cool with it and Jag accepts, but it’s quite the whiplash to go from a 92-year-old man with loads of authority and experience to…Jag. I like Jag! But (no offense) Jag comes across as a boring non-character at times. We learn that Luke has seen this recurring vision of the future wherein the galaxy falls apart under Caedus’s leadership, and I really wish we could have seen an example of this instead of being told about it. Because we’re never really in Luke’s head—definitely the shorter page count at play here—and instead only see Luke through other people’s eyes. He’s focusing Jacen’s attention on him, he allows Ben to be captured so Caedus won’t be too suspicious, and he lures the Mandalorians into a trap; he’s a lot more manipulative than I expected from good old Luke Skywalker. Ben is a good boy, but he felt more mature than fourteen. (Yes, he’s lived through a lot and is Wise Beyond His Years, but there were times when I questioned if a fourteen-year-old would really think and talk like that.) Ben is worried about the people around him, especially when Captain Shevu and he are captured, but he also won’t give away crucial info under interrogation. (More on that interrogation scene later.) Leia and Han just want this war to come to an end, and they’re trying their best to ensure that Jaina makes it out OK. Again, this wouldn’t be a Troy Denning novel without people disguising themselves as aliens—so when Jaina and Leia and Ben sneak onto Coruscant, Leia is the sexy alien. And during the final battle, the Imperial Remnant releases a biological weapon meant to wipe out the Hapan royal family. The Queen Mother survives, but it looks like Allana was killed—and Han is broken up about it. They just found out about their granddaughter, and now they’ve lost her. When they confront the Moffs at the end of the book, Han threatens them; and while we know that Han would never shoot a Moff, I wish he had! Screw those Moffs, they’re garbage. After the end of Revelation, I wasn’t sure if we were going to see Boba Fett and the Mandalorians again. But they’re on Roche in the beginning with Jaina, and they return to Roche when Jaina first attempts to take Jacen out. Mirta Gev and the other Mandos want to kill all the Moffs, but it ends up being one of Jacen’s power plays to remove the Moffs he didn’t like. The Mandos are pretty much all killed, except for poor Mirta, who has spinal cord damage, is captured and tortured by Jacen, and then her DNA is used to create a biological weapon targeting the Fett family. Mirta is rescued in the end, but the weapon is still deployed on Mandalore so that Boba and Mirta can never return home. Oh boy, that development did not feel thought through to me. Yes, it’s a way to keep them off Mandalore, but I felt like no one considered the ramifications here. If you build a bioweapon targeting Boba Fett (the clone of Jango Fett), you’re putting both Jango’s extended family as well as any other Jango clones or offspring of Jango clones at risk—and at one point, there were millions of Jango clones running around the galaxy. Plus, the fact that it apparently does not dissipate and will always be on Mandalore sounds like huge possibilities for the bioweapon to mutate or start affecting other Mandalorians. I know the Moffs are the bad guys here, but the development of this Fett-specific bioweapon seems super risky to me. On the bad guy front, Tahiri Veila continues to be an absolute monster. She has no problem torturing and assaulting a kid (ahem, more on that in the Issues), but killing Captain Shevu causes a crack in her facade. She didn’t mean to go that far, and she’s upset about it—and then Jacen reveals how much he manipulated her, and how their flow-walking sessions did not and could not change anything. She loses trust in Jacen’s vision, but I felt like her about-face at the end was a little too sudden for me. Up until Invincible, she was 100% Jacen’s minion, so I wasn’t sure that I bought her redemption after barely one book of doubts about the Sith stuff. Jacen’s scenes as Caedus were hard to read, partially because I never imagined that Jacen would become Darth Vader 2.0, that Jacen would be the Solo sibling who falls to the dark side. Jacen in the NJO was obsessed with ethics and morality, so to see him become so self-deluded that causing pain and suffering is right was hard for me to swallow. In Betrayal, Jacen had visions of the galaxy erupting into war, and I wish that had continued into the subsequent books—because as it stands, his motivations seem nebulous at times beyond “it’s all for Allana’s future.” Going into Invincible, I hoped that maybe there was a little light left in Jacen and he could be redeemed. Not so much here…he’s fine with a bioweapon targeting the Fetts but not Tenel Ka, he murders Prince Isolder to prevent that, only for the Moffs to target his ex anyway. He tries to warn Tenel Ka at the end, but it’s too little too late. ISSUES: I tore through Invincible pretty quickly, and while I appreciated the frenetic pace (especially compared to Revelation) I felt like that didn’t work as well for the end. We rocket towards the final showdown with Jacen, and then everything ends super fast. I liked the closer to the New Jedi Order series, The Unifying Force by James Luceno, because it concluded the series well and wrapped almost everything up. Invincible leaves a lot of things hanging (bioweapon shenanigans, nothing with Admiral Niathal, we don’t see Daala until she’s voted Chief of State in the end, Zekk is missing and Jag is now head of the Imperial Remnant) and I suspect that you need to read the Fate of the Jedi series to see those dangling threads play out. No one really knew why Jacen turned evil, and papers were signed and the galactic Civil War was over, the end—but real life conflicts are much messier than that, so I would have liked some more pages to wrap the story up more. As it stands, the ending felt somewhat abrupt. And I think that breakneck speed led to the conclusion feeling a little too predictable. The Moffs release their Hapan bioweapon, and obviously Tenel Ka will not die—and it looks like Allana is dead, but there’s no way that they’ll actually kill off Allana after her grandparents just met her and Jacen fell to the dark side “for Allana.” So I wasn’t surprised to learn that Allana is alive and she’s now a “war orphan” adopted by her grandparents for her own safety. Regarding the action scenes: I felt like Jaina's first confrontation with Jacen on Roche was very effective. I was concerned about what was happening, and while I sometimes find Denning’s action scenes disorienting, I could follow most of the action here. However, the second showdown between Jaina and Jacen fell a little flat for me, because it happened way too quickly and wasn’t as easy to follow as the first one. My biggest issue, though, was how Chapter 8 played out. Ben has been tortured and interrogated because Jacen and Tahiri want to find the location of the secret Jedi base, and then Tahiri comes in and she looks nice and she’s putting ointments on his wounds…and then she starts molesting him. Ew ew ew. If I felt like Tahiri in Revelation was treated as younger than she actually was, she’s definitely portrayed as an adult here. I didn’t want to read that, and if it’s meant to show me how bad she’s become I already know! I don’t need to see her assault a fourteen-year-old! I can’t believe this was in the book, and I can get that Tahiri is down a dark path and has lost her way without her molesting a teenager. IN CONCLUSION: Invincible is the conclusion of the Legacy of the Force series, and while it did wrap up some things, there are a lot of loose plot threads dangling for the Fate of the Jedi series to run with. In fact, I might argue there were too many plot things left unresolved at the end! I was very invested in Jaina's confrontations with her brother, even if I do feel like the second one fell a little flat for me. And who even knows what's going to happen with Tahiri next: she made a sudden about-face to the light side, but it can't be that easy. Next up: a standalone adventure! Millennium Falcon by James Luceno My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/6vQRSkpdvH8 “Star Wars Artist Series: Jason Felix” (August 3, 2006): https://web.archive.org/web/200608051... ...more |
Notes are private!
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Jun 15, 2023
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Jul 06, 2023
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Jun 15, 2023
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Hardcover
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034547757X
| 9780345477576
| 034547757X
| 3.99
| 7,143
| Feb 26, 2008
| Feb 26, 2008
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it was ok
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: book eight in the Legacy of the Force series, Revelation by Karen Traviss. SOME HISTORY: Legacy of the Force: Revelation by Karen Traviss brought with it the return of a character from the Bantam era that I honestly never thought we would see again. After terrorizing the galaxy in Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy Trilogy and Darksaber, Admiral Daala retired from her chaotic empire after rediscovering her former lover Liegeus Vorn at the end of Planet of Twilight by Barbara Hambly. That was the last we saw or heard of her for decades, but now Vorn is dead, she wants revenge against the Moffs who tried to assassinate her, and Admiral Pellaeon calls her in as his backup plan. She also seems to personally know Boba Fett, but everyone knows Fett in this series so I'll let that slide. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: As with Inferno, I am mostly going into this read blind and trying to avoid as many spoilers as possible. A BRIEF SUMMARY: During this savage civil war, all attempts to end Jacen Solo's tyranny have failed—so his sister Jaina decides that she needs to learn new skills from a very unlikely source. Meanwhile, Ben Skywalker is still convinced that Jacen killed his mother, and undertakes an investigation to prove that he did it and how. And as Luke Skywalker contemplates unthinkable strategies to dethrone his nephew, this civil war only continues to escalate further… THE PLOT: Jaina decides that she needs Boba Fett to teach her how to defeat her brother, so she travels to Mandalore and seems to spend more time learning from Goran Beviin instead. Boba Fett is very busy with family drama: he found his ex-wife frozen in carbonite, they unfroze her but she’s suffering from her very long time in carbonite, his granddaughter wants to get married and he needs to lead Mandalore, blah blah blah. Ben teams up with Captain Shevu to investigate his mother's murder, and finds some shocking evidence to prove Jacen's involvement in it. Luke is secretly communicating with Jacen's Co-Chief of State Cha Niathal to hopefully capture Jacen (or worst case scenario, kill him), while Jacen sends Tahiri to bring the Imperial Remnant into this civil war. However, Admiral Pellaeon doesn’t feel good about Jacen so he calls in his secret reserves aka Daala. Finally, Jacen is training Tahiri as his Sith apprentice, and continues to believe that his path is correct and justified. CHARACTERS: The initial reasoning for Jaina going to Mandalore made some sense to me: Kyle Katarn faced off against Jacen on Coruscant and wasn’t able to defeat him, so Jaina worries that she needs to learn new strategies to defeat her brother. Boba Fett being her teacher did surprise me, despite Traviss’s propensity for bringing Mandalorians into everything. My biggest problem was that he didn’t teach her anything! This plotline seemed more devoted to having Jaina finally decide that she has to be willing to kill Jacen—which I thought she had come to terms with in earlier books? Anyway, Boba Fett does not teach her a ton because he’s focused on his family drama, so Jaina spends more time with Goran Beviin. He shows her how the Mandalorians go berserker then return to normal, but don’t expect any Karate Kid/Empire Strikes Back training montages here. (More in the Issues section!) Boba Fett is going through a lot. He had previously recalled all the Mandalorians back to Mandalore, but when Daala contacts him about a job they get involved in the Battle of Fondor. Fett is very concerned about Sintas Vel—after being unfrozen, she’s blind and suffering from memory loss, and he’s reluctant to tell her about their past. More than anything, I came out of Revelation feeling bad for Boba Fett. On the surface, he’s accomplished a lot, but he seems incapable of connecting with the people around him. Having now finished the three Traviss novels, I wish that the Boba stuff was its own separate story. It’s compelling, but it feels only tangentially related to the other books in the series. Perhaps if the other authors had integrated Fett and the Mandalorians better into the series, I wouldn’t feel that way—but a Boba Fett Novel or even Boba Fett trilogy would have given this Fett family drama space to be fleshed out and time to breathe. After Sacrifice, in which Ben told his mom what was going on with Jacen and Inferno, in which Ben was really mad about the death of his mother and wanted to kill Jacen, Fury was more focused on Ben reconnecting with his dad. In Revelation, we take a step backward: Ben is still convinced that Jacen killed his mother, so he teams up with Captain Shevu of the Galactic Alliance Guard to investigate. They find Mara’s bloody hair in Jacen’s stealth X-Wing, and then Shevu records a conversation with Jacen in which he confirms his involvement in her murder. I get the sense that Traviss likes Ben, but Ben playing cop felt a little strange to me. He knows Shevu, they worked together in the GAG, but there’s more focus on “Ben the investigator” vs Ben the Jedi in training. I also felt like Ben’s investigation was superseded by the Battle of Fondor. He has the evidence, it’s confirmed, he wants to talk to his dad and his aunt and uncle—but then we spend chapters and chapters on the Battle of Fondor, and Ben doesn’t share his findings until the very end. I’m glad that everyone is now on the same page, but this investigation got dropped for the pivotal big battle. Which made me wonder: did Mara need to die in book 5? Obviously I would prefer if they never killed her off, but it seemed like there were loads of Plot Reasons why they couldn’t find out Jacen did it, and it stretched my suspension of disbelief. Ben goes from anger and revenge to acceptance to questioning things again, and while I know that grief is never a straightforward process, his emotional journey felt all over the place. There’s been this feeling of inertia hovering over the Jedi Order in these books, as they struggle to come up with any response to Jacen, and my disgruntled feelings about the Jedi’s non-approach carries over to my feelings about Luke. I’m glad that he’s talking with Niathal, that the Galactic Alliance and the Jedi agree that Jacen is a threat to the galaxy. But it feels like there were (and are) so many opportunities to go after Jacen, and even when the Jedi make an attempt they’ll just…stop. (I know that we’re meant to wait for the big showdown between Jacen and Jaina in book 9, but it’s frustrating to read!) Luke creates this Fallanassi illusion of ships that only Jacen can see, Luke is hounding Jacen, and then he just gives up. Jacen’s like “I’m better than Luke” and I want to scream “no you aren’t, you just have plot armor!” Chief of State Cha Niathal finally accepts that Jacen is out of control. The tipping point for her seemed to be Jacen killing the lieutenant at the end of Fury, but he’s been a wackadoo for a while now. Like the Jedi, though, she seems hesitant to take actual action against Jacen until pretty far into the Battle of Fondor. There are so many people scared of Jacen and the consequences if they were to remove him from power, and Niathal has some awareness of the fact that she probably was manipulated into this whole situation. I don’t think Niathal is the best Chief of State for the Galactic Alliance, but she’s all they’ve got. Admiral Pellaeon is now 92 years old, he’s close to death, but he’s still in charge of the Imperial Remnant. I like Pellaeon, but he felt off here. He came across as too overtly manipulative to me, and I didn’t get the strong sense of Honor that usually emanates off him. Perhaps it’s his age, but he felt a little sassy towards the Moffs—and also weirdly flirty with Daala? I can accept him calling Daala because they worked together in Darksaber but also…more on Daala later. Pellaeon’s distrust of Jacen is spot-on, especially after he withdraws Imperial forces when Fondor surrenders and Jacen reciprocates by having Tahiri Veila assassinate him. That was a terrible, heartbreaking scene, especially as Tahiri doesn’t even stay while Pellaeon is dying. He calls Daala in his final moments and the tide of the battle changes, but it was so sad to see him go like that. (Side note: Cha Niathal repeatedly called Pellaeon by his first name, and that felt rude to me? It’s like when Luke called him Gilad in Force Heretic I: Remnant--um, that’s ADMIRAL Pellaeon to you!!) I thought in the previous books that Jacen treated Tahiri like a minion, and there was no way he would consider her as a Sith apprentice because he was so dismissive of her. But with the loss of Ben, he really needs an apprentice and he’s invested all this time and energy into her so why not. I've already shared my thoughts about Tahiri falling down this dark path (I feel it’s disrespectful to the progress she made in the NJO), so all I’ll say about Tahiri was that she felt much younger than she should be. People refer to her as “the girl,” Jacen says that she has to wear shoes, and everyone seemed to treat her like a teen or a young adult. Isn’t she around 30 now? Tahiri’s not naive, and she definitely shouldn’t be at this point in time. What can I say about Jacen at this point? In that taped conversation with Captain Shevu, what especially came through for me was how Jacen has rationalized everything that he’s done. He wanted to kill civilians from the very beginning of the Battle of Fondor, to “make an example of them:” he’s willing to do anything to win, and killing civilians doesn’t bother him anymore. He justifies killing Mara because “she attacked me first” (partially true, but…); he justifies killing everyone thus far because he had to, even Nelani Dinn and that poor Lieutenant. It’s so sad to see how his character has changed, because after everything he’s done, he seems irredeemable now. ISSUES: Revelation took me much longer to read than I expected. Part of this was RL stuff (my grandmother turned 100!), but I also found the book far too easy to put down and ignore for extended periods of time. First, a minor quibble: each chapter begins with an epigraph, and they’re communications between different characters: Daala to Boba Fett, or Luke Skywalker to the leader of Fondor. Traviss used a similar stylistic device in Bloodlines--that novel contained news clippings at the beginning of chapters—but I felt like the epigraphs weren’t needed here. They didn’t convey any new information, and you could learn all of that from the book itself. Second, what does Jaina even learn on Mandalore?? She didn’t seem to learn any new techniques beyond that berserker stuff. If she learns any new style of fighting or fighting moves or weapons, it happens offpage. More than anything, Jaina’s time on Mandalore seemed to be spent feeling bad about her family and learning about the Mandalorians and being conflicted about how she’ll face her brother. Maybe I’ll change my mind once I finish Invincible, but Jaina’s Boba Fett training program seemed pointless. I mentioned earlier that Ben’s investigation of Mara’s death felt somewhat superseded by the Second Battle of Fondor, but I think the biggest issue was that this investigation should have happened earlier in the series. I would have put Ben’s investigation either concurrently with his revenge track or immediately before, and it makes me question again whether Mara dying in book 5 was the best way to plot out this series—Ben has to withhold some info, and the Solo/Skywalkers appear way too unobservant if you hold off on the “Jacen killed Mara” revelation until book 8. I didn’t talk about her in the Characters section, so…Daala. In the Bantam era, Daala was a chaotic non-planner; she seemed a little better in Darksaber, but you get the sense that she flies into action by the seat of her pants (and that often doesn’t end well for her). She lost almost all her Star Destroyers, she’s not a great strategic mind, so Daala retiring with her former lover seemed like the best possible ending for her. If she had kept running around the galaxy, she’d have ended up dead, because she wasn’t a great planner or admiral in the end. I know that this book is decades later, and people can change and mature, but Pellaeon talked about Daala like she was the most amazing strategic mind and I was like “are we thinking about the same woman?” Daala was a mess! Daala was a good ground commander who was only promoted to Admiral because she was having a (morally queasy) affair with Tarkin! And on the continuity front, Pellaeon says “oh, if only we had a Moff like Daala” but there have been female Moffs before. I’m not sure we can count Tavira from I, Jedi because she just took over from her dead husband, but there was definitely a female Moff in the Force Heretic trilogy—so a female Moff isn’t a new concept. IN CONCLUSION: I found Revelation a difficult read at times. Traviss writes well, but I felt like her characterizations were off. Maybe Jaina’s time on Mandalore will make more sense in the next book, because it felt like an extended, needless, Fett-heavy part of the book. Boba Fett’s plotline was interesting, but I think it would have worked better as a standalone instead of being shoehorned into the Legacy of the Force series. However, events definitely escalated here: the Galactic Alliance has now fractured into two separate factions, Tahiri Veila assassinated Admiral Pellaeon and the Empire might be a mess for a while, and it all comes down to Jaina’s showdown with her brother in the next book. Next up: the last book in the Legacy of the Force series, Invincible by Troy Denning. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/TIomtt9FVD0 ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mass Market Paperback
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0345477561
| 9780345477569
| 0345477561
| 3.94
| 6,799
| Nov 27, 2007
| Nov 27, 2007
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liked it
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: book seven in the Legacy of the Force series, Fury by Aaron Allston. SOME HISTORY: Fury by Aaron Allston contains some exciting personal developments for the Calrissian family: Lando suddenly has to leave Kashyyyk because surprise! His wife Tendra is pregnant. For me (the reader), this was also surprising news, because Tendra and Lando have been together for decades and haven’t seemed interested in starting a family. Still, I was happy for them, but the timeline/chronology is a little iffy here. Lando is 70 at this point, and while Tendra is younger than him, she’s still in her fifties. Maybe Star Wars has ways of extending human fertility beyond our Earth standards? IDK. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: As with Inferno, I am mostly going into this read blind and trying to avoid as many spoilers as possible. A BRIEF SUMMARY: While the Jedi regroup and re-evaluate their next strategy on the sanctuary moon of Endor, the task force consisting of Jaina Solo, Zekk, and Jagged Fel continue to hunt down Alema Rar—who they believe is the real killer of Mara Jade Skywalker. As this galactic civil war between the Alliance and the Confederates rages on, Jacen plans to kidnap the only person he thinks is still loyal to him: his own child… THE PLOT: Compared to Inferno, which felt like very little action in the first half but then loads of action in the second, Fury felt a bit more consistently paced. There are a lot of plot elements, but they felt spread throughout the novel—whereas the previous novel heavily loaded the backend. We have Jacen’s kidnapping of his daughter Allana; a Jedi attempt to confront Jacen on Coruscant that (purposefully) fails; Han & Leia and Jaina & the Boys’ multiple encounters with Alema Rar; the Solo team sneaking onto Jacen’s flagship to get navigation info about Lumiya’s asteroid base; the Jedi in starfighters simultaneously confronting Jacen until they realize he has a child hostage; the Solo team finally confronting Alema Rar on the asteroid; and Tenel Ka (finally!) asking the Jedi for help in rescuing Allana. The end of the book is this big climactic action in which Jacen attacks Centerpoint Station, the Jedi distract Jacen on his flagship while Han and Leia rescue Allana, and Centerpoint Station explodes due to Jedi sabotage. We end with Jaina realizing that she must be the one to confront her brother, and that she needs someone to teach her new tactics… CHARACTERS: Someone finally confronts Jaina about her obsessive attitude towards honing herself as the Sword of the Jedi—and it’s Jag. He points out that you can over sharpen a blade, and in focusing so heavily on being the Sword she’s forgetting about her responsibilities as a Jedi. His words sort of get through to her, although Jaina is still convinced that she’s the only person who can confront her brother. I appreciated that Jaina had plenty to do in this novel; that’s she’s too focused on what needs to be done to wallow in any of that relationship drama. Meanwhile, Jag is obsessed with dealing with Alema Rar and restoring his family’s honor—but Leia points out to him that he’s acting like a man without anything tethering him to this galaxy. It’s like he sees Alema Rar as this final mission to complete, and then there’s no reason for him to live afterwards. I also liked that Jag was the one to kill Alema, and instead of a Jedi duel to the death it was a mercy kill—Alema has lost so much in these books, and Jag recognized that. During the final confrontation with Alema, it looks like Jag isn’t going to make it…but fortunately he pulls through, and Jag and Jaina are on much friendlier terms at the end. Zekk has a moment where he’s able to communicate with the Sith meditation sphere because of his dark side history (he convinces it to abandon Alema and return home), and then the dark side pool on Lumiya’s asteroid almost consumes him. But like Jag, he also snaps out of it. Leia confronts Jacen on his Star Destroyer, but it’s just a delaying tactic—she’s trying to keep his attention away from the docking bay, and she’s realized that you can’t reason with Jacen at this point. Even if you sat Jacen down and showed him why his actions are wrong, his thinking is so warped at this point that he wouldn’t believe you. This is so sad to me, as part of what I loved about the Original Trilogy was how Luke’s love for his father brings him back to the light; seven books into the Legacy of the Force series, it seems like there’s nothing you could do or say to drag Jacen off this dark path. Wedge and the Antilles family return here, although he doesn’t play as large of a role as he did in Betrayal or Exile. I think the Antilles family plotline is more meant to show us how people within both the Galactic Alliance and the Confederation are becoming disillusioned with this pointless war. Syal is on one side, her father is on another, and Tycho Celchu is trying to follow orders but also help them both. Events needlessly escalate, like when the Alliance drops asteroids on Commenor and the Confederates reciprocate by using biological weapons on Coruscant. The Civil War may have started out because of very specific grievances, but everything is murky now. As the cover features Ben Skywalker pointing his lightsaber at someone, I thought that he would play a prominent role here…but he really doesn’t. He hangs out on the Jedi base on Endor’s sanctuary moon, he has a good conversation with his dad, and then he accompanies the Jedi decoy team when they storm Jacen’s lightsaber. Ben is not as focused on revenge as I expected from a title like Fury; going into the book, I thought that he would still be trying to carry out revenge against Jacen for his mother’s death. But while he still suspects Jacen, he doesn’t tell anyone about his suspicions, so instead we have another book where Luke is grieving her loss and Jaina and the boys are off on a wild goose chase after Alema Rar. Luke’s plans for the Jedi are pretty cautious, but Luke’s M.O. has been “wait and see” for a while now. In Inferno, he was consumed by grief, trying to stick with the Alliance until he heard about Cal Omas’s death and switched sides. I expected a little more bombastic action in Fury, but Mara’s death is still so new that Luke’s still processing things. He sends a Jedi strike team to confront Jacen on Coruscant, Kyle Katarn is grievously wounded, and we find out that Luke never thought they’d succeed but instead wanted to plant a tracker on Jacen. They almost confront Jacen again during the Corellian ambush, until Luke senses a child hostage in his TIE fighter. Ben points out that Luke isn’t really living right now, Luke turns a little corner in the grief process, and then Tenel Ka requests that the Jedi please rescue her child. In the previous book, Alema Rar went to the Sith world of Korriban and talked to a group calling themselves the One Sith. They’re mostly a teaser Easter Egg for the future generation Legacy comic, but they pop up briefly here to destroy Lumiya’s asteroid base and chase after the Sith meditation sphere. Alema and Jacen then are the Big Bads of the book. Alema starts using Lumiya’s Force phantoms trick from Betrayal, projecting uninjured versions of herself anywhere the Solos go. (I wish we had seen a little more of Lumiya using phantoms after the first book, because it was an interesting idea, but it mostly fell off the radar.) Apparently it wasn’t one of Lumiya’s inherent skills, but instead something she could access thanks to the dark side energy suffusing the asteroid. I have to confess to not understanding the logistical stuff about the phantoms here—sometimes they are linked to a specific person, sometimes they are not—but I found it interesting that Alema always projects herself as she once was, as so much of her revenge journey was powered by her loss of health and beauty. Do I wish that Alema had died sooner, because I wasn’t interested in her and she was so underpowered compared to the rest of the Solos? Yeah, a bit. It always surprised me when she would escape from these standoffs, but in the end she was killed not with anger but with sadness and regret of how far she had fallen. I think the loss of Tenel Ka’s loyalty was a huge blow to Jacen; he never realized that she might withdraw her support, and so his kidnapping of Allana feels like a way to both secure the only person he trusts as well as lash out at Tenel Ka. He uses Allana as a hostage to guarantee her mother’s good behavior (he threatens to kill Allana if Tenel Ka doesn’t withdraw her support from the Confederation), and I somewhat bought that threat. So much of what Jacen has done was “for Allana’s future,” but he’s also turned on the others around him in snap decisions. Jacen carts Allana around everywhere, but when she’s confronted with death and difficult situations he has no way of comforting her. In pursuing this Sith agenda, he’s lost so much of his humanity that he can’t sympathize with a frightened child and just does…nothing. Jacen is still trying to work with Admiral Niathal, but I think it’s only a matter of time until he breaks away from her. Jacen needed Niathal in this diumverate because she held political and military power, but with his Sith battle meditation he now thinks that he can predict any outcome and win any battle. But in turn, Jacen has become predictable—as soon as the Corellians use Centerpoint Station against him, the Jedi know that he’ll try to attack the Station and use it for himself. There’s a very minor character here (a Lieutenant in the Galactic Alliance) who falls out of Jacen’s graces because she didn’t stop the Jedi from sneaking aboard his ship. He views her actions as a betrayal, and he kills her in front of everyone on the bridge. Earlier in the series, Jacen had a lot of support among the Alliance troops, but I wonder if that will start to fade as his behavior becomes more illogical and extreme. Vader ruled by fear, but fear also drove people away from the Empire in the end. ISSUES: I enjoyed Fury more than Inferno, and I definitely enjoyed it more than Sacrifice, but I did have some issues here. The first isn’t limited to just Fury but is more of a series-wide issue: I am constantly surprised by Tenel Ka’s inactivity here. Jacen sort of stalemates her, by kidnapping Allana and delivering an ultimatum of “do what I say or I’ll kill your daughter,” but I was surprised by how long it took her to tell the Jedi about her situation. I guess my understanding of Tenel Ka’s character is different than what the authors envisioned here—after the Young Jedi Knights books I have always seen her as that no-nonsense warrior princess, and even though her new role as Queen of Hapes means that she has obligations to more than just herself, she feels under-utilized here. I want her to change and mature, but she’s become a sadly static character. I also feel like Jacen’s fighting abilities…well, they don’t seem consistent from book to book. He kills Nelani Dinn in Betrayal, but I felt like that was a combination of her being much less experienced than him plus a heavy dose of Surprise Murderous Intentions. When we get to Sacrifice, Mara beats the crap out of him, and he’s only able to kill her through trickery/poison. In Inferno, Luke is winning for the first half of the fight until Jacen gains the upper hand in the second, and I honestly think that Luke could have killed him if he hadn’t grabbed Ben and left. (Luke Skywalker is very much OP, and we have three books to go.) So when Kyle Katarn and the other Jedi confronted Jacen on Coruscant, I was not expecting Jacen to take Kyle out like that. Maybe this is my experience with the games peeking through, but I thought that Kyle would be a formidable opponent in a lightsaber duel—and instead, Jacen grievously wounds him way too easily. It feels like there's this discontinuity between how powerful Jacen is and the constraints of the overarching series plot. From the New Jedi Order series, I never got the sense that Jacen was the ultimate fighter. He’s very skilled, but his strongest abilities lay elsewhere, and he didn’t even need a lightsaber to defeat Onimi in the end, just the sheer power of the Force. If anyone was the superior duelist, I would assume it to be Jaina; after all, Luke did prophecy that she was “the Sword of the Jedi.” Maybe that’s why Jaina hasn’t confronted Jacen yet? It just feels like Jacen's fighting skills ebb and flow based on the demands of the books, and I thought Kyle was better than that! (Also, if Jacen can defeat one Jedi Master, why not just throw all of them at him? Problem solved.) Finally, this galactic civil war seems less “plotted out” than the Clone Wars. I suppose going into the Legacy of the Force series I expected major battles or offensives in each book, but that has not been the case—instead, we sometimes go an entire book or part of a book without a single battle. Maybe I noticed that here more so than other books because we had the aftermath of the Battle of Kashyyyk, the Battle of Commenor, the catastrophe on Ossus, the Corellian ambush against Jacen, and the Battle of Centerpoint Station all in the same book. We’re approaching the conclusion of the series, and the military stuff has escalated a lot. IN CONCLUSION: Fury contained a bunch of battles and confrontations evenly spaced throughout. There's a heavy focus on Jacen, as well as Jaina and company finally confronting Alema Rar, and after five books of inaction it's exciting to see the Jedi continuing to DO things and actually having a plan. I did feel like there were some assumptions you had to accept going into this book (the main one for me was that Tenel Ka could spend the majority of the book not doing anything to get her daughter back), but on the whole I felt like Fury was a pretty solid read. Next up: book eight in the Legacy of the Force series, Revelation by Karen Traviss. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/OuEMo9xlHdM ...more |
Notes are private!
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May 03, 2023
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May 12, 2023
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May 03, 2023
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Mass Market Paperback
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0345477553
| 9780345477552
| 0345477553
| 3.95
| 6,686
| Aug 28, 2007
| Aug 28, 2007
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it was ok
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For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacri
For 2023, I decided to reread the post-NJO books set after the Dark Nest trilogy, especially as I abandoned the Legacy of the Force series after Sacrifice all the way back in 2007. This shakes out to the nine books of the Legacy of the Force series, the nine books of the Fate of the Jedi series, three standalone novels, and five short stories. This week’s focus: book six in the Legacy of the Force series, Inferno by Troy Denning. SOME HISTORY: Cover art is usually created months before a book’s release, to drum up interest as booksellers choose what they want to pre-order. Likewise, StarWars.com would often reveal the covers for upcoming Star Wars books months ahead of time to offer fans a first look at future titles. Inferno by Troy Denning was a little different, though. The solicitation cover was just the title, the author’s name, and flames—in March of 2007, the identity and outcome of Jacen’s titular sacrifice in book #5 was still unknown. The actual cover was not shared until a few days after Sacrifice’s release, and the back cover description wasn’t made public until the end of June. MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK: Absolutely no memories of this one! From Sacrifice on I know very few spoilers, and am trying to avoid them. A BRIEF SUMMARY: As the galaxy explodes into all-out civil war, Jacen Solo has seized control of the Galactic Alliance—and by murdering his aunt, has become a secret yet fully fledged Sith Lord. With Luke Skywalker consumed by his grief, Jacen works quickly to consolidate his power and jumpstart his plans to take over both the Jedi and the galaxy as a whole. So Luke has a choice: does he join forces with his nephew to save the Galactic Alliance, even though Jacen has become a tyrant? Or does he join the Confederation to smash a Galactic Alliance that he ultimately helped create? THE PLOT: Inferno is a bit shorter than the books that preceded it, as the paperback clocks in at barely under 300 pages. There’s still a number of plot threads running through this novel, though. Perhaps the heaviest focus is on Luke and Ben separately dealing with their grief around Mara’s death: Ben suspects Jacen and ends up on a chaotic revenge path, while Luke goes from complete inaction to siding with the Galactic Alliance to cutting ties with the Galactic Alliance (all in one book!). Han and Leia narrowly escape a GAG ambush at the Jedi Temple, head off for Kashyyyk to talk with the Wookiees and later rush to Hapes to talk with Queen Mother Tenel Ka. Jaina and Jag and Zekk continue to track down Alema Rar, and end up getting drawn into one of Jacen's terrible horrible plans for the Jedi on the Ossus Jedi Academy. Meanwhile, Alema digs through Lumiya’s stuff on her asteroid base and heads off in search of more Sith. Finally, Jacen starts using battle meditation to manipulate the Alliance/Confederation conflicts, continues to self-justify his actions as being good for the Galactic Alliance, and takes some very aggressive actions against the Jedi and Kashyyyk. CHARACTERS: After Sacrifice, I expected that Luke and Ben would finally have a heart-to-heart, that they would sit down and really talk with each other. But maybe I should have realized otherwise, because there are three more books to go after this one… In Inferno, Luke and Ben’s inability to communicate continues—and continues to frustrate me. Ben has vital information about Jacen & Lumiya and his mother’s final movements, but he keeps his suspicions to himself. Luke instead suspects Alema Rar of Mara’s murder, because intelligence places her in the Hapan cluster afterwards. Ben confronts Jacen, Jacen redirects his attention to Cal Omas, and Cal Omas ends up dead in a seeming assassination attempt—and Ben apparently killing Omas is what snaps Luke out of supporting the Galactic Alliance, and the whole Jedi order defecting during the Battle of Kuat. Ben returns to Jacen and pretends to side with him, and unfortunately contributes to both Jacen’s awareness of the Jedi on Kashyyyk as well as the bombardment of the Wookiee cities. (Ben, you don’t have to be that undercover!) Ben finally attacks Jacen, Jacen overpowers him, and Ben wakes up later in a Yuuzhan Vong Embrace of Pain. (More on that later.) Luke fakes his own death, sneaks onto Jacen’s flagship, engages Jacen in a duel…and even though Luke has the upper hand over Jacen for the beginning of the fight, this ends up being a standstill. Luke stops Ben from killing Jacen and the book ends with no one realizing Jacen’s role in Mara’s death. I think Luke has been inactive and dithering for so much of this series because he is so much more powerful than anyone else, and that really showed in the scene at Kuat where he confronted Jacen—he just pins him in his chair, and Jacen can’t move. It makes Jacen seem weaker than I thought. Likewise, the Jedi response to Jacen has been so frustrating, like artificial drama dragged out to sustain more books than I believe it realistically could. I’m glad the Jedi finally chose a side (and they would have chosen a little sooner, if they hadn’t been humoring Luke), but man did we have several books of no decisions to get there. Leia and Han are still fugitives from Galactic Alliance justice, and they can’t even attend Mara’s memorial service because of Jacen’s arrest order. This was annoying to me, because on the one hand I understand that fugitives can’t just show up at the government’s capital and expect to get away with it. But on the other hand, Mara was their sister-in-law, and it gives me a bad feeling to have Leia and Han completely miss out on this celebration of her life. Instead, Han and Leia rush off to Kashyyyk to talk the Wookiees into remaining neutral. They have a run-in with Jae Junn the Sullustan GA agent and Tarfang the nasty little Ewok (not my favorite Denning characters, but at least they’re not the Squibs). Leia’s pushing neutrality and Jae Junn wants the Wookiees to arrest the fugitive Solos, but then Luke shows up and asks the Wookiees to side with the Jedi Council against the Galactic Alliance. That…does not turn out well for the Wookiees, as Jacen firebombs their treetop cities, so Han and Leia rush off to Hapes to let Tenel Ka know what Jacen’s really doing with her fleet. They smuggle her back to Kashyyyk, Jacen’s forces are routed, and as the book ends Han and Leia seem to have made peace with the fact that the old Jacen Solo is gone and this horrible tyrant needs to be stopped. Jaina and the boys are still on their mission to track down Alema Rar, and apparently between books they uncovered evidence that Alema was on Roqoo Depot shortly after Mara’s death. They follow Alema to the Jedi Academy on Ossus, which places them in the right place at a very bad time. (Jacen contemplated taking over the Jedi Temple on Coruscant when he tried to arrest his parents, but apparently he settled for sending a deranged GAG officer and troops to the Jedi Academy.) Jaina and Jag try to keep tensions calm, but the situation gets much worse—students are pulled out of the dormitory, the adult Jedi are incapacitated, and while Jaina et al. are successful in retaking the Academy there are dire consequences for others. Kam Solusar is badly wounded; Jedi Knights and younglings are killed; most upsetting, Tionne Solusar is tortured and mutilated. (More on that later.) Jaina heads off to Kashyyyk afterwards and witnesses Luke’s supposed death, and she sets Luke on the “Alema killed Mara” track. I appreciate when Jaina is given more to do, because she’s a decidedly minor character compared to her brother. However, I was surprised by how easily Jaina has given up on Jacen, especially compared to her parents. It seems like ever since Jacen manipulated Jaina and the other Jedi in the Chiss/Killik conflict, Jaina has been suspicious of his motives—but one of things I found most interesting about the twins was their close inherent connection, and that’s been completely bulldozered and gone for many books now. Speaking of Alema: she has commandeered the Sith meditation sphere that was Ben’s and then Lumiya’s, and she heads off to the asteroid base and uncovers evidence of more Sith (a group calling themselves the One Sith on Korriban, with connections to the Legacy comic). Apparently she’s decided that the best thing for Balance is to help Jacen? Anyway, she ends up being the deus ex machina who saves Jacen from his own disasters, as she manipulates the Bothan fleet into letting Jacen’s forces escape. In every book up to this point I have been convinced that Alema will meet her imminent demise, but she went an entire book here without being confronted by anyone—so she’ll still be around in book seven, which I was not expecting when she first appeared in Tempest. Oh Jacen. The more terrible things he does, the more he justifies his actions to himself. Going into Inferno, I wondered “what terrible thing will he do now?” and firebombing the Wookiees is pretty darn bad! He’s become so self-deluded that he can acknowledge his love and respect for Chewbacca but still target the Wookiees because they “betrayed” him. I think it’s also telling that he doesn’t target their ships, but instead their villages on Kashyyyk itself…as though the lives of Wookiees don’t matter at all to him. It felt like his own sense of fallibility has become increasingly warped, and in his head he can do no wrong and every action is justified. His resentment of Luke and the Jedi Order has been subsumed by his feeling of superiority. (He’s such a pompous creep now!) I think Tenel Ka’s defection takes him completely by surprise, and he just can’t see why she would remove her support from him. (A little worried about Allana here!) Lumiya’s death also makes him realize that he needs a minion, so he starts working on Tahiri Veila: offering to help her flow-walk back to Anakin’s death. I will touch on this more in the Issues section, but Tahiri is surprisingly receptive to Jacen’s ideas, although she becomes more of a tool than his apprentice. I think Jacen still has hopes that Ben will want to remain his apprentice, despite all evidence to the contrary. Jacen seems to have reached a point where there’s less and less logic to his actions. Like sending a deranged individual to deal with the Ossus Jedi Academy, Jacen’s own reasoning seems to be increasingly skewed as he progresses further on his dark journey. I also wonder if the subsequent three books will show Jacen's physical health degrading further, because that is definitely a dark side element from the films and previous books. The dark side corrupts and degrades, and with Jacen already injured after his showdown with Luke, I’m interested to see if his physical state will decline rapidly as well. ISSUES: My first issue was related to pace: the first half was very slow, and while the second half picked up the pace it felt too frenetic/rushed at times. We go from the Battle of Kuat to the situation on Ossus to Jacen firebombing Kashyyyk to Leia and Han on Hapes to Luke vs. Jacen. Speaking of which, what happened to R2-D2 when Luke faked his death? Obviously, Luke didn’t die and landed on the Anakin Solo, but we never see R2 at any point after that. I need to know that little trash bucket is OK! I found Luke’s fight with Jacen similarly disorienting, and the climax was perhaps too fast-paced in the end. Why did Saba deliver the eulogy at Mara’s funeral? I know that Leia was meant to speak and couldn’t, but Saba seems like an out-of-left-field choice here. Saba and Mara got along OK, but I wouldn’t consider them close friends or anything. From the Solo/Skywalker family, I would have picked Jaina to deliver the speech—and if we’re looking at people with a close personal connection to Mara, Corran Horn and Kyle Katarn were right there! I also took issue with Denning’s treatment of various characters here. Tionne was tortured before our very eyes. Her limbs were blown off, and it was so upsetting to read. Tionne is not a warrior—I don’t think we’ve ever seen her with a lightsaber in her hand. She’s a historian and a musician, basically the closest thing to a bard that the Star Wars universe has. I know Tionne would do anything to protect the Jedi children, but what happened to her felt excessive. To purposefully mutilate a woman who uses her hands to create music made me feel sick to my stomach, and the fact that we never got confirmation that she’d be OK also upset me. I know Tionne is not a major character in any way, but I’m sure there are others like me who love Tionne and are very concerned about her wellbeing. Likewise, Tahiri’s treatment really bothered me here. It felt like the book was suggesting that she never healed from the events of the NJO, that she still has this gaping emotional hole related to the death of Anakin Solo, and that she would be so receptive to Jacen’s manipulations. I thought that the power of Tahiri’s plotline in the NJO was that she went through terrible events, lost the person she loved most in the world, and her mind splintered into two personalities, but she was strong enough to unite those two parts of herself and live on. She loved Anakin, but she was able to live on and build a new life for herself. It felt like Inferno was countering that no, she’s weak, she’s like an addict, and Jacen is able to twist her and use her as a minion. And I don’t like that! I thought her character was stronger than that, and it’s setting up a dangerous precedent. Even Jacen’s portrayal bothers me, as his parents and Luke seem to believe that he was irreparably broken by his experiences during the Yuuzhan Vong invasion. Again, I think that lessens the impact of what Jacen did in the NJO (by coming to a new understanding of the Force and the Vong, Jacen was able to defeat Onimi and end the war) as well as provides an excuse for his behavior in the Dark Nest trilogy onwards. Maybe I just don’t like when characters aren’t solely responsible for their own actions, and have lasting trauma that they can’t seem to overcome? Finally, I was rather boggled by the logistics of Jacen having an Embrace of Pain on the Anakin Solo. Where did he get this from? How is it still alive? Is it from Zonama Sekot, and if so, when did Jacen go to Zonama Sekot in the last ten years? How did he sneak it on board? Etc. etc. It’s very evocative of Traitor, but I had way too many questions about its origins and why it hadn’t been revealed sooner—dark side Jacen seems like the kind of masochist to use it on himself, but whatever. IN CONCLUSION: Inferno is all about the aftermath of the events of Sacrifice: Luke Skywalker goes from consumed by his grief to taking action and standing against Jacen and the Galactic Alliance. Ben Skywalker tries to get revenge on his own, only for that to fail. Jacen loses one of his longest standing allies, as Tenel Ka withdraws the Hapan fleet from the Alliance. A lot happens here, but I found the pace in the first half very very slow and the pace in the second half almost too fast. In the end, I had some major issues with the treatment of several characters, to the point of just closing the book and putting it down and sitting there wondering “was this personally created to hurt me?” Next up: book seven in the Legacy of the Force series, Fury by Aaron Allston. My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/IqYCFofN2Rw ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 16, 2023
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Apr 17, 2023
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4.24
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Feb 24, 2024
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3.40
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it was ok
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Dec 12, 2023
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Dec 11, 2023
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3.60
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it was ok
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Dec 16, 2023
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Dec 09, 2023
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2.33
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it was ok
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Dec 08, 2023
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3.33
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Nov 22, 2023
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Nov 21, 2023
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4.04
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it was ok
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Nov 15, 2023
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3.00
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Nov 08, 2023
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Nov 01, 2023
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3.94
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it was ok
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Oct 29, 2023
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Oct 22, 2023
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3.90
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it was ok
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Oct 15, 2023
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Oct 10, 2023
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3.90
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it was ok
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Sep 30, 2023
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Sep 26, 2023
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3.91
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it was ok
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Sep 15, 2023
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Sep 06, 2023
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3.88
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it was ok
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Aug 26, 2023
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Aug 25, 2023
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3.90
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it was ok
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Aug 07, 2023
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Jul 31, 2023
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3.87
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it was ok
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Jul 26, 2023
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Jul 12, 2023
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3.90
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it was ok
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Jul 12, 2023
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Jul 05, 2023
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3.82
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it was ok
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Jul 2023
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Jun 27, 2023
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4.04
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it was ok
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Jul 06, 2023
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Jun 15, 2023
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3.99
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it was ok
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Jun 03, 2023
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Jun 04, 2023
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3.94
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liked it
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May 12, 2023
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May 03, 2023
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3.95
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it was ok
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Apr 23, 2023
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Apr 17, 2023
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