Heir To The Empire

Date approximate
( )

took me a couple of tries to get started but an excellent book once I managed to break through my own apathy. ( )

Loved the Mrkyr trip for Mara and Luke--she's an excellent character. Audiobook was fabulous, and you can never get enough Thrawn. :) ( )

In 1991, I was a freshman in college when news that the Star Wars saga would be continued in books caused a flurry of excitement. In 2020, when an avalanche of new Star Wars content was just announced it may be hard to understand how excited we were to see the continuing adventures of Luke, Leia, Han and company. As the generation who grew up on Star Wars, we were promised a nine movie saga, but after Return of the Jedi there was eight long years of nothing. And so if the story was going to continue in books, we would read books.

The novel picks up five years after the destruction of the Second Death Star and defeat of the Emperor with the New Republic government now attempting to win the peace. But there are still parts of the galaxy under Imperial control and they are coalescing under a new leader, Grand Admiral Thrawn. In many ways, Thrawn is a more compelling villain than Palpatine as he has no sensitivity to the Force and instead uses his intelligence and studies his enemies' culture to predict they're behavior. Even with this book being de-canonized to the Star Wars Legends, the character of Thrawn has reemerged in other media, because he's just that interesting.

I enjoyed this book on several readings and found it a good adventure, although it is very bookish and probably would've never translated to the screen. On the other hand, my wife and I read this to our Star Wars-obsessed daughter and my wife found it boring, while my daughter lost interest with only a few chapters to go. So, your results may vary. ( )

The story is as engaging as I remember it. Zahn deftly extrapolates the actions, concerns, relationships, and experiences of the familiar Star Wars characters from the original trilogy, while giving them new situations – threats and otherwise – to adapt to, managing to fill out even more of their stories through, for example, a visit to Chewie's home planet and yet another return trip to Dagobah for Luke. That the primary protagonists seem to keep ending up together in the places where the main action seems to be occurring is not more or less providential than in the original movies.

However, Zahn's genius has always been the introduction of his new antagonists: most importantly the alien Imperial strategist, Grand Admiral Thrawn (for whom the trilogy has been post hoc named), and the hate-filled Emperor's Hand, Mara Jade. Expertly crafted characters in their own rights, both are given plausible backstories as to how, despite being marginalized by the Empire (and the Emperor himself), they yet remain loyal to it (and him) in ways that exceed the rote conditioning of the average officer and stormtrooper in the Imperial Navy.

Perhaps more subtly inspired, and something that I had not picked up on with previous reads, is the use of Capt. Pallaeon and Talon Karrde to explicate the more fascinating personalities of Thrawn and Jade, respectively. Zahn uses these two characters in much the same way that Tolkien uses the hobbit characters (mostly) in [b:The Lord of the Rings|33|The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3)|J.R.R. Tolkien|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1411114164s/33.jpg|3462456] – what Michael Drout has called the "epistemic regime." The reader wonders and learns alongside Pallaeon and Karrde about the motives and insights of Thrawn and Jade, respectively, and while it's not quite as expertly done as in Tolkien, the effect is much the same, with our seeing through the eyes of those who have less information.

The only chagrin I have with re-reading this is, of course, that the last time I read the book, I had not even seen the "new" movies, let alone learned that the Expanded Universe was no longer canonical in any way. I still enjoyed the story very much, but knowing that these aren't the events that "actually" happened post-Return is, as the kids say, booty. Given that the Thrawn trilogy was my own introduction to the EU, at a time when it was supposedly curated by Lucas Films, it's disappointing to know that this is not the direction which Disney, Abrams, et al, will be taking the new stories. That said, it is blessedly free of midi-chlorians. (For more thoughts on how I think the jettisoning of the EU from canon is a terrible idea, please listen to the 100th episode of my podcast, Kat & Curt's TV Re-View.)

Nonetheless, I still really enjoyed the story and have the second book in the series sitting here beside me waiting to be cracked as soon as I hit save on this review.... ( )