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The book covers Thrawn's discovery by imperial forces on a distant outer rim world and his subsequent climb up the navy ranks. The narrative borrows a lot of elements from the EU storylines related to Thrawn, including Thrawn having been exiled by his people, his military genius and ability to psychoanalyze via art appreciation, his unparalleled ascension up the military ranks, general anti-alien sentiment among the predominately human empire, Thrawn's brief run-in with Anakin during the Outbound Flight fiasco, and the vague hints that a greater threat to the galaxy exists beyond the outer rim. Those are sufficient similarities that one wonders why they needed to throw out the EU at all, though of course the rationale is Disney's cravenness re: intellectual property.

That said, there are some changes to the narrative from the EU. Thrawn's exile is not as simple as it was written in the aftermath of Outbound Flight. Mara Jade is not present at his promotion to grand admiral, and is seemingly not present in the Disney canon at all. I doubt she'll appear, which is fine, as she's not really needed in this new canon. Pellaeon does not appear either, which sucks because he was actually interesting and cool. Also, Pellaeon's military bearing brought a much needed solemnity to the antagonists; Disney has unfortunately decided to go for farce with Hux & Co. So far, Thrawn has not pissed off the emperor and been punished with a remote posting of any sort, though I suppose that could be on the docket for a later installment - but there's no sense of a Hand of Thrawn setting anywhere. One of the bigger changes is the inclusion of Clone Wars-era tech. In fact, that stuff plays a significant role in the novel, so things like droidekas and buzz droids and vulture droids make appearances. In conjunction with how the clone wars are the exact opposite of what everyone (and Zahn of course) assumed they were up until 2002, the Disney canon is definitely leaning into the shallow imagery of the prequels to give them narrative relevance, and also to sell more toys. Ugh.

The novel's style is mostly fine, and certainly more than apt for, you know, a Star Wars novel. It drags in places and there is maybe one too many set pieces about Thrawn's military genius, but Zahn can at least write sentences and paragraphs that don't make you want to give his editor a hundred noogies, which sets him apart from the Kevin J Andersons of the EU. Each chapter of the book begins with an excerpt from Thrawn's personal journal, which is written like the drat Art of War. I found it a very annoying frame for the story and I wonder why his editor didn't tell him to knock it off and just write the dang story without a needlessly pretentious and amateurish gimmick. The novel ends with Thrawn's promotion to grand admiral and where he meets Darth Vader, which is also annoying in the same way ROTS ended, where everyone is basically in their starting positions for the next installment. The vague threat beyond the galaxy is gonna materialize in some future story and while it won't be the Yuuzhan Vong (of course) I don't expect Disney to introduce anything less stupid than they were.

On the bright side, the novel introduces a new character, Eli Vanto, who is circumscribed decently and gets the most satisfying arc of the novel. He's basically a combination of Pellaeon and Car'das (from Outbound Flight) and accompanies Thrawn throughout the book. Arihnda Pryce, who I guess has a significant role in Star Wars Rebels (which I did not see so correct me if I'm wrong), gets her backstory fleshed out, and the novel does a decent job of making her journey from sympathetic to utterly ruthless mostly interesting to watch (though this is one of the narrative elements that drags a bit, partly because the political maneuvering is so heavy handed and caricatured - at least one of her political enemies is a cartoony mustache-twirler, and most of her dialogue is pretty bad). Thrawn's nemesis in this book is also a decent foil for him, but is kinda wasted, narratively. This is probably not so much Zahn's fault as Disney's, I suspect.

Another thing this book does well is take its time. Unlike the breathless pace of the new movies, this book draws out events and movements and takes place over (estimating here) about seven years. Maybe more. So while parts of it do move a bit slowly at times, that is much preferred to the movies' style of everything happening in an afternoon, because it gives characters and relationships time to breathe and grow. So when Vanto turns down a military promotion because he realizes that his loyalty is to Thrawn, it's much more believable than when Jyn Erso goes from a cynic to the Rebellion's greatest advocate in less than 30 seconds.

There's an interesting thing happening with Thrawn's treatment in this canon. Like a lot of imperials in the Disney EU, he's being humanized and made much more sympathetic than in his original incarnation. I'm sure part of this is due to the fact that he's basically a protagonists in this book, but beyond that he is explicitly positioned as against the more brutal tactics of the Empire in their quest for galactic subjugation. I suppose even Zahn was leaning this way in Outbound Flight but it seems more blatant now, and in a time when actual literal Nazis are praised by the New York Times it seems like a questionable character choice. Disney is already leaning into that in other media though, and I guess Star Wars fans are kind of infamous for that. I'll be interested to see what happens in the new Thrawn book this summer, because his humanizing may be conscious decision by Zahn, with the intention of making the character more purposefully driven by Imperial sympathies over time.

Anyway, Thrawn was decent. It wasn't as good as Heir to the Empire, but it was as good as Outbound Flight, Specter of the Past, or Vision of the Future, and better than anything KJA wrote in the EU.

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My review of Thrawn: Alliances, mostly spoiler-free:

The second of Zahn’s new Thrawn trilogy, Alliances reads like two lesser novels put together to pad page count rather than one coherent novel. This is quite a feat, since the book’s two narratives are intended to mirror each other, but they do so without providing much of a deeper meaning or emotional connection to the events described that they end up feeling more repetitive than anything else. It’s not quite the successor to Thrawn that I hoped for.

Like in Thrawn, Alliances has a structural gimmick. Chapters alternate between a Clone Wars-era story about Anakin and Thrawn (and Padme) infiltrating a Separatist factory and a rebellion-era story about Vader and Thrawn going on a mission for the Empire. Zahn leans more heavily on such compositional devices the older he gets; recall that the prior novel begins each chapter with an excerpt from Thrawn’s private journal, now in the hands of newly-minted ambassador Eli Vanto, retroactively turning the book into a sort of epistolary text. In Thrawn this device felt a bit amateurish, but the problem with Alliances is that the gimmick eventually loses steam. The book switches back and forth between timelines more frequently toward the beginning, while later segments sometimes go three or four chapters before switching. It’s almost as though Zahn himself gets bored of keeping up with the structure he sets out with, and coupled with the fact that neither story is terribly gripping, the structure does not accomplish the chapter-ending cliffhanger suspense it aims to. I noticed that I did not find myself thinking “oh good, back to this story, I’m engaged in what’s about to happen” very often, which is not something you want readers to notice.

The lack of engagement is something I attribute mostly to the character presentation. The biggest problem is Thrawn himself. Of course he’s the Star Wars version of Shelock Holmes, but Alliances makes the same mistake the BBC production of Sherlock makes (and which is detailed very well in Hbomberguy’s video on the topic): confusing unexplained genius for an engaging character. In almost every chapter, Thrawn solves a mystery or predicts his opponents’ actions and reactions. He is consistently shown as thinking several steps ahead of everyone. The problem arises when the readers don't get to go on the journey with him. Our main role is to sit and listen to him explain things, using information we are not presented with until after the fact, giving us little chance at appreciating mystery at all before it is explicated. It is impossible to appreciate deductive reasoning if conclusions are contingent upon information hidden from the audience, so we are reduced to passively ingesting the novel.

Sometimes these miraculous conclusions involve knowledge of the behavior of Star Wars technology and cultures. These things can be convenient fictions and they do a lot of the work of worldbuilding in an in-universe novel like this, but unless we possess intimate knowledge about the droids and materials and peoples involved, Thrawn’s conclusions feel unearned. A balance needs to be struck between feeding us details about the world and creating mysteries that only Thrawn seems to be able to solve, and unfortunately Alliances does not achieve that balance very well. In the original Thrawn trilogy, Thrawn bases many of his conclusions on similarly mysterious data - the psychological character of a species or the time it takes to travel between two docked ships, to name just two that readers could not reasonably be expected to deduce on their own - but the audience is allowed to watch Thrawn make deductions and learn along with him (and our reader stand-in, Pellaeon), lending credence to the fiction that we too could use deductive reasoning with the data given and draw acceptable conclusions. This is a key distinction! We experience deeper engagement and greater pleasure when we get to see something being done rather than being told how it was done. The closest Alliances comes to bringing readers into Thrawn’s deductive thinking is the final space battle, involving Thrawn testing TIE Defenders against a new enemy’s capital ships. So unfortunately Thrawn is presented in a way that neutralizes the primary interesting thing about him.

Thrawn is also a tremendously static character. The two time periods of the novel seem to be about 20 years apart, but he exhibits no dynamism at all between the two stories. He seems to have changed only his uniform. This echoes a similar problem in Thrawn, but there at least Vanto got a chance to grow and mature appreciably, and even Thrawn is shown learning how to interact in the Imperial military and political systems. In Alliances, he’s just Thrawn, genius tactician, no matter the era or context.

Vader and Anakin are also presented oddly, though perhaps more reasonably so. Vader seems to have been Vader for a while, but he acts so much like Anakin pre-Revenge of the Sith that the character seems to have simply dialed up his sense of superiority from 10 to 11. The trouble is, we already saw that happen in Episode 3, so there’s not much new or interesting about either Vader or Anakin in this book. He’s just the same Force-wielding rear end in a top hat with no real depth. Zahn makes motions at giving Vader some jealousy-fueled doubt regarding Thrawn’s loyalties and the Emperor’s faith in the Grand Admiral, but it’s so one-note and Vader’s so flat that by then end, when he finally accepts Thrawn’s position in the Empire and acquiesces to taking battle commands from him, his inner monologue tells us in so many words: “What Thrawn was telling Vader was that he trusted him.” A whole lot of the book is given over to Vader’s distrust of Thrawn (and Anakin’s trepidation about Thrawn in the past) but it ends up being banal and tedious, especially with the heavy-handed dialogue laying out everything for us.

Padme is a non-character. She’s pretty much a less-interesting version of Leia on Honoghr. There is nothing evocative, noteworthy, or compelling about her. I’m incredibly shocked at this because Zahn gave us Mara Jade and an active and forward-thinking Leia, not to mention Winter, H’sishi, and a Pryce with more depth than we’d seen before. These aren’t the deepest characters in Star Wars but at least they have memorable traits. Padme’s chapters in this book are actually more interesting than everyone else's, but that's only due to getting a break from pouting Anakin, one-note Vader, and tactical magician Thrawn. It ends up throwing into sharp relief what a non-entity she is. I guess I can’t blame Zahn entirely since the character barely ranks above furniture in the prequels, but Padme in Alliances is shockingly boring. There’s no there there.

This leads to one of the more annoying things about Alliances and this series in general: these books are saturated in Clone Wars-era tech and gadgets. Battle droids of different types play significant roles in the narrative, as does one of Padme’s handmaidens and to a lesser extent vulture droids. These things are so pivotal in the text that it’s practically branding. In addition to reminding us that these are Star Wars novels, as if we could forget, it feels more like the novel is a vehicle for showcasing these things rather than a story that takes place in a universe that contains them. I strongly suspect this is the result of pressure from Disney on the NEU authors. One of the narratives even takes place primarily on Batuu, the location of the new Star Wars Disneyland experience set to open next year. So the inclusion of all the branded items as pivotal plot devices feels more craven and venal than the earnest sense of worldbuilding in Zahn’s earlier novels.

In classic Zahn form, Alliances includes a few twists. The secret Separatist factory is producing droids and body armor that can’t be defeated by lightsabers (using cortosis), and the Grysk use Force-sensitive Chiss children to dominate hyperlanes in the Unknown Regions (but the children lose their powers as they mature). Both of these twists end up being underwhelming. Partially that’s the fault of the universe, since Zahn could not functionally include a plot device of greater impact without it affecting other texts and movies, but that doesn’t alleviate the sense of triviality when Anakin immediately figures out a way to defeat the droids and Thrawn defeats the Grysk without even a sense of tension that the Grysk ever had the upper hand.

The novel picks up toward the end. The best part is definitely the scene of the 501st First Legion storming a ship to rescue some prisoners. That scene evoked Zahn at his best, with well-defined action and characters we could follow as they try to achieve a goal. There are a few other well done scenes and a few easter eggs pointing to the original Thrawn trilogy, which are fun to catch. But I didn’t find it as good as Thrawn, and it never coalesces into something that justifies either its structure or the poor characterization.

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I'm kind of in shock at how awful Aftermath is. I couldn't even get 100 pages into it before putting it down, and I'm definitely not going to pick up any of Wendig's other novels, NEU-related or not. Here's just a sampling of things that were bad about the book:

• Really awful writing. Way worse than you'd expect, even from licensed genre fiction. I go into these books expecting to cut them some slack but the writing here is completely without merit or charm.
  
• Dialogue that feels like it was generated by a Markov chain that's been instructed to assume that readers are allergic to anything that isn't explicitly explained. Nothing anyone says feels remotely real.
  
• The primary antagonist is utterly non-threatening. She is feared by her subordinates because her subordinates are buffoons, not because she is competent or compelling. She is not feared by anyone else.
  
• Mr. Bones is there in an obviously cheap tie-in to the prequels in order to reinforce the brand and sell more toys, as if we could somehow forget we're reading a star wars novel.
  
• The defecting Imperial agent is also secretly a drunk martial arts expert a la James Bond.
  
• Two characters play a game that is a star wars version of Settlers of Catan.
  
• The Imperials are humanized not only through plotting but by Rebel Hero Wedge Antilles literally explaining to the readers that "the Imperials are just like us"

You know how people describe Tommy Wiseau's The Room as a movie that feels like it was made by someone who has never seen a movie? That's what Aftermath reads like. Wendig had previously worked on scripts, which comes across in his inability to use anything but the present tense and sentences longer than 140 characters. I'd heard that the book caused an uproar with MRA idiots because some of the characters are gay, but I didn't even get to those parts of the book because it was so bad. Wookieepedia says he wrote the book in 45 days, and it shows.

And what is with these books taking time to explicitly advance the cause of humanizing the space Nazis? In an era of right-wing resurgence, do we really need milquetoast justifications of the ones who were just following orders on the Death Star, like we got in Lost Stars, or Wedge going out of his way to distinguish between the pilots of TIEs he shoots down and the people giving the pilots orders on their comms? This stuff isn't the basis of a carefully considered critique of the political dialectic, it's just a cheap attempt to add complexity to characters and situations that ends up justifying fascism. Thanks, Chuck, we really needed that.

Wendig himself responded to critiques of his writing on his blog:

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As for my voice: I can’t do much about that. I’m me. My writing is my writing. I took a long time to find my voice and if it’s not your thing, I respect that. (That said, it also doesn’t make it “bad” writing, as some have suggested. It’s just not what you prefer, which is entirely okay.)

to which I say,

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Lost Stars is my favorite example of how shallow thinking results in accidentally supporting fascism. The premise of the novel is Romeo and Juliet in space, set against the backdrop of the original trilogy. Two kids, who grow up together and of course fall in love, who are both talented Imperially-trained fighters, end up on opposite sides of the galactic civil war. Ciena remains in the Imperial ranks, climbing the Navy's ladder from cadet to captain of a star destroyer; meanwhile, Thane defects to the rebellion and becomes a hotshot starfighter pilot. They fight for their respective causes, meeting each other in battle as well as in the bedroom, as their love never dies even as they support mutually exclusive ideologies.

But how can a young adult novel have a protagonist that supports fascism, and does this get called out? Claudia Gray attempts to thread this needle by giving Ciena an acute sense of honor. Her sense of honor is so great that she considers any promise she has made to be binding for life. So when she signs up for the Imperial academy as a child, she goes all-in. Thane and other friends of hers defect as the Empire does things like "institute slavery" and "blow up planets," but she along with other characters can excuse that, and indeed she does, right in the text, explicitly stating that if there is any chance the Empire might be a force for good, she is duty bound to preserve it. She supports the space nazis right up to the last page of the novel.

What makes this insidious is that the novel justifies her outlook. A simple reading might point out that, militarily, she loses in the end - the Empire has fallen, the Death Stars were destroyed, Ciena herself is a captured POW. She got her comeuppance, didn't she? And isn't the point of the novel that even ostensibly good people can end up supporting morally reprehensible things? Such a reading would be a base analysis, missing critical things about the text and characters. Per the premise of the conflict, Ciena is defined by her honor, resulting in - whoops! - unquestioningly supporting fascist ideology. Not only does this not get called out, Thane himself agrees that if she were to go back on her word, she would be morally compromised. Moreover, she would be a sufficiently different person than the person Thane fell in love with. Stated another way, the rebel pilot acknowledges that his fascist beloved is morally obligated to continue supporting, commanding, and enacting fascism, because her support hinges on her fundamental character. Ciena isn't "good" by any kind of measure, because Claudia Gray has relied on the most facile attempt at character complexity to create this conflict.

To accept the setting Lost Stars creates is to tacitly accept that the Empire's military machine consists of primarily "good" people, who are tricked and led astray by powerful evil leaders. This is of course a repulsive and degenerate understanding of political power, and the fact that the rehabilitation of the Empire coincides with a resurgence of right wing movements in real life is doubly concerning. There are other annoyances in the book, such as the fact that scenes constantly take place "just offscreen" of scenes in the original trilogy. But the book's real problem is that its attempt to create characters with depth results in a facile conflict that requires characters to justify and excuse space nazis.

Arcsquad12 posted:

Traviss did not get on well with fans and coined the term "Talifans" to refer to her detractors, so for a while there was a big flame war on the Jedi Council Forums until Traviss quit posting there.

Gripweed posted:

Gripweed posted:

Presumably you have to start building speed from a fairly significant distance in order to actually be at lightspeed

Gripweed posted:

Yeah when they jump to lightspeed there's a bit of time where you see the stars stretching out before they reach lightspeed. It's only like a second, but if you're moving so fast that the stars are stretching out then presumably you are moving a very long distance in that time since your perspective on the location of the stars is changing.

Gripweed posted:

I don't know who that is. I thought we were talking about a ship ramming another ship at lightspeed. That happens in one of the Star Wars movies, right?

Anshu posted:

That was in the Hand of Thrawn duology, where a group of Fel clones had been planted as sleeper agents on a remote agricultural world, and then when their wakeup signal came they decided to defect to the New Republic because they loved farming too much.

ninjahedgehog posted:

Droid sentience/civil rights has always been a weird third rail that the vast majority of Star Wars media is really reluctant to touch. Like yeah, many droids are clearly creative thinkers with a sense of self-actualization yet are also owned property, but it's also explicitly *not* slavery because we also see plenty of that in Star Wars and it's clearly supposed to be an abhorrent institution that no heroic character would ever dream of partaking in.

So you wind up with edgelord fan theories about how all droids are clearly an oppressed underclass and every organic character who doesn't immediately advocate for their liberation are irredeemably evil, which, like, is obviously not the case? There's just never going to be a piece of Star Wars media where the galaxy turns on Luke Skywalker in favor of the *true* hero, the champion of the droid proletariat. The closest we really get is Lando's droid friend in Solo, but even that is kinda brushed off as a semi-comical aside.

I don't really know what Lucasfilm/Disney's official behind-the-scenes stance on it is, but I imagine it's something like "yeah we know it's weird, but acknowledging it would be a seismic shift in how literally this entire universe works so it's just gonna be this weird grey area of the setting." A lot of authors and sourcebook writers certainly tried to circle this square in Legends, but even the most common explanation of "they get smarter unless you mind-wipe them every now and then" still raises a lot more ethical questions than it answers.

I totally get an urge to deconstruct and examine the issues of AI sentience and there's plenty of pop sci-fi that does exactly that, but I think anyone looking for those themes in Star Wars is just gonna wind up really disappointed.

Chairman Capone posted:

Speaking of the Thrawn Trilogy:

https://twitter.com/DelReyStarWars/status/1408062545651322880