Lit Reading NJO...Again

Probably didn't help that these worlds, which as Core Worlds were insanely rich, didn't have sizable defence forces of their own and used them instead of stringing up two of the fifth fleets the New Republic had.

If NJO was written with the idea that several systems actually had their own ships - heck Gyndine was a shipbuilding world - then perhaps the NR wouldn't have been strung up defending worlds in the Core or Colonies. Those systems should've been able to defend themselves, after all, they did become sizable enough to start their own war against the Galactic Alliance more then a decade later (even if they were built up afterwards).

 

Calling out the Jedi on being surreptitious and ambitious is, like, the right call? Leia threatens a coup, and Luke actually does one.

 

Neither of those things happens in the NJO.

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Luke's coup didn't - but Leia hinting to Borsk that if he messes up, she'll be the one taking over from him, was in the Dark Tide duology.

 

Luke did corrupt the political process to get Cal Omas elected. Cal Omas then merged the heads of the new government with the new Jedi Council.

 

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Well, she's Padmé's daughter.

As to Rodan, we know he has a very straight-laced streak, and that he's able to run a strong government on Commenor, where he builds up a large and efficient military, but keeps them under tight civilian control (and by upgrading old Imperial hulls, he also presumably gets big ships much cheaper and quicker). We also know he wouldn't give the Jedi any official standing independent of their position in the military. But we also know, and I think that this is significant, that he's able to work with people outside his own tightly-run administration through the medium of alliances. And we also know that even though he hates anything to do with smuggling, he gets deeply offended by guys in black cloaks with lightsabers arbitrarily vaping Rebel veterans, which says better things about him than Luke Skywalker ever grasps.

So Fyor Rodan opposes unaccountable uniformed forces and executioners with laser-swords, and what he hates most of all is a conjunction of the two. Does his political position start to seem more familiar all of a sudden?

And his belief in a strong, civilian government is also a belief in democracy. Which is a huge part of why he feels betrayed by the Jedi and by Omas. Is he proud, as everyone thinks, or just highly principled?

The big questions are - would Rodan actually be able to hold together the Senate and the NRDF as a unified organization, and would he change the way that the fight against the YV is conducted?

Rodan is not (so far as we know) a military man, so the question of how he'd actually perform in practice is hard to answer. Politically, his setup on Commenor is shown as strongly presidential with the "uniformed" arm held under close oversight through ministerial subordinates; but if he moved to act this way as chief of state, he might cause considerable tension with the NRDF and member worlds. Would he lose major systems and elements of the fleet? Would they be able to work with him as allies after seceding? Can we infer an insistence on integrating irregulars into the military, and an efficiency drive in the shipyards, and if so, how would that play? And how would the Jedi fit in - would they have to join the NRDF? Would Rodan allow them to act as privateers? Or would they have to form a separate group outside the NR, perhaps under Hapan authority or even through Booster's Hutt contacts?

Best case - Rodan unifies the NR, fires Sovv and Traest, puts Garm and A'baht in charge, and beats the Vong by the end of Destiny's Way. Worst case, the NR collapses because Sovv and Traest and Luke refuse to serve under a legitimate democratically-elected government.

Most amusing case - Sovv, Scaur, Traest, Luke and Jacen all secede out of sheer spite and get their rontos handed to them. Rodan, Daala, Phennir, A'baht, and some random Bothans then beat the YV anyway.

@Vialco - I think you're underestimating the seriousness of the military threat if Borsk "interfered" (Wedge is involved in this; Traest seems to be the primary commander on the battle-plane, so his position does command weight - he may already be commanding the Third Fleet - and he has sent assets into the Unknown Regions, in collusion with Drayson, Scaur and the Chiss, which adds further emphasis to the seriousness of his attitude; Garm, according to the NJOSB, is also one of Traest's backers, as is Keyan Farlander). Ackbar is on Mon Cal (in effect, defending the Mon Cal pocket and the shipyard there) and has full confidence in Sovv.

Borsk did want to take the fight to the enemy, as his comments and actions make clear. A'baht was the only senior NR commander who seems to have shared his stance, but he was simply mocked for agreeing with Borsk. What options does he have - reactivate Lando and Han?

I mean, yes, of course, he has that option, but that would be a very different NJO.

Borsk is grandstanding because the Jedi are politically toxic. Rodan, as he remarks himself, should vote for Corellia for pragmatic reasons, which would swing the vote that way, but he votes, in essence, against Karrde and the Jedi, based on the points Borsk exposes.

And A'baht makes the same point earlier in the novel. Where he emphasises that the obvious place to start a counterpunch is Bothawui.

Borsk is on your side in this, and that is why he's playing the Jedi card in a bid to get the NRDF to do the smart thing.

I think you're perhaps overestimating both the ease of obtaining and maintaining a roundhousing capital-ship battlegroup, and the desirability of big-ship fleets as defensive measures in the first place. For that sort of role, Golan platforms, shields and starfighters make more sense, especially after the experience of the Rebellion showed what X-wings and A-wings could do to big pointy space battleships.

Among the major players, only the Bothans seem to have a modern capital-ship navy of their own, because they have an independent military tradition and a large sector of space to protect, and a snooty remark by Brand suggests they paid for their BACs using the credits the NRDF had paid them to build their ones; perhaps Corellia has begun to build up a fleet as well - the Stridents in the same novel could be read as CDF vessels - but if so, their government has generously placed everything significant under NRDF control and left the sector undefended.

Commenor presumably only acquires ImpStars after the NJO. Systems like Fondor and Kuat are part of a setup which is geared towards producing NRDF ships - they rely on credits from Coruscant to pay their workers and their owners, and would presumably dismiss the idea of building up their own navy as an inefficiency, since the NRDF will prioritise protecting them as a first principle.

Interesting to see how well all this fits together, though - both as background detail and as narrative.

To conclude, a couple of questions for everyone - firstly, is there anywhere on the page that a clear connection is made between the NR's alienation of the smuggler/fringer community (spearheaded by Kyp, Ganner and their cohorts) and the rise of the Peace Brigade (which basically means a lot of smugglers ally with the people who're shooting at the people shooting them)...?

Secondly, is there confirmation in the Caedus novels of the real identity of the "Hapan" who nudged Rodan into backing Corellia? I think I remember something in a later book, but I'm not entirely sure...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

When in doubt, always Blame Borsk™️

 

Speaking of various scenarios-what if the Vong had managed to successfully assassinate Cal Omas?

 

How did Luke corrupt the political process?

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He had Lando and Talon Karrde try to find dirt on rodan(IIRC).

 

Yeah, Luke had Senators blackmailed to get Cal Omas elected. Long live the Galactic Federation of Free Alliances!

 

This is a few pages late, but speaking of Stackpole's contributions to building the EU, especially the development of the post-OT/pre-TTT era, one of the biggest things he set in stone, the liberation of Coruscant in Wedge's Gamble, actually contradicted two of the earlier works that discussed it.

In Heir to the Empire, right within the first few pages, Luke reflects on how the New Republic only just agreed to move its capitol to Coruscant, and only after a fierce debate over it. Obviously both the timing and context were changed for X-wing.

And I have to confess that while I don't remember the specifics, I do recall that the Dark Empire Sourcebook gives a very different backdrop to the liberation of Coruscant (as well as the events with Pestage immediately after Endor, which the X-wing comic very heavily rewrites).

 

They did. Lando and Talon did. Luke knew nothing about it and he certainly didn't ask them to do it. They offered to help Cal Omas win. When they intimated that their "help" wouldn't be entirely above-board, Luke indicated his disapproval. That being said, every one of the Senators persuaded by Karrde and Calrissian to vote for Cal Omas instead of Fyor Rodan were incredibly corrupt. If anyone deserves to be blackmailed, it's scum like this:

Rodan's supporters were cowardly scumbags who would have tried to appease the Vong to the very end to save their own skins. In a fair Galaxy not at war, none of them would have been permitted to retain their Senate seats and most of them would have been in prison. I agree that blackmailing them to vote for Cal Omas was immoral. But, given the dire straits the war was in at the time, I don't consider it to be very high on the immorality scale. It certainly doesn't rise anywhere near the level of an actual coup.

 

I really liked that, it was nice to see the good guys show some balls for once after how pathetically inactive/reactive they were for most of the NJO. Aaron Allston's duology felt like the beginning of the turn-around where the Jedi and friends started showing some real initiative and put the "waah morality we can't attack waah" on the back burner and got **** done (without going full-on and using Alpha-red or turning to the dark side)

 

What is everyone's thoughts on Jaina acting on the Yun-Harla thing?
Should she have taken to the role to influence the Shamed One's?
Should she have done more? Less? Etc.

 

I think it was more a propaganda thing to frighten and anger the Vong.

And she wasn't really involved in the shame one revolt-could she have used her persona to help probably but that wasn't her way of doing things.

I kind of wish Jacen had more embraced the Yun-Shuno avatar he was given.

 

One of the things I loathe the most about pop culture's portrayal of politics is the notion that "good" politicians are supposed to play by Marquis of Queensbury rules, and if they don't, they're selling out and going to the dark side and getting horrid politics all over their suits.

(I freaking love the movie Lincoln for bucking that trend and ending up as an ode to pragmatism in politics. Yes, abolishing slavery was totally worth the bribes and lies that it took to get the amendment passed. It's not like you're going to make politics any less corrupt by not bribing the scumbags; all that would change is who they were selling their votes to).

 

Exactly. Politics can be messy, but that doesn't make it inherently 'evil' like the NJO seems to suggest.

Just because some of Fyor's supporters were corrupt, does it follow that he himself is corrupt? Not necessarily. And why should the Chief of State give preferential treatment to a 100-odd Jedi? That never made sense. Why would such a small group of mystics be granted such a stake in a government of trillions?

I was okay with the psychological warfare aspect of Jaina's operation, but she definitely should have taken a bigger role with the Shamed Ones. Her role was limited too much to military ops...she should have been able to pursue the development of a bigger insurrection.

 

@Son of a Bith - the irony is that while the Jedi act all put out, the Galaxy remembers Borsk Fey'lya as a hero anyway...

@Dr. Steve Brule - not sure where you're going with this. The NR being in control of Coruscant at an earlier date was actually introducd in The Courtship of Princess Leia (1994) rather than Wedge's Gamble (1996). Stackpole simply ran with that. I seem to recall some fans used to have a theory that the Empire briefly regained Coruscant in the largely-unwritten-about gap between CoPL and HttE, but I can't remember the exact details of what the sourcebooks said (though I'll add that there are also similar problems in the period after the Thrawn trilogy - Voren's claim that the Chimaera participated in Shadow Hand at Duro is starkly contradicted by an extract from Pellaeon's log in one of the sourcebooks)...

@Vialco - I feel obliged to point out that everyone who is at Mon Cal ran away from Coruscant (up to and including the Myrkr strike team, bizarrely enough); following the course of events in any detail is complicated by the fact that the collapse of the NRDF takes place in fragments across several novels, and there may not have been any opportunity to properly coordinate the narrative; but by joining up the fragments, I'm inclined to infer that Lando used his spurious general's status to commandeer the Record Time to get the Skycrawler to safey, which wouldn't really be any different than what the senators do; and to use the most detailed example in DW, the case of the Pride of Honour is an interesting one - this small capital ship was badly damaged when the accompanying fighters switched to support a shuttle carrying the Sullustan Senator, but although the captain of the Pride clearly blames the Senator, this could have been caused by the captain refusing to follow the fighters and form up on the shuttle, and an additional complexity is added by the fact that the Sullustan Senator ought to be Niuk Niuv, so the shuttle in question ought to be the Advisory Council's transport - the rather cramped seat of what's left of the rump of the NR executive, whose capture by the YV would be a serious blow - the question of responsibility and right-action here is not as straightforward as a superficial reading suggests. Every capital ship like the Alamania which bugged out when a fleeing senator got aboard must ultimately have been directed to do so by the bridge crew finding a pretext to abandon their position (and in the context of this losing battle, that might even be the smart and honourable thing to do). And if you want to talk about people who bailed on the NRDF at Coruscant, the most egregious example is Sien Sovv, who is notably absent throughout the entire battle.

You'll find that many of the truths we cling to, and all that jazz.

But you know who didn't run? Borsk.

@Ackbar's Fishsticks @SiouxFan - politics are indeed messy, but the point that strikes me most clearly here is that Luke's actions are completely misguided. We can show that his hostility to both Borsk and Rodan is irrational, naive and misplaced... which humanises him, but doesn't say much for his decisions...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Did that sourcebook specifically say Pellaeon had the Chimaera at the time? If he took command of a different ship after His Last Command, the Chimaera could have participated without him. We know he doesn't have it in Darksaber at least.

 

@Iron_lord I'm pretty sure, yeah - I vaguely remember a quote from Pellaeon along the lines of "The Chimaera has only one master".

Darksaber is a puzzle - but two things might be relevant; the novel mentions that legitimist Imperials took Daala's last ISD off her as a parts cache to repair other ships, and vaguely endorsed her as their envoy to the Deep Core to get her to go away; and we know from I, Jedi that Terradoc has ISDs, as he gives one to Tavira - he just prefers to focus his resources on keeping the VSD fleet in the front line. If Voren is wrong ( ), then the Chimaera could either be under refit at Yaga Minor, or parked defensively somewhere in Terradoc's territory...?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

Apparently, it's the New Essential Chronology that details the loss of the Chimaera to the New Republic (and its eventual recapture):

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Chimaera/Legends

New Republic capture
Soon after, he was summoned to the Deep Core to serve the clone of Palpatine. During Operation Shadow Hand, Pellaeon was forced to abandon the Chimaera in the midst of the capture of Duro, losing most of his senior staff in the process and nearly dying himself. Her burnt hulk was taken in by the New Republic.[12]

The Chimaera, now in New Republic hands, was nearly scrapped on several occasions. Finally, some years later, slicers working for the Empire created a false disassembly order for the ship, sending it to the shipyards of Gravlex Med, former homeworld of the Anx. Upon its arrival, its skeleton crew was overcome by Imperial commandos, who then blasted their way through New Republic pickets. Admiral Ackbarhimself commanded the forces that attempted to recapture the Chimaera, but Pellaeon, now an Admiral in command of the entire Imperial Starfleet, nonetheless recovered his flagship.[12] Pellaeon assigned Captain Ardiff to command the ship.[4]

so "has only one master" may simply mean "has only one Imperial master" - unless we want to retcon away its capture.

 

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the original version of the Essential Chronology has this too - that's what I mean by "Voren's claim", which I realise now that I didn't make properly clear - this is presented as "in-universe" text being "written by" the fictional character of Voren Na'al...

Well, I would tend to rate Voren less reliable than Pelly's log. But mostly, I'm just pointing out the continuity details rather than anything else...

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I have to admit that I have read only the minimal amount of NJO (the series was finished before I heard about it and it just did not seem like my cop of tea) but going by what I have read of pre-NJO material, the discussions going on about NJO and what I have read about NJO so do it feel to me that the series... (I'm not certain suffers is the right word but I can't come up with any other so...) suffers from an to big need to have the heroes as the underdogs.

F.ex.: Not only do the main-characters have to fight the Vong invaders but also internal conflicts with the government who seem unwilling to even send out scouts to see if there is anything to all those planets going silent; there is suddenly a conflict within the Jedi order that don't really fit with what have seen of the pre-NJO; Jacon suddenly forget all the non-warrior Jedi among Luke's order so he can be the underdog Jedi who don't want to be a warrior and try to find another way; etc.