Lit A Cynical Walk Through the NJO

So, I’ve finished Conquest. As I said before, this book is breathlessly paced and also quite short compared to the others in the series thus far, just under three hundred pages for the paperback. So, I’ll add these thoughts to the ones I’ve already posted, most of which will be dealing with characterization and plot rather than writing style.

First: I understand now why Anakin/Tahiri has such a fanbase, and why both characters are so beloved by fans of this series. Their relationship and scenes together are, by far, the best written romance I’ve seen in a Star Wars book. Better than Han/Leia, better than Luke/various women Mara included, better than Wedge/Iella, better than Tycho/Winter, better than Corran/Mirax, better than Daala/Tarkin, better than Mandalorians/every woman in sight, and better than Palpatine/dark side.

They are a believable, emotional couple, a teenage romance that doesn’t come off as precocious or sappy in the least. They are childhood friends rediscovering each other for the first time, drawn together by the Force and pulled apart by the Yuuzhan Vong. Anakin’s quest to rescue her is more than just a “save the girl” story, it’s a character journey of the first order, the likes of which hasn’t really been seen in such a pure form since A New Hope. But Anakin isn’t Luke, he isn’t a naïve farmboy seeing the galaxy for the first time. By this point, he’s an experienced, war-bitten Jedi. His journey isn’t to become a hero, it’s to reassure himself that he is one. That not everyone he tries to save will die.

Tahiri changes a lot over a short time. When we first meet her, she’s a talkative fourteen year-old, upset at being left behind on Yavin 4 while her best friend goes to war. By the end, she’s quiet, upset, with darkness to her and an unknown quality to her personality. She’s been irreparably changed by her experienced, scarred, shaped into something both less and more than what she used to be. She describes it best herself, like two halves of a person grafted together, unsure of who she is anymore. The only thing keeping her together and sane is Anakin.

Together, they are a team, a pair of Jedi bonded by experience and by youth, but they are also more than that. They rely on each other for their strength, Tahiri to keep herself from giving in to her Vong-implanted anger, and Anakin to keep himself focused on what he can do when his sense of insecurity and impotence threatens to pull him toward despair or darkness. That’s why they work so great as a couple, they’re both imperfect, flawed people who help to meet each other in those imperfections and make each other better.

Most of the rest of the characters in this book are pretty good as well, but not all of them. Luke comes off pretty well as the harried leader of a faction under a huge amount of pressure from both sides of a gigantic war. Mara actually comes off pretty well, a lot more like her old self, when she isn’t half-jokingly complaining about her pregnancy’s effects on her body. That’s just unnecessarily annoying, Keyes, stop it. Jaina and Jacen aren’t in the book much, but they come off as angry and cynical, respectively. It seems that the lessons that Jacen learned in BP didn’t really change him at all. Disappointing. Talon Karrde gets a few good scenes where he proves once again that, no matter how much he might try to deny it, he really is a good man who keeps his word, even to the point where he sacrifices ships and men to save a quartet of Jedi, simply because he told Luke he would. Ikrit only gets a few scenes, but he comes off as extremely wise and thoughtful, it’s saddening when he dies. But it’s also a passing-the-torch moment, Anakin’s childhood teacher is gone, signifying his entrance into adulthood.

The new characters, namely, the Yuuzhan Vong we get to know, are all pretty great. Vaa Rapuung, the warrior betrayed and shamed by his lover, is probably the most interesting portrayal of a Yuuzhan Vong we’ve gotten thus far. His continued devotion to his gods, even in the face of harsh and cruel circumstances that make it seem to everyone else that he has lost their favor, gives him a fanatical air that borders on the insanity his former peers accuse him of. He is driven to revenge, driven to restore himself in the eyes of his gods, to restore his honor. I like him. He gave us a look into the inner workings of a Yuuzhan Vong mind that we haven’t really gotten to this point, on the roots of their fanaticism; Anakin even points this out. And his death was worthy of a warrior. He reminds me of characters I’ve seen in Japanese samurai movies, obsessed with revenge and restoring themselves to their honor, going to their death for allies they might otherwise be persuaded to kill. Complex and entertaining. He spits in the face of the idea that the Yuuzhan Vong are one-dimensional villains.

Nen Yim is the other one we get a good look at, she provides us with our first real look at the third of the main Yuuzhan Vong castes, not counting the Shamed Ones, the shapers. The shapers aren’t scientists, the fundamental scientific method is heresy to them; they’re more like technicians or repairmen, designed to build and maintain, but not to innovate unless specifically ordered to by the Supreme Overlord. Nen Yim isn’t a particularly good example, she’s heretical and, while she might still believe in their gods to some degree, she doesn’t fear them. Her concern is to the advancement of knowledge and of her race. She doesn’t entertain me as much as Vaa Rapuung does, but she intrigues me. I have no idea where her character goes from here, so please don’t spoil it for me in the thread.

The plot itself, eh, it’s pretty simple. That’s not really the draw here, but what is there works well enough. The only thing that confused me was that the timeline of events was all over the place. There were narrative notes about how much time had passed, often talking in days, that don’t really seem to line up. I assume that everything’s taking place simultaneously, despite different POVs being spread across chapters. It made things a bit confusing to follow, and after a point I just started ignoring any mentions of time greater than minutes, it made things less confusing.

Also, Anakin’s treatment of the Peace Brigade pilot seems a bit… excessive, to me. He treats the man worse than he treats any of the Yuuzhan Vong, short of letting the two Jedi kids torture him with insects. The only point at which he starts to trust him is when he has Qorl (a weird call back, btw) to hold a gun to his head. I know the guy is Peace Brigade and all, but you can use the Force to sense if he’s lying. There’s no reason to treat him like a criminal if you know he won’t betray you. And the two kids, Valin and the Melodie girl, they’re supposed to be eleven and ten, right? It seems to vary just how mature they are depending on the scene. Sometimes they’re calm and competent, and other times they’re acting like six year olds. Small complaints, nothing too major or derailing, but still, it bugged me.

And really, there’s not all that much else to say. This is a short novel with a limited scope and a few, well-defined characters rather than an ensemble, the first since Hero’s Trial. And just like Hero’s Trial, this is a terrifically written work, with deep characters and a brisk pace that kept my interest throughout, despite a few speedbumps. I’ll give my rating after I finish the next part of the duology, probably by the end of the week.

 

Worse, Sannah is actually 13, I believe. Makes her treatment of the pilot really, really immature, even in context. And you're right, Anakin was a bit excessive to the pilot, but if you think about it, these guys may be worse than the Vong, because the Vong are fighting Jedi for religious purposes, believing they're in the right. The Brigadiers? They're doing it for a cheap payoff. Betraying their own galaxy for a few credits. Just scummy. As to Qorl, I had one really confusing moment: at the end, when Anakin asks the pilot how Qorl got him to shape up, or something, the pilot said something to the effect of "Qorl and I...came to an agreement" and he smiled at Qorl, and Anakin got really embarrassed. What was this meant to imply, exactly?

 

Are they doing it for money or for survival? The Yuuzhan Vong kinda rolled over the New Republic and got all the way to the core pretty much unimpeded, then offered sanctuary to collaborators that turned over Jedi.

 

To be fair, I totally believe Anakin would feel worse about the Peace Brigade than the Vong.

I tend to agree.

Surrender is a lifetime of slavery, horror, forced religious conversion, pain worship, and sentient sacrifice.

How bad are they? SAL SOLO considers them monsters.

 

Of course he would: they're traitors.

Maybe both. Some of them truly did believe that it was the only way to survive, but the pilot in this book did seem to imply that he was only in it for the creds.

 

The war is far from over after all and the Peace Brigade is the group assisting the Vong.

 

This thread is reaffirming for me that the New Jedi Order series is the pinnacle of the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

 

Yeah after the fall of the Core, the "war is lost, better start collaborating" argument makes sense, before, not so much

 

One of my favorite parts of, it's got to be either Onslaught or Ruin, was hearing how the Yuuzhan Vong define "peace": submission. They view the Peace Brigade as even lower infidels than the Jeedai and soldiers they fight against. They don't even bother using them as slaves; in Conquest, they sacrifice pretty much every Peace Brigadier they come across. Despite everything the Peace Brigade is willing to do in an attempt to appease the Yuuzhan Vong, they're doing nothing but making their overall situation worse.

 

Thrackan is the one that alerted the Yuuzhan Vong to the praxeum on Yavin 4, and he expected the Yuuzhan Vong to install him as Diktat of the Corellia system and leave it alone in exchange -- instead they make him president of the Peace Brigade as a puppet leader. The fact that he fired Centerpoint wasn't something that they were ignorant about, either, so it's not as if Thrackan was particularly bright...

 

The Yuuzhan Vong were also quite aware that it was an insult too, which was unusually clever of them.

 

Well part of that properly is do to him being a racist bigot, but yeah. The Brigade is complicated, but then "collaboration" always is and I fully trust that a few really feel that it is the only thing they can really do or at least justify it to themselves that way.

 

Very true.

In Ylesia, the actual business is the fact Sal Solo more or less said the Peace Brigade was nothing more than a collection of slavers, pirates, spice-dealers, some combination of the three, and terrorists. We do see more nuanced collaboration, however, that involves the Aqualish trying to turn over their Jedi Knight protector and Dorsk 82's death.

To potentially Godwin the thread, RL collaboration included many people terrified of the Nazis. It also included people who were eager to jump on the band wagon to commit atrocities and betray their nation. Often, I kid you not, surprising and disturbing (as much as one can a sociopath lunatic) Hitler.

 

I guess I forgot this entire plotline - Thrackan was the head of the Peace Brigade? How did he go from that to being the Corellian leader in LOTF? That would mean his collaboration was out in the open. (Plus if memory serves, his supporters tended to be the human supremacists, which presumably would make them hate the Vong even more than the average Joe). Did they ever explain how he bounces back?

To get even more nuanced, a lot of the second category didn't see it as "betraying their nation" so much as rebuilding it in a way more consistent with their values. Prejudice against Jews, Gypsies, etc wasn't exactly unknown in many of the conquered countries, nor was the belief that democracy failed and it was time to try something different, nor was fear that communism would be that "something different." There were quite a few people who saw the occupation as an opportunity to do something about these things.

Sorry to indulge the sidenote, I just happen to be reading a book on Vichy at the moment... that and I can see how in the GFFA, anti-Jedi feelings would play the same role, with anyone who had a grudge against them (Thrackan being one of them) seizing the opportunity to join the bad guys.

 

LOTF has a revisionist history of what happened in the Yuuzhan Vong War. Troy Denning probably didn't read Ylesia. He sure didn't read Traitor.

 

I suppose that I'm biased in that Keyes was able to actually write an Elder Scrolls novel without butchering the lore and cosmology of the series, but his NJO contributions are quite excellent. It's really a shame he never came back to write more Star Wars novels after The Final Prophecy.

 

It's a shame that the good authors that wrote for the NJO wanted nothing to do with the post-NJO.

Edit: I re-read the last third of Traitor again and realized something new!


I'm not sure if I should wait...

 

In Sal's case, he never willingly joined the Peace Brigade. The Vong informed him he was their leader and that he had no choice in the matter. When this was done, Sal went from being the Hero of Corellia to a pariah overnight. All of his assets were frozen and they burned down his house or something equally humorous. Sal Solo, once dumped on Ylesia, proceeded to steal a big briefcase of credits and tried to escape right before Jaina lead the Jedi Strike Team to capture all of the Peace Brigade's leaders.

 

The NJO is a passing of the torch series for the authors as well as the characters, in a way. Members of the old guard like Stackpole, Tyers and Allston are present, some of them putting their last works into the series, along with newcomers like Stover, Denning, Luceno, Keyes, Sean Williams and Salvatore getting their first shot in the universe.

So (dun, dun, dun dun dun!), where are they now?

Keyes only lasted until the end of the series and then went elsewhere. And all the Anakin/Tahiri fans cried wet, wet tears.

Salvatore was given the AotC novel, likely just to finish out his contract, and then went back to his own works.

Stover hung out for a while, but has been MIA ever since Mindor, to everyone's loss.

Luceno, thankfully, has stuck around, but now owns the Prequel era.

Elaine Cunningham's only other novel, Blood Oath, was canned because problems she went through prevented her from writing it.

Sean Williams is stuck writing the video game novels.

William Dix, like Keyes, left at the end of the series, but I'm not sure people miss him quite as much.

The only one who has continued to write in the era they were brought on for originally is Troy Denning.

 

Spoiler

"What you call the dark side is the raw, unrestrained Force itself: you call the dark side what you find when you give yourself over wholly to the Force. To be a Jedi is to control your passion... but Jedi control limits your power. Greatness -- true greatness of any kind -- requires the surrender of control. Passion that is guided, not walled away. Leave your limits behind."

 

Yeah... sorry but that series is not all that consistent to begin with.

 

Oh, that poor book's spine.

As to what you posted...

Spoiler

Isn't that pretty much Luke "discovered" at the end of Crucible. Denning really didn't understand Traitor, did he?

 

Que?

 

Is that Solomon Kane with a lighstaber?