Dark Age of the... Everyone

After the Yuuzhan Vong are done with and the New Jedi Order becomes the Normal Jedi Order, will there be a Dark Age?

A Time when whole worlds will be cut off from one another, with only faint memories to connect them? Leia and Han and everyone tried to solve that by "connecting the dots" and going around the galaxy, but will this work? Or will there be a dark age. The Roman Empire deterioated with the help of outside invaders known as the Huns. Could the Republic deteriorate after with the help of the outside invaders known as the Vong?

 

I think it's very likely. The major trade routes would be operational, but the widespread damage to both the communications and travel capabilities of the gffa at large would cripple intersystem contact. I've seen it expressed elsewhere that the Jedi could become like rangers or marshalls from the Old West in this scenario, and i dig it a lot.

 

Me three!

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I made an RPG set during this time with Pirates and stuff running amok, and now that I got your support I think the idea makes more and more sense.

Jedi Rangers, ooh, ncie sounding.

 

possibly quite a few systems wouldn't like Jedi Rangers meddling in their affairs... like setting up little dictatorships and attacking their helpless neighbors.

 

I suspect there have already been several dark ages in that galaxy, but I have nothing to back that up.

 

Sorry, but this sounds just a bit too much like what's already been done many times in print and media-SF over the years to work for my tastes.

From John Campbell's short story "All" (which was rewritten by Heinlein on order as "Sixth Column") to stuff like Fritz Leiber's "Gather Darkness" and Asimov's Foundation short story about the techno-priests, to A Canticle For Leibowitz; to efforts greater (J. Michael Straczynski's homage to Canticle on Babylon 5, "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars") and lesser (the series Andromeda) in the media realm.

For a Star Wars series? Maybe. But you can bet dollars to donuts that any effort in that vein'll get gigged hard by professionals in the field.

 

Interesting idea. I'm sure that there could be several stories on the rebuilding of the galaxy, expecially after all the devistation in the galaxy. As for a Dark Age... I doubt it. They're doing fine in wartime conditions, but who knows?

 

As someone who reads way too much from all sorts of genres and spent eight years studying literature, I've reached a point where I see the idea of source and influence as so mingled and muddled that it makes no sense to cry that something is 'ripped off' from another source, unless it's just blatantly plagiarized. A concept like this, in capable hands, could very well forge it's own identity without treading on the giant genre feet of leiber and asimov.

 

Heck, there's an argument that the GFFA has been in a state of systems collapse since before TPM... everything we've seen - Palpatine, Luke, Thrawn, the NR, the NJO - has been rage against the dying of the light... on a scale that makes Asimov look small...

That said, I find Asimov's Foundation stuff as close to plagarism as you can get and still be readable... I mean, 'Bel Riose'... c'mon...

It's okay when you're doing a Liebowitz (ie deliberately using a cyclical framework to inflect a commentary on the present day)... and as to the real Dark Ages, Alan Massie's Evening of the World trilogy is shaping up okay (and transcending plagarism), but Ian Pears' The Dream of Scipio, though interesting as literature, was just disappointingly misguided in terms of the reality...

Of course, the whole point of any mythic matter is the idea that the past was 'better'... even Homer was looking back on a golden age... SW, by its elegantly simple retrospective framework, implies a later GFFA which remembers the heroes of the Galactic Civil war in just such terms...

"Jug-jug, Commander"

- The Imperial Ewok

 

We've seen widespread war create massive dark ages in SW before...check out Jedi vs. Sith.

However, there's no real evidence of this occuring after the Clone Wars end (although perhaps we will see some after Ep III comes out), which was just as long a war, and arguably, just as destructive.

 

Following the Clone Wars, the galaxy had the Empire to hold it together. The GFFA is a weak remnant of a failed and corrupt democratic experiment that was damaged enough from within that it would have been tenuous without the Vong invasion. Plus, instead of having unabashed marketed heroes like Darth Vader, the average GFFA citizen doesn't know what to think of the Jedi, because they hear so many differing opinions on them that their heads spin. Imagine trying to reestablish a central government in the US without telephones, satellites, tv, interstates, etc. Oh, and D.C. were destroyed. Assuming a Galactic Alliance victory in TUF, that's what the good guys are faced with.

 

Hey, nobody disses Foundation. It is the best science fiction series out there and if anything, GL ripped off Asimov, IE Trantor---Coruscant.

As for the post Vong invasion galaxy, I think things will be fairly normal in major galactic hubs like the Core and Mon Calamari, but out in the more remote parts of the Rim, there is lots of anarchy and dictatorship springing up from small systems, due to the breakdown of the Holonet and such. I actually wrote an outline for a fan fiction series that had the crew of a then NR frigate traveling thruout these areas and re-establishing contact. Oh, and this was long before the FH trilogy.

 

I rather suspect (as if there's a zeitgeist or any Jungian sense to be found in the uneven matter of SW!) that all the war is actually a symptom of the long-term crisis, not its cause... everything we've seen from TPM onwards is a reflection of an underlying unravelling, reflected by the 'imbalince' the Jedi feel in the Force...

That said, do we want a single galactic superpower?

- The Imperial Ewok

 

I don't think so. First, you have to wipe out all possible modes of contact. And while wiping out communications via holonet or something similar may be possible, it becomes more difficult to wipe out all faster than light technology. You also need to wipe out all those who know how to build hyperdrives.

 

Actually, if you've read The Final Prophesy, you might recant some of those thoughts...

As for an upcoming 'dark age', I think that it would make logical and interesting sense. A wonderful setting for new stories, if absolutely nothing else.

And to echo T McE, why would we want just some new galactic superpower?

 

Maybe you should read Stephen Kings The Stand for another take on a dark age. Flagg was a good Sith analog.