Books Star Wars: Inferno Squad

I know...but I still had hopes for those crazy kids.

 

Got problems with Yoda and other Jedi Masters singing off on Dooku's covert assassination and enlisting a Force-User well known to more then dabble in the Dark side turned bounty hunter to do it. Like I get that the Prequel Jedi were meant to hypocrites but this is past the point of utter and complete blindness to their own actions then I like to see.

 

Asajj Ventress was a fan favourite? My god.

Her dying was just about the only part of the book I liked.

 

They were at war and desperate.

 

While it does go against what the Jedi stand for, and their principles, that kind of action is always welcome for me in Star Wars. It's just realistic, and sensible. Obviously Star Wars is primarily for a younger audience and hence the whole "good guys don't kill the bad guys" thing is suitable in that sense, it really is ridiculously absurd reasoning were you to actually think about it.
That's just me though, I can understand why people would be upset by it given it goes against previously established characterisation.

 

The closing act of this book made it very worthwhile it to me, though I felt like I was being dragged kicking and screaming through the previous parts, driven simply by my excitement for the game.

Spoiler

I didn't care too much for the espionage assignments and spent most of the book trying to like the characters. For me, there's only so much Imperial propaganda you can recite to yourself, and only so much of your humanity you can repress, before I want to take hold of your fictional shoulders and shake you like a rag doll. But even though I wasn't as enamored with the characters themselves, the character dynamics were enjoyable throughout, and with the depths uncovered in the final chapters of this book I'm now even more excited to see the squad in BFII.

Stray thoughts:

Spoiler

1. I think it's interesting that Bokk, having seen the "futility" of the partisan cause, wanted to defect to the Empire ("the side that will win"). This despite having fought with Saw since the beginning and despite the destruction of the Death Star, which left the Empire reeling and the Rebellion's ranks swelling. I haven't read Rebel Rising so I'm probably missing a lot re: how the partisans perceived the Alliance, but I would have thought relations between them changed significantly after the strike on the Death Star. That's something that wasn't very clear to me in this book.

2. I wouldn't put it past Garrick Versio to have lied to Iden about telling Zeehay the truth before she died. Otherwise, he might have an emotionally compromised agent on his hands. But who knows.

3. It's funny that they never gave the seeker droid a name when it's going to continue to have an important role in the game. A name could help players feel that they're interacting with the Inferno Squad equivalent of Artoo or Beebee-Ate.

 

Exactly, that's what makes it so interesting. We'll never know if he was telling the truth or not, and the other question is, does it really matter?

 

Be interesting if they let Lux's character just kind of ride off into the sunset (Iden had the blaster on stun when she shot him) or if they bring him into any future stories. Wonder how well he would fit in the main Star Wars comic? Marvel would probably be free to use him now.

 

Speaking as someone whose favorite Star Wars EU stories are often about the sympathetic Imperials, I had a slightly different take on this.

The distinction between Imperial protagonists isn't a division between "secret good guys" and "terrible people". It has more to do with how they relate to the most unpalatable aspects of the Empire. The typical approach to making an Imperial character that the audience can sympathize with is to detach them from the things that delineate the Empire as the prime force of evil in the Star Wars universe. It varies a bit from character to character, but generally speaking you can spot an Imperial protagonist based on the following attributes:

- They opposed the Death Star on the grounds that it was strategically unsound and/or morally unconscionable, and feel its loss would have been cause for celebration if it hadn't taken so many good men and women with it to the grave.
- They hate slavery, and look forward to the day when the Empire can be rid of it.
- They're skeptical, or even downright contemptuous, of the cult of personality around the Emperor, and think the Empire would be much better off if Palpatine was replaced.
- They put a lot of emphasis on their personal code of honor.
- They remain loyal to the Empire despite knowing the evil it does, because "the galaxy needs order more than liberty" and "my country, right or wrong".

Inferno Squad is interesting because it busts out of that familiar formula. Iden Versio is an Imperial protagonist who is unabashedly pro-Death Star, pro-Palpatine (even pro-Darth Vader!), totally buys in to the narrative that the oppression of the Empire is justified by the greater good it does for the galaxy, and is ultimately willing to get her hands extremely dirty to uphold it. And yet... I don't think she's altogether a terrible person. The question of whether complicity in an evil cause by necessity obviates one's ability to be a 'good person' struck me as one of the most powerfully resonant themes in the novel. It's why it was such a clever and fascinating choice to make the Partisans the main antagonists.

 

They all seemed like pretty solid people to me. Misguided and perhaps a bit ignorant of the people of the wider galaxy but I wouldn't call them "terrible" people or "evil". Sort of just brainwashed by propaganda.

I wasn't paying that much attention though tbf

 

A good barometer for Iden might be when she began her undercover operation and actually verbalized the logic of what made the Empire so unforgivable. I.e., a million voluntary personnel died on the Death Star, but billions of peaceful civilians and children died on Alderaan. In her loyalty to the Empire, Iden is secretly asking herself in this moment, "Is the safer, better galaxy promised by the Empire worth the lives of that many innocent people?" She says yes, because she apparently doesn't know that this promise is a bunch of baloney. But there's a greater question that I don't think she sees, and which someone like Ciena does: Is anything worth the lives of that many innocent people? If her answer to this second question is yes (which it is at least implicitly), then that tips her over into Bad on my scale.

Iden reminds me of Krennic in thinking that terror is an acceptable road to peace--you have to start somewhere. (Though I doubt she'd put it so callously and at least she'd mean the bit about peace.) Speaking of whom, Krennic is an example of someone who is terrible through and through. Like, at least Inferno Squad were "solid people", as EmperorHorus says, in the sense that they cared about others. Krennic... nope.

 

Personally, besides Gideon killing everyone at the end, I can't think of one bad thing they did.


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They, along with those guys Hask shot allowed for hundreds of children to die in a bombing, actively helped make it happen in fact. Though unlike those guys he shot, Hask resolved to do something to prevent it happening again after the fact.

 

I got my copy of Inferno Squad about a week ago, and devoured it in a couple of nights of speed-reading. Since then I've been digesting it, and re-reading parts of it, and I've come to think that it is a very solid entry in the Star Wars canon - provided that one comes at it with the right expectations.

This novel is a great literal example of the old saying that you can't judge a book by its cover. If you tried to predict the story of Inferno Squad based solely on the cover art, the epigraph, and the brilliant first chapter, then you would expect the main plot to be focussed on Iden Versio, Imperial Badass, going on a Kill Bill style Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the filthy freedom lovers who blew up the Death Star. That it's not anything like that is a major indication that this book has Prequel Syndrome - it's about events that happen years before the main character properly begins her Antiheroine's Journey. Iden won't receive her Call to Adventure until Endor, so for the sake of avoiding redundancy there's a lot of things that Christie Golden can't do much more than foreshadow here.

Even so, I found it an arresting story - sometimes thought-provoking, other times gut-punchingly emotional - and even knowing that this is just the appetiser, and the main course is waiting in the single player campaign of Battlefront 2, it was enough to make the Versios two of my favourite characters to come out of the new era of Star Wars.

 

A really engaging book in my opinion. I did enjoy dark disciple but felt that the author was contained . That book very much so played out like episodes of clone wars.

To me inferno squad was a very readable and enjoyable book, I wanted to read that next chapter, especially towards the end when the mentors identity was going to be revealed. (Initially the way it was all worded suggested it was bail Organa, but I had to keep telling myself that would be stupid! The actual revel generated a fanboy squeal;

My only criticism is that I felt it could have been longer, I could have done with other dreamers mission with the squad. Aside from that top 5 of the new canon adult novels for me

 

Good read though I was hoping for a bit more in the pew pew department...

Hopefully we get some good character bits from Inferno in the game- be interesting to see Iden's reaction to hearing about the construction of a second Death Star and then it's destruction.

(Side note: were there any weird paragraph breaks in the print version? I read it on kindle and there were a bunch of breaks that felt quite out of place)

 

Not that I recall (although I haven't re-read it lately).

 

Final chapters were really epic... Overall book was good, there were some boring and too long parts in the middle but since Seyn's mission it got tensed...
Too bad they haven't explored too much what Del and Iden thought about Lux and Del's willingness to save Piikov..

 

So read it, what did I make of it? The biggest problem, one which it never manages to overcome, is the book, as a whole, doesn't work.

Generally, if you do a story from either an anti-hero, so Punisher, or villain's viewpoint, you need something to set them against that is more monstrous than they are. The problem here is this book gives us a much more extreme version of the Imperial viewpoint. Compared to the likes of Fel or Ciena or Jahan Cross, Iden is a far, far more fervant believer in the Empire, up to and including being an enthusiastic supporter of the Death Star, defending it at the Battle of Yavin. This hasn't been done before, while it's an interesting experiment, one that I think fails, the bigger reason for not doing it is it places Iden so far along the axis that anyone or anything she is set in opposition will be less of a monster. In terms of generating a conflicted attitude in the reader, it's quite successful, but does it in turn make for a good read? No, not for me. Oh the book certainly tries to humanise Iden from the initial portrait but it never, ever feels genuine. That the Dreamers are a bunch of redshirts, despite the best attempts of the story to flesh them out and make their various deaths matter, doesn't help either. Oh and it really dragged in the middle.

So this was a book I had to pretty much force myself to read. Fortunately it was only just over 300 pages, had it been 400 it would have probably been too much. Though, the plot didn't have the fuel for 400 pages either.

The one area where the book is a total success is the aesthetic presentation - the cover, the internal pages - it all works very well to enhance it quite a bit.

The problem remains, however, that it's a book about four psychopathic bastards with no redeeming characteristics whatsoever - clearly that was also the aim, but it's one that can't work for me.

The other weird aspect was the discordance that ran through the book, Iden's all for war and battle but only so long as she wins. When she loses? Like at Yavin? That's just cheating terrorism. Similarly the whole outrage over being strip searched stood out as a strange thing to be outraged over given everything else Iden's enthused for. As for the operation involving mass kiddie killing, it felt a quite manipulative move but guess what, Iden was fine with it. As an exercise in how far you can push the reader before they walk away in disgust, it just about works but only in that respect.

It's going to be interesting to see what people make of the BF2 campaign story, as the promise of the First Order is to simply be a more brutal Empire, which will fit this lot just fine.

I have to admit that, if this or when this goes out of print and the hardback goes up in value, then it'll probably get sold.

 

I really don't think that was the intent of this book and I don't understand where people are getting that from aside from their own anti-Empire biases. I found Iden to be a very sympathetic character, and aside from Gideon killing everyone at the end, I really didn't see any action from anyone on the team that could arguably qualify as "psychopathic bastard" behavior.



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