Lit The Legendary 181st Imperial Discussion Group: Allegiance!

Conversely, some of Zahn's explanations are complete cheats in order to hold up the plot. The one that always stood out in my mind is a scene in "Specter of the Past" where Luke finds himself stuck in some sort of metal pirate trap, and he is forced to levitate and detonate a powerpak to free himself. I believe this was set up so that Luke could be injured and Mara could rescue him and they would have to rely on each other. The reason he doesn't bend the bars back with the Force? Because it would take too much effort, or something along those lines. This is in the same book where Luke ponders about using the Force to rip a starfighter out of the sky. There's no logical reason behind him using an overly complicated method to escape. It's only written that way to set up a rescue scene later on.

Similar examples can be seen with Thrawn, the most cited example being Thrawn "deducing" that the attack on Tangrene was a feint, and the real target was actually Bilbringi. How does Thrawn figure this out? Simply because he's already been set up as a genius and because the plot demands it. In the same vein, we have Thrawn looking at artwork of species and then using that to figure out the tactics and tendencies of an entire species. Sure, that's a way for Zahn to show us that Thrawn is brilliant, but the way he does this is never ever explained, and basically serves to tell us that Thrawn is a genius because...he's a genius. I mean, he appreciates art to such a degree that he can read minds. Now that's some feat.

This is basically just a roundabout way to say that most authors have some trouble with railroading the plot that they want to tell, and Zahn doesn't escape doing it as well. Luckily Zahn is less of an offender in this regard, but the problem is that when it does happen it's all the more glaring because Zahn tries to gloss over it by making the characters ignore or shy away from other options within their own internal monologues.

 

Because it would take too long, more than anything else. And Luke has already decided, at the start of the book, to Use The Force Less - which is why he's in makeup, rather than an illusion.

 

Right, but within the context of using the Force less, he makes a big deal about how using the Force in grandiose or unnecessary ways is bad, as he does when he ponders tearing apart the starfighter. In this scene, he is in mortal danger, and the "too long" part is exactly what I'm talking about with Zahn glossing over or misrepresenting other options within a character's inner monologue. The only reason that freeing himself from metal bars will take too long is because Zahn writes it to be that way.

 

I think that at some point in TTT Han and Leia spend a lot of time discussing their next move, and just when they are finishing their plans they remember something that doesn't fit and start again.

If Thrawn from TTT ever got out and attacked the heroes not written by Zahn he'd conquer the galaxy with a teaspoon and a piece of duct tape.

 

There's always going to be some reason somewhere that the plot happens the way it happens. The only reason that anything happens is because the author writes it that way. The virtue of Zahn's writing is that he tries to be convincing. That it would take too long to rearrange strong, solid steel bars with Force pressure isn't so unbelievable as to be misrepresentation. Yeah, sure, he could choose to write that it wouldn't take too long, but that's not a definite fact either way where he's creating an obvious inconsistency (unlike, say, writers who choose to have Jedi easily blowing past every defense and then struggle to create situations in which they don't win by the third chapter). It's not like Zahn ignores it, or says it wouldn't be possible. He acknowledges what you're thinking he should do, admits it would be possible, but says that Luke decides to do it this way because he thinks it will be quicker and time is of the essence. Zahn's not perfect, but he tries and he's way better at it than the vast majority of authors, and I'll take providing an explanation of why the character doesn't do the alternative that you could maybe possibly say isn't as strong as it could be over just not explaining or creating contradictions and hoping the reader is too dumb to notice.

 

I am not sure I agree with Havac
In Allegiance, Mara seems to have mad skills when it comes to the force, and there is a scene that's almost a copy of the Luke scene mentioned above in Spector.
While Obi-Wan is on Force Ghost speed dial for Luke that he is pretty much a Ghost Ex-machine

Let's also not forget the TTT where on a planet with force repelling lizards blot out the force, both Luke and Mara can be sensed through the force

few questions for the book

• Do you think the introduction of the new Stormtrooper characters and there motivation work?
• Introducing Disra, does it work as a Prequel to Hand of Thrawn?
• How well do the movie characters fit into the book, and are they nesscary to the plot?
• Is the development of the film characters a good bridge for ANH and ESB
• Does Obi-wan on ghost speed dial for Luke work with what we know in ANH and ESB?
• Does the actual plot work?
• Are the villians engaging enough as foes for our hero's ?
• Do the various strands weave well enough together to be coherent for the story.
• As Mara is the main character, what do you feel is learned about her and does it actually add/reveal anything more to the character ?

 

The powerpack detonation thing is actually a fun reference to the old WEG Rebel Specforce handbook, where the powerpack bomb trick was described. Zahn likes to add WEG tidbits to his works.
I also prefer Zahn's take on the force. Far more "knowledge and defense" and less "bend the bars and rip star destroyers from the sky"

 

You make Starkiller sad.

 

It would not also surprise me if Vader see himself in her - Young, cocky, with an idealistic picture of Palpatine and thinks there is a special relationship between them while he is actually manipulating you: am I describing Mara or Anakin?

I would not say that. For example Bond only goes after bad people but he is a rather grey character many times.

 

Yes but Bond does not work for the Villain in The films or books.
If Bond was working for Smersh or Spector but only went after bad people and (somehow) always ended up helping the good guys (even Zahn acknowledged this point to me) then it would be comparable

 

TFU and especially the sequel make ME sad.

Except for Kota and Juno. And Bel Iblis. They are cool.

When reading the Zahn novels, it feels like he focuses on the OT version of the force, as opposed to the version shown by KJA in the JAT, seen somewhat in the PT, and more in the Clone Wars series. In his books, the force is a source of guidance, and a tool for the characters, not a motivation and solution for the plot. I think there is a scene in Allegience where Zahn is showing it pretty clearly- Obi-Wan is trying to get Luke to sense the force, and use it to help him escape, but Luke wants the easy answer and Obi-Wan gets annoyed and tells him the door code. Feels like Zahn is mocking those who expect the Force to be the easy answer button.
Just like the scene in HoT where the one Senator is having a hissy fit at the idea of Thrawn returning, despite never having faced him. Takes a bit of wind out of the Thrawn worship- he is a threat, but at the same time some people are blowing it way out of proportion.

 

Of course he's trying to be convincing, but he has to be convincing within his own framework. You can't have Luke ponder ripping a starfighter out of the sky and then in the same book having him believe that bending metal bars back will take too long. Especially when the gross misuse of power is seen as a negative when its used just for its own sake. This is a scenario in which using the Force in a "powerful" way is both useful and will save his life. There's no real reason for him to not do it except to serve the plot.

I do appreciate Zahn for at least putting in some effort in writing his characters pondering different options and deciding on a course of action. I'm sure it's tedious work, especially when he knows ultimately what they will decide. It's solely for the benefit of the reader, and most of the time it works. I'm simply saying that when he does railroad the plot, this feature just accentuates what he's doing, because he's forced to convince the reader that certain more plausible actions are unreasonable. See: several of the Cobra books for a similar thing. With super soldiers that have a wealth of tools for every imaginable scenario, Zahn is sometimes forced to do backflips to make his characters choose less desirable solutions.

 

Hav, comparing things to the Denningverse won't help. It can't. I mean, what does "Zahn writes better plots than Denning" even mean?

I know that Zahn is smarter than other authors, and I agree that dumb plotting is dumb. But I can't really stand the other alternative here, either. Hitting the audience over the head with how smart you were when you constructed the scene doesn't do it for me. It's the Tom Clancy style of writing military procedure manuals for novels, and Zahn's always been so hard-SF (as if) and military-SF that to take notes from the master in military/intelligence fiction was probably in his DNA somehow. And there's a difference between someone larger-than-life like Thrawn getting his Holmes moments in which he himself lifts the veil of his genius and some people being observed third-person narrator style while doing their jobs. I will always remember Clancy for writing entertainment gold like that one guy spending quite a few pages creating a decent gun silencer with just the right amount of grease on it and then staking out eating a candy bar of a certain brand because those are the best if you're doing exactly that kind of stake out; or that one time he described how logs were loaded onto a ship and how that ship travelled a bit just so that the ship can lose a few logs 600 pages in, make a submarine nervous and help in almost starting WW3. Could this be intriguing. It could. But most times it isn't. Most times it's someone boring telling about their day and starting with getting up, washing and the exact contents of their breakfast. Gaah, I'm ranting again.

I should have taken notes to be able to exactly tell which Allegiance scene rubbed me the wrong way, but it was something about Mara or maybe the HoJ boys, like "She did that. She could have done that which seems easier if you spend a lot of time thinking about it, but if you spend an even longer amount of thinking about it and factor in some mad random factor, you'd done what was written." And then there's "smart stuff" like having Leia find out that working as a waitress is hard work. Yeah, she wouldn't have guessed that. And we need to know exactly what a waitress' shift looks like and how Leia proceeded through the day to see that she learned something about something. Like, waitresses might have it harder than friggin' mythical characters fighting a mythical war with mythical rules. Because you can back that up with research, I guess, and mythical is stupid or something.

What's up with all the deus ex machina in this book, anyway? You have a perfect ship with endless supplies just happen to stand around and getting out unnoticed; you have Ben interact in a way we haven't really seen before for a Force Ghost; and to top it off, we get "I happened to play at the palace" with a helping of "that's because I'm his nephew" in what doesn't even seem like a lame parody of "everyone's related in Star Wars".

I'm trying to tackle your questions one at a time, this one first - because I can easily say that I disagree about Mara being the main character. She is, if anything, a main character in a book that combines three storylines. All in all, Han's plot doesn't really take off, especially since it ends up slaved to the HoJ. Him finding his allegiance doesn't really come from what happens in this book, but in the end appears to be tied to Leia, but there's no romance in this book so we wouldn't really know how Leia is keeping Han around. It's more about Chewie being talked about as if he were signing up in the end, which might line up with reasons based on the character's history, but doesn't line up with him not really going out of his way for the Rebellion in Episodes 5 and 6.

Mara's plot isn't about her developing as a character; it's a simple adventure in the context she is in in the time that she's the Emperor's Hand. She doesn't change her attitude. She sees bad people and she thinks working for the Emperor is a good thing to do. End of. She's not the main character. Now, the HoJ would be much more interesting in that regard, but unfortunately Zahn doesn't do nearly enough with them. They're there because "Stormtrooper Avengers with Endless Supplies" is a cool thing to do, so they get their page time. But as fast as the desertion moves, so slow are they in developing a sense of how far they could take their little A-Team van. "Just this one good deed and then we're finished" doesn't work because they have no plan for after they've finished. They keep their supership instead of scattering up and going underground. Thinking about this too hard makes it all pretty weird, and I wish this were about some Mereel-style justice wackos who have been indoctrinated with "the right thing" so much that they don't know how to perform in regular life anymore, or how to use their brain in freedom. But it's just five guys who dress up in shiny armour they love, and they do good stuff because it's entirely plausible that stormtroopers are both extremely skilled-and-trained elite soldiers (instead of mooks who can't shoot straight) and starry-eyed idealists who didn't get the memo that if your superiour wants a civilian fried, you shoot until you got one shot out straight.

Sorry for ranting again. What's up with me tonight?

 

Yeah it always struck me as strange that this ship they have wasn't their undoing somehow. Like I would assume all this military grade hardware would need more fuel, more ammunition, just a lot of expensive stuff that could only be acquired on the black market, which the HoJ doesn't seem to have any knowledge of at all, and really no means by which to pay for it either.

 

That's pretty much how Choices of One begins - they can't replace the stuff they're using up - their armor is battered to the limit of usability - and a mere 3 months after Allegiance, they're planning what they think will be their last mission.

 

That sounds like Bruce Wayne using up his knee and losing all interest in fighting crime after roughly eight months on the job.

 

Well their problem is that they have no money with which to replace their stuff, so they're running on fumes basically. They kinda forgot to plan ahead for this sort of thing.

 

As they should have, since extremely focused foot soldiers (I don't mean this in the infantry kind of sense, but rather as "little people") shouldn't be logistics masterminds.

OK, I wanted to pick up on this one. What does everyone think about the names? For me, only Brightwater really works as a kind of Skywalker-inspired nounfest. La Rone really gets me out of the SW universe. I could see a guy named La Rone being a 501st costume veteran in real life, but in universe... is he a Twi'lek or something?

That being said, is there a progression of Zahn's creativity with names? Is it a progression of our reception of names in general, since the really iconic people came when there was nothing to measure them against?

And Vialco - are there any jokes in these names that I don't get? Now I'm really curious.

 

No joke-aside from the fact Quiller sounds like the nickname for a hedgehog.

 

I liked Saberan Marcross and Daric LaRone as names TBH.

 

They don't do a lot for me, I don't know why. And I wonder if stuff like "Devin Felth" or "Dev Sibwarra" only was better because, you know, those were the days.

 

DAVIN Felth

How about Haber Trell and Maranne Darmic?

Drend Navett?

 

Mindar, Mindor...

None of the others ring a bell, unfortunately.

 

First two are from Side Trip, last one is from HOT.

 

And that's it - TTT had names like Thrawn (first name "Grand Admiral"), Pellaeon (no first name for him yet, I think), Mara Jade, Joruus C'Baoth, Jaina & Jacen, Winter (no... other part of the name), Talon Karrde, Borsk Fey'lya, then the entire Noghri culture stuff... I feel like a lot of this held up really well.

But with Jorj Car'das, Disra, Flim (for crying our load) and I-don't-remember-the-third-Imperial's-name-oh-wait-Major-Tierce-wasn't-it, it already started becoming unmemorable. These days, a lot of this stuff feels like what it had always been but never seemed to be - just syllables glued together. Well, things like Mara Jade or Jacen were obviously telling names with some thought behind them.