Lit Legends Clone Wars: a completist read-through

Right now I'm trying to read every written bit of Legends fiction about the Clone Wars, in timeline order. (I'll also read some of the comics, watch the microseries and TCW and some video game playthroughs, but I'm less completist there.) In this thread, I'm going to list what I've read and add some commentary, and I'm looking forward to your takes and especially pointers on what I might have missed.

(Context: I'm stitching together all the stories I have into a massive text file for a future full read-through of the entire Legends timeline. That's why I'm focusing on stories that can be represented in plain text, rather than images etc.)

So here we go. I'll start before the Clone Wars proper, with the

Separatist Crisis
The earliest text that belongs to this period is the short story Reputation by Ari Marmell, introducing Cad Bane in 23 BBY. It starts out fittingly dark in a hard-boiled way, with Cad Bane thinking War's coming as he stands in the rain. He then proceeds to take a bounty and defeats a fake Jedi in the process.

The first edition of the HoloNet News website, #45, is also dated to (the end of) 23 BBY. I'm inserting HNN articles where they contribute to the overall story, provide interesting perspectives and/or foreshadow important things - and where it's just plain funny. The perfect article to go with Reputation is, of course, "Duros Dispute Encyclopedia". No better way to start a Legends book than with a Duros joke.

I've noted before how the lead-up to AotC is rather sparse compared to what we got for TPM. Before The Approaching Storm, there is only the six-part Star Wars: Adventures series by Jude Watson… and Jason Fry's Hondo Ohnaka's Not-So-Big Score, which AFAICT has no internal markers to put it at any particular point in the timeline but is supposedly set before AotC. It's also so egregiously silly as to be almost unbearable. It has dog emetics and bridesmaids'-dresses jealousies and drunk hijinks and pirate talk. I'm putting it between the darker parts of the Adventures series for comic relief.

Because while the Adventures series is clearly Young Readers material and quite silly in places too, it does have its grim moments. Parts 1-3 (Hunt the Sun Runner, The Cavern of Screaming Skulls and The Hostage Princess) have Anakin and Obi-Wan on adventures around Fondor and its wilderness moon Nallastia, with Mace Windu, Kit Fisto and Bultar Swan joining them in the third book. The second trilogy - Jango Fett vs. the Razor Eaters, The Shape-Shifter Strikes and The Warlords of Balmorra - introduces Jango and Boba Fett and Zam Wesell, with Cradossk, Bossk and Aurra Sing in supporting roles. Being Adventures books (sold with a game book where you can play a part of the adventure yourself), they feature lots of random encounters (robots! spiders! temple traps! more robots! SNAKES ON A PLANE - literally: Mace Windu defeats a jungle snake in the cockpit of a spaceship). Being YR stories, they have cringeworthy moments like a mother and her daughter fighting over who gets to marry Obi-Wan, or (in the 6th book) Aurra Sing asking a Hutt to give her singing lessons. But there is also a long, intense nightmare from Anakin, about his mother and his life as a slave, and a whole plotline where Jango Fett procures a brainless clone child body from Kamino to convince Cradossk that Boba is dead. Dooku and Sidious make the occasional background appearance, along with Wat Tambor, abstractly scheming for something involving Fondor that's never really clarified.

After his nightmare scene, Anakin talks to Bultar Swan, who tells him that "Jedi don't have nightmares" (so when Anakin says that line in AotC, he's presumably quoting Swan). I think this is the perfect place to put the first Baby Ludi article - a nightmare for the Jedi if there ever was one.

Other highlights from HoloNet News #45-55 (i.e. the ones before AotC; #56 has an obituary for Padme followed by a correction that she survived the landing pad bombing after all) include a whole series of articles about the secession of Ando and Sy Myrth and its consequences, the three articles detailing Zozridor Slayke’s vigilante attack on the Federation before Geonosis (and Nejaa Halcyon’s ill-fated attempt to rein him in), and of course the painfully realistic Baby Ludi saga. Reading them in between lighter stuff like the Adventures books helps preserve the feeling of a big galaxy in which a lot is happening, and give you a real sense of how the crisis is ramping up.

And then there’s Ansion. I tried to read through The Approaching Storm twice and gave up twice, both times somewhere in the steppes. (The singing and dancing didn’t help.) This time I actually got through it, with some little help from the Attack of the Clones novelization, which has quite a few scenes that run concurrent with the Ansion mission.

The prologe to R.A. Salvatore’s Episode II novelization is set on the way to Ansion – Anakin has a nightmare about his mother, from which Obi-Wan wakes him by calling “Ansion! Anakin, get up here!” After that, it has lots of scenes that are set before the beginning of the movie, narrating Shmi Skywalker’s kidnapping and the search for her up to after Cliegg loses his legs, as well as some Padme scenes with her family and in the Queen’s palace, where Panaka nags her about security.

Shot through with those scenes, plus some appropriate HNN articles (like the one about Naboo’s spice miners clogging the ports, or about the sabotage attempt on the Yag’dhul senator’s landing platform), the long slog through Ansion’s steppes actually became bearable. I still think the book could do with some serious eliminative editing to get rid of some rather pointless padding, but ymmv.

After Ansion and as the events of the movie start happening, I interspersed the first few chapters from Boba Fett: The Fight to Survive. This is an odd book – the vocabulary is rather restricted and some things are repeated and explained again and again, but that's what you'd expect from a Young Readers book. But beyond that, it is actually quite inventive in how it portrays young Boba’s gradual disillusionment. The scenes where he tries to save the sea-mice instead of feeding them to his pet eel, only for them to get eaten by other creatures right away – or later, on the moons of Bogden, where he keeps thinking he’s making friends but gets betrayed at every turn – do a great job of walking the line between kid-friendly entertainment and presaging the hard man Fett will become.

Besides The Fight to Survive, the only stories I could find that take place concurrently with AotC before Geonosis are the video games Jedi Starfighter and one snippet from Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns. Jedi Starfighter has Adi Gallia fighting the Trade Federation alongside the pirate Nym, then heading to Geonosis when Obi-Wan calls for help to fight the space battle there. Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns has a transmission from Count Dooku to Sev’Rance Tann ordering her to stand by for his escape from Geonosis, placing the previous mission somewhere before or during AotC.

On Geonosis itself, things heat up source-wise. We have The Fight to Survive and the AotC novelization intersecting, sometimes telling the same story from different points of view (e.g. Boba discovers Obi-Wan making the transmission, and attracts the attention of the Geonosian guards by signaling them with reflected sunlight). We have Chris Cassidy’s Insider short story “Precipice”, which is a lengthy retelling of Dooku’s conversation with the captive Obi-Wan, inserting lots and lots and lots of internal monologue. We have Jedi Starfighter with plenty of action in orbit before, during and after the troop insertion.

And there’s more. The prologue to Republic Commando: Hard Contact is set during the troop insertion, where Darman loses his original squad. The first scene of Mike W. Barr’s Insider short story “Death in the Catacombs” is very similar, except that it’s told from the perspective of the otherwise-unknown Jedi Jyl Somtay. The Essential Guide to Warfare has another first-person action account vignette called “Clone Trooper Falls in a Hole” that’s set during the battle proper. The Fight to Survive, again, gives us heartbreaking scenes of Boba staggering through the bloody arena looking for his father’s body, tricking a garbage disposal droid into carrying it outside and burying it.

And more: The Clone Wars: Wild Space starts with Yoda and Mace Windu looking on as clone troopers load up the bodies of dead Jedi; on a similar note, Hard Contact gives us Darman waiting for his team at the extraction site and eventually giving up. Wild Space then goes on to fill some gaps in Attack of the Clones and its novelization by showing Padme trying to see the wounded Anakin on Coruscant and being denied entry, Yoda talking to Palpatine right after his return from Geonosis, Obi-Wan dealing with the fallout and being told to get Padme away from Anakin, then learning about Shmi’s death and reluctantly agreeing to let Anakin escort Padme back to Naboo.

Oh, and then there’s the prologue to Shatterpoint, featuring Mace’s reflections on what he should have done differently at Geonosis. (He should have killed Dooku, sacrificing himself.) We have one final Newsblink announcing that the HNN channel has been reserved for military use “for the Duration of the Emergency”. All of which fits before the final scene in Attack of the Clones: Anakin’s and Padme’s wedding on Naboo.

What a ride!

One final observation: There is a weird time jump in Attack of the Clones for which I couldn't find any source at all: the time between Yoda's departure from Coruscant after the emergency powers vote and his arrival at Geonosis. Both the film and the novelization make it look like barely any time passes between those events - certainly not enough for Yoda to get to Kamino, take charge of the Clone Army, ship out with all the ships and weapons etc. We can assume that some time passed between the sentencing to death of the prisoners and their attempted execution in the arena, but the novelization sure doesn’t make it look like it does, going from jury to execution in what is basically one continuous scene. How has no one written a vignette or comic or whatever showing Yoda’s travels during that time? Has this been addressed in Canon? I’m wondering.

Anyway, that’s it for my read-through of the Separatist Crisis. Have I missed anything? Am I wrong somewhere? I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

For reference, the complete list of things I read for this part of the timeline:
- Ari Marmell, "Reputation" (2012)
- HoloNet News Vol. 531#45-56
- Ryder Windham, "Hunt the Sun Runner" (2002)
- Ryder Windham, "Cavern of Screaming Skulls" (2002)
- Ryder Windham, "The Hostage Princess" (2002)
- Ryder Windham, "Jango Fett vs. The Razor Eaters" (2003)
- Ryder Windham, "The Shape-Shifter Strikes" (2003)
- Ryder Windham, "The Warlords of Balmorra" (2003)
- "Jedi Starfighter" video game (2002)
- Jason Fry, "Hondo Ohnaka's Not-So-Big Score" (2013)
- "The Coruscant Holo Net" in "Star Wars Comic 4" (Titan, 2014)
- R.A. Salvatore, "Attack of the Clones" novelization (2002)
- Alan Dean Foster, "The Approaching Storm" (2002)
- Terry Bisson, "Boba Fett: The Fight to Survive" (2002)
- "Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns" video game (2002)
- Chris Cassidy, "Precipice" (2008)
- Karen Traviss, "Republic Commando: Hard Contact" (2004)
- Mike W. Barr, "Death in the Catacombs" (2004)
- Jason Fry & Paul R. Urquhart, "The Essential Guide to Warfare" (2012)
- Karen Miller, "The Clone Wars: Wild Space" (2008)
- Matthew Stover, "Shatterpoint" (2003)


Next up, the Clone Wars proper!

 

Honestly i would not consider the TCW Filoni Show as part of the Multimedia Project because there are many contradictions between the Two in my opinion read the Republic Comics and the Clone Wars Novels search in Wookieepedia Timeline of the Legends Media and it will give you a good Timeline to start with

 

Yeah, TCW should be only part of canon. It's impossible to reconcile with the rest of Legends stuff.

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All George Lucas canon is part of legends, including The Clone Wars. The multimedia project takes place alongside The Clone Wars tv show, any discrepancies are retconned in favour of the tv show since that’s higher level canon. The alternative is like saying the prequels shouldn’t count as Legends because it’s “impossible to reconcile with the Thrawn trilogy”

Its clear that The Clone Wars must be canon because the books published when it was airing like Fate of the Jedi reference it

 

I'm very torn there. On the one hand I never really got into the Filoni TCW show and I'm pretty miffed about some of the unnecessary inconsistencies it introduced (looking at you, Filoni!Vos) but on the other hand some of the tie-ins are excellent EU material IMO. The first half of Wild Space is pretty good, Karen Traviss's TCW movie novelization is surprisingly solid, and No Prisoners is among my favorite Clone Wars books. I'm definitely going to include them in my read-through, and I have a few ideas on how I can make at least those books work with the multimedia project timeline. After all what I'm aiming for is a fluid and expansive reading experience, which doesn't need to take into account timeline settings that are external to the story.

 

The Ewok movies and the original Clone Wars cartoon, produced by George iirc, although not being directed by Lucas himself, aren't canon.

Why should there be a need for TCW to be part of Legends?

What would happen if someday there's a new canon show or another movie, produced or even directed by George? Would it automatically be part of Legends?

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The problem with trying to excise TCW from the EU is that it creates more problems then it solves. TCW was running for the last 6 years of the EU, so as Watcherwithin indicated, elements from the series can be found throughout the other books, comics, games, and reference books released during that time. The other big issue is that TCW itself had a huge amount of tie-in media, which was often tied to greater or lesser degrees with the ongoing EU (No Prisoners, as cthugha mentioned, is a prime example of this) which would effectively be orphaned as neither EU nor canon in this approach. I'd be skeptical that doing so is desirable to create a tighter continuity within Legends as well, since the Clone Wars continuity has always been less than perfect. (I've been around long enough to remember the arguments that continuity had been broken when first TPM and then AOTC made it clear that existing EU references to the Clone Wars occurring three decades or more before ANH were unsalvageable, again when the order of the original multimedia stories was revised, then again when the Clone Wars microseries came out.)

That being said, I do think it's preferable to assume that at least the episodes finalized for Season 7 needn't be considered part of Legends. While it does leave a few loose ends, one can imagine that the events played out in a manner that is more consistent with the older Clone Wars material. And it's probably best to hand wave away the early assertions that all of the pre-TCW Clone Wars stories somehow occurred in only two weeks time. But overall it's not that much more inconsistent than, say, the Expanded Universe version of the events between ANH and ROTJ.

 

Not necessarily. The canon tiers were an internal LFL guideline. They didn’t always default to the higher tier when resolving a contradiction, for example the G-canon deleted scene from TPM where Anakin beats up Greedo contradicted Greedo’s C-canon backstory in TftMEC. TPM Greedo was retconned to be Greedo’s father, preserving the lower tier source at the expense of the higher. Continuity errors were resolved on a case-by-case basis, until LFL publishes retcons for all the TCW contradictions (which they never will) we can’t know which version of each event would be given preference in Legends canon.

 

The Clone Wars is considered to be canon by George himself.

and the ewok movies were part of the expanded universe canon as well, so their precedent proves why TCW is part of legends

If George Lucas directed a Star Wars movie today, it would not be part of “Legends”, because the old expanded universe is defunct. But TCW was produced as part of the GL canon and incorporated into the expanded universe at the time.

 

Is Season 7 continuity even that obtrusive, beyond possibly a third version of what Obi-Wan and Anakin were doing right before Coruscant was attacked?

 

I guess it doesn't *need* to be part of Legends. It simply is because George Lucas said so.

 

LFL actually ended up overturning this retcon for the reason that it contradicted Lucas' ideas, around the time Greedo the younger showed up in TCW.

I find the Siege of Mandalore harder to reconcile with the EU than most earlier episodes - there's the added wrinkle to Nelvaan/Tythe, but there's also not much room for Spar and the Mandalorian Protectors, and the biggest one for me is that this story is the only time TCW actually shows that the brain chips were responsible for Order 66. Part of it is also out-of-universe, in several ways Season 7 just isn't the same story it would have been if it were released during the EU.

I'm a pretty ardent defender of TCW Seasons 1-6 in the old EU, and this is what it comes down to for me. There absolutely are contradictions, but that's nothing out of the ordinary for any part of the EU's timeline, really.

 

I think that was just Leland making one of his posts where he'd randomly decanonize vast swaths of EU storytelling on a whim, like "Yoda never went to Dagobah before ROTS" or "Palpatine never died before ROTJ." I never took forum posts as canon if they caused more contradictions than they solved (TCW itself eventually showed Yoda going to Dagobah before ROTS), but a few years after Leland un-retconned Greedo's backstory, it was re-retconned by a Star Wars Blog article that attributed the inconsistencies to confusion caused by Greedo and his father sharing the same name and in-universe holoserials. The EU got discontinued before anyone could un-re-retcon it so as Legends continuity currently stands it's ambiguous enough to be interpreted either way.

My preference for dealing with TCW in Legends is to accept the general events as canon (including Anakin having an apprentice between AOTC and ROTS, unfortunately) but the cartoon itself as an in-universe dramatization, so the stories still happened but the specific details don't necessarily have things like Even Piell and Adi Gallia dying too soon or Eeth Koth and Chancellor Valorum coming back to life. The TCW tie-ins and adaptations that Disney canon didn't want can fit into the EU canon as is, I guess.

 

I didn't know that, which blog was it? The Not-So-Magnificent Seven?

 

Yes, here is the relevant passage:

I assume the intention was to preserve part of Greedo’s TftMEC backstory while still allowing TCW to do whatever it was going to do, but given the lack of further contradictions due to the discontinuation, the ambiguity still allows for TCW and TPM Greedo to be Greedo the Elder.

 

The Clone Wars vol. 1

I'm tackling the Clone Wars bit by bit. Volume 1 contains everything that needs to go before the Battle of Christophsis (i.e. before TCW kicks in). Once again, I'm happy to ignore externally imposed timeline settings and will shuffle around the books based on their content alone. In my head, I'm allocating a little under a year for volume 1 (mostly because I'll want to run Triple Zero and Wild Space in parallel later, and Triple Zero explicitly deals with the 1-year anniversary of Geonosis).

Very roughly, my timeline for volume 1 is:

• [all kinds of short stories + Boba Fett]
• Hard Contact
• Shatterpoint
• Jedi Trial + Cestus Deception

…with some minor stuff mixed in.

So let's dive in!

The perfect opening for the Clone Wars proper, in my opinion, is an otherwise unremarkable Insider short story: "Death in the Catacombs", by Mike W. Barr. The prologue happens during the Battle of Geonosis, so I put it there, but the main story opens like this:

That sets the tone just right, I think. For my edit, I might preface it with this Dooku quote from Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns:

That introduces the video game layer that will become rather important in the early days (see below) and also presages the Karen Traviss style of sprinkling significant quotes all through the story.

A second Insider short story that's set shortly after Geonosis ("seven days" apparently, not that it matters for the plot) is Michael A. Stackpole's Elusion Illusion. It features Aayla Secura and Ylenic It'kla going to Corellia, where they meet Nejaa Halcyon working undercover. (This, of course, ties into the backstory for Stackpole's hero Corran Horn, as told in I, Jedi.) For a supporting character, Halcyon has been busy these last few weeks: going to Corellia after the secession, then heading out after the Scarlet Thranta and losing his ship in the process (the backstory to Jedi Trial, dated to shortly before AotC by the HoloNet News articles about it) - and then, despite his apparent disgrace, going straight back to Corellia for the undercover mission depicted here. It's a fun little story which works well when read alternatingly with Death in the Catacombs, and as a Bantam EU fan it warms my heart to see so many callbacks to this era right at the beginning of the Clone Wars.

There is a noticeable dearth of written Anakin and Obi-Wan stories set at the beginning of the Clone Wars. Most of their adventures during that time happen in video games – notably the Dark Reaper campaign in the video game The Clone Wars and the Cortosis droid crisis in New Droid Army – and in the Tartakovsky Clone Wars miniseries.

The main textual source for the early Clone Wars is the Young Boba Fett series. Boba Fett: Crossfire intersects with the Clone Wars video game during the Battle of Raxus Prime, where Boba is left behind by Dooku (who, in the video game, picks up Anakin instead) and then taken aboard the Republic ship Candaserri by clone troopers. From Boba's point of view, we learn that Count Dooku was digging for the Force Harvester on Raxus Prime, but nothing more about the Harvester's fate. The fact that Anakin and Obi-Wan are there during the battle is entirely absent in Crossfire; instead, the new Jedi Glynn-Beti is introduced, who apparently had overall command of the Raxus Prime mission.

There is another interesting (if perhaps not intentional) connection between Crossfire and The Clone Wars: towards the end of Crossfire, the Republic troopship Candaserri reaches Bespin, which at this point seems to be a friendly port. In The Clone Wars, shortly before the attack on Thule gets underway, Mace Windu tells Yoda that Bespin has fallen - meaning this must have happened after Crossfire.

To get up to speed on what’s happening in the wider galaxy beyond Boba, I read the relevant parts of the New Essential Chronology (after all, it is also an in-universe text by Voren Na’al) and added some quotes from the video games. Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns is a goldmine for that, because it has narrative-rich transmissions (usually from Count Dooku to Sev’Rance Tann) before and after the Confederacy missions, plus Mace Windu’s recollections of the fall of Echuu Shen-Jon framing the Republic missions.

On Bespin, Boba gets back on board with Aurra Sing, who promises to help him get Jango Fett's inheritance from Aargau (for a cut). I like the way the Boba Fett books thread his story through existing continuity, having him glimpse San Hill on Aargau and almost spill the secret that it was Dooku who hired Jango as the Prime Clone, only for Aurra Sing to kill the guy he told it to. It's a good story, but it would have been much better with some of the endless repetitions and exposition excised. For my edit, I'm going to cut it down rather mercilessly. In the next book he goes to Tatooine, where he fights Durge and makes his name as a bounty hunter, which is nice but doesn't really intersect with anything else.

The first major book after Young Boba Fett #1-4 is Hard Contact. This has to happen early in the war, because both the heroine (Etain) and the villain (Hokan) only just learn that the Clone army exists near the beginning of the book. At the same time it has to be late enough for the Separatists to have thought of and spun up a bioweapons research lab targeting clones in particular, so after Boba #4 it is.

Hard Contact is pretty grim. To compensate for that, I read Aaron Allston's short stories "The Pengalan Tradeoff" and "League of Spies" in between chapters. "Pengalan" fits in well with the clone musings of Hard Contact, with the bureaucrat protagonist auditing the clone troopers' performance and developing solidarity with them in the process; and "League of Spies" is just extremely funny. In its unflattering portrayal of Republic Intelligence strategy, it also presages the theme of the Republic leadership's subtle sabotage of its own war effort that will rise to the foreground in the later Republic Commando books.

Also early on in the war is Shatterpoint. It needn't be, really; could be pretty much anywhere, content-wise; but it's somewhere around here by fiat and might as well be.

I like Shatterpoint, even though I think Stover's style is particularly overwrought in that one. My favorite part of this book is Mace's relationship with Palpatine: it's comes up in various places across the book that Mace really likes and admires Palpatine, thinking of him as "warm" and empathizing with his difficult position as Chancellor. This comes to a head in this delicious scene in the epilogue:

Oh and the short story “Equipment” that Stover wrote for Insider goes here too, once again showing a clone’s view of things, with a fun orbital gunnery scene. I like how this fits in with the Clone Debriefings from Geonosis (in Hard Contact and the EGtW) format-wise. Sprinkling action reports from clone soldiers throughout the Clone Wars makes them feel much more immediate.

Hard Contact introduces completely new characters; Shatterpoint focuses on Mace Windu almost exclusively. What were Obi-Wan and Anakin doing during that time? The Dark Reaper crisis culminates in the battle of Thule roughly while Boba Fett is on Aargau, and the bio-droid threat from the New Droid Army video game… actually, let's not think too closely about that game. (Anakin kills Dooku at the end. "A clone", the NEC says, but… gah.)

Fortunately Jude Watson has us covered. The final parts of her two multi-era books Secrets of the Jedi and Legacy of the Jedi are both set during the early Clone Wars (or at least during what we now must assume are the early clone wars, because Anakin is still Kenobi's Padawan). Secrets of the Jedi kills off Siri Tachi, whom we last met assisting Adi Gallia in the space battle above Geonosis; Legacy has the Jedi team up with Dooku's childhood frenemy Lorian Nod to try and fail to kill Dooku. Oh and then there is a random Clone Wars scene from Ryder Windham's The Life and Legend of Obi-Wan Kenobi that is tied to nothing in particular and might as well be set here, as it shows Anakin still as Obi-Wan's Padawan. (Can't be too early though, because Cody already has his name.)

Those stories work fine when read in conjunction with Hard Contact and Shatterpoint, again relieving some of the claustrophobia that books set on only one planet tend to evoke in me as a reader. The only slightly jarring thing is the stylistic distance between Traviss's and especially Stover's breathless dramatizing and Watson's and Windham's matter-of-factly narration.

And then, continuing some threads from Hard Contact, we have the “Omega Squad: Targets” short story, narrating That Time Fi Threw Himself On A Grenade that will prove relevant to the mess that is Republic Commando: Triple Zero. (We'll get to that mess in volume 2.)

Finally, to cap off volume 1, I read Jedi Trial and The Cestus Deception back to back. I realize these were supposed to be set later and more than a year apart by the original Clone Wars Multimedia Project timeline (Cestus 12 months and Jedi Trial 30 months after Geonosis, respectively), but there are no internal reasons why they need to be, AFAICT; and since both of them have Anakin as still a Padawan, I wanted to get them done before Christophsis. Also having Yoda decide to knight Anakin (at the end of Jedi Trial) seems like a good a natural end point for volume 1 - and having him on an adventure with Nejaa Halcyon, who first appeared in a story near the beginning of this part, also makes for a nice frame.

And besides, the two books complement each other very nicely. Cestus is an Obi-Wan story where he goes on an adventure with Kit Fisto and a giant snail, while Jedi Quest has Anakin on a mission away from his master. Ventress appears in both, which surprisingly does not cause any problems, because she only interacts with Jedi Quest's main villain via comlink while she's sneaking around in the background on Ord Cestus. And just when she gets more active in Cestus, her role in Jedi Trial gets taken over by Count Dooku. Neat!

The two books also work well as foils for each other on a thematic level: the B-plot in Cestus is about Nate, later Jangotat (should be Jangovod IMO but whatever), a clone whose point of view and fate asks many of the same hard ethical questions that were broached in Hard Contact before. (Yes, I know they were published the other way around; I'm talking about how it feels to read them as one long continuous story.) Meanwhile Jedi Trial's B-plot is all about regular soldiers and non-clone freedom fighters, as well as all kinds of weirdly-named nonclone fleet personnel. (Looking at you, supply officer "Mess Boulanger".) Oh and The Cestus Deception establishes that clones are fertile, which will become relevant later on.

(The only thing that I found really tough about this last part was, surprisingly, how to fit Steven Barnes’s short story “The Hive”, which was written as a tie-in to The Cestus Deception, into that book’s narrative. It is clearly set just before the final paragraph of chapter 32 – it actually starts in the middle of that chapter, supplementing the dialogue with some additional exposition and giving a name to the Council’s eldest who goes unnamed in the novel. But in the novel, Obi-Wan has the idea to make the whole matter more personal for the Five Families in the penultimate paragraph, then in the final one he comms Kit Fisto about it. In the short story, the thought (which drives the whole next part of the novel) doesn’t occur to him; instead he goes on a high-stakes subterranean adventure to rescue the hive queen’s eggs right away, finds a statue of Yoda, and then… well, then apparently he comms Kit Fisto to tell him about an idea he had before all of that, without ever mentioning his adventure or, you know, the fact that Yoda Was Here at all. Sigh. Well, I’ll make it work somehow…)

So now that Obi-Wan is back and Anakin has proven himself as a battle commander and is about to get knighted, the stage is set for the battle of Christophsis and a whole new phase of Clone Wars literature.

Again, for my fellow list appreciators, here's a list of everything I read or consulted for this part of the journey:

• "Galactic Battlegrounds: Clone Campaigns" video game (2002)
• Mike W. Barr, "Death in the Catacombs" (2004)
• Daniel Wallace & Kevin J. Anderson, "The New Essential Chronology" (2005)
• Terry Bisson, "Boba Fett: The Fight to Survive" (2002)
• Terry Bisson, "Boba Fett: Crossfire" (2002)
• Elizabeth Hand, "Boba Fett: Maze of Deception" (2003)
• Karen Traviss, "Republic Commando: Triple Zero" (2006)
• "The Clone Wars" video game (2002)
• Pablo Hidalgo, "CIS Shadowfeed" & "Republic HoloNet News" (Star Wars Insider 65-70)
• Aaron Allston, "The Pengalan Tradeoff" (2003)
• Aaron Allston, "League of Spies" (2008)
• Daniel Wallace & Kevin J. Anderson, "The New Essential Chronology" (2005)
• John Ostrander et al., "The Defense of Kamino" (Republic #50, 2003)
• Jude Watson, "Secrets of the Jedi" (2005)
• Jude Watson, "Storm Fleet Warnings" (2003)
• Timothy Zahn, "Duel" (2003)
• Rodney Thompson et al., "The Scavenger's Guide to Droids" (2009)
• Karen Traviss, "Republic Commando: Hard Contact" (2004)
• Karen Traviss, "Omega Squad: Targets" (2005)
• Matthew Stover, "Shatterpoint" (2003)
• Matthew Stover, "Equipment" (2003)
• Ryder Windham, "The Life and Legend of Obi-Wan Kenobi" (2008)
• Jude Watson, "Legacy of the Jedi" (2003)
• Steven Barnes, "The Cestus Deception" (2004)
• Steven Barnes, "The Hive" (2004)
• David Sherman and Dan Cragg, "Jedi Trial" (2004)

 

That's the main bit. Probably wishful thinking on my part, but I'd like to believe that the pre-Disney version would have made at least a passing reference to at least the microseries version of events, since it was still ostensibly part of the continuity. It makes sense that similar events would have unfolded, but no need to borrow contradictions that weren't already baked in when the EU ended, IMO.

I think that was definitely intended at the time, given how closely linked the first two Boba Fett books are with The Clone Wars video game. Weirdly though, the book Decide Your Destiny #3: Tethan Battle Adventure, which is set concurrently to the 2008 Clone Wars film, also features the same attack on Cloud City from Crossfire, suggesting that the Candaserri arrived at Bespin well after the video game's plot had already ended. I think Windu's actual line was "We just lost the Tibanna colonies on Bespin" without mentioning Cloud City directly, so possibly the Separatists destroyed the colonies with their new superweapon without taking the city just yet.

(As an aside, Decide Your Destiny #1 and #3 are jam packed with references to the pre TCW EU, especially Jedi Apprentice; I was flipping through them earlier and had forgotten just how many cameos and tidbits there were.)

 

What did you think of The Clone Wars game? Did you get to play it or just watch the cutscenes?

 

I didn't know about these! They are definitely going on my list of things to get my hand on and include where possible. Thanks!!

I also only just found the clone pilot action report from the EGtW Authors' Cut that goes with the Battle of Geonosis -- a third one to add to the clone debriefings from Hard Contact and the "Clone Trooper falls into a hole" one from the published EGtW. Nice!

I watched a playthrough on YouTube and I thought it was pretty neat, actually! I like that they start with a defeat at Rhen Var, tying in to Tales of the Jedi of all things, and the Raxus and Thule levels are very atmospheric.

 

Yes I really liked the Ulic cameo. Thule is a planet that I find very interesting for how little info we get on it.

I also enjoyed Cestus more than I thought. I liked how 'dirty' the Jedi got, with the false flag attacks and faking a terrorist cell and Ventress is great.

 

I was surprised by how little was done with Ulic's appearance in that game. There's obviously so much you could wring out of an interaction between him and Anakin, but they mostly just discuss the superweapon. I was also a little disappointed that Thule was still an ice world, given that it's coming out of an ice age in Redemption, but I suppose enough time's past for another one to have come around.

One piece of the Legends Clone Wars chronology puzzle that I don't see mention of often comes from The Essential Reader's Companion: that book pushes some stories back to accommodate TCW, but only those that specifically involve Anakin as a padawan, so The Cestus Deception and Jedi Trial are moved into the 7 week ABG pre-TCW window, but Shatterpoint and the RC novels keep their old placements after it. With how things ended, I don't give that version much more weight than the various fan solutions, but I think it's interesting to see that that's were LFL's head was at in the last days of Legends.

 

That 7 week restriction was a weird one; the source was one of the earliest TCW tie-in novels and not really mentioned (that I recall anyway) on the show itself. Given that the show didn't really give its own spin-off material any greater weight than the rest of the EU, it seems like a strange corner to paint the continuity into when they could have easily gone with either a more realistic timeframe or something less specific.

 

The way they stuck with that number in spite of the reasons not to (is seven weeks even long enough for Anakin's hair to grow that much?) makes me wonder if it came from Lucas behind the scenes or something.

 

Clone Wars contradictions predate the 3D series. One of the biggest is Anakin's Knighting - in the micro series it takes place right after Muunilinst/Hypori, placed by the NEC only four months into the war (the microseries then does a big time skip to a couple days at most before ROTS begins), while in the books it happens in the novel Jedi Trial, which NEC places only half a year before the end of the war.

Obviously the pre-reboot writers for TCW went with the earlier date. I wonder if that's because they were familiar with the microseries but not the books - Ventress is introduced as someone the main characters already know and seemingly assumes the audience does too.

 

Wasn't the official word on The Clone Wars that, in no uncertain terms, it started about a month after Episode II? That's not long to squeeze in all of the Anakin-as-Padawan media, so I'm guessing Licensing settled on seven weeks because it's about the absolute limit of how far you can stretch "about a month" without it becoming just plain falsehood.