Lit Abel G. Peña's "Skyewalkers" and "Lone Wolf"

I definitely did not know about that group. Thanks for the info.

 

Let him come here! He must see our happy faces. Don't you, Halagad_Ventor?

 

In the mean time, I have a question for you all.

At the beginning of the novella, there's a note stating that the events in this story occur between the films Attack of the Clones and The Clone Wars. We know that both movies occurred in 22 BBY. However, the Battle of Skye was dated to 21 BBY (more precisely somewhere around 20.9-20.8 BBY) in The New Essential Chronology. Is the NEC date superceded by that note? I tend to think that it isn't, given that the note is completely out-of-universe, while the New Essential Chronology had an in-world perspective. Then again, Abel began writing SkyeWalkers three years after NEC was released, so maybe the 22 BBY placement should be the final word...

What say you, The2ndQuest, TalonCard, anyone?

(Sorry about the double post, but I can't edit the last one anymore. )

 

It would depend on the final "Legends Clone Wars timeline", which we don't know.

A long shot might be if FFG ends up doing a Clone Wars setting for their Star Wars line, but that wouldn't be for while if they did make one.

 

Since SkyeWalkers is set while Anakin is still a Padawan, it has to occur before The Clone Wars movie where he's already a Knight. TCW has really thrown a spanner in the works in terms of putting a date to events, since the overwhelming majority of stories before its release were working on the assumption that he didn't become a Knight until later in the war and featured him as a Padawan, and have all therefore had to be crammed way back into the early first year of the war as a result.

 

Yes!

Thank you so much Abel Halagad_Ventor, if and when you read this, for ensuring the last gasp of Legends was one of its strongest. Truly, up there with Darth Plagueis, Traitor, Shatterpoint, Yoda: Dark Rendezvous and the Heir to the Empire trilogy as one of my favourite works in all the EU, and definitely my favourite novella.

Bulging to bursting with references, surpassing even the reference-intensive inclinations of Luceno, full of witty and immersive dialogue, a beautiful writing style with a vocabulary to rival Stover's, and one of the most brilliantly realised (and so long did it take for him to be realised!) villains (and characters in general) in Zeta Magnus/Atha Prime. The references to real-life science (Dawkinsian immortal genes, quantum immortality, timeless identity/mental replica theory), as well as fleshing out of in-universe science (Class-D absolute disruption, cloning and flash memory dumps, harmful resonance caused by shared midichlorian signatures, midichlorians resisting the dark side artifice of memory rubs), was a real treat for me, having always longed for more rational approaches and empirically grounded explanations of underlying mechanics in Star Wars.



I hope you continue to write Star Wars novels and novellas for the new canon. You write fantastic prose!

 

This! A thousand times, this! Bravo, good sir.

 

I hope that we can get the comics from Hyperspace that we didn't get. Hodges released just the one book for dark horse and then the second part was never released. That sucks.

 

I'd love to see Escape from Dagu too.

Edit: And Mandorla and Lightsiders too, for that matter.

 

How about Lightsider and Knightfall I: Jedi Storm?

 

I want both of these so bad!

 

Grrrrr...and The Force Unleashed webstrip, for that matter.

Of all of it, I think I want Lightsider the most.

 

I think the dates of the NEC for Clone Wars material have been and should be ignored at this point. It could have been argued before that the battle of Skye needn't have happened during the two weeks to seven months ( ) that Anakin was still a Padawan under the most recent version of the Legends Clone Wars timeline , which supersedes the Chronology's version. However, Abel has clearly taken the Marvel story at its word that Obi-Wan's fellow Jedi during the battle of Skye were his current apprentices. (Which, I think, is more effective than assuming the inhabitants of Skye didn't know what they were talking about at all in the original Annual.)

Fortunately, the entire story takes place over the course of only a day--it seems to have been written with an extremely compressed timeline in mind. (Though there is one other Anakin/Obi-Wan/Halagad adventure hinted at; an encounter with vulture droids and the Church of the First Frequency on Otranto. This likely, but not definitely, took place during the Clone Wars as well. I really don't think there's any more room for another time when the three of them could have worked as a team during the war but prior to Anakin's knighthood, so this might as well be their previous mission.)

There are several different hints at when exactly Skyewalkers could have taken place:

Spoiler

Anakin mentions Ventress, indicating that they have met previously. (Depending on which of their encounters one chooses to interpret as being "first", this could happen after any number of them.)

Mace Windu is mentioned as having "just been" on Dantooine, indicating that the story takes place just after the battles at Dantooine and Muunilist. (Possibly this is instead intended to account for a mistaken earlier or later reference to Mace being on Dantooine--I'm not sure.)

Obi-Wan has stopped wearing full armor in favor of his TCW getup, possibly putting the story after most of the original cartoon tie-ins.

The "Dooku clone" kerfuffle from Dark Rendezvous, explaining the already retconned Dooku doppleganger from New Droid Army is sort of hand-waved here by suggesting that it was merely a theory to account for Dooku's omnipresence. It's mentioned vaguely enough to suggest that this is actually before New Droid Army.

Dashta eel tissues from Ord Cestus, the mutagenic serum used on Nelvaan, the Morgukai shadow army on Selucami, and Spar's Mandalorian reformation are all mentioned, though in such a way as to suggest them as being any possible stages of development/deployment, so it need not necessarily be after or before any of the stories in which they appear.

There are also a couple of things in the story that would suggest a setting immediately before the earliest Clone Wars episodes, but after most of the other Anakin-as-Padawan stories:

Rex and Cody make their earliest chronological appearance, possibly putting the tale after Alpha returned to Kamino to run the training program that Cody is said to have graduated from.

The Resolute is mentioned, and the importance of the Hutt hyperlanes is referenced.

Anakin is given a scar. It's suggested that this is the first time his face was injured in this manner, and that Ventress would find it easy to give him a similar scar later on (as she does in Dreadnaughts of Rendili). This jives with some early theories that Anakin was scarred twice, based on the observation that the scar is more apparent in ROTS than TCW. The hope was that Dreadnaughts of Rendili and Obsession could be moved towards the end of TCW's run.

Now that we've seen where Ventress's arc leads, I'm not sure if this is possible or desirable, but it's definitely back on the table. (Though the story was intended to be released in 2011, SkyeWalkers, like the Essential Warfare cut material, has been edited to account for the events of TCW through Season 5, so there must be a reason the scar reference was left in.)

Anakin's appearance on the cover is closer to TCW than AOTC, though it's closer still to ROTS so this may need to be chalked up to artistic license.

On the other hand, the story ends oddly and doesn't dovetail directly into TCW at all:

Anakin and Obi-Wan are at odds thanks in part to Anakin's immature behavior towards Halagad, which fits more with their attitudes and behavior in the pre-TCW stories than Anakin's relative maturity and their strong bond of brotherhood in TCW.

Atha Prime is preparing a plague assault on the Republic in retaliation for the Skye attack. (Which is precisely what the Jedi were trying to prevent for most of the story.) This may be intended to be the trihexalon incidents on Ohma D'un and Honoghr (connected in TNEC), the release of brainrot in the Weemell sector, the Blue Shadow Virus, some other incident, or all of them, really.

It's possible Abel intended there to be a sequel story that dealt with these issues, but until he arrives to answer questions we can only guess.

TC

 

Hear, hear.

I hope Hal had plenty of blue sauce handy. ;-)

As others have noted, this is the inevitable and unfortunate result of the Clone Wars TV series having forced all prior Clone Wars media that references Anakin as a padawan into the first month or so of the war. Pretty much every single date in the NEC was made obsolete by the T-canon historical revisions brought about by the series ... all before the stories themselves became obsolete, from a certain point of view, by the ending of the EU and the rebooting of Star Wars continuity.

 

*Waves his hand* Those stories aren't obsolete in my book. They'd have to snatch them from my cold, prying fingers.

Yes, I knew that of course, but my mind tends to casually "forget" it. There really is a ridiculous amount of material that's been compressed into the early first year of the war...

 

The Reenlistment of Baron Fel?

 

Joe Bongiorno's Supernatural Encounters in the Star Wars Universe?

 

Pablo Hidalgo's First Empire.

 

Not familiar with that one. Ive never gotten into Del Rey post-ROTJ (no NJO, Legacy of the Force, Fate of the Jedi) so I'm not familiar with Fel, outside Emperor Roan Fel from the comics.

 

OMG.

Wow. just wow.

 

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/The_Reenlistment_of_Baron_Fel

 

Eh, I wouldn't have liked the implications Typhojem being of the Bedlam Spirits would have for Sith history, Typhojem now being an 'immortal god of the Sith.' We have a fairly coherent picture of a 'galactic pantheon' of sorts with Abeloth/the apocalyptic deities beyond the Gunninga Gap in opposition to the Architects, of which the Ones and presumably the Kathol (Those Who Dwell Beyond the Veil link) are remnants, and their effects upon and interactions with the groups who would become the Rhandite nihilists, 'lesser' precursors such as the Gree, Kwa, and Rakata, and even the formation of the Jedi Order.

Supernatural Encounters would work if it was reworked, so that the Bedlam Spirits and the Force Demons gel with that picture, rather than having disparate collectives of similarly powerful beings with little impact on galactic history. Force Demons roaming the stars in the early stages of the universe's formation works well if said universe is the baby universe of Otherspace (being an artificial creation of the Celestials to imprison sealed evils, presumably), as I dislike the thought of entities predating even the Celestials by over 10 billion years still holding sway in the galaxy, and the Bedlam Spirits could work well as being what "the Celestials became," much like the Ones of Mortis.

 

The implication in The Pandora Effect was that Wutzek was the last one. I'm not sure how the Five found him, but they "snared him in an angle trap".

Their ship also seems somewhat extradimensional in nature - opening into realspace - then disappearing out of it.

That story definitely made me wonder about their history, and that of the ship.

 

Most interesting to me is that the Five are indirectly associated with the Sith; they both worship Typhojem, immortal god of the Sith. It almost seems to be a case of evil vs evil; the Five are evil, they worship a Sith deity and the Force knows who else (The Lady with the Locust Heart... Abeloth?), yet secure the imprisonment of eldritch abominations who are called demons.

Given that Abeloth is the only known example of an evil deific power opposing the less evil Celestials (I say less evil, for the Son is counted among their number), it makes me wonder about the "apocalyptic deities beyond the Gap" the Knell of Muspilli allegedly were capable of summoning with the Taurannik Codex, the immortal gods of the Sith (one of which I'd be unsurprised to have been Abeloth, but the only one known is Typhojem, and perhaps god-kings such as Adas), Those Who Dwell Beyond the Veil, and so on. To me, it's indicative of divine warfare between the Celestials and their apocalyptic counterparts (I'd say Skyborn vs Destructors, if much of that Keshiri myth isn't attributable to the Hundred Year Darkness), neatly paralleling the orderly Silentium (likely creations of the Celestials) and the chaotic Abominor, with the Celestials being largely undone or ascending into the Force to leave only a few remnants (The Ones, Kathol) behind, and only Abeloth remaining of their enemies.