Official SURVIVOR'S QUEST Discussion Thread (Spoilers Allowed)...

dp4m, what about those of us who got our copies the old fashioned way - buying it retail?

 

It's a little early, but since some have the book already, I invite you to come and review it in the Survivor's Quest review thread. Thanks!

 

dp4m, what about those of us who got our copies the old fashioned way - buying it retail?

I can't comment on the illegality of the store who violated the embargo date printed IN CLEAR LETTERS on the boxes they received...

 

I'm sorry, dp4m, but I don't understand the limitation on spoilers within a spoiler thread. It's not like someone is going to be unintentionally spoiled, unless they're stupid enough to look at this thread, which clearly has the words "spoilers allowed." If someone looks at this thread, it means that they want/do not mind spoilers.

 

I can't comment on the illegality of the store who violated the embargo date printed IN CLEAR LETTERS on the boxes they received...

Undoubtably. But when the books are printed in Australia by an Australian distributer, they don't come with the same embargo dates that they do in the US and Canada.

 

the limitations on spoilers might have to do with a legal notice from Del Rey Books or LFL (is that true, dp4m)?

 

My habitual and ritual comments on im/patient paperback waits.

Son of a blaster, now I'll have to acquire more comics inbetween the long months.

 

TF.N Books has not received, and never has received a letter from Del Rey or LFL concerning spoilers, etc...

 

Why would you?

 

Maybe it's because they trust the staff here...

 

I'll lift the ban a day early.

Anyone who wants to post a full-review of the book (with spoilers) is now free to do so.

Enjoy!

 

And don't forget to rate it in the review thread either!

 

I can't find my B&N card to order off the Internet, so it'll be a long wait for me.

I assume the font is the same size as the other Del Rey hardcovers? (just had to ask)

 

Got my copy today.
Feels like it picks up right where the HoT duology left off, which is odd after having read the entire NJO since reading HoT for the first time. The writing is all Zahn, he sure hasn't lost his flair. I've read through to chapter 8.

Edit: Apparently the spolier ban is off.

We get another good look into Chiss Society, and we meet Chak Fel, Jag Fel's older brother. More to come later.

 

Picked it up today, but I'm bust reading Blade of Tyshalle at the moment.

 

Isn't Chak dead by the time of the NJO? Or was it another brother?

 

Chak Fel? Never heard of him! As far as I know there were 5 Fel children:
Davin
Jag
Cherith
Wynssa
and the mysterious Cem (mentioned in the FH - Remnant)

Who then is Chak?

 

Here's what I wrote up the other day after I finished reading it. I'll come up with something better for the review thread.

---

Timothy Zahn's latest Star Wars novel Survivor's Quest is a bridging novel between the Bantam era of stories, and Del Rey's New Jedi Order. It offers a few more details into the mysterious Outbound Flight Project initially introduced back in Zahn's Heir to the Empire. While high hopes for this novel shedding light onto the entire events surrounding the Outbound Flight and it's destruction at the hands of Mitth'raw'nuruodo, it ends up adding even more questions than it answers. But along the way there is an interesting tale centering around Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade Skywalker as they try to find some time to spend together even after three years of marriage.

The events of the novel are kicked off with a message to Luke from Admiral Voss Parck of the Empire of the Hand being intercepted and stolen by an agent of Talon Karrde's. In an effort to discover the nature and importance of the message, Luke and Mara head off for Nirauan. Here they learn that the Chiss Ascendancy has found the remains of the Outbound Flight Project, and wish to return it to the Jedi. This leads Luke and Mara to head into Chiss space to rendezvous with an envoy of the Nine Ruling Families, and join in the journey to the resting place of the Project, along with members of the Empire of the Hand (including a unit from the Imperial 501st); Dean Jinzler, the man who stole the message intended for Luke, posing as a New Republic Ambassador and having ties to the Outbound Flight Project; and members of the Geroons, a race supposedly liberated from their Vagaari slavers by the Outbound Flight Project. During the journey though, at least one party along for the ride shows sinister motives as sabotage threatens the mission. The discovery of survivors still living on the remnants of the ships from the Outbound Flight only complicates matters when the saboteurs reveal themselves.

What is learnt of the Outbound Flight Project both gives more insight into it, and more questions. It is revealed that the Project itself is six dreadnaughts connected to a central storage core that provides for both the space and supplies required for a mission of this size, along with the ability for some of the dreadnaughts to detach and establish colonies in the Unknown Regions if needed. The ambush of the Outbound Flight also involved the destruction of a major portion of the Vagaari Empire, who had been causing trouble in Chiss space at the time, although why they were there, and how the battle itself unfolded is never detailed. Along the way, there is also the revelation that during its flight, a deep distrust of the Jedi onboard the Outbound Flight was created which lead to their imprisonment inside parts of the storage core. A policy also then surfaced among the survivors where anyone who exhibited Jedi traits was quarantined, and if proven to carry Jedi potential were exiled to one of the dreadnaughts that was isolated from the others. The fate of the Jedi onboard the Outbound Flight is not known, although it seems they escaped their captivity in the storage core and were aboard the command dreadnaught when it crashed into the planetoid it is found on, along with at least one Chiss officer.

From the sheer lack of details, and mysterious pieces of the puzzle that are brought up in Survivor's Quest, it's likely that the tale of what happened won't be known until the release of the next Star Wars book from Zahn that is slated to deal with this time period in 2005.

Other events of various importances from the novel include:[ul][li]The appearance of stormtroopers from the 501st, Vader's personal stormtrooper unit also known as "Vader's Fist". They are serving the Empire of the Hand, here under the command of Commander Chak Fel. But they aren't quite the same 501st from the Rebellion era.[/li][li]The involvement of Jorj Car'das in the instigation of events. He apparently knows of the discovery of the Outbound Flight, and helps to maneuver

 

Very nice synopsis, Dingo.

I can't wait for UPS to come with my copy on Monday (thanks to whoever said that Booksamillion was selling it online. I ordered a copy and its going to be delivered by Monday I hope! )

So Mara is faced with her choice of giving up a "seat of comfort" sort of like what she had when she was the Emperor's hand? Cool!

 

Just flipped through a copy of SQ at Barnes & Noble today, and I gotta say, I am totally pleased at how L/M work together and love how Mara thinks back on her past.

 

Tim Zahn is back!!!!

How you like this novel, I guess, depends on how you like your STAR WARS generally. Survivor's Quest isn't exactly what we've become used to from DelRey - it doesn't offer teenage angst, profound meditations on the Force, the slow unravelling of POV characters' worldviews, self-consciously alien alien villains, massively murderous space-battles, or even a Dramatis Personae page.

No. It's cleverer than that. What it does is disconcert.

From the best Star Destroyer opening since probably Heir to the Empire, through 350 pages of twists, turns and other, slower but no less perception-distorting and gravity-defying manoeuvres, Tim Zahn slowly and subtly unravels even the framework in which we've grown used to watching the GFFA spin round since Vector Prime... if not since 1977...

The novel starts brilliantly, with Zahn, through a cameo POV by his long-standing sock Talon Karrde, saying everything that the novel is about in plain language for those who're listening in, and dispatching Luke and Mara to the Unknown Regions, where they hook up with a Chiss diplomatic mission, a New Republic Ambassador who isn't who he seems to be, a somewhat bemused little team of Imperial Stormtroopers, and a group of aliens who're definately not what they seem to be.

The first third of the novel, in which events aboard the Chiss ship get increasingly confusing as it journeys to Outbound Flight, is great fun, a slippery spiral of suspicion and puzzlement which allows Zahn to stretch the charaterization of his cast very nicely. Those who like Zahn's take on Luke and Mara and what it means to be a Jedi will find a lot to enjoy here. Those who don't will no doubt hate the fact that they're primarily human beings, rather than Jedi with a mystical ability to always stay on the Light Side of the Force. But perhaps the way Survivor's Quest is geared will make them ask why that should be a bad thing anyway... I certainly think it should...

Apart from that, every main character gets enough nice characterization to bite... I particularly like the three high-ranking Chiss, all very well-characterized, all very different, and all very, very Chiss... but I suspect other people will have other favourites...

When everyone finally arrives at the wreck of Outbound Flight, and run into the survivors, the main action starts rapidly, with a great look at the contrasting methods which Jedi and stormtroopers use to get out of the same supposedly foolproof trap.

After that, things promptly degenerate into a running battle which takes up the middle stretch of the novel... this requires you to keep the somewhat bewildering geometry of the crashed Outbound Flight ship(s) and the relevant locations of the various groups involved in your head at all times, while at the same time dealing with an increasingly disconcerting sense that the interaction between the various factions now shooting at each other - to say nothing of what they know, and what they're trying to achieve - all makes no sense...

Of course, this is deliberate.

But at the same time, you're left grappling with the sense that the lack of any coherent explanation for the survivors' hatred of the Jedi... this is obviously because the underlying events are going to be covered in the prequel - but the lack of clues just seemed a little too convenient... perhaps it's because the handful of survivors out of the tens of thousands or crew didn't have any idea what was going on on the command deck, and there were Jedi doing mind-trick things at the time...

Or perhaps it's deliberate as well, for other reasons entirely...

Any doubts, however, start to get resolved as we finally wade out of the gore and carnage - and see just how many hostile alien warriors four Imperial stormtroopers, one fish-out-of-water TIE pilot, and a Chiss General can kill... and everything slots into place in the sort of really sneaky way that Tim Zahn's plots twist together...

Some people might object that Tim

 

Can you please provide solid spoilers, spoilers to the subtle effective hints that you provide?!

 

SQ sounds really good, how are Luke and Mara? Are we getting anything near the NJO Mara? How is Luke done? Close to the TUF Luke or the weak NJO Luke? Not just in power since Zahn does downplay that but I'm mean in everything else.

And on the very last page, something is pulled out of left-field which made me just punch the air in savage delight, as Zahn closed his display of gymnastics with a final flip for the audience which turns the tables on everything... and I mean it.

Everything.

Could you please PM me what was said/writen please. I won't be able to get the book for a while and I can't wait. Thanks.

Edit: I agree, just give space between the spoilers instead of just hinting at them. This is after a spoiler thread and people should expect to read them.

 

It'd be funny if someone complains about a bad characterization of Mara in Survivor's Quest.

 

Okay... part of the reason that I was ambiguous about the 'spoilers' is that that's the point... everything is left nicely ambiguous throughout the novel...

But...

Basically, at the very end of the novel, it suddenly strikes Mara that the really, really sneaky Chiss plan that they've been pawns in, involving coaxing the Vagaari into an attack in order to do attack them right back, feels disconcertingly like the sort of thing a certain really, really sneaky Chiss would have done...

Only he's been dead for more than a decade, hasn't he?

And of course, Aristocra Formbi, the aeging Chiss diplomat in charge of the whole thing insists it's entirely his own responsibility - in fact, seriously wounded himself at one point, he gets rather preoccupied about how his failure to anticipate some contingencies has led to worse casualties than he's anticipated.

His first words to Luke and Mara, however, suggest a way to reconcile Zahn's teasing with Formbi's evident sense of responsibility - to say nothing of the fact that it explains that he knows things like the fact the Yuuzhan Vong are coming, and where Outbound Flight went down. On first meeting him, Mara and Luke mistake his sidekick, General Drask, for the Aristocra. Of course, they immediately turn to the right Chiss, and apologize.

"Hardly necessary," the other said easily. "No-one would expect you to know one Chiss from another."

If this is Thrawn (and, this being Zahn, that's still a big "if" - the point is fundamentally the possibility, rather than anything else), it's an older, tireder, more fallible Thrawn...

But there are other hints that, while not definitive, certainly disconcert. Sometimes, Formbi and General Drask behave a little bit like the old Thrawn/Pellaeon team. Formbi even sounds a lot like Thrawn at times. And if you glance back over the novel with the thought in mind that maybe he is Thrawn, then a lot of what he says just... distorts... rather nicely....

And at no point that I noticed does any of the UR characters actually definitively think of Thrawn as dead. In fact, at one point, General Drask notes that Chak Fel fights as well as he'd expect for someone "trained under the authority of Syndic Mitth'raw'nuruodo"... an interesting turn of phrase if Thrawn had died at Blibringi, though just possible, I suppose, given that the Chiss train them young.

Actually, hold on, no. Chak Fel is too old to be anything except a clone. He's placed in his mid-twenties by Mara, but we're only seventeen years after Syal and Tir got back together...

And Thrawn is on the cover, after all. Just like he was on the cover of Vision of the Future... and now the fact that Car'das knows "Formbi" in advance, regardless of whether "Formbi" is Formbi or Thrawn, makes everything we thought happened in that novel look slightly... suspicious...


All of which... anyway... you get the idea.

- The Imperial Ewok