Lit Books Rereading the Aftermath Trilogy

I remember being so excited when Wedge showed up in the first real chapter. "Oh man, can't wait to read about Wedge in this sparkling new continuity. It's a new Wedge frontier. Gonna be Wedge central in this Aftermath trilogy let's ****ing go!"

I was not as disappointed as some folks were about to be, buuuuuut...

Edit: And in an ironic reversal from where I ended up, I was initially pretty excited about Rae Sloane, because I love an interesting Imperial officer antagonist. By the end I was less enthusiastic, as it felt like she kept getting lucky, she was showing up everywhere, and she was of course the tired, tired cliché of the good Nazi honorable Imperial. Also, for whatever reason there's a whiff of Poochie about her, which is distinctive in a book with a bunch of original characters who do not have that Poochie smell.

 

IMO, Sloane is a deconstruction of this archetype. Ultimately she is not much better than Rax, attack on Chandrila is a good example of it - she was ok with ambush during the peace negotiations, her disagreement with Rax methods is born from hubris rather than from honor.

 

She’s a multifaceted infinity of extractable interpretations occurring within the text, mitigated by our language structures and historical context?

 

Insert Gilad Pellaeon. An Imperial officer who often went happily along with his commanders committing galaxy wide atrocities. But years later(Hand if Thrawn Era) now that he's the Supreme Commander finds himself much more reluctant to act in any way dishonorable, even to his opponents.

Nevermind that it's during Pellaeon's attempts to surrender the war that he finds his redemption. The point is that his honorable behavior, and his growth as a leader and character are exciting and rewarding to follow.


Sloane doesn't seem to grow throughout the novels, except more bitter.

 

I’d have to search around for it, but I seem to recall Wendig himself invited Thrawn/Pellaeon comparisons with Rae/Rax.

 

I like Sloane as a tragic figure exactly because she doesn’t learn, because she is given the chance to find redemption, to realize the evil of the empire, but ends up holding on to her delusional view that she can build a truly honorable empire.

While nothing has been confirmed, her dying at the hands of dark siders more honest with themselves (Snoke, Hux, Pryde) would be a good bookend for her character

 

Ever since I first read Aftermath, I found the following passage from Ch. 1 intriguing:

Of course, you can read it in a boring way as "the Separatists were mostly based in the Outer Rim, and Sidious did most of his dirty work during the Clone Wars through them" (or maybe you have some other similar reading), but what if it's pointing to something deeper? Maybe the Empire wasn't just what the Republic became, by Senate acclamation, maybe there were some secret facilities forming a deep state of bureaucrats (or some other kind of acolytes) established in the Outer Rim during the Clone Wars, which were then incorporated into / took over the Empire. I wonder what Wendig intended.

Some previous discussion of this (that I found through board search): here, here, here

 

@Xammer

Very interesting observation, and one that I totally missed when I read the book. I think Wendig is referencing Kamino. The clone army was the point of no return for the Republic. It’s what turned them into a de facto Empire years before they became one by law. The ships and weapons were all already easily accessible. But it was the army that made the difference, that fought the wars, that controlled the systems. For all the attention ships and weapons get, it is the actual soldiers that made any of it happen.

It’s also an allusion to the First Order’s eventual rise. That’s an army that grew outside the core in every sense. This trilogy is setting up the seeds for the First Order, not just with the Imperial refugees but also with the vague references to the power of the dark side also originating in the unknown systems of the galaxy.

 

You could make the argument that the militarization that occurred in the Outer Rim during the Clone Wars is a more telling model of the normal Imperial structure of government than the declining Republic, which was more decadent and debate focused, a trait that took decades to "phase out" in the Core Worlds. When the local governors take direct control in ANH they've finally done away with the last pretenses that this is anything other than a military modeled regime with a command hierarchy.

 

It also has to be remembered what the 1st book was labelled as "Journey to The Force Awakens," so in essence it's preparing a galaxy ruled by the FO.

 

Not really, as that's more TLJ not TFA. They were so spoiler afraid that Aftermath had massive restrictions on it, as Life Debt showed.

 

I think in general they were too wedded to the idea that they needed to have material filling in the gaps (for marketing purposes) before anyone even knew what the gaps looked like. If we posit a scenario where the Aftermath trilogy are all almost the exact same books, but with the natural changes that would result had LFL not had Wendig start writing until post-TRoS, I think the whole trilogy ends up stronger.

 

I read that as him talking about the military administration that was created during/aftermath of the Clone Wars, e.g. governors without any democratic oversight, etc. Afterall, Tarkin, who was the poster child of imperial style of government, was made Grandmoff of the Outer Rim. Also, all kinds of republic/imperial military projects began in the Outer Rim (Clone Army, Stormtroopers, Death Star)

 

It is interesting to think back on, but yeah it really felt like Sloane was showing up all over the place back then, but then at some point she just suddenly vanishes in new media, and Star Wars Squadrons is her only recent appearance I can remember.

 

She was even in the ESB A Certain POV. I think now I could see her pop up in one of the live-action shows.

 

On on the 2nd book now, and yeah, Sloane is all over the place in this series. It makes me want to read other things she's in, especially A New Dawn.

I do love the deep friendship Sinjir and Jas have formed.

 

Would make sense, since in canon she takes command of the imperial fleet after the Executor goes down and orders the retreat

 

That would make sense! I wouldn’t be surprised to see a snippet of Han and Leia’s wedding as noted in this trilogy, unless that has been addressed in a book I haven’t read.

 

I think that’s in that upcoming hotel tie-in book.

 

Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel by Beth Revis: 9780593498491 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

 

So she's like the new Pellaeon.

 

One of the thing's I've found maddening about Aftermath in particular, from this trilogy, is the sheer number of fake deaths. So many times do characters end up presumed or apparently dead, only to survive. Sometimes it's only a paragraph or two, before we find out they survived, but when skip-reading through again recently, I was just starting to get bored with how often it was happening.

 

@GrandAdmiralJello