Lit The New Jedi Order: A Retrospective

It’s been 22 years now since the New Jedi Order series began, and 18 since it ended. Over the course of its existence, it was one of the largest, most epic storylines in the entire Star Wars franchise but also one of the most controversial. Said controversy does seem, at least in my experience, to have largely died down over the years, due to a variety of factors including the subsequent release of other series that were even more controversial and the simple distance of time, but the NJO is still remembered and serves as a convenient point of comparison whenever a new big storyline (including the currently ongoing High Republic) comes out. Personally, while I find the NJO inconsistent I like it more than not, and though it certainly has its problems, when it’s good, it’s really good. I still try to reread it every couple of years, and just finished such a reread earlier this year. I thought I’d take the opportunity to do a recap of my thoughts on the series as a whole, as well as a bit of commentary on why I think the NJO worked for me when LotF and FotJ didn’t, and also point out some areas where I think the later series looked back at the NJO and learned the wrong lessons. Shall we begin?


New Jedi Order Retrospective



To start off with, I’m going to look back over the series, going book by book or arc by arc, depending. Interestingly, as I recall the original plan had been for the five hardcovers to be the “core NJO” where the main storyline happened with the paperbacks as side stories – but, well, that ship pretty much sailed with Dark Tide, and ultimately every book regardless of format moved the main plot forward to some degree. I can only imagine that someone who followed only the hardbacks trying to get the “core story” would be very, very lost. With that out of the way, onward!


Vector Prime: Vector Prime starts off the NJO, and let’s get the Wookiee in the room out of the way first – this is the one where Chewie dies, and the moon comes down. And really, those are just about the only things people remember about this one. I wasn’t involved in the fandom at the time (I started following the NJO near the end, between Force Heretic III and Final Prophecy) but I recall learning later that Salvatore took a lot of abuse from the fanbase over something that wasn’t even his call. Other than that, honestly this isn’t that different from a lot of the Bantam-era ‘warlord of the week’ books; the villains are just one small but ambitious Vong faction debuting before the invasion proper and get neatly defeated at the end without the real scope of the invasion becoming clear. That said, it also feels weird in hindsight in some ways, especially because a lot of the Vong worldbuilding hasn’t been ironed out yet, so you get a lot of discrepancies, some of which can be explained by the Preatorite being distinct from the mainstream Vong culture, some of which can’t. Nom Anor reads like a completely different character here, seeming to be an orthodox and highly ranked Yuuzhan Vong rather than the low-ranked but ambitious cynic he’ll later become; shapers are called alchemists (maybe a remnant of the original pitch for the Vong as an exiled Sith faction?); warriors and prefects seem to be in the same chain of command rather than being from completely separate castes; the yammosk is a lot more powerful than how yammosks will usually be portrayed later, seeming closer to a dhuryam in turns of what it’s capable of, etc. But all in all, this is a fairly unremarkable book that’s mostly remembered for containing a big death.


Dark Tide I and II: Michael Stackpole is always good for the military sci-fi side of the Star Wars setting, and he definitely does that here, both with his usual focus on Rogue Squadron (including making Jaina a fighter pilot, which will continue for the entire series) and in introducing the actual Yuuzhan Vong warrior caste. These books aren’t my favorites in the series – I’m more a fan of Force and Jedi stuff than the military side of things, generally speaking – but they’re definitely a solid continuation that really sets the stakes of the overall story. That said, they definitely come off as somewhat rushed (iirc, Dark Tide was originally supposed to be a trilogy but conflict between Stackpole and the editors at Del Rey cut it down to a duology) and IMO this arc does not do wonders for general perceptions of the Vong. For one thing, we don’t have a lot of Vong POVs in this arc, and neither of the ones we do get are typical (Shedao Shai is extra-fanatical; Deign Lian is more a treacherous schemer than a typical warrior) and since this arc comes so early, it really creates a perception of the Vong as “edgelord grimdark always evil monsters” that has some merit but ignores the more humanized Vong we’ll get later in the series. In particular it creates a perception of the Vong as not just having a religious fixation on pain but being outright masochists that they’ve never been able to shake, even though Shedao and the Shai in general get repeatedly mocked for this by other Vong later in the series. I once read in interview (I think it was on the disc that came with the original hardback of Unifying Force?) where the story team actively regretted that the Shai’s attitudes were interpreted as normal for the Vong rather than an extra-nutty outlier.


Agents of Chaos I and II: After a grieving Han mostly sat Dark Tide out, Agents of Chaos really sees him get back in the game. This arc has a pretty strong focus on the underworld and criminal activity and getting Han a chance to return to his roots is fun (even if Luceno overdoes the callbacks a bit, especially in Hero’s Trial). This is also, interestingly, the first arc to really delve into more “mainstream” Vong society after we’ve previously seen outliers like the Praeatorite and Domain Shai; this arc establishes the characterization of Nom Anor we’ll be getting for the rest of the series and introduces the pivotal characters of Harrar and Nas Choka (and Drathul, in a brief cameo). These books also expand the villain cast with the introduction of collaborators like the Peace Brigade and Viqi Shesh. We also meet Droma, who I’ve always had a soft spot for (IIRC he was another character who was controversial when introduced, though it mostly died down when it became obvious he was just going to be Han’s sidekick temporarily and wasn’t going to be pushed as a permanent replacement for Chewie) and Vergere in a small but important role that will set her up for bigger things down the line. That said, the two books don’t really form a single storyline as strongly as Dark Tide did and don’t have a strong single antagonist like Shedao Shai (maybe Nas Choka counts, though he only appears briefly in Hero’s Trial and isn’t really involved with its plot?) the Fondor disaster in Jedi Eclipse has to go through some fairly contrived contortions to go wrong as spectacularly as it did, and the Hapans kind of just repeat the Imperials’ arc from Dark Tide with “another galactic faction allies with the New Republic, suffers a disaster, and goes isolationist again.”


Balance Point: IMO, this is the weakest of the five hardbacks, and despite having some big events feels fairly inconsequential at the same time. Yes, Han and Leia get back together after going through a rough spot, yes Mara finds out she’s pregnant, we meet Tsavong Lah and Duro falls, but the main plot is basically another “the Vong conquer an iconic planet” that we’ve already seen several times by this point. Lah’s introduction is also disappointing; after how much Agents of Chaos hyped him up, he really just comes off here as little more than another interchangeable Vong commander, albeit bigger and meaner than most (this will be the start of a problem with Lah where every author seems to have their own take on him, and he’s very inconsistently written across the series). The actual battle for Duro, alas, is pretty anticlimactic, too. We get Jacen’s vision, of course, but it won’t pay off until the very end of the series, and Lah’s ultimatum at the end will have big ramifications down the line, but in general, this is just a fairly forgettable book.


Edge of Victory I and II: Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m biased. Conquest is probably my favorite single NJO novel, and Rebirth is pretty good too. We’ve heard a lot about shapers and shamed ones so far, but this is the first arc to really dig into them, and characters like Nen Yim and Vua Rapuung give us new perspectives on Vong society that really develop them as a culture and make them feel like people and not just an evil invading force. This arc also gives us a lot of development for Anakin and introduces one of my favorite supporting characters, Tahiri (and her shaping sets off her storyline that will continue to weave through the rest of the series). We even get our first glimpse of Shimrra (and Onimi!) in Rebirth. They’re not without flaws – both books are definitely rushed, which I blame on their having been ordered at the last minute to replace the cancelled Knightfall trilogy, and Tahiri’s sudden arrival in the cast and ascension to major character status can feel a little out of nowhere, Rebirth introduces Tsavong Lah’s brother but does nothing interesting with him whatsoever, and he’s then ignored for the rest of the series – but on the whole, this duology marks a high point in the NJO so far as I’m concerned.


Star by Star: Hoo, boy, this is the big one. Again, let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first – this is the other big death of the NJO (Anakin Solo), though once again it wasn’t the author’s call. This book is… interesting to talk about, because there’s a lot of great stuff here, but it also has some significant downsides. In terms of showing the sheer scope of the war, Star by Star does a better job than any other single novel; when we get to the final battle for Coruscant, it feels downright apocalyptic. Whatever his other faults, Denning is a good writer from a technical standpoint and turns in some really powerful passages here. He also does some good character work. Whereas previous authors mostly just made Borsk an obnoxious obstructionist, Denning is the only one to really get into what makes him tick and even redeems him a bit, especially at the end. He also writes one of the best versions of Tsavong Lah, depicting a bloodthirsty fanatic who’s nonetheless more cunning than he seems and is willing to take advice from Vergere to better understand the ‘infidels’ and even has moments where he genuinely wrestles with his faith and his purpose in life (iirc, it was Denning who said Lah could have been a great hero had he been raised somewhere other than the highly toxic culture of the Vong warrior caste). This book also really elevates Nom Anor from mere recurring villain into one of the main characters of the whole saga and is the first to begin to unravel the enigma of Vergere. On the other hand, aside from the obvious point of Anakin’s death, a lot of the… Denning-isms that would plague Denning’s post-NJO work are also present here, to a lesser degree but still noticeable. He’s obviously got his pet characters he wants to shill including Barabels (it’s not as obnoxious as it’ll get later, but there’s still a not-so subtle subtext of ‘Barabels are awesome! Love my Barabels!’ any time Saba or Tesar are on-page) and Alema (who as a character embodies many of Denning’s worst impulses, being a sexy, edgy, violent ‘bad girl’ who hogs the spotlight, not helped that Denning sometimes gives the impression he’d rather she be Anakin’s canon love interest instead of Tahiri). This is made more obvious by the fact that Saba, Tesar, and Alema all fall out of focus any time anyone else is writing. He’s got a fondness for gratuitous, gory violence and torture, especially in the scenes where the strike team are held captive by Duman Yaght and later on the worldship and falls into the “character deaths automatically improve a work” trap, as even aside from Anakin the strike team get mowed down incessantly, in the process wreaking havoc on the YJK and JJK era casts. So, yeah, this is a book I have mixed feelings about – ultimately, I do enjoy it on its own merits, but it also contains a lot of warning signs of what I consider worse things to come down the line.


Dark Journey: This one is weird in that I simultaneously enjoy it and think it’s one of the weakest NJO novels. Elaine Cunningham never wrote anything else for Star Wars, AFAIK, but she’s done a lot of Forgotten Realms work over the years and I usually like her work and her style; she especially does a good job with Tenel Ka and getting more into Hapan culture (is it weird I honestly want to see more of Sinsor Khal?). Jag had shown up previously in a brief role, but he gets a much bigger reintroduction here and I like his dynamic with Jaina; speaking of returning characters, the book takes Harrar, previously a fairly straightforward villain, and delves much deeper into him as a weary man struggling with his faith and becoming increasingly dissatisfied with his culture in a way that will bear fruit much later in the series. Alas, the biggest problem with this book is that so much of it feels inconsequential. Hapan politics? Even Tenel Ka becoming queen doesn’t have much impact, since she’ll mostly be out of focus for the rest of the series, and we’ll never visit Hapes again. Jaina wrestling with the dark side? She’ll pull herself back before anything too bad happens. Kyp becoming Jaina’s mentor? Never really goes anywhere. Jaina becoming the Trickster? Will only really get going in Enemy Lines. Khalee Lah as Jaina’s archenemy? He’s never more than a violent brute and dies at the end of the book anyway. Ta’a Chume trying to manipulate Jaina into marrying Isolder? Was obviously never going to work and so just ends up a giant waste of everyone’s time. So, yeah – it’s a book I enjoy well enough on its own merits but contributes a lot less than you’d think to the overall arc, and what it does add is done better in later books. And, sorry, but “Shawnkyr Nuruodo” makes no sense as a Chiss name; this has bugged me for years.


Enemy Lines I and II: After Edge of Victory, this is my favorite arc in the NJO. Allston is consistently good at mixing action, humor and heart and he’s on top form here. The entire siege of Borleias, across both books, is a high point of the series and really shows the New Republic learning how to effectively fight back. It also introduces probably the best arc-specific antagonist in the series, in the form of Czulkang Lah. Tsavong Lah, for his part, gets significantly humanized through his relationship with his father and gets to show his smarts by outmaneuvering the priest/shaper conspiracy against him; even more than Denning, Allston writes the best Lah of any NJO author. Rounding out the major villains is Viqi Shesh, who we get to see scrambling desperately to survive in a hell of her own making. We really dig into the Trickster stuff here too, which is always fun. Though she’s not really in focus here much Allston also writes a good Tahiri (which I feel obligated to mention as she’s one of my favorite characters). The Lord Nyax stuff is… random and really has nothing to do with the overall arc of the series beyond the Vong accidentally waking him up when they took Coruscant, but I’ve always kind of had a soft spot for it. Also – “We are machines! We are greater than the Yuuzhan Vong!” That is all.


Traitor: What is there to say? Though Conquest is my personal favorite, Traitor makes a decent case for being the all-around best novel in the NJO, maybe in Legends as a whole. I didn’t like it when I first read it – it’s so different in terms of both style and substance from anything else in the series – but it’s absolutely grown on me over the years. Really, this one is less about plot than theme and character, heavily focused on the three-way interplay between Jacen, Vergere and Nom Anor and the struggle for Jacen’s soul, and it’s wonderfully realized. And of course it made major waves at the time by raising the idea that there is no dark side, though in context its ideas are more complex than that (hint – the truth is always bigger than the words we use to describe it). Though he only shows up in the final act, it also takes Ganner’s arc – previously a fairly straightforward “egotistical hotshot gets kicked in the face by reality and has to learn humility” plotline – and brings it to a magnificent conclusion. Alas, this book has been seriously abused by later retcons. I’ve always hated the “Vergere was a Sith all along!” bit from LotF (seriously, NJO-Vergere has nothing but disgust for the Sith and indeed, the only time Jacen actually manages to turn the table and get under her skin -er, feathers - is when he accuses her or being one) and seems to owe more to fandom’s “Evil Chicken” memes than what’s actually in the text. And the notion that the Jacen of Traitor – who chose to meet the universe with love, and was surprised to learn that the universe could love him back – could become the paranoid, ranting maniac Caedus is a tragedy in ways that go far beyond what the authors intended (also, no, fighting the voxyn did not destroy Jacen’s ability to empathize with animals as even a cursory reading of this book will attest). So, yeah – this is a great, thought-provoking, sometimes disturbing book that left a legacy that got treated terribly. And if someone told me Stover had sat down and read The Divine Comedy just before writing this, I would not be at all surprised.


Destiny’s Way: This is an… interesting one. Plot-wise, it’s really good and has a lot of key events. Vergere’s secrets revealed, the first full appearance of Shimrra, Zonama Sekot introduced, the election of Cal Omas, Alpha Red, regrouping of the New Republic and formation of the Galactic Alliance, and of course the turning point of the war at Ebaq Nine. There’s a lot of great stuff here. However, while a great space opera writer in his own right, I’ve read that Walter Jon Williams wasn’t terribly familiar with the post-Endor Legends continuity, and it shows. Terminology is used weirdly (‘squadrons’ of capital ships?) and several characters feel off. Vergere is unusually forthright, though she may well have decided that the time for secrets was largely past, but Tsavong Lah has gone from fanatical to downright stupid (to an extent that I’ve always headcanoned that his father’s death deranged him in order to explain how many braincells he seems to have lost between books) and Shimrra is rather disappointing, coming off as little more than a big, lumbering ogre rather than the demonic force of evil he had the potential to be (later books, especially TUF, will largely correct this). Also, elements like Sekot and Alpha Red feel like they got dropped into the story without sufficient foreshadowing, though this may be on previous authors more than Williams. But seeing Ackbar come out of retirement for one last battle is great, and regardless of how he was written this book Jaina getting to stick her lightsaber through Lah’s throat is extremely cathartic. It’s also not so much foreshadowed as made explicit in the final scene that Onimi has some sort of hold on Shimrra. So, while the execution was sometimes iffy, there’s still a lot of good stuff in this book.


Force Heretic I, II, III: These books… are really inconsistent. They are really split between four main subplots which have minimal interaction with each other, and they sort of have to be evaluated individually. The A plot is the Luke, Mara and Jacen plot – the search for Zonama Sekot. This one has a cool premise but, IMO, is executed poorly; in Refugee especially we spend a lot of time in a Chiss library (I have nothing against libraries in principle – I’m a grad student – but it doesn’t exactly make for exciting reading) and then engaging in Chiss politics we have no context for involving characters we don’t care anything about, and it just feels like a waste of the premise when we could have been exploring the Unknown Regions. Not helping is that the Chiss as written by Williams and Dix just come off as Empire lite and aren’t that interesting; Zahn’s Chiss worldbuilding from Survivor’s Quest onward will mostly overwrite it and become what everyone else goes with. Even when we do get to Sekot, we do a lot of pointless fooling around before we actually get to meet the planetary consciousness. The B plot is the Han, Leia and Jaina plot involving traveling to planets that have been cut off by the war and, well, it’s filler. Really, obviously filler that mostly adds nothing to the series. Refugee once again is the worst offender – did we really need to do a Ssi-ruuk plotline in the middle of the Vong War? Even if the Vong did turn out to be behind it, that smells like a retcon for various reasons (it’s only alluded to at the very beginning and end of the book, like it was added late in editing, the Vong have never demonstrated the ability to impersonate a species as non-humanoid as the Ssi-ruuk before or after, and surely the Vong would consider entechment the ultimate abomination and would destroy any species that practiced it rather than using them as dupes, and certainly wouldn’t help turn Cundertol into an HRD as part of their plan, even if they intended to betray him afterwards). The C plot, the Nom Anor plot, on the other hand, is really interesting, turning Anor into a faction unto himself as he takes control of the Shamed One heretics and turns them against Shimrra in a bit to gain power. The D plot is the Tahiri plot, which takes place alongside the Han/Leia plot, but I count separately as it’s mostly in Tahiri’s head, and it really brings her arc together as she merges her human and Yuuzhan Vong natures (though the Ryn’s ‘we will sing your song’ bit to her hurts as badly as Traitor after what LotF did to her). So, yeah, these books are kind of all over the map in terms of quality, and therefore become a real mixed bag; Refugee, book two, where the worst of the wheel-spinning takes place, is one of the weakest and least-consequential books of the series. And I guess the arc is named after Nom Anor, because otherwise I’m not sure what the title Force Heretic has to do with anything.


The Final Prophecy: This one seems to get overlooked a lot in discussions of the NJO, but I’ve always had a great deal of affection for it (and not just because it was the first NJO book I read as it came out). Basically, this one is a Tahiri, Nen Yim, and Nom Anor book (plus some Corran!) and since those are three of my favorite characters, this book was right up my alley. Keyes writes by far the best Tahiri, really digging into what her dual nature means for her going forward, and the best Nen Yim, who he created. His Nom Anor’s pretty good too, as he scrambles to regain control the more things slip through his fingers. The meat of this book is the dynamic between those three characters (and Corran and Harrar!) as they journey to Zonama Sekor, and Keyes handles it really well (though alas he can’t resist teasing some major revelations but not revealing them to the audience near the end). The Jaina plotline is mostly filler, but it’s generally fun filler that serves to set up some elements going into TUF. Also it’s interesting that there are only three standalone paperbacks in the NJO that aren’t part of an arc (Dark Journey, Traitor, Final Prophecy) and they each focus on a particular Jedi (Jaina, Jacen, Tahiri) which kind of serves to underscore Tahiri’s status as an honorary Solo, a dynamic I always liked but that, alas, mostly got ignored going forward.


The Unifying Force: And so, we come to the end – and what an end it was. TUF had a lot riding on its shoulders as the grand finale of such a long, epic, divisive series, and it though it has some hiccups it ultimately pulls it off with aplomb. This is one of the longest NJO novels, and it really has to be, as all of our major plot threads converge on Coruscant for a big showdown, but Luceno gives almost everyone a chance to shine (even Fett gets a fun cameo, albeit one that Karen Traviss chose to completely ignore later on because it established that, le gasp, Han and Fett don’t actually especially hate each other! And Han has totally seen Fett’s face!). The final battle for Coruscant, culminating in the climactic duels with Shimrra and Onimi, remains one of the most epic sequences in the franchise. I also think the ending, in which the notion of ending the war by genociding the Vong is soundly rejected and true victory is one not by violence but by a spiritual awakening in which the Vong themselves are fundamentally transformed and redeemed, is ultimately a fundamental rejection of the idea that the NJO as a whole is meant to be ‘grimdark,’ ‘cynical,’ or ‘un-Star Wars’ (though bizarrely both the fandom and later authors would choose to interpret Jacen’s moment of transcendence and subsequent quest for enlightenment as a quest for power that would ultimately lead him to turn Sith, when his actual epiphany in that moment – of surrendering to the will of the Force and rejecting domination – is essentially the antithesis of Sith philosophy). That’s not to say the book is without its problems. Jaina getting damselled by Onimi is… not a good look for the series’ main heroine (seriously, you could’ve had Jaina and Jacen combine their powers to achieve transcendence and destroy Onimi and the scene would’ve played out mostly the same); Tahiri also feels wasted, becoming little more than an extra after Force Heretic and Final Prophecy seemed to be setting her up as a major player; though Nom Anor gets a pretty perfect bittersweet ending, I really wish we could’ve gotten a final scene of him facing death and accepting his mortality; Dif Scaur gets off way too easy for creating a bioweapon that could’ve destroyed all life in the galaxy. But on the whole, this is a really strong ending for the series, and if the post-RotJ Legends continuity had ended there (and some days I almost think it should have…) it would have made a worthy grand finale to the whole saga, and the final pages never fail to bring some slight tears to my eyes.


So, at the end of the day, I feel like my original conclusions stand – the NJO has a lot of ups and downs, but I do feel the pluses outweigh the minuses and the good parts are really good and include some of the best material in Legends. I’ve never worked out a solid ranking of every book in the series, but I’d probably put Conquest, Traitor and The Unifying Force as my top three and Balance Point, Dark Journey and Refugee as my bottom three. Note again that I got into the NJO near its end, so I didn’t experience things like Chewie’s and Anakin’s deaths, the destruction of Ithor or the fall of Coruscant or meeting the Vong or characters like Droma and Vergere for the first time in real time, which didn’t give me the same experience as someone who followed the series from the beginning, and which likely colored my interpretations. In any case, I think I’ll stop here for now, but I’ll be back later with another post looking at the NJO as a whole, the things I think it did well overall and things it didn’t, and its influence on the later direction of the franchise and comparison to some of the later Big Epic arcs. See you then!

 

To sound cynical even though I don’t have that much stake in the game if they hadn’t made the Denningverse either by doing something else or just not making books at all I wonder if the wider perception of NJO remains or changes

 

I think the thing that has changed most about the NJO looking back at it...is it really is taken on the whole.

@MasterGhandalf did a great job of breaking down the episodes of this saga...but in the end, no piece of it really can be understood without the context of the rest...for good or ill.

And despite how dramatic and dissonant and different the choices and voices the authors made...it all became part of the stew.

How that stew tastes...that argument can be left in the past.

 

This is the Internet, nothing stays in the past.

It remains strange that having stuck with it to the end, DR dropped it so fast. X-Wing Mercy Kill shows the untapped potential of new stories set in the Vong war.

 

Yeah, I got the distinct feeling in LOTF that they just wanted to completely forget about the Yuuzhan Vong. But then what exactly were they going for? If they wanted to do something safe, just focus on the familiar movie characters, then just write something set during the Rebellion era.

 

Well, before LotF got announced, there was all the talk about an Old Republic epic.

What NJO also shows up is a problem that has plagued SW ever since, including the Sequels.

The problem is how to have a new enemy, a new conflict, without entirely undermining the previous victories and progress won.

In this respect one potential solution is 'less is more'. I don't think NJO needed the useless politicians or the peace brigade. Some Jedi disagreement yes, but to a lesser degree and a story that knew it was going to redeem the Vong from the start.

 

It's a shame that Stackpole didn't get his Trilogy. The Duology felt disjointed because of it and its a shame those were his last ever Starwars books because of it

 

Yeah, my next big post (hopefully I'll have it ready in the next couple of days) will look at the NJO as a whole and its legacy, I just wanted to get my recap/reflection on the individual parts out of the way first (I'd initially intended to do just one really big post, but decided it would be easier on me and anyone trying to read it to split it up).

I mean, this is pretty much baseless speculation, but I've always wondered how much the post-NJO was a reaction against the NJO being as controversial as it was with a decision to play it safe (that taking the form of 'lots of Sith, walkback of the Vong, and rehashing of movie plots' for LotF, and then when that in turn proved unpopular, a rather blatant new attempt at course-correcting with FotJ). But it is darkly amusing that the Legacy comics - set more than a century down the line - feel in many ways more like a sequel to the NJO, including in showing the effects of the Vong war, than LotF/FotJ did.

Wait, was this just fan speculation or was this an actual plan that got scrapped (or never made it past the drawing board)? I first started lurking on these boards circa 2004 but I don't remember that either way; my curiosity is piqued!

One thing I noticed on this reread is that the NJO does sometimes feel like a rough draft, which I think is due to a combination of having so many authors, being Del Rey's first big Star Wars project, and the speed at which the individual volumes came out (4-5 books a year at the NJO's height). Part of that is you definitely have individual authors introducing new characters or plotlines that have to get woven into the overall narrative and/or plotlines that are initially hyped up big but subsequent authors don't really follow up on (ie, the Great River, the Insiders). The Peace Brigade, I think, were basically added to give a non-Vong enemy faction but almost nobody seemed interested in using them for much beyond disposable henchmen; we get very little sense of their organization's hierarchy or internal culture, and it's really not helped that the climax of their plotline is in "Ylesia", a novella side-story rather than one of the core books. As for politicians - I have more to say on this in my next big post, and while I get what the NJO was going for here this is one that I also think had a particularly bad effect on the franchise going forward as it really started the whole "the Jedi and the government must always be at odds" bit, which contributes to a (hopefully unintentional) "democracy is bad" thing that the later Legends era seemed to have going.

Yeah, I really noticed on this read that Ruin feels like it has two books worth of plot shoved into one fairly short volume, which definitely contributed to the rushed and janky feeling of those books.

 

Something I think worked very, very, well in the NJO is that so many of those little parts of it are basically follow-ups to an earlier corner of the expanded universe established in the Bantam era. "Dark Tide" and "Enemy Lines" are Stackpole and Allston each revisiting the little world they established in their half of the X-wing series; "Agents of Chaos" is revisiting the Han Solo Adventures/Han Solo Trilogy setting; "Edge of Victory" is revisiting the Young Jedi Knights/Junior Jedi Knights setting. The Bantam era had massively expanded the universe and created a ton of new memorable settings and characters; the New Jedi Order went back and revisited a bunch of those and showed us what each of them was doing in this new era. And it works largely because the series is so long (19 books) and authors mostly don't recur; each of them is given a book or two in which they and the characters they created are given their day in the sun, and then we move on to the next one.

It's something that's completely missing from the LOTF and FOTJ series, partly because they're shorter and partly because the rotating author format makes the whole thing a lot more disjointed. Instead of a bunch of authors each being given one chance to let their characters shine before we move on to something else, you get three authors having a tug of war over whose vision is going to dominate the series.

 

I think the 9-book Old Republic epic was a scrapped plan that we have few concrete details of.

As to the post-Vong plans, it is likely DR didn't expect TUF to be the smash hit it was. But that doesn't explain it taking until X-Wing Mercy Kill for them to return to the Vong.

 

I blame the reaction to the prequels for this.

Previous stories had only the original trilogy to go on, and they followed its lead by creating a universe that was, if not quite black and white, pretty clear cut about who the better and the worse sides were - Rebel/New Republic governance and Jedi presence were usually a massive improvement and the system of government they promoted was worth fighting and dying for. But then the prequels came along, and from that point forward the Republic/GA was always a dysfunctional mess that was either useless and ineffective or about to turn into the Empire, because that's what it was like in the prequels.

Nobody seems to have gotten the memo that the reason the Republic was that was in the prequels is that it was a deeply corrupted society in the last stages of its collapse. It has to be that way to set the stage for the Empire and the original trilogy; it isn't supposed to be the Republic's default, permanent state of being. It wouldn't have endured as long as it has if it was always that way.

 

Yeah, the PT effect can be seen in the idea that there can only be one portrait of the Jedi and government, even across the millennia.

 

Its ironic that Del Rey's first Star Wars project was probably their best (and biggest). I still have a lot of annoyances about the series (particularly bringing back old characters just to kill them off) but overall the series did feel epic.

And yeah, the prequels had that effect on a lot of stories, not just the novels. Though its also a convenient way to hold back the heroes, since for most of NJO the New Republic had been at best incompetent, but the prequel era Republic is even worse, so I saw that used as a base for other eras so as to have the heroes struggle more (including the post-TUF novels).

 

I don't think it was just the PT but also the current zeitgeist of that time (and I would say it still is in many ways) was/is that politics cannot be anything but corrupt, ineffective, and be a hindrance to the heroes instead of allies.

 

I guess fictional politics just has the same problem as real-life politics...it's not noteworthy when it's functioning properly.

 

As I said in the zeigtgeist thread (good to see other using the word @Gamiel). Politicians = bad Military officers = good, is a tale as old as military sci-fi. In Star Wars we have it in the early EU (borsk is the embodiment of politics), so this isn't new. And it only really comes up in a couple of books, but they are early books so naturally people paint the whole NR as this.

My top 3 NJO books are 3 Vector Prime, 2 Destiny's Way, Honourable mention: Traitor and number 1 The Unifying Force (though it was also my first 'adult novel' so I might be biased). Yes I entered at the end.

Vector Prime does a good job setting the scene and we see what is lost, we see the good times that are coming to an end.

DW has a LOT of good stuff, it sets up the final conflict of NJO, how to win whether the quick and easy path or the more difficult path. DW ALSO has the Empire as not good and a politician who disagrees with the heroes NOT be evil. It's shocking. Though it also has the dumb sword of the jedi prophecy and changing the NR into the GFFA so it loses points for that.

As to Traitor. It says that the darkside isn't outside it is within. "the darkside you need fear is in here" 'if giving into the force makes you [evil] then maybe the problem is with you not the force'. Is more true to her than "it's not the power but how you use it" (which was said by Kyle in a game). But it is also a very 'dense' book, I found it hard to flow with I was to busying think about what it was saying, not bad, but it keeps it out of the top 3.

Now what can I say about The unifying Force? It is great. It is the end, a glorious end to the NJO and to Star Wars. I mean the ending is literally the laughter of the heroes coming up to be heard in a galaxy far, far away. You can't top that and the only other ending to Star Wars (legacy vol 2) just went for a "the adventure continues" vibe.

It took NJO a while to find it's feet and it's themes, but it got there, it is the EPIC of Star Wars, the biggest single story ever told and will likely stay that way (the high republic and the old republic have to seperate stories, NJO follows the same mains through out the story).


As to bottom 3? Hmmm, Force Heretic 1-3? I did like the Chiss in those though.

 

My bottom ones would be the Borleais books. They just destroy any tension and turn the Vong into absolute Clowns. I think they should have been sold as parts of the X-Wing series, not the main NJO and it would have been fine. Also really dislike Dark Journey just for how pointless it is in many ways. Jaina changes as a character for the first and only time... oh no one conversation with Kyp and its all rolled back.

Favorites would be Star By Star, Traitor and Destinies Way, even though the Denningverse puts kind of a shadow over all three of them.

 

There is no denningverse here. Here we are safe, here we are free


The emperor invites you to lake Laogai

 

I mean after seeing how my goverment handled this whole pandemic thing. And then looking at the news and seeing similar **** ups elsewhere. Yeah .... I can't watch a movie now and say that the politicians are too corrupt or stupid, that they'd never do that irl. Because well .... they have done utterly stupid things, self-sabotaging things just because of greed or the desire to stay in power and screw everyone else.

 

True. Usually no one trusts positive words about political policies or persons, labeling it propaganda.

 

It's not helped by the current party (whichever it is) saying how great everything is and the opposition how bad things are and how great they were when THEY were in charge. To give an example of a current farce going on. The prime minister of my country got fired, so now a new one needs to be selected. The selection process has no expiration date, they can take as long as they want. The ruling party can propose one and the President must approve, naturally they start with people that will never be approved. Meanwhile, the fired prime minister is still serving as acting PM untill the replacement is chosen. It's been weeks already and there is no sign of progress, making the whole "we will fire him for incompetence" thing look like a bad joke.

Or the National Liberal Party saying last year that any alliance with the Social Democrats is making a deal with Satan (these two parties btw have run the country into the ground ever since the USSR collapsed, heck many of their senior people were in the Communist party and they taught the new people the same old corrupt tricks). These days of course they want to ally, it's the right thing to do. And so on and so forth. Really makes it hard not to hate them.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not for authoritarian governments, the problems in my country are the result of such a government. It just seems that democracy is easy to take advantage of, hijack with greed and corruption and steer with alarmist media (seriously, everything on TV or the Net is either something alarmist, or something promoting an us vs them mentality about everything from race, to religion, to politics, to what shows we like etc.).

It's honestly kinda tiring, very depressing and there are certainly days I wish Vlad Tepes would pay our politicians a visit.

 

I don't mind governments being portrayed as hopelessly corrupt and dysfunctional, because God knows there are enough examples of these in many different times and places, I mind when that becomes literally the only portrayal of government that you can find anymore. In-universe, it annoys me more in some stories than others, because there are some (I'd argue Star Wars is one of them) where it simply doesn't fit the universe. Out-of-universe, it annoys me because it teaches people a learned helplessness about the entire process. Never try to make anything better, at least not through politics, because it probably won't work anyway.

 

Oh man, I hate to say it, but yeah I do think at some point the Vong start to feel a bit like a joke. I remember when I read Boba Fett: A Practical Man much later and thinking "holy crap, the Yuuzhan Vong are terrifying again!".

 

Never did get around to reading that one, myself. Fett in general, and especially Fett as written by Traviss, just doesn't interest me that much. Re the Enemy Lines arc, I obviously disagree with this take on it based on where I rank that arc overall; bingeing the NJO, and this time in particular, it does feel like the first half of the series made the Vong a bit too invincible, with the New Republic only managing victories against them that were Pyrrhic at best. Seeing them get their noses bloodied for a change was therefore very cathartic (it also, IMO, makes for a necessary breather between the relentlessly bleak Star by Star - Dark Journey being as much an epilogue to SBS as a story in its own right, which is part of its problem - and the mind-bending Traitor). But this may be as much a matter of personal taste as anything.

 

The five books after Star By Star all really feel like a "turning of the tide" moment. Dark Journey and Star By Star have Jaina and Jacen hitting rock bottom and starting to bounce back; Enemy Lines has the New Republic military turn around and give the Vong a phenomenal kick in the teeth just to signify both to them and to their own side that just because Coruscant has fallen doesn't mean it's over; Destiny's Way has the New Republic as a whole getting back on its feet and under new (and competent) management and returning to the fight. The Enemy Lines books are my favorite, but that whole batch has a sense of renewed optimism that's a breath of fresh air after the entire first half of the NJO.