Let's... Let's ALL Read: The Thrawn Trilogy [Archive] - Page 2

mangosta71

2014-12-20, 03:19 PM

Busy week at work, so I'm ranting about a lot of things all at once. Deal with it.

You know what's even more convenient than Lando appearing right when the operation started? That someone with Thrawn's supposed genius didn't disable the damned slave circuits before using the mole miners.

Aside from that, Thrawn knew before he left Myrkyr that something was up with Karrde. He even had a suspicion about what it was. He should have bombarded the base from orbit before he left - it's not like he actually needed Karrde for anything after his personnel knew how to collect ysalamiri. And he could have held Karrde up as an example to others of what happens when you **** with him. Consider how different things would be if he had done the smart thing. In this battle, Han and Lando would have already been dead; Luke would have been stranded on Myrkyr, captured by the Empire, or dead...

On Kashyyk, it's kind of incredible that Leia's lightsaber remained in position to damage the Noghris' craft during the swing (I might accept it had Leia steadied it with the Force, but she didn't). It's likewise incredible that none of the Noghri saw the sudden blazing beacon of light and maneuvered out of its way. And that Leia smells like Vader. SCENT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY. Vader should smell like stale sweat, leather, and plastic. You can bet that Leia bathes regularly with scented soaps.

To echo the complaint about Mara Jade, yes, she definitely should have been able to hunt Luke down during those 5 years. And now that he's right in front of her, unarmed and cut off from the Force, even she knows that she could just kill him. But his plot armor is so strong that she keeps coming up with excuses not to do it. I mean, she could off him and tell Karrde that they were attacked by vornskrs at night, and they killed Luke before she woke up.

As for the crash, Mara's Skipray was explicitly ABOVE Luke's.; there's no way she was in his slipstream. PHYSICS. The ships were also remarkably intact, considering they plowed into the ground at high speed. And the investigating stormtroopers are so "elite" that they completely missed the tracks that R2 left.

I'm realizing now that I'm not nearly the fanatic Star Wars devotee that I was the first time I read these books. Or perhaps I'm just better at reading critically. I see plot armor all over the heroes, the "genius" villain screwing up left and right...

Angelalex242

2014-12-20, 03:47 PM

Of course Mara isn't going to kill him. Tim Zahn made her with Luke's Future Wife in mind.

Kinda hard to later marry someone you killed. :P

nyjastul69

2014-12-20, 03:48 PM

Of course Mara isn't going to kill him. Tim Zahn made her with Luke's Future Wife in mind.

Kinda hard to later marry someone you killed. :P

I think you just released a major spoiler! :(

Angelalex242

2014-12-20, 03:53 PM

You mean the spoiler that you would've found the minute you googled Mara Jade and found 'Mara Jade Skywalker?'

Anyways, I was discussing why Luke had such Plot Armor against Mara.

nyjastul69

2014-12-20, 03:57 PM

You mean the spoiler that you would've found the minute you googled Mara Jade and found 'Mara Jade Skywalker?'

Anyways, I was discussing why Luke had such Plot Armor against Mara.

Except I never did that. I specifically avoided googling individual names for that very reason. It's also utterly stupid that that could happen.

Please be more cautious in the future regarding spoiling others enjoyment of the novel. Mine just took a major blow.

ETA: I've taken measures to assure that doesn't happen again.

Angelalex242

2014-12-20, 04:01 PM

Statute of Limitations on Spoilers is in effect.

Or would this be a bad time to tell you who Luke's dad is?

Yora

2014-12-20, 04:39 PM

That's why you don't google character bios for books you havn't finished yet.

nyjastul69

2014-12-20, 04:43 PM

That's why you don't google character bios for books you havn't finished yet.

Apparently, that's not good enough. *sighs* Oh, well, nothing can be done about it now. Although, I think Angelalex242 should edit the post to remove the spoilers. It may matter for others who are currently reading along with the thread.

Thrawn183

2014-12-20, 04:46 PM

Statute of Limitations on Spoilers is in effect.

Or would this be a bad time to tell you who Luke's dad is?

I don't go into a thread about the first Terminator film and start talking about the ending to Terminator 2. Come on, man. If there's anywhere to not put up these kinds of spoilers, it's this thread.

TheThan

2014-12-20, 04:50 PM

The interesting thing about Grand Admiral Thrawn is that he’s clearly not perfect. He makes mistakes (well errors really). He didn’t account for the slave circuits or the possibility of Lando being at the battle. Heck why would he?

He didn’t smash Karrde’s base because he was trying to capture Luke alive, and assumed a squad of storm troopers and a few scouts would be enough. He was wrong and suffered those losses as well as allowing Skywalker to slip through his fingers.

It’s also possible that he’s letting Talon go because he’s looking forward to matching wits against him again. This is a guy that successfully hid the Millennium falcon, Luke’s X-wing, Han Solo, Lando Calrissian and Luke Skywalker from Thrawn for at least a day. Thrawn was bested at the intelligence gathering game. Plus Thrawn might see a kindred spirit in Karrde, someone that also has a love of information. maybe he’s got his ego wounded and wants to prove he’s the superior; simply crushing him doesn’t do that but beating him at his own game does.

Thrawn is sly. His Sluis Van attack proves it, a Trojan horse with the intention of stealing valuable warships. Nobody saw it coming… should they have? Sluis van is still heavily protected and attacking it with the intent of destruction is not quite feasible for Thrawn’s forces.

Thrawn knows how to apply the imperial hammer. But more importantly he knows when to apply the imperial hammer. Hunting down Karrde is a secondary if not tertiary objective right now. Not to mention that Thrawn does not let his wounded ego run wild and realizes that killing Karrde out of vengeance is petty at best; but he still realizes that an object lesson can be taught by karrde’s destruction. So he's willing to persue karrde, but not at the expense of his primary objectives.

I also think it’s odd that they keep referring to Karrde’s sneakyness as treachery and betrayal. He doesn’t belong to the empire he has not defected, turned traitor or anything. He simply out foxed the fox once.

Statute of Limitations on Spoilers is in effect.

Or would this be a bad time to tell you who Luke's dad is?

Obi-wan said his dad was a Jedi that was betrayed and murdered by Darth Vader; which is why he was being raised by his uncle. :smallbiggrin:

Angelalex242

2014-12-20, 04:53 PM

What he told you was true, from a certain point of view.

pendell

2014-12-20, 04:53 PM

I am neither a moderator or the starter of this thread. Nonetheless, I would like to politely suggest that all parties review their postings and make use of spoiler tags if warranted.

The "rules of the game" for the thread, as I understand them, is that we spoilerize anything revealed in this book or the hand duology until we've actually read them. I have attempted to do this myself , with [hopefully] only minor slips.

That's a suggestion, nothing more.

Hmm ... will we be reading the duology after finishing up Last Command?

ETA: I see that Angelalex242 has already done this on his own initiative. Thank you , sir.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

TheThan

2014-12-20, 04:55 PM

I am neither a moderator or the starter of this thread. Nonetheless, I would like to politely suggest that all parties review their postings and make use of spoiler tags if warranted.

The "rules of the game" for the thread, as I understand them, is that we spoilerize anything revealed in this book or the hand duology until we've actually read them. I have attempted to do this myself , with [hopefully] only minor slips.

That's a suggestion, nothing more.

Hmm ... will we be reading the duology after finishing up Last Command?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I try to as well.

we could go for all six. the trilogy, the hand of thrawn duology and outbound flight.

McStabbington

2014-12-20, 05:14 PM

With respect, I think we're all selling Thrawn a tad short regarding those mole miners. Yes, failing to change the access codes is something that Star Trek: Voyager used so frequently that it's now been permanently ruined for an entire generation as a plot convenience. But one, this book predates Star Trek: Voyager by four years, so it's really unfair to judge it by a plot twist that a later series overused so badly that it completely wrecked.

Two, and far more important, it hinges on Lando being way more knowledgeable about his business than any CEO usually is. I mean, if Han had taken on a mole miner technician who regularly deals with the machines, that would be one thing, but Lando's the combination President of the business and mayor of the company town he's constructed. I suspect Thrawn may have dismissed the idea that there was any danger not because it was some goofy failure, but for the same reason I might dismiss my concern if the only possibility of failure hinged on Bill Gates' 1) being in the bank I was robbing, and 2) knowing the password for the hacked Microsoft e-mail account I was using to do it.

Now, I suppose you can back this all up a step and say "Well, why didn't Thrawn know that Lando was such a hand's-on business leader?" It's really part and parcel about the Iron Law of Plot Holes: fans never gripe about the plot holes that get the heroes into more trouble, but focus solely on the plot holes that get heroes out of trouble. But what I would prefer to focus on is the fact that if this is the level of nitpicking we have to do to find fault with Thrawn and the plot, then Thrawn does a great deal to live up to his reputation as a pretty stellar villain, and the plot is a very well-done mystery plot, with the solution obvious in retrospect but brilliant in pulling the rug out from under us in the moment.

Yora

2014-12-20, 05:25 PM

The interesting thing about Grand Admiral Thrawn is that he’s clearly not perfect. He makes mistakes (well errors really). He didn’t account for the slave circuits or the possibility of Lando being at the battle. Heck why would he?
On the other hand, his reaction is never "damn, I screwed this up", but always "meh, doesn't matter. My grand strategy is so great, this won't have any effect on it".

He didn’t smash Karrde’s base because he was trying to capture Luke alive, and assumed a squad of storm troopers and a few scouts would be enough. He was wrong and suffered those losses as well as allowing Skywalker to slip through his fingers.

It’s also possible that he’s letting Talon go because he’s looking forward to matching wits against him again. This is a guy that successfully hid the Millennium falcon, Luke’s X-wing, Han Solo, Lando Calrissian and Luke Skywalker from Thrawn for at least a day. Thrawn was bested at the intelligence gathering game. Plus Thrawn might see a kindred spirit in Karrde, someone that also has a love of information. maybe he’s got his ego wounded and wants to prove he’s the superior; simply crushing him doesn’t do that but beating him at his own game does.
Does he know any of this? He only realized that Skywalker was indeed the mysterious runaway on Myrkr when he saw a corellian frighter with an X-Wing in tow right after the stormtroopers failed to report. When he left Myrkr, there wasn't any reason to destroy Karrdes camp. He may have had some secrets, but Thrawn knew that the whole time. And just killing a potential henchman and contact because he wasn't 100%, which was never expected or stated, really just isn't his style.
Until there was proof that Karrde works for the Republic and helps Luke evade capture, there was no reason to make him an enemy.

TheThan

2014-12-20, 05:58 PM

On the other hand, his reaction is never "damn, I screwed this up", but always "meh, doesn't matter. My grand strategy is so great, this won't have any effect on it".

Ultimately nothing has changed between pre sluis van and post sluis van. He’s lost a few ties and a bunch of stolen mole miners and their crews; the crew being the hardest hitting thing about the loss.

He still needs more ships but he hasn’t lost any. His objectives have not changed because of one (albeit major) set back. his plan is simply delayed.

Does he know any of this? He only realized that Skywalker was indeed the mysterious runaway on Myrkr when he saw a corellian frighter with an X-Wing in tow right after the stormtroopers failed to report. When he left Myrkr, there wasn't any reason to destroy Karrdes camp. He may have had some secrets, but Thrawn knew that the whole time. And just killing a potential henchman and contact because he wasn't 100%, which was never expected or stated, really just isn't his style.
Until there was proof that Karrde works for the Republic and helps Luke evade capture, there was no reason to make him an enemy.

Yes, Thrawn didn’t know Karrde had skywalker and company there. He suspected; he suspected enough to leave a capture force behind but not enough to warrant pushing back the Sluis Van attack. He didn’t make a glaring mistake. He had other priorities that kept him from pursuing his hunch with more than a token capture team.

Unlike alot of bad guys, Thrawn can think in the long term. capturing skywalker on Myrrk is a bonus and is not mission critical to his current mission or even his whole war effort.

Yora

2014-12-20, 06:14 PM

Ultimately nothing has changed between pre sluis van and post sluis van. He’s lost a few ties and a bunch of stolen mole miners and their crews; the crew being the hardest hitting thing about the loss.

He still needs more ships but he hasn’t lost any. His objectives have not changed because of one (albeit major) set back. his plan is simply delayed.
Very good point, actually. In this case, it was entirely justified to not be bothered by it.

And not only didn't he lose nothing but a few TIEs and mole miners (I think the part of the frighter with the cloaking device was recovered), the Republic now has 50 capital ships that can not be quickly returned to readiness for battle. Even though they were used as freighters, it would just have required getting a crew settled in and they would have been ready to go. Now they all need a completely rebuild of the bridge and several other major systems, which probably would count as massive battle damage. In fact, he still may have come out of this winning.

Douglas

2014-12-20, 08:08 PM

Apparently, that's not good enough. *sighs* Oh, well, nothing can be done about it now. Although, I think Angelalex242 should edit the post to remove the spoilers. It may matter for others who are currently reading along with the thread.
There's only so much that accomplishes so long as your quotes of it are still unspoilered...

nyjastul69

2014-12-20, 08:29 PM

There's only so much that accomplishes so long as your quotes of it are still unspoilered...

Thank you for pointing that out. I forgot that I quoted it.

TheThan

2014-12-20, 09:55 PM

Zolem

2014-12-20, 10:56 PM

As Pendell put in earlier; despite his setback, Thrawn still has come out on top of things. He’s effectively disabled 50 enemy capital ships and damage or destroyed several more; I don’t think we have estimates on what sort of damage his fleet caused; probably a fair amount. That puts Thrawn at the advantage.

The new republic is hurt financially, as they can’t use those cruisers as merchantmen anymore, and Thrawn doesn’t have to worry about those 50 capital ships ruining his day for a while, not to mention all the chaos caused by a major imperial raid. Despite not being able to steal a single ship from the new republic; he's in a better position than he was beforehand.

And let's not forget that, in a time of economic crisis, they now have massive repair costs fr those capital ships. And there is even the possibility that enough damage was done that they are unsalvageable and have to be scrapped. Yeah, I'd chalk this up as a "solid victory", just not a "turning point in the war" victory.

mangosta71

2014-12-21, 02:28 AM

TheThan

2014-12-21, 03:47 AM

I never watched Voyager. My annoyance at the complete and utter failure to even examine the vehicles that his plan was dependent upon is purely due to the absurdity of him missing that. Presumably he had to train crews to pilot them, but nobody ever bothered to check the avionics? That sort of potential liability would have been corrected if he was actually a genius. Everything seems really heavy-handed on the part of the author this time around, and it's really bugging me.

Now my personal head cannon is that in between the books Thrawn looked into exactly what happened to the mole miners, learned that the engineers didn’t do a proper job and had to teach them a lesson like he had to teach his bridge crew.

Yora

2014-12-21, 11:33 AM

And keeping in the glorious tradition, Dark Force Rising starts with a Star Destroyer over a planet. :smallbiggrin:

Philistine

2014-12-21, 12:37 PM

This being SW, it's very possible that Thrawn didn't have to train crews to pilot the mole miners. Operating spacecraft in Star Wars seems to be a skill set akin to driving in the present day: once you've got the basics down, you can pretty much drive whatever's available.

Also... Thrawn is a fleet commander. As such, there are several very good reasons for him not to spend his time down on the hangar deck personally overseeing the maintenance and refitting of the mole miners (assuming that's even taking place aboard his flagship), much less doing that work himself - not least of which being that, at least as far as we know, he has no particular training or aptitude for that sort of work. Thrawn is at least a couple of steps up the chain of command from that: his involvement in the mole miner refit project would properly be limited to giving orders like, "Have as many mole miners as possible ready in time for Operation X," with all the details beyond that filled in by subordinates at the appropriate levels of command. Missing the slave circuits does perhaps point to an organizational failure - but on the other hand, the use of slave circuits seems to be pretty rare in the setting, enough so that Lando was the only person Luke knew who knew what the remotes even looked like. And the slip would have been harmless except for Lando's coincidental arrival in the vicinity of Sluis Van at the time of the attack. "The only person in the entire galaxy who might be capable of disrupting the plan showing up at exactly the wrong place and exactly the wrong time" is a sufficiently outside possibility that we might perhaps excuse Thrawn for not having it covered, hmm?

Yora

2014-12-21, 01:04 PM

So, did we have any obvious confirmation that Mara Jade has Force powers before? That she was able to find Luke somewhere in space was obviously caused by the Force, but it hadn't been explicitly stated that she had been the one using the Force to search for him. Being used to handling lightsabres could also have been counted off as a coincidence, but in hindsight those hints were totally obvious. Maybe back in the early 90s, when there hadn't been any stories about other Force users but Luke, Vader, the Emperor, and Obi-Wan yet, it might not have been that obvious, but now it really isn't anything of a surprise anymore.

Snooping around on wookiepedia, I discovered that verpines were not invented for this book, but had actually been in an RPG adventure three years earlier.
The defel doesn't match the alien from Episode 4 that is said to also be one at all. However, that alien was CGIed over with a completely different creature in the special editions.

These days, it also strikes me a lot how incredibly racist Star Wars always is. Any time a new alien is introduced, that one specific persons occupation almost always become the speciality of the entire race. Sluis Van has big shipyeards: All Sluisi are mechanics. One verpine is good with hacking ship electronics: All verpines are good with electronics. One hutt a crime boss, all hutts crime bosses. One Rodian a bounty hunter, all rodian culture about hunting. All Jawas scavengers, all sand people raiders, all ugnaught factory workers, all Corellians scoundrels, all Tatooinians farmers, all bothans spies, all chiss (Thrawns people) military masterminds, all noghri assassins, all sullustans good with ships, all gamoreans thugs.

Gnoman

2014-12-21, 01:05 PM

but on the other hand, the use of slave circuits seems to be pretty rare in the setting, enough so that Lando was the only person Luke knew who knew what the remotes even looked like.

Not quite. It's mentioned earlier on that the Falcon NOT having a slave circuit is very odd, which forced them to travel for hours with the shieldship instead of making a coordinated hyperjump. What was extremely unusual about what Luke found (and Lando had) was that it was a full-fledged remote-control for the ship.

Angelalex242

2014-12-21, 01:43 PM

Well, in most cases, it seems to be All Race are X, unless they're jedi instead.

nyjastul69

2014-12-21, 01:55 PM

Philistine

2014-12-21, 02:01 PM

So, did we have any obvious confirmation that Mara Jade has Force powers before? That she was able to find Luke somewhere in space was obviously caused by the Force, but it hadn't been explicitly stated that she had been the one using the Force to search for him. Being used to handling lightsabres could also have been counted off as a coincidence, but in hindsight those hints were totally obvious. Maybe back in the early 90s, when there hadn't been any stories about other Force users but Luke, Vader, the Emperor, and Obi-Wan yet, it might not have been that obvious, but now it really isn't anything of a surprise anymore.

No, that was always very obvious.

These days, it also strikes me a lot how incredibly racist Star Wars always is. Any time a new alien is introduced, that one specific persons occupation almost always become the speciality of the entire race. Sluis Van has big shipyeards: All Sluisi are mechanics. One verpine is good with hacking ship electronics: All verpines are good with electronics. One hutt a crime boss, all hutts crime bosses. One Rodian a bounty hunter, all rodian culture about hunting. All Jawas scavengers, all sand people raiders, all ugnaught factory workers, all Corellians scoundrels, all Tatooinians farmers, all bothans spies, all chiss (Thrawns people) military masterminds, all noghri assassins, all sullustans good with ships, all gamoreans thugs.

To be fair, that's extremely common in F/SF, and other works handle it even worse. In Star Trek, for example, you get almost the exact same thing with one small but nasty difference: all the intelligent peoples in the Alpha Quadrant are interfertile, so it's less Fantastic Racism and more Just Plain Racism. At least in SW they're not all the same species, with assigned social roles based on relatively minor differences in their outward appearance!

pendell

2014-12-21, 02:13 PM

the galaxy who knows the override codes who is not permanently on Nkllon. And Thrawns technicians didn't bother to change them. Of course, the chance that anyone who knows the codes would ever come anywhere near the miners again was incredibly low, but that still should be standard procedure when getting equipment from external sources. Especially captured enemy vehicles.

Agreed. Why give the enemy ANY chance at all to screw things up when you don't have to? That's a lesson all of us RPGers learned well; never EVER give the dice a chance to throw a 1 at you if you can POSSIBLY help it at all.

On the other hand, his reaction is never "damn, I screwed this up", but always "meh, doesn't matter. My grand strategy is so great, this won't have any effect on it".

But we never actually see inside Thrawn's head; we only see him through other people's eyes.

So think what we're seeing in this case is Mask of Command (http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Mask_of_Command.html?id=Zp8ADDoHslAC). Subordinates take their cues from the leader; you can't expect them to have more confidence in the situation than the leader does. If the boss panics, the worker bees panic too.

So it is imperative that Thrawn -- or any military commander -- affect a pose of utmost calm, even if he's inwardly wetting his pants or throwing furniture at the wall. To keep everyone else calm, focused, and on task.

So passing off a defeat or other problem as All part of the plan (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllAccordingToPlan) is a critical skill for any leader. There will be plenty of time to confess your fears -- in the tell-all book which will be published ten years after the war is over.

I think that's what's happening here. I think Thrawn really is quite upset at this failure, but giving in to his emotions is an indulgence he cannot afford at this time. As seen in his interactions with Joruus C'baoth, he is very good at concealing both his emotions and his true intent.

I wouldn't want to play Sabacc with him.

Yeah, I'd chalk this up as a "solid victory", just not a "turning point in the war" victory

Agreed.

Now my personal head cannon is that in between the books Thrawn looked into exactly what happened to the mole miners, learned that the engineers didn’t do a proper job and had to teach them a lesson like he had to teach his bridge crew.

Perhaps. *My* headcanon is that his not punishing any crew on camera or even alluding to it is that he accepts personal responsibility for this failure. If he believed it was someone else's fault than his I suspect he and Rukh would already be heading out to correct the error.

Anyway, Thrawn does have other tools in the motivation toolbox than murdering subordinates who fail him. As we shall see.

Also... Thrawn is a fleet commander. As such, there are several very good reasons for him not to spend his time down on the hangar deck personally overseeing the maintenance and refitting of the mole miners

As fleet commander he is responsible for the success or failure of the operation. It therefore means it was his responsibility to ensure that he had delegated hangar deck operations to someone competent enough to change the codes.

That's the point of leadership. It's not about micro-management. It's about being able to pick the right people to fill the slots and give them the tools they need to do their job. If the people are deficient in some way, assist them in correcting their defects or replacing them with other people. The mere fact that Thrawn's time is not best spent on the hangar deck does not relieve him of the responsibility of doing all he can to ensure the operation's success.

So, did we have any obvious confirmation that Mara Jade has Force powers before?

Yes. In Luke's vision on Dagobah, he saw Mara Jade using Force Telekinesis to steal his lightsaber.

These days, it also strikes me a lot how incredibly racist Star Wars always is. Any time a new alien is introduced, that one specific persons occupation almost always become the speciality of the entire race

I would consider this a limitation of human psychology. My wife has ten parakeets. Because she spends time with them she knows their individual personality traits, but to everyone else they're just feathered creatures. The same with dogs , or cats, or sheep; if you don't actually spend a long time among them all cats, or dogs, or sheep, seem much alike.

I think the same applies to intelligent species in the GFFA; I'll be shot if I can tell the difference between Admiral Ackbar physically and every other member of his species. If I spent time with Mon Cals i would eventually be able to tell male from female, a 'beautiful' member of the species from an ugly one, and a young person just out of adolescence from a middle-aged one.

At any rate, it seems completely believable to me that humans in the GFFA have a hard time distinguishing individuals from a species if they are not familiar with it. That doesn't mean those species really are homogenous; it simply means the characters haven't spent enough time with them to spot the differences.

Besides, it's a shortcut for the author as well; developing a character takes a lot of time and effort after all.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

McStabbington

2014-12-21, 02:22 PM

Now my personal head cannon is that in between the books Thrawn looked into exactly what happened to the mole miners, learned that the engineers didn’t do a proper job and had to teach them a lesson like he had to teach his bridge crew.

That's always been my head-canon, which is pretty much why I'm a bit baffled that anyone else would have a problem with it. Thrawn is a military mastermind, but he's also the guy at the top of the ladder who tells his underlings to do, usually in fairly generic terms such as "Go get X done." That he actually dealt with the tractor beam operator was unusual not simply in that it was his most sharply-defined act of evil thus far, but that it showed he actually is a great deal more hands-on than most grand military commanders would be, both in executing and in evaluating that an execution may well be necessary as opposed to just something that you do because you're EVUL. But he's still not so hands-on that he's ripping guts out of mole miners or reprogramming them himself on his off hours.

Speaking of EVUL, I do think that's the real part where Thrawn becomes the Anti-Vader. In creating Vader, Lucas was clearly creating a villain. In creating Thrawn, Zahn is clearly creating an antagonist. Thrawn is clearly trending evil in his alignment, but he also does absolutely nothing for the purposes of being evil. Even killing the recruit was a calculated move to suggest that manifest incompetence, and then trying to justify it to the High Commander, simply would not be tolerated in the Empire. He does things because he is implacably opposed to the restoration of the Republic, and it is that opposition that places his goals at inexorable odds with the heroes. By contrast, the running gag Vader had of executing people for failure to perform in ESB is so comically terrible an idea over the long-term that it quite literally would only work if we assume that there are thousands of ships in the Imperial fleet funneling capable command officers upwards to keep those command crews staffed despite Vader's whims.

Ironically enough, it's also a distinction that works brilliantly to deepen and revivify the Star Wars universe, because it shows that the universe is big enough for a story beyond good and evil, but can include one about two groups with incompatible goals.

Gnoman

2014-12-21, 02:30 PM

I would consider this a limitation of human psychology. My wife has ten parakeets. Because she spends time with them she knows their individual personality traits, but to everyone else they're just feathered creatures. The same with dogs , or cats, or sheep; if you don't actually spend a long time among them all cats, or dogs, or sheep, seem much alike.

I think the same applies to intelligent species in the GFFA; I'll be shot if I can tell the difference between Admiral Ackbar physically and every other member of his species. If I spent time with Mon Cals i would eventually be able to tell male from female, a 'beautiful' member of the species from an ugly one, and a young person just out of adolescence from a middle-aged one.

At any rate, it seems completely believable to me that humans in the GFFA have a hard time distinguishing individuals from a species if they are not familiar with it. That doesn't mean those species really are homogenous; it simply means the characters haven't spent enough time with them to spot the differences.

Besides, it's a shortcut for the author as well; developing a character takes a lot of time and effort after all.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

There's also the rather logical explanation that we encounter a very limited subset of any given species, and we meet them under situations that would attract very similar types of individuals. For example, nearly all Verpine encountered are technicians. This is because they're biologically well suited to the role, so a lot get hired for that job. Meanwhile, there's never a book with a mission that takes place on their homeworld, so the only ones we meet are those that went out into the galaxy to find work, which is usually easiest for them to find as maintenance technicians.

Angelalex242

2014-12-21, 02:32 PM

Vader was a simple guy.

"The crushing of windpipes will continue until morale improves and competence is achieved."

pendell

2014-12-21, 02:35 PM

Dark Force Rising

Chapter 1: Payback time

The Chimaera has returned to Myrrkr to pay back Talon Karrde. To no one's surprise, the former smuggler base is abandoned save for 20 or 30 ysalamiri.

Nonetheless, Thrawn has insight into Karrde's psyche: He believes that Karrde craves information above all else, and therefore he will stay to observe the assault. But where?

Scanning reveals a single asteroid within observation range. Thrawn suspects Karrde is hiding out behind this asteroid, and brings in an interdictor cruiser, sending the message to the fleet at the same time orders to the ground forces go out. It is planned that the Constrainer will come out of hyperspace just in time to trap any ships hiding at that asteroid.

As it turns out , Karrde IS hiding behind that asteroid, but so is Mara Jade. She has a flash of force precognition, and kicks the Wild Karrde's engines on, to the astonishment of everyone else onboard.

Her hunch pays off spectacularly, as the Karrde evades capture by the Constrainer as it exits hyperspace, just barely evaded the gravity cone and making it into hyperspace.

Mara is a bit worried about this; her force abilities are beginning to manifest again. Every previous time this has happened, she has been forced to up stakes and leave, as normal people are very nervous about having force-sensitives in their midst. Also, it means the voices will start again, driving her nearly mad. Perhaps, if she can kill Skywalker, she will finally have peace.

During this entire sequence, Karrde's pet Vornskyrs growl at her --as they previously growled at Luke. Is there something about the Force, or interacting with the Force, that sets them off?

Aboard the Chimaera, Thrawn is thoughtful. The Karrde started its engines before the Interdictor arrived. Why?

He can think of only three possibilities: 1) Karrde was about to leave anyway. 2) Karrde panicked. 3) He was somehow warned.

But how could he have been warned? No one knew the Constrainer was coming before Thrawn called for it ten minutes ago. No messages came from the Chimaera, and the Constrainer couldn't have sent a message, and no one else could have.

So what happened here?

A puzzle without an obvious answer. Thrawn resolves to think about it.

This shows Thrawn's great weakness in these stories; A brilliant military leader, he is nonetheless ignorant of the Force's true nature and power. Because of this, things happen which , by his logic, are flatly impossible ...

.. as impossible as a farm boy who has never flown an X-wing nonetheless dropping a proton torpedo in exactly the right place to destroy a death star.

The lesson he might have learned from the mole miners as well; odds and probabilities are meaningless when the Force has its thumb on the scale.

At any rate, they discuss C'baoth and the need to get him Jedi to shut him up. Thrawn mentions that Skywalker should come after dealing with the Ackbar dustup, which seemingly the Imperials have had a hand in stirring up. Thrawn also directs that some of his best troops in the ground force be reassigned to Wayland. Why?

On Jomark, C'baoth awaits Skywalker. Even so, he is experiencing problems with memory and other issues.

MEANWHILE, On Sluis Van, the cleanup from the battle continues. Wedge was evidently unable to keep his promise to Luke, whose fighter is still well down the repair queue. Lando, though still recovering from being shot in the last book, nonetheless detects a ship thief -- one Niles Ferrier and his invisible companion, a Defel, or wraith. The Empire has a bounty on ships, and Niles wants to collect.

Lando and Luke confront him. Luke demonstrates that he can take Niles' entire crew if necessary, and a deal is struck; in exchange for Niles' slicer code, they will be given a time period to get out of system before the authorities are notified. Lando points him at a nearby pirate gang, which has ships to spare and is always in need of qualified maintenance personnel and muscle.

Niles , without many options, takes the deal, choosing to rob the pirates instead of the Republic. Lando and Luke speculate as to why the Empire is so desperate for capital ships. In the meantime, Lando uses Ferrier's slicer code to bump Luke's Xwing up to the top of the repair queue.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Cikomyr

2014-12-21, 02:43 PM

The reason Thrawn & Friends did not bothered to check for Slave circuit is that these were extremely rare in the first place. Historical tryout of wide scale use of them were disastrous (they refer to the Katana Fleet), and thus the whole concept was abandonned for droid-based automation.

Lando was an exception, but nobody could have foreseen it.

Also, i have a confession to make. I actually started reading this trilogy with Dark Force rising. The reason was that, at the time, i didnt knew there were Star Wars novel. I was at a summer camp; and i was a rather troublesome youth for the monitors. The Camp's leader hooked me with his copy of Dark Force rising to keep me from trouble during a bus trip, and i never stared my eyes out of it since.

My god was i confused about everything. But eh, it was STAR WARS!! And I eventually found out about the other books and read everything from the start.

So.. Dark Force rising was actually my first taste of the EU :) for me, Niles Ferrier is as an important character as Karrde and Thrawn to the EU

XD

Yora

2014-12-21, 02:47 PM

So think what we're seeing in this case is Mask of Command (http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Mask_of_Command.html?id=Zp8ADDoHslAC). Subordinates take their cues from the leader; you can't expect them to have more confidence in the situation than the leader does. If the boss panics, the worker bees panic too.

So it is imperative that Thrawn -- or any military commander -- affect a pose of utmost calm, even if he's inwardly wetting his pants or throwing furniture at the wall. To keep everyone else calm, focused, and on task.

So passing off a defeat or other problem as All part of the plan (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AllAccordingToPlan) is a critical skill for any leader. There will be plenty of time to confess your fears -- in the tell-all book which will be published ten years after the war is over.
Generally I agree. Assuring his men that he is still in control and has contingency plans to deal with just such a situation fits perfectly well.
But Thrawn as a specific character strikes me as someone who wants his men to admit mistakes, figure out what went wrong, get help from anywhere they can, and then fix the situation as best as can be done. He wants everyone to ask for help and ask question when they don't understand something instead of keeping their heads low and hoping that nothing will go wrong. It would work well for him to be honest and open about not being completely infalible and making mistakes. Never making mistakes is not a skill the crew can learn. But he is a military genius because he always has backup plans and can adjust to changing situations instantly, which is a skill they can learn. The officers don't need to believe that he is infailable, but that he is always in control of the situation, even when something unexpected happens.

The impression that I subjectively get is that he seems to say "I never make mistakes because I always prepare for everything", which seems to be somewhat conflicting with his usual command style. However, I wouldn't say that would be all out of character, because despite his genius, he also seems to be full of pride. It wouldn't seem all inappropriate if he considers himself not only to be the best, but to actually be in a completely different class than anyone else.

McStabbington

2014-12-21, 05:26 PM

Honestly, I didn't read it as him never making mistakes, or him trying to pretend that it were so. That would be a pretty hard facade to maintain when your plan falls through at the last second.. Rather, I read it as Thrawn working worst-case-scenarios through in his head prior to the attack and thinking "Okay, if things go completely pear-shaped here, what have I accomplished and what have I lost?"

At this point, he has effectively pulled a Pearl Harbor to wreck 50 capital ships and the major space installation along the Imperial fronteir instead of carrying out his original plan of wrecking Sluis Van and stealing the Pacific Fleet. His losses have been minimal, and there is very little that a full-bore assault can do to change the cost-benefit analysis any more in his favor. I mean, really what is he going to do, damage those ships even more? So he withdraws. There's really no infallibility required. It's simply that he took stock of what he had and what he could get, and took the most prudent option available to him.

russdm

2014-12-21, 09:22 PM

Be reading along, but didn't feel like commenting yet...

I think you are forgetting that for all that Thrawn is like Sherlock Holmes, Holmes made mistakes in cases and Thrawn can make mistakes too.

Lando being at the battle was hit or miss, and it is unclear and never stated where Thrawn thinks Lando is. But when he notices the Falcon, he apparently doesn't know that Lando had the codes for the mine molers.

The battle ended as a defeat for the New Republic. Yes, Thrawn left Sluis Van, but the ships are crippled for a while, and won't be active during Thrawn's campaign. So he wins out despite the failed capture attempt.

Even better, Ackbar is now out of the picture. He won't be leading the New Republic's military, meaning that Thrawn has a free period in which to inflict massive damage to the New Republic. This benefits him a lot and whoever replaced Ackbar for the time being simply won't be as skilled.

On the Force: I don't see Thrawn as unaware as much as the fact that what limits the Force has is still unknown at this point. Aside from the minor Force using in the original trilogy, Zahn is really defining how the Force works for Jedi and other Force sensitives. We have seen little regarding the Force, and from what the movies show, knowledge about the Force is really limited.

Force Powers, from the movies: Jedi Mind Trick (Obiwan used in Episode 4), Force Choking (Vader spams), Object lifting (Which Luke learned from Yoda), Limited Force visions of the future or current events (Its not really clear if Luke is seeing the future at Cloud City or if he is seeing what is going on as its happening), Force Lightning (from Palps-More Plot bastard).

Beyond that, Zahn had to setup what the Force could do, so its likely Thrawn doesn't know anything, and Thrawn may have been to busy to study up.

pendell

2014-12-21, 09:53 PM

Force Powers, from the movies: Jedi Mind Trick (Obiwan used in Episode 4), Force Choking (Vader spams), Object lifting (Which Luke learned from Yoda), Limited Force visions of the future or current events (Its not really clear if Luke is seeing the future at Cloud City or if he is seeing what is going on as its happening), Force Lightning (from Palps-More Plot bastard).

Don't forget the Force guiding Luke's proton torpedo into a two-meter wide exhaust port on the Death Star.

The Force , IMO, isn't so much about powers directly as it is about Fate, and Force Sensitives, Jedi or not, are the channel that Fate works through.

Put simply, it's a natural 20 or a 1 at the GM's discretion.

I think that interaction with the Force , on the Dark Side , is not just about 'going with the Flow' -- a Dark Sider will influence the Force, shifting the fate of the entire galaxy if he's powerful enough. That is why Palpatine can say "All that has transpired has done so according to my design." It's not just seeing the future, but shaping that future.

In the EP III novelization , Palpatine confronts Anakin about his status as Chosen One ... "Chosen by ME", Palpatine says. It is possible that the Midi-chlorians creating a virgin birth human with a midi count off the charts is a direct result of Plaguis' meddling with it.

But it's also reasonable for Thrawn not to know any of this , as it is likely Palpatine and Vader hold that information close to their chests. In the Death Star novelization, a character gets a death sentence merely for using 'midichlorians' as a search term in a reference library. It was no doubt safer in the Empire to pretend the Force didn't exist .. and the more stupid, such as the General who mouthed off to Lord Vader in Ep. IV, really believed that to be the case.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

TheThan

2014-12-22, 02:06 AM

Don't forget the Force guiding Luke's proton torpedo into a two-meter wide exhaust port on the Death Star.

The Force , IMO, isn't so much about powers directly as it is about Fate, and Force Sensitives, Jedi or not, are the channel that Fate works through.

Put simply, it's a natural 20 or a 1 at the GM's discretion.

I think that interaction with the Force , on the Dark Side , is not just about 'going with the Flow' -- a Dark Sider will influence the Force, shifting the fate of the entire galaxy if he's powerful enough. That is why Palpatine can say "All that has transpired has done so according to my design." It's not just seeing the future, but shaping that future.

In the EP III novelization , Palpatine confronts Anakin about his status as Chosen One ... "Chosen by ME", Palpatine says. It is possible that the Midi-chlorians creating a virgin birth human with a midi count off the charts is a direct result of Plaguis' meddling with it.

But it's also reasonable for Thrawn not to know any of this , as it is likely Palpatine and Vader hold that information close to their chests. In the Death Star novelization, a character gets a death sentence merely for using 'midichlorians' as a search term in a reference library. It was no doubt safer in the Empire to pretend the Force didn't exist .. and the more stupid, such as the General who mouthed off to Lord Vader in Ep. IV, really believed that to be the case.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Also , if you repeat a lie enough people start to believe it.

Zhan was really treading new ground with what we we know the force does and how it affects the GFFW.

I've felt that too often the force is focused down to a specific set of skills that people go to school to learn. It's becme somewhat mundane, but really The Force ought to be deeper than what it's typically shown as. Zhan seems to have hit on right idea that it's not just a bunch of skills to add to your bag of tricks; it's deeper and more spiritual than that.

The Glyphstone

2014-12-22, 02:47 AM

And the occasional bits where Luke or Leia just go with the flow support the idea that the Force sometimes acts of its own accord. Both with Luke's Dark Side visions and his meditations, it's a force (pun intended) that wields its users as often as its users wield it. Later stories definitely lost this spiritual, semi-deterministic side of the Force, turning it into generic Space Magic; this was always the thing that most bothered the hell about me with the Vong - being empty voids in the Force was equivalent to being invaders from the Antimatter Universe, not just some sort of extragalactic biology that lacked a relationship with midichlorians and thus got personal Space Spell Resistance.

Yora

2014-12-22, 12:17 PM

pendell

2014-12-22, 02:27 PM

Chapter 3

The Falcon returns to Coruscant where we find Ackbar is under investigation for a large sum of money that mysteriously materialized in his account; given what we read in the last chapter, it seems likely this is a deliberate attempt by the Empire to frame Ackbar, removing one of the better admirals from the Republic's ranks.

There is a hearing with Fey'la as they recount the events at Sluis Van. Fey'la repeats much of what I have already said; that Sluis Van was a major blunder on the part of the alliance. Fey'la additionally uses the failure of security to attack Ackbar's credibility and competence.

Leia mentions the Grand Admiral. The other leaders can't believe it; all the Grand Admirals are accounted for. Nonetheless, Mon Mothma authorizes research on the claim. Ackbar believes them.

Leia and Han catch up.

Chapter 4

Luke researches Jorus C'baoth. Winter remembers him somewhat.

He discusses with Han. They come to the conclusion there must be an Imperial agent on the council, or perhaps with access to its deliberations.

They go their separate ways

Leia to meet Khabarakh at Endor.

Han to go to New Cov to investigate this sudden, unwelcome, infusion of money Ackbar experienced.

Luke goes to check on his X-wing, still pondering C'baoth.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Thrawn183

2014-12-22, 02:36 PM

Interesting what timescale is used for C'Baoths biography. He was advisor to senator Palpatine in 79 Pre-Empire. Which would mean that by the time of the movies, the Emperor would have been probably well over 150.
Though why not? In Return of the Jedi, he certainly looked ancient and it's good fantasy tradition that sorcerers live very long.

Ragarding The Truce at Bakura:

In that book, Eppie Belden is 128 years old and leads/initiates the Barkuran Revolution. It would appear that in the GFFA, people are capable of living functional, healthy lives significantly longer than we are used to. That's not even taking into account whatever the force may be able to accomplish in terms of longevity.

Yora

2014-12-22, 04:24 PM

I think it's interesting that it's assumed that Palpatine had been a senator for a very long time, just as the movies later did.
Makes a lot of sense, though. I think pretty much everyone who became important in Roman politics was a member of the Roman senate.

When was it established that Palpatine was the first and only Emperor of the Galactic Empire? In Episode 4 it's said that he abolished the senate, which puts him as an autocratic dictator quite different from whatever people had been head of the state and government before him. But I think the old movies never said that he and Vader created the Empire. It's only implied that in the youth of Obi-Wan and Anakin there still had been many Jedi and after Vaders turn to the Dark Side there were almost none left.

Douglas

2014-12-22, 04:48 PM

When was it established that Palpatine was the first and only Emperor of the Galactic Empire? In Episode 4 it's said that he abolished the senate, which puts him as an autocratic dictator quite different from whatever people had been head of the state and government before him. But I think the old movies never said that he and Vader created the Empire. It's only implied that in the youth of Obi-Wan and Anakin there still had been many Jedi and after Vaders turn to the Dark Side there were almost none left.
The exact quote, which I just now looked up, is "The Emperor has dissolved the Council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away."

It's not explicitly stated, but there's a strong implication there that the Old Republic was a fairly recent thing, with the Emperor having to deal with its legacy.

Gnoman

2014-12-22, 04:52 PM

When was it established that Palpatine was the first and only Emperor of the Galactic Empire?

There's two pretty big hints in the first move. The first comes as part of the example you cited.

The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.

This strongly suggests that the Empire is very newly erected upon the structure of the Republic.

Secondly, there's Kenobi's words to Luke early on:

Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi: I have something here for you. Your father wanted you to have this when you were old enough, but your uncle wouldn't allow it. He feared you might follow old Obi-Wan on some damn fool idealistic crusade like your father did.
Luke Skywalker: What is it?
Ben Obi-Wan Kenobi: Your father's light saber. This is the weapon of a Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times... before the Empire.

This strongly suggests that the destruction of the Jedi was part of the Empire's rise to power, and it happened some point after Luke Skywalker's birth (as his father was a Jedi, and was "killed" in the purge.)

Combined, this means that the Empire is less than 18 years old, and is still consolidating power. If there'd been a succession in that time, the Empire probably would not have survived (because without consolidation there wouldn't be enough centralized power to ensure a smooth succession). Thus, the current Emperor was probably the first.

Yora

2014-12-22, 04:56 PM

Ah, okay. I had forgotten about those lines. I think I saw the movie in English only a few times, watching them in German didn't make any lights turn on to recognize specific terms.

pendell

2014-12-22, 04:56 PM

When was it established that Palpatine was the first and only Emperor of the Galactic Empire?

Believe it or not, this was established in the original star wars novelization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_From_the_Adventures_of_Luke_Skywalker) by Alan Dean Foster.

For THIRTY YEARS this (http://www.coffeewithkenobi.com/an-examination-of-the-prologue-of-the-star-wars-novelization-by-guest-blogger-mike-macdonald/) is all we knew about the story before the events of Ep. 4

The Old Republic was the Republic of legend, greater than distance or time. No need to note where it was or whence it came, only to know that… it was the Republic.

Once, under the wise rule of the Senate and the protection of the Jedi Knights, the Republic throve and grew. But as often happens when wealth and power pass beyond the admirable and attain the awesome, there appear those evil ones who have greed to match.

So it was with the Republic at its height. Like the greatest of trees, able to withstand any external attack, the Republic rotted from within though the danger was not visible from outside.

Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic.

Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears.

Having exterminated through treachery and deception the Jedi Knights, guardians of justice in the galaxy, the Imperial governors and bureaucrats prepared to institute a reign of terror among the disheartened worlds of the galaxy. Many used the imperial forces and the name of the increasingly isolated Emperor to further their own personal ambitions.

But a small number of systems rebelled at these new outrages. Declaring themselves opposed to the New Order they began the great battle to restore the Old Republic.

From the beginning they were vastly outnumbered by the systems held in thrall by the Emperor. In those first dark days it seemed certain the bright flame of resistance would be extinguished before it could cast the light of new truth across a galaxy of oppressed and beaten peoples…

From the First Saga

Journal of the Whills

“They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally they became heroes.”

Leia Organa of Alderaan, Senator

So: Palpatine was the First Emperor as far back as 1976 in the original timeline. I remember reading those very words in the 1970s as a grade schooler, and the book was from my local library.

Things have changed in 40 years. Originally, Palpatine was not a Sith Lord but simply a human politician -- and it's not amiss to interpret him as not an evil politician either. Simply a man who took a galaxy in his grip, and then lost control of it. The bureaucracy ran on in his name, doing things he would never agree to if he had only known . This may be one reason why he was off-screen in the original Star Wars; like the Japanese Emperor Showa, not necessarily an evil man but simply the man who happens to be sitting at the top of the machine, all but powerless to control what his own ministers do in his name.

At some point in the timeframe between 1976 and 1982, George Lucas decided to turn the emperor from a rather well meaning but in over his head clueless politician not all that different from Princess Leia into a villainous Sith Lord, the embodiment of evil in the GFFA. I speculate it is because he had decided to redeem Darth Vader, and needed a Greater Evil for Darth Vader to overcome. And there really wasn't anyone else in the Empire who could possibly be greater than Vader save the Emperor himself. So: Clueless Palpatine out, Evil Palpatine in. But he was always the first Emperor of the Galactic Empire. And in this and in all succeeding versions of the story, he took power legally.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora

2014-12-22, 05:13 PM

This makes it interesting how later imperial historians would had been dealing with the reign of the Emperor. The Empire continued as an independent state in one form or another for over 150 years but ruled the known galaxy only for the first 30.
That would make Palpatine somewhat like Charlemagne, who conqured a super-empire, that fell apart just after his death, but established the two great powers of central europe for the next 1000 years.

Cikomyr

2014-12-22, 05:35 PM

Well, the Emperor as the Ultimate Villain was cleaely set up in ESB, how far later than the original star wars was that?!

Jon D

2014-12-22, 06:17 PM

Not only that, but the Nogri homeworld has been indebted to the Empire for generations. At least that's how I read it.

Oddly enough, I think Zahn's timeline works better, since a war encompassing an entire galaxy and the Jedi being all but forgotten works better with a war lasting decades than one that lasts only seven.

The Glyphstone

2014-12-22, 06:19 PM

Well, the Emperor as the Ultimate Villain was cleaely set up in ESB, how far later than the original star wars was that?!

Late enough that Vader became Luke's father (necessitating the 'certain point of view' hilarity) rather than actually having killed Luke's father.

hamishspence

2014-12-22, 07:58 PM

Believe it or not, this was established in the original star wars novelization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_From_the_Adventures_of_Luke_Skywalker) by Alan Dean Foster.

For THIRTY YEARS this (http://www.coffeewithkenobi.com/an-examination-of-the-prologue-of-the-star-wars-novelization-by-guest-blogger-mike-macdonald/) is all we knew about the story before the events of Ep. 4

The Old Republic was the Republic of legend, greater than distance or time. No need to note where it was or whence it came, only to know that… it was the Republic.

Once, under the wise rule of the Senate and the protection of the Jedi Knights, the Republic throve and grew. But as often happens when wealth and power pass beyond the admirable and attain the awesome, there appear those evil ones who have greed to match.

So it was with the Republic at its height. Like the greatest of trees, able to withstand any external attack, the Republic rotted from within though the danger was not visible from outside.

Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic.

Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears.

Having exterminated through treachery and deception the Jedi Knights, guardians of justice in the galaxy, the Imperial governors and bureaucrats prepared to institute a reign of terror among the disheartened worlds of the galaxy. Many used the imperial forces and the name of the increasingly isolated Emperor to further their own personal ambitions.

But a small number of systems rebelled at these new outrages. Declaring themselves opposed to the New Order they began the great battle to restore the Old Republic.

From the beginning they were vastly outnumbered by the systems held in thrall by the Emperor. In those first dark days it seemed certain the bright flame of resistance would be extinguished before it could cast the light of new truth across a galaxy of oppressed and beaten peoples…

From the First Saga

Journal of the Whills

“They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Naturally they became heroes.”

Leia Organa of Alderaan, Senator

So: Palpatine was the First Emperor as far back as 1976 in the original timeline.
That said, in the same novel, Obi-Wan says Vader

"used the training I gave him and the Force within him for evil, to help the later corrupt Emperors. With the Jedi knights disbanded, disorganised, or dead, there were too few to oppose Vader. Today they are all but extinct."

That's the only place it's implied that Palpatine was First, but not Only.

pendell

2014-12-23, 09:33 AM

Chapter 5

Karrde and Mara are settling into a new hideout. Mara is uneasy; too many people about, and to her "crowds" mean "imperial spies".

Karrde politely asks if this is Force or just paranoia.

Previous employer had reacted to her strange hunches with fear, or anger, or simple bald-faced hatred. Karrde, apparently, was going to go for polite exploitation.

Of course. Most of Zahn's heroes and villains are rational first, emotional second. That means no blind raving prejudice or bigotry.

At any rate, Mara informs him it isn't a sensor pack she can just turn on or off.

Karrde presses to learn if she had Jedi training. She changes the subject.

They discuss the Dark Force which I assume is what gives this novel it's name; the Katana fleet, firing Chekhov's gun from last book. Two hundred years ago the Republic had built a force of two hundred dreadnaughts with an immense amount of slave circuitry, reducing their crew requirements from 17000 people to 2000. Then the command crew on the flagship went insane and the entire fleet jumped to nowhere and weren't seen again. In order to avoid losing an entire fleet again few ships have ever been built with that degree of slave circuitry, relying more and more on decentralized droids for automating ship functions .

NOTE: This information is outdated; as of the first prequel the Republic had disbanded its military for about a thousand years, so there would have been no need for a dreadnaught fleet. Also, as seen in KOTOR, droids and decentralized ship functions have been the norm in the Republic for thousands of years, so any flirtation with centralized slave circuits would have been short-lived.

At any rate, the fleet had disappeared until 15 years ago, when a smuggling ship Karrde was on jumped into the middle of it. Thinking they were active warships in pursuit, they had jumped straight out again. Karrde made note of the coordinates and erased the data from the ship's computer; so far as he knows, there are only five other people out there with that information.

At any rate, the Empire wants capital ships. Mara suggests they sell the ships to the Empire at value plus twenty percent. Karrde prefers to sit on the secret , for the same reason he was trying to be neutral in the last book : The Empire's vengeance is legendary, but the New Republic is more likely to win in the long run.

Silly man. Trying to tread the tightrope worked out so well last time, didn't it? Or has he forgotten he just had to abandon his last hideout because there's a death mark on him now? Does he really believe neutrality is possible any longer?

Some credence to this idea comes swiftly, as a bounty hunter attempts to take Mara for the Empire when she is isolated. She attempts to use her force powers -- which she thought had vanished when the Emperor had died. Her primary ability was in communicating with the Emperor from anywhere in the galaxy, instantaneously, but once upon a time she could do telekinesis as well.

It works. The bounty hunter is killed, and they confiscate his pad -- a picture of Talon Karrde with the number "20,000" beside it. Presumably Mara is on the list somewhere as well.

Karrde decides to evacuate to another backup base. Mara asks about giving up the Katana fleet.

We don't give up the dreadnaughts under duress"... "Not to Thrawn, not to anyone. " ... "We may choose to" [give them up] "we will never have to. Is that clear? "

Well, I guess it wouldn't have been a long book if Karrde had come to his senses right away. Still living in denial, I guess.

And, that night, Mara's dreams start again.

Chapter 6

Pelleon and Thrawn are engaged against a rebel bulk cruiser and its A-wings. They don't seem to be doing very well; the removal of Ackbar has decreased the Republic's competence.

They discuss that particular special operation; a vacuum-tight bit of evidence implicating him would have ruined Ackbar, but limited the damage only to him. The ambiguity will send ripples of uncertainty and confusion throughout the Republic, distracting and weakening them at a critical moment. At best, splitting them apart all together. Ackbar is replaceable; the delicate political balance of the Republic is not.

Thrawn is certain that Fey'la will be the cause of all this, just as surely as if he was actually being controlled by Imperial Intelligence. But he's not; Thrawn is simply relying on his own psychological insight into the being.

Pelleon asks what would happen if Fey'la wins and becomes military supreme commander. Thrawn has absolutely no fear of that eventuality; all it means is a few months of military victory followed by another paroxysm of struggle inside the Republic high command as the Republic first realizes A) what a mistake it made B) struggle to fire Fey'la [no easy feat, given what a canny political operator he is] and C) replace him.

Thrawn notes that the Falcon has left Coruscant, doubtless to investigate the leak. Thrawn expects Solo to be aboard, which is why the Death's Head will be waiting for him at the planet.

Thrawn also tells Pelleon that Delta Source -- a source so closely held and confidential Thrawn runs it directly and will not disclose the source's identity to anyone, even Pelleon -- has confirmed Luke Skywalker is on his way to Jomark to investigate C'baoth.

So I guess that will be a mystery for the book -- who or what is Delta Source?

At any rate, they discuss C'baoth. He disobeyed a direct order in a previous battle, and he is a growing danger to the Empire. But Thrawn sees no choice but to continue to make use of him; it's not like they have many former Jedi they can call on.

A man with C'baoth's mental and emotional instabilities can never be a threat to us. Yes, he has a great deal of power, and at any given moment he could certainly do considerable damage to our people and equipment. But by his very nature he's unable to use that power for any length of time. Concentration, focus, long-term thinking -- those are the qualities that separate a warrior from a mere flailing fighter. And they're qualities C'baoth will never possess.

Thrawn prepares to leave to travel to the Noghri homeworld to address the entire population, get them back on task to track down Leia and her twins. He is very disappointed with their previous failures, and is going there to underline his disappointment and to appeal to their strong sense of honor.

All of this takes place with the battle against the rebel force as backdrop, which apparently is so boring for Thrawn that he fights it with less than ten percent of his attention. Thrawn lets the survivors go and orders a jump out; he intends that the survivors will tell their story, resulting in upgraded escort protection to convoys along this route, which will pull warships and fighters from the critical center of gravity where they are needed most. That, or the Republic will simply abandon cargo shipping in this region altogether, which would work nearly as well.

The hunt for capital ships goes on: They have picked up five more, but none large or particularly interesting. They need more.

They discuss Karrde as well. He's still being hunted.

Over to C'baoth.

We see a flashback to the battle Pelleon and Thrawn were discussing. Evidently he had taken direct control of the turbolaser crew aboard the Bellicose and used it to exact personal vengance, despite the protest of the ship's captain. But .. C'baoth kind of liked it.

He was already somewhat mad already, but he's beginning to get not just mad, but drunk, with the kind of power the Empire has to offer him.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora

2014-12-23, 10:42 AM

As a short note: I have not put any chapters on the schedule for the 24th and 25th, as most of us are likely to be bussy with other things.
Chapter 7 and 8 will be discussed on the 26th.

pendell

2014-12-23, 11:06 AM

Suggestion: Given that this is an international group that crosses the date line, perhaps the 27th would be better.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Gnoman

2014-12-23, 11:10 AM

They discuss the Dark Force which I assume is what gives this novel it's name

It was more subtle in the first book, but the titles of all three books in this series have a double meaning. Heir To The Empire can mean either the New Republic (which is slowly taking the commanding central position the Empire once held) or Thrawn (who is the heir to the Imperial traditions and name). LIkewise, one of the meanings of Dark Force Rising seems to apply to the Katana Fleet, but we've already received some hints as to the other meaning.

Cikomyr

2014-12-23, 01:35 PM

The French name of that book was a very.

Very

VERY

boring name of "La Bataille des Jedi", or " Battle of the Jedi"

DFR is way cooler

Yora

2014-12-23, 01:52 PM

In German it's The Dark Side of the Force, which really doesn't say anything, and actually doesn't match the book at all. (At least as far as I can remember the plot.)

If there is also a double meaning in The Last Command, I really havn't the slightest clue what the second one could be.
Obviously, Thrawn will give a last command, but I don't think it was anything major.

That book title was actually poorly translated into German as well.
"Kommando" is technically a possible correct translation of Command, but only for officers giving orders to soldiers. For the Emperors last order "Befehl" would have been the correct word. The German title makes it sound more like "The Last Commando Team".

TheThan

2014-12-23, 02:39 PM

This is interesting as it’s mentioned by Leia that the Grand admirals were not just the best and brightest military commanders in the empire, but that they were also politically astute and skilled in maneuvering whatever sort political structure it had.

This statement immediately pays dividends as we learn Thrawn is behind the scheme to oust Ackbar and that he’s pulling Fey'la’s strings without him even knowing. So now we know that Thrawn can potentially destroy his enemies politically as well as militarily. Destabilizing the fragile new republic is a smart move. At worst it creates chaos and confusion for Thrawn to exploit as the politicians fight amongst themselves (not creating a unified front against him results in a lot of damage). At best it fragments the New Republic and allows him to swoop in and reestablish imperial control one system at a time.

The politicians in the New Republic seem to have a hard time remembering that there's still a war on. Capturing Coruscant and declaring themselves the new republic did not end the war at all. It's interesting that some of the main characters has had to remind themselves that the war was still raging.

Thrawn by contrast is focused on his war effort. As a result he presents a unified front against the new republic, with little in the way of distractions that being Karrdes' crew as the only real objective, Luke and Leia are secondary objectives at this point.

pendell

2014-12-23, 03:07 PM

If there is also a double meaning in The Last Command, I really havn't the slightest clue what the second one could be.

I suspect the last command is the one the Emperor gave to Mara Jade -- the literal last command she received from him, the one that has haunted ever throughout this trilogy.

The command to kill Luke Skywalker.

The politicians in the New Republic seem to have a hard time remembering that there's still a war on. Capturing Coruscant and declaring themselves the new republic did not end the war at all. It's interesting that some of the main characters has had to remind themselves that the war was still raging.

Thrawn by contrast is focused on his war effort. As a result he presents a unified front against the new republic, with little in the way of distractions that being Karrdes' crew as the only real objective, Luke and Leia are secondary objectives at this point.

I suspect that this is a primary reason Thrawn never accepted the legitimacy of the New Republic; the sight of democratic squabbling , to the extent of undercutting the war effort for the sake of selfish gain, is one he perhaps finds repugnant. And so he fights for the Empire not out of any sense of loyalty to the dead Emperor, but simply because he doesn't believe he can trust the Senate to maintain peace and protect the galaxy from all threats, foreign and domestic.

He doesn't seem to be entirely wrong ; what he misses is that it's ultimately the Force and the common man the Republic births and brings forth -- the Han Solos, the Wedge Antilles, the Talon Karrdes -- which preserve the republic, NOT the usually useless governing body that sits on top of it. In fact, I'm having a hard time thinking of a time in these stories when the politicians weren't part of the problem.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora

2014-12-23, 04:04 PM

Oh, and something I forgot to mention back at chapter 4:

Those damn trees! :D

TheThan

2014-12-23, 04:30 PM

Thrawn by contrast is focused on his war effort. As a result he presents a unified front against the new republic, with little in the way of distractions that being Karrdes' crew as the only real objective, Luke and Leia are secondary objectives at this point.

Let me rephrase this to make more sense (I would just edit the post but it’s been quoted already) as it comes off as a little muddled.

Thrawn by contrast is focused on his war effort. As a result he presents a unified front against the New Republic. He has little in the way of distractions, primarily his hunt for Talon Karrde and his crew. Capturing Luke and Leia are secondary objectives but are not paramount to his overall strategy. He's not obsessed with karrde or Luke and Leia; he'll deal with them when the opportunity presents itself and not compromise his plans to get them.

russdm

2014-12-23, 05:40 PM

In fact, I'm having a hard time thinking of a time in these stories when the politicians weren't part of the problem.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Sounds like human history and strongly American History. Shakespeare was clearly wrong; you don't kill all lawyers, instead you get rid of useless politicians (Which Politicians frequently turn out to be usually, its almost clockwork how that happens)

If you haven't noticed, the old republic was dysfunctional and the rebellion is busy trying to restore that same dysfunctional government, which begs the question to me of What is Mon Mothma thinking? here.

The_Snark

2014-12-23, 07:48 PM

If you haven't noticed, the old republic was dysfunctional and the rebellion is busy trying to restore that same dysfunctional government, which begs the question to me of What is Mon Mothma thinking? here.

I'm pretty sure one of the EU books (can't remember which one) addresses this; someone points out how the New Republic can't seem to get anything done, and someone else points out that all the founders and leading figures in the New Republic spent the last couple decades under a government that was very effective at oppressing and exploiting its people, not to mention suppressing dissidents. They're extremely wary of giving their government the power to get things done. The last time they tried that, the cure ended up being worse than the disease.

It would be nice to have a government that was good at getting the right things done, but the problem is that the galaxy is huge, and there will always be disagreement over what the right thing to do is. So they end up with a vaguely ineffectual compromise government that leaves everyone sort of frustrated, but hey, at least nobody is blowing up inhabited planets to make a political point.

McStabbington

2014-12-23, 07:57 PM

I think it's part of the tonal differences between Lucas and everyone else in the Star Wars universe, but in particular Irving Kirschner and Timothy Zahn. Lucas is to Star Wars what Adam West is to Batman or the Silver Age is to Superman: bright, cheerful, full of colorful visuals and impossible feats of derring-do, but doesn't give a fig about depth or complexity. And when he tries it, as we saw in the prequel trilogy, it doesn't really work. In that Silver Age Star Wars, of course the Republic was a noble institution brought down by the Snidely Whiplash that is Palpatine and his evil henchman Darth Vader.

By contrast, for Kirschner and Zahn, we get a more realistic conception of how things work, at a cost of moral clarity. Vader's still a terrible guy in ESB, sure, but it's also a running subplot in the story that most of the Imperial officers are just career military guys stuck in the awful position of trying not to get on Vader's bad side. And here in Zahn's world, the Republic contributed every bit as much as Palpatine to its own demise through stagnation and lack of common interest.

In point of fact, reading this leads me to the sneaking suspicion that part of the problem with the prequel trilogy was that, in pointed contrast to the endless justifications Lucas offers about it being for small children, he actually tried to inject some realism into the series. It's just that he's absolutely terrible at it, and so we get tripe that falls apart under a moment's scrutiny like a Separatist Movement with no actual demands or any real explanation for why separating would be a bad thing.

hamishspence

2014-12-23, 07:57 PM

I'm pretty sure one of the EU books (can't remember which one) addresses this; someone points out how the New Republic can't seem to get anything done, and someone else points out that all the founders and leading figures in the New Republic spent the last couple decades under a government that was very effective at oppressing and exploiting its people, not to mention suppressing dissidents. They're extremely wary of giving their government the power to get things done. The last time they tried that, the cure ended up being worse than the disease.

I believe that was the Black Fleet Crisis series.

russdm

2014-12-23, 09:17 PM

I believe that was the Black Fleet Crisis series.

And a key part of the New Rebellion book which the only real none Zahn use of Ysalamiri by having it eaten by something and still be working despite being in that something's belly. It was weird. Luke tries to pull an "Obiwan" moment and Leia shoots somebody with a blaster in the face.

Cikomyr

2014-12-23, 09:34 PM

I believe that was the Black Fleet Crisis series.

Well, Spectre of the Past/Vision of the Future made a big point about just how impossibly huge and unwidely the Republic truly was.

Jon D

2014-12-24, 12:08 AM

I suspect that this is a primary reason Thrawn never accepted the legitimacy of the New Republic; the sight of democratic squabbling , to the extent of undercutting the war effort for the sake of selfish gain, is one he perhaps finds repugnant. And so he fights for the Empire not out of any sense of loyalty to the dead Emperor, but simply because he doesn't believe he can trust the Senate to maintain peace and protect the galaxy from all threats, foreign and domestic.

He doesn't seem to be entirely wrong ; what he misses is that it's ultimately the Force and the common man the Republic births and brings forth -- the Han Solos, the Wedge Antilles, the Talon Karrdes -- which preserve the republic, NOT the usually useless governing body that sits on top of it. In fact, I'm having a hard time thinking of a time in these stories when the politicians weren't part of the problem.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

It's funny, but that's the core behind the backstory of one of my best Edge of the Empire characters. A former Separatist commando turned smuggler who hated the Empire, but clearly remembered the Republic and was horrified that there was a group dedicated to bringing it back.

pendell

2014-12-24, 02:13 AM

I think it's part of the tonal differences between Lucas and everyone else in the Star Wars universe, but in particular Irving Kirschner and Timothy Zahn. Lucas is to Star Wars what Adam West is to Batman or the Silver Age is to Superman: bright, cheerful, full of colorful visuals and impossible feats of derring-do, but doesn't give a fig about depth or complexity. And when he tries it, as we saw in the prequel trilogy, it doesn't really work. In that Silver Age Star Wars, of course the Republic was a noble institution brought down by the Snidely Whiplash that is Palpatine and his evil henchman Darth Vader.

Not so; Episode 1's Trade Federation showed that the Republic of that time period was broken even without Palpatine. Large interstellar corporations were able to impose a planetary blockade on a core world and the Senate was completely ineffectual. When Senator Padme moved for a no confidence vote in Valorem she was , in essence, also voting no confidence in the Republic as it was constituted. Given that the motion passed, it is obvious other Senators agreed with her.

Of course Palpatine was gumming up the works -- but I suspect if the conditions were not ripe to begin with he could not have pushed it that last little bit. There had been a thousand years of Sith Lords at that time, and they had been forced to remain in hiding, since the conditions to complete their plan were not yet ripe.

Also, to be fair to Lucas WRT subtlety, two points:

1) His audience consisted of 12-year-old boys; the same boys who loved the sight of Anakin winning the swoop race and were tickled to death by Jar-Jar Binks.

2) Whenever Lucas attempted to introduce any kind of subtlety -- a scene in the senate hall, for example -- certain reviewers (http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/star-wars-episode-1-the-phantom-menace/) would start metaphorically throwing their popcorn at the screen shouting "BORING! WE WANT MORE SPLOSIONS!"

To his credit, he did NOT lard up his movies into four hour yawnfests like a certain New Zealand movie producer. Instead, he tried to give his audience what he thought they wanted. He failed, I think ,but it was at least a valiant attempt.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

TheThan

2014-12-24, 03:12 PM

Well lets see, the slow parts of Empire Strikes Back have to deal with Luke going on a journey of discovery as he studies under the tutelage of the wise master Yoda.

The slow parts of TPM are the Queen standing up and making speeches to a bunch of CGI aliens.

Which one is more interesting, Politics or learning about the Force?

It was a good idea to cut those parts down as much as they had, they weren’t just slow, they were boring. It’s unfortunate, because some very important things happen but they were so boring that they needed to blow over them in favor of lightsabers and explosions; otherwise they risked losing the audience’s attention.

Really this shows a huge problem with the writing, that something as important as the main villain of the franchise effectively wining gets reduced to two-five minutes of total screen time during his grand Début and victory.

McStabbington

2014-12-24, 09:58 PM

Not so; Episode 1's Trade Federation showed that the Republic of that time period was broken even without Palpatine. Large interstellar corporations were able to impose a planetary blockade on a core world and the Senate was completely ineffectual. When Senator Padme moved for a no confidence vote in Valorem she was , in essence, also voting no confidence in the Republic as it was constituted. Given that the motion passed, it is obvious other Senators agreed with her.

Of course Palpatine was gumming up the works -- but I suspect if the conditions were not ripe to begin with he could not have pushed it that last little bit. There had been a thousand years of Sith Lords at that time, and they had been forced to remain in hiding, since the conditions to complete their plan were not yet ripe.

Also, to be fair to Lucas WRT subtlety, two points:

1) His audience consisted of 12-year-old boys; the same boys who loved the sight of Anakin winning the swoop race and were tickled to death by Jar-Jar Binks.

2) Whenever Lucas attempted to introduce any kind of subtlety -- a scene in the senate hall, for example -- certain reviewers would start metaphorically throwing their popcorn at the screen shouting "BORING! WE WANT MORE SPLOSIONS!"

To his credit, he did NOT lard up his movies into four hour yawnfests like a certain New Zealand movie producer. Instead, he tried to give his audience what he thought they wanted. He failed, I think ,but it was at least a valiant attempt.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

That's . . . that's largely my point. There was what Lucas wanted, which was the really bright and cheerful stuff without a shred of nuance or complexity. There was what Kirschner and Zahn tried to make, which was a somewhat greyer, slightly more realistic take on the same universe. And then there was Lucas trying to do the same thing as Kirschner and Zahn, and making midichlorians. And then Lucas denied that was ever his intent.

Seriously, it's world-building without the most important part of world-building: appreciation of cause and effect. Yes, there's a Trade Federation engaging in a blockade of a planet. But even a moment's examination and the effort falls apart. What exactly is the blockade of Naboo supposed to accomplish? How does it do this? What exactly are they blockading? I mean, it's an entire planet, with a fully-developed and pretty lush ecosystem. It's not Arrakis, in either sense: it doesn't have any obvious needs for importation, and it doesn't have some one thing that can only be made there and exported. So what exactly does a blockade do, aside from bring Jedi to force an action scene?

That's exactly what I mean. I really suspect that Lucas wanted to be as serious as Zahn, but he's got no sense for it. He doesn't get the tone, he doesn't get the logic, and he definitely doesn't get the character shifts. And when it blew up in his face, he retreated to the position that he made a movie about trade negotiations for children.

TheThan

2014-12-24, 10:22 PM

That's . . . that's largely my point. There was what Lucas wanted, which was the really bright and cheerful stuff without a shred of nuance or complexity. There was what Kirschner and Zahn tried to make, which was a somewhat greyer, slightly more realistic take on the same universe. And then there was Lucas trying to do the same thing as Kirschner and Zahn, and making midichlorians. And then Lucas denied that was ever his intent.

Seriously, it's world-building without the most important part of world-building: appreciation of cause and effect. Yes, there's a Trade Federation engaging in a blockade of a planet. But even a moment's examination and the effort falls apart. What exactly is the blockade of Naboo supposed to accomplish? How does it do this? What exactly are they blockading? I mean, it's an entire planet, with a fully-developed and pretty lush ecosystem. It's not Arrakis, in either sense: it doesn't have any obvious needs for importation, and it doesn't have some one thing that can only be made there and exported. So what exactly does a blockade do, aside from bring Jedi to force an action scene?

That's exactly what I mean. I really suspect that Lucas wanted to be as serious as Zahn, but he's got no sense for it. He doesn't get the tone, he doesn't get the logic, and he definitely doesn't get the character shifts. And when it blew up in his face, he retreated to the position that he made a movie about trade negotiations for children.

While I don’t completely agree with the assessment, I do agree that he aimed prequel trilogy more towards children than he should have.
Lucas had to try to tell the tale of how the republic of old became the empire of the present. However he didn’t (or couldn't) devote enough time to that aspect of his story to make it interesting. So he instead did a bare minimum treatment of the story he had in mind.

Remember he had to tell about the rise and fall of Anakin skywalker, his love affair with Padme, the fall of the old republic and outbreak, spread and conclusion of the clone wars. That's a lot to get done in six hours of movie time.

I’m sure it went over better in his head.

pendell

2014-12-25, 01:35 PM

Merry Christ- erm, winter holiday!

I mean, it's an entire planet, with a fully-developed and pretty lush ecosystem. It's not Arrakis, in either sense: it doesn't have any obvious needs for importation, and it doesn't have some one thing that can only be made there and exported.

The modern US has agriculture, industry, and technology. So if we cut our overseas trade to, say, China and the Middle East, we wouldn't suffer at all , right?

There are a couple of million oil consumers, users of ipads, playstations, and xboxes etc. who would disagree with that. Or would, when these things suddenly dry up.

Trade isn't just about having something someone else doesn't have; it's also the provision of luxury goods or ordinary goods at a lower price than they can be produced domestically.

There's also tourism. Looking at the Naboo we see in Episodes 1 and 2, I suspect Naboo, which appears to have no industry to speak of, is a combination agriculture and tourist world. They sell agricultural products such as those big creatures Anakin and Natalie were playing with in Episode II. Therefore, they must import things like starfighters, spare parts, and technology.

They have the ability, of course, to produce these things themselves. But it makes more economic sense to specialize in a few things and depend on trade for the others. It's the same reason, here in my state of Virginia, everybody drinks California wine when we have our own vineyards (http://www.virginiawine.org/).

So I can well believe that trade is lifeblood to Naboo just as it probably is to the rest of the Republic, and that the Federation blockade was crippling to their economy. However, exactly how that economy works was handwaved by George Lucas -- we're supposed to simply accept that there is a trade economy and a blockade.

In retrospect, that's probably a good idea. If you think people are bored with the senate scenes, you want until we have a Nemoidian in front of a white board lecturing on economics in that faux-Asian accent they have, while a stock market ticker scrolls along the bottom of the screen. I suspect, in such a case, the boredom level would rise so high that it would reach critical mass, creating a sort of boredom reaction that would cause people within twenty miles of the screening theater to spontaneously loll at their desks in stupefaction.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Gnoman

2014-12-25, 03:23 PM

In retrospect, that's probably a good idea. If you think people are bored with the senate scenes, you want until we have a Nemoidian in front of a white board lecturing on economics in that faux-Asian accent they have, while a stock market ticker scrolls along the bottom of the screen. I suspect, in such a case, the boredom level would rise so high that it would reach critical mass, creating a sort of boredom reaction that would cause people within twenty miles of the screening theater to spontaneously loll at their desks in stupefaction.

Honestly, that sounds delightful.

Aotrs Commander

2014-12-26, 08:58 AM

What exactly is the blockade of Naboo supposed to accomplish? How does it do this? What exactly are they blockading? I mean, it's an entire planet, with a fully-developed and pretty lush ecosystem. It's not Arrakis, in either sense: it doesn't have any obvious needs for importation, and it doesn't have some one thing that can only be made there and exported. So what exactly does a blockade do, aside from bring Jedi to force an action scene?

About as much as what, a couple of hundred theorhetical asteroids could effectively blockade Coruscant, truth be known. Space is like, really BIG... In reality, Coruscant ought have more places where the shield would open than that - it's a whole damn city-planet. Even IF you generously assume all the asteroids are set on courses around the only very few or only exit, as the chances of actually being hit by one of a couple of hundred (and in reality there were only about seventy) relatively small by comparison objects in orbit around a planet are pretty damn infinitesimal. Worst cases, you send a drone up and if it blows up, great - ship goes out, becasue the chances hitting one TWICE in rapid sucession are nearly impossible. That was one of the few times Zhan made my sense of versimilitude cringe a bit.

Cikomyr

2014-12-26, 09:19 AM

About as much as what, a couple of hundred theorhetical asteroids could effectively blockade Coruscant, truth be known. Space is like, really BIG... In reality, Coruscant ought have more places where the shield would open than that - it's a whole damn city-planet. Even IF you generously assume all the asteroids are set on courses around the only very few or only exit, as the chances of actually being hit by one of a couple of hundred (and in reality there were only about seventy) relatively small by comparison objects in orbit around a planet are pretty damn infinitesimal. Worst cases, you send a drone up and if it blows up, great - ship goes out, becasue the chances hitting one TWICE in rapid sucession are nearly impossible. That was one of the few times Zhan made my sense of versimilitude cringe a bit.

I dont think you get the idea of the Coruscant blockade. Its not supposed to pose a danger to travelling starships. But its suppose to pose a danger to the city-planet below. Coruscant needs to keep its shields active at all time if it doesnt want to risk 100-m wide asteroid collapse on a heavily populated area

Yora

2014-12-26, 11:59 AM

Merry Christ- erm, winter holiday!

Happy Life Day?

Aotrs Commander

2014-12-26, 01:07 PM

I dont think you get the idea of the Coruscant blockade. Its not supposed to pose a danger to travelling starships. But its suppose to pose a danger to the city-planet below. Coruscant needs to keep its shields active at all time if it doesnt want to risk 100-m wide asteroid collapse on a heavily populated area

Which would be all well and good if they hadn't been fretting about the asteroid hitting ships coming and leaving Coroscant. The whole point about making them keep the shields up was that it was supposed to mean they restricted traffic through the bits that they could open. (If there really HAD been no way to pass through the shields at all, then the blockade would have in fact worked until the NR came to the conclusion they had to risk asteroid hits of have the population starve.) My point was, that even if there was only ONE point where you could be exit the shield, you'd never get the asteroids orbiting fast or dense enough to pose a serious issue - there just isn't ENOUGH of them, especially when they have to be a stable orbit and unguided. Even a gap big enough to let a VSD in or out (say, 900x900m (and I'm talking height (altitude) from the shield surface and width here, not depth, because the asteroid is travelling acrs the depth) would require 103 asteroids to cover to hit it all at once. Of course, you don't want that, but that means, if the window of opportunity to a ship passing theough the envelope where it might be hit is say ten minutes. Let's be generous and drop the height engagement to only 300m, so you say, okay make it three asteroid high and nine long, so 27 asteroids. It means you have to have one of you 27 asteroids passing through that area once every ten minutes to have a chance oof hitting something. Now, stable orbital speed is a FIXED value dependant on orbital radius and masses, so you can't have 'em going as fast as you like (I'm on the wrong drive and don't have time to calculate it, but it's basically cubic route of the radius squared in years), so you are going to need several asterids one one path. And to have one asteroid passing through the targe zone once every ten minutes, you'd need 144 asteroods... I'd do some more hand-clacs, but I have go go now, but you get the idea! Space is just too big.

The Glyphstone

2014-12-26, 04:03 PM

McStabbington

2014-12-26, 07:55 PM

Don't look at it from the perspective of math. Look at it from the perspective of politicians. If they lift the blockade and some freighter or passenger cruise liner or space-bus full of space-orphans and space-kittens flown by space-nuns gets pasted by an invisible asteroid, their career is toast. If that invisible asteroid slips through and wipes out a square kilometer or two of cityscape - killing millions at least, with Couruscant's population density by depth - it's even worse. Mathematically, it is a incredibly small chance, but they're not thinking rationally, and aren't willing to take even that fractionally tiny risk.

What you should be complaining about is that a 24/7 blockade means the entire planet will starve, since it's dependent on imported food and water and other supplies. That is the headbanger moment here.

Which, to bring it full-circle, is what I was complaining was done wrongly in Episode I. The problem, pace Pendell, is that as is, the Trade Federation blockade has no obvious stakes. The stakes in TLC are fairly obvious because of the nature of the planet being blockaded, both politically and environmentally. But they are nevertheless discussed.

In Episode I, on the other hand, it is not obvious that Naboo has any pressing needs. It's not a region. It's a planet, with all the resources that implies. So if you're going to go to the difficulty of saying "It's blockaded", you need to take the next step of answering the question "Okay, why is that important." A good script writer could have done this in a sentence or two. Here, let me give you an example: "Princess, without regular shipments of the Oomphaloomphian serum, the Gungan phage will continue to spread. We're facing a pandemic which could kill millions!" See, it takes one line spoken by an extra, and suddenly the action scene has some meaning because the Jedi no longer only have an obstacle. They have a reason for why they're here to deal with the trade embargo, and they have stakes if they fail.

That someone could potentially do it terribly, Pendell, doesn't mean forgoing doing it entirely suddenly becomes a good idea. A blockade doesn't mean crap to me. As far as I can see, a blockade on Naboo is a bit like enforcing a no-fly zone on the Roman Empire: it's not going to cause any measurable harm or obstruction of the goals of the Naboo that I can see. So you need to explain to me why I'm wrong.

I would like to point out, so long as we're talking about stakes, that Zahn seems to be very good at making the stakes in any given situation fairly obvious. I suspect it's an inherent strength of the Watson-Holmes dynamic that Thrawn and Pellaeon have. Every time Thrawn does something that seems mundane, he has Pellaeon ask him why he's doing it, and then Thrawn explains. What is more, his explanations are always pretty simple (e.g. by wrecking this convoy and then leaving, we place the Rebellion in the lose-lose position of having to divert more resources to protect convoys we're not going to attack, or have them abandon convoys to attacks that, absent protection, we will make), but also not intuitive to those who aren't familiar with military strategy.

pendell

2014-12-27, 01:06 AM

I'm on vacation so I'm going to make very short responses.

a blockade on Naboo is a bit like enforcing a no-fly zone on the Roman Empire:

I would rather say a naval blockade. The Romans didn't have aerial technology. They DID have naval technology. Naboo had intersteller travel, so it is closer to sea travel than air travel.

And a naval blockade was a death sentence to Rome because of the Egyptian grain supply (https://books.google.com/books?id=yhldKEL2viQC&pg=PA224&lpg=PA224&dq=egypt+grain+supply+rome&source=bl&ots=J1skLvI-fY&sig=_wE2xWMOdoG2I1flj9JMn-L6cDI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GkOeVIC4D8egNsypgrgK&ved=0CFAQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=egypt%20grain%20supply%20rome&f=false).

Rome had a massive population far larger than could be supported by local agriculture, and so the "Bread" of the so-called "bread and circuses" was supplied by vast convoys of ships from the province of Egypt.

You might think that a grain convoy makes no sense. After all, Italy isn't exactly a poor , impoverished area without farms; it was a peninsula the size of California with a near-ideal climate. But that is exactly what happened. It was at first cheaper and easier to get grain from Egypt in vast quantities than it was to gain from the rest of Italy, and as the population of Rome burgeoned this went from a luxury to a necessity.

In this sense, trade is like a drug. At first it simply adds life to an existing system, but as it flourishes the system changes to the point where life without it becomes impossible. An addiction, if you will.

This is why -- as related in the last paragraph in this link (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grain_supply_to_the_city_of_Rome#cite_note-10) -- loss of the grain supply meant the end of the Roman political system, as we classically know it.

Naboo doesn't seem to have a large population and they seem self-sufficient in foodstuffs, which means that such wealth as they have comes from trading those foodstuffs off-planet. Cutting off those markets might not mean people would starve, but it does mean that people who were raising (say) 1000 heads of cattle for export now can only sell perhaps 10, to the local economy. The dramatic oversupply means a crash in prices, leads to unemployment, leads to economic ruin and depression.

If Naboo had not experienced first contact and the TF blockaded them, the gesture would have meant nothing; not having any trade links , the TF could not hurt the economy.

But blockading a planet which HAS those links is as disastrous for the planet as cutting off the blood cells would be for a hand.

In a way, that is a very apt metaphor. I have heard it speculated that multicelled structures developed from independent, unicellular bacteria. Cutting bloodstream to independent bacteria means nothing. But when cells become integrated and dependent on each other, cutting the blood supply will kill them all; they are so tightly integrated they can no longer survive without each other.

Why? Because as in any other agricultural economy, farmers grow what will bring them the most profit. Which means that instead of a balanced economy, a tremendous amount of the yearly crop is devoted to the local 'cash crop' for trading. Cotton (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/26/when-cotton-was-king/?_r=0) in the American south. Sugar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugar_plantations_in_the_Caribbean) in the Caribbean. In Modern Afghanistan, Opium (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/13/afghanistan-record-opium-crop-poppies-un).

At any rate, that's what happens in any agricultural society that is linked by trade into a larger system; farmers plant almost nothing but cash crops, at the expense of self-reliance, and when those trade links are cut it means economic ruin.

The Republic of Star Wars is modeled upon the Roman Republic, so I must therefore assume that interstellar trade is the lifeblood of the Republic even as the mare nostrum was for ancient Rome. I therefore conjecture that , economically speaking, Naboo was as dependent on their trade routes as a cell in a body is on the bloodstream; cutting those trade routes would have meant the end of their society as it was currently constituted. The economy and political system would have been built on top of trade, and the withdrawal of that trade would have meant the crash of both.

*Rereads his missive*

Great Scott, I was trying to be *brief* . If I intended to make a lengthy response, I suppose I'd have to add footnotes and submit it as a thesis.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

TheThan

2014-12-27, 03:21 AM

Slightly belated run down of the next two chapters.

Dark force rising chapter 7
We open this chapter on the Millennium falcon with Leia, Chewie and 3PO. They have arrived at Endor and are awaiting khabarakh’s appearance, in order for him to take Leia to Honoghr so she can address them and hopefully sway them to her side.

She gets a little alone time and we get to see some of her private thoughts. However the Falcon passes through the exact spot where the emperor died. This causes Leia to some sort of Force backlash and she faints. But she’s back on her feet again after a few minutes. She alters the ship’s orbit and continues to wait. We also get to see that the writer has not forgotten about Leia’s pregnancy; however it has not caused any direct problems.
Meanwhile Han and Lando have just arrived at New Cov. They are meeting Luke at something called a tap-caf (which I always imagined like a coffee shop like starbucks) called the Mishra. Luke has gone ahead.

On the way there, Lando suspects that Han is trying to “hook” him and get him mixed up in some crazy adventure; Han agrees he could help them but that Lando is under no obligation to stay. However Han recognizes a Bothan that works for our good friend Borsk Fey’lya. Han decides to follow him and instructs lando to go get Luke as this could be important.

Han follows him for a distance and watches him inter a building labeled Amethyst shipping and storage. Han starts casing the joint and is about to radio to Luke and Lando when a female voice stops him.

She instructs Han to turn around, caught red handed Han can only do what he’s told to. To the reader’s surprise (hopefully), it’s not Mara Jade. Instead it’s someone else. She tells Han to put his comm. Unit down and blaster on the ground. Han does so trying to sneakily turn it as he does. However she’s not fooled and promptly turns it off as she picks it up. They head into the Amethyst building but before they get there a siren begins wailing.

Luke is waiting in the Mishra when a fight nearly breaks out over there. Two aliens, a barabel and a Rodin are having a quarrel. Luke watches on as the barabel promptly calls out for jedi justice. Apparently Luke’s reputation and fame precedes him.

Luke is at a loss here, he’s never mediated a dispute before and is treading completely new ground for him. He suffers a little doubt as to his ability, but he rises to the challenge. After hearing both sides out, he’s at an impass. The problem is that the Rodian wishes to pay for a service in imperial credits, while the Barabel will only accept payment in New Republic currency. Lando shows and explains that the imperial coins have no official exchange value with New Republic currency. So simply having the money converted isn’t going to help. I’m sure if it was that simple they wouldn’t be having this argument.

What is a Jedi to do? Fortunately Luke is able to sense that Niles Ferrier is present and he calls him forth. He asks him if he knows the current street rate for exchanging imperial and New Republic money. He does and reluctantly tells him. Luke then makes his decree. Niles is to pay the Barabel in new republic money equal to the amount agreed upon according to the going street rate; he then receives the imperial credits as compensation. He’s not happy with this arrangement, however the Rodian and Barabel are. Niles succumbs to peer pressure and accepts the deal. With that solved Luke and Lando sit down and Lando tells him about the Bothan.

As they talk air raid sirens begin to blare. It’s the empire, they seem to be raiding the planet. Apparently New Cov gets shaken down regularly by the imperials. However this time Han, Luke and Lando are there, and none of them bothered to try to conceal their presence on their way in. I think they need a little practice in the cloak and dagger department.

They make a hasty plan, Lando goes and erases the landing logs showing their arrival, while Luke goes and collects Han.
The chapter ends with Luke and Lando departing.

Dark Force Rising: Chapter 8

Han has been taken prisoner. The people that have him question his identity, apparently the bothan Han was following has told them he’s an imperial spy. They don’t believe him however they don’t quite trust Han either. We learn one of the two women in the scene is named Sena the other is named Irenez.

We quickly learn that Sena is very sharp and not easily fooled. She might even be a match for Mara Jade in the spy role. We also learn that the imperals raid this planet every few months and fairly routine. Lastly we learn about a mysterious Commander who runs this little circus. Who is he? We won’t find out for a bit.

Luke has found them and is escorted in and meets up with Han at their little shindig. Luke fills them in on their plan and Han says it won’t work because they don’t have the time to do it. their only option is to bolt.

Sena tells them of a secret passage to the landing pad and that she’s to give them any assistance they require. They make it to the landing pad and learn that Lando is pinned down and can’t leave his hiding space without being seen. Naturally they improvise. They use the Lady lucks’ slave circuitry to move the ship closer to lando, providing them cover to make it to Luke’s X-wing. Then he blasts off and provides cover fire for everyone sans the bothan to pile on board the lady luck and make their escape.

Luke shoots up some ties as they blast their off of New Cov. They meet up with Sena’s ship as they do so. The imperial ship in orbit, an older Victory class star destroyer, tries to pursue, but three Dreadnought class heavy cruisers jump in system and open fire on the star destroyer. Seems like an even match.

However we don’t get to find out as the Lady Luck and the other ship dock with one of the dreadnoughts and they all make the jump to lightspeed. Sena insists on introducing Han and Lando to the mysterious commander.

Meanwhile Luke makes his escape separately and is going to Jomark, where he intends to find a Jedi master.

Yora

2014-12-27, 09:31 AM

I would rather say a naval blockade. The Romans didn't have aerial technology. They DID have naval technology. Naboo had intersteller travel, so it is closer to sea travel than air travel.

And a naval blockade was a death sentence to Rome because of the Egyptian grain supply (https://books.google.com/books?id=yhldKEL2viQC&pg=PA224&lpg=PA224&dq=egypt+grain+supply+rome&source=bl&ots=J1skLvI-fY&sig=_wE2xWMOdoG2I1flj9JMn-L6cDI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GkOeVIC4D8egNsypgrgK&ved=0CFAQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=egypt%20grain%20supply%20rome&f=false).
Since Naboo looked like a very argrarian planet, the blockade would likely have been purely a trade blockade and not a full out siege. You can run a blockade and the queens ship manages to do so. But her ship was small and looks very fast (because it's sleek and all chrome. All it's missing are red flames painted on the engines). Heavy cargo ships and passenger liners would have a much higher chance of getting shot down on boarded. And you don't have to catch every ship that tries to run the blockade, but only enough so that very few people will even think about taking that risk.
The Nabooians could hold out indefinitly, but high tech imports and any possible exports would pretty much dry up, and you won't get any tourists if all passenger liners will get taken into custody and all passenger quarters and luggage searched for smuggling.
The actual invasion with ground troops makes no sense, but the Trade Federation leaders only do it because Palpatine tells them to, and Palpatine wants the whole invasion to fail.
The biggest error I can see is how that would motivate anyone to side with the Trade Federation and form the Seperatist Movement. The whole affair was not about the Republic being unfair to big business, but about the Trade Federation acting apparently insane.

Yes, the whole thing is full of plot holes, but for the overall narrative, it doesn't matter, since it's irrelevant to the plot what exactly the political crisis is about. All that matters is that Palpatine arranges for a situation where he gets lots of goodwill with the senate and can impeach the chancelor to get the post for himself. It doesn't matter what that political stuff is about, but with a blockade it at least involves space battles. *pew* *pwe*

I actually read chapter 10 before christmas, so I don't remember every scene and detail. But Lando playing with his ships remote control made me think again of the thing Luke found on Dagobah at the very beginning:

The thing is a remote control for space ships.
Luke found it in the cave of a Dark Jedi, who was killed by the group of C'Baoth.
C'Baoth belonged to the crew of the Katana Fleet.
All the ships in the Katana Fleet are linked together with slave circuits.
With that thing Luke will get the whole fleet for the Republic.
Yay!

TheThan

2014-12-27, 09:30 PM

Dark force Rising: chapter 9

Leia and chewie are on board the falcon when khabarakh’s ship drops out of light speed. They begin to dock and Chewie insists on going with Leia. He’s gone past losing his cool and is just about to snap psychologically. However khabarakh agrees to allow Chewie to tag along, since he understands the wookiee notion of a life debt, in fact he says its very similar to his people’s view of honor. Something I think will come into play later.
Leia, chewie, 3PO all board Khabarakh’s ship, leaving the Falcon in orbit around Endor. They then leave, it takes four days to get there so Chewie studies up on the ship in case they need to use it to make a quick getaway during the time.

They arrive at Honoghr and Leia is horrified to discover just how extensive the damage to the planet had been. She blames herself as much as the Empire for this event and feels terrible about it. on their way in they spot the Chimera in orbit around the planet. Thinking they’ve been betrayed, Chewie charges towards the cockpit in an attempt to kill Khabarakh. Khabarakh judo throws chewie and then stuns him. he then answers flight control’s hails just in time to keep from getting blown out of the sky.
They then proceed to land in a safe place, Khabarakh’s home.

Meanwhile on the planet Grand Admiral thrawn and Capitan Pellaeon are going through a norghri welcoming ceremony and Pellaeon is board out of his mind. A lieutenant informs Pellaeon about the situation about the ship taking almost too long to respond to hails and Thrawn decides to go and investigate personally.

Dark Force Rising, Chapter 10
Leia and company land, and Khabarakh introduces Leia and Chewbacca to the clan elder, who begrudgingly agrees to hide her. Chewie (who was unconscious earlier thanks to the stun weapon) learns of Khabarakh’s excuse he gave the imperials and charges back into the ship to disable it and make it look like it was really a malfunction. They manage to hide Leia and chewie just in time as Thrawn and his retinue show up and have a look around.

Thrawn goes in and instructs Pellaeon to stay behind. He orders the a tech team to look over the ship Leia and company was on. when Pellaeon enters the building Thrawn is in the middle of grilling Khabarakh about the situation surrounding his return and some issues Thrawn has with his after action report. Khabarakh manages to get through the interrogation and Thrawn comes up empty with any hard evidence. However he still senses something is amiss. The tech team finds chewie’s sabotage and reports their findings to Thrawn. Still nothing.

With nothing solid to go on they give Khabarakh and orders him to get his ship repaired. They then pack up and leave. Thrawn knows he’s lying about something but doesn’t know what, so he orders a scanning crew to go over the ship before it gets repaired. Then he decides to leave a spy droid nearby to monitor the village. They return to the Chimera and the chapter ends.

russdm

2014-12-27, 11:48 PM

Yes, the whole thing is full of plot holes, but for the overall narrative, it doesn't matter, since it's irrelevant to the plot what exactly the political crisis is about. All that matters is that Palpatine arranges for a situation where he gets lots of goodwill with the senate and can impeach the chancelor to get the post for himself. It doesn't matter what that political stuff is about, but with a blockade it at least involves space battles. *pew* *pwe*

It matters because the story is supposed to tie-in to what we have seen already. Of course, if Lucas had hired Zahn to take the written ideas and mesh out some kind of story that had emotions and resonance and caring and what-have, we would have ended up with Prequels that makes you care when Padme whines about freedom ending. To be honest, Padme, nobody gives a d**n about the Republic falling, because we didn't care about it anyway and Lucas couldn't make us.

Compare the story we are reading with the prequels. How much do we care about is happening here? Then look at how little we are made to care in the prequels. The prequels destroy any value that the Rebellion's strong had and makes the entire rebellion look like idiots for trying to restore such a useless government. Who cares about the Republic and who cares about the Separatists. Neither side matters to the audience and the point of saving the republic never produces any kind of story or something that we would be concerned with.

The best result of the prequels was that it got George Lucas out of the driver's seat and that means we could have star wars that actually looks good. It was a long time coming.

Gnoman

2014-12-28, 06:40 PM

Then he decides to leave a spy droid nearby to monitor the village. They return to the Chimera and the chapter ends.

It's interesting to note that Pellaeon's main concern about the spy droid (disguised as a decontamination unit) is that any irregularity such as an antenna might lead the Noghri to take the decon droids apart. That's awfully suspicious.

TheThan

2014-12-28, 07:21 PM

Well the Norghri are rural and somewhat primitive (technology speaking), but that does not mean they are stupid or unobservant. Besides what good is a spy droid that gets found out and taken apart?

The Glyphstone

2014-12-28, 07:27 PM

Seerow

2014-12-28, 07:33 PM

Cikomyr

2014-12-28, 09:58 PM

It's interesting to note that Pellaeon's main concern about the spy droid (disguised as a decontamination unit) is that any irregularity such as an antenna might lead the Noghri to take the decon droids apart. That's awfully suspicious.

It's obvious he doesn't trust the Noghris, and that he doesn't want them to know Thrawn is on to them.

Thrawn183

2014-12-29, 01:17 AM

I like when Zahn takes steps to make sure Captain P. doesn't come off as an idiot, while still providing Thrawn a chance to explain his plans. This sort of thing is pretty much a narrative necessity.

Gnoman

2014-12-29, 01:25 AM

Indeed. P rarely needs more than a single data point to reach the proper conclusion, and his thoughts often seem to run parallel to or even (very) slightly ahead of Thrawn's. This is a much better means of portraying someone as a genius than the all-to-common Bumbling Watson (which the original Watson wasn't), as your genius is standing out against someone that most people could already respect intellectually.

Yora

2014-12-29, 05:38 AM

I think it's more the implication that if they find one spy droid, they might start looking for others, and he doesn't want them disassembling the regular decon droids either. I guess that could just be bean-counting, though - dismantled droids need to be replaced or repaired.
We also just established that the Empire doesn't really have any interest in helping the Noghri to support themselves. Several of the leaders already assume that, and people like Thrawn and Palaeon would be aware that the Noghri are not entirely buying the whole story.
They are smart guys and can use and repair spaceships. If they wanted to, they probably could figure out how those droids work. Or perhaps don't work.

Yora

2014-12-29, 02:34 PM

nyjastul69

2014-12-29, 05:56 PM

Halfway through the book and through the series, I am getting a bit bored. Yes, stuff is happening, but it isn't exciting stuff. Leias story is probably the most interesting with visiting a new planet and learning about the natives, but Han is once more in some secret base of a scoundrel and Luke finds C'Baoth, and it seems merely a disappointment. Not even a shocking encounter, just disappointing.
And I don't think we've heard anything about what Thrawn and Palaeon are even currently working on for quite some time.

The pace has slowed a bit. Some of that might be because we are limiting ourselves to two chapters per day, not that this a problem. I'm guessing most of us would be reading more quickly if not for the discussion. The first book has intoductions of character and plot. The third book will have the resolution. Both of those are the most interseting parts of a story IMO. Book 2 just get's us from 1 to 3 with story exposition. It's 'middle book' syndrome. I think The Two Towers suffers from 'middle book' syndrome as well.

russdm

2014-12-29, 06:21 PM

The pace has slowed a bit. Some of that might be because we are limiting ourselves to two chapters per day, not that this a problem. I'm guessing most of us would be reading more quickly if not for the discussion. The first book has intoductions of character and plot. The third book will have the resolution. Both of those are the most interseting parts of a story IMO. Book 2 just get's us from 1 to 3 with story exposition. It's 'middle book' syndrome. I think The Two Towers suffers from 'middle book' syndrome as well.

Actually this book has some great stuff coming and features some neat action with Wedge, Lando, the Rogues, and Luke. Han still acts all Han-like. But I thought I should mention this so people keep reading and not brush it off as being a 'middle book' because it is more than that.

How? Read it, people!

nyjastul69

2014-12-29, 07:26 PM

Actually this book has some great stuff coming and features some neat action with Wedge, Lando, the Rogues, and Luke. Han still acts all Han-like. But I thought I should mention this so people keep reading and not brush it off as being a 'middle book' because it is more than that.

How? Read it, people!

I was only analyzing it thus far. I don't know what will come next. There is, as you said, half of the book left yet. At this point though, it's lagging. I'm assuming the pace will pick up. You didn't spoil anything in particular, but you gave some element of 'spoiler clues'. Things to watch out for, so to speak. I'm reading and enjoying it.

I would like to reiterate the assumption of zero knowledge about these novels for those posting, reading, following, etc., this thread.

TheThan

2014-12-29, 11:19 PM

Dark force rising chapter 11
We open this chapter with Han and Lando arriving at their destination. They are suspicious of their new found “friends”, and frankly have the right to be, they have no idea who their dealing with.

They disconnect from the destroyer, noting that they couldn’t pass over to it because the magnetic coupler was miss-aligned, forcing them to stay on the Lady Luck. This was probably on purpose. On the way in they notice several things, this place is a full on military base, and that it’s set up similarly to the way the rebel bases such as the one on Hoth were set up.

They land and Sena takes them to meet her commander. This mysterious commander insists on seeing Han alone first. Much to Hans shock he finds that the mysterious commander is none other than famous Corellian senator Garm Bel Iblis, a man that’s supposed to be dead. They have a bit of a chit-chat and then Han introduces him to Lando, who is not quite so impressed.

Meanwhile on the Chimera, Thrawn has been researching Corellian artwork. Reports sent in from the star destroyer over New Cov indicate that the three dreadnoughts belong to someone they refer to as “the Corellian” and that Han Solo and Lando Calrissian were there flying the Lady Luck. Captain P is quick to point out that they were supposed to be elsewhere. Thrawn admits that bit of intel was an error on his part.
The two believe that Han and Lando are seeking out Bel Iblis to bring him and his group into the new republic. They’re giving Han and Lando too much credit, since they are simply bumbling along here. I find it amuzing that Thraw thinks Han and Lando are meeting up with Bel Iblis on purpose, we see him make a (albeit slight) error in judgment here.

We also learn the Niles Ferrier was picked up by the Imperials and Thrawn “hires” him to find the three dreadnaughts (or their exact location) for him, he’s got three months, if he fails the empire will declare war on him. Naturally Ferrier has no choice but to take the deal.
We also learn that the scanning crew has finished their sweep of khabarakh’s ship. The have discovered wookiee hairs all over the ship. They both come to the same conclusion, a perfectly reasonable one at that. khabarakh was captured, interrogated (his ship thoroughly searched) and then released after a month’s time. They assume that khabarakh has turned and Thrawn decides to go and take personal action into reinforce imperial authority over the Noghri.

It’s interesting to note that no mention of skywalker has been made in this chapter. This suggests that Niles Ferrier didn’t rat him out to the Imps, or that Zhan forgot to go that route. Either way it doesn’t matter Luke is going right where they want him to.

Dark force rising Chapter 12

Leia awakens in her hiding place on Honoghr and meats up with the leader of the village. Leia gets a lesson in Noghri history while Chewbacca learns some Noghri fighting moves and C3PO tells a story to some kids. Leia and the elder also exchange some culture with each other and they find they are not so different. There’s really not much to detail Leia and the leader of the tribe are establishing a dialog and getting to know each other. While this is “boring” it’s also important to establish what’s going on because of what happens later in the series.

Dark force rising Chapter 13
Everything is cut short when Thrawn visits. Leia, chewie and 3PO manage to hide and avoid detection. Thrawn grills khabarakh even harder this time, and calls into question his honor; something the Noghri take very seriously. Leia, still in hiding manages to catch a good look at Thrawn. So now two of the heroes have seen Thrawn; and none know his name.
After a brief demonstration of imperial power, Thrawn decides to allow the Noghri to deal with khabarakh their own way and get whatever information he’s hiding out of him.

Dark force rising Chapter 14:
Luke lands on Jomark and meets Jedi Master Joruus C’baoth. C’baoth beings to dominate Luke from the get go and Luke takes up a subordinate role. C’baoth immediately takes a disliking to R2 and calls him an abomination… that’s a little harsh there he hasn’t done anything to deserve that.
Anyway C’baoth drops lots of hints that he’s gone nuts. Luke witnesses C’baoth’s version of Jedi justice and even sees him throw force lightning. That should be a huge hint for Luke to leave but he doesn’t because dumb. He even tells C’baoth that he knows about the other force sensitive out there (Mara jade).

Anyway at the end of the day Luke comes to the conclusion that C’baoth is Mynock-sh*t crazy. He’s right but he decides to stay and try to help him. How? I dunno but that’s his decision.
_______________

As others have noticed there's not much in the way of excitement happening here in these few chapters. This is the part of the story where things slow down; pieces get put into place, and little nuances of important things happening. Thrawn deducing the wrong conclusion (really the only sensible one), about khabarakh's return from kashyyyk, introducing a new player in Garm Bel Iblis and Leia beginning to befriend the Noghri people. Leia has thrown Thrawn off by doing the totally crazy and going into the lion's den as it were.

Yora

2014-12-30, 06:22 AM

The pace has slowed a bit. Some of that might be because we are limiting ourselves to two chapters per day, not that this a problem. I'm guessing most of us would be reading more quickly if not for the discussion.
I have to agree with that. It's not that I don't feel like wanting to go on, and I even tend to read halfway into the next chapter before I get to stop.
It's a bit like the book is dangling some possibly interesting and exciting parts in front of our faces, but we've now gone quite a while without actually getting one of them.
Of course, we still want to get them, but we've been waiting long enough now. :smallbiggrin:

nyjastul69

2014-12-30, 07:43 AM

Dark force rising chapter 11
...
_______________

As others have noticed there's not much in the way of excitement happening here in these few chapters. This is the part of the story where things slow down; pieces get put into place, and little nuances of important things happening. Thrawn deducing the wrong conclusion (really the only sensible one), about khabarakh's return from kashyyyk, introducing a new player in Garm Bel Iblis and Leia beginning to befriend the Noghri people. Leia has thrown Thrawn off by doing the totally crazy and going into the lion's den as it were.

There is nothing in the canon by which Luke could assume that force lightning is a dark side power. He has seen it used exactly once. We see Vader use a force choke ability. Luke uses this same ability. There is nothing in the canon that implies force lightning is a dark power, at least thus far.

The_Snark

2014-12-30, 07:45 AM

There is nothing in the canon by which Luke could assume that force lightning is a dark side power. He has seen it used exactly once. We see Vader use a force choke ability. Luke uses this same ability. There is nothing in the canon that implies force lightning is a dark power, at least thus far.

It does look kind of evil, though. What with the inflicting horrible pain and exposing the victim's skeleton and all. And given that this is Star Wars, "it looks evil" is a non-trivial argument!

(Also, there's Yoda's "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack" line. Even without the Dark Side Power™ label, this instance seems like it's pretty clearly out of line.)

nyjastul69

2014-12-30, 07:51 AM

It does look kind of evil, though. What with the inflicting horrible pain and exposing the victim's skeleton and all. And given that this is Star Wars, "it looks evil" is a non-trivial argument!

(Also, there's Yoda's "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack" line.)

I agree that it looks evil, and as you said, not trivial in this saga. I don't recall it exposing any skeletons in the OT though. Is that something Lucas added in his abominable remakes?

Yora

2014-12-30, 08:14 AM

I think it was always there, but it's very subtle and easy to miss.

Did I say subtle and easy to miss? In that case, it clearly is not from the special edition changes. :smallbiggrin:

TheThan

2014-12-30, 02:54 PM

Yeah but the only person Luke sees using force lightning is the emperor, someone that’s objectively evil. It’s not that far of a logic stretch to assume that force lightning= evil.

Besides Yoda even called this out, “A Jedi uses the force for knowledge and defense, never for attack”. While it could be argued that the best defense is a good offense, I think that’s twisting the spirit of the saying around quite a bit.

C’baoth is supposed to be a Jedi Master, there was any number of ways that he could have defused the situation, he chose one of the most painful (not to mention simplest and direct) ways of ending the conflict. He even goes on to say that the pain the guy suffered at his hands is a good object lesson for him and helps to assert his dominance over the population. These are not very subtle hints that C’baoth is evil (which the reader should already know by now), but Luke doesn’t quite spot those tells ( is Luke stupid? No but if he did spot them right off, we’d be without a story). Zhan decides Luke is willing to turn a blind eye to what are obviously evil actions in order to learn more about the force than just lifting rocks and swinging a lightsaber. However he does pick up on C’baoth being crazy and decides to try to help him, so points there.

nyjastul69

2014-12-30, 03:07 PM

Forgot that bit withYoda. Point well taken.

TheThan

2014-12-30, 03:13 PM

Forgot that bit withYoda. Point well taken.

Apparently Lucas did too *grumbles about prequel trilogy*

Yora

2014-12-30, 03:55 PM

Looks like Thrawn is completely misinterpreting the whole situation with Kabarak. His theories about Leias activities are very interesting and plausible, but in this case happen to be completely wrong. It seems that he is very much mistaking the previous obedience of the Noghri as loyalty. They do what they are told, but that doesn't mean they are not having their own oppinions about things.

McStabbington

2014-12-30, 09:39 PM

You know, I remember the last time I read this, many years ago, thinking that this was a real botch on the part of Thrawn's technical staff, because if they had done some DNA sequencing, they would have quickly discovered that Khabarakh wasn't captured by many Wookies, but was instead compromised by one. Now, I look at it and see two things. One, Star Wars cheerfully plunders the past for its imaging, creating a kind of best-of-the-seventies tech feel that having the tech crew CSI an answer for Thrawn just doesn't jive with.

Two, I'm no longer exactly sure what this information would change. Thrawn's decision, which is that Khabarakh is very likely compromised, is reasonable given the information, and wouldn't change regardless of whether many Wookies broke him or one did. His decision to force the issue with the Noghri wouldn't change either. If anything, he might actually be more likely to attack Khabarakh's honor with the knowledge, because it could easily be interpreted as friendship or kindred intellects forcing the conversion rather than brute force. Long story short, I just don't see the link now "one Wookie = do a scan of the planet" that I saw when I was ten.

Anyone else ever read this as a plot hole?

TheThan

2014-12-30, 10:50 PM

Why would Thrawn suspect that there are intruders on Honoghr?
There is not a shred of evidence yet that points to that even being a possibility. He knows Chewie travels with Leia and takes her protection very personally so it’s very reasonable that while Khabarakh was held prisoner, Chewbacca took his ship apart and put it back together again personally.

Dark Force rising chapter 15
Han Lando, Bel Iblis sit down and have some drinks while he tells them about his little private army. It turns out that Garm was one of the original three people that put together the rebel alliance (the others being Mon Mothma and Bail Organa). However He pulled out of the alliance when he saw Mon Mothma trying to take over the whole show (or so it seemed to him) and went his own way.

So he’s been running his own personal guerrilla campaign against the empire with just his faction. Now that the empire is on the ropes, Bel Iblis is looking at his options. He doesn’t trust Mon Mothma and fears she’s trying to install herself as empress herself. His fears aren’t really warranted but he’s also considering joining up with the New Republic as he feels they haven’t much choice. However he’s still got some pride and wants to return as an equal not as someone crawling on his knees. His whole reason for bringing Han and Lando there was to get an insider’s feel on the situation from people that aren’t power hungry politicians.

Lando also suspect that those dreadnoughts of Bel Iblis’s are part of the long lost Katana Fleet and start to investigate it. Fortunately Lando did some research into the missing Katana Fleet back in the day and happens to have a very good memory. So they begin their search for more conclusive proof.

Dark Force rising Chapter 16

Lando suspects that the old comm. Station that’s behind the bar (why dunno) is part of the slave circuit rig they used to network the Katana Fleet together, if it is they have proof that Bel Iblis has katana fleet ships. After Hand provides a distraction, Lando gets a good look and his hunch is right. However Sena catches them at the bar and asks them to help the Senator join the new republic.

On the way back to the Lady Luck, Lando and Han Confront Sena about the Katana Fleet, she tells them all they know. Bel Iblis is waiting for them there, however he decides to let them go and search for the katana fleet. Sena tells them not to betray the senator or they’re both dead. They hook back up to one of the dreadnoughts for their return trip to New Cov.

Thrawn and captain P learn that the Millennium falcon is still in orbit over Endor and they are puzzled as to why. They decide that Leia is looking for information on Mount Tantiss storehouse. They begin to break orbit headed to who knows where. When they get a report about one of karrde’s people have been captured; the interrogation was extremely short and thrawn takes his time reading it. dun dun dun

Gnoman

2014-12-30, 11:36 PM

Cikomyr

2014-12-30, 11:41 PM

The more I re-read and think about this trilogy, the more I realize just how extensively a control-freak addict C'Baoth truly is. Thrawn really opened a pandora's box when he pushed for C'Baoth to start using Battle Meditation.

Also, it should probably explain C'Baoth's utter hatred for droids. They are something he cannot insinuate.

russdm

2014-12-30, 11:52 PM

This bit always struck me as a bit off. Unless Iblis wanted one of his guests to find out about the Katana ships, why would he take the risk of putting those chairs in the guest house. If a hustler and con-man like Lando knows that that color pattern was unique, I can't see someone on the staff there not knowing about it, so ignorance is out. It seems much too careless.

It's clear that Garm didn't think his guests would be exploring the chairs nor have the information about it being a different color due to being part of the Katana fleet. Normal houseguests don't go pawing the furniture to find out if it is rare. Plus Lando was attracted initially to something being off about the chair, checked further and found the different colored backing, then wanted to look at the reader (whatever function it served) display and find out what it could tell him.

The only thing I found really odd was that having the Falcon above Endor by where the Emperor died somehow could let Leia find the Mount Tantiss storehouse. Its a rather long bit of thinking on Thrawn's part and he seems to just make it up in bizarre fashion.

TheThan

2014-12-30, 11:59 PM

The Mount Tantiss storehouse project is Thrawn’s baby. It’s super important to keep secret, whatever he’s planning there (there have been a subtle hint or two here and there) is vital to him rebuilding the empire. He’s banking his entire war effort on his secret project there and he cannot afford to let it fall into enemy hands.

No matter how cool you can keep, eventually paranoia will sink in and you’ll start jumping at shadows. Thrawn clearly fears that the new republic may be onto the Mount Tantiss storehouse project and therefore feels the need to protect it.

The Glyphstone

2014-12-31, 12:25 AM

Yora

2014-12-31, 02:31 PM

Just as another note: I had scheduled chapters 17 and 18 for tomorrow with no new chapters for today. I assume a good number of us are occupied with other things this afternoon and night.

Gnoman

2014-12-31, 02:41 PM

Plus, he still really doesn't know anything about the Force or Jedi, and Thrawn gets really weird about things he doesn't understand and can't figure out. Leia is a Jedi, Endor is where the Emperor died, the Emperor knew about Mount Tantiss. The slight possibility that magic Jedi Powers will let Leia find Tantiss is risky, even a genius like Thrawn is going to have a total neuron misfire once in a blue moon

Also, even if there's nothing at Endor to find, if the Rebels are looking for information there, it suggests (to Thrawn) that they have a reason to be searching for something that only the Emperor would know. If they have such a reason, they might have gotten a hint that the Mount Tantiss storehouse exists, which is already far more than he wanted them to know about a "winning the war hinges on keeping this" facility.

Yora

2014-12-31, 03:39 PM

How did Palaeon know that the Millenium Falcon went to Endor? If Palaeon brings the news, then the information does not come from Delta Source, so it would mean someone followed Leia there.
Why would she go there in a single jump, or leave any records where she is going? This trip is supposed to be super special awesome secret, didn't she try to cover her trail?

TheThan

2014-12-31, 03:43 PM

russdm

2014-12-31, 04:41 PM

Captain P and Thrawn discuss this. Some smuggler (with a good reputation for delivering solid information) dropped them an anonymous tip and they are simply following up on it. we don't learn who it is though.

Maybe Karrde? or someone else who we may meet later? I don't think that it is mentioned and nor Zahn bother to say. Almost like it was deliberate or perhaps critical in some way that the ship end up on Thrawn's ship. But there is no reason or need to happen isn't there?...

Angelalex242

2015-01-01, 03:19 PM

Hmmm.

What if Luke's staying there is NOT plot induced stupidity? What if he thinks, having redeemed Vader, he can just redeem this guy too? Vader was a monster 23 years running, he might point out to himself, how bad could a jedi gone crazy actually be by comparison?

Yora

2015-01-01, 03:37 PM

Luke did a Dark Side check on C'Baoth and didn't sense the evil he had seen in Vader and the Emperor. His current assesment is simply that he's both a powerful Jedi and afflicted by some madness. He seems to be quite aware that this could become quite dangerous, but I think he is more concerned with getting C'Baoth to calm down and not to bring an old Dark Jedi Master back to the light side as he did with Vader.

Yora

2015-01-03, 12:28 PM

Well, that was easy. I thought this could get really interesting with C'Baoth recognizing the ysalamiri and assuming she's with the empire, while trying to hide that he's with the empire from Luke. But apparently Mara already knew that he was and everyone turned out to be completely open about their loyalties and nobody having any doubts what sides to pick. Then Luke agrees to come with her, without even having heard what's going on.
A bit underwhelming.

Interesting idea that Vader lost his hand after he returned to the Emepror from the Death Star, but I think in this one case the prequel movies came up with something better.

The plan to rescue Karrde was stupid. It really wasn't a plan at all. Luke even spends some thought on it and realizes how stupid it is, but does so anyway. And this isn't the first time. Luke is acting somewhat stupid a lot, and that the book spells it out doesn't make it any better, but actually worse.

russdm

2015-01-03, 09:33 PM

The plan to rescue Karrde was stupid. It really wasn't a plan at all. Luke even spends some thought on it and realizes how stupid it is, but does so anyway. And this isn't the first time. Luke is acting somewhat stupid a lot, and that the book spells it out doesn't make it any better, but actually worse.

It's Luke. As Ron from Harry Potter would say or Hermione would, "You have a saving people thing, mate". Besides, he owes Karrde for not handing him off to Thrawn so rescuing Karrde should pay off that debt.

Yora

2015-01-04, 05:53 AM

The problem is not that he is trying to save him. The problem is that his plan is to simply walk onto a Star Destroyer and then see what happens.

FLHerne

2015-01-04, 07:05 AM

The problem is not that he is trying to save him. The problem is that his plan is to simply walk onto a Star Destroyer and then see what happens.
As opposed to blundering around the Death Star and seeing what happens? :smalltongue:

Star Wars would be far less fun if the characters didn't do crazy things all the time.

Yora

2015-01-04, 07:15 AM

On the Death Star they were already in a guardroom with stormtrooper armor and R2D2 had computer access when they made the descision to rescue Leia. And then they did come up with a plan before leaving the guardpost and did not blindly stumble around to see what they happen to run into.

Having daring plans that require a lot of luck is cool. Saying "meh, I am the hero, it will be fine" is not.

pendell

2015-01-04, 09:45 AM

Hello, everyone. I'm back after being on vacation and I have to ask ... exactly which chapter are we on? I need to catch up.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora

2015-01-04, 11:05 AM

The schedule is at the top of page 2. Today it's chapters 23 and 24.

Thrawn183

2015-01-04, 11:28 AM

The problem is not that he is trying to save him. The problem is that his plan is to simply walk onto a Star Destroyer and then see what happens.

At the same time, between the movies and whatever we're supposed to assume he has been up to in the mean time; Luke is now probably more experienced with this kind of operation than anyone else alive. Combined with his Jedi abilities, he's pretty much the only person that could do something like this and actually expect to pull it off.

pendell

2015-01-04, 12:41 PM

The schedule is at the top of page 2. Today it's chapters 23 and 24.

Thank you.

WRT Luke's lack of planning, HK-47 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPeI4mX8Nus) may give us some insight. He says that over-planning is the worst thing you can do when attempting a jedi assassination; spontaneous, unplanned acts work better than meticulously detailed ones.

I suspect this is due to the nature of the Force in the GFFA. This doesn't work nearly as well in the real world, but in the GFFA a Force-sensitive acting in an unplanned manner is far more likely to be "going with the Flow" -- acting with the Force -- and as a result unplanned, spontaneous coincidences occur which happen to assist them in their journey. Because they are going in the same direction the Force is.

By contrast, too much planning cuts one off from the living force, with the result that the Force proves to be an obstacle, since one's plans, made without it, may cut across the Force's path. So those little untimed coincidences, which would help the spontaneous force-sensitive, hinder and throw sand in the gears of meticulous plans. It generates Clausewitzean friction, and the best-laid plans go astray.

So for a Force-user "letting go your conscious self and acting on instinct" is actually the quickest and most painless way to achieve a goal.

Planning and logic is a poor second in the GFFA. Planning, as exemplified by the brilliant Thrawn, simply cannot conceive of every possible contingency or make allowance for every unlikely chain of events -- and it is precisely those unlikely events left unguarded which the Force will use as a channel to trip you up. That is why Force-users rule the galaxy, even though I can't remember any save Palpatine who were as intelligent and capable as someone like Thrawn.

Thus, I think Luke's actions are plausible, even though the Force in this regard acts as a mechanism to lampshade all manner of ridiculous plot contrivance which would be unthinkable anywhere outside of ancient myth, where the gods could be similarly capricious.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

McStabbington

2015-01-04, 02:06 PM

Have to say, that's a brilliant bit of speculation. Where our universe has Fortuna or Chance, luck, what have you, the GFFA has The Force putting its thumb on the scales. I've always thought that Obi-Wan's statement "In my experience, there's no such thing as luck," to be the perfect statement for a cloistered monk who had his education, food and shelter all paid for by a large warrior order and whom benefited from some kind of sensitivity that maybe one in a billion sentients across the Galaxy possess. It never occurred to me that if the Force is a real thing, it might actually have altered the rules of the game such to make that statement true.

Yora

2015-01-04, 03:20 PM

The problem I have with that is that it assumes that the Force not only has awareness of what's going on and a desire to make certain outcomes come to pass, but that it also wants an outcome that benefits Luke. That makes the Force a god that is secretly pulling the strings, and I just don't see that anywhere in Star Wars.

The whole thing of "trust your feelings" and "let the Force guide you" makes a whole lot more sense to me when applied only to making the right choices when it comes to picking sides and judging your chances. It's trusting your intuition and letting your subconscious process data that your consciousness isn't even aware it has. And through the Force, a Jedi picks up small details that are not available to other people. It's a concept that is well known both in modern neurology and eastern philosophy: Consciously weighing the pros and cons for a specific course of action breaks the situation down to what we believe to be the essential factors. But eventually the mind keeps simplefying the original question down to such a degree that it becomes purely hypothetical with barely any real connection to the actual specific problem we need to make a descision on. The conscious mind corrupts it to a strawman argument and then comes to a conclusion that seems logical, but isn't really helpful. Intuition and the subconscious also do the same processing of the data, but doesn't break it down to the basics and instead keeps all the details in the calculation. Even the details or conscious mind considers irrelevant or insignificant. And with their ability to sense the world around them and the minds of people connected to them, Jedi do get additional "feelings" that their subconsciousness can use, even if their conscious thoughts don't have any idea what those impressions mean.
That's what it means when Jedi say "let the Force guide you", not "shut down your brain and let the Force use you as a puppet".

pendell

2015-01-04, 07:05 PM

All right, all caught up.

The story so far , as concerning the viewpoint characters:

Han and Lando were rescued by agents of Bel Iblis, a former Imperial senator whose faction left the rebel alliance and waged their private war against the Empire for decades. Borsk Fey'la is attempting to bring them back, thus enhancing his status as a leader of the New Republic. Mon Mothma is evidently quite domineering, and Bel Iblis had left for fear she would set herself up as Empress. This has not happened.

After this encounter, Han and Lando pursue a rumor of the Katana fleet, followed closely by Niles Ferrier, who was captured by the Empire and sent out on a bomb-rigged intelligence freighter with orders to get them the Katana fleet in 60 days or else.

Luke goes to meet Joruus C'baoth. Considering the only two Jedi he has met so far have been Yoda and Obi-wan, he expects C'baoth to be cut from the same cloth. These hopes are dashed -- C'baoth rules his city by directly invading the thoughts of the inhabitants and enforcing his will with force lightning. He rules not by consent, but by decree, essentially no different from the Emperor. Luke has not yet realized that, though.

Mara Jade is captured by the Empire and reveals her status as Emperor's Hand. She is taken to Thrawn, where she ostensibly bargains: The Katana fleet in exchange for 3 million and a lifting of the Death Mark on Karrde's organization. Thrawn pretends to comply , but in fact follows Mara via a homing beacon installed on her ship. Once there, he arrests Karrde and actually does live up to his word, to a certain extent: All of Karrde's associates are free. Karrde himself will be given the option of giving up the location of the Katana fleet freely, in which case he will indeed be freed and given the promised three million. If not...

Mara is outraged at this, and leaps upon Thrawn. Restrained by Rukh, she attempts a Force Choke, but doesn't have the power to cause Thrawn more than momentary discomfort. Offered a position in the Imperial fleet, she pretends to acquiesce, then escapes and heads off to Jomark, in the hopes of finding the one man who can assist her in rescuing Karrde...

On Jomark, C'baoth attempts to shoot Mara down with force-thrown rocks, secretly. When this fails, he next attempts to use the force to dominate Luke into staying. Unfortunately for him, Mara has brought a Ysalamir, and once safely under its influence they are able to depart.

They board the Chimaera and rescue Karrde. Thrawn realizes something is a miss and sounds intruder alert. Nonetheless, the Millenium Falcon, which was retrieved from its abandoned orbit around Endor, is aboard the ship en route to deep storage. Luke, Karrde, and Mara board the vessel and escape, setting their course to the Katana fleet. Thrawn is also on his way there, following Niles Ferrier, who is on Han and Lando's trail...

Leia travels aboard the Millenium Falcon to Endor, where she is met by Khabarakh. She and Chewbacca transfer to his ship, abandoning the Falcon in orbit around Endor, where it will be picked up by the Chimaera. They travel to the Noghri clan world, where they are hidden from the Empire and the visiting Grand Admiral. here they learn the story: The planet was polluted by the aftermath of an interstellar battle and was nearly made uninhabitable. the Empire offered the Noghri aid in exchange for their service.

Something is amiss: By Chewbacca's calculations the cleanup should take eight years. In fact, the Noghri have been slaves for forty-four years, since the Clone Wars. Has the Empire been deliberately slowing the operation..?

Investigation of a decon droid with espionage programming quickly reveals the truth: The droids have NOT been cleaning the land but have been in effect re-poisoning it, thus keeping the Noghri in perpetual bondage. This truth thus revealed, the Noghri end chapter 24 in discussion as to what to do about this -- nothing immediately, as premature action will result in the deaths of their commando teams throughout the Imperial forces , as well as the bombardment of their own planet by the Empire. But this dishonorable action will not be overlooked.

The problem I have with that is that it assumes that the Force not only has awareness of what's going on and a desire to make certain outcomes come to pass, but that it also wants an outcome that benefits Luke. That makes the Force a god that is secretly pulling the strings, and I just don't see that anywhere in Star Wars.

I suggest that the "Light Side" of the Force has an affinity for light and light actions. That doesn't require it to be sentient. The Light Side wants "light" as water "wants" to flow downhill , or as opposing electrical charges "want" to be attracted to each other.

If this is the case, someone sensitive to the light side of the force can allow his actions to be guided by it, as a man on a raft may be "guided" by the water's current.

So it's not that the light side of the force is a god or even a sentient being. I do not think it knows what a lightsaber is or what a ship is or a star is. But it does perceive the impacts on the minds that make it up -- happiness, cheer, lust, anger, "millions of voices crying out in terror" .

It "recognizes" these minds and it "recognizes" light side outcomes -- what will make those minds more peaceful , content, knowledgeable.

A light side user , then, would be much like a surfboarder -- rather than fighting or planning, find out where the current is, then put your board into it and hang on!

And I wouldn't call it becoming a puppet, any more than a steersman is a puppet of the river. It's simply being knowledgeable about how the river works, when to travel with the current and when not to. A Force-user in this sense would be like a tightrope-walker who acts more on trained instinct than anything else. Don't ask them to think about what they're doing or why. The moment they stop acting and start thinking, at that instant they lose their balance and go tumbling off.

That's the light side.

The Dark Side doesn't work that way, because Dark Side users do not submit to the Force. They control it, bridle it, as a cruel man might break a horse or a stallion, enslaving it, binding it to their wills. A Dark Sider thus in the short run has more obvious power, but in the long run tend to lose , both because there's only so much control any single person can exert over the collective minds of a galaxy, and because they inevitably betray and backstab each other.

The fact that Dark Side users do not submit to the Force makes me wonder if there really are two different sides to the force, or whether there are simply two different basic methods of interacting with a single unified Force -- one method submits and tries to "go with the flow", while the other side attempts to suppress, dominate, and twist to selfish ends.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Cikomyr

2015-01-04, 11:53 PM

I never actually picked up the fact that the droids re-poisoned the land. I just thought they were purposely slowing down the work.

End result is the same, off course.

russdm

2015-01-05, 12:24 AM

I never actually picked up the fact that the droids re-poisoned the land. I just thought they were purposely slowing down the work.

End result is the same, off course.

I think it is the modified Kholm-grass/weed had done the poisoning and that decon work was removing the modified grass. Earlier, the matriarch tells Leia that the grass smelled different after ships visited or something. There is also comments or hints that the Empire had said certain things regarding the decon work that was exposed as lies because of Leia's demonstration.

Yora

2015-01-05, 06:55 AM

I think the droids are removing the poison gras, but very slowly. That's why Leia is going to get more of that pesticide that is in the droids.
At least I think, this part was a bit unclear and confusing, but it probably doesn't really matter for the plot. The Empire keeps the planet just as poisoned as they want it to be, that's the whole point.
However, we knew this probably about 10 chapters ago. This book really drags on quite a bit.

pendell

2015-01-05, 12:44 PM

Chapter 25
Han and Lando arrive at an underground casino to try to find Bel Iblis' Katana fleet contact. Evidently he is a compulsive gambler who sells katana ships in order to make ends meet when he runs out of cash, which is often.

Unfortunately for them, Thrawn is one step ahead of them. Niles Ferrier has reported their vector to the casino. Also, Mara's mention of Karrde to Thrawn has prompted a full background investigation , which has turned up the various incidents matching up with a potential meeting up with the Katana fleet, and a crew roster. Going through this list , compared with the people who could be aboard the casino, produces a name: Hoffner, Karrde's old captain.

Thrawn instructs Niles, who outruns Lando to arrive at the casino first. They capture the contact and hold him while the Imperials arrive.

Thus Lando and Han jump right into another Imperial attack.

Niles intends to kill Lando, as he has interfered with Niles' plans once too often. In this they fail, but in not much else. The Chimaera enters orbit, disables the underwater vessel carrying the casino, then sends a boarding party which efficiently captures the contact and whisks him off into space. This is an unconditional victory for the Empire; Han and Lando are lucky to escape with their lives.

Chapter 26

The Republic council meet with Talon Karrde, who offers the Katana fleet.

Fey'la is skeptical and a bit of a roadblock, once again playing the game to maximize his own prestige and power at the expense of everyone else. I suspect he wanted to deliver the Katana fleet himself, and so is delaying Karrde until his own negotiations with Iblis bear fruit.

But time for that has run out; The Grand Admiral has his coordinates and is probably even now en route to capture the fleet.

A decision is made: A preliminary scouting mission will be sent tomorrow morning to assess the value of the ships, and report back; if warranted, a full salvage team will then be sent.

This is Fey'las doing, once again angling for prestige.

This probably means the Empire will get the fleet, I suspect Thrawn is already on his way and is all-in to capture the ships. The Republic simply won't be able to move quickly enough, paralyzed by political games.

Precisely the disease that killed the earlier Republic as well.

Han attempts to reason with Fey'la after the meeting, but Fey'la is completely unable to believe that anyone in the Republic could act from purely selfless, altruistic motives. Appealing to his good nature seems to be mistake on Han's part, he would have had more success if he had attempted to reason with Fey'la cynically. As it is, Fey'la dismisses his attempts at politics as the fumblings of a naive child; not really an unreasonable viewpoint on his part.

Mara Jade, meanwhile, is desperately trying to find an excuse not to kill Luke Skywalker.

Karrde gives her the location of the Katana fleet and orders her to get everything from their smuggling group that can fight there as soon as possible. He recognizes what I just said; Fey'las resistance has all but guaranteed the Empire will acquire the fleet, so they must move quickly to prevent this action.

He also calls for the slicer Ghent to have a look at the deposit that magically appeared in Ackbar's bank account.

They also pull aside Leia to send an independent assessment team to get their before Fey'las group; they need some other source of information reporting to the Council rather than just Fey'las eyes.

Karrde warns Leia that this is a payoff for saving his life; he intends to remain neutral in the war. He's insane if he believes that's truly an option any more. He's thrown in his lot with the Republic, whether he's ready to admit it to himself or not.

Luke sets off with the team, escorted by Wedge and Rogue squadron. Fey'la, Leia, and Karrde follow in the morning on the next ship.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

pendell

2015-01-06, 08:52 AM

Chapters 27 and 28: Big battle!

Scene; The Katana fleet graveyard.

1) Entry: Lando, Luke and Han aboard a nondescript freighter, escorted by rogue squadron X-wings. Of the 200 dreadnaughts of the fleet, only 15 are left; ;the Empire has beaten them to the punch. This battle was over before they even broke orbit over Coruscant. Though the heroes won't realize this until about halfway through the events of these chapters.

At any rate, Luke has a touch of force intuition and they dock with one of the dreadnaughts -- the flagship Katana and begin evaluating it for salvage.

2) Entry: Borsk Fey'la, Karrde, and Leia Solo aboard an Escort Frigate, which carries two squadrons of X-wings. Fey'la orders the arrest of Han and Luke. But these events are interrupted by:

3) Entry: Imperial Star Destroyer Judicator, Captain Brandei commanding. They deploy landing craft to capture at least one of the remaining dreadnaughts.

Fey'la attempts to flee the battle, but Karrde intervenes swiftly. Signalling Leia to use the force to open a comlink channel, Karrde successfully baits Fey'la into a villainous monologue. Realizing what slime he is and how they are being used, the Republic crew of the Frigate cease following his orders; Fey'la is confined to quarters and the ship's starfighters link up with rogue squadron to confront the Judicator and its TIE fighters.

Captain Brandei reports he is engaging the enemy.

4) Thanks to slave-rigging, Han, Lando, and Luke manage to fire a single volley from the Katana's turbolaser battery. Between the X-wings and this volley, only a single Imperial craft survives to dock with the Katana. Luke and Han have their hands full fighting a boarding party.

5) Thrawn receives the report of hard contact from the Judicator. He instructs Pelleon to deploy the Chimaera itself for the battle, but before they can, Joruus C'baoth arrives aboard a highjacked Lancer-class frigate and demands to speak to Thrawn now. C'baoth seizes control of Thrawn's navigation officer, so Thrawn has no choice but to comply. He details the ISD Peremptory to support the Judicator.

6) Back at the battle area, there are multiple new entries: 6 Dreadnaughts under Bel Iblis, responding to a distress call sent by Han under Leia's name. They are followed up by Karrde's smuggling group, led by Mara, which launches a flank attack on the Judicator. Meanwhile, Lando, Luke and Han fight the Imperial boarding action on the Katana, using a commandeered scout walker to even the odds.

7) Just as the battle seems to be tipping in the Republic's favor, the Peremptory arrives, pushing the scales firmly back in the Empire's favor. Three of Iblis' dreadnaughts turn to harass and delay the Peremptory while everyone else prepares to evacuate as best they can. Luke and Han secure the Katana ; Luke notices something odd about the minds of the enemy stormtroopers but has no time to do anything about this. Instead, he ends the battle by using his lightsaber to slash open the bridge to space. Emergency doors snap shut, protecting our heroes, but the enemy stormtroopers are exposed to vacuum and die a horrible death.

8) Now with a moment to catch their breath, Lando, Han and Luke examine the sensors and discover that the tactical picture is grim indeed. Then someone -- I forget who -- remembers that they are aboard the fleet flagship; the other vessels in the fleet can be controlled from here. A quick search reveals that only one of the remaining dreadnaughts is capable of motion; Our heroes set it on a collision course with the Peremptory. the Peremptory has no opportunity to maneuver. The Peremptory and the dreadnaught are mutually destroyed in the resulting collision.

Mara Jade, meanwhile, is shot down.

9) Captain Brandei doesn't like the odds he's facing; six dreadnaughts with x-wing fighters against his own destroyer and a rapidly dwindling TIE defense. He recalls his fighters and beats a hasty retreat into hyperspace.

Tactically speaking, this is a victory for the Republic, destroying an ISD and retaining control of the battlespace after the engagement. But in the long run the book is a victory for the Empire; Thrawn at last has the ships he so desperately needed.

Back on the Chimera recriminations abound. Thrawn accuses C'baoth of losing the battle for the Empire and costing them a star destroyer. C'boath demurs , stating that it is possible Thrawn himself would have died if it had been the Chimeara rather than the Peremptory at the battle.

Having read the story, I think C'baoth's right. There was no way for a star destroyer to avoid the suicidal ramming attack of the automated dreadnaught, however brilliant a mind was aboard it. Laws of physics don't care about the quality of your mind.

At any rate, C'baoth essentially declares himself Emperor and demands to assume command of the Wayland project. The scene ends with him demanding to discuss "the details of our new Empire".

===

Well, that was a really strong , action-packed conclusion to the book. I especially appreciated how well the various Chekhov's guns, such as the slave-rigging, were neatly slotted into place before use. The story unfolds in a logical, rational manner with minimum use of the Idiot Ball. It is like watching a chess game between two very talented players.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Gnoman

2015-01-06, 03:09 PM

Back on the Chimera recriminations abound. Thrawn accuses C'baoth of losing the battle for the Empire and costing them a star destroyer. C'boath demurs , stating that it is possible Thrawn himself would have died if it had been the Chimeara rather than the Peremptory at the battle.

Having read the story, I think C'baoth's right. There was no way for a star destroyer to avoid the suicidal ramming attack of the automated dreadnaught, however brilliant a mind was aboard it. Laws of physics don't care about the quality of your mind.

On the other hand, had the Peremptory's captain not failed to account for the ships being rigged together in the first place he might not have put his ship somewhere that it could have been rammed in the first place. Not counting on the possibility of a 40+ year old ship with no crew aboard flying at you is a reasonable mistake to make, but I don't think Trawn would have made it. The captain of the Peremptory mistook the sluggish reactions of the New Reupublic ships for panic rather than a chain-of-command dispute and grossly underestimated them as a result. Thrawn's never underestimated anybody except the Noghri, and the destruction of the Peremptory is exactly the sort of tactic he would have pulled if he were on the other side.

Also, you seem to have gone into chapter 29 (the last chapter in the book), but didn't mention the big reveal in the last paragraph.

pendell

2015-01-06, 03:52 PM

Also, you seem to have gone into chapter 29 (the last chapter in the book), but didn't mention the big reveal in the last paragraph.

A bit of spillover , my bad :). I assume we can discuss the big reveal tomorrow, when it is scheduled to happen.

At any rate, I don't know how a Star Destroyer could have been employed in that combat other than the way the Peremptory was; If Thrawn had kept his ISD out of range of the dreadnaught's ramming, I suspect the ship would also have been too far distant to influence the battle meaningfully. Oh, they could use their TIE fighter compliment, but sending TIE fighters against three squadrons of X-wings, one of which is Rogue Squadron, is throwing fighters away to no gain.

Imperial tactics make no sense for starfighters alone; starfighters must operate jointly with Star Destroyers to be effective. Moving the ship close to the battle would have been a calculated risk , but one I think any captain who didn't possess some kind of supernatural force intuition would have taken.

At any rate, if the Chimaera had hung back and allowed the Judicator to be attacked by no less than seven capital ships at once , I think the campaign would have ended very quickly; who is going to follow a leader who has such regard for his own skin?

Respectfully ,

Brian P.

Gnoman

2015-01-06, 04:00 PM

They could have maintained the same engagement distance (although the weapons arrangement on the ISD model suggests that it is much better at long range fire than close range), but Thrawn would likely have taken a few seconds to position the Chimera far enough off the easy movement vectors of the "derelict" ships that he'd have been able to counter the attack even while ion cannoned. Peremptory's captains mistake wasn't coming too close so much as it was completely disregarding a major feature of the battlefield, even after said elements had already fired on and destroyed several assault transports.

russdm

2015-01-06, 05:38 PM

The Republic council meet with Talon Karrde, who offers the Katana fleet.

Fey'la is skeptical and a bit of a roadblock, once again playing the game to maximize his own prestige and power at the expense of everyone else. I suspect he wanted to deliver the Katana fleet himself, and so is delaying Karrde until his own negotiations with Iblis bear fruit.

But time for that has run out; The Grand Admiral has his coordinates and is probably even now en route to capture the fleet.

A decision is made: A preliminary scouting mission will be sent tomorrow morning to assess the value of the ships, and report back; if warranted, a full salvage team will then be sent.

This is Fey'las doing, once again angling for prestige.

This probably means the Empire will get the fleet, I suspect Thrawn is already on his way and is all-in to capture the ships. The Republic simply won't be able to move quickly enough, paralyzed by political games.

Precisely the disease that killed the earlier Republic as well.

Han attempts to reason with Fey'la after the meeting, but Fey'la is completely unable to believe that anyone in the Republic could act from purely selfless, altruistic motives. Appealing to his good nature seems to be mistake on Han's part, he would have had more success if he had attempted to reason with Fey'la cynically. As it is, Fey'la dismisses his attempts at politics as the fumblings of a naive child; not really an unreasonable viewpoint on his part.

This whole affair shows why the New Republic is doomed from the start, the fact that political games get played while the it's future is on the line. You will see it with the Caamasi document crisis which features the New Republic nearly falling into civil war and continual problems later, until it gets replaced.

Yet, the Empire doesn't have that problem as much because Thrawn or Captain P can give an order and expect it to be carried out. They don't have to deal as much with groups like Fey'lya and his bothans who thrive on political clashing. Thrawn gives an order and gets the fleet, Fey'yla plays politics and the New Republic loses. It's a clear sign of which side actually works better. Had the Republic's leadership (Mon Mothma) tried to be solid or take-a-stand, its likely that the meeting would have ended sooner and that there would have been more ships for the New Republic to get.

Mon Mothma lacks strong leadership skills. She is the president of the New Republic and its her job to make the calls and to basically say "I have made my decision and I want a team put together now. Get to it.". She never does this; instead she works to get the council to agree to something then does that. She doesn't even push her own view of what needs to happen. In fact, until the vote gets taken, its clear that Mon didn't have any ideas or opinions of her own.

Mon is still too affected by the bad governing practices of the Galactic Republic, which wasn't going to do anything at all until it was discussed in a committee. Mon ends up doing the same thing and it allows the Empire and Thrawn to acquire nearly all of the ships. She already knows or has heard about how the Empire has been asking for capital ships, she even mentions the urgency of getting a team sent out, but she doesn't strongly say that is what she will do and then let the council say whether they will agree with her. Instead, they have to take a vote. Indicisive leadership that wrecked the Galactic Republic, allowing for Palpatine to take over.

This just goes to show that rebels have inefficient government and its a big problem.

GAThraawn

2015-01-06, 07:10 PM

This thread has only now come to my attention, but I wholeheartedly approve.

Jon D

2015-01-07, 06:42 AM

hamishspence

2015-01-07, 06:49 AM

I think it's important to remember the timeline Zahn is giving us. The Nogri have been vassals of the Empire for 44 years, since the closing of the Clone Wars and the fall of the Republic. Imperial Senators like Mon Mothma and Garm bel Ibis are what, in their late 50s to late 60s? They grew up in the Imperial system and held the Republic up as an ideal, which in my mind means that neither of them would recognize the flaws of the Republic and would be deathly afraid of repeating any actions that would emulate Palpatine.

The novelization of RoTJ portrays Mon Mothma as a Senator during the last days of the Republic:

Mon Mothma entered the room. A stately, beautiful woman of middle age, she seemed to walk above the murmurs of the crowd. She wore white robes with gold braiding, and her severity was not without cause—for she was the elected leader of the Rebel Alliance.

Like Leia's adopted father—like Palpatine the Emperor himself—Mon Mothma had been a senior senator of the Republic, a member of the High Council. When the Republic had begun to crumble, Mon Mothma had remained a senator until the end, organizing dissent, stabilizing the increasingly ineffectual government.

She had organized cells, too, toward the end. Pockets of resistance, each of which was unaware of the identity of the others—each of which was responsible for inciting revolt against the Empire when it finally made itself manifest.

And there's references in TTT that have Bel Iblis as "Republic-era" as well - that bit when he tells Han about the last time they met (Han was in school, - Bel Iblis was paying a visit - and Han asked him a couple of irreverently phrased yet insightful questions - one about the anti-alien bias creeping into the Republic, and one about corrupt colleagues in the Senate).

Jon D

2015-01-07, 07:12 AM

Either these people are really old, or were elected as teenagers. Makes me wonder if humans live longer in a GFFA. I know force users do in some cases.

hamishspence

2015-01-07, 07:19 AM

Or, in the Zahn-era, there was intended to be a big gap between the Clone Wars and the establishment of the Empire. Thus, the Noghri homeworld was devastated 44 years before TTT, but the Empire was established quite a bit more recently.

In the West End Games books, I think Mon Mothma was supposed to be "the previous Youngest Senator Ever" before Leia was appointed in her teens.

pendell

2015-01-07, 08:43 AM

This whole affair shows why the New Republic is doomed from the start, the fact that political games get played while the it's future is on the line. You will see it with the Caamasi document crisis which features the New Republic nearly falling into civil war and continual problems later, until it gets replaced.

I'm not sure that's fair.

1) Currently, the Empire is in almost the same position that the rebel alliance was in pre-Endor; in such desperate straits that all the useless politicals have been [mostly] jettisoned. If Thrawn ever actually gets to the point of ruling the galaxy, he will have the same cotery of fractious ,greedy, scrabbling people to deal with, and that means politics. You can't solve every dispute with a star destroyer. If anything ... in the Zahn-stories -- Palpatine seems to have cultivated the Emperor's Hands to fulfill the function of the old Jedi -- personal representatives who could solve problems through one-on-one interaction, rather than overwhelming military force.

Certainly there was a cutaway, in ROTJ, to Palpatine meeting with civilian politicians on the death star, and while looks can be deceiving I'd lay long odds they were cut from the same cloth as Fey'la.

At any rate, the Empire had its share of petty warlords, independent groups like the Corporate Sector Authority, and Moffs who also launched their own coups and civil wars in order to make themselves Emperor or enhance their standing.

2) Regrettably, politics has been an affliction of every human society ever; if you read Sophocles' account of the Peleponnesian War , the Athenians fought like cats and dogs in their Assembly, and the Romans also engaged in politics throughout the Punic Wars. The politics only really gets put aside when people are genuinely in fear of their lives ; politics is therefore a luxury of a society not under threat of extinction. Heck, look at Song of Ice and Fire -- the Starks and the Lannisters find time for trivial disputes while the seven kingdoms are under threat from the walkers of the north and the dragons of the south. "Palace Intrigue" was a common theme in the courts of Royalty.

At any rate, I think the Republic's foundation of mutual consent is a more solid foundation than the Empire's recipe of military rule. Because in such environments , a cult of personality inevitably develops around the leader, and when one is surrounded by flatterers it becomes extremely difficult to get any real knowledge of what's happening out in the Empire. The Emperor becomes a puppet in the hands of the people who control the information he receives.

Which, come to think of it, is exactly what Lucas described happening in the original New Hope novelization.

A Thrawn, or an Augustus, can rise above that. But historically their successors do not.

A Republican system is more fractious but there is no single point of failure from which the entire system can be forced madly off-course. An Empire only works well with a superlative Emperor, when there really is a Palpatine or an Augustus running the show. When someone like Robert Baratheon sits on the Iron Throne, politics is just as bad as in a Republic; Worse, because there are fewer checks and balances to stop a King Joffrey from arbitrarily murdering people.

At any rate ... on to Chapter 29.

Chapter 29: Wrap-up

As mentioned, recriminations between Thrawn and C'baoth.

Luke uses his Jedi sense to locate Mara Jade and she is rescued. Suffering from oxygen deprivation and concussion, she is taken to the medical bay.

They return to the Katana to see the boarding party and find out the truth behind those disturbing minds -- these are clones.

This explains why the Empire is so desperate for ships. They have a set of high-speed cloning devices which they can use to churn out soldiers very quickly. With the Katana fleet under their control and clones to man them, Thrawn has the military power to overthrow the Republic.

The prequels retconned this a bit; The Spaarti process used at Wayland is a very different process from the proprietary ones used on Kamino. Kaminoans took pride in their craftsbeingship, and clones matured at roughly half the speed of ordinary humans. By contrast, Spaarti cylinders could turn out clones in weeks, but the result tended to be ... unstable and to have other flaws.

So it's a very different technology from that used to create the Grand Army in Episode 3. Nonetheless, the New Republic is facing an existential crisis.

TO BE CONCLUDED ....

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora

2015-01-07, 12:46 PM

Timeline-wise, the senate continued to exist long after the Republic was turned into the Empire. Put Bel-Iblis and Mon Mothma at around 70 (which isn't super-old for active politicians) and they would have been 50 during the change. (Which happened to be the average age of the German parliament after the last election).
I think Han said he was 11 when he met Bel Iblis and I think he's about 10 years older than Luke. So it all fits pretty neatly together as well.

That last battle was a big step up from the rest of the book, which I actually found rather boring. Other than that, I can't remember much happening. Han and Lando said hi to Bel Iblis and Leia made friends with one minor Noghri leader. Luke met C'Baoth and then left him again. These three things certainly all become important for the next book, but they could easily have been covered in 2 chapters each instead of 8 or so. And Thrawn and Palaeon didn't do anything, from what I can remember. They apparently got most of the dreadnaught, which happened completely off-screen and we know of it after the fact.
I wouldn't say this book was pointless, but I can't shake the feeling that this story has been made into three books because it was decided that it should be three. Not because the story naturally fits into that format. It could easily have been done in just two books, splitting the middle one and the putting the content into the other two volumes.

With the battle at the end, I felt a bit disappointed with how easily Fey'lya was kicked out. The super-loyal crew wasn't so loyal, and Fey'lya was too happily twirling his villain moustache. It didn't feel like a natural development, but an obvious setup that lacks real effort.

However, I can vaguely remember some things which I believe Thrawn did, which were really cool. So I do have high hopes for the last book. :smallsmile:

The prequels retconned this a bit; The Spaarti process used at Wayland is a very different process from the proprietary ones used on Kamino. Kaminoans took pride in their craftsbeingship, and clones matured at roughly half the speed of ordinary humans. By contrast, Spaarti cylinders could turn out clones in weeks, but the result tended to be ... unstable and to have other flaws.
The kamino did strike me as people who would only deliver the most sophisticated and refined product and perhaps outright refuse to produce anything below premium quality. That there are alternatives seems actually quite plausible.

pendell

2015-01-07, 03:05 PM

Agreed that this second book seems more like 'filler'. I was especially disappointed in Luke's encounter with C'baoth. It just seemed ... anti-climactic. They met, they engaged for less than a chapter, Maria drags him away at X-wing gunpoint.

If Zahn were to rewrite this, I would rather he took up a couple of chapters to review their relationship with each other, allowing their disagreements to gradually foster, then sharpen to a quarrel, until Luke decides he can no longer stay.

THEN is the time for Mara to come swooping to the rescue.

As it is ... yeah. I like the first book and the last book a lot better than this one, which seems a little light.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

pendell

2015-01-08, 12:10 AM

The Last Command
Chapter 1 : The campaign begins

For the first time in a long time the Empire is going to go on the counter-offensive, taking back worlds from the Republic. This hasn't happened in a long time; for the past five years they have mounted rear guard actions, harassment and hit-and-fades, but lost territory bit by bit. No longer.

The offensive is choreographed with the grace of a dancing master. First, five task forces made up of one star destroyer + multiple Katana dreadnaughts each -- including the Judicator, whose Captain is cautioned by Thrawn against allowing vengeance to supersede the battle plan -- each are sent on a different diversionary strike against a different target. The Republic knows Thrawn well enough to expect a diversionary assault, so Thrawn intends to play to their expectations -- then subvert them.

While this is happening, Pelleon is sent to speak with Joruus C'baoth, who mind tricks him into having a special clone from sample [pointless number] gestated for him, to be ready for him on Wayland. He is then compelled to forget the matter entirely.

ISTR from other commentary that C'baoth's mind trick is considerably more vicious than anything done to anyone else mentally in these stories, as he not only mind-raped Pelleon but permanently crippled his willpower as well, making future intrusions all the easier.

C'baoth has either gone full dark or full insane, one of the two.

But that is not momentarily important. Instead, Pelleon reports back to Thrawn.

Each of the five diversionary assaults goes off, drawing off more and more ships from the closest republic base, Ord Mantell, so it will have only a skeletal defense force when the sixth task force hits the base proper.

The resultant distress call brings in all the other reinforcements in the sector -- leaving the real target, the planet Ukio, undefended.

Thrawn enters Ukio space with the Chimaera and demands their surrender. Just before the Chimaera makes its presence known, several cloaked cruisers, guided by C'baoth, arrive and infiltrate underneath the expectedplanetary shield. Thus, when the Chimaera enters, the cruisers are already underneath the shield when it goes up.

Thrawn has chosen Ukio not only for its food supplies (one of the largest breadbaskets in the Republic, which he will need to feed clones) but for their psychology -- his study of their artwork suggests they are extremely quick to buckle when faced with the impossible. Thus the most likely to fall for his trap.

When Ukio refuses to respond to his surrender demand, he and C'baoth orchestrate a careful trick -- the Chimaera and the strike cruisers under the shield fire their turbolasers with split-second precision, thanks to C'baoth's guidance. It appears to the casual observer that the Chimaera has a new superweapon which can go right through shields as if they were not there.

Confronted and flabberghasted by the impossible, they ask for surrender terms. Thrawn is magnanimous in victory, promising them no conscription [for which there is no longer any need, thanks to his clones],
and a promise that war-level taxation will come primarily from Ukio's food supplies. Thus mollified, Ukio surrenders intact, a feat of arms thought impossible up till now.

As Thrawn begins to wrap up the battle, C'baoth suddenly detects the presence of Leia Solo at the site of one of the diversionary attacks -- the planet Filve. He commandeers the task force and orders the entire force to disengage from its mission and capture Leia. The operation is unsuccessful,
thanks to the superior piloting of Han, Chewie, and Rogue Squadron. They deliberately stay in normal space longer than necessary in order to lead the Imperial task force as far as possible from its primary target, buying Filve as much time as possible. When the force is just about to catch up with them, they launch into hyperspace.

Thrawn is, of course, extremely angry. This is the third time in three battles that C'baoth has completely thrown out the battle plan in order to pursue his private agenda. He demands an explanation. C'baoth has a mental breakdown, at one second insisting that he IS the empire, and in the next insisting that Leia wants him to teach his children, waxing quite maudlin.

Apparently realizing he is dealing with a madman holding a hand grenade, Thrawn does his best to soothe him down, but is apparently rapidly coming to the conclusion that C'baoth is more liability than asset.

...

While that is no doubt true, in this particular instance C'baoth is right: As Darth Revan explained to HK-47 , and as HK explained to the protaganist in KOTOR 2, Wars in the GFFA are not decided by weapons but by the number and quality of Jedi on each side. Players of the Star Wars: Rebellion RTS will find a similar dynamic at work. There is no more important war objective for the Empire than neutralizing or co-opting the Republic's Jedi. If C'baoth
was not both arrogant and insane, he might be able to educate Thrawn about this.

Chapter 2
The Republic is attempting to track down the source of clones so that they can be destroyed. The fact that destroying a cloning chamber will also mean killing the developing clone -- i.e. baby -- inside is glossed over.

At any rate, a rumor is heard that clones are passing through the planet Berchest, and so Luke has come to Berchest himself to investigate the rumor. In his hood, he is only slightly less conspicuous than if he had been accompanied by a brass band, as Talon Karrde mentions to Luke when
Karde reveals himself.

They discuss; both of them are here for the same reason, which is to track down Thrawn's source of clones. Karrde is unwilling to help the New Republic, but Luke barters a business arrangement for him,
offering a line of credit on Coruscant in exchange for information. This deal struck, Luke detects the presence of clones on a transport and observes it. This done, he gives this information to Karrde as a quid pro quo, as they have agreed to exchange information for information. Luke departs in order to follow the clone transport, while Karrde attempts
to backtrack to their origin.

Unknown to both of them, the Imperial governor is watching them via a balcony, and orders his adjutant to report to Grand Admiral Thrawn that Skywalker was on Berchest, has seen the special transport, and has been allowed to leave unharmed as instructed.

...

Many things are obvious from that exchange. It is apparent that the Berchest rumor, like the Jomark rumor, was a deliberate plant on the part of Imperial Intelligence, and Luke's arrival here is like the arrival of a fly in a spider's web. I'll bet that he'll use his X-wing to follow the vector of the clone ship, and there will be an interdictor cruiser waiting for him.

Wheels within wheels. This is becoming entertaining again!

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Gnoman

2015-01-08, 12:35 AM

What I want to know is how Luke found out about the clone growth time. Unless Thrawn decided that leaking that information was strategically beneficial (unlikely, as the false sense of security that the manning requirements of the Katana ships imposed was a pretty potent weapon, and expecting each batch of clones to take a year instead of less than a month would cause the New Republic to continually underestimate his strength), that seems like a secret on the level of MAGIC in WWII.

hamishspence

2015-01-08, 02:21 AM

Yora

2015-01-08, 05:30 AM

I got the impression that's common knowledge after the clone wars.

hamishspence

2015-01-08, 07:12 AM

It's common knowledge that normally clones grown in less than 1 year suffer from clone madness, maybe.

But to find out that Thrawn's clones were grown in "fifteen to twenty days" - required analysis.

TheThan

2015-01-08, 03:56 PM

There are cut scenes in ROTS featuring Mon Mothma, Padme, Bail Organa and some other senators. They plan on forming a committee of 2000 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=rjUAatYo6us#t=165) senators desperate to stop Palaptine.

They were all killed, arrested or went underground. While Lucas didn’t include Bel Iblis (because he hates everyone else's contribution to the GFFA), it’s safe to assume he was also one of the important players in their (failed) attempt and simply not in that scene.

So we have canon that Mon Mothma was present during the clone wars and the last days of the old republic. If she’s in her early 20s during this time (judging from how young political leaders tend to be in GFFA, It’s not that unreasonable), she’d be in her mid sixties during this time; which isn’t that old for real word politicians.

hamishspence

2015-01-08, 04:09 PM

So we have canon that Mon Mothma was present during the clone wars and the last days of the old republic. If she’s in her early 20s during this time (judging from how young political leaders tend to be in GFFA, It’s not that unreasonable), she’d be in her mid sixties during this time; which isn’t that old for real word politicians.

Yup - but when TTT was being written, we didn't have the PT.

My response to this:

I think it's important to remember the timeline Zahn is giving us. The Nogri have been vassals of the Empire for 44 years, since the closing of the Clone Wars and the fall of the Republic. Imperial Senators like Mon Mothma and Garm bel Ibis are what, in their late 50s to late 60s? They grew up in the Imperial system and held the Republic up as an ideal, which in my mind means that neither of them would recognize the flaws of the Republic and would be deathly afraid of repeating any actions that would emulate Palpatine.

was that, even in the Zahn (and movie novelizations) timeline, there was some evidence that the Empire was established after Mon Mothma and Bel Iblis became Senators. So they didn't "grow up in the Imperial system".

There's also references to the Clone Wars ending a bit more recently than "44 years ago" - in Heir to the Empire Leia and Han mention that, during the Clone Wars, some Jedi in the Sluis sector "went bad and really mangled things" - and that one got as far as Dagobah before being caught, and that this was "thirty, thirty-five years ago."

Cikomyr

2015-01-08, 09:49 PM

I love the fact that we have all our clues about how Thrawn is getting clones that fast already laid out for us. A clever mind would be able to put the pieces together.

As mentionned earlier, the Chimaera isnt within a massive anti-Force bubble. There is only a handful of Ysalamari on board, despite having seen on screen that Thrawn captured a great many deal of them....

Its interesting to think that at this moment, Thrawn is already spreading sleeper cells of clones of Soontir Fel all around the galaxy to prepare for the Yuuzanh Vong invasion. He is also trying to develop his successor by.imprinting his mind unto Major Tierce's cloned body (the later being a surviving Imperial Guard, not matter the plot of Crimson Empire)

Ergo, a damn lot of stuff happening undercover.

pendell

2015-01-09, 08:51 AM

Chapter 3
Mara comes out of a month-long coma in the medical wing of the palace on Coruscant. At first, she believes she is a prisoner, until she spots Ghent, Karrde's slicer by her bedside with a terminal. Somewhat surprised he hasn't taken over the galaxy from it by now, Ghent mentions in an off-handed way that he cleared Admiral Ackbar about two days ago, revealing the cash deposit in his account to be the work of Imperial Intelligence. He's now slicing Delta Source encrypt codes. For free , of course. Ghent isn't exactly a business type.

Mara realizes she must have been rescued by Luke Skywalker. This bothers her. I forgot to mention it at the time, but the Emperor sent her a force vision of Luke and Vader attacking him together with lightsabers, with his last command ... YOU WILL KILL LUKE SKYWALKER.

The vision is a lie, of course, but one with a grain of truth. It IS true that Luke and Vader together killed the Emperor , if not exactly that way.

The next person Mara meets is Winter, Leia's aide. After a discussion of Winter's time in "supply and procurement" during the Rebellion, conveniently lampshading her absence from the OT movies, they move on to current events. Winter has provided Mara with clothing , and is working on a ship, but all ships are tied up with Thrawn's offensive. Ukio and multiple other sectors have fallen with about another dozen under threat. Mention is made of Thrawn's "bottemless supply of crewers".

Mara is bothered by this, but remembers that she and Karrde are neutral.

At any rate, she and Ghent are to be released with thanks for their help at the Katana fleet and also for Ghent's work in clearing Ackbar. Winter gives her a datacard with contact info that Karrde left for them, and Mara also arms herself with a blaster concealed in the palace library.

Over to the [i]Chimaera, where Thrawn and C'baoth are engaged in yet another public argument. Pelleon is concerned at C'baoth's increasing instability, suspecting it is only a matter of time before he kills someone.

At any rate, C'baoth wants an immediate assault on Coruscant to capture Leia and the twin. Thrawn refuses point-blank, explaining the he does not have the military power to threaten Coruscant at this time. Nor will the cloaked cruiser deception work here, as the pols of Coruscant aren't easily duped farmfolk. The next target for the cloak gambit is Woostri, inahbited by people who have a strong fear of the unknown and a tendancy to magnify rumors of menace out of proportion.

C'baoth demands Thrawn's obedience. Thrawn reminds him that if C'baoth kills Thrawn the Empire will lose the war, and C'baoth will never get any Jedi. C'baoth insists Thrawn would never speak to the Emperor that way. Thrawn contradicts him, noting that he refused the Emperor's orders four times, for which he was called a traitor -- until the admiral sent in his place failed. "Discretion is the better part of valor" -- Thrawn will not waste forces on an impossible mission, nor will he obey orders to perform such a mission, "can do" spirit or no. His willingness to pick his battles and ensure he has done everything possible to stack the odds in his favor is much of the reason why he is the Empire's military genius.

After some more temper tantrum, Thrawn placates C'baoth by sending a commando team to capture Leia and the twins on Coruscant -- while a full invasion is not feasible, a commando strike is. Meanwhile, C'baoth will assist with the cloak gambit. He transfers to the Death's Head.

Thrawn does not use the Noghri this time, displeased and concerned with their continued failures. He can't put his finger on it, but the Noghri are hiding something. He senses it in every communication they send from their homeworld.

Also, the commando team has a second set of orders -- to neutralize Mara Jade, which may mean something other than killing her. Mara Jade, as the Emperor's Hand, may know the location of the Wayland storehouse, and thus she is a liability who must be neutralized.

Pelleon has a vague feeling he has something to draw to Thrawn's attention, but can't quite remember it.

Hmmm ... this makes me wonder... who is the 'Heir to the Empire'? Is Thrawn the heir to the Empire, because he inherited Wayland and its secrets? Or is C'baoth the Heir, since he is the Force User stepping into the Emperor's shoes? Or is Leia the Heir, since she is the Heir of the Lady Vader? Or is the New Republic the Empire's Heir, since it took the Empire's place?

Many questions.

At any rate, Thrawn receives a report that Skywalker is on Berchest, and a secondary report that Talon Karrde was spotted as well -- the governor's aide is a watchdog set on the governor by Thrawn. They make plans to capture Skywalker.

Chapter 4

Skywalker realizes he's in trouble when he detects hollow areas in the force -- Ysalamiri-equipped stormtroopers. This is obviously a trap for him.

After wrestling with his conscience, he makes a diversion by force-grabbing a blaster out of a stormtrooper's hand, moving it into the hand of a completely random passerby , and firing it into the air. Then he attempts his getaway in the resulting commotion.

He reasons that killing an innocent would be a dark thing to do , but maybe embarrassing and inconveniencing him would not. I think he put the man's life in just as much danger. If Stormtroopers are anything like American police, the sight of a gun in someone's hand, let alone FIRING that gun, should be enough to trigger a storm of blaster fire which wouldn't let up until the subject went down -- at which point, life would probably not be possible.

At any rate, the distraction allows Luke to evade the troopers and get to the freighter he is using as transport. Taking off like a bat out of a very hot place, he encounters the Chimaera waiting for him.

The Chimaera locks on its tractor beam. Without a moment to lose, Luke makes his way to his X-wing concealed aboard the freighter. Firing proton torpedoes at the ISD, the freighter self destructs and the X-wing speeds out.
The wreckage of the exploding freighter dissipates the tractor beam, and although for a second or so it seems that the tractor will hold on anyway it lets go. Luke makes his escape.

Aboard the Chimaera, Thrawn takes some consolation from the fact that Luke is now firmly convinced that the clone conduit is here, when it is not. Nonetheless, Thrawn heads down to the crew pit to confront the tractor operator.

"Your name."

"Ensign Mithel".

"Tell me what happened, Ensign."

"Sir, I had just established a positive lock on the freighter when it broke up into a cluster of trac-reflective particles. The targeting system tried to lock on all of them at once and went into a loop snarl. "

"And what did you do?"

"I-- sir, I knew that if I waited for the particles to dissipate normally, the target starfighter would be out of range. So I tried to dissipate them myself by shifting the tractor beam into sheer-plane mode. "

"It didn't work."

[Quiet sigh] "No, sir: the target-lock system couldn't handle it. It froze up completely."

"Yes." "You've had a few moments now to consider your actions, Ensign. Can you think of anything you should have done instead?"

"No, sir. I'm sorry, but I can't. I don't remember anything in the manual that covers this kind of situation. "

"Correct. There isn't anything. Several methods have been suggested over the past few decades for counteracting the covert shroud gambit, none of which has ever been made practical. Yours was one of the more innovative attempts, particularly given how little time you had to come up with it. The fact that it failed does not in any way diminish that."

"Sir?"

"The Empire needs quick and creative minds, Ensign. You are hereby promoted to lieutenant ... and your first assignment is to find a way to break a covert shroud. After their success here the Rebellion may try the gambit again."

"Yes , sir. " "I... thank you ,sir. "

"Congratulations, Lieutenant Mithel. The bridge is yours, Captain. Resume our scheduled flight. I'll be in my command room if you required me. "

Thrawn isn't a murderer who only rewards failure with death. He recognized the above-and-beyond effort the ensign put into solving an impossible problem -- something far more high ranking and brilliant minds had failed at who were not in the heat of battle -- and promotes him. This one act cements the loyalty to Thrawn both of Pelleon and of the Chimaera.

And in the Hand of Thrawn duology, the Empire will defeat a cloaked shroud gambit, no doubt due to the work of Lieutenant Mihel

Also , it seems like Thrawn is shedding his villainous status a bit, since he's no longer murdering as many people. Between his mercy here and at Ukio, he appears to be slowly travelling from out-and-out villain to Anti-hero class 3: Unscrupulous hero (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/AntiHero?from=Main.SlidingScaleOfAntiHeroes).

As the Duology and subsequent books concerning the extragalactice threat will make clear.

Meanwhile, Luke has a damaged starfighter, and heads covertly for the Noghri homeworld.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora

2015-01-09, 05:33 PM

Can't really put my finger on anything specific, but I already like this book a lot more than the last one. Seems like stuff is in motion again, in contrast to Dark Force Rising seemingly meandering at always the same places.

I didn't know The Complete History of Corvis Minor first appeared in this series. Always had a chuckle when that one showed up again in other books.
There is also mention of Muruth Doole on Kessel, though that might be one of Han Solos old pals from the few books that had been written before this one.

By now, I think C'baoth as a villain really doesn't work that great. He's supposed to be a big deal, but he really isn't memorable at all. Being crazy is his one defining characteristic, but he's neither effectively smart nor entertainingly mad. He's just a nuisance as villains go.

Still no new mention of Chekhovs Remote Control from the very beginning. I am sure it will come up again.

Mara realizes she must have been rescued by Luke Skywalker. This bothers her. I forgot to mention it at the time, but the Emperor sent her a force vision of Luke and Vader attacking him together with lightsabers, with his last command ... YOU WILL KILL LUKE SKYWALKER.
Man, this thing is really starting to -
https://38.media.tumblr.com/05964eea61b19087abed528dca8b46ee/tumblr_nhxm90XZF01sbkjbgo1_500.jpg

McStabbington

2015-01-09, 08:02 PM

By now, I think C'baoth as a villain really doesn't work that great. He's supposed to be a big deal, but he really isn't memorable at all. Being crazy is his one defining characteristic, but he's neither effectively smart nor entertainingly mad. He's just a nuisance as villains go.

Is it my imagination, or wasn't Zahn's original idea for the villain to make an insane clone of Obi-Wan Kenobi, only to have that idea completely nixed at the outset by Lucas? Because I think had he managed that, he probably would have made a much more compelling villain. As it is, C'boath isn't so much bad as generic insane megalomaniac space wizard, with nothing compelling to really add to the mix. Which isn't really that bad when you think about it: as much as people say they think Palpatine is a great villain, I'm pretty convinced that people like the idea of Palpatine, as the Puppetmaster who subtly and deftly takes control of the Republic. The actual execution, much like C'boath, was also generic insane megalomaniac space wizard, just turned up to 11 in scene chewing.

GAThraawn

2015-01-09, 09:20 PM

Is it my imagination, or wasn't Zahn's original idea for the villain to make an insane clone of Obi-Wan Kenobi, only to have that idea completely nixed at the outset by Lucas?

That is correct, and one of the reasons C'Baoth doesn't seem to fit quite as well in the story as the other characters. I think Zahn already had a plot outline laid out before mad Obi-Wan got vetoed.

Cikomyr

2015-01-09, 10:18 PM

That is correct, and one of the reasons C'Baoth doesn't seem to fit quite as well in the story as the other characters. I think Zahn already had a plot outline laid out before mad Obi-Wan got vetoed.

A clone of Obi-Wan...? really?..

man, that would have made the

Final showdown against Luuke

all the more thematical.

edit: goddamnit. It would also make a LOT more sense of Obi-wan "final" appearance at the start of the book

Aotrs Commander

2015-01-10, 08:39 AM

Also , it seems like Thrawn is shedding his villainous status a bit, since he's no longer murdering as many people. Between his mercy here and at Ukio, he appears to be slowly travelling from out-and-out villain to Anti-hero class 3: Unscrupulous hero (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/AntiHero?from=Main.SlidingScaleOfAntiHeroes).

Now, here's where I have to disagree. None of this makes him any less a villain - it makes him SMART (Evil Overlord Handbook smart), not less Evil. (I take a bit of personal umbridge at the implication that all villains have to be idiotic minion-murderers or that - ESPECIALLY in Star Wars, where the Empire is never allowed to have nice things1 - that the moment someone doesn't do something comedically, baby-eatingly evil, they sudden become a... well, to use the TV tropes terms well-intenioned extremist.) As the Giant once pointed out - evil people can have friends and things they care about too. Thrawn has not changed one iota from the gentleman that had a man killed for not being trained properly: but he's wise enough to a) know that loyalty, hearts and minds are a thing and b) to recognise, utilise and reward potential where he sees it (and be pleased about it, lest anyone think I'm suggesting this was a decision purely influence by logic or something). He regrets the xenocide of an entire alien race, not because of the lives lost - but because of his own failing in not understanding their art. He hates the rebels (or as close as he comes to it) because they disrupt the organised order of the universe, messy and chaotica as they are (true) and because

he doesn't see them as being able to stand up to the Outside Threat. And, in fact, when that turned out to be the vong, Thrawn was actually proved 100% correct, and the rebels pathetic attempt at government fell completely apart and it was only when they teamed up with the last of the Empire they actually managed something that lasted a bit... until the Empire took over from them a century or something down the line (acording to wookiepedia), a fact I find ENDLESSLY hilarious. Good job, the rebels!

In my own headcanon, Thrawn had more than one clone and came back to lead the Empire to glorious victory and when the vong showed up, they were massecred in their absolute entirity in about five minute by Emperor Thrawn and a half-bazillion Missileboats, TIE Defenders and whatever horrifically overpowered fusion of both Thrawn had whipped up in the meantime, because they were ready and waiting.

Thrawn, as I see it, is the absolute epitome of Lawful Evil (such as a D&D's alignment system could ever truly pideon hole the entire breath of sentinet/sapience into nine conveniant holes): ruthless, driven - but not wasteful or blind to those around him like, say Vader (or the Emperor on a bad day). That's what makes him so damn dangerous. (It's been a while since I read many of the other Star Wars novel sans X-Wing - mostly because most of the rest are fairly pants to the point I got rid of about twenty of 'em last year - but as I recall, most of the other major threats to the NR came from uber-technology or Force-users (or both) rather than just the use of the Empire's remaining conventional forces, yes? If my recollection is correct, then, that says a great deal about Thrawn. (Or the other SW authors, one of the two...!))

Put it this way, I like to consider what would happen if you confronted your given well-intentioned extremist (et al) with the absolutely incontravertable evidence that they were (or were acting) Evil and see how they react. In Thrawn's case, I suspect it wouldn't bother him at all - I get the impression from him, he'd just nod his head (not even bother to shrug his shoulders) and just go back to whatever he was doing.

1Frack's sake, we're not even allowed TIE Fighter (and by exension TIE Defenders or Missileboats or TIE Avengers) or even Thrawn anymore.

pendell

2015-01-10, 09:23 AM

My understanding is that the difference between an anti-hero and a villain is that the villain uses evil means and directly opposes the goals of the heroes of the story. An anti-hero [at least the type I'm talking about], by contrast, may use evil means but is essentially on the same side as the heroes.

And Thrawn IS on the same side as Luke and Han. Not in the terms of the Galactic Civil War, but in terms of a threat that's greater than the Empire.

Spoilers for the Hand of Thrawn Duology and the post-Thrawn Trilogy books

Thrawn is, first and foremost, loyal to his own people, the Chiss. He has received incontrovertible evidence that the galaxy is about to be invaded by the Yuuzhan Vong, a powerful force which threatens all life as he knows it.

It is because he fears this threat that he took service with the Empire in the first place; this threat must be met with military force. He signed on with the Empire because only the Empire has the military power and the organization to meet this threat. The Republic is determined to disarm itself, become a peaceable kingdom again , and return to its normal paralysis and political bickering. In the presence of the Vong, it simply won't do.

Everything he does is a means to that end.

If we were to ask him about evil, I imagine he would quirk an eyebrow and respond something like this:

"War is an exercise in necessary evil ; the commission of a lesser evil to bring about a greater good. The killing of a sapient being, regardless of circumstances, is an evil. And if I am to be judged as evil because I wage war and kill, what of the Rebellion? I have lost count of the assaults on civilian shipping during your hit-and-fade operations, or terrorist bombs, or assassinations , used during your war.

The rebellion wasn't just Luke and Han, after all. It was also Fey'la and the same people who engineered the Caamasi massacre (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Caamas_Document_Crisis) .

If you disagree with my military discipline, I should remind you that the Imperial Navy was not founded or created on your twenty-first century western mores. It more closely resembles the ancient Romans (http://www.milism.net/romanarmy.htm), in which army the commander had the absolute right to put any of his subordinates to death at any time. Even in your own armies, the death penalty was still on the books for sleeping on watch or for desertion until very recently.

How many wars have your people fought lately? By MY understanding, you haven't fought a serious enemy in six decades, almost two generations.

I think I know more about what is needed to fight and win a war than you do. And now, if you will excuse me, I have a galaxy to save. "

And with that, he turns back to face the viewport and the stars.

Also, note that I said he is journeying from villain to anti-hero, NOT that he had concluded that journey. I definitely believe Zahn's portrayal of him is Last Command is far more sympathetic than his appearance in the previous books, and I think this is because he's being transitioned from the role he is fulfilling in this trilogy -- that of primary antagonist -- to the role he, or his memory, will have in the succeeding EU books.

The re-founder of the Empire which made both the Galactic Alliance and the victory against the Yuuzhan Vong possible.

ETA: Thinking about this some more, Aotrs may be right in saying Thrawn is lawful evil. But being evil and being an anti-hero aren't incompatible. Belkar is an anti-hero , and he is totally chaotic evil. But Belkar, like Thrawn, is dialing down the kilonazis while still remaining evil [Belkar is unquestionably still evil, Thrawn might be disputable] . In both cases I think it's because the authors want us to have sympathy for the characters , for whatever reason, rather than simply cheering when the banana peel that is the universe finally trips them up.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

pendell

2015-01-10, 09:48 AM

Chapter 6

The Republic council is reviewing the aftermath of the battle of Woostri. Mon Mothma and Leia are skeptical -- why isn't the Empire using this everywhere? Is it because the Woostri and the Ukions are more psychologically susceptible to a trick?

Ackbar suspects it may be a real weapon with high power requirements, and takes the opportunity to snipe at Fey'la, who is at the council but in disgrace.

Ackbar asks why Bel Iblis is not at the meeting, and it is because he's on the front line trying to win a battle.

This discussion is interrupt by a very significant event -- Leia's twins are on the way. 18 hours of labor later, Jaina and Jacen Solo enter the world.

Cue "Awwwwww".

Unfortunately, the battle to give them a world worth growing up in is not going well. Wedge and Bel Iblis are in the middle of a losing battle. Thrawn's tactical acumen is on display as an interdictor is used to create an artificial gravity obstacle, allowing a perfectly precise hyperjump of a large Imperial force. Bel Iblis is brilliant in this battle, but the most he can achieve is to turn what would otherwise be a rout into an orderly retreat which preserves a fraction of the Republic force. Given this trap was intended to annihilate the Republic task force, he did better than expected , but still not god enough.

Chapter 7

Karrde is back-tracing the clone route when he encounters one Gillespie, a retired smuggler who had been on Ukio until the Imperials took it. Gillespie has binocular recordings of the battle which Karrde intends to sell to the New Republic. He has a proposal which he asks Gillespie to bring to the other smugglers. He agrees.

Their little party is interrupted by a pair of Imperial Lancer-class frigates which vector towards Gillespie's ship. Karrde attacks one of the frigates in the hope of buying Gillespie time to escape. He calls in his backup -- at least a dozen armed freighters. Gillespie calls in HIS backup as well. They both split the scene, intending to meet again soon to discuss Karrde's proposal.

Thrawn and Pelleon debate military strategy. They need more metals, and they decide to hit Lando's facility a second time. This time, they will use Katana dreadnaughts ,which are small enough to shelter behind a shieldship and be protected from the sun. Pelleon makes some intelligent recommendations, to which Thrawn responds "Recommendation noted, Captain, and as it happens, already acted upon. The raid was launched ten minutes ago."

Pelleon is just starting to get up to Thrawn's speed, but he's not there yet.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Aotrs Commander

2015-01-10, 12:21 PM

ETA: Thinking about this some more, Aotrs may be right in saying Thrawn is lawful evil. But being evil and being an anti-hero aren't incompatible. Belkar is an anti-hero , and he is totally chaotic evil. But Belkar, like Thrawn, is dialing down the kilonazis while still remaining evil [Belkar is unquestionably still evil, Thrawn might be disputable] . In both cases I think it's because the authors want us to have sympathy for the characters , for whatever reason, rather than simply cheering when the banana peel that is the universe finally trips them up.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

I think then, we're more arguing terminology than... evil-inity?, so I'll concede your point. Sorta.

(I mean, if we ignore any broad analysis of alignment, I could make an arguement (and often do) that Thrawn is the HERO and the rebels are the anti-heroes. It's just that the typical protagonist/antagonist alignments are swapped over...)

nyjastul69

2015-01-10, 02:02 PM

Okay, after some RL issues caused me to fall behind about 170 pages, I'm now caught up. I agree DFR seems a bit padded. Such a big deal is initially made of Ackbar's removal, I think the story of his reinstatement should have gotten more screen time. TLC is definitely better paced and more entertaining than DFR thus far.

Yora

2015-01-10, 02:37 PM

Oh Lando, you poor bastard. He really keeps getting screwed in this story.

TheThan

2015-01-10, 02:58 PM

I don’t see the tractor beam scenes as making Thrawn appear less evil. Instead it helps reintroduce his character and a very competent and capable commander.

In Heir the empire, the crewman that failed to capture Luke made two grave mistakes, he didn’t try his best, and he made nothing but excuses for his failure. “It’s not my fault; I wasn’t trained for that move”. Both of these resulted in a summarily execution, Thrawn can’t afford to have officers and crewmen on the bridge of his flagship that do not work to the best of their ability, and make excuses when they fail.

The newly christened lieutenant did not make these mistakes, he tried his level best to capture Luke but he still got away and he made no excuses for his actions, taking the blame himself instead of trying to push it off on someone else. This is what spared his life, the simple fact he tried his best to succeed but still failed. Because he came up with a clever solution (that still failed) to a difficult problem, Thrawn saw fit to put him to good use trying to find a working solution to that (a problem that may crop up more often in the foreseeable future) problem hence he got a promotion out of it.

Thrawn holds his people to the same standards he holds himself to, he has yet to push blame onto someone else for his failures, and has done his best to either not fail or to mitigate the damage of his failures. Lesser commanders might hold their crews to higher standards than they hold themselves; pushing the blame for their failures onto others and making excuses for themselves, while not allowing that sort of behavior to occur amongst his crew and officers. But Thrawn clearly does not. That is why Captain P notes that this crew would go to their deaths for him now. They realize these qualities in Thrawn and love him for it.

In the start of the series, everyone was frightened that Thrawn would be a loose cannon like Vader was, however over the course of time, they’ve come to realize that he is not like that and that he values his crew and officers. The result is that his people are not afraid to act. He’s earned their love and admiration and the result is a crew willing to lay down their lives for him. That is an effect you cannot get out of simple blind fear.

pendell

2015-01-10, 06:13 PM

In the start of the series, everyone was frightened that Thrawn would be a loose cannon like Vader was, however over the course of time, they’ve come to realize that he is not like that and that he values his crew and officers. The result is that his people are not afraid to act. He’s earned their love and admiration and the result is a crew willing to lay down their lives for him. That is an effect you cannot get out of simple blind fear.

Totally agree. We might say we need another axis to the scale -- Thrawn is plausible lawful evil -- someone who might actually exist in the real world fighting alongside Rommel -- or alongside "Mush" Morton (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dudley_W._Morton) , an American officer in the same war who was A) a top-scoring submarine ace at the time and B) fired on lifeboats. Something, incidentally, that there is no record of whatsover from the Germans. But the Americans did. Naturally none of us ever went to a war crimes trial for it; we won, after all.

Good and evil aren't necessarily a function of the side you fight for; they are also a measure of your personal conduct , and the degree you try to make your own side into a "good" side. Unless you live in a children's book, the side you fight for is going to have a share of evil; maybe less than the other guys have, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be eliminated or reduced if possible. "The other guy is evil" isn't an excuse for evil.

Where was I going with that? I think the point is that in the real world we rarely have totally evil villains or totally clean heroes. Thus characters like Thrawn are plausible.

Somebody like Palpatine, by contrast, is cartoonish lawful evil. He seems to exist primarily to make everyone else in the story look good. If there's a choice between a good choice and an evil choice, he'll take the evil choice For Teh Evuls even if the good choice would be both more pragmatic and more likely to achieve his ends.

It reminds me a bit of the old WWII propaganda movies in which the other side couldn't possibly be permitted any redeeming qualities whatsoever. The fact that Lucas seems determined to eliminate any shades of gray from the Star Wars universe implies that this is WWII-style propaganda is what he wants Star Wars to be. And I don't understand that.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

hamishspence

2015-01-11, 05:43 AM

Also, note that I said he is journeying from villain to anti-hero, NOT that he had concluded that journey. I definitely believe Zahn's portrayal of him is Last Command is far more sympathetic than his appearance in the previous books, and I think this is because he's being transitioned from the role he is fulfilling in this trilogy -- that of primary antagonist -- to the role he, or his memory, will have in the succeeding EU books.

I don't think Zahn knew he was going to be writing HoT when he wrote The Last Command - there was probably a bit of a gap before he was invited back.

In this Hand of Thrawn-related interview:

http://www.theforce.net/jedicouncil/interview/zahn.shtml

Zahn says they "came back at the end of '93" to ask him to do one more book to bookend the Bantam series.

pendell

2015-01-11, 02:04 PM

Chapter 7

Luke's fighter is damaged after his run-in with the Chimaera, so he heads to the Noghri homeworld where he is welcomed and given shelter. He is concerned at their extreme philosophy of honor, fearful it will cause them to be taken advantage of again.

While on the planet he has a force vision of Leia and the twins in danger, but recalls the last time he went chasing a Force-vision he not only failed to help them, he nearly compromised their own chance at escape. As well as losing his sword hand. He decides to leave things in the Force's hands, and continue with his own business.

Meanwhile, On Nkllon, Lando is recovering from the Imperial raid which robbed him of all metals and let his crawler disabled. It is only a matter of days before the sun comes up, and everyone aboard dies horribly.

He and his crew are saved by Bel Iblis, who responds to his distress call. They are able to rescue the crew but it will take a ship to recover the crawler. Iblis and Lando travel to Coruscant with the intention of acquiring just such a vessle, as Nkllon's minerals are critical to the war effort. Why else did Thrawn rob them?

Chapter 8
Leia nurses Jacen and Jaina. Winter discusses Mara Jade with her. How did Mara know about Winter's service during the war? The most logical answer is that Mara was in Imperial Intelligence at the time, and may still be. Leia determines to sound her out.

Leia meets with Mara. After some beating around the bush Mara confesses to everything -- her service as the Emperor's Hand, her determination to kill Luke Skywalker.

Leia is skeptical. Why hasn't Mara already killed him, then? She's had multiple opportunities. Could it be Mara doesn't really want him dead ...? Perhaps it is not Mara's wish, but some lingering Force push from the old Emperor...?

After the discussion, Mara attempts to contact Karrde but palace communications are down. Odd. Very odd. Palace , as the center of government, should NEVER be down .

She senses danger and, sneaking outside, sees her suspicious confirmed: Four men in a diamond formation. Though their uniforms are palace security, there is no doubt in Mara's mind these are Imperial commandoes.

Before she can do anything about it, someone sticks a blaster in her ear and there is a nasty "click" as the safety is removed. "All right , Jade. Nice and easy. It's over."

...

Uh oh.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

McStabbington

2015-01-11, 03:46 PM

I would add to the discussion of Thrawn's actions that this demonstration shows that Thrawn is a master of two arts: one being combat, and the other being leadership of men. We often conflate this with a discussion of the good/evil spectrum precisely because we have a legacy in our movies and literature of diabolical evil leaders who are terrible to their henchmen to demonstrate how they do things for the evuls, and given that Star Wars specifically homages this tradition, it's not surprising that characters like Vader and the Emperor carry on this grand tradition. But Zahn is taking steps towards realism, and as part of that, one of the means by which he demonstrates that Thrawn is the Anti-Vader is by taking the time to lead his men by inspiration.

The tractor beam operator was put in a difficult position and tried his best to carry out his assignment. What is more, the operator then took responsibility for the failure despite him doing everything he could, beyond his training even, to succeed. It is no surprise that a supremely gifted leader of men would take note of that and reward it in as public a manner as possible. This has nothing in itself to do with being a tactical genius, as you can be a supremely capable tactician and absolutely terrible at bringing out the best in the subordinates you have working with you. And by contrast, you can be mediocre at tactics, but absolutely stellar at inspiring and leading men. But they are complementary skillsets, and it's not surprising that, as part of trying to show exactly how much of an anti-Vader Thrawn is, and how much more realistic he's trying to make the universe, that Zahn would make a point to show this side of Thrawn's character.

Jon D

2015-01-11, 05:17 PM

I think Thrawn operations on the concept of failure happens, deal with it and don't make excuses. Hence the two different results with tractor beam operators. One trirs to push it off, and dies, the other owns up and tried a solution that didn't work.

pendell

2015-01-12, 04:31 PM

Chapter 9

Lando and Bel Iblis are on Coruscant getting no satisfaction on their request for an Assault Frigate to salvage the mining op. Republic commanders are terrified of Thrawn, believing him capable of just about anything. This "Thrawn terror" may prove to be more of a hindrance than the actual commander is.

While grousing about the issue, they notice that there aren't many guards in this wing ... and their comms are jammed.

Now thoroughly alarmed, they grab their blasters and begin to investigate, running into Mara Jade whom Iblis threatens with a blaster, as in chapter 8.

I'm not exactly sure how Mara goes from being a prisoner to an ally in this conversation as it seems awfully fast, but she quickly convinces them that Imperial commandoes are in the palace and after Leia's twins. They get palace security and began heading up to make a rescue.

Mara uses the Force to contact Leia and wake her up. She wakes up in time to realize a commando team is trying to force her door. She triggers the security door, but that won't hold them long.

The security forces show up and are pinned by the Imperial rearguard, which holds them off while their compatriots force Leia's door.

Lando and Chewbacca grab the Millenium Falcon and begin ascending outside the tower, hoping that Leia will use her lightsaber to cut out the window and board the Falcon.

Han and Leia see the ship coming, but mindful of the last ruse aren't inclined to immediately jump aboard. "Thrawn terror" again.

Mara uses a secret passage to bypass the commando rearguard and come up directly behind them just as the commandoes succeed in breaching Leia's door.

Mara urges Leia to surrender as a ruse, which she does. As the commandoes begin to stand up, still completely focused on the inside of the room, Mara Jade takes them from behind. She is able to take down three before the last one is able to react, but he is himself stopped cold by a shot from inside the room, no telling if it was Han or Leia.

The raid ends in failure. There is one survivor -- the group's leader, Major Himron. He fingers Mara Jade as the person who let them into the palace. Completely ignoring the fact that it was Mara who killed his team, Republic security moves to arrest her for questioning and interrogation. No one's happy about this, but Lando's a bit suspicious of her. He remembers her from Jabba's sail barge, and is concerned she really is an Imperial agent.

Chapter 10.

Karrde meets with the other smugglers with a proposal to assist the Republic. The other smugglers are unconvinced, though Niles Ferrier adds his words to Karrde's. Their tune changes abruptly when an Imperial team kicks in the door to arrest them all. Unfortunately for them, Ferrier's Defel -- a bodyguard who is nearly invisible -- attacks them from behind, as if he was expecting this. That split second of distraction is all that is necessary, and the smugglers go for their guns. In the ensuing firefight one of the smugglers is killed, while the Imperial team is wiped out. Angered at the Empire, they agree to help Thrawn track the Empire's clone supply route, although two of them ... Mazzic and Ellor -- have something else in mind as well...

Strangely, there is no star destroyer in orbit nor backup to the Imperial capture team. If it weren't for the dead bodies and the burning cafe, it might almost seem to be a hallucination.

Cut to the Chimaera, where we learn that it was Ferrier who both sicced the Imperial team on the smugglers and then deliberately broke their trap, killing 36 Imperial soldiers in order to establish his bona fides with the groups.

Thrawn is self-controlled as ever, but those who know him by now recognize that he is livid. Once again reminding us he is not Lord Vader, He tells Ferrir in no uncertain terms that he values the lives of his subordinates and does NOT throw them away recklessly, certainly not to establish the credibility of a weasel like Ferrier.

Not only that, he had explicitly instructed the garrison to leave this meeting alone. He expected -- correctly -- that nothing would come of this meeting if left alone, but Ferrier's bungled interference has united them against the Empire, precisely the turn of events he was trying to avoid.

Having established that Ferrier deserves immediate execution for his actions, he demands a full accounting of the meeting. Having received it, he sends Ferrier back to spy on them, gifting him with a "stolen" assault shuttle to establish his credibility. He dismisses Ferrier's childish attempt at duplicity [Ferrier wanted to give them bomb-rigged ships] by reminding Ferrier that the ship will doubtless be checked thoroughly, so it must be in mint condition, without alterations.

There are men who can be trusted to interpret orders, and there are men stupid enough to be given precise orders which are to be followed to the letter. Having firmly established that Ferrier is in this second group, he is sent on his way, accompanied by Rukh to remind him of what will happen if Ferrier messes up Thrawn's plans again.

Having dealt with the matter at hand, Thrawn discusses with Pelleon plans to turn this situation to their advantage -- to alter the record to make it appear that it was Karrde, not Ferrier, who brought Imperials to the meeting, thereby discrediting him and returning the smugglers to their normal neutrality.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Zolem

2015-01-13, 04:24 AM

Oh Lando, you poor bastard. He really keeps getting screwed in this story.

It's the EU. Rule 1 of EU: Lando gets screwed.

Seriously, whenever we first hear about one of Lando's ventures it's either failed, failing, under attack, or some combination of the three.

hamishspence

2015-01-13, 07:11 AM

About the only exception is Dometown - introduced in the Corellia trilogy - in which it's thriving, Lando is getting bored, and it isn't attacked at any point.

pendell

2015-01-13, 08:41 AM

Lando is sort of the cut-me-own-throat Dibbler of the EU. He's always got plans and dreams, but he doesn't quite have what it takes to bring any of them to fruition. So he's always back to selling highly suspect meat pies at the end of the book.

Chapter 11

Mara is in detention as the others work the bureaucracy to get her out. Leia goes to speak to her personally. Leia speculates that Mara intervenes because she couldn't stand to see other children kidnapped the way Mara most likely was -- a speculation I find likely.

Mara breaks down and puts herself irrevocably on the side of the New Republic by divulging her idea of where the Emperor's cloning facility is.

Leia and co. believe her. Luke suggests smuggling a navcomputer to her to get the coordinates, but a planet is still a very large place -- they determine to take her to Wayland to find the center, and to do that they'll have to bust her out of jail.

Chapter 12

Karrde follows an invitation of his fellow smugglers to the Bilbringi shipyard, just in time to witness Mazzic and Ellor blow an ISD under construction to dust, then get away clean under cover of Republic gunships 'on loan' from their facilities. I daresay the Republic wouldn't complain. Karrde determines that they're going to have to organize, they can't just stop with this.

In the aftermath, the commander of the Imperial shipyard is brought before Thrawn on the Chimaera. Drost has a better grasp of protocol than the late crewer Pieters. He keeps his mouth closed and answers only those questions asked. Thrawn spares him and orders him to come up with a new security system for the port, at which time Thrawn will make his decision about the general's future. When Pelleon asks about this, Thrawn tells him that Drost is actually a competent man whose chief weakness is complacency ... a flaw which should not be a problem in the immediate future.

They discuss an appropriate response to the smuggler threat when C'baoth comes screaming onto the bridge, force-choking two guards on his way in. Recalling Pelleon's admonition at the beginning of the first book against treating an ISD bridge as if it were a cattle market, I can't imagine how angry he and Thrawn are, to say nothing of the damage to their men.

Thrawn first calls sick bay to attend to the stricken guards before giving C'baoth his full attention.

C'baoth demands to go to Coruscant to capture the twins. Thrawn agrees ... as soon as they have loaded their 'special cargo' -- a group of asteroids.

C'baoth mind-touches the workers on the asteroids, and from their speculations comes to the conclusion that Thrawn intends to use the asteroids to destroy Coruscant, which he will not permit. Before Thrawn can explain, C'baoth mind-rapes the entire Chimaera. Every being on the ship, all thirty seven thousand, instantly becomes a mindless robot under his personal command.

Thrawn carefully talks him down. Impressive. What do you mean to do now? It's going to take five days to get to Coruscant. Do you know the number and type of ships making up its defense force? Have you considered the planet's energy shield? Do you know who is in command , and how he is likely to deploy those forces? How will you neutralize the planet's ground and orbital defenses? What is the best way to utilize an ISD's strategic and tactical capabilities?

C'boath retorts that he controls the Force. Thrawn calmly states he is merely presenting the problems he and the Force must solve.

After a dangerous minute, Thrawn's rationality gets through. C'baoth surrenders control of the Chimaera and retires to his quarters. Thrawn sends off to the Relentless for a caretaker crew while his men recover. His eyes glow as he considers the door C'baoth departed through. It appears his plan for C'baoth are rapidly being reconsidered ...

Props for Thrawn here. Armed with nothing but his wits he successfully talks the Jedi Master into backing down. If things had gone differently C'baoth could have had the zombie crew kill him with ease.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Gnoman

2015-01-13, 03:21 PM

I never noticed this before, but

Luke just stopped one word short of mentioning his stay on the homeworld of the Noghri. Right next to Delta Source.

Yora

2015-01-13, 05:39 PM

It's the EU. Rule 1 of EU: Lando gets screwed.

Seriously, whenever we first hear about one of Lando's ventures it's either failed, failing, under attack, or some combination of the three.

It isn't any better in the movies either. Bespin gets lost to the empire and his buddy he was forced to betray captured and delivered to his worst enemy. On Tatooine his main contribution to freeing Han is almost getting eaten. And then he leads the charge against the Death Star, right into an ambush. And then he had to give the Milennium Falcon back to Han with a major scatch.

It seems to me that Thrawns complete control over his campaign is increasingly slipping. His plan to discredit Mara didn't work at all and he had always been gambling on her not knowing where Wayland is. Ferrier screwed up so badly that a Star Destroyer got lost and that's probably just the start of the trouble the smugglers will cause. And though he knows the noghri are up to something he goes with wait and see what happens. And C'Baoth is doing outright whatever the hell he wants.
Yes, as many have said before, these are all just minor setbacks that don't really change the plans for his campaign at all. By themselves. But he's starting to gathering quite the collection of minor nuisances.
And then he says "I forget nothing, Master C'Baoth". I think he's starting to focus way to much on his brilliant ruses and secret weapons, while forgetting to keep his back covered.

Cikomyr

2015-01-13, 05:48 PM

I never noticed this before, but

Luke just stopped one word short of mentioning his stay on the homeworld of the Noghri. Right next to Delta Source.

That's the DM rolling for Common Wisdom to.prevent.him from saying it

And the rolling for counter-intelligence

And then roll for Force Intuition

And the make.him use Fate Manipulation to use a re-roll so he doesnt blurt out what will ruin his campaign

TheThan

2015-01-13, 06:11 PM

Discrediting Mara Jade is partially successful. New Republic intelligence doesn’t trust her and are issuing an inquiry.I bet they’re really embarrassed and hurt that the palace is so badly compromised, they know there’s an intelligence leak they can't plug and then a commando team got in, so now they have to save face somehow Mara's a good Target for a scapegoat, especially if they learn she really was an imperial agent. However she’s responsible for saving Leia’s children, so Leia’s naturally going to trust Mara after that. Whether she realizes it or not, Mara has gotten in with the heroes of the rebellion and that carries A LOT of weight (it also makes you above suspicion amongst them) regardless of how much political power they hold, Luke, Han, Leia, Lando and Chewbacca are the people that actually get stuff done in the New Republic. Only a handful of other characters actually matter (Wedge Antilles, Mon Mothma, Admiral Ackbar, Garm Bel Iblis, Lt. Page, maybe one or two others). So thrawn's finger pointing has not dissuaded the people he really needs to dissuade.

And as others have said, a lot of Thrawn's little problems are starting to become big problems, it looks like the loss of that new star destroyer is just the beginning. Thrawn is going to have to start dealing with these issues if he’s to succeed in winning his war against the New Republic. I think Thrawn's biggest mistake thus far is that he fails to realize just how important Luke, Leia and the others are to the new republic.

LadyEowyn

2015-01-13, 07:14 PM

I agree with the analysis of Thrawn's problems, and it connects to what I love most about this series.

For all of Thrawn's pragmatic villainy, his villainy is still what causes him to lose. He puts pressure on Karrde, captures, and tortures him, leading Karrde to decide to support the New Republic (and, incidentally, bring Ghent to Coruscant, which leads to the Imperials losing Delta Source). He double-crosses Mara Jade despite her willingness to work with him, motivating Mara to expose C'baoth's connections to the Empire, which puts here in a position of later deciding to join the New Republic. He (and Vader before him) deceives and thereby enslaves the Noghri, ultimately leading to his death. (In the last case, it's notable that Thrawn, despite being an alien, acts anti-alien towards the Noghri. He values Imperial lives, but he quite clearly doesn't value Noghri lives, and treats them as expendable.)

In comparison, the heroes win because of their virtues - in particular, their willingness to trust people and give them the benefit of the doubt even when doing so appears to be, from a pragmatic point of view, reckless. Han is willing to trust Karrde even after discovering he was keeping Luke prisoner. Leia risks her life, her liberty, and her children to travel to a planet of aliens who have thrice tried to kidnap her, because she believes freeing them from Imperial control is worth that risk. Luke trusts a woman who has repeatedly threatened to kill him. And it's the support of Karrde (at Bilbringi) Mara (at Mount Tantiss), and the Noghri (aboard the Chimaera) that ultimately gives the New Republic victory.

Thrawn is better and more practical than the Emperor and Vader in that he treats other Imperials well. But the key characteristic of the heroes is that they extend trust and good treatment to neutral parties and even enemies. It's the central difference between them and Thrawn. It's why they're the good guys and he's the bad guy, and it's the primary reason why they win.

pendell

2015-01-14, 08:14 AM

Pretty much agree with Lady Eowyn's spoilered comments; Thrawn may be a military genius but he's no politician. Coalition-building is as important as military strategy and he's falling down on that end. Karrde, Mara, and the Noghri were each part of the Empire or neutral at the beginning of this story; by his actions he is steadily alienating them and making them into members of the Republic.

Jade's heel face turn is especially disturbing, given she was the Emperor's Hand. She should be more than willing to serve in the Empire , yet Thrawn has alienated her repeatedly, first by attacking Karrde, to whom she feels loyalty, second by breaking his word to her, and thirdly by attacking children.

Part of this may be that Thrawn, being a top-down person in a military organization, doesn't quite understand that the Republic doesn't operate in that fashion. There's a lot of activity that happens outside the command chain , and this is often more vital to the war effort than the work that goes through channels. He assumes that having fooled the top commanders he has done all he needs to; People who aren't Admirals such as Karrde or Han don't register on his scope nearly as strongly as they should.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

pendell

2015-01-14, 08:25 AM

Chapter 13
Luke, Han, and Lando bust Mara Jade out of jail in order to head to Wayland and destroy the cloning facility. At first Mara demurs, but realizes she's in too deep to back out now.

Chapter 14.
The Empire raids Coruscant. Thrawn is easily defeating Admiral Drayson, until Mon Mothma humbles herself and asks Bel Iblis to assume command. Once this occurs, the tide of the battle shifts as he withdraws his forces, giving Thrawn the choice of dueling with the defense platforms in orbit or following the fleet down into the range of Coruscant's ground-based weaponry. Thrawn chooses option #3: The Republic ships detect launching tractors aboard the ISDs, but no ships appear to be leaving ... cloaked?

One of the ships collides with an invisible object, and the Reps concentrate ion cannon fire on the spot to reveal the problem: An asteroid, previously hidden by a cloaking field.

Thrawn lets them all have a good look, then orders the asteroid vaporized. Having done this, the Imperial fleet departs, having neutralized Coruscant at least for the moment. Why? Because there are now an unknown number of cloaked asteroids around the planet -- by the duration of the launching tractors, as many as 287 could have been deployed. Lowering the planetary shield risks an asteroid impact which would be a catastrophe. So Coruscant must remain shielded, cut off from the rest of the galaxy, until all the asteroids have been swept.

Of course, cloaking technology is expensive, so Thrawn has only deployed 22 actual asteroids. For the remainder the tractor was "dry-fired" using a feedback shunt. The Republic figures that this is a possibility but they can't take the chance without an exact count. So until proven otherwise they will assume there are indeed 287 asteroids in orbit, ready to fall with dinosaur-killing force at any time.

ETA: When Karrde was at Bilbringi to observe Mazzic's raid, he did notice the asteroids.

Thrawn's action closely resembles the Doolittle Raid (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doolittle_Raid), a direct strike at the enemy capital which does little physical damage but provides a psychological boost to friends and a terror to foes. It can also have the impact of provoking an enemy into a rash action -- which is probably exactly what Thrawn wants -- .

During the battle, Leia encounters Ghent and puts him on breaking Imperial battle encrypts. He doesn't fit in well enough to make much contribution, but after the battle he gives Leia the decryption key to Delta Source. Now they can see exactly what DS is transmitting; just the break they need to isolate and neutralize the source.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora

2015-01-14, 08:30 AM

The thing with Mara is that she was loyal only to the Emperor himself, not really that much to the community of which he was part. In fact, her mission was to "find and destroy his enemies", which probably almost exclusively consisted of other high ranking imperial leaders who had their own ambition. In the EU, the military had always had its own view of things and were not exactly fond of having civilian politicians meddle in their business (most likely based on the German Military in the late 19th to mid 20th century; after all, they are Space Nazis). And once he was dead, the other political leaders immediately started to fight each other.
There really wasn't any place for Mara in the Empire without the emperor.
But I think that character can get a lot more detailed discussion once we reached the end of the book.

TheThan

2015-01-14, 02:41 PM

By now our heroes have gotten pretty good at busting people out of jail.
Luke and Han bust Leia out of the deathstar’s detention cell in A New Hope.
Lando busts Leia and Chewie out of the empire's clutches in Empire strikes back
Luke Leia, Lando and chewie bust Han out of carbonite and rescue him from Jabba the hutt in Return of the Jedi.
Luke busts himself out of Talon Karrdes’ jail in Heir to the empire
Luke and Mara bust Talon karrde out of the Chimera’s detention cell in dark force rising
Luke and Han bust Mara out of house arrest in the imperial palace in The Last Command.
I guess jail breaks are becoming their specialty.

The thing with Mara is that she was loyal only to the Emperor himself, not really that much to the community of which he was part. In fact, her mission was to "find and destroy his enemies", which probably almost exclusively consisted of other high ranking imperial leaders who had their own ambition. In the EU, the military had always had its own view of things and were not exactly fond of having civilian politicians meddle in their business (most likely based on the German Military in the late 19th to mid 20th century; after all, they are Space Nazis). And once he was dead, the other political leaders immediately started to fight each other.
There really wasn't any place for Mara in the Empire without the emperor.
But I think that character can get a lot more detailed discussion once we reached the end of the book.

I always thought starwars was an allegory for the American revolution.
A big galaxy expanding empire that rules by fear and has no problems with stepping on the little guy
The Empire's military commit straight up atrocities and mass murder
A group of rag tag freedom fighters fight against impossible odds to overthrow the regime and build a new country based on the rule of law, not the rule of a king.
All the imperial officers talk in British accents.
The main characters are major players in the events of the story and go on to forge their new country (like the founding fathers).

pendell

2015-01-14, 03:21 PM

If you mean "The American Revolution as myth", you'd be right. But not the American revolution as history. Those ragtag farmers would have had a lot more trouble if they weren't getting vast quantities of arms from France, not to mention a regular French army (http://www.nps.gov/york/historyculture/rochambeaubio.htm). As towards atrocities ... don't even get me started (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2000/07/did_the_brits_burn_churches.html).

I would say that Star Wars is more a hodgepodge. Take the Gibbon's Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, cross it with American mythology to get heroic rebels, then throw in a dash of Nazi Germany to make the Empire into something everyone can feel good about fighting. But it's not a retelling of the American revolution.

Of course, these movies came out around 1976, the 200th anniversary of our independence, so that may have been a factor.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

TheThan

2015-01-14, 09:21 PM

Oh yeah I totally agree that it’s not pure allegory, it’s influenced by plenty of other things. Heck Lucas practically cut and pasted the fighter scenes and the falcon escape from old WWII war footage.

Anyway when I mentioned atrocities, I was actually thinking of the Boston Massacre, which was blown WAY out of proportion by propaganda. In fact, that propaganda was so effective that even today the words Boston Massacre brings to mind images of hundreds of innocent Americans being shot down in cold blood by a horde of blood thirsty red coats.

The difference is that the rebellion doesn’t have to exaggerate, they simply go “remember Alderaan” and that’s that. The empire destroyed billions of people in an instant (not just 5 dead and 6 wounded like the Boston Massacre). The most horrible thing about the destruction of Alderaan is that not a single person, officer, crewman whatever even questioned the order. There was no “you may fire when ready” “what sir?” “Can you confirm that order sir?” or anything like that; so as far as I'm concerned every one of them are as guilty as Tarkin and Vader for murdering billions of people on Alderaan.

pendell

2015-01-15, 09:48 AM

so as far as I'm concerned every one of them are as guilty as Tarkin and Vader for murdering billions of people on Alderaan.

I wouldn't go so far. Even the second-class chef peeling potatoes in the galley? The Death Star Novelization went into this -- quite a few of the people who signed on believed the death star would be used against military targets only , or on demonstration targets. The annihilation of a defenseless planet, a Core World at that, was something unimaginable to many of them.

And once they knew, what could they do about it? Is our chef in the galley going to grab a blaster and take command of the ship?

I would assign guilt to Tarkin first and foremost, then a lesser share of guilt on a case-by-case basis depending on A) to what extent they knew they were firing on an inhabited planet purely as an exercise in terror B) what they could reasonably have done about it once they knew.

The odds are pretty good 99% of the Death Star crew didn't even know about Alderaan until after it happened. It's not like everyone in the bowels of reactor shaft #3 has a viewport to the bridge and are privy to Tarkin's dialog with Leia.

So the first place I would look for guilt would be to those who passed on that order and acted on it. As for everyone else, being blown to dust with the ship should be more than adequate punishment, I think.

Moving on to the story ...

Chapter 14 & 15

Karrde meets with Gillespie. The search for the clone route has come up a dry hole. Given the lack of evidence, Karrde correctly concludes that the route was a decoy. Gillespie indicates that he wants money to continue, and the others want out; they are businesspeople, and they can't keep running ships and crew at a loss forever. Meanwhile the Empire has been intelligently leaving them alone and even offering shipping contracts, in the hopes of soothing them back into neutrality. Karrde calls another meeting.

Meanwhile, Mazzic is captured and brought aboard the Chimaera to Thrawn. Thrawn notifies him that he is not here for punishment, but here to clear the air -- the attack on the cantina was not authorized by the Empire. Lieutenant Kosk and his men had been hired by other parties.

All of which is absolutely true.

Having put on this display, Thrawn orders Mazzic returned to his backup base where his crew fled after evacuating the primary one. "Did you really think you could hide if I wanted you found?" he asks. This display of power underlines that Mazzic is to Thrawn as a mouse is to a cat -- alive only at his pleasure.

Having thus given Mazzic a bravura performance of carrot and stick, he next meet with Niles Ferrier. He gives Ferrier a data card implicating Karrde as the one who hired Lieutenant Kosk. He once again has to walk Niles Ferrier step-by-step through elementary subterfuge, having to spell out to him exactly Niles' role -- have his Defel plant the card, then show up at the meeting, never be alone, and keep his mouth shut.

Simple instructions. Even a child should be able to follow them, right?

Cut to Wayland. Mara Jade and the companions prepare to journey to the fortress to the stronghold. Han proposes leaving Mara behind, but Luke won't here of it. On the journey, Mara asks Luke about Endor, and Luke tells her what actually happened -- he had not struck at the Emperor after the first swing, and he and Vader had not attacked the Emperor. Instead, the Emperor had nearly killed Luke when Vader tossed Palps down the reactor shaft. Luke couldn't have done anything if he wanted to , being paralyzed by lightning. He hadn't gone to the Death Star to confront the Emperor; he had gone to the Death Star to turn Vader from the Dark Side.

Mara consider this. She doesn't seem fully persuaded, but she hates Luke marginally less than she did.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Cikomyr

2015-01-15, 01:19 PM

There is a lot of things i hate from Anderson's book of Jedi Academy. But among the top of the list was the complete and utter disregard of Mara Jade's character evolution regarding her hatred of Luke.

Another top of the list was the depiction of Bel Iblis as an extremist Hawk who couldn't wait to get his hands on another super weapon.

russdm

2015-01-15, 10:15 PM

Having thus given Mazzic a bravura performance of carrot and stick, he next meet with Niles Ferrier. He gives Ferrier a data card implicating Karrde as the one who hired Lieutenant Kosk. He once again has to walk Niles Ferrier step-by-step through elementary subterfuge, having to spell out to him exactly Niles' role -- have his Defel plant the card, then show up at the meeting, never be alone, and keep his mouth shut.

Simple instructions. Even a child should be able to follow them, right?

Knowing Ferrier, he would have been better off just shooting Niles and finding someone in his own intelligence service that could fill in. Or maybe having C'Baoth use some Jedi Mind-Fu on Ferrier so he doesn't screw up again.

It's bad he didn't, Ferrier is rather stupid.

pendell

2015-01-16, 11:28 AM

Knowing Ferrier, he would have been better off just shooting Niles and finding someone in his own intelligence service that could fill in. Or maybe having C'Baoth use some Jedi Mind-Fu on Ferrier so he doesn't screw up again.

It's bad he didn't, Ferrier is rather stupid.

Agreed.

I was once told that military officers could be categorized into one of four groups depending on their intelligence and energy. The brilliant and energetic once were to be put on staff; you need their drive to constantly improve, but you don't want them in the top slot because they get so hung up chasing details they lose sight of the big picture, so the top slot went to the brilliant but lazy.
The bulk of officers were [relatively speaking, they were hardworking and intelligent compared to the general population] lazy and stupid; they were expected to do the bulk of the work. Do what you're told because you're not smart enough to interpret orders. It's the bulk of any organization.

The absolute worst kind were the stupid and energetic ; these people tended to constantly cause problems for the organization because they couldn't make constructive changes. The result is continual friction.These were to be kicked out as quickly as possible.

Ferrier is in this fourth class : Stupid and energetic.

As we shall see.

Chapter 17
Leia and Winter plant juicy intelligence tidbits in the hearing of various people, then head to Ghent's Delta Source decrypts to find out which rumors get transmitted, and which didn't. It is hoped that once they see which rumors are being transmitted, they can find out who heard those rumors and finger the culprit.

Except it doesn't work. Feed in everyone who heard and didn't hear the stuff Delta Source sent out; feed in everyone who heard or didn't hear the stuff Delta DIDN'T send out, and you come out with the same answer every time. A straight zero.

Are we dealing with 15 or more spies? Unlikely. Security is bad but not that BAD.

All the reported conversations took place in the Grand Corridor. A recording device there? A droid, perhaps...?

They send in a security sweep and watch the grand corridor to see if any droids flee ahead of the sweep. None of them do.

Leia watches and notes that the plants in the garden respond to the sounds made by the cleaning droids ... and leaps to a conclusion. She orders one of the trees dug up.

Eight feet down, they find the answer: Delta Source is the plants! The plants naturally respond to sound. There are leads from the plant to a sophisticated program which will translate the plant responses back into speech, and here is an imperial-issue encryption device and transmitter to send on the information. So that's it: Delta Source is a sophisticated recording system, with no electronic parts near the grand hall for a sensor sweep to pick up.

They begin digging up the trees; Delta Source is silenced.

Meanwhile, Bel Iblis and the Republic fleet are busy sweeping Coruscant orbit for asteroids. Spreading dust, they then observe the dust for any disturbances which might be caused, say, by a cloaked mass plowing through it. Seeing one such disturbance, they volley ion fire at the area and successfully decloak an asteroid. Before they can capture it, it self-destructs. Thrawn evidently didn't want to lose the cloaking technology so easily.

One asteroid down, estimated hundreds to go.

The sweep operation continues. A transport [thankfully unmanned] collides with a cloaked asteroid. Deprived of power, it goes into a terminal orbit and burns up in Coruscant's atmosphere; one more victim of the Galactic Civil War. Republic force fire along the asteroid's likely trajectory but come up empty.

This isn't going to be easy.

It is observed that a crystal grav trap could be useful for locating cloaked objects, but all of the available traps are in Imperial space. Perhaps we can fix that...

.. and with that Chekhov's Macguffin placed on the table, we move on.

Chapter 18
Karrde's meeting starts with the smugglers. Mazzic arrives with the heavy mob and forces their way onto Karrde's ship. Karrde was concerned something was up, as sensor anomalies indicated they might have an intruder.

As Mazzic forces his way into his office and finds a certain data card, Karrde realizes all too well what has happened: Ferrier's defel has planted evidence in Karrde's office, framing him for the attack on the smugglers.

Karrde is in a tight spot and no mistake. Fortunately, Ferrier is constitutionally unable to let things be or keep his mouth shut. Disregarding Thrawn's advice in the last few chapters that less information is better, Ferrier does all he can to discredit Karrde's defense ... only to make a fatal slip. He mentions the Lieutenant's name when no one else has brought it up.

Mazzic wants to know: How does Ferrier know what is on that datacard?

Now that Ferrier has aroused everyone's suspicions, Karrde moves in for the kill: How is Ferrier here at all, given he hadn't been invited?

A quick head count confirms: No one invited Ferrier to this meeting. So why is he here, and how does he know what's on that Datacard?

By now it's obvious even to Ferrier that the jig is up. He pulls out a thermal detonator and takes the room hostage. Karrde warns him that he will self-destruct the Wild Karrde rather than let Ferrier have it. He means it, and Ferrier knows he means it, so instead Ferrier forces Karrde to fly him over to Ferrier's ship. Abandoning his Defel employee like the cowardly weasel he is, Ferrier boards his ship and takes off, dropping a conner net on top of the Karrde as a parting gift, immobilizing the ship.

Unfortunately, Ferrier hadn't thought through his escape very well. The smugglers have a number of fighter escorts outside the range of the net, and they are all faster than Ferrier's gunship.

At Karrde's request, Mazzic makes the call. "Griv, Amber. Gunship on the way. Take it."

And that's the end of Ferrier.

The smugglers are now all even more irate with the Empire than before. And they are ready to listen avidly to Karrde's proposal.

---

This was an error on Thrawn's part. He should have left the smugglers alone and executed Ferrier for his murder of Imperial troops. Absent Ferrier's actions, this meeting would have fallen apart to no gain to anyone. As it is, by putting his trust in a man of corrupt mind and feeble skill, Thrawn has made things immeasurably worse for him. Being the greatest military genius in the galaxy isn't enough if you don't have quality people who can execute those orders, and Ferrier was definitely not suited for any role as a spy.

At any rate, Ferrier is vaporized out of the story, to no one's regret.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

TheThan

2015-01-16, 03:10 PM

I would hardly call Ferrier a man of feeble skill. He’s supposed to be the best spaceship thief in the galaxy that alone suggests he’s good at stealing ships. So he clearly has a skill set. However it’s possible Ferrier got caught holding the idiot ball for this book OR he is simply no match for Grand Admiral Thrawn and Talon Karrde in the cleverness, espionage and general sneakiness department.

Being the best at one thing does not mean you're automatically the best at something else. it's quite possible Ferrier is way out of his element doing spy work for Grand Admiral Thrawn. After all he's a thief not a spy.

russdm

2015-01-16, 06:02 PM

Chapter 17
Leia and Winter plant juicy intelligence tidbits in the hearing of various people, then head to Ghent's Delta Source decrypts to find out which rumors get transmitted, and which didn't. It is hoped that once they see which rumors are being transmitted, they can find out who heard those rumors and finger the culprit.

Except it doesn't work. Feed in everyone who heard and didn't hear the stuff Delta Source sent out; feed in everyone who heard or didn't hear the stuff Delta DIDN'T send out, and you come out with the same answer every time. A straight zero.

Are we dealing with 15 or more spies? Unlikely. Security is bad but not that BAD.

All the reported conversations took place in the Grand Corridor. A recording device there? A droid, perhaps...?

They send in a security sweep and watch the grand corridor to see if any droids flee ahead of the sweep. None of them do.

Leia watches and notes that the plants in the garden respond to the sounds made by the cleaning droids ... and leaps to a conclusion. She orders one of the trees dug up.

Eight feet down, they find the answer: Delta Source is the plants! The plants naturally respond to sound. There are leads from the plant to a sophisticated program which will translate the plant responses back into speech, and here is an imperial-issue encryption device and transmitter to send on the information. So that's it: Delta Source is a sophisticated recording system, with no electronic parts near the grand hall for a sensor sweep to pick up.

They begin digging up the trees; Delta Source is silenced.

There were (or are) hints in the previous books about/who Delta Source was. After knowing the truth, those hints stand out rather strongly when you reread the books looking for them.

Yora

2015-01-16, 07:31 PM

Oh, and something I forgot to mention back at chapter 4 [DFR]:

Those damn trees! :D

Quite clever. And the asteroids as well.

I really like this book a lot more than Dark Force Rising. It's easily up there with Heir to the Empire and deserves it's reputation.

pendell

2015-01-17, 10:16 AM

same here.

Chapters 19 & 20

Luke, Mara, Han, Lando , Chewie and the droids are still making their way through Wayland's wilderness. They are a bit surprised that they are encountering no predators or locals.

Chewbacca discovers a dead predator nearby, killed in flight with a single knife-thrust. Mara identifies this as being a technique of the Mynershi, one of the three indigenous intelligent peoples of the planet, who specialize in close combat. So they are nearby. Why aren't they bothering the team?

Luke force-detects a band of locals approaching. He shows Mara how to determine the number in the approaching party by feeling for the differentiation in their minds. Then suddenly the local party departs . Frightened of something...? Why?

Luke discusses his concerns about teaching Leia's twins.

Concerns which are Totally justified (http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darth_Caedus).

He wonders how one teaches wisdom and compassion? Mara suggests by example. With that thought, Luke decides to give Mara a refresher course in force-use in the little time they have. Mara needs the skill, and Luke needs the practice as a teacher.

Mara asks why Luke is training her? Answer: "For whatever purpose destiny has for you."

Leia wakes up at night back on Coruscant. Something is bothering her ... she discusses it with her new bodyguard. I think I forgot to mention that the reason Han was willing to leave Coruscant was because a Noghri squad has infiltrated the palace -- this time, as Leia's bodyguards rather than her kidnappers, and they appear to be doing a fine job.

Meanwhile, the Republic is losing more battles. Wedge is briefed by Ackbar and General Madine on their next assignment: To steal a CGT from the Empire to sweep Coruscant of its cloaked asteroids.

There are three available. The most obviously vulnerable is the one at Tangrene, being set up to protect a secret police base.

Riiiight.

So instead we're going to mount a deception operation to make it appear the Republic is hitting Tangrene, when in fact we're going to be hitting Bilbringi, the main Imperial shipyard.

And I know what you're all saying to yourselves: It's big, it's well defended, and what in the galaxy is the high command thinking about? The answer is simple: It's big, it's well defended, and it's the last place the Imperials will expect us to hit.

That, and it will also damage both their shipbuilding capacity and Thrawn's reputation, both in sore need of denting.

Cut over to Admiral Thrawn and Captain Pelleon for two short scenes. Thrawn seems to take a sort of amusement in the Republic's deception operation. Awww, the rebels are so cute when they're trying to be cunning! It's like watching a small child trying a card trick on his parents!

Thrawn immediately deduces that the preparations to hit Tangrene are trying a little too hard to be subtle, and therefore it cannot be the true target. The true target must be Bilbringi -- the last place any sane person would expect to hit. But Thrawn's own battles have taught him much about what frightened people will do, and that includes desperation ploys. He orders Pelleon to prepare an ambush at Bilbringi. I get the impression that the Tangrene operation was a trap, the Republic refused to nibble on the hook, so Thrawn is moving everything to their true target.

While the Republic attempt doesn't fool Thrawn, it fools the smugglers. They expect the Republic to hit Tangrene and be ambushed by Thrawn their, giving them the opportunity to hit Bilbringi for the CGT there. They make their own preparations to steal the CGT.

And with that, all three forces set out for Bilbringi. This has the makings of a galaxy-class clusterfoo and no mistake.

Meanwhile, Gillespie's macrobinocular recording has made its way into the Republic's hands, and review of the records quickly reveals the deception; a turbolaser from a cloaked ship inside a planetary shield firing simultaneously with a Star Destroyer outside. The Empire's new "superweapon" is a clever fraud. Countermeasures are instituted immediately: Saturation fire at the point the turbolaser blast originated from. They deduce the synchronization must be due to the crazy Jedi Master Luke encountered on Jomark.

They discuss Talon Karrde. Mon Mothma intervenes to keep Karrde's credit line open, and she continues to back Luke's decision, trusting both his Jedi abilities and his integrity.

That points up the difference between the Republic and the Empire: Mon Mothma is no military leader, but she does not underestimate Jedi capability, and what's more she can trust the Jedi working for her to act in the Republic's best interest. Thrawn seems to think very little of Jedi capability, and he certainly can't trust C'baoth. He's also alienated Mara Jade. So while he may have built up the Empire's forces in terms of raw number he's left it weaker in terms of trust and in terms of force-sensitives, a resource no less critical than Star Destroyers.

Leia experiences some misgivings. Might they need to send reinforcements to help the Wayland operation.

Admiral Drayson is reluctant -- all ships are already committed to Bilbringi. Unexpectedly, Counselor Fey'la speaks up -- he is determined to see the Wayland construct destroyed, even if it means postponing Bilbringi. There appears to be some dark secret there which the Bothans would prefer to remain silenced forever.

Setting us up nicely for the Hand of Thrawn duology. Zahn may not have had a contract for additional books, but he definitely seems to have been setting up potential future storylines with that in mind.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora

2015-01-17, 02:04 PM

I don't think Thrawn had the decoy attack figured out right away. In the first scene he has having a hunch that something is fishy and goes to his room to put on his thinking cap and look at art Ackbar and Bel Iblis have at home. Only in the second scene does he figure it out.
Even though he gets the right result in the end, this was taking him a lot longer than usual. I think he is being set up for making a fatal mistake regarding his enemies true plans.

Last time we had to deal with Fey'lya he was moustache twirling evil, this time we see him in his unlikeable but responsible ally role. I think he has a good point. The asteroids can wait, there is no hurry. While Wayland doesn't have anything to gain for the Republic, anything that can be flown out before the attack fleet arrives can be a gamechanger in the empires favor in the future. Hitting shipyards can be done any time and will be just as effective in the long run if done two or four weeks later.

However, I noticed something odd about Winter:
Winter refuses to tell where the information comes from and Bel Iblis backs her up, which might indicate Ghent found it.
But the data chip not only has the coordinates but also says the team successfully landed undetected, and they are talking openly about Luke, Han and Mara being there.
Then why the secrecy? Why is the transmission not "from Solo exactly"? And didn't they agree not to make a transmission to Corruscant? Something isn't adding up here.

One possibility might be that someone found the Falcon was found and a fake message sent, and this scene got messed up during editing.
Or the location on the map is a pure fabrication and they have a secret plan fishing for more spies. Though if the spy sends a message to Thrawn that Weyland was found and not include coordinates, Thrawn might clear out the place and all is lost.
It's all very strange.

LadyEowyn

2015-01-17, 02:43 PM

Thrawn immediately deduces that the preparations to hit Tangrene are trying a little too hard to be subtle, and therefore it cannot be the true target. The true target must be Bilbringi -- the last place any sane person would expect to hit. But Thrawn's own battles have taught him much about what frightened people will do, and that includes desperation ploys.

I love this. So many heroes' plans are based on the premise of "they can't possibly think we'd be stupid/crazy enough to try that, so they won't be expecting it!"

I feel like there should be a rule on the Evil Overlord List: "Yes, they are stupid enough to try that." Thrawn is one of the few villains who figures it out.

Yora

2015-01-17, 03:08 PM

Under normal circumstances the Republic planning would be bad. The enemy obviously knows what they want and that there are only three places they could get it. They know he is on to them and preparing a trap. That the trap is a decoy trap should at least be considered.
With Thrawn doing the whole trap and his track record so far, the generals are pretty much acting stupid for the sake of plot. Rather weak writing.

What else could they do? Exactly what Fey'lya said. Not attacking any of the three targets at all.

McStabbington

2015-01-17, 04:06 PM

I don't know that it's weak writing so much as strong writing about the weakness of many of the characters, as well as a much-welcome added dimension to Borsk Fey'lya. The asteroids at the moment don't pose any tangible military threat because the planet that they're blockading, Coruscant, has no tangible military value. Certainly in the long-term, they need to take care of the asteroids because city-planets aren't known for their food production capacities, but for now, the war is being directed from the Senate just fine regardless of whether the planetary shield is up or not.

But the thing is, that's not how the Senators are thinking about the matter. Call it what you will: rationalizing their own fears, overblowing their own importance, magnifying the morale loss that having Coruscant blockaded poses on the war effort. However you want to put it, these "leaders" are clearly operating from the assumption that getting that planetary shield down is a vital part of the war effort, when it oh-so-clearly isn't from a more objective standpoint. And of those Senators, only Fey'lya, who has recently had his own ego punctured most thoroughly, recognizes it.

There's a difference between the writer creating a plot hole and the characters having a blind spot that makes them fall into a pit trap cleverly laid by the writer. This to me is clearly the latter. And then Zahn follows it up by having a previously dispatched minor villain show unexpected help and perceptiveness that makes it clear that, no, this is a problem of the character's own doing. For me, it's a very astute bit of writing.

And, as Lady Eowyn said, it really should be a part of the Evil Overlord list that every once in a while, you should ask your ordinary six-year old advisor what would be the most moronic course of action to take, and then create some kind of failsafe just to be sure that the heroes won't do exactly that.

russdm

2015-01-17, 04:19 PM

Unexpectedly, Counselor Fey'la speaks up -- he is determined to see the Wayland construct destroyed, even if it means postponing Bilbringi. There appears to be some dark secret there which the Bothans would prefer to remain silenced forever.

Given how much Bothans prefer personal political power, his being concerned over something for all Bothans should have set off a few alarm bells in Leia's or Mon's heads. It doesn't happen though, and we have to wait to Zahn's next books (Which should be read next, in my humble opinion) tell us why it was a concern.

I don't see the concern over Coruscant being anything than the fact that the shield prevents ships from taking off and so the Rebels can't send off any reinforcements out. But, if all of the Rebels reinforcements can only come from Coruscant, then something is wrong.

One thing regarding the planned attack, is that if the Rebels fail they will lose ships that they committed which makes it easier for Thrawn and his campaign. Plus, the rebels end up overdoing it, a trait which they seem to have learned during the Rebellion time of the original trilogy perhaps and so they employ here and frequently elsewhere. Although it is nice that Captain P still doesn't believe Thrawn is right at the end of the chapters.

Yora

2015-01-17, 04:26 PM

It's not that he thinks Thrawn is wrong. It's just that he isn't so certain that Thrawns assumptions are so spot on that they don't need to take precautions for any other possible course of events.
Not just now but from the start. And I've always fully supported him on that. Because Thrawn already made some mistakes and was just Lucky that the damage turned out to be minor.

pendell

2015-01-18, 09:55 AM

Yeah, Thrawn is a little too confident for my tastes in his assumptions -- but he is right on this one and, so far as I can see, he has so far only lost one battle at which he was personally present, the battle of Sluis Van.

Chapters 21-22.

Luke, Mara, Han and Lando finally discover why they haven't been having a problem with predators; they have a secret Noghri bodyguard, eight in number, who have been traveling around the group, 2 to a side, driving off sentient war parties and killing predators.

The locals have been attempting to force a confrontation but the Noghri have not permitted this. Now they wish a parley, to determine whether they are going to continue to give battle to the outsiders. Threepio is brought up to interpret.

It seems there is a long history with humans on this planet. Before the Empire, humans in the Republic era had made war and taken the lands of the locals , pushing them until their technology began to fail, at which point they settled into an uneasy but violent equilibrium with the other peoples here. Since then, C'baoth and the Empire have enslaved them in succession.

The locals are unconvinced the new group is any different -- and frankly so am I . What's going to happen is they are going to destroy the Empire's storehouse, then leave them to their own devices. I suppose it frees them from Imperial slavery, but it isn't going to resolve the longer term issue with the humans on the planet. You'd need a full-time Jedi mediator for that.

Luke's words are totally useless to persuade them -- words are cheap. What DOES persuade them is deeds -- when they see Chewbacca shoot down a predator with a bowcaster.

"He have lightning bow?" They ask.

Yes. Chewbacca is an equal with the humans, not a slave.

This persuades the locals that Luke's group is different. "Armed men are free men". If there's one constant in all human societies, it's that slaves or serfs are not normally permitted to carry arms. To give someone a weapon is to show that you trust them to use it responsibly in defense of society, rather than tearing it down.

The locals are persuaded. They permit Luke's group to pass and will not hinder them or inform the Empire of their activities.

Meanwhile, Mara dialogues with one of the Noghri, who reveals the depths of anger the Noghri have at the Empire's deception. At some point in the not-so-distant future ALL Noghri commando teams will revolt and do as much damage as they can to the Empire. The Noghri mentions that Luke is the son of Darth Vader, something Mara hadn't known up till this point . It puts a new gloss on her Last Command.

C'baoth makes mental contact with Mara Jade , promising that she and Skywalker will serve him.

Cutaway: I don't know if I mentioned it earlier, but a few chapters ago C'baoth had demanded to return to Wayland, no doubt because he has foreseen Skywalker's and Mara's presence. He is travelling on the Star Galleon Draklor along with General Covell and Imperial troops selected as cloning templates.

During the trip, Covell has amused himself by entering Covell's mind and rewriting him into a mindless puppet. He is amused at this.

This -- this -- is true power. Holding another's life in the palm of your hand. Having the power to choose his path, and his thoughts ,and his feelings. To rules his life and decree his death.

...

To command his soul.

I consider this the most horrible thing I've ever seen done in Star Wars, worse than anything Vader did to his subordinates. C'baoth is using his power to play god with other humans, twisting them into his own playthings.

Right until they hit the ysalamiri bubble which completely covers the Wayland facility. Cut off from Master C'baoth's force connection, Covell falls apart. C'baoth uses him. Covell as a puppet walks through the base, saying nothing and doing nothing but what C'baoth explicitly tells him to do. Then C'baoth is shown to the Emperor's suite while Covell goes to his own quarters.

Once in his quarters , without orders, Covell's experience is :

He stared off across the place they'd left him in, watching the patterns of lines and listening to the emptiness all around him. Eventually he fell asleep.

His orderly finds him dead several hours later. Without C'baoth around and without that force connection, he is like a puppet with its strings cut, incapable even of biological life after a certain point.

Colonel Selid, the garrison commander , reports to Thrawn and Pelleon. Covell had come to the base, seemingly a zombie, had a "private meeting" with the soldiers who had brought with him, then went to his quarters. The troops stripped a supply room of explosives and left. And now Covell is dead.

Thrawn patches through to C'baoth, who is enraged at his imprisonment with Ysalamiri. Thrawn demands only one thing: What has happened to General Covell?

C'baoth eventually responds

"General Covell was mine to do with as I pleased, as is everything in my Empire. "

Thrawn has heard enough. He cuts off C'baoth and speaks again to Colonel Selid, who is reinstated as garrison commander. C'baoth is placed under arrest. He may have free run of the Emperor's throne room but cannot leave it. All control circuits are to be disconnected. None of the troops who left are to be allowed back inside the base -- they are presumably acting under false orders from a traitor to the Empire. Another ship will be along presently to collect them.

After disconnecting, Thrawn announces his new plan to Pelleon -- C'baoth's usefulness is nearly at an end, but the madness is "in his mind, not his body."

Pelleon picks up right away. Does Thrawn intend to clone C'baoth?

That is exactly what Thrawn intends. Not here, but somewhere absolutely secure, in the unknown regions.

Another gun on the table for a future story, such as the Hand of Thrawn duology.

Cutaway to Wedge at a port cantina. He encounters Aves, one of Karrde's people, whom he last met at the end of Dark Force Rising, when Aves was part of the team that hit the Judicator from behind. The Republic and the smugglers had worked together then, and there is still some feeling between them.

After establishing his bona fides by eliminating an Imperial spy tailing Wedge, Aves asks for any clues about the upcoming operation against Tangrene.

Wedge's response is a classic of military talk:

Let me talk to my unit commander. If you haven't heard from me in 28 hours, don't expect to.

So the operation is going to kick off in 28 hours, but phrased in a deniable way so that Wedge could not get in trouble. He didn't actually say anything about Republic operations, but the implication is so heavy even a child couldn't miss it.

Thus clued in, Aves departs to give Karrde the word as they plan their own operation to grab the Bilbringi CGT. Wedge, meanwhile is a bit relieved that his own part of the Republic's deception operation is going off well. The Republic is attempting to deceive people into believing they are going to hit Tangrene, and even Imperial intelligence has been taken in by the deception. Everybody believes it except Thrawn himself.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

McStabbington

2015-01-18, 03:55 PM

I consider this the most horrible thing I've ever seen done in Star Wars, worse than anything Vader did to his subordinates. C'baoth is using his power to play god with other humans, twisting them into his own playthings.

Not only do I agree, I think makes for a compelling statement about the difference between Zahn and Lucas in their views of good and evil. Lucas in the original trilogy had a fairly good sense of right and wrong, albeit one whose portrayal was colored by the cheerful pulp medium he was mining for his work. For all that we talk about Star Wars as having a Silver-Age gloss, it's easy to forget that Star Wars also pulls the exact same trick that Watchmen would ten years later: rather than having the planet-destroying superweapon stopped at the last moment, it actually goes off, destroying an entire peaceful world that couldn't defend itself and had no time to evacuate. It's a moment that those Imperial Defenders who like being contrary for the sake of being contrary kind of gloss over and handwave, because it's horrific. But like the medium he's drawing inspiration from, the evil is still really big and 'splodey and in-your-face about how evil it is.

Zahn, by contrast, has a much more subtle and nuanced demonstration of evil. A guy is incompetent and refuses to take responsibility for his actions. Most people would say that's grounds for court martial, maybe penal colony. Thrawn coldly executes the man. A guy carries out his orders and is selected for a cloning project, and the Jedi Master he's guarding on the way completely deconstructs his mind and is only partially able to rebuild it before the mental link is cut. Covell may have been on the villains' side, but he himself didn't display any overtly villainous qualities, and for his loyalty he is not only killed, but utterly obliterated as an individual in the process. Where Lucas went big, Zahn went very small and very personal. But for all that, I think it's a tossup whether I loathe C'boath or Tarkin more.

Gnoman

2015-01-18, 09:10 PM

However, I noticed something odd about Winter:
Winter refuses to tell where the information comes from and Bel Iblis backs her up, which might indicate Ghent found it.
But the data chip not only has the coordinates but also says the team successfully landed undetected, and they are talking openly about Luke, Han and Mara being there.
Then why the secrecy? Why is the transmission not "from Solo exactly"? And didn't they agree not to make a transmission to Corruscant? Something isn't adding up here.

One possibility might be that someone found the Falcon was found and a fake message sent, and this scene got messed up during editing.
Or the location on the map is a pure fabrication and they have a secret plan fishing for more spies. Though if the spy sends a message to Thrawn that Weyland was found and not include coordinates, Thrawn might clear out the place and all is lost.
It's all very strange.

This is now answered.

The Noghri on Wayland sent the message. The defection of the entire Noghri race placed their entire people in mortal peril, so knowledge of them is being kept very secret, and the use of the Noghri as Thrawn's elite commandos would lead most high officials to fundamentally distrust them without proof that hasn't been given yet - the same instincts that led to Mara being incarcerated.

pendell

2015-01-19, 09:29 AM

Chapters 23, 24:

Leia is searching for information on cloning facilities and not finding much of anything. Meanwhile, the Republic has destroyed 22 asteroids and is having a hard time finding any more. Some suggest that we've got them all, but it doesn't seem reasonable that Thrawn should drop less than 70, even if the majority of the firings were dry.

While we are in the middle of these discussions, Talon Karrde arrives to pick up Mara Jade.

Due to fear of imperial monitoring, even through encryption, Leia can't reveal either that Mara is not under suspicion nor that she is not on the planet -- not over a broadcast channel, at any rate. So there follows a fairly awkward conversation.

Karrde purchases a face-to-face audience with Leia using information -- an exact count of the asteroids Thrawn dropped, which he had seen and recorded at the Bilbringi shipyard during Mazzic's attack a few chapters ago. Twenty-two, the exact number they had destroyed.

This persuades Leia and the high command enough to allow Karrde a five-second window to land on the planet.

Something sparks Leia's memory -- wasn't Karrde held aboard an ISD? Mara had mentioned Thrawn had taken 5000 Ysalamiri ... but there had been no problem using the Force during Karrde's rescue, so where are the Ysalamiri then, if not with the fleet?

Cloning .. Ysalamiri .. the pieces fall together.

The reason clones go insane when they are grown too quickly is because the Force messes them up, especially if their template is still alive. They don't have time to get used to the Force or the pressures it generates, so it drives them mad. Solution: Block the cloning facility from the Force using ysalamiri.

Which means Luke and Mara are heading into a force-dead objective and they won't know it until they're actually there. She determines to try to rescue them ... and there is only one man who can do it.

Karrde lands and all is revealed to him face-to-face: Mara is not here, and is on her way to the cloning facility.

Karrde is mentally somewhat disappointed -- he had spent a lot of other people's money to trace that cloning route, and now all that effort has gone to waste. Karrde has debts to pay to the other smugglers, and like any organized crime group they don't look on such things kindly.

Happily, Counselor Fey'la stumbles on the scene as well to encourage Karrde to take Leia and ensure the destruction of the Wayland facility. For some reason the Bothans really want the Emperor's secrets to be lost forever. He states their discovery would be a disaster to the Bothan people.

Karrde: Disasters to the Bothan people don't worry me. How much do they worry you?
Fey'la: How much worry will it take?
Karrde: Nothing unreasonable, merely a credit of , say, seventy thousand

This enables Karrde to pay his bills. Fey'la agrees readily -- too readily, to my mind. And with that Karrde , his team, and Leia set off on the Wild Karrde to Wayland.

Chapter 24:

The strike team arrives at the Wayland facility, which is indeed heavily guarded.

C'baoth has prepared for their arrival. The Imperial troops duped by him have supplied the townsfolk with blasters, thermal detonaters, and portable missile launchers. The townsfolk, following C'baoth's orders, commence an attack on the storehouse, providing Luke and company with the diversion they need to enter. While they are doing this, some of the locals they met earlier offer to assist. Luke details a Noghri commando to assist them in creating a diversion, not only saving their lives but possibly helping their own mission as well. The more diverted the Imperials are, the better.

Leia, Karrde, and his crew arrive at Wayland flying a false Imperial ID created by Ghent. On final approach, they stage a repulsor malfunction which will allow them to land and prepare their own assault. Karrde brings along Sturm and Drang, his force-seeking trained predators, in order to track Mara down.

Elsewhere, the Republic, Empire, and Smuggler fleets all converge on Bilbringi for their various "surprise" attacks.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Yora

2015-01-19, 02:41 PM

This is now answered.

The Noghri on Wayland sent the message. The defection of the entire Noghri race placed their entire people in mortal peril, so knowledge of them is being kept very secret, and the use of the Noghri as Thrawn's elite commandos would lead most high officials to fundamentally distrust them without proof that hasn't been given yet - the same instincts that led to Mara being incarcerated.
Yeah, seems now obvious.

And with only four and a half chapters left, it's finally starting to feel like endgame. Even though none of the characters are suspecting it. Even Thrawn, who is counting on Bilbringi being a major decisive battle that will determine the end of the war, is assuming that this is the start of the end for the Republic. But we got a huge space battle right around the corner and all our heroes on a primitive forest world sneaking into an imperial base with their little alien friends to destroy vital infrastructure.
...wait a minute?! :smallyuk:

I just checked and the final chapter 29 is again very short, not worth getting a whole day of discussion, so I say we do it together with 27 and 28.
But I do think we're probably going to be left hanging in the middle of the action tomorrow. I am not looking forward to having stop reading at that point. I might actually skip tomorrow and then do it all in one go the day after.

LadyEowyn

2015-01-19, 02:55 PM

And with only four and a half chapters left, it's finally starting to feel like endgame. Even though none of the characters are suspecting it. Even Thrawn, who is counting on Bilbringi being a major decisive battle that will determine the end of the war, is assuming that this is the start of the end for the Republic. But we got a huge space battle right around the corner and all our heroes on a primitive forest world sneaking into an imperial base with their little alien friends to destroy vital infrastructure.
...wait a minute?! :smallyuk:

Zahn does a perfect job of combining all the key elements from the climax of Return of the Jedi, and yet making everything feel original and exciting. It's a deliberate call-back, but not a repetition.

Yora

2015-01-19, 03:10 PM

There is a lot of that throughout all the story. Lot's of almost quotes from the movies that just sound very familiar.

I also noticed that in each scene with multiple characters, it's always written from the perspective of a specific character. If it says "Skywalker and Calrissian", it's Mara. When C-3P0 is described as "prissy", it's Han. It's very consistent.

pendell

2015-01-20, 07:28 PM

Yes, I suspect he's doing that deliberately to make it sound like a real successor to the original story. And he does it well.

Chapters 25 and 26.

Mara, Luke, Han, Lando, Chewbacca and the droids infiltrate the facility and set about determining how to bring it down.

Mara suggests their may be a self-destruct switch in the Emperor's throne room. He was the sort of person who didn't like sharing his toys, so it's a possibility.

Luke and Mara go off to explore that option, while the others explore more conventional methods. Chewbacca comes up with a solution that will set up an arrhythmical resonance in the installation's reactor. Lando is hesitant; this solution will blow the entire citadel to bits as well. If possible, Lando would prefer this not be a suicide mission. They keep it as a fallback.

Leia and Karrde link up with Han and Lando.

MEANWHILE... the smugglers arrive at Bilbringi, ready to steal the CGT their. Just at that moment an uncountable number of Star Destroyers surge into the system.

At first, Mazzic, Gillespie and the others are prepared for a fight to the death, but then they realize that the star destroyers aren't setting up to englobe them ... it's an entrapment configuration. They're preparing to pull someone out of hyperspace and pound seven kinds of trash out of them ... the Republic fleet.

The smuggler fleet decide to lay low, just for awhile longer. The battle may open up opportunities, but acting now will just mean their certain destruction.

Luke and Mara arrive at the Emperor's throne room ... to face off with C'baoth, sitting on the throne. Here in the force-bubble created by the Ysalamir, he is only an old man, powerless.

For the most part.

Luke tries to reason with C'baoth. Explaining to him that he is not Jorus C'baoth -- he is C'baoth's clone. The Outbound Flight's records are conclusive. He begs him to come back with them, because the people of the galaxy still need his wisdom.

This works out about as well as you would expect. C'baoth rejects any service to the "lesser beings" of the galaxy, who murdered the Jedi. The Jedi henceforth will rule the galaxy, not serve.

He takes this opportunity to launch into a full-blown villainous monologue, omitting the evil laugh at the end but not much else. He informs the heroes that what he has done to Covell -- which he explains is to take over his mind, remoulding it in the image he wishes -- he will do again and again to the clones in the facility here, so that the army Thrawn imagines he makes for himself he is really making for C'baoth.

Luke and Mara are horror-struck by this. There is nothing in the chamber of interest, and they won't strike an unarmed man in cold blood, so they turn to leave.

At this Jorus C'baoth produces a remote control and , with the calm remark "I did not give you permission to leave", presses it.

At that moment, charges attached to every ysalamir cylinder in the installation, placed there by Covell's company under thrall-Covell's orders, explode. Every ysalamir in the installation dies at once.

The Force returns.

Nice to have a villain to do the dirty work, eh?

As I said, the Force returns. C'baoth takes the opportunity to hit Luke and Mara with force lightning. Luke fends off the attack with his lightsaber, but Mara is stunned -- I would say about 2 rounds no action in D&D terms.

And now, C'baoth reveals the next act in his play --a cloaked figure steps forward , wielding a lightsaber, to challenge Luke.

The cloak falls away to reveal Luke's face. "Yes, ... it is you." C'baoth says. "Cloned from the hand you lost at Bespin, wielding the lightsaber you lost there."

Luke is distracted by a terrible buzzing in his head, possibly brought about by the near-proximity of his force-using clone.

And as the chapter concludes, their lightsabers clash, blue on green!

TO BE CONCLUDED!

Respectfully ,

Brian P.

pendell

2015-01-21, 08:24 AM

Chapter 27-28-29

Wow, these are some great chapters, the high point of the trilogy! Don't take my word for it-- get the kindle edition! Go, go!

The lightsabers clash and Luke fights his clone. Luke isn't at his best, but Luuke (the name of the clone) doesn't seem to have much of Luke's thoughts and feelings in him -- just the shell.

Perhaps this Luuke has been remade already by C'baoth? But how is that possible , since
C'baoth has been in the force bubble and had no opportunity?

It does seem , though, that clone-Luke is a remote control robot being manipulated by C'baoth for the force.

C'baoth banters with Mara while the duel commences, demanding that she join him or
face a similar choice one day. Mara uses a technique the Emperor taught her to
close her mind to C'baoth ; C'baoth detects the attempt, and punishes her mentally,
but is not able to penetrate her shield.

Mara fakes helplessness, pretending inability to charge C'baoth -- the attempt would
be futile at this juncture anyway. She would simply eat more force lightning.

She begins a slow and careful scan of the room, feigning surrender but actually looking
to recover her blaster.

Skywalker tries a trick, forcing the clone to drop his lightsaber. he then attempts to force-grab it away but C'baoth intervenes, grabbing the saber himself and returning it to the clone.

C'baoth will only allow this duel to end in the death of one of the combatants.

Luke next attempts to destroy clone-Luuke's lightsaber. C'baoth reads his attempt [guess
Luke never learned to guard his own thoughts, eh?] and force-throws Mara's blaster into his shoulder at the critical moment, causing his swing to go wild. C'baoth toys with him as a cat might with a mouse.

At this moment, Han, Leia, Karrde, and his two vornskyrs Sturm und Drang arrive.
Han wastes no time shooting at C'baoth, but we've already been to this movie.

C'baoth grabs a stone , Mara's blaster, and any other small object he can find to interpose in the way of Han's shots. He blocks three shots . The fourth never happens; C'baoth at last manages to rip it from Han's hands.

... 4 shots in a round? Han must have taken multishot...

C'baoth unleashes a force wave which flattens everyone in the room, then hits Han with
Force Lightning. Leia blocks the lightning with her blade. C'baoth blasts the catwalk, dropping it on top of her her and knocking away her lightsaber.

Luke puts forth a tremendous effort and temporarily stuns his clone. He turns to C'baoth
and makes him an offer: Let my friends go and I'll stay.

You have GOT to be kidding me , of all the too-nice ....

MEANWHILE ....

Lando and Chewie are apprised by Han of the situation over a communicator. They decide to go with the arrhythmic resonance scheme -- they have no more options. They also have to keep the Imperial troops not fighting C'baoth's diversion from breaking back into the clone chamber and killing them all. They begin to set it up.

BACK IN THE THRONE ROOM...
C'baoth declines Luke's offer. He wants Mara as well. He has foreseen it. He contemptuously force-pulls Han's blaster another half-meter away from where it had lain, as Han is crawling towards it. He is fully in control of this situation.

The clone returns to the battle. He and skywalker duel. C'baoth continues moving the blaster away from Han. He obviously has enough concentration both to direct the battle against Luke and toy with the prisoners as well. That's why he's a Jedi master.

C'baoth decides to make things simpler, with a gesture he force-grabs Karrde's blaster, han's blaster, and Leia's own lightsaber. They travel through the air towards him.

And now Mara acts. Summoning all the force-strength she has, she manages to grab
Leia's lightsaber and it redirects to her hand.

Wasting no time, she attacks clone-Luuke from behind. Luke has just tricked the clone into slicing into a viewscreen, and got a faceful of sparks for his trouble. He turns to face Mara...

Mara looks full in the clone's face as she shoves the lightsaber home.

Watches the light in his eyes die.

Hears the voice that has been in her head for years shouting YOU WILL KILL LUKE SKYWALKER finally cease. Mission complete. The Last Command has been fulfilled.

The Republic jumps into the Imperial trap at Bilbringi, and Ackbar gets to reiterate his famous "it's a trap!" line. Pelleon suggests letting some of them escape so that the backbiting may begin. Thrawn designates Ackbar's ship for messenger duty.

Wedge Antilles and the rest of the Republic fleet are quite busy fighting like rats in a trap.

He gets a comm from Aves, Karrde's rep on the spot. Aves makes some very fast bargaining -- they are right off the Imperial flank and are going to grab the CGT array in 60 seconds. Any direction they should go in?

Wedge points them at a pair of golan defense platforms. If they can be damaged or destroyed, the Republic ships will get into the shipyard and the entire face of the battle will change. Aves concurs, and asks for a friendly escort on the way out. Since the Republic ships will have to go through that hole, Wedge readily agrees.

For this Wedge should be Grand Admiral himself, I think.

The agreement is made, they work quickly to act on it.

BACK IN THE WAYLAND THRONE ROOM...

C'baoth stands alone, but he is not defenseless. He promises Mara Jade a slow and painful death for messing with his plans.

C'baoth brings the ceiling down on their heads, pinning most of them under the rubble.

As he works his will, he informs Mara she cannot die yet .. not until she has been able to
visit the cloning chamber. One Mara Jade or another will kneel before C'baoth, as far as
he's concerned.

Lando and Chewie finish their mission and begin extraction. They call Han to warn him and the team in the throne room to get out of the building before the reactor goes KABOOM.

Luke tries one more time to reason with C'baoth. It works about as well as the last one.

Mara, however, is once again not as helpless as she had let on. When the ceiling fell
she used her lightsaber to cut holes in the ground, allowing the boulders to drain out.

C'baoth blasts away with force lightning at her, which she blocks with her lightsaber. She
is nearly blind, but Leia is force-guiding Mara in.

Mara is doomed without some kind of help. Luke looks around, and then force-calls his lightsaber to slash the pet Vornskyr leashes.

C'baoth has enough time to kill EITHER the predators OR Mara but not both.

He chooses to hit the vornskyrs. One of them dies. But he's used his combat action for this round, and now it's mara's turn. Unchecked by force lightning, she closes the gap and stabs him dead.

C'baoth asplodes with force energy.

With C'baoth dead and the building about to explode as well, they look for an exit. One of C'baoth's actions has opened a crack to the outside! Leia and Luke enlarge the crack with their lightsabers, and soon the team is on the way to join the Karrde and escape.

Is that everything? Oh, right. We still need to get rid of Thrawn.

Ave's counterattack has turned the course of the battle , and things are beginning to look
grim for the Imperials. Even Thrawn is beginning to sound a little concerned, but he
still believes the battle is winnable.

At this moment a report comes in from Wayland .. it is under attack by a number of forces, including Noghri commandoes.

Before Pelleon can mention this he is immobilized. He hears a quiet voice.

For the treachery of the Empire against the Noghri people. We were betrayed. We have been revenged.

Rukh leaves, Pelleon looks over to see Thrawn , seated in his chair. There is a dagger through his heart and bright red blood seeps onto his spotless white uniform.

Thrawn catches his eye, and smiles.

"But," he whispered, "it was so artistically done."

And with that, the red glow from the eyes is extinguished forever.

There is nothing for Pelleon to do but order a retreat. With the loss of the Bilbringi shipyards, the tide of the war has tilted again .. this time decisively against the Empire.

Chapter 29
AFTERMATH

Mara and Luke speak with each other on Coruscant. Mara is at peace with herself for
the first time in a long time.

Luke gives her his lightsaber. Why?

Lots of reasons. Because you earned it. Because you're on your way to becoming a Jedi and you'll need it. Mostly, though, because I want you to have it.

Luke turns to leave.

Hang on a minute, I'll come with you.

And that is the start of many, MANY, things.

THE END. [For now]

Respectfully,

Brian P.

pendell

2015-01-21, 08:29 AM

Well, that was a spectacular finish to this trilogy.

Still ... who else is just a touch disappointed at the way Thrawn was punked ? I mean, they spend three books building him up into this terrible threat and he gets killed in less than a paragraph?

Ah well. At least his death happened on-screen. I don't recall the Wayland facility actually exploding in the book.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Cikomyr

2015-01-21, 11:39 AM

I personally adapted a quote from DS9 to adapt it to Magnificient Bastards.

"You cannot defeat a Magnificent Bastard. The best you can do is kill him."

The only way for the Republic to having beat Thrawn is through an assassination strike. Not on the battlefield.

Thrawn was undefeated, but he still lost the war.

Aotrs Commander

2015-01-21, 11:46 AM

Rukh leaves, Pelleon looks over to see Thrawn , seated in his chair. There is a dagger through his heart and bright red blood seeps onto his spotless white uniform.

Thrawn catches his eye, and smiles.

"But," he whispered, "it was so artistically done."

And with that, the red glow from the eyes is extinguished forever.

There is nothing for Pelleon to do but order a retreat. With the loss of the Bilbringi shipyards, the tide of the war has tilted again .. this time decisively against the Empire.

Boooooo! Swiz! Cheating rebel scum!

This is exactly why Nogri top the list of "races I'mma gonna exterminate", above even Ewoks.

hamishspence

2015-01-21, 11:55 AM

Noghri killing Thrawn is an example of his own schemes (or at least, his continuation of the Empire's schemes) coming back to bite him.

Once the Noghri knew that their new overlord was complicit in the scheme to keep them in "the oldest form of covert slavery in the galaxy" - of course they were going to want revenge.

LadyEowyn

2015-01-21, 02:17 PM

Yora

2015-01-21, 03:02 PM

Did Rhuk have any scene in this book except for the last one? The last thing I remember seeing of him was intimidating the noghri who were hiding Leia on Honogr.
The moment to strike was excelently chosen. The second his cover was blown he had the knife in Thrawn even before Thrawn and Palaeon could finish the thought that the noghri had turned against them.

What surprises me is how terribly the ambush at Bilbringi turned out for the Empire. They had every advantage and it was meant to destroy a significant portion of the whole Republic fleet, and it still went pretty downhill because some armed feighters had managed to slip behind them. "We are not defeated yet" is as bad an assesment as Thrawn has ever made.

pendell

2015-01-21, 03:41 PM

It's a wonderful finish, and excellently done in that Thrawn loses because of the people he's alienated, betrayed, and/or double-crossed: Mara (who is the reason he's lost the cloning facility), the Noghri (who kill him), and the smugglers (which make the Battle of Bilbringi more challenging; without their involvement, possibly even Pellaeon could have pulled out a win at Bilbringi).

Agreed.

Although I'm not entirely clear on why the Empire didn't win Bilbringi. They had overwhelming forces, and the smugglers' ships weren't really powerful enough to tip the balance. I presume Pellaeon was in shock from Thrawn's death and his brain wasn't really working tactically.

This is why (http://archives.erfworld.com/Book%201/1).

The smugglers were a pebble on the scale. But when the scales are fairly close to evenly weighted already, a pebble at just the right time and place can make all the difference.

Have you ever played chess? In a grandmaster-level match, spotting a pawn is a death sentence for the person taking the handicap. The balance of forces is so even that, eventually, all the higher level pieces were exchanged, and that one extra pawn will tip the balance. Players resign, at that level, once they're down more than a few pawns. Absent any kind of probability in the game, the greater weight will be brought to bear with all the certainty of a ticking metronome.

It's not just weight of material , either. Position (http://www.chesscentral.com/Chess_Moves_Contril_Center_a/188.htm) can be as critical as raw power. A few pieces , advantageously positioned, can exert force out of all proportion to their numbers.

That is, what I think happened here. The Republic brought a LOT of ships to this battle. While the Imperials could massacre them so long as they were bottled up, the smugglers broke open the trap.

So instead of a man fighting a bear at the bottom of a pit, that man is now facing a bear on even terms.

It was still winnable at this point, but the loss of Thrawn ended that hope. Winning against Ackbar at this point, with Ackbar having the advantage of position and with the golan defense platforms either down or critically threatened, required grandmaster skills. Skills Thrawn had but Pelleon didn't.

So Pelleon applied the lesson Thrawn taught him at the end of the first book -- not to waste men and ships in trying to change an outcome that has already been decided.

All battles that aren't massacres from the start are, as Wellington put it, "a close-run thing." And in such a battle, Even a single unit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shiloh#Lew_Wallace.27s_lost_division) in the right place and time can change the outcome.

Respectfully,

Brian P.