Star Wars: Outbound Flight!

Our book today is the Star Wars novel Outbound Flight by Timothy Zahn, who won so many fans and kick-started the whole Star Wars fiction franchise with his so-called 'Thrawn Trilogy,' Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, and The Last Command.

Outbound Flight brings back two of his most popular characters, seen here years earlier (in fact, as the ever-present Chronology at the beginning of every Star Wars book informs me, 27 years earlier) than the events in his famous trilogy: there's long-bearded, imperious Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth, and there's blue-skinned, glowing-eyed Imperial military genius Admiral Thrawn. C'baoth wants Supreme Chancellor Palpatine (whom we all know is secretly the Sith Lord Darth Sidious, although of course at this point in the Star Wars saga, none of the good guys - or bad guys, for that matter - know it) to approve Outbound Flight, a mission of space vessels with colonists and armed escort-ships, the goal of which sounds suspiciously Star Trek-ish: to seek out new life and new civilizations (as well as to look for somebody named Vergere, but since the book doesn't tell its readers much about her, I'm guessing she was the plot focus of some other Star Wars novel).

C'baoth isn't a pleasant character - he's brusque and overbearing, as curt and insufferable to his poor Jedi apprentice as he is to politicians, provincial governors, and his fellow Jedi Masters (Obi Wan Kenobi and his young Jedi apprentice Anakin Skywalker have substantial parts in this book and are well characterized by Zahn). Thrawn, on the other hand, is both pleasant and easy to empathize with - and Zahn seems to revel in that dialectic, a hero we don't like and a villain we do. Zahn has always been the best Star Wars writer in what is, admittedly, a limited stable, and Outbound Flight is consistently fun to read. Of course, it helps that when he's writing such characters as Kenobi or Anakin, we can't help but mentally picture the actors from the movies, in this case the underrated Ewan McGregor and the vilified Hayden Christensen:

With a sigh, Obi-Wan shut off his comlink and slipped it back into his belt.

"Still nothing?" Anakin asked. "No," Obi-Wan said ...

Anakin muttered something under his breath. "We should have tried calling her earlier."

"We did try calling her earlier," Obi-Wan told him. "You were just too busy playing with Duefgrin's swoop to notice."

"Excuse me, Master, but I was working, not playing," Anakin said stiffly. "The Brolf we're looking for is named Jhompfi, he lives in the Covered Brush house ring, and he's supposedly using the burst thrusters on a speeder he uses to smuggled rissle sticks out to the Karfs."

Obi-Wan stared as his Padawan. "When did you get all that?"

"When you were wandering around the neighborhood looking for clues," Anakin said. It was hard to sound hurt and smug at the same time, but the boy managed to pull it off.




There's a large cast of characters in Outbound Flight, from our familiar Jedi to their Padawans (C'baoth's hapless apprentice Lorana Jinzler is particularly well realized) to nefarious agents of Chancellor Palpatine to Thrawn and his allies (who want both Outbound Flight and C'baoth destroyed) to the ordinary men and women who agree to leave behind everything they've ever known and travel outside their galaxy in order to colonize the unknown. Early on in that voyage, it becomes obvious that C'baoth is Zahn's Ahab; he starts claiming more and more authority for himself, including taking children from their parents to train them as Jedi, a decision those ordinary men and women accept with revealing resignation:

"They took the boy away three hours later," Uliar said, scowling across the table at his friends.

"What do you expect?" Tarkosa asked reasonably from across the table. "Jedi are as rare as dewback feathers. I can understand why they wouldn't want anyone with the talent to slip through their fingers."

"But before it was always just infants," Jobe Keely reminded him, his face puckered with uncertainty. "Kids who don't even know they're alive yet, much less knowing who Mom and Dad are. These kids have all been much older."

"But they've all been willing to go, haven't they?" Tarkosa countered. "Even the boy this morning. He was scared, sure, but he was also pretty excited. Face it, Jobe: most kids think it would be really cool to be a Jedi."

Naturally, as long-time Zahn readers could guess, the confrontation at the climax of Outbound Flight can only be between C'baoth and Thrawn, and as fans of the "Thrawn trilogy" will be able to guess, such a confrontation can only end one way, although even there Zahn is full of surprises, including this tantalizing little scene:

"I have indeed won," [Thrawn] told C'baoth. "I have only to give a single order -" His hand shifted slightly on his control board, his fingertips coming to rest on a covered switch edged in red. " - and you and all your people will die. Is your pride worth so much to you?"

"A Jedi does not yield to pride," C'baoth spat. "Nor does he yield to empty threats. He follows only the dictates of his own destiny."

"Then choose your destiny," [Thrawn] said. "I'm told the role of the Jedi is to serve and defend."

"You were told wrongly," C'baoth countered. "The role of the Jedi is to lead and guide, and to destroy all threats." The unburned corner of his lip twisted upward in a bitter smile.

Without warning, Thrawn's head jerked back, his whole body pressing back against his seat. His hand darted to his throat, clutching uselessly at it.



Outbound Flight is that rarest of Star Wars novels: one that entertains independently of its franchise. Slobbering completists will find enough timeline tidbits to satisfy them, but general science fiction readers will thoroughly enjoy it as well. Zahn has carved out a niche for himself writing adventures in the world of mad genius George Lucas, and that world is the better for it.

My only real frustration with the book? Everybody in it is so caught up in their own machinations (be it C'baoth's burgeoning madness, Obi-Wan Kenobi's desire to save him from it, or Thrawn's desire to use it against him) that the central idea of Outbound Flight is largely overlooked. After all, the very first thing any of us learned about Star Wars is that the entire story takes place "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away." When somebody from that galaxy far, far away takes it into their head to build a fleet of ships and go in search of life in other galaxies, it's us they're looking for - and if not us, then what about the Colony Worlds of 'Battlestar Galactica'? Or the galaxy-spanning empire of the God Emperor of Dune? Or, for that matter, Star Trek's Federation? The urge to explore is absent from this book even though it's nominally about exploring.

But that's a minor point, one Zahn could well have addressed if it'd been part of the story he set out to tell. As it is, that story's plenty good enough.

Coruscant Nights Volume 1: Jedi Twilight

Our book today is the first novel in a Star Wars trilogy called(for reasons the books themselves fail to make clear) Coruscant Nights. It's called by Michael Reaves, and it's called Jedi Twilight, and its events take place immediately after the conclusion of the last Star Wars movie, Revenge of the Sith (anybody remember when this whole thing was just one quirky, hyper-enjoyable summer movie? I thought not .... sigh ...).

For those of you needing a refresher course, The Revenge of the Sith differs from the common run of big-budget sci-fi movies by ending with the total and resounding defeat of the good guys. The clone army, under the direction of the evil Emperor, has assassinated virtually all the Jedi Knights and driven the few remaining survivors into hiding or exile. Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi go into exile. Jax Pavan, the dour and capable hero of this trilogy (on the books' covers, he looks a bit like Patriots super-quarterback Tom Brady - who might just be up for the part, since his football days are over) goes into hiding, and he hides in the last place you'd expect a Jedi to hide (if you were prone to expecting such things): in the bowels of Coruscant itself, the capital city of the Empire, the seat of the aforementioned evil Emperor's power.

Jax Pavan goes into hiding as a kind of private investigator, but he's always on edge about the Imperial pursuit that forever dogs his footsteps, and even the slowest readers will quickly anticipate a confrontation down the line between our hero and Vader. Reaves is a talented, quick-footed author, however (Jedi Twilight is very often a very entertaining read), not one to blow his perfect climax early, as it were. Jedi Twilight has plenty of action, derring-do, and explosions to keep the pages turning in the meantime.

And there are plenty of subplots too, the best of which involves a reporter named Den Dhur and his trusty droid I-5 (who's been heavily modified in the personality department, just in case you were dreading another C-3PO), both of whom are also searching for Jax Pavan, although for different reasons. Dhur is just after a great story; I-5's motives center around Jax's father Lorn Pavan and a surprising undercurrent of stubborn loyalty. Even half-inebriated, Dhur is aware enough of this to let it irk him:

But did it make any sense to keep looking? Den thought about it, somewhat laboriously, one neuron blindly groping through the alcoholic fog to link with another. Though he hated to say it, hated even to think it, he couldn't help reaching the same conclusion over and over: No. It didn't. Lorn Pavan's son was either off-planet or akk chow by now. Either way, there wasn't a lot that could be done about it. The remaining Jedi had scattered to the four solar winds - a prudent move, in Den's opinion - and even if Jax Pavan was still somewhere on Coruscant, the odds of bumping into him on a street corner weren't too good in a planetwide city with trillions of inhabitants.

One of the most amusing little themes running through Jedi Twilight actually involves those trillions of inhabitants, or at least the species making up the bulk of them:

Humans. They dominated culture, trade, government, the military - everything, in short. Love them or hate them, you couldn't ignore them. For better or worse, humans were the architects of the galaxy's future. It was only such a benighted, aggressive, and hubristic species, it seemed to him, that could have created a monster like Darth Vader.




Of course, there are problems inherent in reading any Star Wars novel. The backstory is now so hysterically profuse - and the rabid fan base so, shall we say, up to date with all of it, that a writer in Reaves' position must either include explanations of what a Neimoidian is (and risk offending the geeknoscenti) or leave those explanations out and bewilder newcomers. And lurking in the background of all these books is the weird, insane spider at the heart of this vast web, Star Wars creator George Lucas, whose 'outlines' these books fill in and whose approval they all require. It's like if Gene Roddenberry were still alive, read every Star Trek novel, and were crazy as a shithouse mouse.

Still, when those obstacles are overcome, Jedi Nights and its sequels provide some better-than-average escapist action reading. Michael Reaves clearly knows his craft, and in addition to peppering his tale with enough special effects to keep the whole thing humming like a lightsaber, he also manages to slip in more characterization than any reader of a series like this would expect. Jax Pavan might remain a bit of a hero-manque, but lots of secondary characters (most especially I-5, but also certainly including Darth Vader himself) get some pretty loving attention. Franchise fiction has been worse served than this, certainly.

Death Star

Our book today is “Death Star” by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry, and as anybody can guess from its title, its subject is the building, operation, and eventual fate of the gigantic doomsday weapon from “Star Wars.”


We all remember the exact moment we heard the line. We here at Stevereads experienced it in a shabby mulit-plex in West Seneca, just outside of Buffalo, and we confess it, we were quietly thrilled.

Of course we’re referring to ‘Star Wars’ (we here at Stevereads care not one jot about the franchise’s insanely megalomaniacal creator or his control-freak grip on the terminology attending his creation – ‘Star Wars’ is ‘Star Wars’ … the first, Part One, period)(when Lucas was an intern here, dreaming of making film adaptations of the John Carter novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, he would not have dreamt of being such a control-freak dictator … his future movies might benefit if he recalled something of that humility) the moment when our intrepid heroes, crammed inside the Millennium Falcon, drop out of hyperspace and into a great field of debris, beyond which hangs a dull grey malevolent moon. “That’s no moon,” old Ben Kenobi intones, “it’s a space station.”

His fellow adventurers don’t believe him at first, of course: why should they? A space station as big as a moon? It’s a classic science fiction moment, one for which the aforementioned lunatic, George Lucas, deserves full measure of credit. Even on old VCR tapes fuzzy with age, the moment still has the power to amaze.

So it’s not all that surprising that the ‘Star Wars’ fictional franchise would get around to giving it its due. That franchise is a deeply disturbing thing when examined in any kind of detail; the fandom it supplies like a crack dealer supplies his gibbering detail-obsessed addicts makes, it need hardly be said, no literary judgements. Members of that fandom have spent HUNDREDS of HOURS of their personal lives detailing the Mirialandan cultural epochs, with no even small hope of their work ever being acknowledged by their Dark Lord, much less used – even ‘Star Trek’ fandom has nothing by way of psychotic obsession to offer as compromise, which is saying something.

So we must walk on eggshells, but it’s still possible to do so. Can anyone, for instance, forget Alan Dean Foster’s ‘Splinter of the Mind’s Eye,’ the very first and still one of the best pieces of ‘Star Wars’ fiction? And, much later, Timothy Zahn gave us a genuinely talented ‘Star Wars’ novel just bristling with technical details and some pretty good character analysis.

Now, much later, comes the latest ‘Star Wars’ novel, ‘Death Star’ by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry. It’s a hardcover, and its dust jacket cover art is reminiscent of the great Vincent DiFate, and its whole enterprise is replete with a quality conspicuously absent from most ‘Star Wars’ fiction: intense readability.

‘Death Star’ tells a story we all know already, only from the inside out. We know that a revolutionary moon-sized space station, armed with a planet-killing laser, will move on the planet Alderaan and utterly obliterate it. We know this space station is commanded by a spare, ascetic man named Grand Moff Tarkin, and we know he has to deal with a towering, enigmatic black-robed figure named Darth Vader.

Reaves and Perry know perfectly well that they’re playing off this already-established tension, and they do so expertly. Vader appears tellingly seldom in the book, the evil emperor hardly at all, and of course the various medics, technicians, and enlisted grunts who move the narrative forward never know anything about a heroic Corellian freight captain and his enormous hairy first mate/pet, nothing about a weirdly-matched pair of gay robots, and nothing about the budding romance between a weirdly-coiffed Senator’s daughter and a farmboy from a desert planet. These workaday people know nothing of any of this, and they certainly don’t expect that their enormous space station (the inner day-to-day workings of which our authors convey with wonderful and eye-opening detail) will be stage to the final encounter between the old Republic’s two greatest warriors and former best friends, the armor-encased Annakin Skywalker and the prematurely-aged Obi-wan Kenobi.

It doesn’t matter that THEY don’t know – the whole point of this quick-footed novel is that WE know. And one of the best things Reaves and Perry do is to humanize the thousands of ordinary people whose workaday lives are caught up in the station’s construction and workings – somehow, the fact that none of those ordinary people are evil manages to underscore how evil their leaders are.

Of course, the novel wouldn’t be any fun without those evil leaders, and Star Wars fans will prick up their ears every time one of them makes an appearance. And naturally, given the book’s subject, the lion’s share of these appearances will go to Grand Moff Tarkin, who was played with such delicious icy reserve by Peter Cushing in the movie. At one point early in the novel the writers take us inside Tarkin’s thoughts as he’s musing about setbacks in the construction of his beloved space station, and we learn with some delight that there’s no love lost between him and our other main bad guy:

“In addition to these annoyances, Darth Vader, the emperor’s pet, was wont to show up unannounced now and again to lay his heavy hand on the whole process. Vader, unfortunately, was beyond Tarkin’s command, even though, as the first of the new Grand Moffs, he was a man whose whim was law in the entire Outer Rim Territories.”

Our authors are quick to show us that the feeling is mutual:

“This trip, he [Vader] felt, should not be necessary. Governor Wilhuff Tarkin – ‘Grand Moff Tarkin,’ as he had been recently designated; a ridiculous rank, in Vader’s opinion – knew his duty. He had been charged by the emperor to create this behemoth that was supposed to strike fear into the hearts of the Rebels, and certainly he knew what would happen to him if he failed in his duty.”

Every Star Wars fan knows story unfolding offstage while these two jockey for advantage and their minions go about their daily lives. Reaves and Perry very wisely show us nothing of that story until its course locks it into the novel. The key, as the faithful know, is a stolen set of plans for the Death Star. Those stolen plans set the stage for one final confrontation between Vader and Tarkin:

“The shimmering image of Darth Vader appeared before Tarkin, life sized, as if he were standing in the same room.
‘Grand Moff Tarkin. Why have you called?’
‘I understand there is a remote possibility that a set of plans for this battle station may have been stolen by Alliance agents.’
‘Yes.’
Tarkin clamped his teeth tight enough to make his jaw muscles ache. ‘You knew this?’
‘I have my own agents.’
The black helmet had no way to change expression, of course, but Tarkin could hear the amusement in the Dark Lord’s voice. ‘I see,’ he said, his tone carefully neutral. Now was not the time to be at odds with the Emperor’s lackey.
‘I will find out if it is true, and if so, I will deal with it.’ The black helmet inclined questioningly. ‘That is why you called me, isn’t it?’
Tarkin nodded. Vader might be many things, but fainthearted he was not. Once he began a task, he seldom served from finishing it. Odds were that the story was no more than a baseless rumor, but if not, no one was better equipped to determine the facts and eliminate the problem than Darth Vader. A useful, if dangerous tool – no matter how Tarkin might feel about him personally.”

The search for the stolen plans leads to the capture of heroic Princess Leia, and one thing after another lead to the climactic lightsaber duel between Darth Vader and Obi-wan Kenobi. Reaves and Perry even here resist the temptation to start telling that other story – we see no further into Ben Kenobi’s thoughts during that fight than his exact words from the movie allow. Instead, they stick to the story of the Death Star until its last minute, when all but a handful of the characters whose lives we’ve been following get blown to smithereens. There are a couple of heroic survivors, but Grand Moff Tarkin goes down with the ship, believing in its invincibility to the last second.

In all, an entirely satisfying Star Wars novel – which is an extremely rare occurrence in a crap-crowded subgenre. If the book contains anything depressing, it’s the odd digression one of the characters makes while inspecting the Death Star’s library, of all things. It turns out that even long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, some things never change:

“It was a pity that most people didn’t actually go to libraries anymore, not when they could sit in the comfort of their own quarters and access files electronically. Want to read the hot new interstellar caper novel, or the latest issue of BEINGS holozine? Input the name, touch a control, and ZIP – it’s in your datapad. Need to study the history of winged intelligent species? No more difficult than inputting search parameters, then scanning the bibliographic references and choosing a place to begin.”

But fear not! Apparently, even in such a far-flung setting, there are a few holdouts:

“There were, of course, old-fashioned beings who would trundle down to where the files were. On some worlds the most ancient libraries kept books – actual bound volumes of printed matter – lined up neatly on shelves, and readers would walk the aisles, take a volume down, sniff the musty-dusty odor of it, and then carry it to a table to leisurely peruse.”

We here at Stevereads are happy to number several of those ‘old-fashioned beings’ among our legion of readers – we’re happy to know that even in the Star Wars universe they’re out there doing what they’ve always done: losing themselves in reading while the rest of the universe is zapping lasers at each other.