Star Wars Legacy of the Force Review and Impressions

WARNING: Spoilers below.  Sorry, can’t be helped.  But while I will ruin some of the surprises, I will not reveal the ultimate ending. 

Star Wars: Legacy of the Force is a nine part series set several years after the last major trilogy, New Jedi Order.  It is written by three authors, each penning three of the novels.  The authors include, in no particular order, Aaron Allston, Karen Traviss and Troy Denning.  Denning is the most well known, having written many Forgotten Realms trilogies for TSR, now Wizards of the Coast.

This story line, to be blunt, shows the transformation of Jacen Solo from a mere foot soldier in the new Galactic Alliance, into a new Emperor.  This story can not be read in a vacuum; to fully understand the characters and their motives, you must be familiar with the events of both the New Jedi Order story as well as the Dark Nest trilogy.  Jacen’s actions and transformations are directly related to his experiences in these novels.

First off, it needs to be said, that this story was a little too long.  I think seven books would have been perfect (though, with three authors, each needed to be given an equal number of books, and six would have been too short, unless each was expanded 50 to 100 pages).  Anyway… I’m not going to judge whether the story was good or not.  This is not a stand alone story.  It exists within the framework of the expanded Star Wars Universe, and is an integral part of the mythology.  Its not a single, off-shoot story that can be easily judged based on its relevance and execution.  This story defines the characters and their futures, and as such, in my mind, simply exists.  now, their are elements to the story I liked, and others I loathed, but the series does follow the natural progression and evolution of the characters and the universe.

I’ll tell you one thing I really disliked and felt slowed the story to a crawl at some point: Boba Fett.  We all love the Fett from the movies.  But each of Karen Traviss’ novels dedicates half of the pages to Fett, his family, his home life, his home plant, and his status as the leader of the Mandalorean people.  It’s interesting, I guess, fleshing out the character from mere mercenary to an actual, dynamic character, but it was too much.  Now understand, Fett plays an integral role in the end game of the story, and his back story and the associated characters to play a major role, but i felt it was too much.  I felt that the same results could have been achieved through different means with a more satisfying experience.  Whether or not focusing on Fett was Traviss’ idea, or the idea of the braintrust behind the expanded universe, i don’t know.  But what I do know is that too much time was focused on Fett.  Don’t get me wrong, some people may like this.  or love this.  Because Fett is a beloved character in the Star Wars Universe.  But I felt that it lengthened the story too much, causing it bog down too much at times.

A second issue of mine was the villain in the books.  We have Alema Rar, a Twi’lik Jedi driven insane during the Dark Nest Trilogy, and Luminya, another Jedi from Luke’s past.  Both play integral roles in the story, but quite frankly, neither of them are that interesting or compelling  characters.  The only villain worth the ink is Jacen Skywalker.

What did I like?  We get to see the deaths of many major characters (I won’t ruin this for you), many Jedi battles, plot intrigues, and a lot of suspense.  We see the return of the Imperial Remnant and Admiral Daala.  And we get the slow, deliberate transformation of Jacen Solo into Darth Caedus.

The story of Jacen Solo is not original.  But what is these days?  We start with a man who wants to help the Alliance as it deals with the defection of Corellia and several other major planets.  We see a man who begins his quest with good intentions before being sucked into the Sith philosophy.  And like so many men in history and literature, the innocent desire to do good for the sake of all gets twisted into a philosophy of the means justifying the ends.  And over the course of the series, Jacen slowly grabs for power, doing horrible things in the same of the greater good.  He kills a terrorist during an interrogation.  He subverts Ben Skywalker.  He orders his parents killed.  He goes after Luke.  He kills a lot of innocent people.  He sacrifices his own fleet for nothing more than pride.  And, by the end, he is willing to do the same acts that Palpatine did, supposedly for the greater good. 

Watching Jacen’s fall from grace is a sobering peek into the minds of men who think they know better than everyone else what’s best for them.  At the beginning, you can sympathize with Jacen, with his actions, with his reasoning.  He is the most  tragic of figures, and the seeds of his rise and subsequent fall are evident early on.  The authors show us step-by-step how Jacen is drawn to the dark side and how he slowly becomes the monster he ends up being.  As a reader, its intriguing to look at the slippery slope Jacen finds himself on and wondering, on a personal level, how far we would go as individuals to achieve his goals.

This is a different type of series from New Jedi Order, in that NJO was several smaller, sometimes independent stories, woven together to form the larger tapestry of the Yuuzhan Vong War, and each individual trilogy or duology or stand alone book could be judged on how well it integrated with the larger story.  But this series is a single cohesive story and can’t be jugded by the same standards.  And again, that’s why I will not judge it on the merits of the meat of the story.  But in conclusion, I will say that I believe that same story could have been delivered in a shorter, more cohesive story where Fett, as well as other chaff, could have been minimized.  But in the end it was a good, thought sometimes very predictable and slow, expansion of the Star Wars Universe.  And like with any good story,  for every conflict that was solved another was created,  setting us up for the next intriguing chapter in the expanded Universe.

If you have any comments or more specific questions, feel free to comment.

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