Deutsche VersionStar Wars Legacy Of The Force: Invincible
I just finished reading the last part of the Star Wars Legacy of the Force series, called Invincible. For those of you will still read this book, this contains spoilers. For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, this will be boring.
As a very general overview for those of you who only know the movies: It’s about fourty years after Star Wars IV (if I recall the time scale correctly). The Empire’s long gone but a huge war against weird aliens has left the galaxy a mess. While all was rebuilding someone started a new war about some wanting to secede from the galactic republic. Most main characters have adult children, and it’s one of the children of Leia and Han Solo who turns over to the dark side of the force and becomes an asshole. If that sounds familiar to you, well, it certainly does to me.
So, to the review.
Invincible
Do not want. After the first third of the book I was waiting for the punch line, the part where things would start getting interesting. It didn’t come. Most of the book is just random fighting, and I’ve never been a fan of books about fighting.
Most of the book is dealing with Jaina[^1] killing her twin brother Jacen, or, as he calls himself, Darth Caedus. Character development, finishing story arcs or similar is just happening pro forma.
[^1]: Leia’s and Han Solo’s daughter
The end of the book doesn’t give closure to all the questions asked before. Tahiri[^2] comes back from the dark side — who cares? Ben[^3] does some of the agenting stuff he is so good at, but apparently only to make sure people don’t forget about him. Tenel Ka[^4] and Allana[^5] pretend to die except they don’t. Finally, there are new commanders for everything who just get that position by being there at the right time.
If you have all the previous eight books then of course you should buy it, just for completeness’s sake, but I think you can safely wait until the paperback release.
[^2]: Random Jedi girl [^3]: Son of Luke Skywalker [^4]: Queen of something, Jedi [^5]: Daughter of Tenel Ka and Jacen (which isn’t made public)
Legacy of the Force
Since this was the end of Legacy of the Force, I thought it would be time to look back at the entire series as well.
The overall story arc was, to be honest, not good. A Jedi turning to the dark side - Wow, the world so hasn’t seen that before… The politics stop even pretending to make any sense at all in the last third, and none of the problems are actually solved in a believable way.
At the same time, though, various subplots are done rather nicely. Ben’s actions in the second half of the series are interesting, and while I’ve never been able to see why people care about Boba Fett, the mandalorian[^6] part of the books was actually the best.
[^6]: Mandalore is an ancient warrior culture, the nice bucket head of Star Wars V and VI fame belongs to them.
Mara Jade
There’s no use talking about Legacy of the Force without mentioning the death of Mara Jade, Luke Skywalker’s wife. She was a very major character of the Extended Universe, so killing her off was a rather important event.
To be honest, ever since the New Jedi Order series (the one before this) Mara Jade hadn’t been able to live up to her full potential. Her role was mainly “wife of Luke”, although she could have been (and was, in previous books) a very interesting and cool character in her own right.
Mara Jade was so out of touch with what she should have been that killing her seemed like an act of mercy. I fully believe that it was the best these authors could do with her. Although to be honest, her final book, Sacrifice, where she gets killed actually shows her as good as she could be. All in all, it’s a stupid waste of an interesting character.
What’s probably worse is that this stops playing an important part in the book very soon after. It doesn’t mark an important change, really, it only strengthens everybody’s resolve to keep on doing what they were doing before already.
For the future
I think Star Wars needs way more trains.
A great deal of interesting characters is dead. At the same time, it seems that Luke, Leia and Han have stopped doing interesting things at all and just look on, give advice and “feel something” when it’s convenient. Maybe I’m wrong here, but I wouldn’t count on it.
Ben Skywalker has turned into a more or less interesting character, in many ways the way his mother should have been. Jaina Solo, well, they tried hard to make her interesting, but in my opinion they failed. She just doesn’t do enough unpredictable or individual things all the time. Even when she has original ideas it’s all just “for the mission”.
The next book will be a stand-alone. It’ll be interesting to see what happens after that. I hope it won’t be another galactic war that can only be resolved with a group of core jedi, but I fear the authors have no idea what else to build a series on. Neither do I, of course, but then I’m not getting paid for inventing stuff like that.
Written on May 21st, 2008 at 10:07 am
