Heir to the Empire

Well, here was a pleasant surprise. Though I’ve been aware of the legion of Star Wars novels that have been available since I was in elementary school, I’ve never read any, suspecting that their quality would lie somewhere between a Wookieepedia article and the usual movie tie-in novel. But over the years Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy has gotten consistent enough praise for me to notice, and the strong recommendations of several of y’all whose taste I trust finally convinced me to check out the first volume, Heir to the Empire.

This novel picks up a few years after the original film trilogy ended. Han Solo and Princess Leia have married and are expecting twins. Leia, slowly undergoing her own Jedi training under Luke, learns that the twins will be especially strong with the Force. Luke begins the story troubled by the division with the Rebellion—now billing itself as the New Republic—especially internal factions attempting to assert themselves against the Rebellion’s more established leaders. Like many rebellions, success may prove to be the worst thing that could happen to it.

This vulnerability of the New Republic, struggling for both legitimacy and unified purpose as the Empire crumbles, arises as the Empire calls up a new leader to deal with the threat to its hegemony. Grand Admiral Thrawn, a blue-skinned, red-eyed being who has spent years campaigning in imperial backwaters, replaces Darth Vader. Thrawn views his predecessor as an unhinged mystic who catastrophically failed the Empire. He approaches defeating the New Republic with a combination of icy rationality and art. A connoisseur of painting and sculpture from worlds all over the Galaxy, Thrawn believes that understanding an opponent’s cultural background is as important in defeating them as pure logistics.

Not that the logistics don’t matter. The destruction of the second Death Star has created a manpower shortage across the Empire. Thrawn’s recruits are young and inexperienced, their training rushed and their discipline and protocol incomplete at best. Further, there is a shipping shortage across the Galaxy.

It’s this logistical problem that slowly becomes the center of the plot and draws the different characters together, as the New Republic dispatches Han to negotiate hiring smugglers as ad hoc transport—including some familiar characters from Han’s past—and Thrawn lays plans of his own for commandeering the vessels the Empire needs.

The one important plot element I haven’t mentioned here is the wild card: Mara Jade, a woman employed by one of the crime lords Han approaches about working for the New Republic. Mara is cagey about her past even with her boss, has an impressive breadth of technical skills she picked up who knows where, is familiar with the Force and lightsabers, and yearns to kill Luke Skywalker. But the less revealed about her, her background, and her quest to confront and kill Luke the better.

There’s much more going on in the story than even the above may suggest—including a trip to the Wookiee home world, a rogue leftover Jedi with a taste for mind control, and a race of brutal assassins Thrawn puts on the scent of Leia and her twins—and the richness with which Zahn evokes the world of the original trilogy is one of its pleasures. Heir to the Empire gives us a situation that believably continues that seen at the end of Return of the Jedi and introduces new complexity and depth to both the Rebellion and the Empire. But best of all, it provides an excellent villain. Thrawn is coolheaded, canny, skilled in both long-term strategy and tactical improvisation, and his insistence that culture matters combines menacingly with a typical Imperial willingness to use force. He proves a genuine threat to both the New Republic and to the familiar characters we care about.

But Zahn also manages to do what Disney failed at twenty years on: using the originals and their world to drive off in new directions that aren’t mere pastiche. Everything in Heir to the Empire feels truer to the original films and—perhaps even more importantly—plausible and true to real life than anything in the Disney trilogy. As I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s no wonder fans of books like this are ticked off with Disney.

But if Heir to the Empire stands out in comparison with something like The Last Jedi, that’s because it was already good in its own right. The quality of the writing itself is middling, improving over the course of the novel, but the plotting, characterization, and thoroughness of the world imagined by Zahn is outstanding. Heir to the Empire is solid genre fiction, which I’ve argued before no one should turn up their nose at, and enjoyable from beginning to end. I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

Preliminary notes on worldbuilding

Over the weekend I started reading my first Star Wars novel, Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn. This isn’t my usual fare but it came highly recommended enough by enough trusted friends that I finally picked up a copy last year. I’m enjoying it.

What I’ve found especially enjoyable is the convincing post-Return of the Jedi situation Zahn imagines: the Empire struggling to recoup its losses, especially in manpower, and calling in reserves from the outer edges of its reach, and the Rebellion threatened by diverging priorities, in-fighting, overconfidence, and poor choices leading to bad PR. Grand Admiral Thrawn is not unlike “Hitler’s Fireman,” Field Marshal Walter Model, being rushed from one doomed campaign to another on the strength of his tactical acumen, and this outcome for the Rebellion will be familiar to anyone who saw Lawrence of Arabia or who has studied the American Revolution in real depth. (It is, in fact, the better outcome, since the members of most resistance movements end up like the protagonists of Rogue One, the most realistic Star Wars movie.)

That is, Heir to the Empire has good worldbuilding.

I hate the term worldbuilding.

It was cute as a term for what novelists, especially those dealing in fantastical or unfamiliar worlds, have to do to make their stories believable the first 10,000 times I heard it. But the more I heard it the less I liked it, or at least the way it was used—especially when it was used as a single criterion for praise of condemnation of a novel.

At any rate, Heir to the Empire got me thinking about this topic again, and I wanted to get some of my thoughts and misgivings about it down in writing. Consider the following informal preliminary notes toward a full account of worldbuilding.

As I conceive of it, “good” worldbuilding works along or toward the following aspects of a story:

• Plausibility

• Complication

• Depth

• Thoroughness

In addition to their obvious purposes—any story should be plausible, right? and “deep” is always preferable to “shallow”—the first three should all suggest the fourth.

This brings me back, as so often, to John Gardner’s “fictive dream.” I’ve written about this in much more detail before, but the short version is that fiction works like a dream in absorbing the dreamer’s attention with a situation and story that are unquestionably real as long as the dream endures. It should be “vivid and continuous,” with the reader’s senses convinced by carefully selected concrete details and nothing to distract and “awaken” them.

Gardner’s conception of fiction as a dream is key to my own understanding of writing, but if it is missing or fails to account for anything it is the strangest and most uncanny aspect of dreaming. In a real dream, we simply know a lot of things beyond the specific events and details of the dream itself. A dream comes prepackaged with unexplained context. This is often the most difficult part of a dream to explain to whatever patient person you’re telling about it: “I was in the lobby at work, but it wasn’t really the lobby, it was an airport terminal, and I was there to…”

Worldbuilding’s best and most proper function, I think, is to fulfil this role, to provide context for what is assumed by the characters within the story. Because really vivid characters will seem to have existed before your story begins, in a world that was carrying on without waiting for you, the writer, or the reader to show up.

I have two basic problems with worldbuilding as it is popularly talked about. The first arises with the verbs I keep using: seem just now, and suggest above.

There is no law governing how much worldbuilding an author should or must do for a given story. It’s going to depend on the story. A novel about ordinary people with nine-to-five jobs set last year will not need a lot of deliberate, calculated explanation. A story set in, say, the marches between the native Britons and the invading Anglo-Saxons in AD 550, or in a fantasy world, or in a galaxy far far away, will require much more. In writing a novel like these, some authors will lay it on with a trowel, and some readers will complain if they don’t.

But worldbuilding works best by suggesting thoroughness. The full world imagined by the writer should come through organically, without a lot of direct explanation, and “build” through allusive power that also characterizes and advances the plot. This requires skill and art. The infodump—which is not the same thing as exposition—does not. The writer must resist to urge to put every detail on the page. They must know what to leave out.

Pro and con examples: Tolkien is the paradigmatic example of allusive, suggestive worldbuilding done well. People who complain about the long songs or mentions of “irrelevant” legends of historical characters miss this dimension of his storytelling and read an impoverished version of his work. Robert Jordan, on the other, hand, actually does most of the things people accuse Tolkien of doing: going off on tangents, bringing the story to a halt for extraneous info, overexplaining, overdescribing, overstuffing.

My second problem with worldbuilding is that, as much as it is discussed as some special characteristic of fantasy, science fiction, or some other genre, it is something all writers of all fiction should be doing. Indeed, if they’re doing a good job of writing fiction at all, they’re already doing it. It is inseparable from imagination and good craftsmanship and is, ultimately, a meaningless subcategory of creativity. See again Gardner’s fictive dream.

Again, these are notes on the subject, not an exhaustive treatment. I may revisit the topic again soon, especially if having gotten this into writing I’m able to refine my thoughts.