A great deal was riding on this modest book. In September 2014 Lucasfilm had just retired thirty-eight years of Expanded Universe fiction, and the first novel of the replacement had to demonstrate that the new arrangement — books, television and films sharing one continuity — could produce something worth reading. John Jackson Miller was handed that job and responded by writing an industrial thriller about workplace safety.
The premise
Gorse and its moon Cynda are a mining operation supplying thorilide, a material the Empire needs for capital-ship construction. Count Vidian, an efficiency expert who has replaced most of his body with machinery and all of his ethics with throughput targets, arrives to increase output. His proposed method will destroy the moon and everyone working on it. Kanan Jarrus is a drifting explosives worker who would very much like not to be involved.
Vidian
The novel’s best idea. He is not a Sith or a warlord; he is a management consultant with a bestselling book and a body count, and the Empire loves him for entirely rational reasons. Miller writes the horror of him as procedural rather than gothic — the memos, the quotas, the metric that makes killing a workforce the cheaper option. It is the closest the canon line has come to explaining what the Empire actually does on an average Tuesday.
Kanan and Hera
The book’s assignment was to show how two Star Wars Rebels leads met, and it does that without requiring the reader to have seen a frame of the show. Kanan is written as a man who has spent a decade successfully not being anything, and Hera as someone who has spent the same decade being extremely specific about what she is. The dynamic is fine rather than thrilling, but the restraint is welcome — nobody here is being introduced with a fanfare.
Craft
Miller is a reliable, unshowy professional and this is a reliable, unshowy novel: clean structure, decent pace, one good villain, no wasted chapters. The prose does not try anything. The supporting cast — particularly Skelly, a paranoid demolitions veteran who is right — is better than the lead pair.
Where it sits
First novel of the current canon, and a prequel to a television series it does not require. Read it before Tarkin if you are working through the publication route, and read it knowing it is a beginning rather than a highlight.
Who should read it
Readers interested in how the new continuity started, and anyone who likes their Empire depicted as a spreadsheet with a fleet attached. Casual readers can safely start elsewhere.
