In May 1991 Bantam Spectra published a Star Wars novel by a working science-fiction writer named Timothy Zahn, and the modern expanded universe began. It is difficult now, with several hundred books in print, to explain how unlikely that was. There had been Star Wars fiction before. There had not been Star Wars fiction that people queued for.
What it does
Heir to the Empire opens five years after the Battle of Endor. The New Republic holds Coruscant and cannot hold much else. Leia is pregnant with twins and drowning in ministerial work. Luke is the entire future of the Jedi Order and has no idea how to teach. Han is trying to be a politician's husband. It is, structurally, a novel about the exhausting part that comes after the victory parade — which in 1991 was a genuinely fresh idea for this franchise.
Into that walks Grand Admiral Thrawn, the last of the Emperor's senior commanders, who has spent the interval in the Unknown Regions and has come back with a plan, a fleet and a completely different theory of how to fight a war.
Why Thrawn worked
Because he is not Vader. He does not choke subordinates. He does not shout. He promotes competence and he explains himself, which makes him legible to the reader and therefore genuinely frightening. Zahn also gave him a limit — he is a strategist surrounded by an institution that keeps handing him worse material than he deserves — and the tension between the two is the engine of all three books.
Mara Jade
The other lasting invention. A former Imperial agent with a personal grudge against Luke Skywalker, introduced as an antagonist and written with enough interiority that the reader is never quite sure which way she will break. Thirty-five years of expanded-universe fiction have not produced a better original character.
Where it shows its age
The prose is functional rather than beautiful. Some of the technology reads as very late-1980s — the ysalamiri conceit in particular is a plot device wearing a biology costume. And the novel assumes a reader who has seen the original trilogy recently and needs no reintroduction to anyone.
Canon status
Since April 2014 this book has been part of Star Wars Legends rather than current canon. That changes nothing about whether it is worth reading. The canon Thrawn of Zahn's 2017 novel is a different man with the same name, and the two versions are best read as two drafts of a good idea.
