In October 1999 Del Rey took over the Star Wars novel licence and opened with a book that kills Chewbacca. Everything about the New Jedi Order’s reputation — its ambition, its bleakness, the arguments it still generates — is set by that decision, and Vector Prime is far more important than it is good.
The reset
The Bantam era had produced fifteen years of self-contained trilogies in which the New Republic won, the villains were Imperial remnants, and the status quo was restored by the last chapter. Del Rey’s answer was a single nineteen-book war against an enemy from outside the galaxy: the Yuuzhan Vong, who use grown biotechnology instead of machines, cannot be sensed through the Force, and consider pain a devotional practice. It is a genuinely good premise and it solves the Bantam problem at a stroke — this enemy cannot be negotiated back into the previous shape of the setting.
The death
Chewbacca dies on Sernpidal, pulling Anakin Solo clear while a moon comes down on the planet. Salvatore stages it well: there is no last stand and no speech, just a Wookiee who will not board the ship, and a boy who has to leave him. The aftershock — Han Solo blaming his own son, and staying that way for three books — is the most emotionally honest thing the series does.
It remains the only occasion on which one of the original trilogy’s lead heroes has been killed off in a tie-in novel, and the argument about whether it was necessary has been running ever since. Our own view is in the dispatch on the war.
Where it is lumpy
Salvatore is writing a first chapter of a nineteen-volume plan, and it shows. Enormous amounts of setup are delivered as conversation. Nom Anor and the invasion vanguard are introduced faster than they are characterised. Mara Jade’s illness, a major thread for the next several books, is here mostly as a symptom list. And the prose is noticeably plainer than the material deserves — this is a book about the end of an epoch written in the register of a competent action novel.
The Yuuzhan Vong problem
Their unreachability through the Force is the series’ strongest idea and its most divisive; a great many readers found the whole conceit an unwelcome intrusion of hard science fiction into a fantasy setting. Whether you agree, it does what it was designed to do: it makes the Jedi insufficient, which is the only way to write a war the heroes can lose.
Who should read it
Anyone intending to read the New Jedi Order, which you should — it contains Traitor, and several others nearly as good. Just be warned that the opening volume is the weakest of the early run, and that the series it launches is considerably better than its launch.
