Eli N. Vanto is a human Imperial officer and the deuteragonist of Timothy Zahn's Thrawn (Del Rey, 2017). A supply-track cadet from the Wild Space fringe, he is attached to the newly discovered Thrawn because he happens to speak the trade language of Thrawn's region, and spends the novel being dragged into a career he did not choose as translator, aide, student and eventually protégé.
He is the reader's way in — an outsider watching an outsider — and the novel's quiet subject is what association with Thrawn costs a human officer in an institution built on human supremacy. At the end of the book Thrawn sends him to the Unknown Regions as a liaison to the Chiss Ascendancy, and he returns in Thrawn: Treason (2019) carrying a warning about Thrawn's own people.
Catalogue entry. This figure has a verified record here rather than a full write-up — the encyclopedia labels its own depth instead of padding it.
