Nom Anor is the Yuuzhan Vong executor and intelligence agent who serves as the invasion's advance man. He first appears — unnamed as to species, presented only as a mysterious offworld plotter — in Dark Horse's Crimson Empire II: Council of Blood (1998–1999), and becomes a central antagonist of the nineteen-novel New Jedi Order sequence that opens with R. A. Salvatore's Vector Prime (Del Rey, 1999).
The sleeper
By the time the invasion begins in 25 ABY, Anor has been inside the galaxy for years, fomenting civil wars on worlds nobody was watching and building a picture of a Republic that cannot mobilise. The New Jedi Order's opening move works because the enemy had a case officer on the ground before it had a fleet.
Caste is the character
The Yuuzhan Vong are rigidly stratified — warriors, shapers, priests, intendants, and beneath them all the Shamed Ones — and Nom Anor is an intendant, which is to say a bureaucrat and a spy in a civilisation that worships pain and combat. Everything he does is shaped by having no standing in a warrior culture. He lies constantly, including to his own gods, because lying is the only weapon his caste is issued.
The Prophet
His best material comes late. Fallen from favour and hiding in the undercity of the conquered, terraformed Coruscant, he reinvents himself as Yu'shaa, the Prophet — the messianic leader of the Shamed Ones, preaching a heresy he does not believe to a congregation he despises. It is an extraordinary piece of characterisation for a series villain: a cynic who accidentally becomes the most important religious figure of his generation.
Why the character works
Because he is the only Yuuzhan Vong in nineteen books who is not sincere. The invasion's horror comes from its absolute conviction; Anor is the crack in it, and the series uses him to show the reader what the Yuuzhan Vong look like from inside to someone who does not believe.
Where to read him
Vector Prime introduces him properly; Michael A. Stackpole's Dark Tide I: Onslaught (2000) develops him; the Prophet material runs through the later books to James Luceno's The Unifying Force (2003).
Continuity
Legends. The Yuuzhan Vong and everything about them were placed outside canon by the 2014 reset and have not been restored.
