Rae Sloane is a human female from the industrial Core world Ganthel. She was introduced in John Jackson Miller's A New Dawn (Del Rey, 2014) — the first novel published in the rebooted canon — as a young Imperial captain, and rose across subsequent books to Grand Admiral.
The believer
What makes Sloane worth a dossier is that she is not cynical. She genuinely holds the Imperial argument: that order is worth its price, that competence should be rewarded, that the alternative is chaos. The novels then spend hundreds of pages showing her an Empire that is racist, wasteful and run by men far worse at her job than she is, and watching her metabolise that is the most interesting sustained character work in the current canon's Imperial fiction.
Aftermath
Chuck Wendig's Aftermath trilogy (Del Rey, 2015–2017) is her main text. It puts her at the centre of the Imperial collapse after Endor, through the Battle of Jakku, and into the flight to the Unknown Regions that the sequel-era material builds the First Order out of. Her partnership and rivalry with the shadowy Fleet Admiral Rax is the spine of the trilogy.
Canon only
Sloane is a post-2014 creation with no Legends equivalent. The Legends account of the Imperial remnant after Endor is completely different — the Thrawn trilogy, the Imperial warlords, Daala — and readers should not try to reconcile the two.
Reading note
Read A New Dawn first even though it is chronologically much earlier. Meeting her before the rank makes everything after it land harder.
