Voort saBinring — “Piggy” — is a Gamorrean male and a founding member of Wraith Squadron, serving from the unit’s creation in 7 ABY through most of the Yuuzhan Vong War. Aaron Allston created him for X-Wing: Wraith Squadron (Bantam Spectra, 1998).
The premise is a deliberate provocation. Gamorreans in Star Wars had been, since 1983, visual shorthand for stupidity — grunting guards outside a throne room. Allston’s answer was to make one of them a gifted mathematician and ballistics specialist, and then to make the reason genuinely ugly: Voort is a survivor of Imperial experimentation, cognitively enhanced by people who regarded him as material.
What the books do with that is better than the concept. Voort is neither grateful nor triumphant. He is a person whose intelligence is inseparable from an atrocity committed against him, working alongside pilots who mostly call him by a nickname he did not choose. In the Wraith novels the comedy and the cruelty are frequently the same sentence.
He returns as the lead of Mercy Kill (Del Rey, 2012), the last Wraith novel and Allston’s final Star Wars book, set decades later with the squadron reconstituted for one more job. Voort is Star Wars Legends.
