The High Republic is the most ambitious thing Lucasfilm publishing has ever attempted: an entire era invented from nothing, with no films to serve, developed by a standing group of authors across novels, comics, audio and young-adult lines simultaneously. It launched in January 2021 with Charles Soule's Light of the Jedi and ran in three phases through 2025. Everything in it is current canon, which makes it the only deep-history era on this site you can read without a continuity disclaimer.
The premise
Roughly two centuries before The Phantom Menace, the Republic is expansive, wealthy and pleased with itself. Chancellor Lina Soh's slogan is “We are all the Republic,” and she backs it with Great Works — most visibly Starlight Beacon, a vast station in the Outer Rim meant to project rescue, medicine and hyperspace navigation into frontier space. The Jedi are not civil servants yet. They are thousands strong, dressed in gold-trimmed cream rather than beige, deployed as first responders, and genuinely admired.
What goes wrong
Two things, and they are the same thing. The Great Hyperspace Disaster of 232 BBY — a freighter breaking up in hyperspace and spraying lethal debris across inhabited systems — exposes how little the Republic actually controls the space it claims. And the Nihil, a raider confederation under Marchion Ro, turn out to be less a criminal problem than a political argument: the frontier does not want the Republic's rescue, and Ro is willing to kill on a planetary scale to prove the Republic cannot deliver it anyway.
The programme's structural masterstroke is that Ro is not a Sith and has no interest in the Force except as a thing to neutralise. His weapon against the Jedi is not a lightsaber. It is a creature that eats their connection to the Force, and the Jedi's inability to conceive of that is the point.
The three phases
Phase I (2021–2022) is set at 232 BBY and covers the Disaster and the Nihil's first war. Phase II (2022–2023) jumps back a hundred and fifty years to 382 BBY, to a conflict over the Force itself on Jedha and a cult called the Path of the Open Hand — the origin story for everything Phase I assumed. Phase III (2023–2025) returns to 229 BBY for the Nihil's Stormwall and the Occlusion Zone, and finishes the war. Read Phase I first regardless of chronology; Phase II is a prequel and works like one.
Where it meets the screen
The Disney+ series The Acolyte (2024) sits at the era's far end, around 132 BBY — roughly a century after the novels and a century before the films. It is High Republic in label and tone but shares almost no characters with the books, so it is a clean entry point rather than a sequel.
For readers coming from the films, this is the era that makes the prequel-era Jedi legible. The Order in Fall of the Jedi is not what it always was. It is what it became after two centuries of finding out its confidence was not warranted, and the High Republic is the record of that discovery in progress.
