Two novels, one author, one character, twenty-six years apart, in two continuities that do not acknowledge each other. Timothy Zahn is the only Star Wars writer who has been given this opportunity, and reading our reviews of Heir to the Empire and Thrawn side by side turns up something neither review says on its own.
The 1991 book is not about him
Heir to the Empire (Bantam Spectra, May 1991) is a New Republic novel with an antagonist in it. The viewpoint belongs to the heroes; Thrawn is a pressure applied from off-stage, and most of his effectiveness on the page comes from the reader watching competent protagonists fail to anticipate him. He is a structural device, and an unusually good one.
The 2017 book is entirely about him
Thrawn (Del Rey, April 2017) inverts the arrangement. Now he is the viewpoint, and the tension has to come from somewhere else — so Zahn relocates it into the institution. The novel becomes a workplace story about an alien officer being promoted by a xenophobic navy that needs his results and resents his existence. That is a different engine entirely, and it is why the canon novel works for readers who have never seen a Star Destroyer.
What the pair reveals
That the character was always a lens rather than a subject. In 1991 he is the thing the heroes cannot see around. In 2017 he is the thing that cannot see around itself — a man whose analytical brilliance is precisely calibrated to the wrong institution. Read together, the two books make an argument about competence in the service of a bad cause that neither makes alone.
Which one to read first
The 2017 novel, if you are new. It assumes nothing, it connects to the television series most readers have already seen, and it is a cleaner piece of construction. The 1991 novel, if you care about how this shelf came to exist — it is the more historically consequential book by a distance, and our anniversary piece makes that case at length.
The scores are close and should not be
The two reviews land close to one another, which flatters the older book on craft and undersells it on importance. That is the exact failure mode of a ten-point scale, and it is why the verdict line matters more than the number. If you want the honest version: the 2017 book is better made, the 1991 book mattered more, and you should read both.
The full route through the rest of the shelf — Alliances, Treason, the Ascendancy prequels and the remaining Legends volumes, Dark Force Rising and The Last Command — is laid out in our Thrawn reading guide.
Roundup of this site’s own reviews. All opinions here are the site’s.
