The New Jedi Order is the most ambitious thing the Expanded Universe ever attempted and the most divisive, and those two facts are the same fact.
The shape of it
Del Rey ran the sequence from 1999 to 2003 across nineteen novels, with further short fiction around them. It opens with R. A. Salvatore’s Vector Prime and closes with James Luceno’s The Unifying Force in November 2003. The premise is an invasion from outside the galaxy by the Yuuzhan Vong, set roughly twenty-one to twenty-five years after Return of the Jedi.
Nineteen novels by a rotating cast of authors, publishing on a schedule, telling one continuous war story. Nothing on this shelf before or since has attempted that scale of serialisation.
The decision that defined it
In the first book, Chewbacca dies — killed saving Anakin Solo when a moon is brought down on the planet Sernpidal. It remains the only occasion on which one of the original trilogy's lead heroes has been killed off in a tie-in novel.
Reader opinion split immediately and has never really closed, between those who read it as a cheap stunt to establish stakes and those who read it as the necessary cost of a story in which the protagonists could actually lose. Both readings are defensible. What is not in dispute is that it worked as a signal: every subsequent book in the sequence was read by an audience that believed the authors would go through with things.
What the scale bought
Room to be strange. A nineteen-novel war can afford a book that stops the plot and does something else entirely, and the standout example is Matthew Stover’s Traitor (2002) — a novel that is almost entirely two characters arguing about the nature of the Force while very little happens. In a standalone trilogy that book could not exist. Inside a long sequence, it is the volume everyone remembers.
What the scale cost
Accessibility, permanently. Nineteen novels is not a recommendation you can make to a newcomer, and the sequence assumes years of prior reading before it starts. It is also relentlessly grim in a way that a lot of readers found unlike Star Wars — which was, to be fair, rather the point, but a point that not everybody wanted made.
Reading it now
It is Legends, it is long, and it is the deep end. If you have read the Bantam-era books and want to know what happens when the Expanded Universe stops protecting its cast, this is the answer. If you have not, start somewhere else and come back — the sequence rewards the investment, but it will not carry you.
Retrospective on a completed publishing sequence. No forward-looking claims.
