Book Review: Star Wars The High Republic - Light of the Jedi by Charles Soule

This was always going to be...interesting.

On the one hand, going back hundreds of years before the Battle of Yavin IV is a good idea - we've got plenty of stories in the Star Wars universe that take place between the Siege of Naboo and the Battle of Exegol, so it makes sense to pick a new time period and start fresh. But on the other hand, this presents a bunch of problems.

Starting with this: If you take out the Empire, and you take out the Sith, and you take out Luke and Leia and Han and Chewie, and you take out X-Wings and Tie Fighters, do you really have Star Wars? It's kind of a Theseus Paradox - if you take all the Star Wars out of Star Wars, can you still call it Star Wars? Obvious from the title, this book leans heavily on the fully-operational Jedi, and revolves around hyperspace, but when the biggest callback to the Star Wars we know (besides a cameo from Yoda) is the San Tekka clan, what exactly makes it Star Wars?

There is also a problem with focus. Everything we think of when we think about Star Wars happens when the Republic is overthrown, the Empire takes control, and is finally defeated by the Rebels. That's a space of around 35 (Earth) years. We had heard in the Prequels that the Republic had stood for a thousand years, but never learned much about what happened in those years. Now that we're starting to...does it really make sense how much we focused on a 35 year period of time? It kind of diminishes the Skywalker saga to learn that the non-Skywalker history was rich as well.

The story itself is above average. The first third of the book is brutal - a giant starship hits something in hyperspace, and the Jedi are called in to help stop the pieces of it from jumping out of hyperspace and destroying planets. Cleaning up starship debris is the space equivalent of a sandstorm (insert DEEP HURTING joke here); the book doesn't get interesting until the protagonists are able to question what exactly the ship would have run into.

That's where we get to the Nihil, who will be the main antagonists of the High Republic series. I've seen mixed opinions on them, but I'll say I actually warmed to them as villains the more I learned about them. They're a gang in the Outer Rim with a rather on-the-nose name (they also listen to music called "wreckpunk", which I hope we can all agree to forget about) made up of all kinds of different races and species. What sets them apart from Crimson Dawn or Black Sun, though, is that they managed to kidnap some one who is a prodigy at finding hyperspace lanes.

While much of the book feels like it takes place alongside the Prequels, the one thing that really sets it apart is that hyperspace is relatively new and unexplored. In fact, the Republic has just barely touched the Outer Rim, and there are few known hyperspace lanes. However, the Nihil captured a woman who can instinctively pick out hyperspace lanes - it's like if the Mafia created the atom bomb. This hyperspace mastery is what sets the Nihil apart from other gangs and sets them up to be a problem across the entire galaxy.

Protecting the galaxy from the Nihil are, of course, the Jedi. There are a ton of them here, although they do, shall we say, get pared down as the book goes on. The Jedi do have their moments. It's cool to see more races represented: there's an Ithorian Jedi (remember Hammerhead from the Cantina scene?), there's a Trandoshan Jedia named Sskeer (the only name I remember from the book - I hope he's a distant ancestor to Bossk!), and a Wookie padawan who actually has a few great scenes focusing on his inability to communicate with most people. It was also interesting to get inside the heads of the Jedi and see how they interacted with the Force, from the one Jedi who saw the Force as a vast, deep ocean, to another Jedi (my personal favorite) who interacted with the Force through a song that played through her head.

Just like the Prequels, though, the book has a Han Solo problem - all the heroes seem upright and stonefaced. Nobody's all that funny, nobody mixes it up, nobody's the least bit scruffy. That is a problem for engaging with this book - so far all the heroes are people we can't be, not people we could be making hard choices.

Obviously, there's a lot of time to fix at least the Han Solo problem - this is only the first book of what is supposed to be a huge series of books/comics/cartoons. Hopefully things pick up with the next one. Five out of ten hot dogs.