Book Review: Star Wars - The Living Force by John Jackson Miller

For decades I've been enraptured by politics. I've sought out multiple sources of information about obscure elections, lived and died by winning candidates, spent nights tossing and turning in bed wondering how things in government will turn out.

This obsession with politics comes from a place of love, my belief in treating others with kindness, gentleness, and respect (which is also how I have to keep reminding my son to treat the cat). That this core value manifests in prioritizing politics isn't a huge leap, but by obsessing with politics I sometimes lose sight of how many other, smaller but no less important opportunities there are to make the world better, like running a diaper drive or making plates of food for the infirm or donating clothes for the needy. It's important to keep your eyes on the big picture, but you can't lose sight of the smaller opportunities to make people's lives better.

Seems like a strange way to lead into a review of a Star Wars book - but that's what's at the core of this fascinating book.

In Star Wars - The Living Force, which takes place a few years prior to The Phantom Menace, the Jedi are on the decline, and are forced to close some of their outposts in far-flung regions of the galaxy. As the Jedi outposts move out, criminals move in, and life deteriorates. As the Jedi prepare to formalize the closing of their outpost on the planet Kwenn, a fortuitous event happens - Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi stop a robbery on a passenger transport, but the passengers are less than grateful - in fact, they blame the Jedis' absence for causing the spike in crime. Back on Coruscant, Qui-Gon reports what he learned to the Council. He then issues a challenge - for the whole Council to visit Kwenn, regardless of whether the outpost closes or not, to let the people know they care. And as an extra challenge, they each have a mission - to do one good thing.

In the Star Wars universe, this shows how the Jedi have been so focused on the Cosmic Force - more of the big-picture part of the Force - that they've lost sight of the Living Force, the part of the Force that guides interactions between living things.

The Jedi Masters go to Kwenn and actually interact with the people, to varying degrees of awkwardness. One Jedi takes over an abandoned school, another group tries to quell a taxi strike, and Yoda helps an old man be at peace with his passing when the man's son is unable to to visit him.

The concept behind this is spectacular - not only because of the fish-out-of-water situations the Jedi find themselves in (like the Jedi who decides he is a love expert), but also because it's so important to remember that distinction, that we all have the power to do good things, no matter the scale.

I'm focusing here on half of the story - there's also another half of the story that deals with space pirates and criminal gangs, and has some cameos by a future prominent Admiral, and at the end those stories intertwine - the pirate story is fine (with one point noted below), but it was the interactions that fascinated me.

The only real drawback in this story is that it had an opportunity to make a real statement about the drawbacks of the Jedi Order but pulled back just enough. Keep in mind that I say that because one of the main points of the Prequels was to show that the Jedi Order wasn't nearly as righteous as it was made out to be in the OT era. When we find out the origin of the leader of the space pirates, there was a real opportunity to strike another blow against the order - the pirate was a child on a war-torn planet, and when she was then placed in an orphanage with two other children, both of them displayed Force sensitivity and were then taken away by Jedi, leaving the future pirate to grow up all alone without any friends or family. If this came to a full stop right there, and in the inevitable confrontation with the Jedi they had no justification for that, it would have been perfect. But it's revealed that the Jedi who took the two was Sifo Dyas, who was so busy looking into possible futures that he neglected the necessities of the present (like finding Youngling prospects, which he was subsequently barred from doing), and that there would have been rules and procedures that would have prevented the pirate from being left alone in the orphanage. I feel like this was an unnecessary deus ex machina - it would have fit in more with the spirit of the Prequels if the Force sensitivity overruled everything.

That aside, this was a great Star Wars book, one of the best that I've read. I hope it inspires readers, just like the Jedi, to do even just one good thing. Eight out of ten hot dogs!