#i could talk for ages about the differences between the ascendancy and the “normal” galaxy and what they think of them

[spectral-musette]

I just finished reading Thrawn: Alliances by Timothy Zahn, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, as expected.

If anybody was holding back because they hadn’t yet read Thrawn but they’re still excited or curious about the Thrawn and Anakin or the Thrawn and Vader team up, there’s not really any need.  Alliances stands alone very well.

(some spoilers to follow, both for the novel itself and references to the end of Rebels)

I wouldn’t even say that Season 3 of Rebels is necessarily required viewing to read Alliances, though it does set the scene. The novel picks up shortly after the finale of S3, so there are some Rebels spoilers, but fairly old ones (I mean, you could probably deduce that Thrawn doesn’t capture the Ghost crew at the end of S3 by the fact that a S4 exists, right?)

It also confirms that Vader stepped back from the pursuit of Kanan and Ezra at the end of S2 because Palpatine tugged on the leash and smacked him with a rolled up newspaper. Vader is fixated on Thrawn’s inability to capture the Spectres at Atollon, going so far as to suspect that Thrawn might be a Jedi sympathizer.  Ironically of course, this isn’t completely untrue. Vader knows that Thrawn had been a willing ally to Anakin once, and that the two had parted in mutual respect at least, if not tenuous friendship. It’s just that Thrawn’s sympathies don’t necessarily dictate Thrawn’s actions.

On some level, Vader is asking the same question that the reader might be asking (and I’ve asked as a reader many times): how can Thrawn, a keenly intelligent, charismatic person of some degree of principle, serve Palpatine, who is clearly very evil? Vader’s ongoing question is whether Thrawn’s first loyalty is to the Empire, or whether ultimately he still has a higher loyalty to the Chiss Ascendancy. And in the deepest, most hidden part of Vader where Anakin still lives, does he want the answer to be the latter?

The two time periods are completely intermixed. The effect is a little like flipping channels between an episode of Clone Wars and an episode of Rebels (albeit one featuring only Imperials). But it’s done in such a way that the interconnected storylines unfold simultaneously, with the reader getting just the right amount of information at the right time. It’s well done and basically effortless to follow along with. The chapter breaks often feature dramatic narrative parallels between the two stories.

TZ’s narrative voices for Clone Wars era Anakin and Padme are both very well done. Anakin is delightfully pissy and competitive with Thrawn, and the way that the two characters find their footing as allies highlights the fact that they’re both brilliant, just in different ways. We’re used to seeing characters like Pellaeon (or even Eli Vanto in Thrawn) being quite outpaced by Thrawn’s machinations. Anakin (and Vader) is perfectly capable of following, he just tends to attack problems in different ways, and Thrawn periodically goes along with Anakin(Vader)’s more aggressive solutions.

Padme’s adventure on her own is entertaining as well. She spends a bit of it rather stuck, stranded and waiting for Anakin to show up as reinforcements, but it didn’t come off as too damselly to me, just that she’s biding her time and planning her next moves.

Thrawn spends about 5 minutes with the two of them before he’s totally convinced that they’re a couple (despite their protestations to the contrary), which he clearly already suspected just from the way Anakin talked about Padme anyway. I could’ve done with a little more romance – Anakin and Padme’s dramatic reunion is pretty dampened by “let’s not make out in front of the blue guy” (he knows anyway, so why bother?). Not that I don’t appreciate the romance that I was given; I just would’ve liked a little more.

And TZ’s handling of Vader’s point of view was interesting. Anytime Vader is forced to recall something that happened to him as Anakin, he internally refers to his former self as “The Jedi”, avoiding the mere mention of his name as much as possible. He doesn’t even tell Thrawn that he killed Anakin (as he told Ahsoka at Malachor), merely repeating that Anakin Skywalker is dead. It rings very true to the character and the state of dissociated identity that he should be in at this point, still a few years before he discovers that Padme’s son is alive.

My big question as a reader was, of course: will Thrawn figure out that Vader was once Anakin Skywalker? Spoilers, naturally he does. But where we pick up the story, he seems to already suspect strongly enough to very deliberately namedrop Anakin and set verbal traps regarding their past adventure. It all reads very well, but I’m still left wondering what Thrawn’s first clues were. How do you look at Vader, and think, ah yes, this must be the passionate, reckless golden adonis I once met? You can’t really say it’s that Vader appeared as Palpatine’s apprentice right after Anakin’s death, because Vader’s appearance coincides with the deaths of the majority of the Jedi Order. I don’t doubt that Thrawn could figure it out, but I would’ve liked to know when it first occurred to him.

And because Thrawn treats Vader, in some respects, how he treated Anakin, Vader has moments where he tends to act in a slightly, marginally more Anakin-like fashion around Thrawn. There are moments when the troops in the First Legion expect a reprimand from Vader that never comes. And the moment that Vader chooses to hold back from Force-choking Thrawn shows that on some level he still wants to prove himself Thrawn’s equal at his own game of tactics and observation and intellect rather than merely cow him with a display of dark power. Ultimately it’s fleeting though - Thrawn finally accepts Vader’s insistence that Anakin is dead, and we know that they won’t share a stage again before Vader’s redemption and Anakin’s (final) death.

The story also makes a Nature-of-the-Force statement by telling us that, to Thrawn’s knowledge, Force Sensitivity manifests in the Chiss only in very limited ways. That is, the Chiss navigate deep space via the precognitive abilities of Sensitives, but that Force sensitive Chiss are only gifted with precognition, only female, and that their sensitivity fades over time. I’m feeling…skeptical about this. It’s possible that Thrawn’s knowledge of these matters is limited (he admits that it’s pretty secretive), or that Chiss culture is actually shaping the experience of the Sensitives? Maybe precognition is the only skill they’re encouraged to develop? Maybe it’s only tested for in girls? Maybe the girls are permitted to retire from their stressful careers as navigators when they reach a certain age and live normal lives? We’ve seen Jedi knights from dozens of species, and while different Jedi certainly seem to have different gifts, we’ve always been led to think that this just varied by the individual, not that there were definite species-specific limitations.

This does clarify the fact that Thrawn’s pilot/navigator in the Clone Wars era storyline who never appears on page is in fact a little girl or a young woman. (What did the story look like from her point of view? How curious she must’ve been about Anakin! What is her dynamic with Thrawn like?) And so, at the end of Rebels, with Ezra Bridger and Thrawn cast blindly into Wild space/The Unknown Regions by the Purrgil’s hyperjump, this actually is a situation that Thrawn is relatively familiar with – he could presumably help Ezra figure out how to navigate via the Chiss method? And, if they end up in Chiss territory, Ezra could open up the horizons of the Chiss navigators to Jedi abilities they’ve perhaps always had but never developed? The idea of Ezra trying to train a herd of tiny Chiss girls in Jedi teachings is somehow pleasing. It’s an interesting seed planted here, and I would love to see what it flowers into, if things go in that direction.

Another interesting suggestion is that, because the Force sensitive Chiss navigators are called “sky walkers”, Anakin’s family name could’ve originated out in the Unknown Regions near Chiss space. Perhaps some precognitive Skywalker ancestor had a brush with the Chiss, and either took the epithet for the navigators as their surname, or, conversely, gave their surname to the profession. Or it could just be a coincidence.

I’m a little confused about Thrawn’s initial response to Anakin’s name. Either Anakin translated his surname into the trade language (which doesn’t make sense), or Thrawn already understands much more Galactic Basic at this point than he lets on (likely).

And I was pleased that, I’m pretty sure, Outbound Flight remains mostly canon-compliant. I know it’s not canon, but I’m very fond of it, and so far I don’t think anything in either Thrawn novel contradicts it in a major way.

And, as an aside, though I really enjoyed the Thrawn and Anakin dynamic, I can’t help but wonder what a team up between Thrawn and Obi-Wan would’ve been like. I don’t think that Obi-Wan would’ve felt intellectually threatened by Thrawn’s personality in the way that Anakin did. I also think Obi-Wan would’ve been much more curious about the Chiss, in contrast to Anakin’s single-minded focus on the mission/saving Padme, which Thrawn might’ve been quite wary about. I’m not really sure how I think they might’ve gotten along, only that the collaboration of two of the greatest tactical minds of the Star Wars galaxy must surely be a thing to witness?

On a note totally unrelated to the actual content of the book, I HATED the way that the matte dustcover of the book felt. I literally made blackberrycreek carry the book through Barnes and Noble for me. I read it with the dustcover off (not unusual for me), and I wasn’t pleased with the white-on-white binding either. I suspect that they were trying to evoke the white grand admiral’s uniform or something, but it just looked cheap to me. Anyway, that dustcover felt terrible, and also the B&N exclusive sticker was murder to remove and left a nasty adhesive residue, what the heck, go back to gloss, Del Rey.