This is part 2 of a long sketch. For part 1, go here.

51%

Ralrra is concerned that Leia and Chewbacca will be spotted on Kashyyyk and ratted out to the Empire, yet I read no indication that Leia is wearing a disguise or even a cloak. Even her dumbass mother wore a disguise when on the run from people who might kill her.

52%

Luke was stranded in deep space, so Karrde’s ship shows up and offers to rescue him. Luke hears a ‘cool female voice’ on his radio. This can only mean one thing: The triumphant return of Mary Sue Pinkett Smith!

Luke’s Force senses are being dampened, and it soon becomes apparent that Karrde has ysalamiri on board. However, my initial thought was that Mary Sue is a Jedi. After all, it’s an amazing new power convenient to the plot, despite the fact that there are supposed to be no other Jedi in the galaxy, so of course she’s a Jedi, right?

Now that I think of it, C’boath is also a brand-new, convenient Force-user, even though there are supposedly none left besides Luke, Leia, and her unborn twins. What a ripoff.

Oh, and all of these Jedi/padawan are human. Is there some kind of in-universe rule about humans making better Jedi? I checked Wookieepedia’s page on humans and only found a blurb about them making up ‘a large proportion of the Jedi Order’.

Actually, 90% of the characters introduced so far in this book are human. Why is this Terran race the single most influential in this entire galaxy? Can Star Wars’ writers, and Timmy Jojo particularly in this case, not get their head around humans not being the center of the goddamn universe?

tl;dr: Humans are full of win!

53%

Karrde is said to have ‘pale blue’ eyes. Next to ‘cool green’, this is the most annoying and over-used eye description possible. He also has a ‘cool’ voice. Is there any other kind in this book? Heir to the Empire has more ‘cool’ than the Fonz.

Karrde is so smug in this scene. Why Luke doesn’t pull out a lightsaber and hijack the goddamn ship is beyond me.

We’ve reached the dramatic meeting of Luke and Mary Sue Pinkett Smith, and Timmy Jojo is laying on the suck. It’s as if he wants to accentuate how annoying and/or flat his characters are.

. . . okay, get ready for stupid.

Luke talks to Karrde, whose dripping smugness should have alerted Luke, a Jedi Master, to danger. Then Luke reaches the bridge and sees Mary Sue, recognizing her from the convenient Dark Side cave earlier (and feeling waves of psychic hatred pouring off of her) . . . and then, when Karrde tases him from behind:

Dimly, he felt himself falling . . . and wondered with his last conscious thought how in the worlds Karrde had done this to him.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about the cover. I happened to notice it again as I was loading the book today on my iPod touch. A few things bothered me.

I remember picking up a paper copy just after it had first been recommended to me, and I remember thinking, “Who’s that wizard with the glowing jazz hands? Luke as an old man? No, because there’s Luke just under his armpit, giving the reader a sexy come-hither look. He doesn’t look like Obi-Wan. Maybe it’s Darth Vader come back to life as an old man. That would be sweet.”

Turns out that the SHINING FINGER-ed wizard is C’boath. But . . . why? In the first half of the book, C’boath has been a very minor character. Why does he take front and center on the cover of the first book of the Thrawn Trilogy?

Which brings me to Thrawn. There he is, down in the lower left corner, standing lamely with his arms crossed. This pose, and his placement on the very outskirts of the cover, say everything you need to know about his character.

Chewbacca is standing opposite of him, implying that there will be an awesome battle between them at some point. This would be, without doubt, the most awesome thing ever. Even Chewbacca’s pose says, “Yeah, I’m the most awesome thing in this book. Feast your eyes, ladies.”

Leia and Han are featured prominently, but the latter reminds me of Sad Keanu, while Leia seems to be wondering, “Wait, have they pulled me into another bullshit spin-off? I told them no more after the Star Wars Christmas Special!”

Finally, we have some Stormtroopers against a fiery background, even though all the battles so far have been either in space or involving those mysterious grey-skinned aliens. I don’t think we’ve seen a single Stormtrooper yet. Come to think of it, where are the grey-skinned aliens? I’d like to know what they look like, since they weren’t in the movies.

To sum, other than the misleading line about Timmy Jojo being a Hugo Award winner (for a non-Star Wars short story called Cascade Point), this cover says it all: This book doesn’t know where it’s going, so here’s some iconic characters and a wizard.

Well, once more unto the breach. I resume with chapter 19, which opens with this sterling paragraph:

He awoke slowly, in stages, aware of nothing but the twin facts that, one, he was lying flat on his back and, two, he felt terrible.

I can hardly blame Timmy for using the hackneyed expository device of enumerating facts about a character’s situation as they awaken. After all, I was doing it myself . . . when I was fourteen. And this description of Luke waking up goes on for a full page.

54%

Mary Sue was there when Luke was . . . sigh tased from behind. Now he wakes up and . . . she’s sitting there waiting to talk to him!

Mara Jade walks up to Luke, “close enough that he could reach out and touch her”, points her blaster in his face, and tries to talk tough. But all I can picture is this:

For a moment Luke just stood in the doorway, staring. The room was large and spacious, its high ceiling translucent and crisscrossed by a webwork of carved rafters. The walls were composed of a dark brown wood, much of it elaborately open-mesh carved, with a deep blue light glowing through the interstices. Other luxuries were scattered sparingly about: a small sculpture here, an unrecognizable alien artifact there. Chairs, couches, and large cushions were arranged in well-separated conversation circles, giving a distinctly relaxed, almost informal air to the place.

But all that was secondary, taken in peripherally or at a later time entirely.

It was taken in ‘peripherally or at a later time entirely’, yet it’s the thing you choose to jabber on about first.

Here’s the big problem: Yes, this stuff would be noticed peripherally or later . . . in the movies. In the movies, nobody gave half a dog’s shit what interior decorator the sets had — they wanted to know more about the characters and the story. Even in exotic locates, they weren’t so because the owner of whichever house we were in had gone to Bed, Bath & Beyond when they moved in.

Much as it might pain you, think about The Phantom Menace. Specifically, think back to the house in which Anakin lived with his mother, Smee. Can you remember anything about the place, other than that it was brown and poor-looking? No lingering shots of decorations or tools or bullshit details like that.

Don’t try to tell me that you need to describe these things in such length to get the same feelings in a text medium. You could get the same general sense by describing it thusly: “Smee’s house was small, with walls of sandstone and no decorations.” Congratu-fucking-lations, you’re now a better writer than Timmy Jojo, a boneheaded shit-for-brains jackass.

So Luke is distracted from the gorgeous interior decorating by a big tree growing up through the floor of the room.

There were stories he remembered from his childhood about fortresses with trees growing up through them. Frightening stories, some of them, full of danger and helplessness and fear.

And in every one of those stories, such fortresses were the home of evil.

Okay, let’s ignore for a moment how stupid it is that a kid who grew up ON A DESERT PLANET with barely any knowledge outside of nerf-herding was apparently told stories (by his ignorant nerf-herding uncle) about fortresses with trees (and on what planet isn’t specified).

Timmy Jojo is basing all the tension of this scene on a mythology that we, his Terran readers, are completely unfamiliar with and baffled by. Not only that, but rather than writing out these stories earlier (he could easily have found an excuse to have Luke telling Leia these stories as a set-up for this scene), he throws together a laughably amateurish few sentences obviously meant to make a dim-witted reader say, “Oh! That sounds scary! Gosh, I’ll bet something interesting is about to happen!”

55%

Mary Sue has a blaster holster . . . on her left forearm. Google Image Search is giving me nothing but comic book panels. And the more I think about this concept, the more stupid it sounds. If you have the barrel pointing upward, the gun will fall out of the holster or need to be secured, making Luke’s appraisal of “nearly as accessible as if it would have been in her hand” impossible. If the barrel is pointing downward, I can’t imagine a positioning that wouldn’t be awkward on the draw. And if the gun is positioned sideways, you’d bash the barrel into walls and doorways as you walk, and wouldn’t be able to bring your arm down to your side. This doesn’t scream ‘badass’ to me, it screams

Luke took a sip. It tasted all right; and anyway, if Karrde had wanted to drug him, there was hardly any need to stoop to such a childish subterfuge.

Funny, because if he was, you just fell for it.

“The Empire would find out anyway,” Karrde shook his head. “Their new commander is extremely good at piecing bits of information together.

TELL ME ABOUT IT.

56%

Luke [walking with Mary Sue] took a careful breath. “I don’t know why you dislike me so much–”

Oh, here we go. We might finally learn what her bullshit motivation is.

“Shut up,” she cut him off. “Just shut up.”

. . . Or she might snap at him like an eight-year-old. Appropriate response:

57%

To bring you up to speed: Luke is trapped in Karrde’s (tastefully-decorated) compound, surrounded by ysalamiri that block him off from the Force, unable to escape because of alarms, prowling dog-creatures, and Mary Sue Pinkett Smith waiting to phaser him if he blinks wrong. His X-wing is in the shop, R2 is God knows where– excuse me, the Force knows where, and the Empire is after him while the Republic has no idea that he’s in trouble.

Admittedly, a bleak situation. But then he pulls out this line:

Never since facing the Emperor had he felt so helpless.

Or, for that matter, actually been so helpless.

You stood in the throne room of the second Death Star, built by an Empire of nearly unmitigated power and control, helmed by a mad emperor with your own corrupted, mega-dangerous, and terrifying father at his right hand, as you faced attempted brainwashing and lightning to the face to join their evil revelry, all while your twin sister, best friends, and loads of teddy bears risked their lives mere miles away on the planet’s surface to save the galaxy from the clutches of evil hands, possibly eventually your own.

But possibly getting shot by Mary Sue? That’s equally overpowering?

58%

Now we’re over to Han Solo and Lando talking about . . . the Republic council’s politics. Wow. Also, Timmy Jojo is trying to build some tension over who the mole in the council is, and keeps writing Fail’la as a bitch in order to hint that it’s him. Therefore, I refuse to guess that it’s him, and instead think it’s . . . uh . . . Leia’s servant, Winter! Yeah, that’s more plausible, purely because it hasn’t been obviously hinted at.

59%

Han and Lando figure out a plot hole I hadn’t even noticed, and then fill it: Why haven’t the ambushers been using stun weapons on Han and Leia whenever they’ve attacked? Well, they want her twins to brainwash into becoming dark Jedi, and stun weapons might cause her to miscarry. Okay. I’ll buy that. You got me. You caught the tater.

60%

Han is accosted by a man in a pub. Someone calls him Reverend.

Reverend? Han looked up at the glowering thundercloud again, and this time he saw the black, crystal-embedded band nestled against the tufts of hair at the other’s throat. . . . There were extreme religious groups all over the galaxy

Hold on. Are you telling me that Star Wars has Catholics? But with black, crystal-ly collars instead of white? Are you trying to tell me that Timmy Jojo is so incapable of creating a world not filled with Terran creatures and people and concepts and rituals and vocabulary, that he has basically created Space Catholics?

And now we’re watching Han, the cards dealer, the Reverend, the security, and the other gamblers bicker about cheating.

61%

This planet we’re visiting has a new government that has been cleaning the place up, and then we hear about a group of people living out in the mountains and getting food smuggled to them.

“They’re not rebelling or making trouble or even sitting on vital resources. They’re simple people, and all they want is to be left alone to continue living that way. The government’s apparently decided to make an example of them, and among other things has cut off all food and medical supplies going that way until they agree to fall into step like everyone else.”

In other words, all governments in Star Wars are either evil or the Republic. No, wait, Fail’la Winter wants to take over the Republic and/or turn it over to the Empire. So, all governments in Star Wars are evil.

Torve grinned. “No offense, Solo. I like to feel out my customers before we do business

I refuse to photoshop another Brokeback Mountain poster. Here, look:

“I trust we passed?”

“Like babes in the tall grass . . .”

Just to recap for those of you too stoned out of your minds to have closed this page long ago: Han and Lando saw that their contact’s ship had been impounded (him being a smuggler’n'all). They go into a nearby bar and find him playing cards; in getting him out, they nearly get arrested because of a one-scene character named *sigh* Preacher.

Now they’re trying to get the smuggler to take them to Karrde so that he can provide protection for Leia (which is still a laughably, Lovecraftianly stupid idea). The guy is hesitant to guide them to his boss’ hideout just because they got him out of a bar; however, Han offers to get his ship out of impound, which convinces him to be more helpful.

Here, then, is my question: What purpose was served by the scene in the bar? Preacher will almost definitely never appear again (his Wookiepedia entry is tiny). We didn’t learn anything about the planet/characters that either will prove useful or couldn’t have been mentioned elsewhere. You could cut that scene out entirely by having Han and Lando just park and wait for the guy to sneak into their ship. Then they offer to get his ship out of impound. Bam, fifteen pages saved. Why was this scene left in the book?

Okay, I’m uncomfortable with the sudden shift in the next chapter. Specifically, Timmy Jojo decides that this chapter should be from Mary Sue Pinkett Smith’s point of view. The problem is that the inside of her head is exactly as cliched and uninteresting as the redheaded outside. In place of intelligent thought, Timmy likes to talk about how her ‘stomach tightens’ and her ‘throat tightens’. I full expect ‘bra tightens’ at some point.

Y’know, ’cause Timmy’s pants have tightened.

62%

Karrde and Mary Sue have been talking about their plans for about five minutes. I almost wish I was watching this, unabridged, as a movie, so that I could fully appreciate just how fucking boring it is. I’m sure the artiste didn’t mean for me to miss a single frustrating, drawn-out, pointless dialog.

[Luke] was standing by the window, dressed in that same black tunic, pants, and high boots that he’d worn that day at Jabba’s palace.

That day she’d stood silently by and watched . . . and let him destroy her life.

Are.

You.

Serious.

For you non-writers in the audience, I would like to explain a pleasant concept to you. For future reference, I will refer to it as a Dan Brown Moment.

You’re an aspiring writer, unsure of your abilities. You read Stephen King, you see Inception, you watch Avatar: The Last Airbender, and you feel tiny and untalented. You hear of the difficulties of getting published, of how competitive and cutthroat writers can be, of how demanding your readers are. You wonder if you’re just wasting your time.

And then you read Dan Brown or Steven Erikson or Timothy Fucking Zahn. You see The Room and Eragon and Twilight and The Last Airbender. You see that The Jersey Shore has been renewed for another season. You wonder what sort of cock-for-brains would give money to the sort of cock-for-brains who come up with this garbage.

You watch these books hit the New York Times’ bestseller list, sometimes #1. You watch these movies rake in money. You see these awful TV shows maintain the ratings they need to continue as poxes on TV Guide covers.

And suddenly . . .

. . . you feel pretty damn talented.

You’re going to do just fine.

63%

Mary Sue puts Luke inside a storage shed. She checks the boxes and sees one marked ‘Blasting Disks’; however, inside are only coveralls. She looks at the rest of the labels and confirms that everything there is harmless.

Can you spot the problem?

If you said ‘she just saw that one label was wrong, so how can she trust the labels on the other boxes’, congratulations, you are less of an idiot than Timothy Zahn.

[Luke observed that] Mara had glanced at [the boxes'] labels, but she’d actually looked inside only one of them. Perhaps a more complete search would turn up something useful.

WAIT, REALLY?

It wasn’t likely, of course, that Mara would have missed anything that obvious.

And by ‘wasn’t’ likely, you mean ‘extremely, even predictably’.

The beep came again, followed by a series of equally soft warbles. Warbles that sounded very familiar.

IT’S CALLED A SENTENCE FRAGMENT. STOP USING THEM.

For a pair of heartbeats there was silence from the other room. Then, abruptly, the wall erupted with a minor explosion of electronic jabbering.

This book is like a vibrator, except that it delivers Dan Brown Moments instead of sexual pleasure.

[Luke said,] “I’m going to try and get this

“TRY TO.” IT’S “TRY TO.” YOU DON’T SAY ‘AND’, YOU SAY ‘TO’. HOLY SHIT, LEARN ENGLISH. WAS THIS BOOK EDITED?*

(*To be fair, this is a colloquialism and is usually passed over by editors. However, it fucks the pissing shit out of me, hence my rant.)

64%

Luke opens up his artificial hand because there are removable power supplies inside, and he needs one in order to rewire the door mechanism and escape. He asks R2D2, who is on the other side of the wall, if it can walk him through removing a power supply. Now, it’s been established (erroneously) that in this book, Luke doesn’t understand R2D2 without a translator. So how the fuck is it supposed to ‘walk him through’ this no-doubt delicate electronics procedure from the other side of a wall?

Next chapter, not that the word-diarrhea doesn’t run over. Han is trying to get Karrde to join the Republic; the smuggler shits out this insipid jewel:

Interesting, indeed. I presume the Provisional Council would be willing to record legal guarantees of all this?

“Your proposal is, as I said, very interesting. But not, I think, for my organization.”

Timmy Jojo thinks he figured out how to use commas. That’s so adorable.

65%

Thrawn IMs Karrde that he intends to land on his planet to gather ysalamiri and ‘talk’. This somehow takes three minutes of dialog to communicate. I need to stop comparing this moron to Darth Vader; it’s driving me insane.

66%

Karrde is trying to decide what to do with Han Solo and Lando, now that Thrawn is on his way in. Mary Sue suggests they just turn the two over to Thrawn and hope they get a bounty.

[Karrde] countered coldly. “. . . they’re our guests. They’ve sat at our table and eaten our food . . . and like it or not, that means they’re under our protection.

I call bullshit. Luke started out as your guest, if only to trick him onto your ship. You’ve fed him. Therefore, according to your magical rules, Luke is therefore ‘under your protection’, so pushing him around, killing him, or turning him over to the Empire should be off the table. This is just a plot weasel to keep Karrde from doing the obvious and turning his guests over to Thrawn.

67%

Mara’s lip twitched. “And do these rules of hospitality apply to Skywalker, too?” she asked sardonically.

No.

No, no, no.

Mary Sue is not allowed to be the voice of reason. No. I refuse. No. Make it stop. MAKE IT STOP.

[Karrde] nodded at the door. “Enough talk.

IF ONLY.

Alright, we’re back to Luke hacking the door.

And with no fuss or dramatics whatsoever, the door slid quietly open.

See, this is why I think this book never saw a talented copy-editor. The first half of this sentence screams “I’ve never written a book before; they’re just words, right? How hard could it be?” Seriously, cut out the first half of the sentence and see what you get:

The door slid quietly open.

Leave it to the reader to realize, “Wow, something is finally going Luke’s way. Sweet.” By muddying the sentence with more of your pretty words, you’re distracting from the point.

Meanwhile, Luke and R2D2 have now escaped from holding through his ingenious use of circuitry and his captors’ half-baked use of an easily-removable restraining collar on R2D2. This brings back to mind a problem I had with this idea: Why don’t they just drug Luke into a coma? They’re keeping him awake in a proverbial RPG dungeon, out of which he might be able to fight despite his Force powers being out of reach. Haven’t they ever read the Evil Overlord List?

68%

Mary Sue Pinkett Smith Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way is ‘stalking her way glowering across the compound’. Write your own damn joke; I’ll be in the corner not caring.

Now she’s outside and whining. Suddenly!

She spun around and looked over toward the maintenance hangar—

Just in time to see one of their two Skipray blastboats rise above the treetops.

For a pair of heartbeats

STOP. SAYING. THAT.

she stared at the ship, wondering what in the Empire

AND THAT.

Karrde thought he was doing. Sending an escort or pilot ship for the Imperials, perhaps?

AND THE FRAGMENTS. STOP IT.

Jesus Christ. I think the book is trolling me now. It is actively bad. It is Timmy Jojo saying, “I know that someday, people much smarter than myself will read this. I want them to be so pissed-off that they shit themselves in rage.”

IT WORKED.

HERE ARE SOME PICTURES OF BIRDS.

Obviously, the pilot had far more experience with the craft than Luke had. That, or else such a fierce determination to recapture Luke that it completely overrode normal common-sense caution.

Either way, it meant Mara Jade.

69%

[Karrde, of Thrawn:] Those glowing eyes, Karrde decided, were even more impressive in person than they were on a comm display. And considerably more intimidating.

Welp, that’s it. The book is now officially raping itself.

Karrde let his face harden a bit. “All my associates are special,”

Karrde finds out that Luke, incredible Jedi warrior that he is, crashed his ship into a tree. He tells Thrawn he’s going to send out a rescue party (all the while desperate to keep Luke’s presence on the planet a secret from Thrawn).

Thrawn took a long step forward, reaching two pale blue fingers to cover the top of the comlink. “Permit me,” he said smoothly. “Troop commander?”

One of the stormtroopers stepped forward. “Sir?”

“Take a detail out to the crash site,” Thrawn ordered, his eyes still on Karrde. “Examine the wreckage, and bring back any survivors. And anything that looks like it wouldn’t normally belong in a Skipray blastboat.”

70%

The strangest thing about waking up this time, Luke decided dimly, was that

I don’t give a shit! :D

Luke gets out of the wreckage of his ship and sees that Mary Sue’s has crashed nearby. Here’s how this book can be redeemed: Let us see her mangled corpse. That’s all I ask.

A backup flight was inevitable — she would probably be able to hold out until then. But then again, she might not.

Oh, don’t tease me, Timmy Jojo, you flirt!

Only the top of the pilot’s head showed over the seat back, but that shimmering red-gold hair was all he needed to see to know that his earlier guess had been correct. It was indeed Mara Jade who’d been chasing him.

First he keeps writing sentence fragments, and now his sentences are too long.

For a pair of heartbeats

For a pair of heartbeats

For a pair of heartbeats

For a pair of heartbeats

If this book contains one more instance of ‘a pair of heartbeats’ and it’s not talking about Doctor Who, I will destroy the internet.

Then Luke considers saving Mary Sue from the wreckage of her ship.

[Luke was] torn between the need for haste and the need to satisfy his

*perks up*

internal sense of ethics

Bah.

But if he turned his back on Mara now, without even pausing to check her condition . . .

Right, because that would be wrong. Not like a few chapters ago, when he saw a freighter being attacked by Imperial warships and tried to beat cheeks without even trying to rescue them. See, if you’re just a ship in space being attacked, Luke Skywalker doesn’t care about you. But if you’re a humongous bitch to him, you’re a person.

By the way, I’m calling it: MARY SUE IS AWAKE AND WAITING FOR HIM. SHE NOT ONLY SURVIVED THIS HORRIBLE CRASH THAT WOULD HAVE PULVERIZED A NON-AUTHOR-PENIS-INSERT-CHARACTER, BUT SHE IS AWAKE AND READY TO FIGHT HIM AND LOOK LIKE WHAT TIMMY JOJO THINKS IS A BADASS. I GUARAN-FUCKING-TEE IT.

Ready? Are you ready to find out if I’m right? ARE YOU?

And it would, after all, only take a minute. Stepping into the room, he looked around the seat back.

Directly into a pair of wide-open, perfectly conscious green eyes. Green eyes that stared at him over the barrel of a tiny blaster.*

“I figured you’d come,” she said, her voice grimly satisfied.

*Also, FRAGMENTS FOR THE FRAGMENT GOD.

He found the release and got the compartment open. Inside was an unfamiliarly labeled metal case with the very familiar look of a survival kit to it.

So it was a survival kit labeled in an alien language. Christ.

[Mara Jade] snorted. “Listen, buddy boy, it was

Did . . . did a Star Wars character just say ‘buddy boy’?

” . . . Put the bag down and get that droid out of there.”

Luke did as he was told.

You know, half the book so far has been Luke ‘obeying’ Mary Sue. Author fetish fuel, maybe?

Within a handful of seconds

There was something in her voice — command, or urgency, or both — that stifled argument or even question.

Yeah, calling it: This is author fetish fuel.

71%

But she was right behind him, close enough that he could hear her breathing and occasionally feel the tip of her blaster as it brushed his back.

PAGING DOCTOR FREUD.

They made it perhaps ten meters farther in

PLEASE HURRY, DOCTOR FREUD, THE MENTAL IMAGES ARE TAKING OVER MY BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIN.

After that . . . unpleasant bit, Luke and Mary Sue hunker down in the trees and watch as an Imperial ship hovers down over their wreckage.

A small motion caught the corner of [Luke's] eye, and he turned his head to look directly into the muzzle of Mara’s blaster. “Not a move,” she whispered, her breath warm on his cheek. “Not a sound.”

Luke ‘nods understandingly’. That . . . is not the appropriate response. This is the appropriate response.

Luke stared at her, his eyebrows coming down angrily over his monocle. “‘Not a sound’?” he repeated incredulously. “What, you think I was going to get up and go say ‘hi’ and ask if they have any spare sandwiches? Maybe find out if we can get a lift? You stupid Mary Sue bitch. Which do you think I’d rather face: A moron who holds a blaster wrong and doesn’t know that an arm holster makes her look like a fucktard, or a bunch of heavily-armed, trained Stormtroopers?”

R2D2 buzzed a soft agreement. Mara Jade shot it an angry look, then returned her glare to Luke. “Stormtroopers can’t even hit a target–”

“We haven’t seen you hit a single fucking target except a keypad, and that was point-blank. Face it, dumbass: The author might be trying desperately to make you sound tough and respectable, but it’s not because he wants an interesting and capable character. You’re sticking your penis-gun in my face, breathing down my neck, next you’re going to pull out the whips and chains, right? You don’t even get it. You’re a fetish. That’s all. You’re Author Fetish Fuel.”

Mary Sue stared at Luke for a long moment, then turned and shot Timothy Zahn in the face, thus ending this horrible book.

THE END

As if I haven’t proven my point enough, there is then more of this insanity:

Mara slid her arm over his shoulders, pressed her blaster into the hinge of his jaw, and [watched the shuttle].

Hey, uh, dumbass bitch. Think about this for a second. You’ve got a shuttle full of Stormtroopers, who have been sent by their *sigh* ruthless and cunning grand admiral, to find you or your bodies. They’re going to look at the wreckages, see zero bodies, and fan out to search the forest. They’re going to find your dumb ass spooning with Luke, and you’re going to look even more stupid than usual.

Luke watched as [the Stormtroopers] split up and headed off to search the two ships, the strangeness of the whole situation adding an unreal tinge to the scene. There, less than twenty meters away, was Mara’s golden opportunity to turn him over to the Imperials . . . and yet, here they both lay, hiding behind a tree root and trying not to breathe too loudly. Had she suddenly changed her mind?

Or was it simply that she didn’t want any witnesses nearby when she killed him?

In which case, Luke realized abruptly, his best chance might actually be to find some way of surrendering to the stormtroopers.

You heard it here first, people: Mary Sue is such a bitch that Luke would rather eat laser than be around her for another minute.

Two groups of stormtroopers disappeared into the fighters, while the rest walked around the edge of the newly created clearing, probing with eyes and portable sensors into the forest. After a few minutes those inside the fighters emerged, and what seemed to be a short meeting was held between them at the base of the shuttle ramp. At an inaudible command the outer ring of searchers came back in to join them, and the whole crowd trooped into their ship. The ramp sealed, and the shuttle disappeared once more into the sky, leaving nothing but

Quiet,” Mara muttered. “They’ll have left a sensor behind, just in case someone comes back.”

Clearly, the stormtroopers had urgent dental appointments to get to, and couldn’t be bothered to actually check the fucking woods.

He hadn’t thought her ________ could get any harder than [they already were/it already was]. He was wrong.

If you filled in the blanks with ‘eyes’, you are Timmy Jojo. If you filled it with the right answer, you are a normal human being.

72%

Mary Sue starts bitching at Luke about how he ‘destroyed her life’ back at Jabba’s lair, but won’t specify how. Since she’s not ready to tell us, I’m going to fill in that blank:

Mary Sue and Jabba the Hutt were lovers.

(It could be worse: I could have done my Adrian Monk impression and said ‘sex lovers’.)

They decide to build a carrier for R2D2 out of branches. Mary Sue pulls out Luke’s lightsaber and heads for a tree. Luke is *sigh* worried that she’ll hurt herself.

She raised the weapon, ignited it–

And in a handful* of quick, sure swipes twimmed, shortened, and cut the branches from the  tree.

Dude, I call her Mary Sue for a reason. Of course she’s magically good at whatever skill is needed. Should circumstances or bravado require it, she’s also good with raquetball, Scrabble, plastic surgery, underwater basketweaving, corn, shadow puppets, kanoodling, skydiving, and Hutt fellatio.

*YOU CAN’T HAVE A ‘HANDFUL’ OF TIME OR A ‘HANDFUL’ OF ACTION. STOP SAYING THAT; IT MAKES YOU LOOK LIKE A DIPSHIT.

73%

We’re back with Karrde and Han Solo & Friends. The latter have figured out that the Empire paid the compound a visit earlier, and wonder about Karrde’s steps taken to keep the two groups separate.

[Karrde had put away the dinner he and Solo & Friends were sharing] “Everything that might have indicated we had guests,” Karrde said. “The Grand Admiral is highly observant, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to know exactly how many of my associates are staying here at the moment.”

Apparently, Thrawn’s magical ability to figure things out with almost no clues isn’t because of an enchanted wish-stone from a pirate ship, and it’s sure as hell not bad plotting; it’s because he’s ‘observant’.

Here are some people who I believe are observant:

Thrawn is not observant; he merely has an enchanted wish-stone from a pirate ship, which tells him all he needs to know about the plot. Occam’s Razor, people.

Han and Lando sneak off to look at this mysterious shed they’ve heard about, in which Karrde has been keeping a prisoner (*cough*Luke*cough*). They find the lock plate that Mary Sue blew off the door.

“That must have been one beaut of a shot,” Han frowned

Timmy, we get what you’re trying to constantly tell us: Mary Sue has a huge penis and you desperately wish that she would make passionate love to you with it. But you can’t expect us to believe that Han Solo would see this point-blank blaster shot and assume that Mary Sue had accomplished it while standing fifty yards away, blindfolded, and furiously sexing you. You really need to look up the trope ‘Informed Ability‘.

74%

Lando finds the tiny power supply that Luke used to jury rig the door. He notices a distinctive logo:

“You saw it during the war . . . It’s the logo of the Sibha Habadeet.”

You better Sibha Habeeb It.

Karrde, of Mary Sue: “She has a certain– Well, why mince words?”

Why stop now?

[Karrde's] eyes seemed to flatten, just for a minute.

The eyes flattened a little more.

He fixed Han with a hard look.

The hard look hardened even further.

Deep breath.

Okay, the scene is over. Nothing can be worse than trying to picture these weird-ass facial expressions.

The dimly lit holographic art gallery

had changed again, this time to a collection of remarkably similar flame-shaped works

that seemed to pulsate and alter in form as Pellaeon

moved carefully between the pedestals.

He studied them as he walked, wondering where this batch had come from.

75%

Thrawn decides to send a bunch of Stormtroopers to lie in wait for Karrde’s mysterious escaped prisoner. Pelleaon is understandably skeptical.

Stormtroopers were in critically short supply these days. To waste them like this, on something so utterly unimportant as a smuggler squabble . . .

“Karrde lied to us, you see,” Thrawn continued, as if reading Pellaeon’s mind. “Whatever that little drama was this afternoon, it was not the common pursuit of a common thief. I’d like to know what, in fact, it was.”

“I . . . don’t think I follow, sir.”

“It’s very simple, Captain,” Thrawn said, in that tone of voice he always seemed to use when explaining the obvious. “The pilot of the chase vehicle never reported in during the pursuit. Nor did anyone from Karrde’s base communicate with him. We know that — we’d have intercepted any such transmission. No progress reports; no assistance requests; nothing but complete radio silence.” He looked back at Pellaeon. “Speculation, Captain?”

“Whatever it was,” Pellaeon said slowly, “it was something they didn’t want us knowing about. Beyond that . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know, sir. There could be any number of things they wouldn’t want outsiders to know about. They are smugglers, after all.”

Pellaeon makes a good point. The Empire has just shown up unannounced on Karrde’s figurative doorstep; he’s definitely got a lot to hide, being a smuggler-lord. Maybe he’s captured the royalty of some planet, or maybe he has contraband Imperial equipment that he intends to sell, or maybe he’s into little boys and it was a twelve-year-old in the shed, or maybe it’s none of Thrawn’s goddamn business.

“Agreed.” Thrawn’s eyes seemed to glitter. “But now consider the additional fact that Karrde refused our invitation to join in the search for Skywalker . . . and the fact that this afternoon he implied the search was over.” He raised an eyebrow. “What does that suggest to you, Captain?”

That Karrde is too busy to help with your bickering with the Republic, and therefore hasn’t kept up to date on it? That he was trying to flatter you by saying ‘oh, it’s been days, you must have caught him by now’?

Pellaeon felt his jaw drop. “You mean . . . that was Skywalker in that Skipray?”

“An interesting speculation, isn’t it?” Thrawn agreed. “Unlikely, I’ll admit. But likely enough to be worth following up on.”

FUCK THIS

FUCK THRAWN, FUCK MARY SUE, FUCK TIMOTHY ZAHN

FUCK THIS BOOK

I’M NOT FUCKING READING IT ANYMORE

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

“Yes, sir.” Pellaeon glanced at the chrono, did a quick calculation. “Though if we stay here more than another day or two, we may have to move back the Sluis Van attack.”

“We’re not moving Sluis Van,” Thrawn said emphatically. “Our entire victory campaign against the Rebellion begins there, and I’ll not have so complex and far-reaching a schedule altered. Not for Skywalker; not for anyone else.”

Huh. Wow. For the first time in the book, Thrawn actually sounds like a ‘commander’ of some sort. He has actual military strategy in place (as opposed to ass-pulling and prophecy) and is attempting to merge several plans at once. I find myself beginning to respect him.

He nodded at the flame statues surrounding them. “Sluissi art clearly indicates a biannual cyclic pattern, and I want to

Scene switch back to Mary Sue and Luke (THANK GOD). She apparently twisted her ankle in the Skipray crash, but has been trying to hide it from Luke. So she . . . walked several miles on rough terrain while thinking she could hide it. And now it’s ‘starting to ache’.

Timmy, have you ever been in the woods?

When I was ten or so, my family and I were in a pasture about a mile from our house. I fell across a stick and twisted my wrist. I was then in such overbearing pain that my dad had to carry me home.

Even if Mary Sue is a grown woman, hardened by experience, she wouldn’t be able to twist her ankle in a vehicle crash and then walk for hours on rough terrain without a sign that she’s hurt. Not happening.

But hey, Timmy, come with me into the woods sometime and I’ll twist that thing up good for you. Then let’s see you walk home. Of course, I’ll be behind you, jabbing a pitchfork into your ass. Might make things more difficult. (Someone in the IRC channel later pointed out that it might fit into his fetish. MENTAL IMAGES FOR EVERYONE!)

She wondered if he’d guessed about the ankle, dismissed the question as irrelevant. She’d had worse injuries without being slowed down by them.

Well, duh. What sort of Mary Sue would be ‘slowed down’ by such trivialities as physical injury?

. . . Mara arranged her glow rod and blaster in her lap where they’d be accessible.

. . . Mara arranged her glow rod . . . in her lap where [it would] be accessible.

. . . Mara arranged her . . . rod . . . in her lap where [it would] be accessible.

76%

Her mouth tightened, and she ran her fingers along the side of the lightsaber hanging from her belt.

77%

Karrde is talking to one of his men about how Thrawn just sent down a shuttle of stormtroopers to hole up in the city to wait for Luke and Mary Sue to pop up. This is when I come to a realization. Think about the past few scenes, working backward:

• Karrde talking about what Thrawn is planning and what Han Solo/Lando will do tomorrow.
• Luke and Mary Sue talking about what to do tomorrow; Mary Sue thinking about what Karrde is planning.
• Thrawn and Pellaeon discussing what Karrde hid from them.
• Han Solo and Lando talking to Karrde about what Karrde had kept hidden and what their plans are for tomorrow.
• Mary Sue and Luke talking about whether they should stick together or she should kill him. About fifteen seconds of running/hiding from Stormtroopers.

Notice a pattern? In those five scenes, the only action was Mary Sue and Luke staying away from Stormtroopers. Since then, nothing has happened on-screen. Thrawn prepared some troops to send out, Karrde is taking measures to lock down his base, Mary Sue and Luke are hiking through the forest, and Han/Lando are probably getting ready for a firefight. Yet we see none of this. It’s sometimes mentioned, sometimes implied, rarely shown. The majority of this book is people talking about more interesting things happening off-screen.

So here’s my bet, judging from the above pattern: The next scene after this will be 1) focus on Thrawn, 2) involve Thrawn blathering, and 3) be devoid of action.

Chapter change! Let’s see if I’m right!

Staring at the curtains, Leia gripped her blaster with a sweaty hand

OH WHAT THE FUCK.

78%

We get a surprisingly intense scene in which Leia fights off two intruders who try to kidnap her. The first, she takes out with a lightsaber, and it’s badass. She second gets behind her and has her pretty much pinned, when this happens:

The alien’s body went abruptly rigid–

And suddenly, without any warning at all, she was free.

You know, it takes about three beats to read that sentence. Meanwhile, this action (suddenly coming free) was one-beat. My revision would probably be like so:

The alien’s body went rigid, and then relaxed, freeing her.

Copy-editors, people. We’re a bitchy bunch, but we’re handy.

Behind the alien, the door slammed open; and with a roar, Chewbacca boiled into the room.

That’s not an OCR error or a typo, people; I even checked on Amazon (page 312, halfway down). Chewbacca didn’t ‘bolt’ or ‘barge’ into the room; he boiled.

Leia glanced past him through the doorway to the darker hallway beyond, a strange dread suddenly twisting into her stomach. There had been three Wookiees in the house with her. “Where’s Salporin?” she asked.

Ralrra hesitated, just long enough for her suspicions to become a terrible certainty. [He did not survive the attack,] the Wookiee said, almost too softly for her to hear.

Leia swallowed hard. “I’m sorry,” she said, the words sounding painfully trite and meaningless in her ears.

[As arre we. But the time forr mourning is not now.]

Leia nodded, blinking back sudden tears as she turned to the window. She’d lost many friends and companions in the midst of battle through the years, and she knew that Ralrra was

Hold on. I’m sorry, but who the hell was Salporin? Was he some Wookiee bodyguard we never even saw? Wait, was he the one with whom Chewbacca did chest-bumps when they arrived on the planet? Is that it? Am I supposed to give a shit? Tell me Ralrra died and I might care, though only because I read his backstory on Wookieepedia, not because this book told me anything interesting. Tell me Chewbacca died and I’d start a war. But we’re barely/never shown Salporin (the book was too busy screwing around with Luke, Karrde & Co.), so while Leia might miss him, does Timmy Jojo honestly expect me to give a fuck?

So after that tragedy, Leia decides to try to escape separately from the Wookiees (both of whom have been hurt) so that they won’t be harmed further. When Ralrra calls her on this:

Leia grimaced. So much for the quiet, noble self-sacrifice.

She knows by now that they’re trying to take her alive and must have guessed that they want her unborn twins. So it’s not self-sacrifice; it’s self-sacrifice plus two bonus sacrifices. It’s a Baal-ian smorgasbord. I’m about ready to call it: In Star Wars, being pregnant makes you stupid.

79%

They decide to all together climb down the big Wookiee tree to a landing pad.

The Wookiees didn’t crawl across the tops of the plaited branches, the way she’d anticipated doing. Instead, using the climbing claws she’d seen her first day here, they hung by all fours underneath the branches to travel.

And then they traveled.

If you mentally replaced ‘traveled’ with ‘danced’, congratulations, you’re watching as excessive an amount of Doctor Who as I am.

They spot a small ship hovering at a distance and watching them.

“It couldn’t be a Wookiee rescue ship, I don’t suppose,” she offered hopefully.

Chewbacca growled the obvious flaw: the airspeeder wasn’t showing even running lights.

Wait.

Earlier, like about 20% ago, Leia worried about coming to the Wookiee planet because she didn’t have a translator and couldn’t understand Chewbacca. Now, suddenly, she can. Ralrra doesn’t translate this for her. So how . . . how does she know what Chewbacca said? How? HOW? HOW DOES SHE KNOW?

As they’re climbing down, Leia ties her lightsaber to the end of a long rope, then lets it swing right into the hovering ship, causing it to crash. Earlier, Leia’s lightsaber shut off as soon as it was knocked from her hand; one scene later, it stays on while swinging on a rope. Maybe this is a plot hole or maybe just badly written; based on previous experience, guess which I’m leaning toward.

The alien was sitting motionless in a low seat in the tiny police interrogation room.

I am now picturing Leia and Chewbacca wearing trenchcoats and fedoras.

80%

The grey-skinned alien smells Leia’s hand for a while, and then gets down on its knees and starts apologizing. I’m . . . intrigued.

Apparently, the alien just realized that Leia is the daughter of Darth Vader, his former master, so he’s feeling sort of bad about the whole ‘almost kidnapping you’ thing.

Leia stared down at him, feeling her mouth fall open as she struggled to regain her mental balance. The right-angle turns were all coming too quickly.

And by ‘too quickly’, you mean about three times per book.

This guy just called Leia ‘Lady Vader’. That is sexy.

81%

Desperate to get these grey aliens on the Republic’s side, Leia offers to go to their planet alone to stand trial for the destruction caused by a Republic x Empire battle years before (not specified). You might throw up your hands, but I say this is a much smarter plan than getting Karrde involved, purely because it doesn’t involve Mary Sue.

Wait a second. Leia knocked out a grey-skinned alien, then started climbing down a world-tree with Chewbacca and Ralrra. Then, after using her lightsaber to take out a ship tailing them, she suddenly remembers the grey-skinned dude she knocked out. Next scene: They’re back in the city, questioning the alien.

So the scene in which they climb part-way down the world tree?

Completely.

Pointless.

Leia nodded, blinking back tears. “I’ll be there,” she promised.

And wondered if this war would ever truly be over.

Oh, chapter end. What could possibly come next?

Fingering Skywalker’s lightsaber, Mara studied . . .

“Just keep your shirt on,” she told him.

“You really don’t have to go for finesse, you know,” he offered.

. . . “That wasn’t so hard now, was it?” she said

The always-helpful Dr_Kens pointed me to an article on writing viruses (yes, it’s Huffington Post, but I only frothed at the mouth once while reading the article, and that was because of sidebar items; this writer deserves to be published on a better site). Timmy Jojo hits almost every single one of these, including the awesomely-named Old Spice Guy Effect.

82%

Mara snorted with contempt. Jedi! she threw the epithet at him as she turned back to the droid.

Wait. The proofreader in me just had a minor heart attack.

“Jedi!” she threw the epithet at him

No, that’s still wrong.

“Jedi!” She threw the epithet at him

Still wrong.

Mara snorted with contempt. ”Jedi!” She turned back to the droid.

Acceptable.

Her twisted ankle seemed to be largely healed, but she knew better than to push it.

Because traveling on rough terrain for days isn’t pushing it. After all, it’s ‘largely healed’ now! Truly, all of first aid and common sense must be thrown out the window in the face of Mary Sue’s unbeatable medical skills.

Mary Sue sends up an antennae so that R2D2 can remotely access Luke’s X-wing and leave a message that they’re alright and need help. Instead, it finds a message from C3PO.

“I trust you’ll be able to decrypt this image, Artoo,” the protocol prissy continued.

“According to [Karrde], there are Imperial stormtroopers waiting in Hyllyard City for you to make your appearance.”

Mara clenched her teeth . . . So Thrawn hadn’t been fooled.

Mary Sue is making the same mistake I once did: Expecting Thrawn to opt for ‘common sense’ and ‘logical assumptions’ when he has a magical pirate plot diamond. I found a lot of peace once I accepted the fact that our villain is basically omniscient.

83%

THE BOOK IS SAVED!

Mara herself lay unmoving, the back of her head toward Luke—dead

MARY SUE WAS KILLED BY A BIG WOLF THING!

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

or merely stunned, it was impossible to tell.

Artoo, clearly too far away to reach her in time, was nevertheless moving in that direction as fast as his wheels could manage, his small electric arc welder extended as if for battle.

. . . That is the most adorable thing in Star Wars.

Woah, fight scene with Luke and R2D2 against the vornskr, which I picture as like a wolf-Komodo dragon. This is kind of awesome–

But it had been pinned out of action for a pair of heartbeats

WELP, THAT’S IT, INTERNET DESTROYED. THANKS, TIMOTHY ZAHN. THANKS A LOT.

Moving along,

He looked down to see Mara push half the dead vornskr off her chest and raise herself up on one elbow. “What in blazes was that

Wait, ‘what in blazes’? A reference to the Christian hell? What happened to ‘what in the Empire’ or ‘in the name of the moon’? I don’t know whether to approve Timmy using an actual saying, or get mad because he’s using Terran mythology.

84%

Luke and Artoo save Mary Sue from the critter, both sustaining injuries in the process. Mary Sue thanks them by re-confiscating Luke’s lightsaber and sneering at R2D2′s damage.

For a long minute Luke watched [Mary Sue], trying once more to understand the complexities and contradictions of this strange woman.

she’d escaped a bloody death by a bare handful of centimeters

“What do you want, a medal?”

Luke shook his head. “I just want to know what happened to you.”

. . . “You happened to me,” she told him

<~FekketCantenel> OH SHIT GUYS
<+Akashe> FUCK SHIT WHAT
<~FekketCantenel> FOR THE FIFTEENTH TIME ALL BOOK, MARY SUE MIGHT ALMOST MAYBE KIND OF A LITTLE REVEAL WHY SHE HATES LUKE
<~FekketCantenel> MAYBE FOR REALS THIS TIME
<~FekketCantenel> @_@
<~FekketCantenel> I’M SO FUCKING EXCITED
<+Akashe> OH FUCK NO WAY
<+Dr_Kens> NO WAY.
<+Akashe> And then Han rushed in. LUKE I’M GLAD YOU’RE ALIVE YOUR PREGGO SISTER IS IN TROUBLE AND THAT WOOKIE DIED
<~FekketCantenel> “I was a dancer at Jabba the Hutt’s palace the day you came for Solo.”
* ~FekketCantenel does spittake
<+Akashe> …
<+Akashe> FUCK
<+Akashe> ASS
<+Akashe> MOTHERFUCK SHIT PISS ON A SPIKED DILDO
<+Dr_Kens> …
<~FekketCantenel> “Luke frowned at her. No. Her slim figure, her agility and grace — those certainly could belong to a professional dancer. But her piloting skills, her expert marksmanship, her inexplicable working knowledge of lightsabers — those most certainly did not.”
<~FekketCantenel> wow.
<~FekketCantenel> that just summed it up for me right there.
<+Dr_Kens> NO SHIT, REALLY LUKE?
<~FekketCantenel> “You weren’t just a dancer, though,” he told her. “That was only a cover.” <– AND NOW SHE’S JAMES FUCKING BOND
<~FekketCantenel> so Luke has a moment of insight/figuring it all out
<~FekketCantenel> “You were waiting for me,” he said. “Vader knew I’d go there to try and rescue Han, and he sent you to capture me.”
<~FekketCantenel> “Vader?” She all but spat the name. “Don’t make me laugh. Vader was a fool
<+Akashe>  Dot fucking dot fucking dot.
<~FekketCantenel> okay fuck this
* ~FekketCantenel punts ipod across room
<~FekketCantenel> fuck this motherfucking fuck.
* ~FekketCantenel goes to corner to scream for a while

The title ‘Emperor’s Hand’ is mentioned, and suddenly I understand the IRC channel’s previous mentions of Mary Sue having something to do with ‘the Hand’. Akashe argued that, now that we know Mary Sue has such an adventurous background, her expansive skillset makes more sense. However, I’m not sure which I hate more: That she’s a Mary Sue because she has so many convenient skills, or that she’s a Mary Sue because she was secretly involved in all the stuff the main characters from the movies were involved in, so she’s totally relevant!

Wait a second. So Mary Sue was a dancer in Jabba’s palace, sent by the Emperor to kill Luke. So Luke was captured and everyone was carted out on this execution barge, to the sarlacc pit. And the entire reason Mary Sue couldn’t kill Luke and Co. or stop them from escaping is simple: Jabba refused to let her come along. Never mind why he refused, just go with it.

Being an incredible, galaxy-traveling spy for an evil Emperor, she didn’t . . . put on a disguise? . . . sneak onto the ship? . . . ninja-stick to the side of the ship? . . . hijack a small cruiser and fly there herself?

She just said ‘oh, okay’ and then let Luke get away?

[Luke's vision in the cave explained:] The first time, years ago, the cave had spun him an image of a possible future. This time, he knew now, it had shown him a possible past.

It’s official. The cave used in the movie to get across some disturbing symbolism . . . has been transformed into Plot Device Cavern. Visit today and buy souvenir flashbacks and realizations! Tour the incredible Why The Fuck Am I Reading This display!

85%

As a result of Mary Sue failing to get a taxi to the execution, Luke goes on to murder the Emperor (well, technically, Darth Vader did, but as Luke decides, Mary Sue probably isn’t one for details). Since Mary Sue was the Emperor’s Right Hand, she’s now out of a job; since the Empire is gone, she has no identity, status, or fallback.

TL;DR:

WAH WAH WAH! Sure, I worked for a tyrant who would have bent the entire galaxy to his whim and murdered billions of people for no reason, BUT HE PAID WELL! AND I GOT TO BE SPE-SHUL! But now he’s gone and I’m not spe-shul anymore :’( So fuck all the innocent teddy bears and the freedom of the galaxy, YOU’RE A MEANIE-FACE! WAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

To help you recover from how stupid that was, here are some characters with actual tragic, tear-jerking, sympathetic backgrounds:

You know things are bad when the scene switches to Pellaeon and Thrawn, and I said, “THANK GOD!”

“It looks good, Captain,” [Thrawn] said to Pellaeon. “Exactly the way it should. You may proceed with the test when ready.”

“It’ll be a few more minutes yet, sir,” Pellaeon told him, studying the readouts on his console. “The technicians are still having some problems getting the cloaking shield tuned.”

He held his breath, half afraid of a verbal explosion.

Two problems. First and foremost, I don’t think Thrawn has so much as raised his voice throughout the book. Timmy is so desperate to make us think Thrawn is ‘cool, collected, badass’ that he’s basically written him without emotion. Why you would be afraid of any ‘explosion’ is beyond me.

Second, Thrawn said ‘you may proceed with the test when ready’. Well, we’re not fucking ready yet, obviously.

I just don’t get this. It’s supposed to make us feel tense, like Thrawn is a mean boss and we’re not getting our project done fast enough. However, it’s such an obvious ploy as to be laughable.

By the way:

But the Grand Admiral merely nodded. “There’s time,” he said calmly.

So much for that, then.

It’s funny how, at 85%, I’m finally getting a feel for this book. I can pinpoint the line of dialog in a conversation at which a Star Wars movie would have said, “Welp, time for a cut to another scene, because we got all we could out of that one.” And when the conversation continues regardless, I can just about predict how long it will last, measured in a new metric that I have dubbed ‘Notsinglefuckwas’ or ‘nsfw’. This particular instance isn’t so bad; I measured 1.2 nsfw before they switched to another scene.

86%

SCENE SWITCH! Here’s how it begins:

Wedge Antilles looked up from the data pad with disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he told the dispatcher. “Escort duty?”

The other gave him an innocent look. “What’s the big deal?” he asked. “You guys are X-wings – you do escort all the time.”

“We escort people,” Wedge retorted. “We don’t watchdog cargo ships.”

The dispatcher’s innocent look collapsed into thinly veiled disgust, and Wedge got the sudden impression that he’d gone through this same argument a lot lately. “Look, commander, don’t dump it on me,” he growled back. “It’s a standard Frigate escort – what’s the difference whether the Frigate’s got people or a break-down reactor aboard?”

Wedge looked back at the data pad. It was a matter of professional pride, that’s what the difference was. “Sluis Van’s a pretty long haul for X-wings,” he said instead.

“Yeah, well, the spec line says you’ll be staying aboard the

GUH. Hold on. Okay, there’s some guy named Wedge, and he’s talking to a dispatcher (over a video screen or is the dispatcher actually there?) about guarding cargo ships. Are we on a ship or in a planet or in an office or something? Timmy, I know I told you not to over-describe the sets, but this is too far in the opposite direction! Who are these people? Where are we? What the fuck is going on?

A little more dialog and then SCENE OVER. What the fuck? Timmy keeps trying to wedge this Wedge guy into the book, and while I’m told he was a minor character in the movies, I have no idea who he is and give absolutely zero shit about him. Why does he get an entire scene to hear about his orders and then mope about how the New Republic could be falling apart?

The great Plinkett once pointed out Star Wars’ tendency toward the Ending Multiplication Effect: While the plot of A New Hope had a single ending goal (blow up the Death Star) to build toward, Empire had two endings going on at once (Luke fights Vader while his friends escape), and Return had three (Luke vs. Vader and the Emperor; the battle of Endor; Rebel Fleet attacks the Death Star). Then you get Phantom Menace, which had four endings, all so boring that I can barely remember any (one was probably Darth Maul fighting the Jedi, while another involved Padme). As Plinkett points out, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith ‘toned it down’. However, this book, meant as a pseudo-sequel to Return, has . . . well, at this point, 86% of the way through this book, how many endings are we shooting for?

1. Luke, Mary Sue, and R2D2 escape the forest, possibly fighting some Stormtroopers.
2. Karrde, Han Solo, and Lando do . . . something. This one might converge with #1.
3. Thrawn is boring.
4. Leia keeps escaping from the grey-skinned aliens. Maybe another boring Wookiee will die.
5. Wedge will probably fight in a space battle.

Five, people. The Ending Multiplication Effect* continues.

(*Full disclosure: I suffer from this as well. Golden Sands: First timeline finishes long before the second, so you get one coherent ending. Neon Days: Tep fights guys while Anna fights something else. Silicon City: Tep does a thing while Anna and Co. do a thing while various other people do stuff. It’s a good thing all these scenes share the same general atmosphere, or it’d probably be pretty annoying to shift between them. And now I am going to preemptively duck and cover while critics lob disagreements. Whee!)

Chapter 28

It was just before noon when they began to notice the faint sounds wafting occasionally to them through the forest.

For the second chapter in a row, I have to ask: Wait, where are we? Are we at Karrde’s base, which is surrounded by forest, or are we with Mary Sue & Co. in the forest? In other words, who are ‘they’?

So they (turns out to be Luke and Mary Sue) are hearing speeder bikes in the forest. Luke says they’re military; he can tell because he rode one on Endor and because of how the pixels look.

She didn’t reply, and for a moment Luke wondered if the mention of Endor might not have been a good idea. But a glance at Mara’s face relieved that fear. She was not brooding, but listening.

Woah, Mary Sue missing an opportunity to waste time and nearly get them killed? Total character reversal!

Let’s take a break from the book for a moment and chortle at how appropriate this bit is, from an article on the Star Wars Holiday Special:

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t actually like it, and I couldn’t, in all honesty, make an argument towards its quality, but there’s something so completely wrong about it, about the fact that it seems completely alien to Star Wars as we know it know, that draws me in like a moth to a particularly tacky flame.

87%

She glared at him. But it was a reflexive glare, without any real argument behind it.

The ‘meh’ness displayed here is so perfect that I almost wish it was the opening line of the book.

They made good time, despite the lingering tenderness of Mara’s ankle

They’d gone perhaps another kilometer, with the whine/drone of the speeder bikes rising and falling in the distance, when suddenly they were there.

There were two of them: biker scouts in glistening white armor, swooping up to them and braking to a halt almost before Luke’s ears had registered the sound of their approach. Which meant a very short ride, with target position already known.

Which meant that the entire search party must have

There’s just so much stylistically wrong here. I see fragments, bad pacing, another fragment, more bad pacing . . . Here, let me fix this.

They walked another kilometer, the whine/drone of the speeder bikes rising and falling in the distance.

Suddenly, two biker scouts swooped up to them and braked to a halt. They wore glistening white armor and had their blaster cannons trained on the travelers.

I’m still not pleased with how it turned out, but I’m proud to have at least been able to leave out the insufferable ‘ooh look I’m Timmy Jojo, I’m so clever, I have characters smart enough to figure out things, but I don’t think my reader is bright enough to figure out for themselves that the characters have figured it out!’

[One scout called,] “Identify yourselves, in the name of the Empire!”

This is yet another case of ‘wait, who talks like that?’

88%

Luke and Mara decide to disguise Luke’s face and let him pretend to be ‘Jade’, who has captured a bounty (Mara) for Karrde. This is a stupid plan, but it’s desperate and they don’t have much to work with, so I don’t much mind it. However, Luke pulls the usual bullshit:

Somewhere in the back of his mind, though, he couldn’t help but wonder if this was the sort of trick a Jedi should use.

By the time they finally stepped out from under the forest canopy, their escort numbered no fewer than ten biker scouts and twenty stormtroopers. It was an impressive display of military power . . . and more even than the fact of the search itself, it drove home to Luke the seriousness with which the mysterious man in charge of the Empire was treating this incident. Even at the height of

Expository narration!

Three more people were waiting for them . . . two more stormtroopers and a hard-faced man wearing a major’s insignia on his dusty brown Imperial uniform. “About time,” the latter muttered under his breath

Very suddenly, we shift to this guy’s (Pellaeon’s?) point of view, though he remains unnamed. I want to say that this is at least the sort of camera-jump they would make in the movies, but in a text medium, it comes off as clumsy.

He frowned at Luke’s face. “What in the Empire happened to you, anyway?”

Okay, this is starting to piss me off.

“It itched like blazes for a while.”

And that.

. . . the first of the biker scouts swooped close to hand Mara’s blaster to the major. “Interesting weapon,” the major murmured, turning it over in his hands before sliding it into his belt.

This trope always bugs me. When movie villains confiscate weapons, they tend to add them to their belt or set them on a nearby table or otherwise keep them within reach of the good guys. Wouldn’t it be smarter and more militarily appropriate for the major to hand the blaster back and tell the trooper to enter it into some sort of impound?

Hyllyard City is described thusly:

small houses and commercial buildings crammed fairly tightly together, with relatively narrow streets running between them.

‘Fairly tightly’? What would be ‘unfairly tightly’, then? ‘Relatively narrow’? Relative to what?

While being escorted through the city by Stormtroopers, Luke sees another prisoner added to the group:

Luke finally got a clear look at the prisoner. It was Han Solo.

The stormtroopers opened their ranks slightly to let

Wait, wait, where’s the paragraph of unnecessary exposition about how Luke is concerned for Han, confused about how he got here, and hopeful that it’s all part of a rescue operation? I can’t just fill in the blanks for myself, Timmy; I’m stupid enough to be reading this book, so I have to be a fucking moron! Explain it to me!

89%

The escort continues through Hyllyard city, where Luke notices a building.

A fairly impressive archway, too . . . The upper part was composed of different types of fitted stone, the crown flaring outward like a cross between an umbrella and a section of sliced mushroom. The lower part curved in and downward, to end in a pair of meter-square supporting pillars on each side. The entire arch rose a good ten meters into the sky, with the distance between the pillars perhaps half that.

I’m having Pillars of the Earth flashbacks, though at least Timmy Jojo isn’t using Catholic cathedral architecture vocabulary, and at least this only lasts a paragraph. Then again, I’d rather go back and re-read Pillars’ page upon page of architecture descriptions than continue with this book.

The perfect place for an ambush.

Luke felt his stomach tighten. The perfect place for an ambush . . . except that if it was obvious to him, it must be obvious to the stormtroopers, as well.

And it was. The vanguard of the party had reached the square now . . . They were expecting an ambush, all right. And they were expecting it right here.

Jesus. A seven-year-old could write better than this. Here, let’s try:

Luke noticed that the open space was perfect for an ambush. Unfortunately, so did the stormtroopers. Suddenly, a dinosaur appeared and ate a stormtrooper, but Darth Vader took out his lightsaber and

Luke deliberately trips R2D2 (apparently you can easily and deliberately trip a heavy robot that has most of its weight thrown backward) and uses the distraction to have it emit a loud signal to C3PO, who is supposedly nearby. And . . . none of the Stormtroopers or nearby Imperial ships pick up and decode this message. Nobody else in hearing understands what just happened. Wow.

“I hope,” Han murmured from beside him, “you know what you’re doing.”

If I could teach the world anything about copy-editing, it would be that punctuation is like musical notes. A period is called a full-stop for a reason; a comma is a pause, a semi-colon a longer pause. In the above-quoted sentence, Han seems to pause in the middle of his sentence for about two seconds. “I hope . . . . . . you know what you’re doing.” Not that this is a deliberate pause, meant to simulate distraction, interruption, thought, or dramatic weight. It’s just bad sentence construction.

Well, that’s all the education you get today. If you want more, stop reading a Star Wars EU novel.

“So do I,” he murmured back.

In a very few minutes, he knew, they would both find out.

Chapter 29

“Oh, my!” Threepio gasped.

90%

We switch to Lando, C3PO, and a few other guys, all lying in wait to ambush the Stormtroopers and rescue Luke and Han. They watch the escort ‘across the way’, which I assume is Jojospeak for ‘from about fifty feet away’. Lando could apparently hear R2D2′s transmission ‘wail’ even from that distance. So if everyone in a fifty-foot radius could hear it, are you still trying to tell me that not a single device picked up that it was an encrypted transmission? Even assuming they don’t decrypt it in the next five minutes, it has to be suspicious that the droid would send an encrypted transmission after falling over. Why are they not shooting holes into Luke, R2D2, and Han? Apparently, not only are Stormtroopers bad shots, they don’t know when to shoot.

The Imperials were nearing the middle of the square now, Lando saw, the stormtroopers looking wary and alert as anything.

Wait, ‘wary and alert as anything’? WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?

“Well, we sure as blazes don’t want

STOP SAYING THAT.

He looked out at the stormtroopers . . . and hoped that Luke did indeed know what he was doing.

The vanguard had already passed the archway, and the major was only a few steps away from it, when four of the stormtroopers abruptly blew up.

91%

Lando made his men hold off their attack, much to the displeasure of some guy named Ames, whom Lando had to hold at gunpoint. Now that the ambush is going sour, Lando gets hit in the arm with a blaster shot, and then Ames turns on him.

“He’ll come through,” Lando whispered through the pain. “He will.”

But he could tell that Aves wasn’t listening . . . and, down deep, Lando couldn’t blame him. Lando Calrissian, the professional gambler, had gambled one last time. And he’d lost.

And the debt from that gamble — the last in a long line of such debts — had come due.

This is getting ’Harlequin Romance bad’, ‘Dan Brown bad’, ‘Fanfiction Friday bad’. The writing was laughable earlier in the book, but Timmy definitely knew he was in the homestretch when he wrote the last few things I’ve quoted. Now, every author goes through that (myself included), but, and I can’t stress this enough, THAT’S WHAT COPY-EDITORS ARE FOR. You would think, with all of George Lucas’ police patrolling this thing before release, somebody would have taken a minute to actually clean up the style.

Luckily for you readers, I’m not nearly so lazy, and will treat the last 10% with the same–

92-99%

Herp derp derp durr

91%.

With a bellow, [Han] swung his former shackles full across the faceplate of the nearest guard.

Ignore for a moment that Han doesn’t strike me as the bellowing sort. Am I the only one who pictured the shackles bouncing harmlessly off the Stormtrooper’s helmet, and him then giving Han a look of mild annoyance?

Beside him, the guards had subdued Han’s crazy attack and were getting back to their feet, leaving Han on his knees between them.

Much fanfiction was written that day.

Luke saves the day by getting his lightsaber from R2D2, then cutting through the pillars of the huge arch they’re standing under, so that a huge stone structure collapses on the Stormtroopers (but, somehow, not on R2D2, which was in the midst of the battle). Afterward, they get Lando into a medical ship while Ames tells Karrde that he nearly shot him.

Wait, let me try to get the continuity straight. So in the middle of the battle, when things were at their worst, Ames turned away to point his gun at Lando. He then apparently stood that way for five minutes (during which time Luke and Han escaped their bonds), not shooting, until he heard the crash of the arch and turned around to see that the battle had been won. There’s no alternate indication in the pacing of the scene.

Screw it. Lando’s a timelord.

Mary Sue has been quiet for a while, other than snapping at Luke at one point. This reminds me of a funny tidbit from Wookieepedia: While trying to name the book, Zahn tried ‘The Emperor’s Hand’. That’s right, folks: He wanted to name the book after Mary Sue. Of course, his eventual choice, ‘Heir to the Empire’, is apparently a reference to Thrawn, who gets even less face-time than her.

92%

Just before Luke and Han take off, Karrde asks Han for a ship . . . for some reason.

Karrde watched [Luke and Han fly away], wondering if that last suggestion had been too little too late. But perhaps not. Solo was the type to hold debts of honor sacred

Wait, how does Karrde know that? If I remember 30% ago correctly, he’d never met Han before two days ago. Does Han have a reputation for being honorable and helpful? Well, he took sides with the Rebellion, yes, but I still wouldn’t trust the guy to give me a sandwich unless I’d known him a while. Lando, on the other hand . . .

Just as Han and Luke leave orbit, Luke feels ‘a surge of awareness and strength . . . The Force was again with him.’ Now that we don’t need the ysalamiri plot device, it goes right out the window.

“I just– it’s like being able to see again after having been blind.”

Han snorted under his breath. “Yeah, I know how that is,” he said wryly.

Oh, ha ha.

[Han] glanced at Luke again. “–but you look like something the proom dragged in.”

. . . the what.

[Wookieepedia definition of 'proom'] “Prooms were animals, possibly feline. A popular description of someone with a ragged appearance was the saying, “You look like something the proom dragged in.” [Only appearance: Heir to the Empire.]

He made up a new animal just for that one moronic, immersion-breaking line. This isn’t “I wanted to go to Tashi Station to pick up power converters,” this isn’t “You stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf herder!”, this is sci-fi gibberish at its most unnecessary.

“[Mara Jade] wants to kill me,” [Luke] told the other.

“Any idea why?”

Luke opened his mouth  . . . and, to his own surprise, closed it again. There wasn’t any particular reason not to tell Han what he knew about Mara’s past– certainly no reason he could think of. And  yet, somehow, he felt a strangely compelling reluctance to do so.

Don’t worry, Luke. That’s just the sensation of being written by a hack.

93%

“Where are we going? . . . Coruscant?”

“A little side trip first,” Han said. “I want to swing by the Sluis Van shipyards, see if we can get Lando and your X-wing fixed up.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t bother with Sluis Van, then,” Luke suggested, feeling a sympathetic shiver. “Lando’s hurting, but he’s not in any danger.”

Han shook his head. “No. I want to get him taken care of– and you, buddy, need some downtime, too,” he added, glancing at Luke.

“I just wanted you to know that when we hit Coruscant, we’re going to hit it running. So enjoy Sluis Van while you can. It’ll probably be the last peace and quiet you’ll get for a while.”

So let me get this straight. Out of all of the inhabited, equipped systems in the galaxy, Han Solo is extremely ironically* setting course for the very system that Thrawn is about to attack. Meanwhile, Wedge and the other fighter pilots are being extremely ironically* sent to that same area. *Warning: May not contain actual irony.

Maybe that was part of Thrawn’s plan all along.

Y’know, since he’s omniscient.

In the blackness of deep space, three-thousandths of a light-year out from the Sluis Van shipyards, the task force assembled for battle.

LAWL

“Perhaps they’re having trouble with their transmitter,” [the communications officer] suggested hesitantly.

For a handful of heartbeats, Thrawn just stood there, silent.

Okay. You know what? I’ll bite. How many is a ‘handful’ of heartbeats? We first need to determine how large a heartbeat is. You could say it’s the size of a heart, but then you could only fit one in your hand, so that doesn’t work. After that, the first image that comes to mind is a little glob the size of a marble, so let’s go with that. I can fit about . . . twelve marbles in my hand without trouble. Thrawn probably has larger hands than I do, so let’s ratchet that up to twenty. Assuming Timmy is using the Universal Standard Human Heartbeat, which takes about .75 seconds, Thrawn stood and stared into space for fifteen seconds.

“No,” he said at last. “They’ve been taken. Skywalker was indeed there.”

Or maybe a heartbeat is the size of a magical plot diamond taken from a pirate ship.

94%

Chapter 31

Captain Afyon of the Escort Frigate Larkhess shook his head with thinly disguised contempt

OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE.

You know what this scene-opening line reminds me of?

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.

That’s the first line from Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. For an explanation of why it’s terrible and how it relates to the above quote from Heir, check out this series of articles on Language Log. You might also take a look at my Clichés I Abhor entry on Telling Us The Character’s Name.

“You X-wing hotshots,” he growled. “You’ve really got it made — you know that?”

Wedge shrugged, trying hard not to take offense. It wasn’t easy, but then, he’d had lots of practice in the past few days. Afyon had started out from Coruscant with a planetary-mass chip on his shoulder, and he’d been nursing it the whole way.

Want to know how I feel right now? Watch this video, but instead of ‘wrong’, think ‘bland’.

Here, 90% later, I’ve remembered my resolution to skim expository paragraphs. As such, I just blazed through a page or so. Then Wedge notices the empty freighter that Thrawn sent floating toward them . . . for some reason.

“Trouble?”

Wedge focused on the captain in mild surprise. The other’s frustrated anger of a minute ago was gone, replaced by something calm, alert, and battle-ready.

Making that bland bland bland bland character development . . . bing bong! completely pointless!

95%

And in the space of a single heartbeat, the whole thing went straight to hell.

He used ‘heartbeat’ again?

Wait, his usage make sense, for once.

I . . . I can’t make fun of it.

My life is empty.

Wait a second, ‘straight to hell’? Isn’t that another one of those Terran-mythology-based sayings? All is right with the world!

The freighter ship BLOWS UP!

The bay was suddenly no longer empty.

One of the X-wing pilots gasped. A tight-packed mass of something was in there, totally filling the space where the Larkhess’s sensors had read nothing. A mass that was even now exploding outward like a hornet’s nest behind the pieces of the bay.

A mass that in seconds had resolved itself into a boiling wave front of TIE fighters.

Wait.

Excluding the fact that the above was almost entirely made up of fragments, how do you have a mass of space ships? If they bump into each other, don’t they blow up or damage equipment? A ‘mass’ doesn’t imply a formation, so are they just flying in random directions and hoping not to bash together? Are TIE fighters like fish, or maybe like those robots from the end of the Matrix trilogy, and when you put them in a school, they flow together?

ARE TIE FIGHTERS ACTUALLY SPACE COCKROACHES?

And as they swung around in response, he knew with a sinking feeling that Captain Afyon had been wrong. Rogue Squadron was indeed going to earn its pay today.

The battle for Sluis Van had begun.

You know, I’m getting really tired of this melodramatic bullshit. Yes, Timmy, I know that this is a bad situation and that our heroes (or whoever Wedge is) are in big trouble. You don’t have to throw in a ‘dun dun DUN!’ every time something important happens.

Luke clawed his way . . . into the copilot’s seat. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“We just walked into an Imperial attack,” Han growled

“They’ve got the system bottled up,” Luke said, his voice glacially calm. A far cry, Han thought, from the panicky kid he’d pulled off Tatooine out from under Star Destroyer fire all those years ago. “I make it five Star Destroyers and something over twenty smaller ships.”

Hooray for pointless, flow-breaking narration-flashbacks!

For a moment [Luke] frowned as a strange thought suddenly struck him. But no. [The approaching conical ships] couldn’t possibly be Lando’s missing mole miners. Even a Grand Admiral wouldn’t be crazy enough to try to use something like that in battle.

96%

Thrawn, on the deck of his ship, sees the Millennium Falcon join the battle (towing an X-wing). He:

1. Instantly assumes that it’s Luke’s X-wing (never mind that Wedge and his entire group fly X-wings, and Han might just be rescuing one of them);
2. Instantly assumes that Luke is also aboard or nearby, as opposed to the theory that Han found Luke’s X-wing floating in space with Luke either dead or missing;
3. Instantly assumes that they just escaped from Myrkr (Karrde’s planet) and bee-lined it here, as opposed to Han coming here from some other location;
4. Instantly assumes that Karrde was indeed hiding Luke, as opposed to Luke being somewhere else in the galaxy (where Han found him); AND
5. By extension, instantly assumes that Luke and Co. were indeed responsible for defeating his Stormtroopers on Myrkr (as opposed to angry smugglers, rioting locals, a New Republic attack, some kind of interference in communication preventing them from reporting in, a bad case of Montezuma’s Revenge, or one of many millions of other possibilities conceivable in a complex universe, i.e. one not written by Timmy Jojo.

Oh look, it’s that plot jewel from a pirate ship!

Directly ahead, a Calamari Star Cruiser

Wait.

Lawl.

What?

Calamari is cooked squid.

My conclusion: OH MY GOD THEY FRIED UP AKBAR AND THEN TURNED THE DISH INTO A SHIP. I’m now picturing a spaceship with Akbar’s head mounted on the front; it drifts through space with the scent of delicious seafood wafting behind it.

. . . even as he swung around to follow Wedge, Rogue Five blew him out of the sky.

Wait, aren’t they in space?

And just before it closed the gap completely, he caught a glimpse of an acridly brilliant light.

. . . an acrid light? A light with an irritatingly strong and unpleasant taste or smell? WHAT THE FUCK?

97%

[Han] broke off; and, abruptly, he swore. “Luke– we got it backwards. They’re not here to wreck the fleet.

“They’re here to steal it.”

A few things.

1. That’s not how you use a semicolon.
2. “Han went quiet, then swore.” There. Fixed.
3. ‘Backwards’ is British English. Leave off the ‘s’ (‘Backward’) for American English, in which this book is written.
4. To be fair, Timmy broke the dialog across two paragraphs appropriately, by leaving the closing quotation mark off the end of the first sentence.
5. However, it was used unnecessarily here, except to add more of Timmy Jojo’s lazy, half-assed melodrama. The penultimate and last sentences could easily have been in the same paragraph and still carried dramatic weight; instead, the effect is pathetic and, again, flow-breaking.
6. Proofreading aside: Han figures out that the mole-miners are going to drill through and ‘steal’ the ships, as opposed to simply causing decompression, thereby killing the crews and damaging equipment. Granted, Thrawn has now built up a history of stealing his enemies’ shit for later, so this makes sense if you’ve been reading the book. However, I doubt Han has all the information I do, so him jumping to this particular conclusion (as opposed to Luke, who is now in touch with the Force) feels like he might have the twin to Thrawn’s magical plot diamond.

For a long heartbeat Luke just stared

GRAH. Okay, back to the maths. A Long Universal Standard Human Heartbeat would, I presume, be double that of a normal Universal Standard Human Heartbeat; ergo, .75 * 2 = 1.5. So Luke stared at this cataclysmic battle for all of 1.5 seconds. Not enough time for a dramatic Star Wars moment? You’re not Timmy Jojo!

Something else you have to understand: There’s a long break between Han’s melodramatic line and Luke’s long-standard staring. I’m not sure how this translates from ebook back to the original book, but I’m assuming it’s a sort of scene break within the chapter. [Edit: Amazon's Look Inside feature confirms this (page 389).] However, this is still the same scene. Why would you have a scene break within the same scene?

I’m not sure if I understand right, but it seems as if the mole miners are latching onto the ships and then controlling them (as evidenced by a New Republic Star Cruiser firing on Wedge). Is this possible? I mean, if R2D2 can plug his little thinger into any port and haxxor enemy ships and controls, I guess this is possible, too. It’s just not being explained very well. Then again, in the midst of a battle, this sort of thing wouldn’t be clear at all, so I’m giving Timmy Jojo props for accidentally writing properly.

Luke shoots up a mole miner and blows the hatch off.

And through the opening, a monstrous, robotlike figure came charging out.

“What–?”

“It’s a spacetrooper,” Han snapped back. “A stormtrooper in zero-gee armor.

What the fuckle?

98%

Pellaeon oversees his ship blasting a frigate and then drawing it into their group using a tractor beam.

Clearly against its will, the Assault Frigate began to move inward.

I have to be the only one who pictured it kicking and whining, “I don’t wanna!” Then again, I might merely be projecting my own feelings about finishing this book.

He had no doubt the tractor crew would do the job right

You might even say that they will . . . git ‘er done.

they’d shown a remarkable increase in efficiency and competence lately.

My initial thought is that this is more tedious bullshit about C’boath taking control of the Empire the way Palpatine once did. And then I remember that it’s easier to make a crack about how they’re working harder in order to reach the end of the book faster.

Thrawn jabbers something about a spacetrooper (I’ll bet Heinlein reached for the lawsuit button when he heard about that) and that they have more captured ships approaching in fifteen minutes. Please tell me that this book isn’t going to take another fifteen minutes to read. I’m hoping it’s more in the neighborhood of, uh, thirty seconds.

Back to Han and Luke, who are talking about doing something to the tractored ship (all while not getting drawn in) to help it escape.

“How about using one of the droids?” Wedge suggested.

“Neither of them can do it,” Luke told him. “Artoo hasn’t got the manipulative ability, and I wouldn’t trust Threepio with a weapon.

I just pictured C3PO holding a lightsaber. Or a gun. Or a medieval broadsword. Wow. Nightmare fuel.

“What we need is a remote manipulator arm,” Han said. “Something that Luke can use inside while . . .”

Han has a flash of insight: The mole miners are being remote-controlled on a hackable band. If this turns out to be true, I’m officially calling it: Thrawn’s genius strategizing is an Informed Ability. No such perfect genius would base his entire hijacking plan on devices that can be easily controlled, which he stole from the guy whose side he is now attacking.

So they drag the injured Lando out of bed and he gets into the copilot’s seat.

“You heard all that?” Han asked him.

“Every part that mattered . . . I could kick myself for not seeing it long ago.”

Dude, you were unconscious or in the other room for most of this fight. Were you even aware that we were in a battle? How the hell were you supposed to . . . Dammit, never mind, let’s just finish this.

99%

Their plan works. This obvious security flaw — basically the equivalent of a supervillain stealing the hero’s wireless router, setting it up in his secret base, and then leaving his Wifi unsecured and his Windows folder shared over the network — went completely unprotected. They didn’t, I dunno, re-fit the miners to be controlled by a more secure method. They didn’t even reset the security codes that Lando apparently knew by heart.

For a long minute

I’m not even going to blast this one. Know why? Because this is my chance to gloat:

For a long minute Thrawn sat in silence, staring down at his status boards, apparently oblivious to the battle still raging on all around them. Pellaeon held his breath, waiting for the inevitable explosion of injured pride at the unexpected reversal. Wondering what form that explosion would take.

Abruptly, the Grand Admiral raised his eyes to the viewport. “Have all the remaining Cloak Force TIE fighters returned to our ships, Captain?” he asked calmly.

“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon told him, still waiting.

Thrawn nodded. “Then order the task force to begin its withdrawal.”

“Ah . . . withdrawal?” Pellaeon asked cautiously. It was not exactly the order he’d been anticipating.

Thrawn looked at him, a faint smile on his face. “You were expecting, perhaps, that I’d order an all-out attack?” he asked. “That I would seek to cover our defeat in a frenzy of false and futile heroics?”

Did . . . Did this fucker just lampshade himself?

“Of course not,” Pellaeon protested.

But he knew down deep that the other knew the truth. Thrawn’s smile remained but was suddenly cold. “We haven’t been defeated, Captain,” he said quietly. “Merely slowed down a bit. We have Wayland, and we have the treasures of the Emperor’s storehouse.

Which, now that I think of it, haven’t been mentioned since they were attained off-screen. Don’t tell me this is foreshadowing.

Sluis Van was to be merely a preliminary to the campaign, not the campaign itself. As long as we have Mount Tantiss, our ultimate victory is still assured.”

Dammit. I really did want to see this guy throw a tantrum over his moronic mistake. Instead, he’s trying to spin it like it’s no big deal. What an asshole.

So there would not be an explosion, after all . . . and with a twinge of guilt, [Pellaeon] realized that he should have known better from the start. Thrawn was not merely a soldier, like so many others Pellaeon had served with. He was, instead, a true warrior, with his eye set on the final goal and not on his own personal glory.

Taking one last look out the viewport, Pellaeon issued the order to retreat. And wondered, once again, what the Battle of Endor would have been like if Thrawn had been in command.

You know, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching pro wrestling, it’s that when you have a star with great crowd draw (Palpatine, Darth Vader), and you also have an up-and-coming guy whom you want to sell to the crowd (Thrawn, Mary Sue), you don’t sell your new guy by burying the old. All that does is make the crowd nostalgic about the star; they sneer at this new chump who has to be booked so heavy-handedly just to get over.

Too much wrestling lingo, didn’t read: Stop trying to make us respect Thrawn and Mary Sue by comparing them to better, more interesting, and more respectable characters.

Afyon blathers about how Fey’lya is going to start a ruckus over how Luke, Han, and Lando basically crippled a bunch of New Republic ships in order to keep them from being taken. Yep, this is how foreshadowing is done, people: Wait until the last minute, then have your characters jabber about an unaddressed problem! Oops, book over, looks like you’ll have to buy the next one!

Leia calls Han from Coruscant.

He heard her take a deep breath. “Admiral Ackbar has been arrested and removed from command. On charges of treason.”

YOU DON’T MESS WITH OUR CALAMARI! Han, let’s get over there and break his ass out of jail!

“We haven’t gone through a war and back just to watch some overambitious Bothan wreck it.”

“How are we going to stop him?”

Han grimaced. “We’ll think of something.”

To Be Continued . . .

I could bitch about how, instead of leaving us worrying about the Empire and C’boath and Mary Sue and other possibly legitimate threats, we’re left wondering why we should give a shit about New Republic politics.

I could.

But then I realize:

100%

It’s over.

IT’S OVER.

Our long nightmare is over. Everything after this point is going back to proofread, clean up, maybe add some links and alt tags, and–

“Heh.”

WHAT DO YOU WANT, MARTY TZU. I’M DONE WITH YOU.

You ridiculed me because I forgot about LAN security. Yet you, too, have forgotten something important.

Spit it out, if Timmy Jojo will let you.

This was but the first book in a trilogy.

. . . fuck.

FUCK.

Additional sources of hilarity

• The Wookieepedia page for Heir to the Empire (check out the ‘Appearances’ section and try to count how many ‘First Appearances’ there are)
• The Heir to the Empire Sourcebook for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game
• The comic adaptation of Heir to the Empire
• I might eventually do an illustrative article on what I would have changed in order to make Heir worth reading.
• During a fanfiction game in the IRC channel, I wrote the beginnings of . . . well, of something horrible. It might see the light of day; we should all pray it doesn’t.

About Fiona Canteberry

A novelist from northwest Arkansas, Fiona's range of topics include writing, tropes, and self-improvement. She goes by 'FekketCantenel' online.

2 comments

• Roadrunner says:

  August 19, 2010 at 3:51 pm

  looks like TZ is a fan of SUDDEN HANDY PLOT DEVICES

  Reply
• Dr_Kens says:

  August 31, 2010 at 11:03 am

  Thrawn always has his revenge!

  But that was great. Nice job on the Let’s Read!

  Reply

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