Book Review – Star Wars: Survivor’s Quest by Timothy Zahn

Once again we travel to a galaxy far, far away, readers! This time the destination is Star Wars: Survivor’s Quest. Strap into your X-wings and hold onto your lightsabers, because here we go!

Set three years after the Hand of Thrawn duology and three years before the Yuuzhan Vong Invasion, Surivivor’s Quest begins with Talon Karrde aboard Booster Terrik’s traveling casino, the Errant Venture. He is anxiously waiting to hear from Luke and Mara Jade Skywalker. Someone in his organization betrayed him. They stole a message meant for the Skywalkers, then rushed off into the Unknown Regions with it.

Knowing how trouble-prone the two Jedi are and what the difference a few days can mean where important messages are concerned, Talon has practically paced a rut into the Errant Venture’s command deck waiting for Luke and Mara to get his message to meet him at the casino. Booster tries to calm him down, but all he succeeds in doing it making Talon stop pacing. The smuggling chief doesn’t like letting his people or friends down, and even though Mara is now a Jedi and the wife of Luke Skywalker, she’ll always be his friend. The idea that this message’s delay could put her and her husband in jeopardy does not sit well with him.

Meanwhile, blissfully unaware of this, Mara Jade Skywalker is in a cantina on an Outer Rim world negotiating with a gang that used to work for Karrde. Having turned his organization into a neutral intelligence agency that reports to the New Republic and the Imperial Remnant, Karrde has been gradually disengaging from the smuggling world for the past three years. Mara has been helping him out, in part because she is also been working on separating herself from his organization.

It is hard to say how the previous meetings went, but this one isn’t looking like it will be smooth sailing. The leader of this gang has stocked the cantina with all of his friends, most of whom have blasters pointed at Mara’s back. Since Talon is cutting them loose, the gang leader demands Mara forward them half a million credits as a “tide-me-over” until they can connect with another, more powerful organization like Karrde’s to maintain their operations.

The demand is more than a little unreasonable, and Mara has no intention of fulfilling it. She is also not as helpless or alone as the gang thinks. Using the Force and her lightsaber to distract the group, she buys Luke enough time to make his fantastic entrance. There is a brief scuffle, but the Skywalkers end it without bloodshed. Mara promises to transfer a generous but sane amount of money to the group just as a young man rushes in to tell his boss they received a message from Karrde for Mara.

Luke takes the opportunity to scare the crooks with an apparent Jedi mind trick by reciting most of the message, which was forwarded to him from Mara’s ship. Having suitably impressed the bunch, the Skywalkers leave. Knowing Karrde wouldn’t send a message to them and throughout his network of contacts unless he really needed to talk to them, they head out to meet the Errant Venture.

Once there, they find the Venture getting a new paint job. Booster is having it painted bright red, perhaps in the hopes of making the Star Destroyer less intimidating. Contacting Karrde and Booster, they learn about the message. Turns out it was from an Admiral Voss Parck on Niraun.

Mara and Luke share a look. Last time they saw Parck was in Vision of the Future, when they blew up a hangar full of his fighters. The fact that he suddenly wants to talk to them is more than little surprising.

It also doesn’t bode well, since Parck was adamant that there were hundreds of threats the Republic wasn’t capable of facing in the Unknown Regions. If one of those threats is headed their way, they need to know about. Saying good-bye, the Skywalkers head to Niraun….

To find that they’ve been invited to see the remains of Outbound Flight. By the Chiss.

Destroyed by Thrawn on its way to another galaxy, the colonizing ship Outbound Flight was thought lost for good. But now the Chiss have found relics of the vessel in an asteroid field. Since Outbound Flight was primarily a Jedi project, the Chiss have invited Luke to come and pay his and the new Order’s respects to the victims.

Mara is less than pleased. The whole thing is a little too neatly packaged. Provided the Chiss have found what is left of Outbound Flight, the timing of the message’s delivery was such that, even if it hadn’t been stolen, she and Luke wouldn’t have had time to tell anyone in the New Republic where they were going. Although her danger sense isn’t prickling and she’s not getting any warnings from the Force, the whole thing feels too much like a set up.

Nevertheless, she knows as well as her husband does that they have to take this mission. The why is still a mystery, but they can both sense they’re being guided by the Force into this mission to the Chiss. Getting the coordinates from Parck, they head out to meet the Chiss envoy…

…And then the fun begins.

If you want to see what Luke and Mara’s married life is like, Survivor’s Quest is a must-read. Although they haven’t had the first three years of their marriage all to themselves, by this point they are an even more exceptional team than in previous novels. They have grown together and become far stronger than they ever were apart. I wish Zahn had been allowed to write up more adventures like this for them!

As usual, since this is a Timothy Zahn novel, there are no Warnings for Younger Readers. Everything is completely above board. No sex, no gratuitous violence, and nothing remotely offensive. It is just a fun romp in a galaxy far, far away. No one could ask for better than that.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Pick up Survivor’s Quest at your earliest opportunity, readers. You won’t regret it!

Book Review: Star Wars: Outbound Flight by Timothy Zahn

Since I have disposed of this book, I thought it best to review it here and now rather than later. Star Wars: Outbound Flight focuses on the grand, enigmatic experiment which occurred just before the Clone Wars began in the Star Wars mythos. A Jedi project headed by Master Jorus C’Baoth, Outbound Flight was an ambitious attempt to leave the Star Wars galaxy, planting colonies on the way out.

Unfortunately, Outbound Flight never got past the edge of the Outer Rim into Wild Space. They met a Chiss force led by Thrawn and were wiped out.

After reading Survivor’s Quest, which I will review here in a little while, I really wanted to know what happened aboard Outbound Flight. So when I saw the book in a store, I bought it without hesitation.

Outbound Flight, sadly, was something of a disappointment to me. I have heard from Mr. Bookstooge about Zahn’s limitations as an author, not to mention experienced them when I finished his promising Quadrail series. Outbound Flight is, unfortunately, in this category as well.

I think the reason I did not notice his limitations in his other works – or put up with/ignored his weaknesses in his other stories – is because the characters were so engaging that these faults didn’t annoy me. Zahn’s rendition of Mara and Luke, their relationship, along with Han and Leia and their relationship, is always fun and interesting. So I think that usually I can give Zahn a pass on the slower parts of the books he wrote which were previously reviewed here. Outbound Flight, sadly, lacked that staying power for most of the tale, though I did grow to like a couple of the characters herein.

Before I discuss the story, I have to say one thing in defense of Zahn. Looking up the submissions guidelines for Baen and the other publishers of his work, I see that they require something on the order of 100,000 – 150,000 word limits on their manuscripts. That is a lot of work to fill out; creating a story which meets criteria like that means you get a thick book in the end. (My small paperback copy of Outbound Flight itself was almost an inch thick!) It may not be that Zahn is a weak author so much as he works with publishers who refuse to take stories slimmer than an inch in the spine, and he cannot transfer his stories away from those companies due to contracts or something.

I could very well be wrong, of course. And, since I do still enjoy the majority of Zahn’s work, this is probably personal bias speaking. But it is something I have been thinking about lately due to the fact that some of Zahn’s books work fine despite their length while others do not. I can only assume that those stories which “feel off” do so because they should have been shorter, but he had to make them longer than was healthy for them to satisfy the requirements of his publisher(s).

Anyway, back to Outbound Flight. It begins with Jorj Car’das – up and coming smuggler and the youngest member of his present crew – thinking he is going to die pretty soon because his current captain has ticked off a Hutt crime lord, in part because he gets a kick out of it. (Yeah. Wow. How is it this guy isn’t dead yet?)

The crew makes a blind jump into hyperspace, but the Hutt follows them. What neither of them realizes until the freighter is knocked out and the Hutt’s ship destroyed is that they are in Chiss space. Actually, they are in Thrawn’s lap. He has Car’das and his two crewmates brought aboard his ship, the Springhawk, where they learn he can speak Sy Bisti. Thrawn eventually invites them to stay for a little while longer so he can learn Basic, paying them for their time with some loot taken from slavers. Car’das agrees to the bargain on his captain’s behalf, but asks to learn the Chiss language as well.

Meanwhile, back in the Republic, C’baoth is fighting with the bureaucracy to get the Outbound Flight project approved. His apprentice, Lorana Jinzler, does her best to keep up with him but it is clear that she isn’t pleasing him any more than the irritation of the bureaucracy. Instead of getting what he wants, C’baoth is shunted to work on some negotiations on Brolf….

Only to find Obi-Wan Kenobi and a teenage Anakin Skywalker are waiting for him.

Things sort of spiral out from here – it turns out that Palpatine wants C’baoth out of the way because he is so strong in the Force and has Dark Side leanings. (This book shows us quite clearly how the clone went mad; the original beat him to it.) You don’t want a rival when you are trying to take over the galaxy, after all, and Outbound Flight is the means Palpatine plans to use to get rid of C’baoth – along with a whole lot of innocent people.

Car’das’ character was wonderfully expanded in this novel, and I really enjoyed reading from his perspective. Watching him interact with Thrawn, who has the hint of Dark Side leanings of his own in this book, was great, too. Lorana was another interesting character who grew more likeable the longer I read about her, and Zahn handled Obi-Wan’s perspective well while giving us hints about Anakin’s eventual fall to the Dark Side.

None of this, sadly, saves the book from its rather tedious pacing. The novel probably would have worked better if it was shorter, but I don’t think there are very many Star Wars books out there which are short – unless you count the ones meant for children. Even the short story collections have very thick spines.

I’m not casting Outbound Flight into exterior darkness, though, because it fleshes out the above characters so well and explains what happened to the project. My local library has received this copy so that others can read it and (maybe) enjoy it more than I did. If long books or Zahn’s stretching beyond his limits bother you, then this book will probably not be something you absolutely need to read – unless you want more original Expanded Universe background on Outbound Flight, Thrawn, and Car’das. (I really liked him in this novel – did I say that already? He was extremely interesting and well-developed here.) If even that doesn’t appeal to you, then please avoid this book.

Well, that’s it for now, readers; I am wiped. I got absorbed in the book while I was writing this in order to keep at least some of the details straight, so this is quits for me. Until next time, may the Force be with you.