Star Wars: The Living Force
In the year before The Phantom Menace, Yoda, Mace Windu, and the entire Jedi Council confront a galaxy on the brink of change.
The Jedi have always traveled the stars, defending peace and justice across the galaxy. But, the galaxy is changing, and along with it, the Jedi Order. More and more, the Order finds itself focused on the future of the Republic, secluded on Coruscant, where the twelve members of the Jedi Council weigh crises on a galactic scale.
As yet another Jedi Outpost leftover from the Republic’s golden age is set to be decommissioned on the planet Kwenn, Qui-Gon Jinn challenges the Council about the increasing isolation of the Order. Mace Windu suggests a bold response: all twelve Jedi Masters will embark on a goodwill mission to help the planet, and remind the people of the galaxy that the Jedi remain as stalwart and present as they have been across the ages.
But the arrival of the Jedi leadership is not seen by all as a cause for celebration. Warring pirate factions have infested the sector in the increasing absence of the Jedi. To maintain their dominance, the pirates unite, intent on assassinating the Council. And they are willing to destroy countless innocent lives to secure their power.
Cut off from Coruscant, the Jedi Masters must reckon with an unwelcome truth: that while no one thinks more about the future than the Jedi Council, nobody needs their help more than those living in the present.
Author: John Jackson Miller
Cover artist: Liz Eno
Publisher:Â Del Rey
Release date: April 9, 2024
Narrator:Â Marc Thompson
ISBN: 9780593869666
Not only is the return to the prequel era always very welcome, especially with The Acolyte heading our way so soon detailing the start of the long fall to Order 66 and the extermination of the Jedi Order, but also the return of John Jackson Miller to Star Wars novels after almost a decade is something to be celebrated. Writing in this era for the first time, Miller is no stranger to weaving engrossing plots with engaging characters, and here – just as The Phantom Menace did so well 25 years ago – he presents us with a cast of engaging characters who have no idea of quite how bad it’s all going to get.
We find the galaxy at something of a crossroads. The Jedi Order continue to close outposts across the galaxy, temples that while sparsely occupied still serve as fading beacons of hope to the many worlds clinging on to relevance and profitability. We kick off with the classic pairing of Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, taking passage home aboard a commercial starship that is hijacked by pirates. An easy situation to remedy for Jedi of their talents, but the publics reaction to and perception of the Jedi says everything. We – the readers sat here in a galaxy far, far away from the ones the Star Wars story take place in – read from high above the narrative, a tickertape trickle of exposition framing what we see. We can flick through the pages and view the future, the past and the present, knowing where this is going, and while you sense Qui-Gon has more of a grasp on this unwelcome future than anyone, the Force moves in mysterious ways, ebbing and flowing from light to dark. So, the real question is, what does it mean to be a Jedi in this era?
Miller takes that question and runs with it, not only laying down Qui-Gons view that helping people means actually helping people in the most tactile manner, while the massed ranks of the council seconded in their seclusion on Coruscant have very different views. When the opportunity to visit the world of Kwenn in the Mid Rim – right on the very edge of Hutt Space on the lengthy Pabol Sleheyron hyperspace lane running through Hutt space from Formos to Randon – arises, the Order make the decision to go en masse, not only to potentially close the outpost there but to celebrate two hundred years since the Jedi led the Great Renewal, one of the many noteworthy galactic endeavours undertaken during the High Republic era that saw the world raised to prosperity with a bright future ahead. However, the galaxy is vast and times change; Kwenn is now a shell of its former self, and as the council arrive and head out into the world to meet the people and help where they can, we see the decline. That decline is clearly analogous to the stagnation of the Jedi, and in what could have easily been a stodgy trudge of a story, Miller injects it with humour (Even Piell and the school kids), insight (more Jedi, less Order), wisdom (attachments are not the problem, indifference is) and foreboding (Senator Palpatine ‘assisting’ Supreme Chancellor Valorum) and as such crafts a story that skips by, giving depth to the council we’ve known for a quarter of a century, voices to characters who’ve never spoken before and another layer of detail to the state of the galaxy when Episode I kicks off just one year later.
In addition to the Jedi heading towards a calamitous tipping point, so the proliferation of pirate gangs in the Slice show just how far away from Coruscant even the outer reaches of the Mid Rim are. While Kwenn is certainly closer to the feathered edges of the Outer Rim than the Core, the advancing issue of piracy only highlight how rare it must be to see a Jedi in these parts. Even in this time period, one you would imagine to be littered with tales of the Jedi and stories of their powers, the Jedi are mentioned in the vaguest sense. Some have heard of them, many haven’t and those that have only know the barest of details. However, the Filthy Creds, the Staved Skulls, the Vile and the Riftwalkers are certainly known to the people of the Slice. They are its harsh reality, and so the slippery grasp the Order and the Republic has on this region of the galaxy is every bit as tenuous as their ability to see the darkness right under their noses. Kwenn may be far from the concerns of the interior, but we can plainly see how the Republic has turned inward, casting its influence in smaller and smaller circles; it’s unknowingly creating a galaxy that will, in just 14 short years, turn on the Jedi and accept (at least initially) a new (and legally elected as my colleague Brian Cameron often reminds me) regime in the form of the Galactic Empire.
There are plenty of memorable elements introduced in what feels like a beginning. The pirate Zilastra, the various gangs of the Slice and even the world of Kwenn, a world first mentioned in The Force Awakens Beginners Game that now gets the spotlight of the galaxy shone on it. In story time we have a whole year until The Phantom Menace – the same amount of time between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi – so now Miller is in the era and laying down breadcrumbs, let’s hope he gets the chance to tell more stories. Not only because he’s so adept at what he does, but because it also means we’ll get the chance to hear the ever-amazing and eternally enthusiastic Marc Thompson bring the characters of the novel to life once again. He’s our audio MVP, and it’s very pleasing to see him get the attention and adulation his marathon readings deserve.
We’re told that The Living Force dovetails into The Glass Abyss from Steven Barnes which arrives 16th October so don’t sit on this but do head to Audible, Amazon or wherever you download your audiobooks and have a listen as the anniversary of Episode I continues and we get to dive into the year leading up to The Phantom Menace.Â
- Hardcover Book
- Miller, John Jackson (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 432 Pages - 04/09/2024 (Publication Date) - Random House Worlds (Publisher)
