Good thing I checked the forums first, otherwise I would've made a duplicate post
I'll just copy everything I was going to do into here.
Mini-review:
Heir to the Jedi takes place an indeterminate time after ANH but well before ESB; although no definitive time period is given it seems to take place closer in time to the events of ANH than later. It also wasn't quite as good as
Tarkin unfortunately, which I blame on a few things. It is told entirely from the first-person perspective of Luke Skywalker, which means it was important for the book to really capture Luke's voice throughout the story. Unfortunately in a number of parts it didn't, which threw me off a bit. Pacing is sometimes off as well, parts of the book just fly by while others linger a bit in certain sections. Finally there's a sense of minimalism in terms of the characters. The book starts off with the Alliance sending Luke to negotiate an arms deal with a Rodian clan, and I just can't help thinking they
must have a trained diplomat or someone better trained for this. It's that common complain that despite a literal galaxy of characters
everything revolves around the classic cast. This sense starts to dissipate as the book progresses but it left a bitter taste in my mouth.
As before I tried to keep spoilers to a bare minimum while highlighting passages which flesh out the background and provide fodder for debate. First batch of posts right now, will follow up with more later.
Ch 1 pg 5-6 wrote:There's no one around to answer all my questions now that Ben's gone.[...]I know Han likes to scoff at the idea of the Force, but when a man's body simply disappears at the touch of a lightsaber, that's more than "simple tricks and nonsense."
And I know the Force is real. I've felt it.
I still feel it, actually, but I think it's like knowing there's something hidden in the sand while you're skimming above it. You see ripples on the surface, hints that something is moving down there - maybe something small, maybe something huge - living a completely different life out of your sight. And going after it to see what's underneath the surface might be safe and rewarding, or it might be the last thing you ever do. I need someone to tell me when to dive into those ripples and when to back off.
I thought I heard Ben's voice a couple of times during the Battle of Yavin, but I'm wondering now if that really happened. Maybe I only thought I did; maybe that was my subconscious speaking to me - a kind of wishful thinking. He's been silent since, and I don't feel I can talk to anyone else about the Force.
So this is pretty firm confirmation that there are no other Force users around post-Yavin who can teach Luke anything about the Force, unless Luke is acting totally out of character and simply dismissing potential teachers as being not Jedi enough. Which brings back that interesting question of what exactly is going to happen to all the Jedi we see in the Rebels cartoons.
Ch 1 pg 6 wrote:Leia is cloistered with the leaders of the Alliance in the fleet, which is currently hiding in the Sujimis sector around an ice planet no one has paid attention to since the Clone Wars.
The Alliance fleet hiding in the Outer Rim. This location will be important for later quotes regarding hyperspace travel.
Ch 1 pg 9 wrote:She wore desert camo fatigues tucked into thick-soled brown boots, a blaster strapped to her left hip, and what looked like a compact slug rifle strapped to her back, held in place by a leather band crossing diagonally across her torso.
I flicked a finger at the rifle. "You hunt sandstone scorpions with that?"
"Yep. Can't use a blaster on them. Their armor deflects heat too well."
"I'd heard that."
"And since so many people are wearing blaster armor these days, a throwback weapon that punches through it is surprisingly effective if you know how to shoot one."
Unsurprisingly, designing your armor to protect against certain attacks but not others leaves some vulnerabilities. Also clearly some animals are just naturally blaster-resistant.
Ch 1 pg 12 wrote:We had to navigate several different hyperspace lanes to get to Rodia from the Sujimis sector and I was getting used to the way the Jewel handled, so our trip probably took more time than strictly necessary. Fortunately we weren't in a hurry and I enjoyed every minute of it.
A bit about the route Luke took, again giving context for later quotes.
Ch 1 pg 13 wrote:I engaged the ship's baby laser cannon and waited until I got a system go-ahead, then dived on the lateral axis toward the TIE fighters. I flipped on the deflector shields and locked on the targeting computer. One look at the ships and I knew the TIE pilots were hanging on to the orientation of the Star Destroyer from which they had deployed; they had a sense of which way was "up" and they were sticking to it, which is a limiting and even dangerous perception to hold on to in space. Up and down don't really have a meaningful use until you're in atmosphere. I deliberately rolled as I dived, adjusted my nose so that the leading TIE fighter was in my sights, and fired.
It's curious how Luke seems to recognize this fact while these TIE pilots do not. It could be just that these pilots are newbies since there's no mention of this in any other incidents.
Ch 2 pg 19-20 wrote:We arrived at a dock that appeared at first to be unguarded, but I sensed somehow that wasn't the case. After all the security I saw getting this far, I couldn't imagine they'd leave this wide open. Laneet caught my expression and interpreted it correctly. "There are guards. They're in stealth armor."
"Oh, really? I've never seen stealth armor."
Laneet made a noise similar to a chortle but closer to a digestive problem. "Hence the name."
It reminded me of Ben's assertion that your eyes can deceive you. The Force would help me pierce through such illusions if I could learn how.
A return of stealth armor from the EU which hides the wearer, at least from the visual spectrum. Luke opines about being unable to see past these stealth suits but it could be the sense he had felt earlier
was the Force trying to warn him.
Ch 2 pg 26 wrote:"Kenobi! I know that name! He came to Rodia during the Clone Wars to help return a kidnapped child from another clan. Am I to understand he's still alive?"
For a moment I felt my throat close up, but then I was able to say, "Not anymore. He died at the Battle of Yavin."
"Ah! So a Jedi was involved in the destruction of the Death Star. The Alliance's victory there makes much more sense now. The Jedi have a way of turning daunting taskes into routine ones."
I decided not to mention that I'd been the one who'd delivered the fatal shot to the exhaust port. Besides, Obi-Wan had helped me.
It's curious that Luke says Kenobi died during the Battle of Yavin since technically he died long before that on the Death Star itself. It could be he's purposefully conflating the earlier escape from the DS and the later attack on it as one event. Or he could be telling the truth "from a certain point of view" to the Rodian rather than get into the gritty details.
Ch 2 pg 34 wrote:Insects and birds and amphibians continued to drone and chirp and croak, heedless of my problems, but their noise existed on another level than auditory. When I stretched out with my feelings and tried to locate the ghest through the Force, all I got was an overwhelming sense of the life surrounding me - nothing so specific as a single bird or fish or predator. I knew that many of the creatures were hungry and wanted to eat other creatures, but there was no sense that a certain one wished to eat me.
Not surprisingly, Luke is having difficulty distinguishing specific life forms in a setting chock full of them. Presumably with better training this wouldn't be as difficult.
Ch 3 pg 37-38 wrote:Doing my best to relax and leave myself open to the Force, I activated Huulik's lightsaber and marveled again at how the hilt didn't feel quite right; even though I'd wiped it down with a damp cloth and removed all hints of debris, it still seemed to want to escape my grip with a slippery, viscous surface tension that was absent from my own lightsaber. Was it a function of Rodian versus human manufacture? Or was my lightsaber better suited to me because it had been constructed by my father?
The blade was not pure light, of course: It was energy from the same sort of power cell that fueled blasters, given form by passing through a kyber crystal as superheated plasma that arced at the top and returned to the hilt. It didn't give off heat until it touched something solid; the rest of the time its power was contained by a force field.
So a little canon information about how lightsabers work (surely enough to allow us to start building them, no?) and the possibility that lightsabers react differently when not being carried by the one who built them. Since the Force is clearly involved in its actual construction (see below) this shouldn't be a surprise.
Ch 3 pg. 38-39 wrote:As before, I kept myself open to the Force, but now I tried to focus on the lightsaber and feel the Force inherent in it. Closing my eyes, I explored the top of the hilt right below the emitter with my fingers, searching for any tactile clues. The surface retained the same strange slick feeling, but I detected nothing unusual at the top, or around the button or dial, or even on the rest of the hilt. When I ran my finger fully around the base, however, clockwise and then counterclockwise, eyes still closed and trying to feel the Force, a snick announced the appearance of a fissure lengthwise down the hilt; after another soft click, the casing popped free, revealing yet another metal sheath, one that looked more like mine and had visible screws. Artoo unscrewed them for me and I was able to lift off one half of the sheath and reveal the innards.
The power cell at the base was insulated and held no interest for me. Above that was a platform for the primary focusing crystal that gave the lightsaber its color. Two additional crystals floated above it, balanced so precariously on mounting ridges that they could easily be disturbed - and they had been. They lay askew, and I feared I must have done that in the process of disassembling it. The lightsaber wouldn't work properly now, even if I put it back together; without proper focusing there was no telling what would happen if I tried to turn it on. It might explode. And aligning those crystals by hand would be impossible - I sensed that it had to be done with the Force, and only through the Force would I know whether it was aligned properly or not. They were wafer-thin slices of crystal, too, a beautiful clear amethyst, and might scratch or cloud with handling. Moving them precisely with the Force would ensure that they remained pristine.
The lightsaber's construction confirmed for me what I had already suspected: Far from being merely a feeling of interconnectedness that could guide your actions or a method of tricking the weak-willed, the Force could be used to manipulate solid objects. However, the skill required to construct a lightsaber - or even put this one back together - was a parsec or five beyond my current abilities.
...
Obi-Wan had never addressed telekinesis with me. It was likely that I wasn't strong enough to begin training in such an advanced field of study.
So we have the return of the Force being required to construct lightsabers and the inner layout of one (a primary color crystal and two additional ones? why does that seem so familiar...
). I do wonder if there are technological ways to get around the Force requirement though. Using precise force fields would allow for the safe handling of the crystals and exact alignment, so it would depend on being able to determine if the alignment is correct, whether it is simply a physical aspect of how the crystals are place or something more mystical.
Also, while it took me back a bit, there really is no demonstration or even mention of telekinesis in the original Star Wars movie. It really is only in ESB where we see Luke and Vader moving things with their mind. There are touches of this all through the book, where things we take for granted or assume simply are really aren't and get 'discovered' by Luke, which are nice.
Ch 3 pg 41 wrote:Meditating and getting to a quite place when alone was somehow different from feeling the Force in combat or while piloting or practicing against drones. When I opened myself to the Force in those situations, it was more of an instinctive process, and I felt guided and warned in an almost effortless way, perhaps owing to a combat-ready state of action and reaction where there is no time for thought, and a profound sense of personal danger.
A little bit about how Jedi precognition works in combat, it matches previous descriptions from the EU and the movies.
Ch 4 pg 43 wrote:We took a longer route back to the fleet, a circuitous path that involved forging a new hyperspace lane between Kirdo and Orto Plutonia - but only after scanning the ship for tracers and spyware. Without immediate pressure and with the luxury of time, Artoo minimized the inherent risk of traveling along unknown hyperspace lanes in conjuction with the nav computer of the Desert Jewel.
Confirmation that anyone can make a new hyperspace route as long as they have some time, a good nav computer and an astromech on hand.
Ch 4 pg 48-49 wrote:"So one of Dad's scouts made a discovery recently on this moon orbiting a planet in the Deep Core, and when Dad got the news, he sent a full crew out - his best one. Hasn't heard from them in a couple of weeks, and he wants to know if his collection crew is still there, and, if so, whether anything can be salvaged - especially if there are any living or dead crew and critters on the ship. He'll pay handsomely for any news of it."
"Why doesn't he simply send someone else to go check it out?"
"It's a new discovery, as I said, and he'd prefer to keep it quiet. Industrial espionage is huge in his business. Crews can make a lot of cash on the side tipping off his competitors. He knows firsthand because he pays bribes to the crews of his competitors, as well. He was hoping I could go by myself because he doesn't really trust anyone else, but I told him I was serving the Alliance now and I am. And the other thing is, the hyperspace lanes to this system aren't well established yet, and being in the Deep Core with all those mass shadows makes it even more risky. So he needs someone who's not only loyal but also willing to take a leap. The nav computers on the Jewel are pretty good, but I don't know if they're that good."
So besides an expose of the cutthroat nature of the SW biomedical industry, we have further confirmation of the difficult nature of trying to navigate hyperspace through the Deep Core. While it's not impossible it requires skills and equipment which isn't too commonplace.
Ch 5 pg 55 wrote:Pasher was located in the Inner Rim at a sort of interstellar dead end.
The location of our hero at this point, provides context for later hyperspace travel quote.
Ch 5 pg 56 wrote:"This is Luke Skywalker, Daddy. He's with the Alliance and he'll be going with me to Fex."
"Pleasure to meet you, sir," I said, nodding at him.
"Hmph! Skywalker. Where have I heard that name?"
"He's the one who destroyed the Death Star, Daddy."
"Ah! The pilot!"
It seems knowledge of who destroyed the Death Star is somewhat common by now. The question is whether the Imperials themselves were the one to broadcast it or if it's something that's come out of the Alliance.
Ch 5 pg 59 wrote:Artoo decrypted the Fexian file and used the coordinates therein to plot a route as we left the atmosphere of Pasher. I asked him to plot a safe trip into a well-known Core system before trying to navigate the Deep Core. When making a dangerous jump like that it was always best to pause, confirm your position among the stars, and recalculate using the latest possible data.
Pretty self-explanatory.
Ch 5 pg 63-65 wrote:The human's limbs went slack, his eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell forward just as the Bith had. Hafner finally got it together, much too late, and shot a stun blast at the unnamed human and at the Bith. Tiny squeals resulted, and the predators lay revealed: small six-legged creatures with spindly limbs that ended in clawed fingers designed to clutch and hold on to prey. Their heads were long snouts with a bulbous skull at the top ringed by eight eyes evenly spaced around it. Their bodies had sharp rigid spines in four rows of four each, presented radially so that anything trying to slap away the creatures would get poked. In each case, the creatures had their snout inserted into a hole in the helmet. Hafner leaned in closer to the human to get a better look.
-snip-
Reaching out with the tip of his blaster, Hafner thrust it underneath the creature's neck and lifted, pulling the flexible snout out of the cavity only to discover that there was another, thinner snout, like a translucent hose, inside of that one, and as it came free, blood and chunks of brain slipped out and plopped wetly onto the helmet.
-snip-
Being careful to avoid the spines, Hafner picked up the limp alien form with his gloved hands. "Not heavy. Thin bones but very strong ones," he said. "And look at the skin. Colors radiate wherever I touch it." ... "Must be a highly advanced chromatophore system in their skin." Cradling the creature by its lower extremities in his left hand, he grabbed hold of the snout with his right. The clear feeding tube retracted by reflex on contact. Hafner continued his commentary. "Hmm. The snout looks completely flexible, but that's not entirely the case. There's a bone inside it along one edge - wait. It moved to the bottom now. How strange."
-snip-
Hafner's fingers probed at the bone, and it moved again. "Look at this. The bone inside that runs along the snout actually rotates in a full circle. Must be an extraordinary socket and musculature system at the base of the skull, and that feeding tube must retract far up inside for it to be allowed such free movement."
His fingers clutched around the edge of the snout. "Down here there is a ring of bone, near the orifice. Yes, it is a ring indeed. I wonder if..."
He squeezed and pulled down against the skin of the snout - and unveiled a horror. It was a rotary blade of teeth, pointed down and insulated by its angle from cutting the inside of the creature's snout. But they could cut through a helmet - and then a skull - just fine. The teeth were discolored but otherwise undamaged.
"This is incredible," Hafner mumbled. "They use these teeth and a rotary motion to drill through the skulls of their prey, damaing the brain, and then when their victims fall down, they insert their feeding tubes and...well. Feed. What must they be made of, to penetrate through these helmets like they did? Some sort of crystalline coating to the teeth, perhaps, as hard as diamond?"
The Fexian Skullborer. And yes that is it's actual name. The things read like something straight out of a cheesy horror movie, which is coincidentally how this part of the book reads.
Ch 5 pg 67 wrote:We got a toxicity report that indicated the Bith would have fallen stone dead of heart failure if the skullborer hadn't penetrated his helmet first - so slapping at them was not an option. There was some speculative reports on the skullborer's skeleton and the composition of the drilling teeth. The helmets worn by the first crew were about an eight on the hardness scale, so the teeth were at a minimum a nine and possibly a ten, considering the speed at which they had bored through the material. Our helmets were now nine point five on the hardness scale, including the visor, while the rest of the armor was standard, albeit insulated from stun blasts. Since stunning had proven to be effective, recommended tactics suggested immediate application of the stun stick if attacked.
A bit more on the brain-eating creatures from outer space. It may be a bit of a leap to assume whichever hardness scale SW uses is the same as
our own, but if so it gives us an idea of the hardness of standard personal armor.
Ch 6 pg 69 wrote:It would be hours before we made it all the way into the Core, where we would take time to make the final calculations prior to making the last jump to Fex.
So we have a confirmed travel time of hours to travel from the Inner Rim to the Core, particularly between Pasher and their final jump-off point into the Deep Core. While no exact distances are given, with the size of the galaxy and relative locations of the Inner Rim and Core regions, that's pretty damn fast. Presumably they were traveling along known hyperspace routes to speed their progress.
Ch 6 pg 70-71 wrote:After our meal, the armor begged to be tried on. The body was a strong but fairly lightweight insulated mesh, padded and reinforced on the torso and spine, designed to stop kinetic rounds and claws, I supposed. The helmets, by contrast, were almost absurdly heavy and cumbersome. We first had to put on a thick rubber insulation mask that the instructions claimed would shield us from the inevitable use of stun sticks to our own heads. It swept down across our collarbones and across the breadth of our shoulders. Then the helmet was fitted on top of that, so heavy that maintaining balance would be a problem. Any sudden movement forward or backward would tug your body in that direction, as I demonstrated by trying to look down. Nakari threw her head back to laugh at me and fell backward, pawing unsuccessfully at the walls to keep herself upright.
-snip-
It was a problem, but not an insurmountable one. We managed to regain our feet, but not quickly and not without considerable strain. If we went down on Fex, we would not spring back up again. Running for more than a few steps might be impossible.
"Did they even test these things before giving them to us?" I wondered aloud, steadying myself against the walls of the passageway.
The comical suits our heroes will use to combat the things from beyond the stars, and they're not even powered to assist the wearer. You know I'm not surprised the suits turned out this way. This is coming from the same guy who thought it'd be a swell idea to send his own daughter into danger rather than something which would make more sense like droids (to be fair a skullborer could still attack a droid, mistaking it for a living thing, and bore into its skull damaging important components before realizing there's no delicious grey matter to suck out, but still). Additionally we do find out that armor which defends against kinetic attacks are still being made, despite the rarity of slugthrowing weapons.
Ch 6 pg 72 wrote:We had enough empty hours ahead that some rack ime was not only feasible but advisable, so we took advantage and asked Artoo to wake us when he was ready to jump into the Deep Core. He did so, and after we guzzled soome black, bitter instant caf that succeeded in clearing our heads while savaging our taste buds, I annoyed him by asking to triple-check his coordinates with the Desert Jewel's nav computer. It took him less than ten seconds, but he sounded affronted.
"Sorry, Artoo, but I've never jumped into the Deep Core before. It's crowded in there and things move fast and this isn't a well-established route yet, so I think an abundance of caution is warranted." That seemed to mollify him, and I let him take us in for the jump. It was only fifteen minutes until the white lines of the stars collapsed into pinpoints again and we were in the Sha Qarot system, a red sun and a black planet criscrossed with a web of crazed orange faults. Fex appeared from orbit to be a serene contrast to the angry planet, a cool soft plum scoop of ice cream. The whole system was beautiful from orbit, and since we were in the Deep Core the sky was thick with stars.
So we have an explicit time scale with this hyperspace jump, going from a point in the Core (likely a point on the border between the two regions) and Fex within the Deep Core. Even if we wanted to stupidly low-ball this example and have them be a lightyear or less from each other, that's still insanely fast.
Ch 6 pg 79-80 wrote:And as soon as I hit the ground, two more weights landed on me in quick succession, thunk-thunk, right on my visor, though I saw nothing. A white circle of abraded polymer appeared directly above my left eye and I could hear the material scream as it was torn to shreds by the invisible creature drilling directly toward my head.
So apparently visors with a hardness of nine point five on whatever scale SW uses can be drilled through by the skullborers' teeth (don't worry though, it takes them long enough that Luke survives, sorry for the spoiler
)
Ch 6 pg 81-80 wrote:The skullborer had chewed through her glove like tissue and had sawn through the web of tendons in the back of her hand, though it didn't break any of the bones; Nakari had blasted it to jelly before it could drill so far. It was impossible for her to make a fist now. I slapped a bacta patch on it, gave her something for the pain, and let the automated medical system continue from there. She'd need a true surgeon to repair the damage, but the system could keep her stable and free of infection.
The injury suffered by Nakari, will become relevant later.
Ch 6 pg 81-82 wrote:Though my theories would probably be laughable to anyone with a better knowledge of biology, I wondered if the skullborers might get smarter depending on what they ate. Would the prions and neurons of their meals accrete somehow and improve their thinking? If such a thing were possible, maybe eating the double brain of a Cerean would explain how their tactics adapted and improved - because they had been pursuing a tactical strategy of going after Nakari's hands. And come to think of it, when they attacked my face, the way that one of them landed on top of the other was clever, too - I couldn't get to the one on the bottom using the stun sticks, and they hadn't seen the blasters get used yet, so they wouldn't have been able to account for that. But that possibility raised other questions. The one that landed on the other's back would have necessarily been punctured by the first's spines, so if that had been planned it had been a planned sacrifice. Could they even see each other while camouflaged? Maybe that one-two business had been a complete accident. The two that attacked Nakari had obviously coordinated their attack, though, which made me wonder how they communicated. We had heard no vocalizations from them until we caused them pain.
The simplest explanation - and far more likely than the idea that they could get smarter by eating brains - was that the skullborers were at least semi-sentient, maybe even sentient to begin with. But between them killing the first two collection crews and me and Nakari killing them back, we had never had time to puzzle out their status.
Well of course they get smarter by eating our brains, that's how space horror movie monsters work! It would be interesting though to find out just what sort of evolutionary impetus would result in a creature such as the skullborer. Mentioned in the book but not quoted is the fact that other creatures on Fex either have crystal-like armoring on their heads and shoulders or some other defensive mechanism (i.e. retracting head within body), but I wonder whether the animals developed these defenses as a direct result of the skullborers, or whether they were already going towards armored body parts for another reason and the skullborers developed based on this changing dynamic. Or it could be a Wizard did it, who knows.
Ch 7 pg 89 wrote:Nakari's left hand, encased in a thin protective sheath full of bacta, waved at me from the ship's loading ramp. "Those must have been some sweet dreams," she said with a smile.
"Yeah, I feel rested. How about you?"
"High on meds and days away from getting back full use of my hand, but otherwise functional and happy to be here."
SW medical tech means, despite taking sever injury to her hand including tendons severed, our intrepid heroine will have her hand back to normal in a few days.