Illuminatus Primus wrote:Citing please?
It has been posted here a few times, I couldn't find it. You can either accept it, or dis - regard it. I will understand either choice.
He was told not to include them and did so anyway.
Star Wars Insider 36, Timothy Zahn wrote:Also off limits-for reasons now perfectly clear-was any discussion of the Clone Wars and Anakin Skuwalker's fall to the dark side of the Force.
Also, Leia caught the clear date for the Honoghr's collapse, which had to occur after the beginning of the Clone Wars. Hence the awkward "different Noghri year" fix in the
Essential Guide to Alien Species. If the date wasn't a problem, why did they make a continuity fix?
He obviously put down a flawed date.
Yes he did, however he always maintained that Lucas could at any time 'backout of the drive way and run over the little trucks I was playing with in his front yard, however it is his story and I have no reason to complain about it'. It was a blooper, you are right.
The point was that Luke was a Jedi. Vader sacrificed everything for the son he loved. But Yoda himself says, "once you start down the Dark Path, forever will it dominate your destiny." Luke paid for his hatred. Throughout the EU we can see this--Luke will always be haunted by the Dark Side, and it will affect his decisions always: it destroyed his father, and nearly destroyed him.
If you read the Dark Empire Tradepaper Back, or if you read any of the Sith Wars comics, you would recognize the parallels driven between Ulic Qel-Droma and Luke Skywalker. Luke willingly surrendered to Palpatine to co-opt him from within. It was a contest of wills. Palpatine believed that in his own sacrifice to destroy him (who represents the timeless and immortal personification of evil) he would sucuumb.
It wasn't about Luke falling to the Dark Side again. It was about Luke attempting to destroy Palpatine from within. And he succeeded. Leia and Luke finished what their father started when he balanced the Force and precipitated the collapse of Palpatine's Empire.
But that's the thing, after TESB, Lucas realised without a shadow of a doubt, that he didn't need anymore episodes beyond RotJ, because as far as he was concerned the story was finished. Which means that Anakin does indeed bring balance to the force. This can be found from TPM and the AotC 'interviews and specials' and on StarWars.com. Anakin has brought balance to the force, end of story.
Dark Empire, totally invalidated Anakin's contribution. It totally cheapened it. Maybe I haven't read all the companion books that come with it, but frankly if the comics themselves cannot adequetly convey their meaning I will not be bothered. For all intents and purposes, Luke went over to the Dark Side out of curiosity.
What? Ysalamiri were clearly put there to bring Luke and other Force Users down to everyday guys again. They also helped clones. So?
What do you mean so? Leia said it in a monologue to Garm Bel Iblis. Thrawn had removed thousands of ysalamari from Mykyr, however at no time did Luke have any problems when he and Mara were rescuing Karrde. Thrawn was not putting them on his ships, he couldn't, not if he wanted C'boath to coordinate his forces for him.
Also, aside from direct force attacks, any competent force user could butt rape any moron with an ysalamiri on their shoulders, as C'boath demonstrated to Mara. It did allow others to perhaps get a 'jump' on a jedi, but it hardly crippled them. At least not if the jedi knew what they were doing.
As for the rest--Zahn is the one who has paralyzed Luke with the most philosophical junk. In the Hand of Thrawn duology he gets lectured by Mara of all people and why he can't use the Force too much or he won't hear the will of it. Yet action is clearly the path in the NJO, which invalidates most of that speech.
Bullshit. I am sorry but that is. At no time did Mara say 'action, bad, inaction good'. All she said is that the more you draw on the force, the more raw power, the less you can hear its will. While that power is there, and you can use it, it might not always be the best choice. That's all. And frankly that speech was warrented, given the massive disjointed way Force users were displayed in the EU, it needed some kind of rationalisation as to why Luke just didn't reach out and crush ships as they approached, or mind rape all his opponents when they dis-pleased him.
Of course we have to accept there are more than just that. But shouldn't there ever have been joint assaults? References to other Admirals? Anything?
There was, or at least a passing mention in TLC, where General Covell is fuming in his head as he recalls when Thrawn finally let the rest of the fleet and army command into his secret about the clones. Yes it would be nice if there was a mention, I agree, but would it have actually served story? I don't know.
The Imperial Remnant is not the Galactic Empire and it cannot be used to prove anything about the Galactic Empire.
I cannot stress this enough. The Galactic Empire ended when former Guardsman Kir Kanos executed "Emperor" and former Interim Council Chairman Xandel Carivus.
Just because Zahn has a bunch of governors sit at a table with the highest ranking naval officer doesn't make that a real government. The Administration, the Emperor's advisors, the Grand Vizier, the Ruling Circle, the Imperial High Command. The Galactic Empire had a central government even after the Moffs took control.
I was under the impression that by the time Thrawn returned, Isaard had done away with such things? Oh well, with the quote of ANH it still fits, the Emperor might have had an Imeperial Court (actually every EU source says he did), however all they really did was just wheel and deal as to who would get which areas to govern. Meaning they could select who was in charge where, but they weren't in control.
It suddenly is not difficult to see how WEG made its mistakes when there are people who base calcs on how long it would take one ship to map a galaxy.
Curtis Saxton wrote:Even before the attainment of faster-than-light propulsion, interstellar colonisation is an essentially non-linear, self-propagating process. Consolidated colonies master their local resources and are eventually able to deploy their own starfleets and interstellar probes. In any year, the rate of further colonisiation is proportional to the number of mature colonies. Even if a new colony takes centuries to develop enough wealth to spread its own colonists, the long-term growth of the civilisation is exponential. It is rather like the reproduction of bacteria: i.e. only limited by the available territory and (metaphorical) food. Mathematically, even if an average settled world produces only ten new colonies of its own in every thousand years, the civilisation will double in size roughly every 69 years. If there exist worlds that are even more effective at producing colonists then the doubling time will be much shorter.
Clearly, the settlement of the entire galaxy must have been finished in a very short time compared to the age of the Galactic Republic, let alone the recorded span of pre-Republic history. The only regions that can remain unsettled are those that are physically unattractive for settlement.
...
Sublight Exploration
There is plenty of time for the mainstream, human-dominated civilisation to have propagated throughout the entire disk of the galaxy. Sublight travel is sufficient to explore all reaches of the galaxy. Manned scouts are not necessary; probes have the virtue of being cheaper and more expendable.
Coruscant has been urbanised, to the extent of blocking sunshine to the lowest levels, for over 90,000 years [The Courtship of Princess Leia p.43]. The radius of the galactic disk [Shield of Lies] is only 60,000 light years. Therefore the entire galaxy is easily within human reach even if travel was exclusively sublight.
The literature contains references to other starfaring human cultures that are on the order of hundreds of thousands of years old. SWAJ#8 says that the Gree recognised humans as an interstellar (but not necessarily hyperdrive-using) species, and their peak was several hundred thousand years ago. At least several hundred thousand years of isolation are necessary to produce offshoot human species such as the Chiss, Zabrak, Yoda's species etc.
Hyperspace Exploration
Using hyperdrive, a starship can travel from the Core to the Outer Rim in a matter of days (as demonstrated by Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace and the occupants of the Millennium Falcon in A New Hope.) This mode of travel is innately fast enough to put the entire galaxy within easy reach, and there are only a few conceivable practical limitations to travel. Firstly the number of possible destinations is so large that no individual is likely to see more than a tiny fraction of the galaxy's systems in a lifetime. However a modestly organised bureaucracy could easily catalogue every star or other major object, and a basic database could easily fit in a hand-held computer.
The second practical criterion is that travellers should be able to reach their destination without crashing into anything during the trip. Physical obstruction is a major concern, according to Han Solo in A New Hope, and in the elaborations in the rules developed for the roleplaying games. However the games and the literature indicate that any obstacle can be avoided if a sufficiently circuitous route is mapped by a living or artificial surveyor.
How hard is it to establish a route to any particular destination? How much time does it take? It evidently doesn't take much effort at all, providing that someone has an incentive to reach the particular part of space. The Dark Empire Sourcebook documents that the Deep Core was charted within just a few years, using merely "thousands" of probots, at the behest of Senator Palpatine. This exercise is trivial compared to the galaxy's total industrial capacity, which is capable of building a moon-sized battle station in secrecy. In fact this number of probes is many orders of magnitude less costly of materials than a single star destroyer. Furthermore the reported survival rate of the probes is respectable, considering their disposability.
Since the Deep Core is the central, densest part of the galaxy*, the exploration of any other region must be far cheaper and safer. The halo, being the emptiest region, is likely to be easy but unattractive to explore. The disk of the galaxy is both more penetrable and relatively richer in resource systems than the Deep Core. Therefore if there were any unexplored regions in the disk, they could and would be filled within years, with much less than a Palpatine effort. One part of the disk is as good as any other. It is ludicruous to suppose that huge arcs of the disk could remain neglected when they have the same average density of desirable resources and emerging or advanced native civilisations as the rest of the disk. On the timescale of the history of the Galactic Republic, the circumstance of an entire sector remaining unknown can only be explained by a poverty of physical resources and/or physical remoteness from the galactic core and disk.
More conclusively, The Empire Strikes Back provides canonical proof that a survey of extensive regions of the galaxy is practical. If the Unknown Regions were seriously impenetrable and constituted a huge portion of the galaxy, then the Rebel Alliance could have hidden there in complete security. They would need only to survey a route to a single new system. Conversely, Lord Vader was able to order thorough inspection of a vast number of remote systems, with reasonable confidence of success. Open space was big enough to hide a rebel fleet forever [Return of the Jedi], but the Empire was able to send probot scouts to a statistically significant proportion of all the galaxy's habitable planets.
And most of that is from the canon. It isn't hard for US to find stars that would likely have terrestrial planets. There are quintillions of them, and they can build 900 km battlestations in secret and travel across the galaxy in days. It is obvious from TESB that huge-scale probe droid exploration of even the most remote systems is feasable and a choice made by the Empire looking for a tiny Rebel base.
It is interesting to read the article you presented, because Dr Saxton is completely right, however; 'The Dark Empire Sourcebook documents that
the Deep Core was charted within just a few years, using merely "thousands" of probots, at the behest of Senator Palpatine'. Indicating that at the time of the Republic the deep core hadn't been mapped. He is right when he says that it would be the most difficult place to map in the galaxy, however this doesn't diminish the fact that at the time of the republic there were still areas of the galaxy which had yet to be explored.
Furtermore, while it is obvious that this doesn't neccessarily meant that less dense regions, which represent a lesser challenge to explore, had also remain un - mapped, we accept the fact for a few reasons;
- Item 1, the political and economic will or reason to do so. The vastness of space and the huge quantaties which are readily available just boggle the mind. Our own asteroid belt contains enough water to support 7500 trillion people (source the Millenial Project). While the entire population of the Galactic Empire is undoubtably greater, we do know that if other solar systems are anything like ours, they have the required resources to supply their planets at their finger tips.
- Item 2, for some reason the structure of the Republic and the Empire seems to be 'inward looking', in ANH Dantoonie was 'too far away to make an effective example', Yavin was deserted, in TESB Hoth was deserted, and Bespin wasn't under the Empire's jurasdiction. In TPM Tatooine was out side of Republic control, and Kamino was unkown. All this points to a political mentality where the core is the 'centre' and the further you are removed from it, the further outside you are from it's direct knowledge and administration.
- Item 3. Thrawn was banished to the 'Unkown Regions' on a mapping expedition for punishment, and yet we know this was a cover story, as he was sent there to increase the territory of the Empire under his control. Mapping is all well and good, but you need to actually settle the area for it to be truly 'known'. Meaning that to say it is the 'Unknown Regions' doesn't mean they don't know what stars are where, or how to navigate them, it can also meant that for some reason there is no official contact between whatever governments or species are there with the Galactic government proper. In fact this is a telling point since the Republic Outbound Flight Project was sent there prior to leaving the galaxy in order to establish such links, and that Palpantine's private army had no trouble getting there to set up an ambush, and add to the fact that Palpantine was in contact with the Chiss ruling families trying to recruit Thrawn to the point that he knew when Thrawn was banished had sent a Victory SD to pick him up.
Simply put, there was no contact between the powers and governments in the 'Unkown Regions' and the Galactic proper, thus making them Unknown, not because it wasn't charted or explored.
Which is why George Lucas bought a copy for each of his employees for Christmas that year? Because it shit on his baby? Right.
Cite please?
I'll take your word for it.
Zahn's still a prick. If he didn't want to cooperate and write in LFL's territory as they said so, he should've found another job.
Zahn actually had two ultimatums when writing the duology, Luke and Mara getting married, and the peace treaty. He said he felt it was important for closure. He said if he couldn't put those two things in he really couldn't imagine what kind of story he could tell. Lucas Books agreed to it and let him write. Meaning that they editorial staff approved his points. Had they wished for it to not be there, then he would have been told to go and take a long walk off a short pier.
He chose his own character, a brutal killer to lecture Luke about how wrong he was and for Luke to kindly agree and end up loving her. He tried to set the bar for everyone about the Force, which was exceedingly arrogant. And for Luke to fall before the advise, its obviously there to be true. How else was it going to be presented by Zahn?
I have already explained this, it was a neccessary reationalisation, that needed to be made. His interpretation of the Force is what he got from
watching the cannon movies!
The whole Vision of the Past is about Thrawn's fanatics coming out of nowhere and bragging about the threats they fought (with no navicomputers and puny ships, mind you, with a 29-planet industrial base). How about that a political aide was replaced by Mara, Thrawn, and Vader? Vader was the Sith Apprentice, Thrawn was another Grand Admiral who ended up killed at Palpatine's whim. Mara was another Emperor's Hand (apparently one who needed to be deluded that she wasn't the one and only, because the others apparently dealt with it).
No, wrong. Thrawn was being directly supplied by Palpy himself. It was said as much in the novel, that the Chiss government itself had nothing to do with what Thrawn was doing out in the unkown regions. If other writers have chosen to ignore this point, then bring that up with them, because I disagree as much with it myself.
That's not even touching on all the Senators screaming and pissing themselves because Thrawn was rumored to have been seen.
And yet, most of them were busy trying to tear the NR apart over the Bothans compliction in the Camaas incident, and not one was seriously considering a military strike to handel the Remenant, as their own constitution prevented it. The fake Thrawn didn't come back trying to conquer the NR, systems were willingly petitioning to join, as an opportunity to get a 'one up' on their competitors, something which was also directly mentioned in the book.
He still misinterpreted the scale and minimalized the Empire so you'd wonder if there was anything besides Thrawn and his fleet. There are some big holes, and some cheap tricks (the magic threat from nowhere, the magic leader from nowhere, the magic lizards from nowhere, et cetera).
As apposed, the super-weapon of the week syndrom, the re-incarnation of the Emperor (out of nowhere), the use of the Force on a scale that was never ever seen in the movies (one wonders where the Emperor's force storm was at Endor, or at any other time during the movies), the out of character behaivour of our major cast after RotJ? Yeah the rest of the EU is just stellar in comparison.
Zahn is an alright author and I enjoy his short-stories a lot. I enjoyed the TTT a lot, despite a couple things he did with it. I did not enjoy the duology.
Fair enough.
My dislike for him is his belief that he can dictate the overall EU. His pattern of arrogance with his characters (which are really LFL's) is annoying. He refused to work with Vietch, subtlely took pot-shots at it with Mara, took shots at everyone else's characterization of Luke, and even tried to take credit for the YV with his "great threat" of the Chiss. He treats the EU like he has the moral rights to it, when he overrode other works written well before his.
He was told to end up the current series in preparation for the YV, whether the statement was in regards to the YV or not, is a matter of prospective, given that it has been proved that the Chiss had no idea about the YV in the NJO series, then we can just take it as prophetic pessemisem and move on. Only fan-whores seem to have a difficulty to accept this as they interpret everything that Zahn writes as gosspel.
Not to mention Thrawn is based on a Marvel character (General Sk'arr) and Mara is eeriely similar to Shira Brie.
Who? Actually don't worry, I don't really care.
He also insulted the comics before as well. He's needlessly beligerent and uncooperative and I think he's made too many unproductive moves with Star Wars for me to ignore.
He isn't to authors which at least try and get his perspective on how to write the characters he introduced. Like he said, 'they aren't mine, they are LFL, however as a matter of curtesy I would ring and ask Michael (Stackpole) if I was writting his characters correctly', and I for one agree with him.
Over and over again, even trying to mess with their work (which is the great irony of the DESB, which make Thrawn much more insignificant and a traitor).
DESB?
He was the first EU writer to do so--I think a lot of responsibility for later problems falls on that. Marvel didn't have that problem so much. And WEG's scale isn't so bad (though their fucked up when it came to ships).
Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn't he also the first EU author to be published with the exception of Splinter of the Minds Eye? And besides, his novels were completely in line with what we have seen in the movies, where 1 million CloneTroopers are meant to be a significant force.
Oh its rationalizable. The point is, I'm happy and elated when a piece of EU work doesn't require these "fixes" and rationalizations. If they need to be made, its usually because someone messed up. And I think Zahn messed up.
Fair enough, discussion conceeded.
