lightreads

Children of the Jedi: Star Wars: Star Wars Series (Star Wars - Legends)

4/5. Star Wars expanded universe. Leia and Han follow rumors of a hideout where Jedi children were protected from the purges, while Luke gets trapped on a thirty-year-old imperial battle cruiser controlled by a malevolent artificial intelligence, and haunted by the ghost of the Jedi woman who died trying to destroy it.

I'm not gonna front; I like this book partially because of just how much hordes of Star Wars fanboys haaaaaaate it.

Oh, hey, did I mention this is that relatively rare beast, a Star Wars book written by a woman? Gosh I can't imagine why I felt it necessary to insert that sentence after my last paragraph, it must be coincidence, huh how weird.

So anyway, I hadn't read this since I was a teenager. I remembered it as an unusually complex and rich EU book, and I was absolutely right. That doesn't mean it's successful in what it's doing, but by God, it's doing a lot of stuff.

I could actually write a couple thousand words about this and why it's so interesting to me, but I don't have time. Short version: this book is thematically about being a remnant person: the young man whose partner could not surrender him to disease so she built a droid to hold his memories, and the Jedi trapped in the gunnery computer for thirty years. The book cycles through multiple iterations of struggle with this, and like a lot of scifi, it has a strong bias towards discounting any kind of life that doesn't comfortably match narrow notions of proper embodiment. But it tries; there are several touching and strange conversations in which various people struggle with how they seem to have lost themselves in losing their bodies. I entirely agree with Luke's response that you are who you are right now. You're never not yourself, he means, you're just a displaced you, or a frightened you, or a transformed you.

And related to that thematic line are repeated instances of co-opted self-determination. Artoo, for example, is at one point forced to ( spoiler ), and in parallel the droid holding the memories of that young man I mention above is forced by a restraining bolt to watch his partner imprisoned, and to do nothing. The book plays with these, and with choices taken away – from the ghost Jedi when she was left to die, from Luke, at the end of this book.

So yeah, there's a whole lot more here than there usually is in the EU. I think it's ultimately unsuccessful, to say nothing of problematic. For one thing, Hambly is forced to wrestle with one of the fundamental moral flaws of the Star Wars universe, which would like us to believe that droids are not sentient beings while also encouraging us to love them as sentient beings. You cannot spend any serious time thinking about Star Wars without coming to the conclusion that all of our heroes are, in fact, slave-owners. And, well, Hambly doesn't have a handle on this, because it's a really big fucking problem. She tries – there's a great conversation where Luke is trying to talk to someone about self-definition, and Threepio keeps interjecting with his entirely different viewpoint – but it's not enough. And she just can't fundamentally bring herself to credit nonstandard forms of life as valid, not when push comes to shove. That's what I think a couple of the key deaths at the end of this book are entirely about. But that said, it's a damn interesting book.

So yeah, the fanboys hate it because there's, like, a romance (which I'm meh on myself, actually), and Luke spends the whole book physically and mentally disabled by pain, which is apparently not acceptable, and because, well, we all know why the fanboys hate it, let's be real. But I like it, so there.