The Hand of Thrawn
Specter of the Past, Vision of the Future

By: Timothy Zahn
rating: 7.5
Setting: 15 years after ROTJ

Comments:
Once again, Timothy Zahn has passed up everyone else in the writing department. In Specter of the Past, Zahn puts in all the intracacies that make you keep reading--not because you feel like it is your duty as a Star Wars fan to get to the end, but because you really want to find out what happens. I do have a couple of gripes, however. As you can tell from reading my previous reviews, I hate it when a planet or race of people is destroyed. Well, in this novel, no planets are destroyed, but the whole plot centers around a planet that was destroyed back in the times of the Emperor, and who was responsible for it. That bugged me. Also, I don't like it that Zahn is forced to acknowledge the characters in some of the lesser quality novels preceeding this one. Oh, well...he couldn't help it. A couple things I really like about Zahn's writing in the Heir to the Empire Trilogy are again present. One is the way Zahn works lines and situations from the movies into his novels, which really connects the movies to his writing. The other thing is that the entirety of the plot is relatively believable. There are no totally off-the-wall and bizarre elements that make the reader think the story couldn't happen in the Star Wars universe. Vision of the Future only increased my opinion of this series. It was so clever and so detailed. There were lots of plot twists, and it was very suspenseful. The way all the plot parts worked together was very intricate, and I couldn't put this book down! Again, unfortunately Zahn was forced to acknowledge situations from other novels. One thing I didn't like about Vision of the Future was the big critique of Luke, and all this stuff about how he, and consequently his students, had been tainted with the dark side all along. I just don't like to think of one of my favorite characters and good guys, Luke Skywalker, this way. However, I also saw it as a subtle criticism by Zahn of the Luke/Force parts of the plots of all the other novels. He's saying that they weren't good, which I agree with, because the Luke/Force parts of most of the novels were the worst parts. If this interpretation of the criticism of Luke is true, then I guess Zahn is trying to patch up the damage the other novelists did as best he could. I also like absence of profanity in Zahn's writing. Overall, this series just didn't have quite the charisma of the Heir to the Empire Trilogy, but was good nonetheless.

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