Heir to the Jedi offers us some Star Wars fan-fiction in book form

Those of us who are mega-fans of Star Wars are pretty familiar with disappointment. It’s just a normal part of life when you’re dealing with the brain child of George Lucas. You have the prequel trilogy, which might go down as being the most disappointing thing to ever happen in movies (looking at you Phantom Menace). The recent batch of cartoons had the colossal waste of time that was the Clone Wars movie, which spawned the otherwise excellent TV series. And now, we have Heir to the Jedi, which is the third of the “New-Canon” Expanded Universe novels.

The book is written by Kevin Hearne and focuses on Luke Skywalker as he deals with the pressure of being “that guy who destroyed the Death Star and who is also trying to become a Jedi.” He’s given a mission to rescue a super-skilled slicer (hacker) from the Empire and then escort her to a safe world so she can work for the Rebel Alliance. Luke is joined on this mission by Nakari Kelen,a crack sniper and Rebel operative who is also the daughter of a wealthy biotech mogul and Luke’s love interest throughout the novel. The three of them deal with unnamed Imperial secret agents, unnamed pirates, and a bunch of unnamed bounty hunters who all seek to recapture the slicer.

The book is told entirely from Luke’s point of view, through the first-person, and is written like someone’s Luke Skywalker fan-fiction they had written during sophomore year of high school. Absolutely nothing in this story is left to the imagination; battles are described down to the last detail, and Luke narrates every little moment like a prepubescent school child. One of the ships is described as looking like a piece of toast, noodles are used a frequent point of reference and narrative tool, and at one point a headshot is described as being “like periods at the end of a sentence.”

The dialogue is middling and heavy handed. The slicer, whose species is described as being highly logical and loving of mathematics, but every time she speaks she just ends up sounding like a poor copy of Spock. All of the exchanges between Luke and Nakari feel juvenile, as if they were written by a 14 year old trying to deal with his first crush. The only character that doesn’t feel contrived is R2-D2, and that’s mostly because he can’t speak. None of the adversaries the group faces have any personality. They’re all just unnamed mooks for Luke and company to kill.

The plotting felt weird and poorly paced. Luke and his little team sort bounce around from encounter to encounter. Nothing really builds on itself. An early adventure to a newly discovered moon populated by sentient mosquitos that eat your brains (I’m not making that up), is the only time there’s anything resembling tension and it still goes nowhere. In fact, the entire story just feels horrifically low-stakes. Where Lords of the Sith and A New Dawn use mostly original characters and lays down some pretty high-stakes events, Heir just feels like a total waste of time. Nothing particularly important happens here, and even Luke’s journey to becoming a Jedi, which is the ostensively the focus of the novel, isn’t really explored well (read Jason Aaron’s and John Cassaday’s Star Wars comic series if you want to see this journey depicted well).

Poor pacing, and an otherwise underwhelming plot makes Heir read like the transcript to a high school game of D&D. Luke makes for a wholly bland narrator and main character. He suffers from the “whiny farmboy” syndrome he had from Episode IV, which makes sense considering this book takes place almost directly after that movie, but it makes for a poor read. This book was so difficult for me to read through, that by the time Nakari was suddenly fridged (and fridged HARD) at the end, I no longer had the energy or willpower to get angry about it.

Not everything can be a winner in Star Wars, and Heir to the Jedi is most certainly the low point of the new Expanded Universe. Do yourself a favor, skip this book and go read the comics.

–AK