The original Zahn trilogy was already a diffuse work, and this dulogy is rather more so. The fact is all the more problematic because the tale is made of slighter stuff--villains on their last legs, a con man's pretending to be the second coming of Admiral Thrawn (we know that much from the start), the internal politics among New Republic worlds of which we had previously known little or nothing. The intrigues among the Bothans and Caamasi and Mistryls (and for that matter, the question of what ever happened to J'orj Kardas) could have been interesting given the proper treatment, but they are all thinly sketched (understandably, as anything more would have overbalanced this epic still meant to center on our familiar protagonists), and serve only to leave the two books still more crowded and slower-paced than they already are.
This sets the story we get here up to be something of an anticlimax, and alas, the execution is not all that it might have been, especially from the standpoint of pacing. This is, partly, a matter of overwriting, compounded by the fact that the book, rather than switching back and forth quickly across its various threads, tends toward very lengthy scenes. (The climax of Luke and Mara's adventure, for instance, runs some fifty pages without so much as a glance at the other goings-on.)
Time and again I felt my patience being tried by the fact--and such occasions the more numerous because of how long the books happen to be. Specter of the Past is 344 pages long, while Vision of the Future is rather longer, at 528 very packed pages markedly longer than any of the preceding books (and it seems, longer than any other Star Wars book published as of the time of this writing). Still, I did stick with it to the end, and I can say that the book does manage to build on what came before. The events of the book's narrative do, ultimately, determine what the relationship between Luke and Mara is to be, while it is here that the Empire, or rather the little left of it, concludes its peace treaty with the New Republic. Still, it seems to me that there was, by this point, not so much remaining to be wrapped up, while taken by itself it is not really all that satisfying--certainly not in the nine hundred page form in which we got it. In fact I find myself suspecting that there was a rush here to cash in on the popularity of Zahn's trilogy, the three volumes of which each had a very healthy run on the New York Times bestseller list), and promise readers a sense of this being a similar "event," compromising what might have been a perfectly fine single, epilogue volume of more modest proportions.
Indeed, while I am usually even less likely to have a good word for a prequel than a sequel, I found myself much preferring Zahn's Outbound Flight--a better-proportioned, swifter-paced and more cleverly constructed book that derived rather more interest from the Thrawn character, and that it seems to me has a much juster claim to being more than "another" Star Wars book from the standpoint of the mythos.
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