Review: Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future, by Timothy Zahn

MILD SPOILERS AHEAD

After revisiting Timothy Zahn's sequel trilogy to the original Star Wars trilogy I found myself picking up the duology which capped off that story, consisting of Specter of the Past (1997) and Vision of the Future (1998).

The original Zahn trilogy was already a diffuse work, and this duology 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 crowds the story rather than enriches it. And as if the clutter were not enough Zahn here is prone to uneconomical prose that had a way of dragging out scenes that were quite long enough to begin with in a book less prone than most of its peers to cut back and forth among its plotlines. (The culmination of Luke and Mara's adventure, for instance, runs some fifty pages without so much as a glance at the other goings-on in the rather sprawling story.)

Time and again I felt my patience being tried by all this--with 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 that is left of it, concludes its peace treaty with the New Republic that finally ends the war. 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--an anticlimax not improved by the nine hundred page form in which we got it. In fact I find myself suspecting that the sheer mass of the story was a crass attempt to cash in on the popularity of Zahn's trilogy, and promise readers a sense of this being a similar "event," instead of 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 better claim to being more than "another" Star Wars book from the standpoint of the mythos.