Here we go with Book 4 in the STAR WARS: THE NEW JEDI ORDER series and the titles just keep getting longer.
It looks like I owe James Luceno an apology and a second chance. I’ve been enjoying this series quite a bit, but I was dreading starting this book because of my bad experience trying to read his SITH prequel novel, STAR WARS: LABYRINTH OF EVIL. While I found that book very scattered and difficult to read, I had no such complaints about AGENTS OF CHAOS I: HERO’S TRIAL.
In many ways, this book feels a lot like VECTOR PRIME. My main problem with the last two books in the series was their lack of focus. They seemed to pursue way too many storylines. With HERO’S TRIAL the series gets back to basics with a focus on Han Solo. After the tragedies in VECTOR PRIME, Han has been drowning his sorrows in seedy bars instead of joining the fight against the Yuuzhan Vong invaders. His apperances in the last two books were little more than walk-on cameos, but in this book, Han takes center stage.
Han reverts back to his loner status and wants nothing to do with his wife, kids or Jedi brother-in-law. He learns that one of his old smuggling buddies is now doing jobs for the Yuuzhan Vong. Since Han is hungry for vengeance, he decides that the fastest course of action is to find this smuggler and do some killing. He puts the Millenium Falcon on mothballs and sets out without letting anyone know where he’s going.
Meanwhile, we learn more about the Yuuzhan Vong, who are continuing to creep closer to the core planets. They are tough bastards and there’s really nothing the New Republic can do about it other than try to slow them down. More about their culture and crazy religion is revealed here and we learn that their journey to this galaxy has taken hundreds of years and several generations have lived out their lives on the Yuuzhan Vong starfleet. This time they get the bright idea of allowing the Republic to capture a fake defector who is loaded up with beetles. Once these beetles reach maturity, they will expel poisonous gas which the defector will hopefully be able to breathe onto the Jedi and kill them.
You can probably guess that Han is going to run into this defector first. But not before he finds himself in several troubling situations including a barfight with his old bounty hunter nemesis: Bossk! The appearance of Bossk (my favorite childhood action figure) really made this book for me.
The thing that this book really highlights is the importance of Han Solo in STAR WARS stories. In the previous two novels, something was just missing: not so much Han Solo in particular, but the rogue character in general. Han’s down and dirty humanity really ground the STAR WARS concept. With Han in the mix, we aren’t just focused on Jedi mysticism and intergalactic politics. Instead, we see the seedy side of the STAR WARS universe: sleazy bars, card games, bounty hunters, etc.
As much as I liked this book, I was still a little turned off by Luceno’s sci-fi speak. He gets into a lot of technical details about how things are made, or the background of very obscure characters that it has a tendency to slow the book down a little bit. But the most grievous (pun intended) of all mistakes comes when trying to describe some kind of exotic style of alien music. Case in point: “Bland renditions of twenty-year old jizz classics wafted from unseen emitters.”
Jizz references occur several more times in the book, and every time it completely sucked me out of the narrative. I have never read any mention of “jizz” in any other STAR WARS book. How does something like this slip by the Lucasfilm continuity honchos? Jizz? If there are two things that do not go well together, it’s STAR WARS and jizz.
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