Empire's End

Having finished this first real attempt at post-Return of the Jedi stories in the new canon, I am predictably disappointed.

This new universe doesn't have room for the kind of expansive tales that the now-Legends universe of my childhood did. It's clear that the main characters (Luke, Leia, and Han) are off-limits to the author; they can do nothing notable since their past is reserved for the movie-script-writers. There are no new or innovative villains, but instead simple ones vaguely gesturing toward the future threat of the First Order. There can be no exploration of the nature of the Force, the establishment of a new Jedi order, or exotic alien threats. All of that would interfere with the backdrop for the new movies, and is thus outside the realm of the new EU.

Instead, we get a story about a new set of nobodies pursuing short-term objectives, and accomplishing foregone conclusions. The author tries to make them sympathetic and interesting, but in the end they're not our Star Wars characters from the movies; they're the author's inventions, who we know will not be carried forward unless this particular author writes yet more novels. This can be done well (see the now-Legends Rogue Squadron novels), but in this case it wasn't, perhaps due to Wendig's young-adult-novel writing style.

Given this precedent, I don't see a way forward for the new canon to achieve anything like the breadth and depth of the Legends Universe. The filmmakers clearly want to be unrestricted, leaving the books to fill in their wake instead of interleave into a single shared universe. Books in the new canon may provide an interesting diversion, but they won't recapture what we had.

As such, for fans like me who want an expansive Star Wars universe, it's best we return our attentions to the old Legends universe. We can re-read the stories it provides, while accepting the fact that its timeline will not continue indefinitely as we'd hoped.