And we get it, Thrawn and Pellaeon are fascist Holmes and Watson.
I may have told this story before.
Several years ago, after
Thrawn came out, Timothy Zahn was attending Farpoint, a convention local to me in Baltimore. I stood in Zahn's autograph line, and when it was my turn, I handed him the book. He looked up at me -- he was seated -- and he asked me what I thought.
"Two things. First, I felt incredibly dumb; I missed an obvious clue. And second, this was the strangest Sherlock Holmes novel I've read."
He finished signing. He stood up, handed me the book, looked me in the eye, and asked me to explain.
The obvious clue that I missed was the Cygnus/Nightswan connection. I know Earth's constellations; Cygnus is a swan in the night sky. Nightswan. "I knew this, and I didn't make the connection, because this takes place in another galaxy where they don't speak English or have our constellations, so I took the names literally."
And he talked about how Leia drinks hot chocolate in
Heir to the Empire, which was just how it was translated. I hadn't thought of his
Star Wars fiction in "Red Book of Westmarch" terms, but it made sense.
The second point, there's obvious Holmes/Watson parallels in the Thrawn/Vanto relationship in
Thrawn, and retrospectively I can see that in the Thrawn/Pellaeon relationship as well.
Zahn spent a few minutes, holding up the line, for this conversation. It's what every writer wants, an attentive reader.
While I do enjoy the Thrawn trilogy, one big problem I tend to have with Timothy Zahn's Star Wars books is they're a little too military sci-fi, not enough pulpy mythic fantasy. That was an issue that plagued a lot of the Legends EU.
I sometimes think one of the appeals of the EU is that the Bantam novelists generally approached
Star Wars as a harder sci-fi universe than Lucas did. They tried to worldbuild -- Zahn worked out a chronology of the Clone Wars for
Heir to the Empire -- and tried to rationalize and ground their books.
I was thinking yesterday about Vader's failure at Hoth. As cool at the AT-ATs are, as awesome as
Beowulf expert Julian Glover is, a ground assault on the Rebel base was entirely the wrong approach, because it gave the Rebels a slim chance of escape.
The Rebel base has shields? Fine. Just bombard the glacier from orbit, have the ejecta pile up
on the shield, and bury the Rebel base, trapping them under the shield and the accumulated mass of snow and ice. Drag some comets in from the Oort cloud with tractor beams and drop them on the Rebel base if they need more material. Just bury the Rebels, lay siege, and wait for them to surrender -- which they will, through probably not until most of them have died of starvation.
That's how I think Thrawn would have handled Hoth. Tarkin, without a Death Star, might have done the same. But Vader's haste and his desire to take "the son of Skywalker" alive led to a debacle that allowed key Rebellion personnel to escape, and that led to the Empire's defeat.
The Empire could have ended the Rebellion then and there at Hoth with a different and more ruthless strategy.
