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A review by jaredkwheeler
Jedi Trial by Dan Cragg, David Sherman
1.0
Star Wars Legends Project #154
Background: Jedi Trial was written by [a:David Sherman|766185|David Sherman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1339448923p2/766185.jpg] and [a:Dan Cragg|20578|Dan Cragg|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]. It was published in October 2004. Sherman is the author of a series of Vietnam War novels and Cragg is the author of several nonfiction books about the military. Together they have collaborated on a series of military sci-fi novels. This is their only Star Wars work.
Jedi Trial is set . . . okay, well, about that: According to the novel itself and any other sources printed around the time of its publication and for several years after, it is set 30 months after the Battle of Geonosis (about 20 years before the battle of Yavin) and depicts Anakin's ascension to the rank of Jedi Knight during the final months of the Clone Wars. Then The Clone Wars animated series came along and decided that Anakin was made a Jedi Knight about a month into the war, a good two and a half years before this. The official attempt to reconcile this was to declare that any works depicting or mentioning Anakin as a Jedi apprentice (i.e. most of the comics, novels, and YA novels, etc. published as part of the collaborative Clone Wars multimedia project during the years between the release of Episode II and Episode III) now take place in the first 6 months of the way.
This is a stupid solution, and the sheer absurdity of it finally struck me full-force as I read this novel. I wrote a bit before in my review of The Clone Wars novel about what a mess this all was from the point of view of trying to figure out the timeline in advance of reading my way through all the Clone Wars stuff. Now that I have, it ends up looking even worse. At the time I just figured it was really confusing, but that contradictions would be fairly minor. But it runs quite a bit deeper than that. The problem is twofold:
First, the inconsistencies and contradictions are significant, not in what the older material states, but in what it leaves out. It simply isn't possible to imagine the events of The Clone Wars animated series happening in-between or around the events of the Clone Wars multimedia project that came before it. Too many important things happen, and they would come up. Ahsoka Tano alone leaves a gaping vacuum that can't be plausibly filled.
Second, if you're trying to construct some sort of combined Legends timeline, as difficult as that is, the majority of the animated series stuff falls together right in the middle of the multimedia project stuff. But the multimedia project was written as a coherent whole to tell the story of the Clone Wars, and it's pretty disruptive to the narrative flow for it to be interrupted by a completely different story of the Clone Wars halfway through.
When it was announced in 2014 that the Star Wars Expanded Universe was no longer canon and would be rebranded as "Legends," splitting it off into its own closed alternate timeline, it was a big deal. At the time, I'd read little or none of the Clone Wars multimedia project, and hadn't seen any of the Clone Wars animated series beyond the pilot movie, so what I didn't realize then was that the timeline had already split. Disney may have formalized it, but the animated series had already broken ranks with all previous Star Wars media by totally disregarding and even outright contradicting previously established material. I've already noted at least one instance where this totally derailed an ongoing storyline in the EU. Namely, that it resulted in Karen Traviss bowing out of completing her "Republic Commando" series because the animated series completely scrapped all of the lore she had painstakingly established about Mandalore.
And don't get me wrong: The animated series is a wonderful gift to Star Wars fans. It's great, and it has fed directly into the even-better Rebels animated series. It's not perfect, but it is consistently better than much of the EU covering the same period. I didn't know how I'd ever get through reading The Cestus Deception and Jedi Trial is (spoiler for the rest of this review) utter crap. But I don't like the way the series showed such total disregard for others playing in the same sandbox, often in ways that weren't really necessary.
What's weird, then, is that when the EU split happened, everything up to that point remains part of the Legends timeline, but the animated series was basically the only thing outside of the films to also make the transition into the new canon. In my opinion, this means the obvious solution to the timeline weirdness is to consider the animated series tie-in stuff to be part of the new canon only, where it actually makes sense and actually fits, and if I were beginning this project again, I'd cut all of it out of the Legends timeline entirely.
Summary: Praesitlyn is a planet that houses the beating heart of the entire Republic communications network, and a Muun admiral named Pors Tonith has just swept in to take it with an overwhelming force. With resources already stretched too thin, but forced to act, the Jedi Council assembles a small army of clone troopers to be led by the only two Jedi available: the disgraced master Nejaa Halcyon of Coruscant and Anakin Skywalker. Both are hungry for an opportunity to prove themselves, but the odds are stacked against them and the stakes couldn't be higher.
Review: On paper, this had to have sounded like a brilliant idea: Get two authors with military and combat backgrounds and experience writing about the military who have collaborated on military sci-fi to write you a Star Wars war novel. But then it turns out that they're terrible writers and the book is terrible. Somehow Jedi Trial manages to be orders of magnitude crappier and less gritty and less visceral and authentic (for lack of a better word) than literally anything by Karen Traviss, or Stover's epic, Vietnam-esque Shatterpoint, or even the MASH-inspired Medstar duology.
It's very clear that the writers know what they're talking about when it comes to the military and warfare, and it's nice that they make an effort to address issues that just never ever come up anywhere else in Star Wars: Armies take time and planning to put together and to coordinate and to deploy. Armies require supplies and supply lines, which also takes a lot of additional personnel working behind the scenes. Armies need information to operate, and that requires good reconnaissance. There's more to strategy than throwing masses of troops at each other. The problem is, they mostly raise these issues by pausing the action to have a character deliver a didactic monologue about it . . . like they just can't stay off this soapbox, whether anyone (either the reader or the characters in the story) is interested or not.
And speaking of the characters in the story . . . They're so, so bad. Bland, featureless, laden with wooden dialogue. And their names are even worse. Names like, I kid you not, "Makx Maganinny" and Clone Commando CT-19/39: "His own nickname for himself was Green Wizard, because of his rank as a sergeant and his skill at patrol craft." The main POV original characters are pilot Erk (named, I assume, after the noise an Imperial Admiral makes when Darth Vader Force-chokes him mid-sentence) and recon trooper Odie (named after . . . well, who knows). These two stumble from bit to bit all through the story, and about 2/3 of the way through I suddenly realized that they hadn't actually had any impact on anything that had happened. You could just chop every mention of them out of the book and it wouldn't leave a hole. I'm pretty sure we'd all be better off if this one had been left out: "Anakin leaned forward and kissed Odie lightly on the cheek. The aroma of her freshly washed hair brought back memories--Padme--and his heart raced with joy." Sweet lord, Anakin, don't be such a benighted creeper! Is Padme the only person you know who washes her hair regularly, or just the only person whose hair you regularly sniff? Wait, don't answer that. I don't actually want to know.
Oh, and about Anakin . . . Yes, he's pretty badly written in this. Though Anakin is such a poorly written character to begin with that I suppose I should at least partway forgive them that. I'm less inclined to forgive them their protrayal of Nejaa Halcyon, which is so bad Michael Stackpole should consider suing. The reason he's "disgraced" makes absolutely no sense, and the eventual payoff of all that is even worse. But the missed opportunity here is even more egregious. The one thing we know about Nejaa Halcyon (as a character who was created before the prequels dictated certain rules about the Jedi Order), it's that he had a family. And so, of course, that family is a dark secret he keeps from the rest of the Jedi, much like Anakin's own secret. And this thing they have in common actually comes up between them, which ought to be the basis for some fantastic characterization and development . . . but they just throw it away like the garbage the rest of this book is.
The one concession I'll give it (in addition to the "raising pertinent, often-ignored issues" I mentioned earlier) is that it's not a complete drag to get through. They keep things moving for most of the book, and the plot never feels like it's just marking time the way some of the worst novels do. But that's pretty far from enough. I'll leave you with this series of excerpts centered around an event that happens partway through the novel:
"Friendly fire, Anakin thought, that was what the sergeant had called the accident. He wondered who had invented such a ridiculous term. Some staff officer, no doubt, someone safe and secure in a headquarters, someone who jested at scars but who'd never felt a wound himself. There was nothing friendly about fire that caused that much injury, no matter who it came from. Anakin fought down a surge of anger at the kind of military mind that would call such a thing 'friendly fire.'"
I hope that's the last time I ever see a Star Wars novel attempt such a trite, flagrant Shakespeare rip off. It doesn't even make sense. Later, Anakin visits his friend, the victim of the aforementioned incident:
"'With a head injury like that he won't last much longer. We can't even give him a sedative, unless, of course, you want me to end his misery--'
"Anakin turned on him. 'If I ever again hear you say something like that about one of my troopers, I swear . . .' He shook his head."
HOW DARE YOU PROPOSE A HUMANE OPTION FOR A SUFFERING PATIENT, YOU MONSTER. But then, after Anakin threatens the doctor for daring to suggest such a thing and the doctor leaves ... Anakin straight up lies to his friend! He’s all, “You’re gonna be fine! We’re gonna lift you up to our best hospital ship and they’ll get you all fixed up!”
And then his friend dies and Anakin is all, “Tomorrow I lead the attack! He will be avenged!”
Anakin, bro ... HE :clap: WAS :clap: KILLED :clap: BY :clap: FRIENDLY :clap: FIRE. Of all the things going on around you, this is the one thing that is not the enemy's fault. Actually, come to think of it . . . I said earlier that those two characters could be pulled from the novel without causing a ripple. That's not quite true. This was their fault. So it's not even that things would be no different if they didn't exist. It's that things would be better.
Don't. Read. This.
D-
Background: Jedi Trial was written by [a:David Sherman|766185|David Sherman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1339448923p2/766185.jpg] and [a:Dan Cragg|20578|Dan Cragg|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png]. It was published in October 2004. Sherman is the author of a series of Vietnam War novels and Cragg is the author of several nonfiction books about the military. Together they have collaborated on a series of military sci-fi novels. This is their only Star Wars work.
Jedi Trial is set . . . okay, well, about that: According to the novel itself and any other sources printed around the time of its publication and for several years after, it is set 30 months after the Battle of Geonosis (about 20 years before the battle of Yavin) and depicts Anakin's ascension to the rank of Jedi Knight during the final months of the Clone Wars. Then The Clone Wars animated series came along and decided that Anakin was made a Jedi Knight about a month into the war, a good two and a half years before this. The official attempt to reconcile this was to declare that any works depicting or mentioning Anakin as a Jedi apprentice (i.e. most of the comics, novels, and YA novels, etc. published as part of the collaborative Clone Wars multimedia project during the years between the release of Episode II and Episode III) now take place in the first 6 months of the way.
This is a stupid solution, and the sheer absurdity of it finally struck me full-force as I read this novel. I wrote a bit before in my review of The Clone Wars novel about what a mess this all was from the point of view of trying to figure out the timeline in advance of reading my way through all the Clone Wars stuff. Now that I have, it ends up looking even worse. At the time I just figured it was really confusing, but that contradictions would be fairly minor. But it runs quite a bit deeper than that. The problem is twofold:
First, the inconsistencies and contradictions are significant, not in what the older material states, but in what it leaves out. It simply isn't possible to imagine the events of The Clone Wars animated series happening in-between or around the events of the Clone Wars multimedia project that came before it. Too many important things happen, and they would come up. Ahsoka Tano alone leaves a gaping vacuum that can't be plausibly filled.
Second, if you're trying to construct some sort of combined Legends timeline, as difficult as that is, the majority of the animated series stuff falls together right in the middle of the multimedia project stuff. But the multimedia project was written as a coherent whole to tell the story of the Clone Wars, and it's pretty disruptive to the narrative flow for it to be interrupted by a completely different story of the Clone Wars halfway through.
When it was announced in 2014 that the Star Wars Expanded Universe was no longer canon and would be rebranded as "Legends," splitting it off into its own closed alternate timeline, it was a big deal. At the time, I'd read little or none of the Clone Wars multimedia project, and hadn't seen any of the Clone Wars animated series beyond the pilot movie, so what I didn't realize then was that the timeline had already split. Disney may have formalized it, but the animated series had already broken ranks with all previous Star Wars media by totally disregarding and even outright contradicting previously established material. I've already noted at least one instance where this totally derailed an ongoing storyline in the EU. Namely, that it resulted in Karen Traviss bowing out of completing her "Republic Commando" series because the animated series completely scrapped all of the lore she had painstakingly established about Mandalore.
And don't get me wrong: The animated series is a wonderful gift to Star Wars fans. It's great, and it has fed directly into the even-better Rebels animated series. It's not perfect, but it is consistently better than much of the EU covering the same period. I didn't know how I'd ever get through reading The Cestus Deception and Jedi Trial is (spoiler for the rest of this review) utter crap. But I don't like the way the series showed such total disregard for others playing in the same sandbox, often in ways that weren't really necessary.
What's weird, then, is that when the EU split happened, everything up to that point remains part of the Legends timeline, but the animated series was basically the only thing outside of the films to also make the transition into the new canon. In my opinion, this means the obvious solution to the timeline weirdness is to consider the animated series tie-in stuff to be part of the new canon only, where it actually makes sense and actually fits, and if I were beginning this project again, I'd cut all of it out of the Legends timeline entirely.
Summary: Praesitlyn is a planet that houses the beating heart of the entire Republic communications network, and a Muun admiral named Pors Tonith has just swept in to take it with an overwhelming force. With resources already stretched too thin, but forced to act, the Jedi Council assembles a small army of clone troopers to be led by the only two Jedi available: the disgraced master Nejaa Halcyon of Coruscant and Anakin Skywalker. Both are hungry for an opportunity to prove themselves, but the odds are stacked against them and the stakes couldn't be higher.
Review: On paper, this had to have sounded like a brilliant idea: Get two authors with military and combat backgrounds and experience writing about the military who have collaborated on military sci-fi to write you a Star Wars war novel. But then it turns out that they're terrible writers and the book is terrible. Somehow Jedi Trial manages to be orders of magnitude crappier and less gritty and less visceral and authentic (for lack of a better word) than literally anything by Karen Traviss, or Stover's epic, Vietnam-esque Shatterpoint, or even the MASH-inspired Medstar duology.
It's very clear that the writers know what they're talking about when it comes to the military and warfare, and it's nice that they make an effort to address issues that just never ever come up anywhere else in Star Wars: Armies take time and planning to put together and to coordinate and to deploy. Armies require supplies and supply lines, which also takes a lot of additional personnel working behind the scenes. Armies need information to operate, and that requires good reconnaissance. There's more to strategy than throwing masses of troops at each other. The problem is, they mostly raise these issues by pausing the action to have a character deliver a didactic monologue about it . . . like they just can't stay off this soapbox, whether anyone (either the reader or the characters in the story) is interested or not.
And speaking of the characters in the story . . . They're so, so bad. Bland, featureless, laden with wooden dialogue. And their names are even worse. Names like, I kid you not, "Makx Maganinny" and Clone Commando CT-19/39: "His own nickname for himself was Green Wizard, because of his rank as a sergeant and his skill at patrol craft." The main POV original characters are pilot Erk (named, I assume, after the noise an Imperial Admiral makes when Darth Vader Force-chokes him mid-sentence) and recon trooper Odie (named after . . . well, who knows). These two stumble from bit to bit all through the story, and about 2/3 of the way through I suddenly realized that they hadn't actually had any impact on anything that had happened. You could just chop every mention of them out of the book and it wouldn't leave a hole. I'm pretty sure we'd all be better off if this one had been left out: "Anakin leaned forward and kissed Odie lightly on the cheek. The aroma of her freshly washed hair brought back memories--Padme--and his heart raced with joy." Sweet lord, Anakin, don't be such a benighted creeper! Is Padme the only person you know who washes her hair regularly, or just the only person whose hair you regularly sniff? Wait, don't answer that. I don't actually want to know.
Oh, and about Anakin . . . Yes, he's pretty badly written in this. Though Anakin is such a poorly written character to begin with that I suppose I should at least partway forgive them that. I'm less inclined to forgive them their protrayal of Nejaa Halcyon, which is so bad Michael Stackpole should consider suing. The reason he's "disgraced" makes absolutely no sense, and the eventual payoff of all that is even worse. But the missed opportunity here is even more egregious. The one thing we know about Nejaa Halcyon (as a character who was created before the prequels dictated certain rules about the Jedi Order), it's that he had a family. And so, of course, that family is a dark secret he keeps from the rest of the Jedi, much like Anakin's own secret. And this thing they have in common actually comes up between them, which ought to be the basis for some fantastic characterization and development . . . but they just throw it away like the garbage the rest of this book is.
The one concession I'll give it (in addition to the "raising pertinent, often-ignored issues" I mentioned earlier) is that it's not a complete drag to get through. They keep things moving for most of the book, and the plot never feels like it's just marking time the way some of the worst novels do. But that's pretty far from enough. I'll leave you with this series of excerpts centered around an event that happens partway through the novel:
"Friendly fire, Anakin thought, that was what the sergeant had called the accident. He wondered who had invented such a ridiculous term. Some staff officer, no doubt, someone safe and secure in a headquarters, someone who jested at scars but who'd never felt a wound himself. There was nothing friendly about fire that caused that much injury, no matter who it came from. Anakin fought down a surge of anger at the kind of military mind that would call such a thing 'friendly fire.'"
I hope that's the last time I ever see a Star Wars novel attempt such a trite, flagrant Shakespeare rip off. It doesn't even make sense. Later, Anakin visits his friend, the victim of the aforementioned incident:
"'With a head injury like that he won't last much longer. We can't even give him a sedative, unless, of course, you want me to end his misery--'
"Anakin turned on him. 'If I ever again hear you say something like that about one of my troopers, I swear . . .' He shook his head."
HOW DARE YOU PROPOSE A HUMANE OPTION FOR A SUFFERING PATIENT, YOU MONSTER. But then, after Anakin threatens the doctor for daring to suggest such a thing and the doctor leaves ... Anakin straight up lies to his friend! He’s all, “You’re gonna be fine! We’re gonna lift you up to our best hospital ship and they’ll get you all fixed up!”
And then his friend dies and Anakin is all, “Tomorrow I lead the attack! He will be avenged!”
Anakin, bro ... HE :clap: WAS :clap: KILLED :clap: BY :clap: FRIENDLY :clap: FIRE. Of all the things going on around you, this is the one thing that is not the enemy's fault. Actually, come to think of it . . . I said earlier that those two characters could be pulled from the novel without causing a ripple. That's not quite true. This was their fault. So it's not even that things would be no different if they didn't exist. It's that things would be better.
Don't. Read. This.
D-