The Thrawn Trilogy

When Scott Danielson over at SFFAudio.com reviewed the 20th Anniversary Edition of Star Wars: Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn I made it my next pick from Audible. With Scott I was quite impressed with Marc Thompson narration and the book was more like a radio dramatization then the regular run of audiobooks. The voices of the well-known characters was pitch-perfect and you would think that Harrison Ford was involved, plus all the sound effects including R2D2 really made the experience quite immersive.

So when I finished that one I went back to Audible only to find that the other two books in the trilogy were abridged. There is a circle in Hell for people other than Readers Digest who do abridgments and this quite annoyed me. I recently found out that they have now released unabridged audiobooks of the series and I am currently quite enjoying the second novel.

This series really invokes all those feelings associated with Star Wars. Before the movie had come out I had read the novelization of Episode 4 “Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker”. The title of the book had caught my eye at the bookstore. The book itself ghostwritten by Alan Dean Johnson for George Lucas was rather forgettable and I had pretty much forget I had read it by the time the movie came out the following summer. I kept wondering why the plot seemed somewhat familiar. This trilogy brings back all that was positive in the movies without the bitter aftertaste of the prequels. The plotting and storytelling are good enough and the cat and mouse games played between the Grand Admiral Thrawn and the characters we are so familiar with is quite fun The persistent and canny Grand Admiral is always on their heels and two moves ahead strategically. This series almost makes me want to grab a bag of popcorn while reading. These books are PM (pre-midichlorians).

Now if only George Lucas would repent of Episodes 1-3 and let somebody with talent write the story arc about how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader that doesn’t make me raise angry fists in disapproval.