“We shall see who is stronger…” -Exar Kun
A somewhat scattered, superficial conclusion to Kevin J. Anderson’s Jedi Academy Trilogy, Champions of the Force concludes the various disparate narrative threads established in the prior two books. The spirit of the ancient Sith Lord, Exar Kun (who arose during the Great Sith War 4,000 years ago), continues to plague Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Academy on Yavin IV –especially one of Luke’s top pupils, Kyp Durron, whom we revisit only days after he has apparently turned to the darkside and stolen Qwi Xux’s memory along with the Sun Crusher in an attempt at annihilating Admiral Daala’s two remaining Star Destroyers in the Cauldron Nebula (though Daala narrowly escaped aboard her flagship, the Gorgon). Next, Kyp plans to confront the Imperial training center on Carida where his brother Zeth was taken many years ago (Kyp and Zeth are from the world of Deyer where their family lived in raft colonies on the calm terraformed lakes, but peace on the planet was shattered when their parents decided to protest the destruction of Alderaan –Kyp was then taken away with his parents to work in the spice mines of Kessel while Zeth was taken to Carida for military training). But when negotiations go awry, Kyp fires the Sun Crusher weapon directly at the Caridan sun, killing thousands, perhaps even millions of people (including his own brother). What? How this possible? Doesn’t this render Kyp Durron a genocidal maniac? Well, we later learn that Kyp has actually been under the influence of Exar Kun this whole time, conveniently demonstrating that Kyp Durron cannot be held responsible for his own actions.
Meanwhile across the galaxy, Kyp Durron’s massacre on Carida causes a great disturbance in the Force. Luke Skywalker has been left in a comatose state, barely alive on Yavin IV as the Solo family arrives to revive him. Suddenly, he awakens as a ghostly spirit, where he is tormented by the shadowy silhouette of Exar Kun, a stranger with “long black hair, shadowed skin, and the tattoo of a black sun emblazoned on his forehead. His eyes were like chips of obsidian and just as sharp. His mouth bore a cruel scowl, the expression of one who has been betrayed and has had much time to think bitter thoughts” (61). Kun has been trapped in a spirit state for four thousand years, and he has developed the capacity to control people like Gantoris, Streen, and Kyp Durron. He uses this power in an effort to recruit a Jedi for himself who can destroy Luke’s lifeless body. But when these attempts fail, Exar Kun recruits a trio of Alchemical lizard-esque flying creatures from the jungles Yavin IV try to attack Luke’s body, but Luke manages to Force-connect with several students along with young Jacen and Jaina Solo who fight the creatures. This leads to a battle royale as the twelve Jedi Knights-in-training (Cilghal, Streen, Kirana Ti, Tionne, Kam Solusar, Dorsk 81 and others) all band together to fight the disembodied spirit of Exar Kun, and they are joined by the Force ghost of ancient Jedi Master, Vodo-Siosk Baas (who had first spoken via the Jedi holocron as featured in the prior book). He appears and suddenly reminds the students that “Together Jedi can overcome their weaknesses… Exar Kun, my student –you are defeated at last!” Then the entrapped spirit of Luke also appears, “The way to extinguish a shadow… is to increase the light.” This leads to a collective burst of light that emanates forth and strikes Exar Kun who then vanishes with little more than a brief, curtailed scream. Thus, about halfway through the book, Exar Kun –the evil villainous Sith Lord– has been vanquished in an underwhelming manner. Is he really dead? Does anyone ever truly die in Star Wars?
By my count, there are about a dozen or so other plot threads in this book: Imperial Ambassador Furgan, once booted out of Carida by Kyp Durran and the Sun Crusher, heads to the secret planet of Anoth where baby Anakin Solo (the youngest son of Leia Organa Solo and Han Solo) is being kept in hiding and watched over by Leia’s assistant Winter. How does the Imperial remnant know about this secret planet? Recall that in the previous books, the Empire had installed some sort of mind control device in Terpfen’s head (Terpfen is the personal Mon Calamari mechanic of Admiral Ackbar) and they activated his mind control to breach the secret location of baby Anakin. This leads Terpfen to come clean to Leia, and confess that the Empire has maintained some sort of control over his mind and used it to access secret New Republic data (but only sometimes), while Furgan leads an Imperial contingent ground assault on Anoth into the fortified base where Winter and Anakin reside. To do so, Furgan and his stormtroopers aboard the Vendetta (helmed by Colonel Ardax) land on Anoth and mount MT-Ats (or Mountain Terrain Assault Transports) which are eight-legged arachnid vehicles also known as “Spider Walkers” which battle the automated defense systems and Foreign Intruder Defense Organism (or “FIDO”), as Winter and her TDL “nanny droid” try to conceal baby Anakin. Eventually, Winter leads a pack of stormtroopers into Anoth’s network of underground caves where they die, but Furgan manages to snatch Anakin… However, Ackbar, who has been in self-imposed exile on his home planet of Calamari in self-imposed exile, is visited by Leia and Terpfen because he is apparently the only person who knows the secret location of Anoth (for some reason, the planet was kept secret even from Leia!) The only people who know about Anoth are Winter (who resides on Anoth), Luke Skywalker (who remains in a comatose state), and Ackbar on Calamari. Thus, Ackbar, Leia, and Terpfen lead a surprise rescue of baby Anakin aboard the star cruiser Galactic Voyager at just the last moment –little Anakin somehow shoots a bit of Force lightning at Furgan who then attempts to flee on his Spider Walker but he is chased by Terpfen who sends him tumbling down a cliff to his death. We are then reminded of the strange romance burgeoning between Ackbar and Winter. I also learned a bit about Ackbar’s backstory: apparently, he was once a prisoner of the Empire, forced to serve as an unwilling liaison to Moff Tarkin.
Meanwhile, Tol Sivron, the Twi’lek chief administrator of the Maw Installation, is left in charge in Admiral Daala’s absence where he has been apparently harboring an Imperial secret –a Death Star prototype. In my view, this was the most ridiculous addition to the book –I mean, really? Yet another Doomsday superweapon alongside the Sun Crusher? And once again, it’s the Death Star? This whole schtick has gone quite stale by this point. At any rate, Tol Sivron is joined by a cohort of annoying Imperial administrators (Doxin, Golanda, Yemm, and Wermyn) who are constantly meeting to discuss strategy in a jab at bureaucrats. We also learn a little bit about Tol Sivron and his resentment of Daala, as well as his home planet of Ryloth where the Twi’leks live in catacombs.
Anyway, the romance between Wedge Antilles and Qui Xux continues in this book as they board the Yavaris and lead a successful raid of the Maw Installation where Qui attempts to piece together her memories which had been wiped clean by Kyp Durron in the previous book. Meanwhile, Chewbacca and Threepio also lead an uprising of enslaved Wookies. Meanwhile, Han and Lando venture out to find Kyp Durron before he can cause more destruction with the Sun Crusher. Meanwhile, Mon Mothma is ill and infirm, lying on her deathbed in a physically weakened state, until Terpfen reveals that she was actually poisoned by Ambassador Furgan on the Skydome Botanical Gardens, with a “self-replicating swarm of nano-destroyers: microscopic, artificially created viruses dismantling Mon Mothma’s cells one nucleus at a time” (197). This leads Mon Mothma to resign her post and appoint Leia as Chief of State for the New Republic. Meanwhile, Lando Calrissian and Mara Jade meet in Imperial City regarding an agreement with the Smugglers Alliance in distributing glitterstim spice from Kessel, which Lando now owns. Lando wants his old friend Nien Nunb to help run the spice mine (Nien Nunb is a creature who appeared in Return of the Jedi; he is a Sullustan who grew up in the tunnels and warrens on a tough volcanic world). Meanwhile, Admiral Daala returns to the Maw Installation aboard her last remaining Star Destroyer, the flagship Gorgon.
At any rate, the “death” of Exar Kun apparently awakens several characters from his Sith mind control, especially Kyp Durron who surrenders himself and the Sun Crusher to the New Republic. Additionally, Luke Skywalker also returns to his corporeal form, but his role in the rest of the novel is minimal unfortunately. Amazingly, the fate of Kyp Durron is handed over to Luke who forgives him and grants him the chance to be a Jedi once again, even though he has the “blood of millions, perhaps billions” on his hands, as Mon Mothma notes. Forgiveness for Kyp Durron makes sense when remembering Luke’s eternal hope and optimism for his own father, Darth Vader, but the speed at which we are asked to embrace Kyp again is still jarring.
Meanwhile, Han, Lando, and Mara Jade all converge on Kessel. Previously, Lando had won control of Bespin’s Tibanna gas mines in a sabacc game, he served for years as Baron Administrator of Cloud City, and he had run metal-mining operations on the super-hot planet of Nkllon (as featured in Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy), but now with his huge reward from the blob-races on Umgul (the comically silly scene in Book I of the Jedi Academy Trilogy), Lando plans to make a successful operation out of the spice mines on Kessel. He arrives at the deserted planet of Kessel to retrieve his ship the Lady Luck –shamelessly flirting with Mara Jade the whole time– only to find that Moruth Doole has holed himself inside the prison building. Recall that Moruth Doole is a frog-like creature called a Rybet who ran the spice mines like a slave-labor camp. Han, Lando, Mara, Ghent, a group of Mistryal guards, and the Smugglers Alliance raid the spice mines and kill Doole’s blind wormlike larvae and female Rybets –Doole’s mechanical eye pops off and breaks into a thousand bouncing and rattling components onto the floor and he flees into a nearby tunnel where he is quickly killed by a giant spider… it is a comical scene all around.
Anyway, there is no time to rest as the Death Star prototype arrives at Kessel and mistakenly destroys its outpost moon, before a grand battle ensues which leads back to the Maw Installation as Daala leads an apparent suicide mission into the Maw Installation but her Star Destroyer the Gorgon survives by heading straight to the walls of the Maw, but Sun Crusher powered by Kyp destroys the Death Star prototype while Tol Sivron is sucked into a black hole along with the Sun Crusher –Han and the Falcon crew retrieve the Sun Crusher’s large message cylinder suspended in space, but inside they find Kyp himself!
In the end, all wrongs are put to right. Cilghal, one of Luke’s students, uses the force to rescue Mon Mothma who recovers in a bacta tanks. Somehow, Daala and the crew of the badly damaged Gorgon head for the Core worlds hoping to find warlords still loyal to the Empire –“Through persistence she [Daala] could become victorious. One day” (310). The book closes with a ceremony for the newly reconstructed Cathedral of Winds on the planet Vortex (the homeworld of the stoic, winged Vors) where Leia and Ackbar had accidentally destroyed this remarkable piece of architecture at the start of the previous book). And Luke christens his new Jedi Knights:
“You are the first of the new Jedi Knights… You are the core of what will become a great order to protect the New Republic. You are champions of the Force” (321).
Unfortunately, each new book in the Jedi Academy Trilogy offers diminishing returns, ultimately concluding in this rather ridiculous, chaotic finale. Champions of the Force is very much a haphazard novel filled with plenty of surface-level fluff, almost if a bunch of disparate ideas were carelessly slapped together under a tight deadline. I was not particularly crazy about some of the romantic subtext between Admiral Ackbar and Winter. While there is some fun adventure to be had in Champions of the Force, I found myself mostly disappointed on the whole with the Jedi Academy Trilogy.
Anderson, Kevin J. Jedi Academy II – Champions of the Force. Del Ray (an imprint of Random House, a Penguin Random House Company), New York, NY, 1994 (republished in 2015).
Champions of the Force was dedicated to Anderson’s stepson and “research buddy,” Jonathan MacGregor Cowan. Much of the novel was written at the Montecito Sequoia Lodge in the redwood forests of California with tape cassettes sent to his typist.
I now think that the Death Star was significantly more appealing as a one-story destructive power, as was the planet killer for Star Trek’s The Doomsday Machine. Of course, Star Wars hasn’t been a particularly dimensional SF universe and so there’s always a great deal to keep revisiting in either sequels or prequels. Fans to some extent may appreciate that much familiarity, certainly when an unexpected change may otherwise hinder the chances for positive reactions, as some examples in the recent decades have for Star Trek and Doctor Who. But in this case I might be underwhelmed by the Jedi Academy trilogy too. Thank you for your review.