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380 pages, Hardcover
First published January 5, 2021
“We’re all the Republic.”
“They could… tap into something [the Jedi] It wasn’t just the Force. It was their Order itself. It gave them confidence, a structure, a willingness to make choices to serve the larger purpose of spreading light in the galaxy. It made them bold, and made them strong.”
“The Republic was not one world. It was many, each unique in ways large and small. Solving one problem inevitably caused others. There were intractable cultural, historical, economic, and military conflicts among inhabitants of worlds. There were warlords and agitators and malcontents and other less-easy-to-handle enemies – plagues and strange magical factions on hidden worlds who believed they should conquer the galaxy and, yes, even hyperspace anomalies. But the key was this – and Chancellor Soh believed it to her very soul, and had made it the cornerstone of her entire government: You could not solve those problems individually. It was ridiculous to even try. What you could do, however, was make various peoples of this high era of the Galactic Republic see one another as people. As brothers and sisters and cousins and friends, or if nothing else, just as colleagues in the shared goal of building a galaxy that welcomed all, heard all, and did its best to avoid hurting anyone. Truly tried its best. If you could make that happen, then problems didn’t have to be solved. Many would solve themselves, because people believed in the Republic more than they believed in their own goals, and would be open to that magical word – compromise.”
“For the Nihil, Kassav thought. For the storm.”
“Avar could sense the weariness in the song, of all her companions in her great Order, these heroes who had all stayed to save people they had never met and probably never would, people who would never know the choice or the sacrifice being made on their behalf. None of that mattered […] Her great Order was with her, as she was with them, and the Force was with them all.”
“What matters are the choices you make in your life, not where you came from.”
“Peace without justice is flawed, hollow at its core. It is the peace provided by tyranny.”
“The light of the Jedi. The beacon activated, a signal, a sound, a chime, a tone that anyone with even the most rudimentary of equipment could hear, for hundreds of parsecs around the station. Anyone who was lost, afraid, confused, hopeless, they could tune in. They could listen, and the sound would help them find their way. The Starlight Beacon. The first of many. All was well.”
It is the time of the High Republic: a peaceful union of like-minded worlds where all voices are heard, and governance is achieved through consensus, not coercion or fear. It is an era of ambition, of culture, of inclusion, of Great Works. Visionary Chancellor Lina Soh leads the Republic from the elegant city-world of Coruscant, located near the bright center of the Galactic Core. (3)Oh, come on. This is something you can only write with a straight face if you’re not really thinking about it at all. By the end of this novel, even, the cracks in this perfect society are starting to show, and even “visionary Chancellor Lina Soh” seems to be either clueless or intentionally insidious. Star Wars authors so rarely ask the questions that I would find the most interesting.