Star
Wars: A New Dawn
is the first novel aimed at adults in the rebooted canon that came about after
the purchase of Lucasfilm by the Walt Disney Company. The commission would have come to author John
Jackson Miller soon after the decision would be made to decanonize the original
expanded universe and was explicitly meant to be a tie-in novel to Star
Wars: Rebels, the then upcoming animated series to be aired on Disney
XD. Pitching the novel as for adults and
not at the young adult market is an interesting one, however this is likely due
to the fact that 2014 was a far different publishing landscape than it is today
as A New Dawn is not a particularly complex novel or one geared towards
an older audience. The characters are adults
which would make it an odd choice, but not impossible to be marketed as a young
adult novel, and while thematically this is a novel dealing with life under a
fascist regime there is nothing that would not resonate with a younger
reader. Particularly odd, then, is that
in publishing it for the adult market, the fact that it is a tie-in to a series
aimed at the teenage audience (Disney XD was a network that tended to skew
older than the Disney Channel crowd) is nowhere to be found on the cover. Dave Filoni’s introduction is the only
indication that this is meant to be a direct tie-in, and yet marketing a new
expanded universe like this makes perfect sense. Star Wars: The Clone Wars remained
canon largely due to the production of Star Wars: Rebels as an indirect
sequel and explorations of those original characters remain popular. There is a safety net with a tie-in to an
ongoing piece of media, if it fails the ongoing art can soak up some of that
failure and team running Star Wars can decide how to pivot.
Luckily, A
New Dawn is quite an engaging look at life under the Galactic Empire. While there is the direct connection to Star
Wars: Rebels, an animated series I have not seen, this is a novel that stands
on its own merits. John Jackson Miller
is quite good at painting the picture of how the machine of empire runs. The scale of the novel is, for the better,
quite small in scale: there is a mining operation that has fallen behind
schedule and the Empire needs results so they have dispatched one Count Vidian
to increase production. Vidian is the novel’s
primary antagonist and in terms of antagonism there is a tired banality to all
of his actions. While he certainly can
be cruel and believes in the empire’s cause, he is simply one cog in the
machine that keeps the galaxy moving and the burgeoning rebellion on its
toes. That does not mean he is an
ineffective villain, his ultimate fate is quite wonderfully realized and feels like
one of those necessary small victories of the protagonists making great
personal strides that are a drop in the bucket of the grand scheme of
things. Miller uses Vidian as representative
to just how rhythmic and almost entirely predictable a machine like the Empire
must be. Because of that predictability
there are easier buttons to push and eventually break.
The opposite
to Vidian is protagonist Kanan Jarrus, a man who has grown up as the Empire has
risen, being one of the few Jedi to survive Order 66 through the sacrifice of
his master, portrayed beautifully in the prologue. This sort of loss is explored as indelibly altering
Kanan’s identity, changing his name from his birth name of Caleb Dume to Kanan
Jarrus, Jarrus coming from the smuggler who helped him survive. A New Dawn uses the beginnings of the
rebellion as a shock to the system for Kanan, slowly getting him out of that
survival mode and into the mode of living.
While it obviously could not take the title of A New Hope, this
is a novel exploring how hope can come like an explosion going off after periods
of careful planning. The Empire has
always had cracks inside of itself after all, even with Palpatine’s accumulation
of power and dismantling of democracy, and Miller knows exactly how to exploit
those cracks. There are still people who
remember the Clone Wars and the Jedi of old, even if they are people living
their lives every day and falling in with the party line so to speak. The Empire rules with an iron fist because it
has to or else the cracks would be exploited sooner. Kanan is paralleled with Hera Syndulla, one
of the rebels and the novel’s second protagonist, both she and Kanan are
featured on the cover. It’s their clash
of personalities that deepens A New Dawn. Rebellion is something that slowly becomes
more and more attractive to Kanan as he begins the process of working through
his own trauma and live again.
Overall,
perhaps the biggest weakness for Star Wars: A New Dawn is that it wraps
up with a few too many open-ended threads, explained away by its status as a
tie-in to a show that was beginning to air when it is published. John Jackson Miller as an author is really
good at getting the reader in the heads of the characters and their various
points of view, all towards that exploration of the Empire as a real society
where people had to live instead of the omnipresent antagonist of the original
trilogy. 8/10.
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