Excersus XXIII: The Hands of Fate

Livia has been chopping off a lot of hands lately. I suppose that's inevitable when you're battling primarily Hindu figures - or maybe she's secretly a Jedi?

Speaking of which, I have just finished the ninth and final novel in the Legacy of the Force series. If you haven't been following the extended Star Wars universe, this is a good series to start with - it gets you within spitting distance of being current in the chronology, and it is, in terms of depth and scope, the best I have read. Previous series went between fun and gripping extensions of the universe (the excellent Black Fleet Trilogy) to silly fluff with anger-inducing characterizations (the Jedi Academy Trilogy), but none of them probed the depths of the consequences of having self-righteous religious zealots more or less running the galaxy with as much insight as the Legacy series at its best. Everybody ends up doing terrible things in these books, and the thread of who is morally justified gets harder and harder to follow to the point that you end up taking time out to evaluate, in a way you probably didn't before, the nature of Sith versus Jedi, and more deeply than that, the nature of power and governance. Book 8 in particular I actually dog-eared in parts for future reference, which is something I thought I'd never do with a freakin' Star Wars novel before. We can still do epic in this modern age, when we try.

- Count Dolby von Luckner