Review: "Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising"
The kids are alright
There are no children in the original Star Wars trilogy.1
The prequel trilogy, other other hand, is an entire daycare. Kids do all sorts of unsafe things in those films: enter illegal street races, run a constitutional monarchy, talk to Anakin Skywalker.
Why are there so many rug rats in the prequels? Surely not to make Star Wars more popular with children—as if that were even possible. It probably had the opposite effect: As an editor of a magazine aimed at grade schoolers, I have seen evidence that kids are least inclined to read articles about their peers. I don’t have equivalent data for Star Wars, but “excessive reliance on child actors” is rarely cited as a strength of the prequels.
The surest sign, then, that the novel Thrawn Ascendance: Chaos Rising takes place outside the usual Star Wars universe is the centrality of an actually likable nine-year-old character, named Che’ri2.
In fact, when the titular protagonist reaches an enemy planet and seems to be on the precipice of a climactic space battle, the perspective of the novel abruptly shifts from the command bridge to Che’ri’s bedroom, deep within the ship. Instead of describing Thrawn’s tactics, Timothy Zahn relays Che’ri’s nervous musings about a battle she can’t see or really hear. Here is a commitment to the child perspective that would make even George Lucas blush.
But unlike Lucas (and despite Che’ri’s similarities to little Ani Skywalker), Zahn justifies her importance. Chaos Rising introduces details of Thrawn’s origin story and his mysterious species, the Chiss, to the Disney Star Wars canon. Che’ri proves a useful cipher for both.
The biggest difference from the Chiss of Chaos Rising and the Chiss of Legends is the “sky-walker” corps, the force sensitive little girls tasked with navigating their ships in the unstable hyperlanes of the far reaches of the galaxy. Che’ri is the sky-walker who steers Thrawn’s vessel.
Zahn has admitted the entire sky-walker idea began as the set-up to a joke in the book Thrawn: Alliances, in which Thrawn meets Anakin Skywalker during the Clone Wars and guffaws at his name3. But as with all Star Wars background characters, a joke name begets a complicated backstory. In Chaos Rising, the sky-walkers are the only Chiss with “Third Sight”—the precognition that helped Anakin win the podrace—but the ability fades by the time they hit 13. Like the Jedi younglings, they leave their families as toddlers. They’re the precocious little sisters of the spice-addicted navigators of Dune.
As a standalone story, Chaos Rising is unfocused. The chapters alternate between “memories” of Thrawn and his pal Admiral Ar'alani (formerly Commodore Ziara) rising up the ranks of the Expeditionary Defense Force, and their current attempts to confront a growing menace, led by the delightfully named (but barely described) General Yiv the Benevolent. (I liked this back-and-forth time-jumping structure more than the similar one in Alliances, in which I found the Vader/Thrawn dynamic in the A-plot much more interesting than the Anakin/Thrawn flashbacks.)
Anyone who reads this book, however, is looking less for a tight story than insight into Thrawn’s character. On that count, it delivers. In 2016’s Thrawn, Zahn alludes to the character’s ignorance of politics as his achilles’ heel. But like Peter Sellers in Being There (1979), Thrawn still bumbles his way into the fastest political ascendancy (no pun intended) in the history of the Empire. It makes this supposed weakness almost seem like a carefully cultivated front—evidence of his secret political genius.
Chaos Rising makes the shortcoming more explicit—and bizarre. In Palpatine’s Empire, Thrawn has to appease a few governors and one wrinkly old Sith. Every aspect of Chiss society involves political posturing and horse-trading, reminiscent of the Gethens of Ursula K. Le Guin’s classic The Left Hand of Darkness.
Thrawn comes off as a true weirdo among his people. In Star Trek, all the Vulcans are more or less modeled after Spock. The Chiss are hardly a race of dispassionate, calculating Thrawn clones. But his inability to comprehend personal politics is outweighed (for now) by his uncanny knack for guessing the military ambitions of other species. This insight leads to a fundamental disagreement. The noble families that rule the Chiss want to maintain a sakoku-style isolationism. Thrawn advocates for preemptive strikes and covert regime change.4
Useful but aloof, Thrawn maintains a precarious position as a “merit-adoptive” in the Chiss’s oligarchical society. It turns out that like young Anakin, Thrawn was pulled from his family at a young age to cultivate this talents. Thrawn’s powerful benefactors have given him a provisional place among the elite, but can take it away if the upstart commander oversteps. Thrawn doesn’t care about his standing—he just wants to beat General Yiv—which makes him all the more dangerous.
In this context, Che’ri’s prominence makes sense. The Chiss are a society run by talented orphans. Thrawn, Che’ri, and Cheri’s caregiver Thalia5 relate to each other as victims of the same arrested development. Ar’alani, born into a ruling family, becomes a broadly maternal figure, looking out for the other three. Despite being around the same age, Ar’alani and Thrawn relate less like love interests and more like Hera and Ezra from Rebels.
Through these relationships, the Chiss transform from enigmatic galactic outsiders to the arch-species of Star Wars: one big found family, all struggling to remember their parents, like Leia on Endor. This Thrawn—a problem child with loyal friends—may seem miles away from the calculating grand admiral who served as a sharp contrast to the original trilogy’s heroes in Heir to the Empire. But Thrawn hasn’t necessarily changed as a character. After all, everyone’s the Luke Skywalker of their own story.
I remember my panic when I first realized all the adults in the world are just children who got old. The fun of Chaos Rising is everyone around young Thrawn having a similar thought: This guy might be too smart to die young. Imagine the menace he’ll be when he grows up.
O.K.—the Ewoks have babies. But when your species is teddy bears, it’s hard to tell who is 10 and who is 40.
Presumably from the French chérie, meaning “darling.” There’s another kid mentioned in the book named Ab’begh, which is a spelling of Abby some Instagram mom in Texas has to be close to inventing.
In an earlier draft, Thrawn encountered Salacious B. Crumb and explained the popularity of the Crumbl Cookies franchise among his people.
Y’know…the Bush Doctrine.
Thalia and Thrawn’s names both start with a Th- because they’re adopted by the same noble family, the Mitth. I don’t think I’d fit in as Thsam.