Eruption
The Adventures of Lanoree Brock, Je'daii Ranger
Author: Tim Lebbon
Medium: Vignette
Publication Date: April 25, 2013 on Kindle Daily Post
Timeline Placement: 25,793 BBY
This story is written in the form of an entry made by Lanoree Brock in her ship’s log between chapters two and three of the subsequent item on our timeline, Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void. Actually, calling it a story isn’t even accurate; it’s just a few paragraphs of Lanoree recapping the first two chapters of a book we haven’t even read yet, but in vague terms to avoid spoilers. Basically all she says is that she’s been sent on a mission and it’s serious shit, with a little bit of forced characterization and back story thrown in. It’s like a teaser trailer for the book, except even worse than that sounds.
1/5 Death Stars. Completely pointless.
Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void
Author: Tim Lebbon
Medium: Novel
Publication Date: May 7, 2013
Timeline Placement: 25,793 BBY (with flashbacks to 25,802 BBY)
Series: Dawn of the Jedi
When we last saw Lanoree Brock at the end of “Eruption,” she had been summoned back to Tython by the Je’daii Masters for a mysterious mission. That mission, it turns out, is to hunt down and neutralize her long lost younger brother, Dalien Brock, who has been believed dead for the past nine years. The main story line of the book is punctuated by frequent flashbacks to the events of nine years ago, when Lanoree and her brother traveled across Tython to begin their Je’daii training and Dal ultimately disappeared. He has recently resurfaced as the leader of a cult known as the Stargazers, whose mission is to escape the Tythan system and rediscover the original planets from which the Tho Yor took their ancestors. To accomplish this, Dalien is seeking a device called a hypergate, rumored to be buried on Tython beneath the ruins of a city built by an ancient and mysterious alien race known as the Gree. If he’s not stopped, Dalien Brock’s mad quest could destroy the entire star system . . . somehow.
The book describes Lanoree as a 25-year-old hottie with auburn hair and gray eyes. Not quite a match for the green-eyed redhead trope, but close enough for government work. It’s difficult to tell from the only two pictures we have of her, but given that the text describes Dalien Brock as a swarthy bro, Lanoree is apparently our first non-white protagonist (enjoy that while it lasts!). There are also a noticeably high number of female secondary and minor characters, including the Stargazers’ financial backer, Kara, a morbidly obese hoverchair-bound woman with artificially elongated arms. If nothing else, Into the Void really racks up points on the diversity scale.
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The Adventures of Lanoree Brock, Racially Ambiguous Samurai Mage |
Following a tip from her mentor, Master Dam-Powl, Lanoree first travels to the sixth planet in the system, Kalimahr, to find a Twi’lek rogue named Tre Sana. We know he’s a rogue because he’s described as such in the dramatis personae. On her way to meet him, however, she notices a Stargazer spy taking pictures of her. She confronts him, which results in him machine-gunning a bunch of innocent bystanders for no reason and then blowing himself up. Lanoree is then taken into police custody for questioning, where she mind-tricks the police captain into telling her that a woman called Kara, played by Kenneth McMillan, is funding the Stargazers. When she meets Tre Sana, this is the only information he has for her, making his character completely pointless and redundant. He sticks around for the rest of the book anyway. I guess Lanoree’s party needed a rogue.
Tre Sana’s brain has been alchemically altered by Dam-Powl to render his thoughts unreadable to telepathic Force-users, allowing him to serve as her underworld contact. (This Chekov’s gun never impacts the plot in any significant way.) In return for feeding information to the Je’daii, Tre has been promised a new identity and a fresh start at life so he can escape from all the terrible things he’s done in the past. (We’re never told what those terrible things are.) Lanoree frequently has to remind herself not to let her guard down around Tre, because he is a dangerous man with the proven capacity for great evil. (The most evil thing he does in the book is shove a guy out of the way so he can use a payphone.) Tre Sana’s whole character is a violation of the cardinal rule of storytelling: show, don’t tell.
I hate this character more than life itself.
I think the author intended him to be pitiable, but really he just comes across as pitiful. He has no agency of his own; almost everything he does is something he’s forced to do by another character. The only exceptions are shooting Kara with a tranquilizer dart when they interview her at her apartment, and rescuing Lanoree toward the end of the book, because she’d been too competent up to that point. Even when he rescues her a second time by pushing her out of the way of gunfire, the text suggests that he might have just tripped and accidentally bumped into her. He’s afraid of heights, he’s always twitching or looking pale, he spends the final act of the book throwing up and passing out from breathing poisoned atmosphere, he’s constantly being outsmarted and put down by Lanoree. Presumably he’s supposed to fill the niche of the “Han Solo-type” character but he’s just pathetic and no fun to read about at all.
After Tre renders Kara unconscious in retaliation for being unhelpful, Lanoree ransacks her apartment and discovers the diary of Osamael Or, a legendary archaeologist believed to have been lost forever in the ruins of the Old City millennia ago. From this she learns that to operate the hypergate, Dalien needs to acquire a Gree device powered by dark matter. This is bad news, because “exposing dark matter to normal matter would be cataclysmic. It would create a black hole, swallowing Tython in a heartbeat. The rest of the system too.” Which is not at all what dark matter actually does. That actually sounds more like how the sci-fi trope of antimatter typically works. Dark matter does sound sexier, though.
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A Gree, one of about a dozen technologically advanced ancient alien races that dominated the galaxy in the distant past. |
Lanoree tracks her brother to Nox, the third planet from the sun, a poisonous wasteland whose inhabitants can only survive inside cities covered by transparent domes. In a secret weapons development station beneath one of the cities, Dalien’s scientists complete their work on the hypergate activation device, and are then gunned down by the Stargazers for their trouble. Strangely, although Dawn of the Jedi: Force Storm makes a point of showing everyone carrying guns that fire actual bullets because blasters haven’t been invented yet, blasters are as common in Into the Void as they will be during the timeframe of the movies (although in the book they’re called “laser blasters,” which sounds like what they’d be called by an eight-year-old or George Lucas).
Lanoree and Tre are captured and Dalien reveals that he’s instigated a civil war on the planet by sending an assassin to commit a number of high-profile murders in another domed city using a Je’daii sword. Je’daii are hated on Nox due to their kicking its ass in the Despot War twelve years earlier, so evidence of a Je’daii working with one of the domes quickly pits the others against it. The domes’ armies roll out to meet one another and thousands of civilians are killed in this sham war Dal has instigated solely to facilitate his escape. He can’t bring himself to kill his sister, however, instead leaving one of his henchmen to finish the job while he and the rest of his crew escape amidst the chaos they’ve sown.
Lanoree makes quick work of her would-be murderer and she and Tre resume the chase, leaving Nox to burn behind them. They follow a tracking device Lanoree slipped onto her brother to Sunspot, the first planet in the system. Dal charges the Gree device in one of the planet’s mines using a rare element called marionium, which is mainly found in mushroom power-ups. Lanoree is captured again, but this time her brother is done fooling around and personally shoots her in the chest.
She’s able to use the Force to drain the blast of most of its power, however, which is a pretty cool trick but seems less effective than just deflecting it with your hand. Tre Sana and Ironholgs, Lanoree’s useless droid, carry her back to her ship, where she’s able to use some weird alchemical Force technique to heal herself. They then race back to Tython to stop Dal from activating the hypergate. They all end up down in the ruins of the Old City, the place where Dalien faked his death nine years earlier. The remaining Stargazers are killed off by ancient Gree traps or Lanoree’s sword, but Tre Sana is incapacitated by being shot in the neck. Lanoree leaves him to bleed to death (although he tragically doesn’t) and ventures on alone to confront her brother just as he’s about to open the hypergate. She makes one last plea to save him by using the Force to implant his mind with memories of their happy childhood together and the love she feels for him, but this only enrages him and she is forced to strike him down. Lanoree then spends a long time sitting beside her brother’s corpse, staring at the Gree device and wrestling with the temptation to turn it on and see what happens . . .
The book actually goes on for a few more pages but this would have been the perfect place to stop so fuck that denouement.
Meditations
Into the Void isn’t anywhere near terrible but I was slightly disappointed nonetheless. I’ve already gone over what a sickeningly ineffectual character Tre Sana is, and since he’s the secondary protagonist it’s kind of unfortunate that he sucks so much. Dalien Brock is an interesting villain, a Force-sensitive who hates the Force. He views its manipulation of his destiny as a violation and is violently repulsed whenever a character telepathically touches his mind. He’s a little reminiscent of Kreia from Knights of the Old Republic II, except instead of being an awesome and complex character he is just a dick. The vast of majority of his page-time is during the flashback portions of the book, when Dal is a petulant 14-year-old. He’s just a douchebag to his sister the whole time, then randomly murders some guy for no reason, fakes his death, and disappears. Then we meet up with him again nine years later and he’s grown up to be a genocidal psychopath. Of course.
What makes this especially disappointing is that he and his Stargazers actually have a point. All the inhabitants of the Tythan system are descended from people who were basically abducted from their homes by aliens and marooned here as part of a science fair project. They’re curious to know where they come from and what their lives could be like out there among the stars. That’s a legitimate viewpoint and one that could create some interesting tension with the Je’daii, who are content to just stay on Tython and meditate on the Force. So naturally they’re all fanatical murderers. At one point one of the Stargazers tells Lanoree that Dalien is the kindest man he’s ever met. Um, no, dude, he’s clearly a homicidal lunatic. I wouldn’t mind a contrast between the Stargazers’ goals and the extreme methods they use to achieve them, but it’s hard to have a realistically layered conflict with ambiguous morality when the one side that makes sense is just crazy people.
Fortunately, Lanoree still remains an enjoyable character, although she apparently no longer carries the gun she had in “Eruption,” which could have come in handy a few times in this book. She’s quick-witted, competent, and unflappable. Despite all the terrible things she sees and experiences on her mission, she never loses her way or gets overwhelmed; she just sucks it up and keeps going. She’s actually kind of an unapologetic bitch a lot of the time, which is a refreshing take for a female lead in a story like this. Tre Sana even calls her a bitch in the text, which might be a first for Star Wars.
The only thing that felt strange for her character was her affinity for arcane alchemical experiments. She uses the Force to grow a living organism out of a sample of her DNA. It looks like a shapeless blob of flesh with an eye on it, and she’s somehow able to use this semi-conscious creature to heal herself after Dal shoots her. This whole subplot is weird and unsettling and feels out of place, especially since she doesn’t grow or change at all as a result of it. Instead of realizing, “Hey, this is kind of weird and creepy, maybe I should knock this shit off,” she thinks it’s awesome and resolves to grow more brainless flesh sacks in the future.
Other than that, though, Lanoree Brock is a strong protagonist and it’s disappointing that she’ll never appear in another Star Wars work ever, ever again. Near the end of the book, she returns to Tython as the Force storm from Dawn of the Jedi: Force Storm rages. She experiences a vision just like characters from that comic will, and I briefly hoped that she would appear in future arcs of the comic. But alas, it was not to be.
3/5 Death Stars.
