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jmyodafriend's review against another edition
adventurous
tense
fast-paced
- Strong character development? Yes
4.75
One of the best on the series, even though it didn't feature any of my favorite characters! Very well paced, new depth to old characters, more interesting revelations, and damn it the bad guy gets away again! What will happen next?!?
adamkor's review against another edition
adventurous
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
hstapp's review against another edition
3.0
A good change of pace well written, all the characters are believable. Han even sounds like classic Han occasionally. The storyline is pretty good, better than many of the others in the series, but not the best.
alphaalexis's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
burninator's review against another edition
adventurous
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
3.0
lady_forest_323's review against another edition
adventurous
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? No
4.0
yak_attak's review against another edition
4.0
Review/Thoughts on Twitter
https://twitter.com/serswjm/status/1271532154376388610?s=20
(Spoilers)
https://twitter.com/serswjm/status/1271532154376388610?s=20
(Spoilers)
jessicaelisa's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
3.5
jadsia's review against another edition
5.0
Loved it! I'm so close to the end of the NJO and I'm dying for the secret! Of course, we can suspect what said revelation will be but omg I'm so excited! I only wish I'd started reading the NJO 15 years ago when my husband first asked me to.
blancwene's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 stars
For 2021, I decided to reread Del Rey’s first attempt at a multi-author book series in the Star Wars universe: The New Jedi Order, which was published between 1999 and 2003. This shakes out to 19 novels, two eBook novellas, three short stories, and a tangentially-related prequel era novel.
This week’s focus: the penultimate volume in the New Jedi Order series, The Final Prophecy by Greg Keyes.
SOME HISTORY:
Terese Nielsen was originally contracted to create the cover art for the Knightfall trilogy by Michael Jan Friedman. But when those books were cancelled, she ended up creating the covers for Greg Keyes’s three NJO novels instead. Her works layer different mediums on top of each other--oils and acrylics, colored pencils and airbrushed paint--and feature vibrant, rich colors. (She previously did a lot of art for the Magic: the Gathering card game, but...err...Wizards of the Coast ended their relationship with her in 2020, as her social media featured alt-right/conspiratorial views.) The Final Prophecy made it to number thirteen on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for the week of October 19, 2003.
MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK:
I’m pretty sure that I read The Final Prophecy back in the day, yet I remembered very little of it--in particular, I had no memory of Wedge and Jaina’s plotline.
A BRIEF SUMMARY:
The troubles for the embattled living planet Zonama Sekot have just begun. Scientist Nen Yim is ordered to use a captive ship to find weak spots in Zonama Sekot's technology. But what Nen Yim discovers about the planet shocks her to the core. Meanwhile, during an attempt to retake the Bilbringi system, General Wedge Antilles and his fleet are suddenly stranded deep in Yuuzhan Vong space….
TWO MAIN SUBPLOTS:
The Final Prophecy features two main plotlines: one which I found engrossing, and one which is probably necessary for future plot developments in [b:The Unifying Force|211973|The Unifying Force (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #19)|James Luceno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389773828l/211973._SY75_.jpg|2442771] but which I found not as interesting to read.
The first involves the Shaper Nen Yim’s interest in the living planet of Zonama Sekot; Nom Anor in his guise as the Prophet making a prophecy that the Shamed Ones and the Jedi would walk together on a planet that would be the Yuuzhan Vong’s salvation; Nom Anor asking the Galactic Alliance for passage to Zonama Sekot; the Galactic Alliance dispatching Tahiri Veila and Corran Horn to pick up first the Prophet, and then Nen Yim, and even Harrar the priest. They travel to Zonama Sekot, crash on the planet, and start to discover things about the planet.
Meanwhile, in the other plotline, the Galactic Alliance is beginning to recapture Core worlds that they lost in previous books. As the book opens, we see Wedge Antilles and his forces attacking the Yuuzhan Vong on Duro--but it’s a ploy, and instead other forces retake Fondor. Of course, the shipyards at Fondor aren’t much use to them yet, so they decide to retake Bilbringi as well (intelligence suggests that those shipyards may be more intact). Wedge’s fleet heads to Bilbringi, with the other two fleets--Admiral Pellaeon of the Imperial Remnant, and Admiral Kre’fey of the Galactic Alliance--waiting for word from Wedge to join the ambush. Except the Yuuzhan Vong have taken out all the Holonet transmitters, and so no one can talk to anyone. Wedge is stuck; Han and Leia end up being dispatched as communication couriers; and during the fiasco at Bilbringi, Jaina wanders into a pirate trap.
THE CHARACTERS:
I liked seeing Wedge (commanding forces really well), but the attack on Bilbringi didn’t feel hugely important to the overarching series. It felt like they needed to tick a “space battle” box, and set things up for [b:The Unifying Force|211973|The Unifying Force (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #19)|James Luceno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389773828l/211973._SY75_.jpg|2442771]. This battle could have been devastating for Wedge and Jaina...except for the fact that I know there’s one more book, and I don’t think anything bad is going to happen to them here. The Yuuzhan Vong’s method of taking out the Holonet transmitters was innovative, and a good idea: so many of the Galactic Alliance’s plans come down to communication across very long distances, and that was a great way to disrupt it. But it also made me wonder why it was so important in [b:Force Heretic III: Reunion|842591|Force Heretic III Reunion (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #17)|Sean Williams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407356361l/842591._SY75_.jpg|2307450] for Han and Leia to rush off to Esfandia and get that station up and running when one book later, the Yuuzhan Vong were going to knock out communications again in a completely different way.
I sometimes wonder if the authors don’t know what to do with Jaina, and thus we have Jaina captured by pirates. Stuff like this happens to Jaina a lot, where she has to use her Force skills and cunning to think her way out of a situation, but Jaina’s honestly not good at scheming! Let her stay in her starfighter, because she's much better at flying than skullduggery.
But fortunately the other plotline (for me) made up for the Bilbringi attack’s shortcomings. I liked Tahiri’s plotline in the Force Heretic books, but I wasn’t sure how the unification of Tahiri and Riina would work. In The Final Prophecy, this personality union came together a lot better for me: her Yuuzhan Vong memories come naturally to her, but so too do those aggressive, prone-to-anger responses. Tahiri’s trying to balance them with her Jedi training, but she’s still a teenage girl who’s been struggling for years and has had to figure a lot of things out on her own.
As the book opens, Tahiri is on Dagobah to visit the Cave again--Anakin Solo had a vision of her as both a Dark Jedi and Yuuzhan Vong, and she wants to figure out if her merge with Riina has sidestepped that potential future or made it more likely. She makes a Shamed One a promise to tell the Prophet of the “promised world” (not Dagobah, but Zonama Sekot), and when she returns to Mon Calamari she’s dispatched with Corran Horn to pick up the Prophet on Yuuzhan’tar and take him to the living planet.
At first I wondered why Corran? But in [b:Edge of Victory II: Rebirth|35429|Edge of Victory II Rebirth (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #8)|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388187398l/35429._SY75_.jpg|72183], Keyes paired Corran up with Anakin and Tahiri, so I think he likes that pairing of mature but grumpy Jedi + over-eager teen. Corran doesn’t trust Tahiri, but Corran really doesn’t trust anyone. I like the development later on, where Tahiri asked him to be her master (and why he hasn’t stepped up sooner), because Corran hasn’t really trained anyone at this point aside from maybe Ganner Rhysode in the Dark Tide duology. Corran’s been a bit of a lone wolf in the Jedi Order, and I think teaching others would be good for him.
But Corran and Tahiri don’t go to Zonama Sekot with just Nom Anor; they also bring along Nen Yim, now a Master Shaper, and the priest Harrar. There’s an interesting dynamic at play between them all, because Corran and Tahiri don’t trust the Vong, but the Vong don’t trust each other either. Yet as they spend more time on Zonama Sekot, Nen Yim and Harrar learn more about the planet, and we start to see connections being formed between the Jedi and the Yuuzhan Vong. That’s part of what I liked so much about [b:Edge of Victory I: Conquest|320347|Edge of Victory I Conquest|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403184941l/320347._SY75_.jpg|1776613]: while the Yuuzhan Vong worldview is absolutely incorrect and the Vong do horrible things, the reasoning behind why they did those things was understandable and sympathetic at times.
Nen Yim in particular is such a strong character in Keyes’s books. At her core, Nen Yim just wants to save the Yuuzhan Vong, because she believes they’re headed down a path of endless, fruitless war. Her research into Zonama Sekot’s technology seems to hold the key to ending the conflict. Nen Yim’s a different kind of heretic than the Shamed Ones--they’ve replaced their gods with the Jedi, and revere the Jedi to an uncomfortable extent. (The Jedi aren’t gods, they’re all too fallible!) But Nen Yim doesn’t think the gods even exist, and suspects the Vong have been told countless lies to cover something up that their culture does not want to address. She comes to Zonama Sekot originally with the intent of eliminating it as a threat, but instead comes to realize that the planet has a deep connection to the Yuuzhan Vong somehow.
Harrar also realizes that Zonama Sekot is very important, but his aims feel more political in nature than Nen Yim’s. She is focused on saving her people, and while Harrar wants to end the bloodshed to an extent, he’s more interested in removing Shimrra from power. Apparently there is a faction (the Qorealists) who supported the previous Supreme Overlord; I wish this had appeared in previous books, because I think this should have been built up like the Jeedai heresy into a growingly prominent faction within the Yuuzhan Vong that do not side with Shimrra and perhaps think that they never should have invaded this galaxy. But instead it’s thrown on the reader with one book to go, and that’s not a lot to build on. Yet even Harrar (who back in the Agents of Chaos duology was trying to mass murder Jedi) has now come to respect them and even help them in the end.
But the wrench in all this is Nom Anor, that conniving little weasel. In the Force Heretic trilogy, Nom Anor became the Prophet of the Shamed Ones heresy, but by the end of [b:Force Heretic III: Reunion|842591|Force Heretic III Reunion (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #17)|Sean Williams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407356361l/842591._SY75_.jpg|2307450] he was not doing well. He’d lost his insider into Shimrra’s court, he survived an assassination attempt, and his religious movement was losing momentum. So he comes out with this prophecy (that’s not a prophetic vision at all, just information that he had overheard), and while everyone else sees how important Zonama Sekot is and how it’s connected to the Vong, he sees an opportunity to get back in Shimrra’s good graces. He knows how much Shimrra wants the planet eliminated, so he leaks its location to Yuuzhan’tar and turns on Nen Yim and Harrar.
He murders Nen Yim, which was an absolute shock--she’s such a prominent figure that I didn’t see her death coming at all! He throws Harrar off a cliff--but we don’t see his death, so he’ll probably come back in the next book--and is picked up by Shimrra’s forces, apparently headed back to Yuuzhan’tar. I was a little disappointed that Nom Anor gave up so soon...he could have led the Shamed Ones to revolt, and come to power that way...but at his heart, Nom Anor is a coward. It’s why he always runs away, and won’t face people one-on-one. He has great ambitions, but when push comes to shove he doesn’t want to do the hard work to achieve his goals. He’d rather take the easy way out, and here betraying the Jedi and Nen Yim and Harrar is exactly that--just weaseling off like he always does.
ISSUES:
My biggest issue with The Final Prophecy is that it’s a short book! I felt like the scenes with Tahiri and Corran and the Vong could have been further fleshed out, and I would have loved to see even more with Nen Yim. Because as it stands, Part One is just Nom Anor making his prophecy, Nen Yim discovering things about Zonama Sekot’s technology and contacting Harrar, and Tahiri and Corran being assigned to this Coruscant mission. Part Two involves Tahiri and Corran arriving on Coruscant, meeting up with the Prophet, breaking Nen Yim out of Shimrra’s compound, and the two Jedi and three Yuuzhan Vong taking off for Zonama Sekot. And then Part Three details their time on Zonama Sekot; true, it’s half the book (the same size as Parts One and Two combined), but I felt like their plotline could have easily been expanded.
I think part of my desire for a longer book stems from my disinterest in the Bilbringi attack--this is a Star Wars book, so here’s your obligatory space battle that will set stuff up for the last book. (I found it interesting that the abridged audiobook completely omits the Battle of Bilbringi, and solely focuses on the Jedi and the Yuuzhan Vong.)
Maybe The Final Prophecy could have been two books instead of one? If we stole a book from the Force Heretic trilogy and turned it into a duology, this could have become a duology as well… Although it seems like Greg Keyes likes writing short, fast-paced books, because both [b:Edge of Victory I: Conquest|320347|Edge of Victory I Conquest|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403184941l/320347._SY75_.jpg|1776613] and [b:Edge of Victory II: Rebirth|35429|Edge of Victory II Rebirth (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #8)|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388187398l/35429._SY75_.jpg|72183] are right around 300 pages--rather short for the New Jedi Order series.
IN CONCLUSION:
The Final Prophecy is a little uneven in that we have an amazing plotline with the Jedi and the Yuuzhan Vong, but a more tedious one with Wedge’s forces and Jaina. (I’m not sure if that’s because I was so engrossed in the Zonama Sekot sections that whenever we cut away to the Battle of Bilbringi, I just wanted to return to Tahiri and Corran’s scenes.) But I do appreciate how real Greg Keyes’s Yuuzhan Vong characters feel, because there’s a tendency in the New Jedi Order to make them two-dimensional villains and nothing more.
Next up: the final hardcover release in the New Jedi Order series, [b:The Unifying Force|211973|The Unifying Force (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #19)|James Luceno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389773828l/211973._SY75_.jpg|2442771] by James Luceno.
My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/3_jPVr9g42Y
NJO Update: Keyes Returns (November 2002): https://web.archive.org/web/20050204192643/http://www.starwars.com/eu/lit/novel/news20021119.html
Interview with Terese Nielsen (2008): https://web.archive.org/web/20081009022046/http://www.starwars.com/vault/collecting/news20081007.html
For 2021, I decided to reread Del Rey’s first attempt at a multi-author book series in the Star Wars universe: The New Jedi Order, which was published between 1999 and 2003. This shakes out to 19 novels, two eBook novellas, three short stories, and a tangentially-related prequel era novel.
This week’s focus: the penultimate volume in the New Jedi Order series, The Final Prophecy by Greg Keyes.
SOME HISTORY:
Terese Nielsen was originally contracted to create the cover art for the Knightfall trilogy by Michael Jan Friedman. But when those books were cancelled, she ended up creating the covers for Greg Keyes’s three NJO novels instead. Her works layer different mediums on top of each other--oils and acrylics, colored pencils and airbrushed paint--and feature vibrant, rich colors. (She previously did a lot of art for the Magic: the Gathering card game, but...err...Wizards of the Coast ended their relationship with her in 2020, as her social media featured alt-right/conspiratorial views.) The Final Prophecy made it to number thirteen on the New York Times paperback bestseller list for the week of October 19, 2003.
MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK:
I’m pretty sure that I read The Final Prophecy back in the day, yet I remembered very little of it--in particular, I had no memory of Wedge and Jaina’s plotline.
A BRIEF SUMMARY:
The troubles for the embattled living planet Zonama Sekot have just begun. Scientist Nen Yim is ordered to use a captive ship to find weak spots in Zonama Sekot's technology. But what Nen Yim discovers about the planet shocks her to the core. Meanwhile, during an attempt to retake the Bilbringi system, General Wedge Antilles and his fleet are suddenly stranded deep in Yuuzhan Vong space….
TWO MAIN SUBPLOTS:
The Final Prophecy features two main plotlines: one which I found engrossing, and one which is probably necessary for future plot developments in [b:The Unifying Force|211973|The Unifying Force (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #19)|James Luceno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389773828l/211973._SY75_.jpg|2442771] but which I found not as interesting to read.
The first involves the Shaper Nen Yim’s interest in the living planet of Zonama Sekot; Nom Anor in his guise as the Prophet making a prophecy that the Shamed Ones and the Jedi would walk together on a planet that would be the Yuuzhan Vong’s salvation; Nom Anor asking the Galactic Alliance for passage to Zonama Sekot; the Galactic Alliance dispatching Tahiri Veila and Corran Horn to pick up first the Prophet, and then Nen Yim, and even Harrar the priest. They travel to Zonama Sekot, crash on the planet, and start to discover things about the planet.
Meanwhile, in the other plotline, the Galactic Alliance is beginning to recapture Core worlds that they lost in previous books. As the book opens, we see Wedge Antilles and his forces attacking the Yuuzhan Vong on Duro--but it’s a ploy, and instead other forces retake Fondor. Of course, the shipyards at Fondor aren’t much use to them yet, so they decide to retake Bilbringi as well (intelligence suggests that those shipyards may be more intact). Wedge’s fleet heads to Bilbringi, with the other two fleets--Admiral Pellaeon of the Imperial Remnant, and Admiral Kre’fey of the Galactic Alliance--waiting for word from Wedge to join the ambush. Except the Yuuzhan Vong have taken out all the Holonet transmitters, and so no one can talk to anyone. Wedge is stuck; Han and Leia end up being dispatched as communication couriers; and during the fiasco at Bilbringi, Jaina wanders into a pirate trap.
THE CHARACTERS:
I liked seeing Wedge (commanding forces really well), but the attack on Bilbringi didn’t feel hugely important to the overarching series. It felt like they needed to tick a “space battle” box, and set things up for [b:The Unifying Force|211973|The Unifying Force (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #19)|James Luceno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389773828l/211973._SY75_.jpg|2442771]. This battle could have been devastating for Wedge and Jaina...except for the fact that I know there’s one more book, and I don’t think anything bad is going to happen to them here. The Yuuzhan Vong’s method of taking out the Holonet transmitters was innovative, and a good idea: so many of the Galactic Alliance’s plans come down to communication across very long distances, and that was a great way to disrupt it. But it also made me wonder why it was so important in [b:Force Heretic III: Reunion|842591|Force Heretic III Reunion (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #17)|Sean Williams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407356361l/842591._SY75_.jpg|2307450] for Han and Leia to rush off to Esfandia and get that station up and running when one book later, the Yuuzhan Vong were going to knock out communications again in a completely different way.
I sometimes wonder if the authors don’t know what to do with Jaina, and thus we have Jaina captured by pirates. Stuff like this happens to Jaina a lot, where she has to use her Force skills and cunning to think her way out of a situation, but Jaina’s honestly not good at scheming! Let her stay in her starfighter, because she's much better at flying than skullduggery.
But fortunately the other plotline (for me) made up for the Bilbringi attack’s shortcomings. I liked Tahiri’s plotline in the Force Heretic books, but I wasn’t sure how the unification of Tahiri and Riina would work. In The Final Prophecy, this personality union came together a lot better for me: her Yuuzhan Vong memories come naturally to her, but so too do those aggressive, prone-to-anger responses. Tahiri’s trying to balance them with her Jedi training, but she’s still a teenage girl who’s been struggling for years and has had to figure a lot of things out on her own.
As the book opens, Tahiri is on Dagobah to visit the Cave again--Anakin Solo had a vision of her as both a Dark Jedi and Yuuzhan Vong, and she wants to figure out if her merge with Riina has sidestepped that potential future or made it more likely. She makes a Shamed One a promise to tell the Prophet of the “promised world” (not Dagobah, but Zonama Sekot), and when she returns to Mon Calamari she’s dispatched with Corran Horn to pick up the Prophet on Yuuzhan’tar and take him to the living planet.
At first I wondered why Corran? But in [b:Edge of Victory II: Rebirth|35429|Edge of Victory II Rebirth (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #8)|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388187398l/35429._SY75_.jpg|72183], Keyes paired Corran up with Anakin and Tahiri, so I think he likes that pairing of mature but grumpy Jedi + over-eager teen. Corran doesn’t trust Tahiri, but Corran really doesn’t trust anyone. I like the development later on, where Tahiri asked him to be her master (and why he hasn’t stepped up sooner), because Corran hasn’t really trained anyone at this point aside from maybe Ganner Rhysode in the Dark Tide duology. Corran’s been a bit of a lone wolf in the Jedi Order, and I think teaching others would be good for him.
But Corran and Tahiri don’t go to Zonama Sekot with just Nom Anor; they also bring along Nen Yim, now a Master Shaper, and the priest Harrar. There’s an interesting dynamic at play between them all, because Corran and Tahiri don’t trust the Vong, but the Vong don’t trust each other either. Yet as they spend more time on Zonama Sekot, Nen Yim and Harrar learn more about the planet, and we start to see connections being formed between the Jedi and the Yuuzhan Vong. That’s part of what I liked so much about [b:Edge of Victory I: Conquest|320347|Edge of Victory I Conquest|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403184941l/320347._SY75_.jpg|1776613]: while the Yuuzhan Vong worldview is absolutely incorrect and the Vong do horrible things, the reasoning behind why they did those things was understandable and sympathetic at times.
Nen Yim in particular is such a strong character in Keyes’s books. At her core, Nen Yim just wants to save the Yuuzhan Vong, because she believes they’re headed down a path of endless, fruitless war. Her research into Zonama Sekot’s technology seems to hold the key to ending the conflict. Nen Yim’s a different kind of heretic than the Shamed Ones--they’ve replaced their gods with the Jedi, and revere the Jedi to an uncomfortable extent. (The Jedi aren’t gods, they’re all too fallible!) But Nen Yim doesn’t think the gods even exist, and suspects the Vong have been told countless lies to cover something up that their culture does not want to address. She comes to Zonama Sekot originally with the intent of eliminating it as a threat, but instead comes to realize that the planet has a deep connection to the Yuuzhan Vong somehow.
Harrar also realizes that Zonama Sekot is very important, but his aims feel more political in nature than Nen Yim’s. She is focused on saving her people, and while Harrar wants to end the bloodshed to an extent, he’s more interested in removing Shimrra from power. Apparently there is a faction (the Qorealists) who supported the previous Supreme Overlord; I wish this had appeared in previous books, because I think this should have been built up like the Jeedai heresy into a growingly prominent faction within the Yuuzhan Vong that do not side with Shimrra and perhaps think that they never should have invaded this galaxy. But instead it’s thrown on the reader with one book to go, and that’s not a lot to build on. Yet even Harrar (who back in the Agents of Chaos duology was trying to mass murder Jedi) has now come to respect them and even help them in the end.
But the wrench in all this is Nom Anor, that conniving little weasel. In the Force Heretic trilogy, Nom Anor became the Prophet of the Shamed Ones heresy, but by the end of [b:Force Heretic III: Reunion|842591|Force Heretic III Reunion (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #17)|Sean Williams|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1407356361l/842591._SY75_.jpg|2307450] he was not doing well. He’d lost his insider into Shimrra’s court, he survived an assassination attempt, and his religious movement was losing momentum. So he comes out with this prophecy (that’s not a prophetic vision at all, just information that he had overheard), and while everyone else sees how important Zonama Sekot is and how it’s connected to the Vong, he sees an opportunity to get back in Shimrra’s good graces. He knows how much Shimrra wants the planet eliminated, so he leaks its location to Yuuzhan’tar and turns on Nen Yim and Harrar.
He murders Nen Yim, which was an absolute shock--she’s such a prominent figure that I didn’t see her death coming at all! He throws Harrar off a cliff--but we don’t see his death, so he’ll probably come back in the next book--and is picked up by Shimrra’s forces, apparently headed back to Yuuzhan’tar. I was a little disappointed that Nom Anor gave up so soon...he could have led the Shamed Ones to revolt, and come to power that way...but at his heart, Nom Anor is a coward. It’s why he always runs away, and won’t face people one-on-one. He has great ambitions, but when push comes to shove he doesn’t want to do the hard work to achieve his goals. He’d rather take the easy way out, and here betraying the Jedi and Nen Yim and Harrar is exactly that--just weaseling off like he always does.
ISSUES:
My biggest issue with The Final Prophecy is that it’s a short book! I felt like the scenes with Tahiri and Corran and the Vong could have been further fleshed out, and I would have loved to see even more with Nen Yim. Because as it stands, Part One is just Nom Anor making his prophecy, Nen Yim discovering things about Zonama Sekot’s technology and contacting Harrar, and Tahiri and Corran being assigned to this Coruscant mission. Part Two involves Tahiri and Corran arriving on Coruscant, meeting up with the Prophet, breaking Nen Yim out of Shimrra’s compound, and the two Jedi and three Yuuzhan Vong taking off for Zonama Sekot. And then Part Three details their time on Zonama Sekot; true, it’s half the book (the same size as Parts One and Two combined), but I felt like their plotline could have easily been expanded.
I think part of my desire for a longer book stems from my disinterest in the Bilbringi attack--this is a Star Wars book, so here’s your obligatory space battle that will set stuff up for the last book. (I found it interesting that the abridged audiobook completely omits the Battle of Bilbringi, and solely focuses on the Jedi and the Yuuzhan Vong.)
Maybe The Final Prophecy could have been two books instead of one? If we stole a book from the Force Heretic trilogy and turned it into a duology, this could have become a duology as well… Although it seems like Greg Keyes likes writing short, fast-paced books, because both [b:Edge of Victory I: Conquest|320347|Edge of Victory I Conquest|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403184941l/320347._SY75_.jpg|1776613] and [b:Edge of Victory II: Rebirth|35429|Edge of Victory II Rebirth (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #8)|Greg Keyes|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388187398l/35429._SY75_.jpg|72183] are right around 300 pages--rather short for the New Jedi Order series.
IN CONCLUSION:
The Final Prophecy is a little uneven in that we have an amazing plotline with the Jedi and the Yuuzhan Vong, but a more tedious one with Wedge’s forces and Jaina. (I’m not sure if that’s because I was so engrossed in the Zonama Sekot sections that whenever we cut away to the Battle of Bilbringi, I just wanted to return to Tahiri and Corran’s scenes.) But I do appreciate how real Greg Keyes’s Yuuzhan Vong characters feel, because there’s a tendency in the New Jedi Order to make them two-dimensional villains and nothing more.
Next up: the final hardcover release in the New Jedi Order series, [b:The Unifying Force|211973|The Unifying Force (Star Wars The New Jedi Order, #19)|James Luceno|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389773828l/211973._SY75_.jpg|2442771] by James Luceno.
My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/3_jPVr9g42Y
NJO Update: Keyes Returns (November 2002): https://web.archive.org/web/20050204192643/http://www.starwars.com/eu/lit/novel/news20021119.html
Interview with Terese Nielsen (2008): https://web.archive.org/web/20081009022046/http://www.starwars.com/vault/collecting/news20081007.html