Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare by Jason Fry

Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare
by Jason Fry with Paul R. Urquhart

This is a guide to "warfare" in the Star Wars universe. What this means in practice is that it's kind of a military history, a chronological telling but with a focus on military organization, weapons, starships and starfighters, strategies and philosophies, military politics, and military personalities.

Published: 2012
Read: August 2024

I would have put this on my list before it came out in 2012, which was a very different time for Star Wars, both in a broad sense (The Force Awakens would come along in 2015 and "decanonize" a lot of what is in this book) and for me personally (even before the new trilogy came along, a series of mediocre Expanded Universe releases was diminishing my interest). So when I first started reading this, I found it pretty hard going. There is a time, I guess, where I would have found reading about military conflicts set over five thousand years before the films interesting... but now my reaction was kind of bafflement: in terms of themes, characters, worldbuilding, &c., it could basically be anything, not really Star Wars. I am not reading Star Wars books because I care about the Tionese and the Rakatha! I'm reading them because I care about the Jedi and the Republic! So as I began the book, I was wondering if I even cared enough about Star Wars to enjoy it at all.

Thankfully, as I read on, it turned out the problem was the disconnect from the Star Wars I am familiar with, not my interest in Star Wars in general. Once it got up to around a millennium before the films, the era of the excellent comic Jedi vs. Sith, I found the book a lot more interesting and engaging, as it had a clear connection to actual stories I had seen or read. From then on, you can basically draw a straight line to the prequel films, and thence to the original trilogy, and so on. This stuff I found fascinating; it gets a bad rap (and makes for bad movies, to be honest), but I love the politics and minutiae of the prequel era, the details of the disintegration of the Republic. Author Jason Fry does what I think tie-in fiction does best, takes a bunch of disparate references and weaves them together into a coherent story. If you care about this kind of thing, there are lots of retcons here; if you don't, what's worthwhile is the retcons makes for a complex story that explains a lot of the stuff we see in the prequels: the lack of a Republic military, the creation of the Clone Army, the reluctance of the Jedi to get involved, and so on. I also really enjoyed the exploration of how the Rebellion was organized (something I had never given much thought to) and what tactics they used, and how the Empire chose to counter them. One of my favorite Star Wars eras is that of the Bantam novels, the early New Republic, and there's lots of crunchy detail there too, good drawing of connections between the X-Wing books and the Thrawn trilogy and Dark Empire and so on.

I found the discussion of The New Jedi Order kind of superficial, unfortunately, and once you get beyond that, you end up in an era where I don't care about the stories anymore, and thus I don't really care about what the books have to say; I hated Legacy of the Force and didn't even bother to read Fate of the Jedi. I did like the Legacy comics, but they feel so very disconnected from everything else.

The book mixes in-universe historical overviews, "found documents"–style interludes (a soldier's diary, a politician's speech, and so on), and call-out details on ships and weapons. I don't care about ships and weapons, so I tended to skim those sections, but the rest was pretty interesting. Sometimes the "found documents" would really work for me, like Wedge's account of Baron Fel, making interesting angles on familiar tales. Probably the real highlight of the book is the illustrations... but I read it on my Kindle via a library loan, so the impact of those was very much lost.

Anyway, I was honestly kind of dreading it at first, reading it only out of a sense of obligation to the me that put it on my list a third of my life ago, but I ended up enjoying the three days I spent on it. Sooner or later, I'll have to check The Essential Reader's Companion out of the library, too, the last of the "Essential Guides" that I was interested in but never got around to.