Even though I am not a big fan of the Star Wars prequel movies, I like the milieu they conjured and was (back in the day) overall pretty diligent about collecting tie-ins from the old "Expanded Universe" set during the movies. This included comic tie-ins to The Clone Wars tv show—a show I never really watched! I did watch some episodes of the first season about a decade ago, but I didn't get very far. But recently, the comics rose to the top of my reading list, and I decided to do everything I had left: not just the comics, but all the tie-in novels too. I did read two of those back when I attempted to watch the show, but there were three more I'd never gotten around to.
Star Wars: The Clone Wars: No Prisoners |
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Originally published: 2009 Acquired and read: November 2025 |
So the first installment on my Clone Wars journey is No Prisoners, a novel by Karen Traviss. There never were any more of these novels than the original batch of five, and looking at the book, I kind of feel like they didn't totally know how to handle them. While Dark Horse's comics are clearly aimed at the same child/YA audience as the show, this book seems to be avoiding any overt indication that it ties into a kids' tv show: there are clones in armor on the front cover, battledroids on the back, so we see no sign of the show's distorted, stylized art style, nor even a familiar character rendered in CG. Neither the front nor back overtly mention that this ties into a tv show. The focus of the book is clearly one aimed at old-school EU fans, not people watching the show: aside from Anakain and Ahsoka, the focal characters are Captain Pellaeon, an EU stalwart going back to the Thrawn trilogy, and Callista, a Jedi whose previous appearances were largely in a set of not-very-well-remembered 1990s novels. In fact, part of the purpose of the novel is clearly to explain inconsistencies between how the Jedi were depicted in those 1990s novels and how George Lucas wrote them when he made the prequels.
That makes, to be honest, a bit of an odd duck. It's not surprising to me there were no more books after this initial batch of five, because I'm not sure there was much of an audience for what they were doing. Who wanted something that tied into a kids' tv show but also told adult-focused stories dredging up bits of 1990s EU continuity?
Well, there is at least one person who wanted this: me. I mean, I didn't watch the show, so I don't care how much the book matches the feel of the show, I just care how much it entertains me.
And Traviss, though I have very mixed thoughts about some of the books she wrote, was clearly one of the best writers of the old EU, with a strong grasp of characters and a clear ability to bring together complexity and themes. In this book, three things collide: Anakin's conflict over his ongoing relationship with Padmé (a violation of his Jedi vows), Pellaeon needing to go on a rescue mission for a Republic spy who turns to be his lover, and the appearance of the renegade sect of Jedi that Callista belongs to, ones who believe attachment is not the path to the Dark Side. The book is all about how we make life-and-death choices when our loved ones are on the line, who is ready to commit acts of violence and who is not, from the opening about Republic spy Hallena Devis to the pitched final battle to Captain Rex having to train a new complement of clones. The action is quick, the characters are well drawn, the themes are interesting. Traviss explaining the inconsistencies about Callista's group of Jedi could have felt like gratuitous retcons, but here it's fertile ground for showcasing Anakin's conflict between duty and desire.
I don't know that it's a great book, but it's a very good one, and it's hard for me to imagine there's a better tie-in novel to the new Clone Wars tv show out there. I wish I'd read it before, actually, because it actually seems to fit fairly well into Traviss's Republic Commando sequence, as a couple of its characters reappear in its last couple installments, Order 66 and 501st, and I imagine it reads better in that sequence than among the tv episodes it supposedly slots in between!
