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Star Wars: Planet of Twilight Audible Audiobook – Abridged
New York Times best-selling author Barbara Hambly returns to the Star Wars universe to tell a breathtaking tale of a mysterious world where the battle between the New Republic and the Empire takes a shocking new twist.
Nam Chorios is a barren backwater planet that was once a dreaded prison colony and is now home to a fanatical religious cult. It is here that Princess Leia has been taken captive by a ruthless and charismatic warlord bent on destroying the New Republic. Meanwhile, Luke lands on a mysterious planet in search of his lost love, Callista, only to discover the Force is his own worst enemy. But worst of all, as Han, Chewie, and Lando leave Coruscant on a desperate rescue mission, a strange life-form, unlike any the galaxy has ever seen, awakens - a life-form so malevolent it will destroy everything, both Empire and New Republic, on its path to domination.
Amazon.com Review
From Library Journal
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
From the Publisher
, (TM) and 1997 Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. Used under authorization.
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
Nam Chorios is a barren backwater world--once a dreaded prison colony, now home to a fanatic religious cult. It is here that Princess Leia has been taken captive by a ruthless and charismatic warlord bent on destroying the New Republic. Meanwhile, Luke lands on a mysterious planet in search of his lost love, Callista, only to discover the Force is his own worst enemy. But worst of all, as Han, Chewie, and Lando leave Coruscant on a desperate rescue mission, a strange life-form, unlike any the galaxy has ever seen, awakens...a life-form so malevolent it will destroy everything--both Empire and New Republic--on its path to domination.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
One of his fellow crewmembers on the New Republic escort cruiser Adamantine found him slumped across the table in the deck-nine break room, where he'd repaired half an hour previously for a cup of coffeine. Twenty minutes after Barak should have been back to post, Gunnery Sergeant Gallie Wover went looking for him, exasperatedly certain that he'd clicked into the infolog banks "just to see if anybody mentions the mission."
Of course, nobody was going to mention the mission. Though accompanied by the Adamantine, Chief of State Leia Organa Solo's journey to the Meridian sector was an entirely unofficial one. The Rights of Sentience Party would have argued--quite correctly--that Seti Ashgad, the man she was to meet at the rendezvous point just outside the Chorios systems, held no official position on his homeworld of Nam Chorios. To arrange an official conference would be to give tacit approval of his, and the Rationalist Party's, demands.
Which was, when it came down to it, the reason for the talks.
When she entered the deck nine break room, Sergeant Wover's first sight was of the palely flickering blue on blue of the infolog screen "Blast it, Koth, I told you..."
Then she saw the young man stretched unmoving on the far side of the screen, head on the break table, eyes shut. Even at a distance of three meters Wover didn't like the way he was breathing.
"Koth!" She rounded the table in two strides, sending the other chairs clattering into a corner. She thought his eyelids moved a little when she yelled his name. "Koth!"
Wover hit the emergency call almost without conscious decision. In the few moments before the med droids arrived she sniffed the coffeine in the gray plastene cup a few centimeters from his limp fingers. It wasn't even cold. A thin film of it adhered to the peach fuzz beginnings of what Koth optimistically referred to as his mustache. The stuff in the cup smelled okay--at least as okay as fleet coffeine ever smelled--and there was no question of alcohol or drugs. Not on a Republic escort. Not where Koth was concerned. He was a good kid.
Wover was an engine room regular who'd done fifteen years in merchant planet-hoppers rather than stay in the regular fleet after Palpatine's goons gained power: she looked after "her" midshipmen as if they were the sons she'd lost to the Rebellion. She would have known if there had been trouble with booze or spice or giggle-dust.
Disease?
It was any longtime spacer's nightmare. But the "good-faith" team that had come onboard yesterday from Seti Ashgad's small vessel had passed through the medical scan; and in any ease, the planet Nam Chorios had been on the books for four centuries without any mention of an endemic planetary virus. Everyone on the Light of Reason had come straight from the planet.
Still, Wover pecked the Commander's code on the wall panel.
"Sir? Wover here. One of the midshipmen's down. The meds haven't gotten here yet but..." Behind her the break room door swooshed open. She glanced over her shoulder to see a couple of Two-Onebees enter with a table, which was already unfurling scanners and life-support lines like a monster in a bad holovid. "It looks serious. No, sir, I don't know what it is, but you might want to check with Her Excellency's flagship, and the Light, and let them know. Okay, okay," she added, turning as a Two-Onebee posted itself politely in front of her. "My heart is yours," she declared jocularly, and the droid paused for a moment, data bytes cascading with a faint clickety-click as it laboriously assembled the 85 percent probability that the remark was a jest.
"Many thanks, Sergeant Wover," it said politely, "but the organ itself will not be necessary. A function reading will suffice."
The next instant Wover turned, aghast, as the remaining Two-Onebee shifted Barak onto the table and hooked him up. Every line of the readouts plunged, and soft, tinny alarms began to sound. "Festering groats!" Wover yanked free of her examiner to stride to the boy's side. "What in the name of daylight ...?"
Barak's face had gone a waxen gray. The table was already pumping stimulants and antishock into the boy's veins, and the Two-Onebee plugged into the other side had the blank-eyed look of a droid transmitting to other stations within the ship. Wover could see the initial diagnostic lines on the screens that ringed the antigrav personnel transport unit's sides.
No virus. No bacteria. No poison.
No foreign material in Koth Barak's body at all.
The lines dipped steadily toward zero, then went flat.
"We have a complicated situation on Nam Chorios, Your Excellency." Seti Ashgad turned from the four-meter bubble of the observation viewport, to regard the woman who sat, slender and coolly watchful, in one of the lounge's gray leather chairs.
"We meaning whom, Master Ashgad?" Leia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the New Republic, had a surprising voice, deeper than one might expect. A petite, almost fragile-looking woman, her relative youth would have surprised anyone who didn't know that from the age of seventeen she'd been heavily involved in the Rebellion spearheaded by her father and the great stateswoman Mon Mothma: with her father's death, she was virtually its core. She'd commanded troops, dodged death, and fled halfway across the galaxy with a price on her head before she was twenty-three. She was thirty-one now and didn't look it, except for her eyes. "The inhabitants of Nam Chorios? Or only some of them?"
"All of them." Ashgad strode back to her, standing too close, trying to dominate her with his height and the fact that he was standing and she remained in her chair. But she looked up at him with an expression in her brown eyes that told him she knew exactly what he was doing, or trying to do, and he stepped back. "All of us," he corrected himself. "Newcomers and Therans alike."
Leia folded her hands on her knee, the wide velvet sleeves and voluminous skirt of her crimson ceremonial robe picking up the soft sheen of the hidden lamps overhead and of the distant stars hanging in darkness beyond the curved bubble of the port. Even five years ago she would have remarked tartly on the fact that he was omitting mention of the largest segment of the planet's population, those who were neither the technological post-Imperial Newcomers nor the ragged Theran cultists who haunted the cold and waterless wastes, but ordinary farmers. Now she gave him silence, waiting to see what else he would say.
"I should explain," Ashgad went on, in the rich baritone that so closely resembled the recordings she had heard of his father's, "that Nam Chorios is a barren and hostile world. Without massive technology it is literally not possible to make a living there."
"The prisoners sent to Nam Chorios by the Grissmath Dynasty seem to have managed for the past seven hundred years."
The man looked momentarily nonplussed. Then he smiled, big and wide and white. "Ah, I see Your Excellency has studied the history of the sector." He tried to sound pleased about it.
"Enough to know the background of the situation," replied Leia pleasantly. "I know that the Grissmaths shipped their political prisoners there, in the hopes that they'd starve to death, and set automated gun stations all over the planet to keep them from being rescued. I know not only that the prisoners didn't oblige them by dying but that their descendants--and the descendants of the guards--are still farming the water seams while the Grissmath homeworld of Meridias itself is just a ball of charred radioactive waste."
There was, in fact, very little else in the Registry concerning Nam Chorios. The place had been an absolute backwater for centuries. The only reason Leia had ever heard of it at all before the current crisis was that her father had once observed that the old Emperor Palpatine seemed to be using Nam Chorios for its original purpose: as a prison world. Forty years ago it had been rumored that the elder Seti Ashgad had been kidnapped and stranded on that isolated and unapproachable planet by agents of his political foe, the then-Senator Palpatine. Those rumors had remained unproven until this second Ashgad, like a blackhaired duplicate of the graying old power broker who had disappeared, had made contact with the Council in the wake of the squabbling on the planet and asked to be heard.
Though there was no reason, Leia thought, to make this man aware of how little she or anyone knew about the planet or the situation.
Do not meet with Ashgad, the message had said, that had reached her literally as she was preparing to board the shuttle to take her to her flagship. Do not trust him, or accede to any demand that he makes. Above all, do not go to the Meridian sector.
"Very good!" He passed the compliment like a kidney stone, though he managed a droll and completely automatic little chuckle as a chaser. "But the situation isn't as simple as that, of course."
From a corner of the lounge, whe...
- Listening Length3 hours and 1 minute
- Audible release dateFebruary 12, 2007
- LanguageEnglish
- ASINB000NJXFLO
- VersionAbridged
- Program TypeAudiobook
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Product details
Listening Length | 3 hours and 1 minute |
---|---|
Author | Barbara Hambly |
Narrator | Anthony Heald |
Audible.com Release Date | February 12, 2007 |
Publisher | Random House Audio |
Program Type | Audiobook |
Version | Abridged |
Language | English |
ASIN | B000NJXFLO |
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"...Her characterization is deeper and more vibrant than other Star Wars authors--Dave Wolverton may be her closest second...." Read more
"...It was interesting to re-read these books that are now in the legends category, and see what elements remain in Cannon and what don't" Read more
"...n't say I found the planet exactly enjoyable to learn about, it was certainly memorable, no small feat in the vast Star Wars Expanded Universe...." Read more
"...They start off long and dragging, but her endings are quite intense. This book in particular took a bit to get into...." Read more
Customers find the writing style derivative and unwieldy. They also say the thoughts of Hambley aren't clear. Customers also mention that the book is short and they're confused about what's going on.
"...in my opinion, and Steve Perry's Shadows of the Empire is simply badly written. The Hambly texts have been my favorite re-reads...." Read more
"...for Children of the Jedi, finding its plot derivative and the prose rather unwieldy...." Read more
"...In sum, I think Hambly is probably a pretty good literary author, I just question her stylistic prose choices in writing this novel...." Read more
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It was interesting to re-read these books that are now in the legends category, and see what elements remain in Cannon and what don't
And that is the problem. Hambly is writing not just genre fiction, not just tie-in fiction, but Star Wars genre tie-in fiction, aimed at the widest possible audience whose sole interest is answering the question "what happens to our heroes after Return of the Jedi?" Hambly instead wants to produce a weird work of literature. She intends for this book to cement her abilities as a master crafter of the fine literary arts.
It goes without saying that all of this is inappropriate. Whatever her skills as an author, Star Wars books should not be difficult pieces of literature, but fairly straightforward submissions of plot and character development that build a single cohesive story.
On that note, Hambly is great when it comes to characterizations, especially Leia, undoubtedly as it's easier for a female to write a strong female character. Thankfully, unlike other authors, she even gives Leia, Chief of State of the New Republic, a bodyguard!
Her storyline with C-3PO and R2 is one of the best I've read regarding this pair, who are usually reduced to being side-characters that re-enact overused clichés from the films. Here they actually do something of importance, and they function as well-developed characters beyond their established tropes.
Luke is slightly more powerful here than the pathetic character he is in most Bantam novels, but of course Hambly has to incorporate a dreaded plot device that prevents him from using his Force powers to the fullest (a hugely annoying, disappointing, and endlessly-recurring motif).
The weakest character perhaps is Han.
Daala is back and her character is advanced in a favorable direction.
The planet of the week is reminiscent of Tatooine but with crystals. Her development of its politics and cultures is intricate but might overstay its welcome too long, since you know Nom Chorios or whatever will be irrelevant once the novel concludes.
What Hambly is BEST at however is horror. This comes out on three occasions: 1. The Jedi witch woman in the main town 2. The staircase with the drochs 3. Dzym. Hambly's writing in these moments becomes extremely visual, gripping, and horrifying. She finally paints an extraordinarily clear and terrifying picture that transcends the genre into something much more creepy. These are the best moments of the book.
Finally, Hambly's development and send-off of Callista is excellent. While Luke developed some chemistry with Callista in Children of the Jedi, Anderson totally dropped the ball in Darksaber and Callista became a major impediment towards advancing Luke's character; indeed, in that novel they had absolutely no chemistry at all and it was more painful reading the scenes between Luke and Callista than watching Anakin and Padme. I couldn't wait until it was over. I suppose those in charge echoed these concerns, because Callista develops into a much cooler woman who chooses to part from Luke. For the first time I actually like her character and I'm pleased with how they wrapped things up here.
In sum, I think Hambly is probably a pretty good literary author, I just question her stylistic prose choices in writing this novel. This book is actually pretty important in the scope of things and there is a payoff to read it after you've plowed chronologically through the stuff that has come before.
They also took the time to resolve (if a little clumsily) the matter of Callista, Luke's would be paramour. Afterall, they needed to clear the way for a certain firy-haired ex-smuggler to take her rightful place in that regard...