New Star Wars Book Light of the Jedi Shows a Side of the Jedi Order We’ve Never Seen
While Star Wars movies have hit a somewhat rocky patch, the franchise is firing on all cylinders across other media, from Disney+ shows to games, comics, and novels. Recently, the novel Star Wars: Light of the Jedi was released as the first step in establishing a new era of storytelling for the franchise that will interweave across different mediums.
Set 200 years before the events of the Prequel Trilogy, Light of the Jedi features the Jedi Order in their prime. In an interview with Polygon, the author of the novel, Charles Soule, explained how the Jedi masters of that era were different from the ones we have already seen.
“The idea of Light of the Jedi and The High Republic, the way that the Jedi are depicted in the initiative, is not to reinvent or change or challenge what we know about the Jedi. It is simply to deepen it and depict them in an era when things were different. The Jedi that we saw in the prequels, which is where we basically saw a robust Jedi Order so far, was under the specter of a pretty corrupt senate and a manipulative Sith overlord who had been doing everything that he could behind the scenes to undermine the Jedi Order for a very long time. We don’t have that influence, and so we have a Jedi Order that has been able to explore its connection to the Force, in a very deep way for a long time, which is great.”
The main character of Light of the Jedi is Avar Kriss, a human female Jedi Master of the Jedi Order during the time of the High Republic. Kriss and her fellow Jedi are tasked with solving the Star Wars event known as “The Great Disaster”. The efforts of the Jedi Order to protect the people of a planet from the fallout of the event constitutes the rest of the novel and allows us to explore the various facets of the Order. According to Soule, the character of Avar Kriss perfectly encapsulates how the Force connects to different Jedi masters in different ways.
“Avar Kriss is emblematic of that [deep connection to the force]. She is a brilliant Jedi who interprets her connection to the Force as music. As readers go through the High Republic material, we did want to look at the way that different Jedi experience the Force because not everybody’s gonna see it the same way. Because she is so focused on the way that she and the other Jedi contribute to what she calls the song of the Force, she is able to draw together and connect with the other Jedi, which is something that we have sort of seen alluded to in the past, in the Extended Universe with with a concept called battle meditation. She takes it to a different place, a very Jedi type place, which I think is beautiful. And so there are many different Jedi in The High Republic, they all do different kinds of things. They have different points of view, they have different goals. They’re people, basically.”
The Star Wars: The High Republic publishing initiative will span several novels, as well as interweave into the existing comic series from Marvel and IDW Publishing. Star Wars: Light of the Jedi was released on January 5, 2021. This news first appeared at Polygon.
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