I’ve always seen Rogue Planet as a bit of an oddball entry into the Expanded Universe. It’s a standalone plot that isn’t part of a trilogy, and yet it draws on and references The Phantom Menace and also the Yuuzhan Vong plotline. And yet it’s not essential to either. If you skipped reading this one, you would be able to understand the Vong series later on perfectly well. In fact the Vong series is so much further down the line from Rogue Planet that the references here are really little more than easter eggs, despite the fact that most of the plot is centred around them.

I think a lot of what makes this book so kooky is when it was written. It’s got a publication date of 2000, and we follow a young Anakin and Obi-Wan some three years after The Phantom Menace. It’s also around this time that the Vong series was being written, but was still a ways off completion, and it was before we had any idea what Attack of the Clones or Revenge of the Sith would be like. As a result, the book references heavily from TPM and the Vong series, and uses pre-Ep II Expanded Universe lore about the years in between. So Raith Sienar and Wilhuff Tarkin are described here as the first two people to push for the Death Star design, even though this is never mentioned in AOTC and had to be later retconned to shove the two ideas together (and as for the supposed ‘new canon’, just throw everything out of the window). Rogue Planet also has Sekot weirdly referring to itself as only newly achieving sentient consciousness… but by the end of the Vong series we knew that

Spoiler

Sekot had exiled the Vong long ago.

See how it doesn’t quite match up? And sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad. Sometimes re-reading this book feels like you’re in a slightly different alternate Star Wars universe where nothing is quite right. Sometimes, especially for classic original trilogy and Expanded Universe fans, it feels like coming home when all the rise of the Empire ideas come out of the woodwork that the EU had before the prequels were made – and as one of those people who actually liked those ideas and thought the prequels’ vision of the Clone Wars didn’t make nearly as much sense, I find this to be welcome.

Rogue Planet seems at times to be remarkably well-written, but at other times distinctly less so. The world-building in the beginning is great. The garbage pit race, the Jedi Temple, Charza Kwinn, the arrival at Zonama Sekot – they all feel like interesting new material but more importantly that they slot neatly inside the established universe. The story holds my attention well during the first half, and for sure the language has excellent fluidity and flair. It reads smoothly and engagingly – it’s not amateurish or pedestrian or functional; I can’t stand that kind of tedious language in my reading choices. The language quality holds throughout, but the storytelling quality dips in the second half if you ask me. Obi-Wan and Anakin spend an awful lot of time on the planet just going along with things and not investigating what they’re supposed to be investigating. It wasn’t frustrating from a patience point of view, but because it was one of those things where it could all be solved in fifteen minutes if only the characters would come out and have an honest conversation. And the climax of the story is a super-chaotic skirmish during which I’m not entirely sure what happens. Just to be clear – I have read and re-read this book probably more than five, less than ten times over the years; but I am still unclear on what Sienar was assigned to do, what Tarkin wants to do, and the general chaos of the final skirmish.

As a result of all of the above, I’m never quite sure how to rate Rogue Planet, or even whether I should keep it in my True Canon Ultimate Cut. It’s genuinely interesting and enjoyable at times, but its conclusion is confusingly chaotic. It draws upon classic pre-prequel notions about the rise of the Empire, but doesn’t mesh well with the ending of the Vong series or the actual AOTC and ROTS. It heavily references and draws upon other stories… but it really isn’t essential to any of them.

6 out of 10