Dark Tide I: Onslaught Review: Michael Stackpole Brings the X-Wing Energy to the New Jedi Order

My Star Wars Legends reread has officially crossed into the New Jedi Order, and I’m two books in. If you missed it, I covered the series opener in my Vector Prime review, which set up the Yuuzhan Vong invasion and took something from Han Solo that the series is still dealing with.

Book two is Dark Tide I: Onslaught by Michael A. Stackpole, published by Del Rey in February 2000. It’s the first half of the Dark Tide duology, and I’ll say it right up front: this is a fantastic second entry, and in a few ways it’s an even better read than Vector Prime.

What Onslaught is about

Light spoilers for the setup only. I’ll flag the bigger ones further down.

The Yuuzhan Vong weren’t finished after Vector Prime. They’re now carving through the Outer Rim, and Lando’s world of Dubrillion is one of the first places to fall.

Back on Coruscant, the Senate under Chief of State Borsk Fey’lya doesn’t want to believe any of it. Plenty of senators suspect the whole invasion is a Jedi scheme to grab more power, which is exactly the kind of politics you’d expect from this New Republic.

So Luke does what he can with what he has. He sends small teams of Jedi out on recon: Luke and Jacen go to Belkadan, Corran Horn and Ganner Rhysode head to Bimmiel to find a group of missing scientists, and Anakin goes with Mara to Dantooine while her illness keeps getting worse.

Meanwhile, refugees from the Outer Rim are piling up on Dantooine. You can probably guess where the Vong show up next.

Stackpole writes a dogfight like nobody else

If you read the X-wing books, you already know why Stackpole was the right pick here. He wrote a big chunk of that series, and the space combat in Onslaught has the same punch, with pilots chattering over comms and dogfights you can actually follow from cockpit to cockpit.

He’s just as good on the ground. The battle on Dantooine is the centerpiece of the book, a desperate fighting retreat with New Republic troops trying to get refugees off-world while Vong forces close in.

The stakes feel real, too. Rogue Squadron takes a beating against coralskippers, and roughly half the refugees on Dantooine don’t make it out. Vector Prime made the Vong scary on a small scale, and Onslaught shows what they look like as an army.

Old friends: Corran Horn, Gavin Darklighter, and Rogue Squadron

This is where the book really got me. Gavin Darklighter now leads Rogue Squadron, which is a little wild when you remember him as the teenage farm kid from the early X-wing books (I may have said “look at you!” out loud on my Kindle).

He’s doing well, too. He has a wife and kids now, which is a really nice thing to see after how rough his story got by the end of Isard’s Revenge.

Corran Horn is back as a full Jedi, and Stackpole clearly loves writing him. His pairing with the arrogant Ganner Rhysode on Bimmiel is a fun odd couple, with the two of them butting heads right up until things go very wrong.

There’s more fan service sprinkled around. The Caamasi senator Elegos A’Kla returns from I, Jedi, and Wedge and Tycho stop by Gavin’s office near the end. It’s a small moment, but it felt like a reunion.

The Solo kids go their separate ways

Vector Prime kept the Solo children mostly together. Onslaught splits them up, and each one gets a storyline that shows where they’re headed as characters.

Jacen follows a vision on Belkadan, loses a fight to a Vong warrior, and ends up in the Embrace of Pain until Luke rescues him. Anakin spends his time learning from Mara, and their talks about living with her illness are some of the quieter highlights of the book.

Then there’s Jaina joining Rogue Squadron. She’s sixteen, which raises some eyebrows in the story, but she’s already a gifted pilot and the Rogues need people who can fly.

It makes complete sense for her character. Jacen is the thinker and Anakin is the natural Jedi warrior, so giving Jaina an X-wing and a squadron gives her an identity of her own.

Lightsabers against Yuuzhan Vong warriors

There’s a lot of great Jedi action spread across all these missions. The Vong are immune to the Force and carry living weapons that can stand up to a lightsaber, so every duel feels like a real fight instead of a Jedi carving through stormtroopers.

Corran’s fights on Bimmiel are the standouts. He nearly dies in one, and Ganner has to drag him out.

The detail I loved most is how the Vong warriors respect a good opponent. Even in a fight to the death, they recognize when a Jedi fights well, which gives them a warrior’s code that reminds me of a samurai drama (or a Klingon episode of Star Trek, depending on your nerd background).

It also makes them more interesting than faceless invaders. You get the sense that killing a worthy enemy matters to them, and that pays off at the end of the book when one Vong commander, Shedao Shai, swears personal revenge on the Jedi who wronged his family.

The best scenes: hunting Vong by fear, and outplaying the Senate

Spoiler note: this section gets specific about two late scenes.

The Vong can’t be sensed through the Force, and they’ve slipped warriors disguised as humans into the crowd of refugees. Nobody can tell who’s who.

The solution is brilliant. The heroes tell the refugees they’re all about to die and genuinely terrify everyone, then Leia and Danni Quee (the scientist from Vector Prime, whose Force abilities are starting to show) move through the crowd looking for the people who aren’t giving off any fear at all.

The calm ones are the Vong. It’s a tense scene, and I love that it turns the Vong’s biggest advantage against them.

The other standout is pure politics. At the end, Leia, Elegos, and Gavin confront Borsk Fey’lya with hard evidence of the invasion and a little bit of blackmail, and they box him in so neatly that backing the military is the only move that lets him save face.

If he refuses, he looks terrible. If he agrees and lets the military handle the war, they’ll help him look good, and watching our heroes play the Senate perfectly was just as satisfying as any space battle in the book.

Verdict: a great second book, with one sad Corellian

My one real complaint is Han Solo. He’s only in the book briefly, and when he is, he’s miserable.

I get it, he’s grieving Chewbacca, and that loss should hurt. But he comes off as a mopey loser early on, and then he’s basically gone for the rest of the book, off drinking or something while everyone else is fighting the Vong.

I thought he’d mostly come to terms with Chewie’s death by the end of Vector Prime, so this felt like a step backward. It doesn’t suit the character, and I’m hoping he snaps out of it fast and gets back in the cockpit in the next book.

Everything else works. Dark Tide I: Onslaught is a must-read if you loved the X-wing books. The battles are huge, and seeing Gavin, Corran and the Solo kids all in the thick of it was a blast.

If you only came to the expanded universe for the big three, Han’s absence might sting more for you than it did for me. For everyone else, Onslaught does a great job of keeping the momentum going from Vector Prime, and with Shedao Shai out for blood, I’m diving straight into Dark Tide II: Ruin next.