As with previous ongoing Star Wars series, Abyss marks a point in the storyline where it gets a lot harder to say anything much useful while also avoiding large spoilers for previous books. But I’m interested enough in seeing where they’re going with it to lay out at least a bare-bones sketch, all the same. First, things I’ve probably already told you anyway: the Fate of the Jedi series takes place some forty years after Luke and Leia and Han saved the galaxy from the Emperor. They have since saved it from the rest of the Empire that wasn’t really done yet despite their boss’s demise, from extra-galactic invaders, and most recently from a newly risen Sith Lord with uncomfortable family ties. Now, the Jedi are trying to save it from themselves, since many of them are suffering psychotic delusions, while navigating a political minefield that has already resulted in Luke Skywalker stepping down as Grand Master of the Jedi Order to go on a pilgrimage and figure out why good people do bad things, more or less.

Okay? So, the series at large has been Luke and his son hopping from one group of non-Jedi Force-sensitives to the next to gather this information, while everyone else plays at political shenanigans back home. The political shenanigans have been interesting, but in this book (as, I suspect, ultimately will be the case in the series as a whole) they’ve been largely irrelevant stage-dressing, since they don’t really touch on the Force, which is what we’re honestly here about, right? That part is where I’m getting to be interested, for two reasons. The first is one I’m likely to be let down by in the long run, but they seem to be making a close examination of Lucas'[1] underlying cosmology for the entirety of his creation, and I hope to see interesting conclusions drawn. The second, though, is a thing I haven’t mentioned previously (I don’t think), that there seems to be an old-fashioned Jedi-Sith confrontation on the way. Not the master-and-apprentice always-two Sith Lords of the last good long while, no, I mean the actual Force-sensitive species of them that wanted to take over the galaxy way back before there was an Old Republic. Which admittedly doesn’t sound that different on the surface, but old things coming back has always seemed pretty cool to me, and I do not expect to be disappointed as far as seeing where that goes. So, y’know, possible cool stuff in the outing, and interesting philosophical turns and the omnipresent swashbuckling and aforementioned political shenanigans in the meantime are more than tasty enough mind-candy to keep me coming back for more.

[1] I mean, obviously he has never given it even a tiny fraction of this much thought, but I guess at some degree of abstraction he still has veto power.