The New Jedi Order

• 1. Introduction

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  The New Jedi Order is a series of 19 science fiction novels set in the Star Wars universe, published between 1999 and 2003. It asked a question no Star Wars story had dared to ask before: what happens when an enemy arrives that the Force cannot touch? The Yuuzhan Vong, an alien species from outside the galaxy, exist entirely outside the Force. They feel no presence in it. They cannot be sensed through it. For a Jedi Order built on the Force as its foundation, this single fact redraws everything.

  The series begins 21 years after the destruction of the Second Death Star, with the New Republic straining under internal conflict. Then the Yuuzhan Vong emerge from the outer reaches of the galaxy and begin carving through it planet by planet. What follows spans the entire 19-book run: an occupation of Coruscant itself, the death of Chewbacca in the very first novel, and the transformation of characters like Jacen Solo and Tahiri Veila in ways that would define Star Wars fiction for years.

  How did a publishing venture of this scale get planned? Who decided that Chewbacca could die? And what does a Jedi do when their greatest weapon stops working? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. Building the Bible

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  In 1998, Sue Rostoni, managing editor for Lucas Licensing, and Shelly Shapiro, editorial director for Del Rey Books, joined with novelist James Luceno to map out the entire arc of the series before a single book was written. Their first act was to create a series bible. It coordinated story arcs, tracked new characters, and maintained continuity across what would become the longest-running Star Wars book series ever published.

  Luceno described the process plainly: "We created a series bible that coordinated the story arcs, a database for new characters and continuity that was passed out to writers who were hired to do the work." The writers who came on board ranged from established Star Wars hands like Michael Stackpole to names from broader science fiction: R.A. Salvatore, Troy Denning, Matthew Stover, Aaron Allston, Walter Jon Williams, Kathy Tyers, and Sean Williams and Shane Dix, among others. That list alone runs to twelve authors across 19 novels.

  The Yuuzhan Vong species itself had a specific origin. The character Nom Anor was first introduced in the Dark Horse Comics series Crimson Empire, and the Vong were built outward from him. Nom Anor became a recurring presence across multiple New Jedi Order titles, serving as a primary antagonist whose schemes and eventual disgrace thread through the entire series. Luceno offered one guiding principle the team kept close: "We are mindful that we're playing in George Lucas's backyard, but everyone who has written for the franchise has contributed something."

• 3. The Death That Changed Everything

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  Vector Prime, the first novel in the series, arrived in 1999 written by R.A. Salvatore. It landed on the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller List upon release. But what people remembered was not the bestseller ranking. It was the death of Chewbacca.

  On the planet Sernpidal, Han Solo, his son Anakin, and Chewbacca race to evacuate civilians as the Praetorite Vong drag the planet's moon Dobido into a collision course with the surface. They save as many people as possible aboard the Millennium Falcon. But Chewbacca is left behind, and dies when the moon strikes. It was, according to the source, the first and only time a major film character had been killed off in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.

  George Lucas approved the death, but the decision originated with the book editors. They sent Lucas a list of characters they wanted to kill, with Luke Skywalker at the top. Lucas responded by identifying which characters were off-limits. Chewbacca was not on the protected list, which is how he was chosen. Opinion about the decision split sharply: some read it as a sales stunt, others as a genuine signal that no character was guaranteed to survive the new series.

  Mark Hamill reprised his role as Luke Skywalker in a commercial for Vector Prime. In the ad, as Luke, he recalled his previous struggles and expressed uncertainty about whether he could defeat the Yuuzhan Vong threat. The death of Chewbacca in Vector Prime was later identified as a key factor in Disney's 2014 decision to strip the Expanded Universe of its canonical status, rebranding it as Legends.

• 4. The Fall of Coruscant

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  Star by Star, written by Troy Denning and published in 2001, reached number 11 on the New York Times bestseller list on the 18th of November 2001. The novel contains the pivotal Myrkr mission, in which Anakin Solo leads an all-Jedi strike team into the heart of a Yuuzhan Vong worldship to destroy a voxyn cloning facility. Voxyn were creatures bred specifically to hunt and kill Jedi through the Force.

  Anakin dies on that worldship, fighting off Yuuzhan Vong warriors to buy his comrades time to escape. His uncle Luke Skywalker, far away, notes the moment he passes. The mission fractures the survivors: Jaina Solo retrieves her brother's body; Jacen Solo is captured by the Yuuzhan Vong and Vergere. The fall of Coruscant follows in the same novel's closing chapters, with a Vong fleet numbering in the tens of thousands. Chief of State Borsk Fey'lya, rather than surrender, detonates a bomb inside the Imperial Palace that kills him, 25,000 Yuuzhan Vong warriors, and destroys a portion of the surrounding complex. The Yuuzhan Vong capture and rename the planet Yuuzhan'tar, after their own destroyed homeworld.

  Dark Journey, written by Elaine Cunningham and published in 2002, also reached number 11 on the Times bestseller list, on the 17th of February 2002. Cunningham described it as a personal story focused on Jaina Solo in the aftermath of losing her brothers. Jaina's grief pulls her toward the dark side of the Force across the book's events, before her friends and family pull her back.

• 5. Jacen Solo's Transformation

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  Traitor, a 2002 novel by Matthew Stover, stands apart from the rest of the series. It features no characters from the Star Wars films, focusing entirely on Jacen Solo's captivity among the Yuuzhan Vong under the guidance of the mysterious Vergere.

  Vergere was an Old Republic Jedi who had spent fifty years living among the Yuuzhan Vong. She had done so, it is later revealed in Destiny's Way, to protect the living world of Zonama Sekot and to gather intelligence on the Vong. In Traitor, she subjects Jacen to weeks of torture through the Embrace of Pain, then begins dismantling his understanding of the Force. Her central claim is that there is no light side and no dark side, only a single power that the Jedi have artificially divided.

  Jacen resists until a moment in which Vergere leads him into a trap where he nearly kills everyone present, including her. The experience makes her argument impossible to dismiss. Ganner Rhysode, who had spent months searching the galaxy believing Jacen alive when almost no one else did, tracks him to Yuuzhan'tar. He ends up buying Jacen time to complete his business with the World Brain by fighting every Yuuzhan Vong warrior at the Well of the World Brain alone, until the hall collapses on top of him. The Yuuzhan Vong later came to worship a figure called the Ganner, a god who guards the entrance to their realm of the dead, modeled on Rhysode's last stand. Jacen emerges from his captivity with what the series describes as a "perfect mastery" of the Force achieved during the battle to retake Coruscant, a state of oneness he had moved toward through everything Vergere taught him.

• 6. Tahiri Veila and Divided Selves

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  Tahiri Veila entered the New Jedi Order series as a secondary character, Anakin Solo's friend from the Junior Jedi Knights stories. The series pushed her to the center of her own story when the Yuuzhan Vong captured Yavin 4 and took her prisoner in Edge of Victory I: Conquest, published in 2001.

  Master Shaper Mezhan Kwaad and her assistant Nen Yim subjected Tahiri to experiments aimed at creating a Yuuzhan Vong-human hybrid, implanting a second personality into her mind. Anakin rescued her by enlisting the help of a Shamed Yuuzhan Vong named Vua Rapuung, who wanted revenge against Kwaad for his own shaming. Rapuung sacrificed himself so Anakin and Tahiri could escape; Tahiri herself, while still partly brainwashed, decapitated Kwaad before Anakin guided her back to herself. When Anakin died above Myrkr, the Yuuzhan Vong personality implanted in Tahiri began to seize control periodically, and she spent the remainder of the series in an internal war between her two selves.

  By Force Heretic II: Refugee, Tahiri falls into a coma as the two halves of her identity fight directly inside her own mind. She eventually masters the conflict and emerges with what the series describes as a peculiar empathy toward the Yuuzhan Vong that no other Jedi shares. At the end of the series, rather than return to the New Jedi Order, she chooses to remain on Zonama Sekot to continue studying the Vong and help them build a different kind of society.

• 7. Zonama Sekot and the Ending

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  The living world of Zonama Sekot threads through the final third of the series as the Yuuzhan Vong's own prophecy of doom. Supreme Overlord Shimrra feared it. The Shamed Ones revered it. Master Shaper Nen Yim, working aboard its surface in The Final Prophecy, published in 2003, discovered a biological connection between the Sekotan ship she was studying and Yuuzhan Vong DNA itself, suggesting that Zonama Sekot and the Vong shared a common origin.

  Nom Anor, once the Yuuzhan Vong's most effective agent provocateur and later the secret prophet of the Shamed Ones under the identity Yu'shaa, sabotaged the planet's hyperdrive cores in an attempt to kill it and buy back his standing with Shimrra. The attempt failed. Zonama Sekot emerged from hyperspace in Shimrra's own skies above Yuuzhan'tar at the climax of The Unifying Force, written by James Luceno and published in November 2003.

  The Unifying Force concluded the war with the death of Shimrra at Luke Skywalker's hands inside the Supreme Overlord's Citadel. Warmaster Nas Choka, seeing the Vong cause collapse around him, surrendered to the Galactic Alliance. The hardcover edition of The Unifying Force included a CD containing Vector Prime, a round-robin interview with contributors to the series, and the Yuuzhan Vong bible, the source material the authors had used throughout. In January 2025, Variety reported that a film called Star Wars: New Jedi Order, starring Daisy Ridley and directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, was in development, suggesting that the war the novels described may yet find its way to a screen.