The New Jedi Order: The Unifying Force

The Unifying Force is the final novel of the New Jedi Order series. Its hardcover version was released on November 4, 2003. A CD-ROM was included with the hardcover release, which contained the eBook version of Vector Prime. The paperback included the Star Wars: New Jedi Order Round-Robin Interview.

Editions

 * ISBN 0345428528; November 4, 2003, Del Rey, 529-page hardcover
 * ISBN 0553713701; November 4, 2003, Random House Audio, Abridged CD
 * ISBN 0345428536; August 3, 2004, Del Rey, 576-page paperback
 * ISBN 8324124276; Amber, 596-page Polish paperback
 * ISBN 0099410524; 2004, Arrow Books Ltd., 576-page UK paperback

Back cover
'''Triumph or obliteration? For the New Jedi Order and the unrelenting Yuuzhan Vong, it will be the last, epic battle&mdash;the ultimate fight that will decide the fate of the universe...'''

Internal flap
''The Galactic Alliance's hard-won success in combating the extragalactic Yuuzhan Vong has proven all too brief&mdash;and the tide has turned again to the invader's advantage. The Yuuzhan Vong, having overcome the strategies of the Jedi and their allies, have pushed deeper into the galaxy and conquered more worlds. Coruscant has been remade into the capital of the extragalactic aliens and renamed Yuuzhan'tar. The remaining defenders of the galaxy are struggling to form a united front. Luke, Mara and Jacen are missing in action. Clearly the stage is set for endgame.''

''While Han and Leia receive the horrifying news that hundreds of high-ranking Alliance prisoners face death in a sacrifice to the alien invader's bloodthirsty gods, Luke and his team try to persuade Zonama Sekot to help in the war effort. Yet as they speak, the Alliance capital world Mon Calamari is under attack.''

''At the same time, the Jedi's alliances throughout the galaxy are being tested and the chances of an Alliance victory are being jeopardized by rogue factions determined to deploy the lethal Alpha Red that will exterminate the entire Yuuzhan Vong species. Also among the Yuuzhan Vong, there is a threat of revolt by the oppressed lower classes of their society. Oppressed Shamed Ones and high-ranking officials alike fear that their Supreme Overlord Shimrra's actions will provoke the wrath of their gods. Ultimately, for both opposing forces, too much has been sacrificed and too much is at stake. And now, the final battle between the Yuuzhan Vong and the Galactic Alliance.''

Paperback
In the spectacular finale of the New Jedi Order series, Luke, Han, and Leia rally for their last stand against the enemy that threatens not only the galaxy but the Force itself.

''The Galactic Alliance's hard-won success in countering the extragalactic Yuuzhan Vong onslaught has proven all too brief&mdash;and the tide has turned more to the invaders' advantage. The marauding aliens have pushed deeper into the galaxy in their ruthless quest for domination. The remnants of the resistance are struggling to form a united front. Clearly the stage is set for endgame.''

''Now, as Luke and his team try desperately to convince the living world of Zonama Sekot to join the Jedi's final campaign against the Yuuzhan Vong, a lone space station is all that stands between Alliance headquarters and ferocious enemy forces, which are poised to wage their most decisive assault. For both sides, too much has been sacrificed&mdash;and too much is at stake&mdash;to ever turn back. And now nothing can stand in the way of seizing victory...or facing annihilation.''

Plot summary
Prior to the Battle of Yuuzhan'tar that occurs in the novel, a series of events and other battles - such as the Battle of Selvaris, the Battle of Caluula, the Battle of Corulag and the Battle of Dac - lead up to the downfall of Supreme Overlord Shimrra Jamaane of the Yuuzhan Vong. Elsewhere, the living planet of Zonama Sekot is still in transit in hyperspace for the Coruscant system since the events of the previous novel, and the characters taking refuge in the planet's caves and other safety features (see the plot summaries of Force Heretic III: Reunion and The Final Prophecy to find out who the characters on Zonama are) recover Harrar, who was thought to be dead in his previous confrontation with the treacherous Nom Anor. The characters on Zonama also realize that the living planet is actually the seed of the Yuuzhan Vong home planet, the original Yuuzhan'tar, which was destroyed in the ancient Cremlevian War in the the Yuuzhan Vong galaxy. From the destruction of their home planet, the Yuuzhan Vong were stripped of their Force-sensitivity and experienced great pain, as they had lived in symbiosis with the original Yuuzhan'tar, rendering them unable to contact the Force or be detected in it, ever again from that point on. This was among one of the reasons that the Yuuzhan Vong hold pain and death in such worship to their religion, because, when they were cut off from the Force, they realized that pain and death were the only other forms of symbiosis that they could achieve. Thus, they had cemented this new way of life into their religion by creating gods who look for such positive regard to embracing what all living beings must suffer. And when the Cremlevian War had devastated the Yuuzhan Vong galaxy as a whole, it forced them to journey into the Intergalactic Void in search of another galaxy for them to conquer and live in, thus leading into the eventual invasion. Meanwhile, Nom Anor is accepted back into Vong society and is promoted to the rank of Prefect, which is one step closer to his ultimate goal in life of being High Prefect, by Shimrra under the mistaken belief that Nom Anor had killed Zonama Sekot. But unfortunately for Nom Anor, he still has to bare the existence of the current High Prefect Drathul and his own Jedi heresy movement is still standing strong by the worker caste and Shamed Ones even without his leadership, thanks to his once-trusted aide, Kunra. And in the Galactic Alliance, Admiral Ackbar dies of old age, something that saddens the military of the Alliance before their showdown with the Yuuzhan Vong.

Eventually, Zonama Sekot arrives in the Coruscant system, coinciding with Nom Anor's false prophecy to the Shamed Ones' Jedi heresy as it appears in the Vong capital's skies. This not only distorts the Yuuzhan Vong social hierarchy and causes joy in the Shamed Ones for bringing their oppressive rulers down, but it causes Shimrra to go insane, as Nom Anor sees. Realizing that Shimrra and his order will be brought down, Nom Anor returns to his guise as Yu'shaa the Prophet and fights alongside the Shamed Ones against those who are still loyal to Shimrra as the Battle of Yuuzhan'tar begins. And while the Galactic Alliance forces battle the Yuuzhan Vong in space, on Yuuzhan'tar and at Zonama, Harrar, Han and Leia Organa Solo lead a mission to either convince the World Brain to cease its efforts of trying to destroy Yuuzhan'tar, as ordered by Shimrra to prevent anyone from inhabiting the planet in case the Vong lost the battle, or kill it. But they are then captured by High Prefect Drathul and his forces, and Han, Leia, Harrar, C-3PO, R2-D2, Cakhmaim and Meewalh are taken by them to be executed at the Well of the World Brain as a sacrifice. Meanwhile, Mara Jade Skywalker, Kenth Hamner and Tahiri Veila fight alongside the Shamed Ones against Shimrra's forces, and Tahiri comes into contact with Nom Anor. She captures him and holds him for Mara to come over so that the latter can see it her way as to how he should be punished for all of the wrong he has done throughout the war. However, Nom Anor evades Tahiri's grasp and tries to escape, but Mara chases him down into an abandoned building. After a brief fight between Mara and Nom Anor, Mara defeats and nearly kills him for giving her the coomb spore virus years earlier and for all the other misdeeds which he has given the Jedi and the late New Republic during the invasion. But Nom Anor pleads for mercy, and even though Mara does not believe his claims that he has changed since he became Yu'shaa, she spares him for other people to decide his fate after the Battle of Yuuzhan'tar, assuming that the Galactic Alliance will win. He also tells her that Shimrra has ordered an Alpha Red-infected Vong ship, transferred from Caluula, to Zonama Sekot, because since Zonama's biology is closely related to the Vong's own biology, it can kill the living planet. So they ally with the Shamed Ones to save Han, Leia, Harrar and the others from being executed and subsequently try to warn Galactic Alliance forces about the Yuuzhan Vong's attempts at destroying Zonama Sekot, the latter situation being all for naught as the Alpha Red-infected ship successfully evades the Alliance's defensive forces to arrive at the living planet. Despite this, Drathul's forces are overwhelmed, even by traditional warriors who have seen the error of Shimrra's ways, while the High Prefect himself is strangled to death by Nom Anor, being that they were personal enemies. The World Brain is convinced to cease its functions of causing anomalies on Yuuzhan'tar by Jacen Solo's telepathic connection to it, after he had beaten back Shimrra's own commands over the World Brain.

While the Battle of Yuuzhan'tar still rages, Luke Skywalker, Jacen and his sister Jaina enter Shimrra's Citadel to kill him and bring an end to the war with his death on the Galactic Alliance's victory. Shimrra is joined with several genetically modified warriors called Slayers, who were created for the sole purpose of killing Jedi, to duel Luke, Jacen and Jaina. But in the end, the Slayers are all killed in combat against the three Jedi despite the former's efforts. However, Shimrra poisons Luke with his special amphistaff, the Scepter of Power, while also suffocating him with it. The Supreme Overlord then tries to finish Luke off with the lightsaber of the late Anakin Solo, disregarding the Yuuzhan Vong's hatred of mechanical technology. This is to show Luke how it feels to be fighting something that is part of, or at least similar to, their society, reflecting on the Vong's battle against Zonama Sekot the living planet. Meanwhile, Jaina follows Shimrra's Shamed familiar, Onimi, into the Supreme Overlord's evacuation ship, and the familiar knocks her unconscious and chains her up in between statues of Yuuzhan Vong deities on the ship's bridge. Back with the confrontation between Luke and Shimrra, Luke manages to cut the Scepter of Power into pieces with his lightsaber, preventing the Scepter from cutting off his air supply any further, retrieves his late nephew's lightsaber out of the Supreme Overlord's grasp and uses both lightsabers to decapitate Shimrra. Luke then collapses from the poison injected by the Scepter of Power into his system, and throws Anakin's lightsaber to Jacen, but the latter misses it, reflecting the vision he had at Duro three years earlier. Despite this failure, Jacen is sent by the faltering Luke to retrieve Jaina.

On the bridge of Shimrra's evacuation ship, Jaina wakes up and Onimi reveals that he was actually the real Supreme Overlord of the Yuuzhan Vong all this time. He believes that the Jedi are the avatars of the Vong gods, with Jaina being Yun-Harla the Trickster goddess, which Jaina used as a persona in the latter half of the war as psychological warfare against the Yuuzhan Vong. And this supports Onimi's motivations as he explains that he was once a Shaper who tried to fuse himself with a yammosk after discovering that the eighth cortex was empty, and he became a Shamed One. However, he found that he could touch the Force, and used it to manipulate Shimrra via hypnotism into becoming the false Supreme Overlord of the Yuuzhan Vong from the Intendant caste. Behind the scenes at Shimrra's throne, Onimi was the one who really lead the Vong to their invasion of the galaxy, and he believed that those of Yun'o (the Yuuzhan Vong gods) were just testing him and his species to see if they were worthy of the planets that the galaxy provided. But as the war dragged on with it worsening on the Vong's side, Onimi then thought that the gods wanted to destroy him and his rule with Shimrra acting as his puppet. The real Supreme Overlord asserts that Yun'o would not want one with such power to be stronger than they were if this was the reason that their creations were losing the war.

Before Shimrra's evacuation ship, controlled by Onimi, launches, the Jedi-Shamed Ones party arrive at the false Supreme Overlord's Citadel where they find his decapitated form and Luke dying. The latter is taken by Mara aboard the Millennium Falcon for medical healing, while Harrar announces to the Shamed Ones and their traditional Vong captives that Shimrra is dead, which enhances their joy in toppling his order, and Han, Leia and Nom Anor board the evacuation ship to search for the Solo twins. Then the ship launches, and as it reaches for space above Yuuzhan'tar, Jacen confronts the insane Onimi, who believes that his opponent is Yun-Shuno the Pardoner goddess of the Shamed Ones, on the bridge of the ship. Jacen then experiences the return of the voice that told him to "stand firm" at Duro, realizes that it was that of his late grandfather, Anakin Skywalker, and then he fights Onimi using the Force. And at the end of the fight, Jacen emerges easily as the victor because he opened himself to the full, raw power of the Force in all of its glory in the galaxy, throwing off Onimi's actions at every turn. With this, Jacen achieves oneness with the Force as a result, making him too powerful for the real Supreme Overlord to counter. When Han, Leia and Nom Anor see Jacen's victory, they find that he has aged much older by five years, erasing any trace of his childhood while Onimi has been shaped properly again. But then he dies off from his duel with Jacen, and disappears as a puddle of foul hydrocarbons. This was the result of Jacen curing Onimi of being Shamed in his defeat, and this left him unable to handle the toxic poisons that he tried to use as weapons inside his own body against Jacen, which the latter easily repelled as part of the countering of his opponent's actions in the fight. After Onimi's death, the end of the real Supreme Overlord of the Yuuzhan Vong, the yorik coral deck of the ship simply absorbs his liquid remnants into itself. Jacen then saves Jaina, and Nom Anor tries to kill the Solos for the misdeeds that they have given him by tricking them into going into a garbage chute, making them think that, initially, it was an escape pod. But because of Jacen's Vongsense, he detects Nom Anor's treachery and prevents the deaths of his family and of himself by providing this information to all those present. Nom Anor desperately tries one last attempt to escape them by using his plaeryin bol to shoot poison out at Jacen and use a device, disguised as a finger on his hand, to depart. But Jacen uses a Force technique taught to him by the late Vergere on rendering Nom Anor's poison barren in terms of its intended effects to transform it into water, thereby saving himself. Leia also stops Nom Anor from escaping by cutting off the hand from which he pulled the device with her lightsaber, immobilizing him. After Jacen tells him that it didn't have to be this with way, Nom Anor proclaims that it did, because he fit in neither the native galactic society for his manipulation and treachery or the Yuuzhan Vong for his cowardice and selfishness. Regardless, he is offered, by Han, to escape the dying ship when the Solos reach the real escape pod, as the evacuation ship has been weakening since Onimi's death thanks to the connection that he had with it. But Nom Anor finds that the Yuuzhan Vong have lost the war and he doesn't want to have any part of what is to come, considering the proclamation that he just made after getting his hand cut off by Leia, and that he and Onimi were similar because they were both heretics. So Nom Anor pushes Han aboard the escape pod with the latter's family, and he leaves himself aboard the dying evacuation ship as it explodes above Yuuzhan'tar. This ends the life of the Yuuzhan Vong responsible for approximately half the war as the Solos survive in the escape pod, shooting back towards the Millennium Falcon that already has the dying Luke and Mara aboard. Jacen uses his tears to heal Luke and he recovers from Shimrra's amphistaff poison. The Solos and Skywalkers then reunite in a bittersweet embrace, glad that the war is finally over while C-3PO and R2-D2 watch on, with Threepio telling Artoo that he envies over what joy humans must feel in times like this.

Following the destruction of Shimrra's evacuation ship, with Warmaster Nas Choka witnessing this event, he knew that the Supreme Overlord died with it (which is technically true, since Onimi was the one who really lead the Yuuzhan Vong into the war). Seeing that the Vong have lost, under the belief that they have lost Shimrra as the species' conduit to their gods and that their deities have turned against them, Choka ordered all forces in the galaxy to either surrender to the Galactic Alliance or commit suicide, officially heralding the war's end. As for the Alpha Red-infected ship, Zonama Sekot managed to destroy it before it could even touch the surface of the living world, similar to the fate of the rest of Alpha Red as the Galactic Alliance destroys all remaining samples, considering that it is no longer needed. And after the Battle of Yuuzhan'tar, Choka makes a deal with the Galactic Alliance at the Sekot Accords; they will be spared, despite the invasion that they caused which resulted in 365 trillion native galactic deaths, and they will be brought to Zonama Sekot, the seed of the original Yuuzhan'tar. After Choka and his remaining obedient forces collect, as part of the deal, all other remaining Vong forces in the galaxy for Zonama, especially those who haven't heeded Choka's announcement that the war has ended, the living planet takes the remaining Vong in the galaxy and travels into hyperspace. From this hyperspace jump, Zonama Sekot disappears back into the Unknown Regions so that the Yuuzhan Vong will be safe from the vengeful Bothans, who still have their ar'krai declared against them. On the planet Zonama, and by the intelligence Sekot, the once-violent species will learn the meaning of peace and regain their connection to the Force. Joining Zonama Sekot and the Vong are the likes of Danni Quee and Tahiri. Luke also announces that coinciding with the war's end is the beginning of the New Jedi Order's newfound belief that the Jedi's best way to serve the Force is to act accordingly to their consciences, as is under Sekot's belief of the Potentium, or the Unifying Force, and stay out of the affairs of the Galactic Alliance in the postwar galaxy. Their new Temple will be located on Ossus to prove that point. Jacen, in the aftermath of achieving oneness with the Force in his duel with Onimi, decides to go off on a sojourn throughout the galaxy to study numerous beliefs and theories about the Force, train under them and find out which Force belief will be the most appropriate for him to follow now that the war is over. Imperial Remnant Grand Admiral Gilad Pellaeon, as a token of his gratitude for the Galactic Alliance helping the Remnant defeat the Yuuzhan Vong, gives Han and Leia the Alderaan painting Killik Twilight, which Han and Leia lost to Grand Admiral Thrawn years earlier when they were on a mission to Tatooine. Jaina is forced to finish her relationship with Jagged Fel because of Jag's duties to the Chiss and Jaina's duties to the rest of the galaxy, though Jag promises that whenever he can, he will visit Jaina. The book, and the series, finishes with many of the characters, including Jacen before he leaves for his sojourn, going back to Kashyyyk to honour the sacrifices of many whom have died in the war, including Chewbacca and Anakin Solo, and having a feast and celebration afterward.

Behind the scenes
Nom Anor was identified as an executor in Dramatis Personae, despite the fact that he was already a prefect at the beginning of the book.

Pash Cracken was identified as a Major, while in The Final Prophecy, mere months earlier, he was identified as a General.

Harrar was identified as a High Priest, while he always held the rank Priest in previous books.

Commander Czulkang Lah was retconned as a Supreme Commander.

The Jedi Masters were referred to as members of the Galactic Alliance Advisory Council, while they should be the members of the High Council.

Boba Fett returned and fought side by side with Han Solo for the first time.

Gilad Pellaeon mentioned that the Bastion Accords were signed five years earlier, while in fact the event had been ten years earlier.

Leia's Killik Twilight made its first real-world appearance since Tatooine Ghost.

There are several references to Shakespeare's "Macbeth." Two notable references are when Shimrra refers to three women as "black midnight hags" and when Onimi asks Nom Anor if he thought "we three would meet again."

A reference is made to one of Mark Twain's famous quotes near the end of chapter 13 when Nom Anor is on his way to speak to the heretics. He reassures the Shamed Ones that, "The rumours of my death were greatly exaggerated."

Ebaq 9 is sometimes referred to as "Ebaq Nine"

There is a reference to Dewlannamapia being at Chewbacca's funeral, but she had died over 30 years before.

Soron Hegerty is markedly absent, even though she was present on Zonama Sekot at the time of its jump to hyperspace and should have been trapped on the planet with the rest of the group.

Cover gallery
This is a gallery of the different cover variations of The Unifying Force.