Jedi Prince (along with The Glove of Darth Vader, The Trioculus Saga, The Saga of Prince Ken, or the Son of Palpatine series) is the informal name given to a series of Star Wars young reader novels that "take up where Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi left off." The title "Jedi Prince" refers to Ken, the twelve-year-old hero of the series who teams up with Luke Skywalker and the Rebel Alliance to fight the Empire.
The Empire, led by Grand Moff Hissa and Supreme Prophet Kadann, attempt to install Trioculus as Emperor, claiming that he is Palpatine's son. Palpatine's real son, according to the series, is a madman named Triclops. Both Trioculus and Triclops are mutants who have three eyes.
The books were written by a married couple, Paul and Hollace Davids, and illustrated by Karl Kesel.
Ken, a Jedi Prince
The series was collected in two trilogies as Star Wars: Book One and Star Wars: Book Two.
Books in the series
- The Glove of Darth Vader
- The Lost City of the Jedi
- Zorba the Hutt's Revenge
- Mission from Mount Yoda
- Queen of the Empire
- Prophets of the Dark Side
| Characters | Organisms | Droid models | Events | Locations |
| Organizations and titles | Sentient species | Vehicles and vessels | Weapons and technology | Miscellanea |
Fan reaction to the series
The series is generally not popular with fans of the movies, who consider them to be silly.[1] Fans have accused the series of being preachily politically correct, with every book having a "save the environment" theme.[2] Fans also believe the film characters don't appear very often and, when they do, act out of character.[3]
In response to the negative critique, Paul Davids points to the popularity of the series among student readers and their sales of millions worldwide.[4]
Jedi Prince and the rest of the Expanded Universe
Places, situations, and technology from this series have been referenced in other Expanded Universe sources.[5] However, some facts in the series are contradicted by most of the Star Wars universe: for example, the books describe the difference between male and female droids, while robots are not qualified as female if not necessary, like Guri.
The series has been retconned in many ways. For example, according to Paul Davids, the series takes place over the course of five years, but the Star Wars timeline lists all the events as taking place within the same year. Another retcon is that the right glove of Darth Vader was a Mandalorian crushgaunt fitted with Lord Kaan's Sith amulet, explaining how the glove survived the destruction of the second Death Star.
Prophets of the Dark Side ends with Han Solo and Leia Organa walking down the aisle of their wedding ceremony, but a retcon states that the wedding was interrupted and never completed. Han and Leia were canonically married in the later novel The Courtship of Princess Leia by Dave Wolverton.
A retcon in The New Essential Chronology revealed that Trioculus, Grand Moff Bertroff Hissa and other members of the Central Committee of Grand Moffs were trying to overthrow Director of Imperial Intelligence Ysanne Isard—who ruled the galactic capital of Coruscant—and usurp control of the Empire. Grand Moff Hissa connived to install Trioculus as the public leader of the Empire and gain support from the majority of the Imperials loyal to Isard. Isard is never mentioned in the series—in fact, it is frequently suggested there is no Imperial leader other than Trioculus—but this particular retcon was invented to fit the series into the established timeline.
A retcon in the unlicensed Polyhedron 103 magazine stated that the Jedi Prince series had in fact been a children's story of the actual events told by Leia Organa Solo to her children Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin. However, this retcon was later ignored in The Dark Side Sourcebook which retconned the story to be true, but with numerous fixes—one of the most prominent, that the Kadann featured in the series was a con artist hired by Imperial Intelligence and the Prophets of the Dark Side were pretenders working for the Church of the Dark Side. The original Kadann never appeared in the novels, and the true Prophets of the Dark Side were hiding on Bosthirda during the events of the series. Who's Who: Imperial Grand Admirals established that the false Kadann met his end after Grand Admiral Afsheen Makati—who hated the true Kadann—mistakenly thought that the pretender was the Supreme Prophet of the Dark Side and destroyed Scardia Station, killing the false Kadann.
The origins of Triclops were revealed in Aliens of the Empire by Abel G. Peña and Rich Handley. Triclops was not Palpatine's biological son, but the product of a scientific experiment in which Darth Sidious hired scientists Mammon Hoole and Borborygmus Gog to study the spontaneous generation of life. Sly Moore obtained a Human female called Niobi as the test subject for the project. Niobi gave birth to a three-eyed mutant, and she and her son were banished by Sarcev Quest, a Dark Side Adept loyal to Emperor Palpatine. However, in 2013, Peña and Handley wrote a new series of article for the official Star Wars Blog, entitled Barely Tolerable: Alien Henchmen of the Empire. In part one of that series, it was revealed that the three-eyed son of Niobi was in fact Trioculus.
In part three of the article series, which was released on September 12, 2013, Handley and Peña finally tied Triclops with Sly Moore, but did not explicitly reveal the father's identity. Later in the year, Peña and Greg Mitchell co-wrote another blog article titled The Star Wars Spy Game: SPIN Declassified, which explicitely referred to Triclops as Palpatine's true son, not simply an alleged one.
One conflict that has not been addressed involves the Rebel research center called DRAPAC on Mount Yoda. According to Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire, Leia, Luke's twin sister, didn't even know where Luke had been training during the Millennium Falcon's stop at Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back until, after returning from an expedition to Dagobah five years after the Battle of Endor—well after the New Republic had been established on Coruscant—Luke confided where Yoda's secret retreat had been.
Author commentary
"If we had written #7, however, I would remind you that it takes MANY STEPS to get down the aisle, and there is not one chance in hell that Han and Leia would have made it to the end of the aisle and sealed their marriage before a harrowing IMPERIAL ATTACK would have savaged their hoped for wedding and left it all in ruins. No nuptials took place that night, my dear friends." – Paul Davids[6]
"This has been about 10 years and it's very hard to remember, except I recall we would have called one book SHADOWS OF OBIWAN. That was before "Shadows" showed up in other STAR WARS titles." – Paul Davids[6]
"It may be helpful for you to know that our contract with Lucasfilm (and Lucasfilm's contract with Bantam on our series) was for six books with an option for an additional three, which would have made for a nine book series. At the time we anticipated the probability that the series would go to nine books, and therefore we had to plan ahead for where the next three stories would go. Though complete story outlines for the next three were never written, we definitely decided on some aspects of the future three stories (7-9) before books 4-6 were published. Our intent definitely was to have the Empire attack and ruin the intended wedding of Han and Leia before they ever said 'I do.' The wedding never would have happened—and that's how book 7 would have begun." – Paul Davids[6]
Bibliography
Notes and references
External links
Jedi Prince on Wikipedia- Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Glove of Darth Vader, but Were Afraid to Ask
- Jedi Prince, Part 1 (Episode #7 for 1/10/2014), published by PodOmatic on Scum and Villainy Radio (archived from the original on January 10, 2014)
