June 2025 - Wedge's Gamble

[colls]

This month's book is Wedge's Gamble (Star Wars: X-Wing #2) by Michael A. Stackpole

1. How did you like it?

2. How strategic do you think leaders (Rebel or Imperial) were as they plotted the fate of Coruscant? Who best understood their enemy?

3. Did any of the characters' fates surprise you?

4. Any overall thoughts?

COMING UP NEXT
July: THEME: Any Legends book (published 1976-2014)
August: BOOK: The Mask of Fear (Star Wars: Reign of the Empire, #1) by Alexander Freed

Book & theme suggestions can be left on on this post

Comments

[colls]

1. I thought it was okay. In a different mood I probably would've enjoyed it a great deal more. Corran kind of bores me and so much of this novel centers on him.

2. I thought the Rebels were all over the place. Freeing Black Sun criminals, sending some pilots down to do undercover work, etc. They had to navigate amongst themselves (Akbar & Fey'lya - for example) nearly as much as they had to navigate hyperspace lanes. Isard, on the other hand, is calculating and pretty cunning - knowing the rebels will expend resources they don't have to save people.

3. I kind of sussed out Erisi when she was paired with Corran for the undercover mission and he ALMOST has sex with her but then doesn't. I thought hmmm... you can't have your hero bedding the enemy. So basically the opposite of surprise I guess?
I'm glad Aril Nunb survived. I thought she might be a goner.

4. Like I said above, I don't find Corran very interesting and this book has such a large cast of characters that it's a bit of a chore to keep it all straight when I only read a few chapters at a time. The pacing is probably a "me" thing as I don't recall pacing being a problem in book #1.

[brokenmnemonic]

Given the title of this novel, I was really expecting Wedge to be the main POV character, not Corran. There are things about Corran's past that could be interesting (I liked learning more about the investigations he and his father were involved in back when he worked for CorSec, and how that related to Mirax's family) but I don't find him particularly interesting. I can understand why the author couldn't use Wedge as a POV character when it came to the idea of a spy within Rogue squadron, given that Wedge trusts the person Corran doesn't, but this really didn't give me much faith in Corran's investigative abilities. Or maybe that was the point?

I used to watch a tv show called Tour of Duty when I was in secondary school, and this book reminds me a bit of that show - it started out making some interesting points about the Vietnam war, who was fighting into it, what happened in the aftermath of events like the assassination of Dr King... and then there was a season where the unit suddenly became an elite special-forces adjacent unit doing all sorts of weird stuff. It feels like this book was trying to make Rogue Squadron into a combination of both a squadron of fighter aces and an elite commando/infiltration unit and cyberwarfare unit, and I'm not sure I buy that. I'll be amazed if the fallout from it becoming public knowledge at some point that the Alliance deliberately released Black Sun members doesn't come back to haunt them, but the politicking going on in the council and Fey'la pushing Akbar into compromises worked for me.

I thikn you're right about Erisi, but I think that's also maybe an artifact of the time the book was written in? I think if it'd been written ten years ago, Corran and Erisi would've hopped into bed together and we'd have had much more focus on the fallout from that. Although if it had been written more than ten years ago I'd hope we'd also have had more female characters and plots that don't revolve around their relationship with Corran.

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... but this really didn't give me much faith in Corran's investigative abilities. Or maybe that was the point?
And since I'm not all that investing in Corran, I find I didn't care much. Which is why I was rather 'meh' on most of this.

I forgot to mention that I did love it when Winter showed up and that she was on Coruscant. I know she's been around since the first books and in the comics a lot, but I remember her most from Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn. Anyway, a great character and a SPY! that I had hoped would make it into film/show at some point. (Andor was RIGHT THERE *sigh)


I remember Tour of Duty! :D And yes! That's an apt comparison.

[brokenmnemonic]

1. Basically, I thought it was... ok? It felt a little like someone was trying to do something akin to The Guns of Navarone or a similar WW2-style infiltrate and sabotage mission, and while I thought the challenge of taking the shields down and the way the Alliance was having to manage internal politicking, Isard and other Imperial factions, it felt all the way through to try and turn Rogue Squadron into some kind of multi-skilled commando unit. I thought the strengths of the book were around the challenges of trying to find a successful sabotage method as Isard's forces defeated each attempt, and around Isard's plan to use a disease to drain Alliance resources away and slow down the Alliance war machine. The plague-developing Imperial researcher was a great villain to hate, and I thought the effort to hijack a giant construction droid was a clever solution, particularly when we saw Wedge's reaction to seeing just how quick and brutally efficient those droids are at what they do.

2. I think that Isard came across as the major character with the most strategic freedom and plan of action, and I think she had a solid plan for manipulating the nature of the Alliance against itself. I think that on the Alliance side, Ackbar is still the one with the best mind for military strategy, but I liked that the story showed that political machinations are already starting to complicate the prosecution of the war, and how Ackbar would much rather have to deal with purely military problems. I was rather nonplussed that the Alliance decided using Black Sun convicts as a destabilising force on Coruscant was a good idea - that's the kind of thing that's going to be hung around the neck of their government like a millstone forever when it goes public.

3. I can't say I was surprised to find out about Erisi, but as you've flagged up, I think it was rather telegraphed because of the time the book was written in and the nature of the target audience. It's annoying, because the sort-of love triangle might've been more interesting if she wasn't a villain. As it is, I found I was just waiting for the revelation to come out so that the plot could move on. I didn't find Corran anything like as engaging as I suspect I was meant to, particularly as the parts of his character that I thought could've been interesting (mainly about his time in the Corellian security services, and his contacts - for good and bad - from that era) ended up just being used to keep telling us how his father could and Mirax's father would never have endorsed the idea of them being a couple, and to justify his refusal to consider that Celchu could be anything other than an Imperial agent. If the book had been written more recently, I could maybe think the latter was a subtle dig at the way police detectives will fixate on a particular person as the villain and refuse to consider anything that would challenge that assumption, but here it just didn't work for me.

4. I couldn't help but groan at the setup whereby a Bothan (I think) character decides that because they don't find them attractive, one of the Rogues must be an Imperial agent. That felt really clumsy, particularly by modern standards. Mostly, I felt that this book was trying to force the Rogues into playing a role that you wouldn't expect them to be capable of doing, without a lot of justification for doing it. I think this would've worked better as a story if it'd involved a nearly or completely new crew. It's the sort of story I think would work well in something like a Twilight Company pattern of novel, rather than trying to make me believe that a group of ace pilots could also happen to develop expert talents to make them infiltrators and saboteurs.