Lucasfilm has finally given us a glimpse of Star Wars: The High Republic by releasing a chapter of the first book, Charles Soule’s Light of the Jedi.
Set 200 years before the Skywalker Saga, the team behind the new publishing initiative has described this era as the galaxy’s golden age, with the Jedi Order at the height of their power and the Galactic Senate maintaining peace and justice across the Core Worlds and beyond. The newly released chapter, meanwhile, teases that it’s not all going to be fun and games and the next big disaster is coming for the heroes of the High Republic. It doesn’t give away too much of the plot, mind you, but there are still some interesting details that give us an idea about what this period will roughly look like.
For one thing, even the chapter’s “opening crawl” confirms what we’ve been told so far; the galaxy is truly at peace. Chancellor Lina Soh, who leads the Republic from its seat in Coruscant, has launched a new initiative to colonize the Outer Rim. This is where the Jedi Knights come in. Since those regions are full of predators and dangerous phenomena, the Chancellor requests that the Order establish outposts across the unknown worlds. The Senate also tasks the force-sensitive warriors to aid everyone in need. It’s also safe to presume that the Jedi will use the Force to navigate the uncharted hyperspace lanes of the Outer Rim, a technique interestingly known as Skywalking.
It also stands to reason that we’ve already seen one of these Jedi outposts in Soule’s The Rise of Kylo Ren series when Luke and Ben noted about checking out that it’s been there for many centuries.
Star Wars: The High Republic seems to depict the Jedi Knights as gunslingers in their version of the galaxy’s Wild West, where these warriors of peace will supposedly take down bad guys and bring wrongdoers to justice. And we can’t wait to get into the story when it arrives early on in 2021.