WARNING: These notes will completely spoil Servants of the Empire: Imperial Justice. Haven’t read it? Stop and go here.
(Part 1 of Imperial Justice notes are here. Go here for notes for Edge of the Galaxy and here for Rebel in the Ranks.)
Part 2: Justice
In the second part of Imperial Justice, Zare discovers the consequences of continuing his quest to find Dhara, pushing him to a fateful decision. He’s made enemies of both Roddance and Oleg, and the net seems to be closing on him. It’s definitely closing on Merei – and worst of all, our protagonists no longer have each other, as their relationship goes from strained to finished.
Maybe this is a good place to stop and talk about being cruel to fictional characters.
UH-OH, Y’ALL, HE’S DRAGGING OUT THE SOAPBOX.
About a million years ago, a small but vocal segment of Star Wars fandom lost its collective mind about (wait for it) Kevin J. Anderson’s decision to kill off General Madine in Darksaber. I read the back-and-forth in disbelief. General Madine? Really? The guy who was inserted into Return of the Jedi as insurance in case the Mon Calamari masks weren’t expressive enough? Beyond that, I couldn’t figure out what those angry fans wanted. A novel in which Madine accompanied Luke & Co. on picnics, everyone was nice to each other and nothing bad ever happened?
Unfortunately, that pretty much was what this segment of the fanbase wanted, for every character you’d expect them to care about and a bunch of others besides. (Once again: Madine? Really?) I’ve learned that every fandom has this faction, and every writer has to politely but pointedly ignore its members, because there’s no storytelling that way – no conflict, no suspense, no growth and ultimately no measurable audience.
As fans, few of us take things that far. (Thank goodness!) But even a moderate-sized draught of Protect My Favorites is bad for storytelling. A book will fail if readers don’t care enough about the characters. But a book will also fail if the author cares too much about the characters. That’s not your job. Your job is to manipulate them as required for the story – to which the storyteller must be “eternally and unswervingly loyal,” in the words of the great Isak Dinesen.
And sometimes that means your job is to be one cold-blooded motherfucker. Isak Dinesen probably wouldn’t have put it that way, but I bet she would have nodded.
I THINK HE’S CLIMBING OFF THAT THING. IT’S OK TO COME BACK.
Imperial Justice is indeed cruel to Zare and Merei, pushing them to breaking points beyond which they’re no longer the same people. But that cruelty is in service of the story and their breakup is an unhappy but logical outcome of their situation. They’re extremely capable, but they’ve navigated wrenchingly difficult times in part by being able to rely on each other for comfort and counsel. Once that’s taken from them, they struggle to adjust. Rather than helping each other through tough patches by talking, their inability to talk makes those tough patches worse. And once they can talk again, during Zare’s winter break, they discover it’s too late.
Zare returns to the Academy and is assigned, along with other cadets, to supporting Kallus’s crackdown on dissent – an exercise that Roddance hopes will force him into a mistake and his dismissal from Imperial service.
He’s paired with Oleg, his nemesis, and goes door to door asking Lothal citizens about their neighbors’ loyalties. The techniques are straight out of the fascist playbook, from breaking down social bonds by recruiting informants to using the letter of the law as a weapon. Same goes for the rhetoric that accompanies those techniques. It’s hard to disagree that evading even a minor law is wrong. It’s tough to argue that treason doesn’t, in fact, begin with disloyal thoughts. And it’s difficult to raise practical objections to rigorous law enforcement when you know you’ll be accused of being soft on crime.
Whether you’re in a galaxy far far away or a divided county close to home, opposing such rhetoric demands you say “yes but” to seemingly straightforward propositions, something depressingly few people have the strength and/or intellectual honesty to do. It’s tempting to drop the “but” and not think about the bigger picture, with its gray areas and complications and imperfect answers. (Of course, as a member of the military, Zare has far less leeway than that.)
There is some pushback to Kallus’s orders and discussion of those gray areas, which I used to explore the key characters’ different points of view. As true believers, Oleg and Roddance don’t care about those gray areas. Chiron is painfully aware of them but trusts that someone with more authority will do the right thing. It’s Zare who sees what Chiron can’t – that the Empire’s abuses aren’t a bug but a feature.
Things get worse from there, with Zare and the other cadets ordered to take the children of fugitives into “protective custody.” That forces Zare to confront the question that breaks him: What isn’t he willing to do in order to find his sister? Is Dhara’s life worth bringing pain and misery to many other families? Zare eventually finds his limits and vows that he won’t obey an order he knows is wrong, even though he knows such an order is inevitable. This is the trap Roddance has set for him, and Zare escapes it only because Oleg stumbles into his own trap first.
Merei, meanwhile, grows increasingly desperate to escape her mother’s investigation and Laxo’s organization. She and Jix cook up a plan to use a pulse-mag to erase her records at Bakiska’s – an attempt that relies more on bluster than planning, and predictably fails. But Merei then improvises, faking her own kidnapping and engineering an Imperial raid she convinces herself will send Laxo to prison. Instead, it results in the crime boss’s death, leaving Merei to live with the consequences.
I’d sketched out a chillier endgame, in which Laxo’s death was what Merei intended. My editor Jen Heddle objected to that, and she was right. The sticking point wasn’t the audience but the character – that was too ruthless for Merei at that point in the story. Having Laxo’s death be accidental, even if Merei should have realized the danger, was a better way of showing she was in deeper than even she realized, and raised the interesting question of how she’d react to a miscalculation that got people killed.
The lesson, as always: storytelling is a collaborative process, and editors are there to help you. Listen to them!
Notes on this section:
Epilogue
The epilogue is essentially a preview of The Secret Academy, setting up a few things that are important to that book. We find out that Zare hasn’t escaped but been maneuvered into greater danger by his enemies. Zare and Merei are moving on completely different tracks that may or may not converge. And Merei can’t resist more electronic snooping, suggesting that her getaway may not be so clean.
All of those elements would come into play in the series finale – but that’s another set of notes. See you soon!
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