''Jedi Prince'' series

The Jedi Prince series is a series of science fiction novels set in the Star Wars expanded universe, written by Paul and Hollace Davids. They were published by Bantam Skylark. The series went from 1992 to 1993. The series takes place between the books The Truce at Bakura and Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor—about two years after Return of the Jedi.

Entries

• 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

• Ken, the main protagonist, is a brave but callow youth, whose behavior resembles that of Luke Skywalker before his Jedi training. Raised in the Lost City of the Jedi for the first twelve years of his life, Ken eventually joins the Rebel Alliance, where Luke discovers him. Ken is the son of the mutant Triclops and, therefore, grandson of Emperor Palpatine.
• Trioculus is the self-proclaimed son and heir of Palpatine. As his moniker implies, he has three eyes: two in the same place as a normal human and a third on his forehead. He attempts to procure the glove worn on the hand that Darth Vader lost in his duel with Luke Skywalker in Return of the Jedi. This glove is rumored to bestow great power upon its holder. Trioculus is killed by a droid replica of Princess Leia.
• Triclops is Palpatine's illegitimate son. He was sent into solitary exile the very moment he was born because the Emperor sensed that his son could become an even more powerful master of the dark side than he was. Nevertheless, Palpatine overlooked one important fact in his son: Triclops was a pacifist. Triclops was so named because of his three eyes, the third being in the back of his head and during his exile, The Empire began to administer shock treatment therapies which eventually drove the boy insane; he was then sent to the Imperial insane asylum on the planet Kessel. While there, he met a nurse named Kendalina, a Jedi Princess, and the two fell in love and eventually conceived a child. Kendalina was eventually murdered, however, and their son, Ken, was taken away from the asylum by an unnamed Jedi Master and took him to the Lost City of the Jedi on Yavin IV. Triclops was made to work in the Spice Mines of Kessel under the slave lord Trioculus. After pledging pacifism and his desire to see the Empire's demise, Triclops was taken in by the Alliance, and he unknowingly discovers their top secret files. Alliance scientists discovered that The Empire had fitted Triclops with an implant that transmitted these plans to Imperial Probe droids as and when they were conceived. To counter this, The Alliance deliberately input disinformation into a file and allowed the sleeping Triclops to transmit this data to a nearby probe droid. The Alliance scientists, after numerous tests, found that macaab mushrooms would destroy the implant in Triclops' mind without causing any damage to his brain and so Luke Skywalker set out on an expedition to the planet Azrid where these mushrooms were found to grow, but the operation to destroy the implant never came to fruition as they found that Triclops had managed to escape from the DRPAC leaving only an impassioned letter to his son, Ken.
• Grand Moff Hissa is an Imperial Moff who plots to take over the reins of the empire by using Trioculus as a puppet dictator. He loses his legs during a scuffle with the Rebellion, in which he falls into a vat of acid; thereafter, he uses a hovering wheelchair to get around.
• Supreme Prophet of the Dark Side Kadann is a bearded dwarf who prophesies that the next Emperor would wear the glove of Darth Vader, hence Trioculus' interest in it. In the Dark Side Sourcebook, it is revealed that this Kadann was once a Jedi who was secretly turned to the dark side before the Great Jedi Purge. He pledged his loyalty to Palpatine, and was thus spared and became one of his chief advisors. Kadann foresees the Emperor's death at Endor and tries to warn him; this warning went disregarded, of course.

Reception

The novels of this series met with a poor critical reception from many fans. Complaints included the relatively small roles played by the characters from the movies, their acting out of character, the simplicity of the plots, and that each novel had a heavy-handed environmentalist message (ranging from saving the whales to the greenhouse effect to air pollution).

The fan attitude toward the series is exemplified by a 2016 strip of the xkcd webcomic. In it, a character is found by others to have never seen any of the films. To get around the resulting social humiliation, he improvises details from the film, unaware that he is not the only one bluffing this way. The strip's mouseover text advises those in a similar situation caught by genuine fans of the franchise to "just say it's from the Jedi Prince book series, which contains so much incongruous stuff that even most Expanded Universe/Legends fans collectively agreed to forget about it decades ago."^[1]

ISBN Information

• The Glove of Darth Vader, 1st edition paperback, 1992. Paul Davids and Hollace Davids, ISBN 0-553-15887-2
• The Lost City of the Jedi, 1st edition paperback, 1992. Paul Davids and Hollace Davids, ISBN 0-553-15888-0
• Zorba the Hutt's Revenge, 1st edition paperback, 1992. Paul Davids and Hollace Davids, ISBN 0-553-15889-9
• Mission from Mount Yoda, 1st edition paperback, 1993. Paul Davids and Hollace Davids, ISBN 0-553-15890-2
• Queen of the Empire, 1st edition paperback, 1993. Paul Davids and Hollace Davids, ISBN 0-553-15891-0
• Prophets of the Dark Side, 1st edition paperback, 1993. Paul Davids and Hollace Davids, ISBN 0-553-15892-9

References

External links

• Jedi Prince series at Wookieepedia