Perhaps even more embarrassing for the Empire is the history of its leadership in the aftermath of the Emperor’s death. The Imperial Remnant was little more a pariah state, roughly equivalent in size and menace to our own world’s North Korea. The fifteen years after the Battle of Endor did not simply mark a decline for the Empire – it had collapsed so completely and so thoroughly that what remained was barely recognizable as the same nigh-unstoppable force that destroyed Alderaan, crushed the rebel base on Hoth, and had the Alliance fleet severely outmatched before the destruction of the second Death Star. The territory of the Imperial Remnant consisted of approximately one-third of that pitiful red blob. A virtually invincible armada of twenty-five thousand Star Destroyers that had struck fear into the hearts of any sentient being bold or foolish enough to oppose it had been reduced to two hundred.
A vast state that had once encompassed an entire galaxy and over a million inhabited worlds now amounted to only a mere eight sectors containing a thousand backwater solar systems. With the 1997 release of Specter of the Past, the first half of Timothy Zahn’s Hand of Thrawn duology, the once-mighty Galactic Empire was reduced to a pitiful shadow of its former self, so weak and insignificant that its leader began the novel considering the terms of their surrender to the New Republic. The likes of Grand Admiral Thrawn, Trioculus, mad Admiral Daala, the warlord Zsinj, Hethrir, and Ysanne Isard all made use of Imperial resources in their battles against the victorious rebels and the New Republic, but remarkably little attention has ever been paid to the Empire’s perspective in all of this – their leaders visible to us only when plotting some diabolical new scheme, otherwise existing only as a menace for our heroes to vanquish. The surviving Imperial forces provided little more than a superficial backstory for the comically evil mustache-twirling warlord-of-the-week and generic lightsaber fodder for our heroes to cut and shoot their way through. For an entity so inseparable from the fundamental image of Star Wars, one would logically assume that it would continue to be a major obstacle for our protagonists and play a significant role in the future of the universe well beyond the setbacks it suffered in Return of the Jedi.Īlas, the Expanded Universe had other ideas.
Every conflict requires its threat and every hero their villain, and there exist few adversaries in fiction as memorable and infamous as the many and varied minions of the Galactic Empire. Save the lightsaber, there are few elements of Star Wars more iconic than the Star Destroyer and the faceless legions of the Imperial Stormtrooper Corps.
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