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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wingsandsword" data-source="post: 4869797" data-attributes="member: 14159">In The Hand of Thrawn duology (Specter of the Past & Vision of the Future) the Empire/Imperial Remnant was definitely well past its prime.  The novels open with the Imperial Remnant on the brink of total defeat, it holds only a few sectors in the Outer Rim (having finally lost the Deep Core and a few other Imperial strongholds), a relative handful of Star Destroyers, and it is so shorthanded on ships that it has even largely had to stop using any form of TIE Fighter and use whatever mass-marketed commercial starfighter it can get its hands on.  Most of the Imperial leaders, lead by now Grand Admiral Pellaeon, want to discuss a peace treaty with the New Republic, but a small faction manages to somehow resurrect Grand Admiral Thrawn (and find the last surviving member of the Royal Guard, about a decade after the last one was believed dead, while they are at it) and uses rumors of a document that would prove the Bothans were participants in a major Imperial genocide, and uses these two developments to rally unaligned worlds to the Imperial flag and push the New Republic to the brink of Civil War.Now, for the spoiler sensitive: [spoiler]The "Thrawn" was literally just a con man with a disguise, an Imperial Moff hired a master actor/con man and he had some cosmetic surgery, and with some faked battles it looked like the genius was back, at least for a brief period enough to rally some worlds and pull the Empire out of surrender negotiations.  The Royal Guardsman was a somewhat-unstable clone of one of the real last surviving guards, created as a side experiment during the original Thrawn Trilogy, the original Guardsman was one of Thrawn's troopers and died in the campaign, so the clone quietly assumed his identity.[/spoiler]  So, in other words the Empire by those novels was a pathetic shell of what it once was, and had to use lots of trickery and fakery to even approach being a plausible threat.  The novels end with the signing of a treaty that ends the Galactic Civil War, as the New Republic recognizes the Imperial Remnant as a legitimate sovereign entity, albeit one that rules only a tiny portion of the Rim of the galaxy, and the Galactic Empire formally acknowledges it does not rule the Galaxy and is only a regional power (at best) now.  These novels also, in the long term, set up some concepts with the Empire that would later play out in the Legacy Era, and making it quite explicit that the human-centric racism of Palpatine was gone from what the Empire had now become, in fact many of the more outright "evil" aspects of the Empire were gone from the Imperial Remnant at this point, largely because they didn't have the military power to enforce it and the only way to sway more worlds to their side was to be less overtly evil.  The fact that all the various Imperial darksiders had finally been stomped out by that point meant that the Dark Side wasn't synonymous with Empire anymore either.  Doing a little research, the sense of finality and conclusion found in those two novels was probably intentional because they were the last Star Wars novels produced by Bantam before the license shifted to Del Rey, and it was the last Star Wars novel produced before the prequels (Del Reys first novel was the Episode I novelization).</blockquote>

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