Before You Press Play
- Voice: Marc Thompson is the definitive voice of Star Wars fiction audio, immersive, precisely calibrated, and as important to the Thrawn experience as the prose itself.
- Big ideas: Loyalty and competing allegiances, political maneuvering within empire, strategic intelligence
- Atmosphere: Tense and cerebrally satisfying, with escalating stakes
- Worth it?: The strongest entry in Zahn's new Thrawn trilogy, resolving the central loyalty question with integrity and leaving the character in a genuinely interesting place.
I came to Thrawn: Treason already deep in Timothy Zahn's new trilogy, which is to say I came to it already trusting the writer. Zahn created Grand Admiral Thrawn in the 1990s in a book that arguably saved the Star Wars expanded universe, and his return to the character in the Disney canon has been a careful, sustained argument for why Thrawn's particular form of intelligence, analytical, art-referencing, rigorously patient, is worth the extended exploration it requires. Treason, the third book in the new trilogy, is where that argument pays off most completely.
The central dilemma Zahn sets up is the best he has found for this character: Thrawn's TIE Defender program, which he considers essential to the Empire's survival, is being defunded in favor of Director Krennic's Death Star project. The bureaucratic maneuvering this sets in motion forces Thrawn into proximity with the very institutional forces that will, in the timeline's near future, demonstrate the catastrophic error of the Death Star philosophy. Meanwhile, his former protégé Eli Vanto returns with a warning about Thrawn's homeworld, the Chiss Ascendancy, that forces the question the title announces: where does Thrawn's ultimate loyalty actually lie?
Our Take on Thrawn: Treason
Zahn has spent two previous books establishing Thrawn's psychology from multiple angles, his art analysis method, his tactical genius, his peculiar code of honor, and Treason is where that accumulation of characterization pays dividends. The loyalty question is not answered simply. Zahn has never been interested in simple Thrawn. The book's conclusion places the character at an intersection of obligations that the reader understands to be unresolvable in the conventional sense, and the way Thrawn navigates that intersection is the most revealing thing about him that Zahn has yet written in the new canon.
The involvement of the Grysk, the alien threat that appears across the new Thrawn novels and in the Chiss Ascendancy prequel trilogy, gives Treason its operational spine. The tactical sequences are crisp and intelligent in the way Zahn's best military SF always is. He thinks through how a strategist of Thrawn's caliber would actually approach a problem, what information he would need and how he would get it, and the chess-match quality of those sequences is a genuine pleasure for readers who want the genre to make them work a little.
Why Listen to Thrawn: Treason
Marc Thompson is, quite simply, the reason to experience this series in audio rather than in print. His Thrawn voice is a complete creation, measured, precise, slightly formal, and containing within its restraint the character's complete inhuman clarity of thought. His range across the Imperial hierarchy, the Chiss characters, and the human supporting cast is extraordinary. He has narrated enough Star Wars material to understand exactly what each register demands, and Treason gives him his most complex ensemble to work with in the new trilogy.
At thirteen hours, the book is appropriately weighted for its ambitions. Zahn does not rush the bureaucratic intrigue sequences, which is correct, Thrawn's political maneuvering within the Imperial hierarchy is as interesting as his tactical operations, and Thompson reads those sequences with the same focused attention he brings to the action set pieces.
What to Watch For in Thrawn: Treason
The book does presuppose familiarity with the first two Thrawn novels and, to a lesser extent, the Thrawn: Alliances events. Listeners coming in cold will understand the basic plot but will miss the accumulated weight of Thrawn's relationships with Eli Vanto and Ar'alani, which are central to the emotional architecture of this volume. One longtime fan reviewer notes that Treason goes even deeper into Thrawn's psyche than its predecessors, that payoff is available only to readers who have done the prior work.
The Death Star connection, Director Krennic, Project Stardust, the budget competition that frames Thrawn's dilemma, is handled with the care Zahn brings to timeline integration. Readers familiar with Rogue One will appreciate the precision of the fit. Those who are not will not be lost, but they will miss some of the resonance.
Who Should Listen to Thrawn: Treason
Essential for anyone following the new Thrawn trilogy. Marc Thompson's narration makes this one of the best audio experiences in Star Wars fiction, and Zahn's resolution of the loyalty question is the series' most satisfying payoff. Readers new to Zahn's Thrawn should start with the first book, Thrawn, rather than entering here. General Star Wars fans interested in Imperial-era political fiction will find this a compelling argument for the character's endurance.
