I was starting to think that the reason that I enjoyed Outbound Flight more than the The Thrawn Trilogy was because I usually like the prequel era stories more, but it turns out that Zahn's novels just get better as they go along (although Allegiance wasn't as good as Outbound Flight, in my opinion). I'm very excited to read Survivor's Quest!

I'm not sure why this was a duology rather than a trilogy. The first book, Specter of the Past was of regular length, but Vision of the Future was over 500 pages long! I'm interested in knowing why Bantam took that route.

In the traditional Zahn style, this story had a plethora of threads to tie together, and he did so magnificently. It did take me quite some time to read the entire thing, but the last one hundred pages kept me going until the end. I liked how the "Hand of Thrawn" could've been so many different things, and I was even more impressed by what it actually was. I thought it would be a reference to his actual hand being cloned, but it turned out to be something much more interesting. There were lots of other surprises that I didn't imagine would occur, especially the truth about Tierce.

So now I've read all of the Bantam-era Star Wars books. I have to admit that they were a lot better than I expected them to be. However, I like the newer novels a lot better and have been looking forward to the New Jedi Order series every since I started my path more than two years ago.

What's next?
I'm almost finished with Union, and I actually have Gamer #7 which contains the short story Red Sky, Blue Flame. After that, I'm going to start on the Junior Jedi Knights series, although I probably won't finish it before the graphic novel The Force Unleashed comes out tomorrow (after which, I'll be reading the novelization which came out today).