Throwback Thursday: Timothy Zahn’s Conquerors’ Trilogy Is Every Bit as Grand as Thrawn

The trilogy picks up in the far-future with Conquerors’ Pride. Commander Pheylan Cavanagh is in charge of a Commonwealth task force, which has discovered signs of a new alien race: four ships “milky white in color, shaped like thick hexagonal slabs of random sizes attached to each other at random edges. Alien as hell.” It is the Commonwealth’s first contact with another species, and moments after they transmit an introductory radio burst, the alien ships open fire, destroying the task force in six minutes. Cavanagh escapes, and watches in horror as the escaping life pods are methodically destroyed as well. At home, Cavanagh’s father, a former member of the Commonwealth parliament, learns that his son might still be alive. As the threat of invasion nears, he defies governmental measures and convinces Copperhead pilot Adam Quinn to exit Commonwealth space, locate his son, and bring him home. All the while, Pheylan Cavanagh contends with his status of a prisoner of war, and formulates his own plan to escape.

In the second novel, Conquerors’ Heritage, Zahn does something unconventional: he flips the viewpoint to the invading alien Zhirrzh, whose was with humanity has ground to a stand-still. Their lone prisoner, Cavanaugh, has escaped, and now, factions within their society have begun to make their own moves, with drastic consequences. Then, there’s the question of what started the war: according to the Zhirrzh, humans fired the first shot.
Finally, in Conquerors’ Legacy, Zahn alternates viewpoints, as humans and Zhirrzh barrel toward one another and the war escalates. Factions on each side race to understand how the war started, and are stunned at the tragic revelations they uncover. To prevent all-out annihilation, a small alliance of members from both species will go to great lengths to bring conspiracies to light and end the war.
Zahn has long been one of my favorite hard SF writers, and the Conquerors’ trilogy is a series I’ve read and reread. With these novels, and many of his other works, Zahn assembled a fantastic space opera with a rich background and interesting set of characters. What stands out the most, however, isn’t the physics, or how the Commonwealth is composed, or the warfare, but the way an entire intergalactic war can be traced back to a terrible mistake.

Throughout science fiction history, there have been many tales of first contact, with good and bad outcomes. This is one of the first I encountered that thoroughly examines the fallout. First contact is a trope that’s often underestimated: imagine being dropped into a foreign culture with no way to communicate—not even a shared genetic heritage. It’s hard! Zahn points to another factor: the assumptions that we believe we can rely on—surely a space-faring alien race would be able to utilize radio, mathematics, and other “basic” technology—may be gross errors. His switch from the human side to the alien helps immensely to get his point across, avoid heavy-handed plot twists that paint alien invaders as an unknowable menace, and reveal the entire situation as deeply complicated.
The action occurs due to mistaken assumptions, but Zahn goes a step further: he recognizes that in any highly complex situation, there are individuals more than willing to take advantage of the confusion for their own gain. Both humans and Zhirrzh retreat to their respective corners, pushed along by internal agents who are pointedly trying to engage in a war to their own ultimate benefit.
It’s what makes the Conquerors’ trilogy work so well: Zahn presents warfare as a complicated, shifting event, rather than as a place for characters to prove their worth and show off their bravery. In doing so, he’s constructed a fantastic, under-appreciated space opera that balances action and politics in a captivating narrative that has stuck with me for years.
Don’t think we didn’t notice the X-Wing on the cover of book two, publishers.