Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising Excerpt Teases Attack on Csilla

Star Wars fans will travel back in time to discover Grand Admiral's origins with the release of the upcoming prequel novel Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising. Set for release this September, an excerpt from the book has been released, teasing the attack on Csilla.

Timothy Zahn's Chaos Rising tells the story of Thrawn's early Chiss military days. Aside from the excerpt, a clip from the audiobook edition has also been released, as well as a first look at the poster included with the exclusive Barnes & Noble edition.

The poster shows a young Thrawn and the sigils of the Chiss Nine Ruling Families and the Ascendancy. You can check it out below!

Credit: SW

Being an origin story of some sorts for Thrawn, it'll certainly be interesting to see another side of the Grand Admiral, who've fans only gotten to know in the Imperial navy on Legends and the new Canon. Here's a snippet of the Chaos Rising prologue in which some fans might recognize a few elements from Zahn's Legends novels.

"The attack on the Chiss Ascendancy homeworld of Csilla was sudden, unexpected, and—despite its limited scope—impressively efficient.

The three large warships came out of hyperspace on widely spaced vectors, driving inward toward the planet with spectrum lasers blaz­ing at full power toward the defense platforms and the orbiting Chiss Defense Force warships. The platforms and ships, caught by surprise, nevertheless took less than a minute to begin returning fire. By then the attackers had altered their directions, angling in toward the clus­ter of lights spread across the icy planetary surface that marked the capital city of Csaplar. Their lasers continued to fire, and as they came within range they added salvos of missiles to their attack.

But ultimately it was all for nothing. The defense platforms easily picked off the incoming missiles while the warships targeted the attack­ing ships themselves, blasting them into rubble and making sure that any fragments entering the atmosphere were too small to survive the journey. Within fifteen minutes of the attack force's arrival, it was over."

You may check out the full excerpt of the prequel novel on StarWars.com

Initially set for release in May, Thrawn Ascendancy: Chaos Rising has been delayed to October and was finally bumped to September 1st.

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