The Glove of Darth Vader
"Quite surprising. I've certainly never heard any gossip that Emperor Palpatine had a son by a three-eyed alien woman."—The series in a nutshell, courtesy of C-3PO
The Glove of Darth Vader is the first installment of a series of Star Wars Expanded Universe novellas for younger readers written by Paul and Hollace Davids and published in the early 1990s. They are most remembered nowadays for their questionable quality, but occasional references to them still crop up in the modern EU, and they've been neatly fitted into the official EU timeline (with a little bit of retconning to make them fit better). The title of the first book has been adopted for the (untitled) cycle as a whole, which is also known by the names of Jedi Prince and Son of Palpatine.
Books in the series include:
- The Glove of Darth Vader (1992)
- The Lost City of the Jedi (1992)
- Zorba the Hutt's Revenge (1992)
- Mission from Mount Yoda (1993)
- Queen of the Empire (1993)
- Prophets of the Dark Side (1993)
Tropes used in The Glove of Darth Vader include:
- And That's Terrible: "I bid you Dark Greetings," anyone? "I grant you my Dark Blessing."? They really wanted us to know that they knew the Empire was evil. And apparently even the Empire wanted the Empire to know that the Empire was evil.
- Big No: C-3PO gets one of these.
- Body Horror: What befalls Hissa on Duro.
- Call a Rabbit a Smeerp: Whaladons (take a big fat guess as to which endangered Earth animals these stand in for in the book's Green Aesop[1]) and "braze" (brown haze, i.e. smog), among others.
- Canon Discontinuity: Not quite, but the events of the books have been made a lot less significant to the overall Star Wars story than the writers probably intended. Also, the decision of Lucasfilm to cancel the series just as other, better received, EU novels (such as Zahn's trilogy) were getting big has been interpreted by some observers as a damage-limitation exercise.
- At one point it was pretty much treated as completely non-canon (some gaming sourcebooks aside), but current Lucasfilm policy seems to be that nothing is so contradictory to the rest of the EU that it can't be fixed with a big enough Retcon.
- In particular, according to an article in issue 103 (October 1994) of the Polyhedron Tabletop RPG magazine (albeit unlicensed), the series was actually a youngling-friendly retelling of those events by Leia Organa Solo to her children.
- At one point it was pretty much treated as completely non-canon (some gaming sourcebooks aside), but current Lucasfilm policy seems to be that nothing is so contradictory to the rest of the EU that it can't be fixed with a big enough Retcon.
- Card-Carrying Villain: The baddies in these books take this to the level of Narm - see that entry below as well as And That's Terrible, above.
- Cruella to Animals: Trioculus takes a break from pursuing our heroes to hunt animals.
- Green Aesop: One in each book, invariably Anvilicious.
- I Am Your Father: Ken finds out that he's Ken Palpatine
- Interspecies Romance: Again implied by the Backstory.
- Kick the Dog: What does Trioculus do when his forces are out looking for the glove, ignoring plenty of strategically significant discoveries on the way? He tootles around hunting endangered wildlife. Green Aesop ahoy!
- MacGuffin: The titular glove, which is a MacGuffin in the classic sense because without its clever gadgetry it really doesn't do anything but drive the plot.
- Meaningful Name: "Trioculus", 'Tri'- meaning 'three', and 'oculus'- a form of the word ocular, 'of the eye'; so, three eyes.
- My Car Hates Me: In the first book with a minisub.
- Portmanteau: The Moffs hold a Mofference on the Moffship. .
- Red Right Hand:
- Trioculous' three eyes.
- Plus, he literally receives a Red Right Hand as one of the unintended side-effects of his medical droid's modifications to Vader's glove.
- Small Reference Pools: When suggesting where to put the interim Imperial capital, the council only seem to have heard of planets that appear in the films.
- They Fight Crime: Actually, they save the whales, rainforest, polluted atmosphere, etc.
- Written Sound Effect: One of the series' major Narm sources. It's hard to escape the conclusion that the writers might have been better off doing a comic book. Or that they were being paid by the letter - "KRR-RR--AAAAAAANG!" is the sound of two submarines docking.)
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