To me this was a fairly interesting experience. As with the Thrawn Trilogy it's a bit of a surprise to see the continuity like this, before retcons came along in the modern era. This one though has a lot of 90s Star Wars novels to reference. The interesting thing is that I'm pretty sure Zahn is being a bit patronising towards them, especially the ones involving Luke and Callista. All those stories are sort of passed over a little dismissively, but that doesn't bother me.
What does rather interest me is that Vision of the Future is twice the length of Shadows of the Past...enough for a third book. For reasons unknown though he kept is as one regular novel and one gigantic one.
I also noticed that there was a lot of the regular Zahn traits here; especially very long 'realistic' travel times. It takes days (and chapters) for characters to get anywhere. I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not.
I guess the greater problem is that there are so many plot lines and several of them just don't go anywhere much. And like the Thrawn Trilogy it seems Zahn likes his own characters more than the movie ones, as it's his own characters doing most of the heavy lifting.
Again none of this actually bothers me, and it's a relief actually that we have Jedi who are not invincible or Force gods like we get in the Prequels, about to throw mountains or the like.
None of that's really a problem though. For me I liked the story, and I've come away with an even greater appreciation of Pelleon as a character.
For me this is where actual Star Wars ends. Everything which comes after it is the rather distasteful Vong and NJO series which I have utterly no interest in. So in that way it serves as a good capstone on the 20 IC years from ANH to this point and the end of the war.
