Star Wars shares sneak peek excerpt of next High Republic book: Into the Dark

There’s a new excerpt from the book The High Republic: Into the Dark by Claudia Gray.

Star Wars just released the first of its High Republic books earlier this month, but as promised, there is still so much more to come. Books like Charles Soule’s Light of the Jedi and Justina Ireland’s A Test of Courage were the first to come out in this series (and have already become New York Times best-sellers), and now Star Wars is teasing one of the next books to be released.

Today, Star Wars shared an excerpt from the young adult novel by Claudia Gray The High Republic: Into the Dark. An interesting contrast compared to the title of Soule’s book, and it probably tells us a lot about what’s in store for the story.

Here’s a summary of the book from Disney Books, and then read down below for a summary of the excerpt shared by Star Wars today:

"Padawan Reath Silas is being sent from the cosmopolitan galactic capital of Coruscant to the undeveloped frontier—and he couldn’t be less happy about it. He’d rather stay at the Jedi Temple, studying the archives. But when the ship he’s traveling on is knocked out of hyperspace in a galactic-wide disaster, Reath finds himself at the center of the action. The Jedi and their traveling companions find refuge on what appears to be an abandoned space station. But then strange things start happening, leading the Jedi to investigate the truth behind the mysterious station, a truth that could end in tragedy…."

The High Republic: Into the Dark excerpt summary

The excerpt of Into the Dark provided by Star Wars isn’t too long. But if you’d prefer a TL;DR summary of the book, here’s what happens.

Not much action takes place during this scene, but it does set up the events that are to come. Reath Silas is gathered with Orla Jareni, Cohmac Vitus, and Dez Rydan. Together, the Jedi are preparing to head out to the space station Starlight Beacon in the outer rim. As mentioned in the summary, it seems like this is the first time for some (if not all) of them flying so far away from the core.

But in order to get there, they grab a ride on a ship piloted by an eccentric character named Leox Gyasi and his young co-pilot Affie Hollow. A majority of this excerpt is mostly Leox showing off his goofy, Star-Lord-like character, and Reath cringing at the circumstances. For example, Leox pilots an old-looking ship, and the navigator aboard his ship is a straight-up rock. Even weirder, he simply calls his ship “Vessel,” and the old thing doesn’t even have the proper bunks for them to rest — so Leox states they’ll have to improvise by using partitions.

All this seems to bug Reath, and little does he know (according to the book’s summary, at least), their ride through hyperspace on Vessel is going to be more complicated than their introduction to the pilot. Unfortunately for Reath and the crew, there will be no turning back from there. And I’m sure as we begin to read the full story, we’ll see how it fits into the broader narrative of The High Republic series.

If you’re interested in reading the full book, The High Republic: Into the Dark comes out on Feb. 2.