IIRC, the whole point of that part in the book where they talk about the reborn Emperor was to suggest that maybe it wasn’t really Palpatine but an imposter. Apparently Zahn really hated the plot of Dark Empire. 😃
Maybe, but mostly it was about Luke. They seemed to suggest that all the events of the Jedi Academy books were due to Luke having been influenced by the dark side. hence everything went wrong. That entire chapter seemed to exist so that Zahn could ret-con whatever he didn’t like. Or maybe Lucasfilm as for it. I seem to recall that he was told to specifically add the Luke and Mara romance as well.
I personally really like Dark Empire, and the fact that it didn’t really acknowledge Zahn’s books outside of the crawl is fine with me. More time spent making an interesting and different story, rather than spend too much time trying to connect everything. Hand of Thrawn has over-all been fine, but all the references and attempt to combine everything has made it very tedious to read, and I much prefer the stories where the writers for the most part just wrote whatever the heck they felt like.
IIRC, Zahn was none too fond of direction the EU went in after the release of the Thrawn Trilogy – he never liked Palpatine returning in clone bodies, how KJA & co. developed Mara’s character, etc. – so he felt compelled to fix those issues in the Hand of Thrawn books. That’s why so many of those references are there.
Oh yeah, and he’s friends with Stackpole. They even collaborated on a story or two together.
So Hand of Thrawn was basically just one big ret-con to put everything together before the release of the PT.
That would explain the lack of any real story. I mean I’ve read about 600 pages and very little has actually happened. And I still have over 400 pages to go.
(Funny that he didn’t like the idea of a cloned Palpatine, since he himself was so obsessed with cloning. Even Hand of Thrawn re-introduces a cloned character from a previous story.)