By the way, I finished Catalyst. I’ve got a few quick bullet points that relate directly to Rogue One for now, and if anyone has any questions I’m happy to answer. Obviously, spoiler alert.
-When the rumor about a digitally-recreated Tarkin being in the film came up I had serious doubts, but now I’m expecting it. The Tarkin/Krennic rivalry was a huge part of the book.
-Saw Gererra played a somewhat significant role toward the end. The first time he turned up in the trailers I assumed our intrepid heroes would be seeking him out to enlist him in the Rebellion based on his experience as an insurgent in the Clone Wars, but now that I know he’s got a personal relationship with the Ersos, I suspect he’ll be a sort of protector for Jyn.
-The Force sensitive Rogue One character that was hinted at in some interview or other is Lyra Erso, Jyn’s mother. She talks vaguely about being able to feel the Force, but she doesn’t have any practical Force skills or abilities. I expect her to die in the opening flashback, so this isn’t likely to be a major factor in the story. The rumor floating around that the hooded figure in the trailer is an Inquisitor that’s introduced in Catalyst is at least half bullshit, as no such character was in the book.
-The Erso family is hiding from the Empire by the end of the book. Throughout the story, Galen Erso didn’t know that his Kyber crystal research was being used for the Death Star superlaser because Krennic led him to believe he was working on a renewable energy project. Galen never actually finds out about the Death Star, but he and his family bail when they get suspicious. The flashback from the trailer is definitely Krennic finally finding them.
-A Dressellian smuggler is heavily involved with Krennic, the Erso family, and Tarkin, and I’m really hoping he turns up in the film because I’ve been a fan of the Dressellian species ever since I got the action figure of the one with the eyepatch when I was a kid.
-The Empire definitely exterminated the Geonosians to keep the Death Star secret. The book never actually stated it explicitly, but we saw in the Darth Vader comic that the race had been practically wiped out at some point, and in Catalyst we see that the early stages of the Death Star’s construction took place at Geonosis and that Geonosian labor was used. Furthermore, the Empire wrecks a handful of other planets that were involved in the construction in the book, so there’s definitely precident.
In all, this was certainly one of the better nuEU books I’ve read. It and Bloodline are the only two canon novels I’d consider to be great SW stories.
