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Timothy Zahn is a Science Fiction, Fantasy and Space Opera author, best known for writing The Thrawn Trilogy, one of the founding contributions to the Star Wars Legends timeline. Among fans, he's often considered to be among the best, if not the best, of Star Wars authors. There are a number of factors involved in that, including his respect for Imperial characters, his ability to write immensely complicated and detailed plots, the fact that he reads and uses the other books in the EU, and his habit of foreshadowing things that will be revisited years later in different books.

In the Thrawn trilogy, he justified or filled in almost all of the original three movies' Techno Babble, Loose Ends, Scotch Tape, and Plot Holes, resulting in a consistent universe with coherent rules. Years after the Thrawn trilogy, he wrote the Hand of Thrawn duology, renowned for fixing a lot of odd details that had appeared in subsequent novels, pairing up Mara Jade and Luke Skywalker, and having the New Republic finally sign a peace treaty with the Imperial Remnant.

He has also written Survivor's Quest, Outbound Flight, Allegiance, and Choices of One. An interview dealing with that is here.

Zahn has written a number of short stories, two of them in collaboration with Michael Stackpole of the X Wing Series. The two authors seem to get along pretty well, and while Zahn freely involves characters introduced by other authors, he uses Stackpole's characters more specifically - all of the Rogues have at least one line, though most of them aren't directly named. He and Stackpole also wrote The Reenlistment of Baron Fel but, agonizingly, this hasn't been published.

And when the fandom takes an author and promotes him as the example of how to fix messes made by other authors, you know he's good.

A lot of his characters in Legends were killed off unceremoniously. Reputedly, he knows that although he created them he doesn't have a say in how they die, but he's still a bit annoyed that none of the authors doing so bothered contacting him.

A prolific author, he's also written numerous books outside of Star Wars, including the Dragonback series, The Conquerors Trilogy, The Cobra Trilogy (sequel series has just started back up), the Quadrail Series, the Blackcollar trilogy and several short stories set in the Honorverse.

When the Disney buyout of Star Wars led to Canon Discontinuity for Legends in favour of the new Star Wars Expanded Universe, Zahn returned to write a new trilogy of books set around Thrawn, though this time set during the era of the original trilogy, rather than after it. When Grand Admiral Thrawn made the leap to the small screen and appeared, alongside other Thrawn Trilogy characters, on Star Wars Rebels, Zahn became a very happy man.


Tropes characteristic of Timothy Zahn's work (only include if they appear in at least two of his works):

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