Awesome / Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor

• Luke pulling off the feat that the Revenge of the Sith novel - written by the same author - called Anakin's masterpiece: safely landing a chunk of a huge damaged ship onto a planet.
  "We have crew aboard who are running out of air. So we'll get them some. There's a whole planetful, right there."
  "Sir! We don't have engines - we don't even have repulsorlifts. You're not actually suggesting we take this - this fragment of a ship into atmosphere with nothing but attitude thrusters-"
  "That's right. I'm not suggesting. I'm ordering. And I'm not just taking us into the atmosphere." Luke stretched his hands out into the electrostatic control fields above the pilot console and let himself smile, just a bit; for the first time in weeks, he felt like a Jedi again. "I'm going to land this thing."
• Han Solo destroys an entire wing of TIE fighters using nothing but asteroids and repulsorlifts. He's so good at it that the Imperial pilots believe they're fighting a Jedi who moves the asteroids with the Force.
• Luke and Lando both get points as well for strategic brilliance. Luke comes up with—in moments—a plan to get the Melters, the stormtroopers, Mandalorians, and New Republic ships working together to evacuate every one of the noncombatants. Lando also comes up with a plan to send his ships around to the other side of the planet to keep them safe from the radiation, launch empty escape pods to keep the Imperials busy. When Fenn points out that there will still be significant anti-ship defenses, Lando nods and points out that yeah, it could be a problem. Which is why he's got five or six hundred Mandalorian commandos on call.
• Then there's this, coming from an old clone trooper (remember that they're clones of Jango).
  Group Captain Klick: "Lord Mandalore. Emperor Skywalker sends his regards. The situation has changed."
• Luke shields Han and himself from the fire of about two hundred of Cronal's stormtroopers, who have them completely surrounded.
• After Cronal puts him through an eternity of the Dark, Luke escapes and is depressed for quite a while. However, after accepting the fact that all things come to an end and deciding that this does not invalidate his efforts to make the universe a better place, Luke manages to prove Cronal's philosophy wrong, saves Leia from having her body hijacked, and defeats the villain in a single act of the Force:
  • The Dark is described as an Instrumentality-like world where Cronal is a black hole at the middle, Leia is a bright and supermassive star tide-locked with him, and everyone else is stars. Luke realizes that Cronal is trying to break Leia's spirit and take over her body, but unlike Luke, she doesn't have an avenue of escape. Cronal's POV has him trying to break her, and nothing he tries works; when he breaks through her resistance he finds her mind shining with light that "stabs him like a knife in the eye".
  • Then Luke finds them, physically rescues Leia, and informs Cronal that a very angry ally is on his way to Cronal's real body. Cronal jumps to hyperspace, which can't interact with realspace - and in the Force, Luke follows him, bright with enough Light to deserve a capital letter. In the Dark, Cronal becomes a colossal black hole and swallows Luke effortlessly, and with a mixture of contempt and relief he thinks that Luke's trick had done nothing to him whatsoever.
    Luke: That's because I'm not trying to do anything to you. I'm doing something through you.
  • The opposite of a black hole is a white fountain; the theory is that what falls into a black hole passes into another universe, and the matter falling into another universe's black holes passes into ours as pure, transcendent energy. Luke becomes one of these and effortlessly vaporizes Cronal in hyperspace.
  • Even before coming to his epiphany about the universe, Luke still flat-out refuses to give in to his own pain. When Cronal looked at the darkness at the end of all things, he decided to embrace it. Anakin? He despaired and tried desperately to avert the death of his loved ones. Luke? He looks at it, accepts that everyone dies, and decides to keep going anyway, because people need him.