Title: Darksaber
Author: Kevin J. Anderson
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 430
Rating: 7/10
Kevin J. Anderson – Darksaber
When I was younger, I was a massive Star Wars fan – not uncommon for my generation, because the original films were reissued when I was eight and Episodes I, II and III soon followed. I was also a bit of a reader, as you can probably tell. The result? I delved into the universe (pun intended) of Star Wars books and lost myself for several years.
Darksaber is one of the best, featuring many of the favourites from the original films and a few new characters. Set eight years after Return of the Jedi, Luke and Han return to Tattooine and discover that the Hutt family is building a secret superweapon, a rebuild of the Death Star called ‘Darksaber’.
Kevin J. Anderson
Yeah, imagine that. The Hutts owning a Death Star. That can only mean trouble. Couple that with the existence of Admiral Daala, who I think I was a little in love with, and you’ve got a plot in the making. Kevin’s writing is believable and captures the essence of the original films well, but he has had the practice – he authored the Jedi Academy Trilogy, which went on to become a New York Times Bestseller. In fact, he wrote over twenty Star Wars books, and he now has forty bestselling books to his name.
Interestingly, it’s easy to picture the main characters as they were in the films, only with more worry lines and the odd grey hair. It helps that Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and co. have all aged publicly, and only the non-human characters are difficult to place. Then again, most of the returning characters are human anyway, which could be an intentional ploy on Anderson’s part. It’s hard to tell.
The Jedi Library
However, this is not the sort of book that you can just pick up and read if you’re not already a Star Wars aficionado – it turns out that a lot of people take Star Wars very seriously, you know the type. And because of this, the writers of the Star Wars novels have a lot of material to research, the number of characters, places and storylines that have already been explored number in the hundreds, if not the thousands.
This gives the writers a supply of source material with which to shape their own stories, and they frequently refer to events that have happened in other novels, especially the author’s own. If you love Star Wars, you’ll like Darksaber – if you like Star Wars, you’ll struggle through it. Be warned.
A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far, Far Away…
