Chad's Reviews > Dynasty of Evil

I was tempted to give this a 4-star review, as it is, among the Darth Bane novels, the best of the bunch. I realized, however, that "Dynasty of Evil" initially seems far better than it actually is only because it has been published in the midst of a horrible spate of really bad Star Wars novels. The fact that Chrisie Golden has such a clumsy handle on things like characterization and plot make Drew Karpyshyn's handling of the same techniques seem like a life-sustaining breath of fresh air. So let's call it a 3.5 star review, and move on to the specifics.

The specifics: Darths Bane and Zannah are still ho-humming thier way toward establishing a galaxy-conquering Sith Order. They haven't actually done much in the twenty years since Bane set out on this task, but that's in keeping with his New-Sith philosophy: slow and steady wins the race. Instead of charging all over the galaxy wreaking havoc, he and Zannah have spent all their time collecting old parchments and holocrons and Sith trinkets that will help them develop their abilities. All the while, Bane is annoyed that Zannah doesn't get on with it and challenge him for the title of Dark Lord of the Sith. You can surmise where all of this is headed.

There is a lot of fun to be had here. To begin with, the protagonists are villains, which means Karpyshyn can pull out all the stops concerning the carnage he can inflict on the characters. Its a refreshing inversion of standard practice in the Star Wars EU that when new characters are created, you know they won't die unless its for some melodramatic, emotional tipping point. Not in "Dynasty of Evil". Karpyshyn creates several characters, giving them all good face time and pleasent little back-stories, some of whom are key characters and are pivotal to the plot, only to snuff them out with little warning. There is a high body count, and very little of it is used to wring false-emotion out of a scene. If they don't matter to Bane or Zannah, then screw 'em. They die; moving on.

There is also the peculiar feeling that Bane and Zannah are not intended to be some kind of all-powerful evil badasses. The Sith, as written in the current "Fate of the Jedi" series, are a bunch of mustache-twirling nogoodniks, who think themselves to be rather clever, and its clear that the reader is supposed to accept that they're rather clever, only they never appear clever because they don't do anything besides stand around and brag about how clever and decietful they are.

Bane and Zannah break this mold (and I like to think Karpyshyn has done this deliberately) by being written as amateur evil-doers who don't actually know what they're doing but blindly flail around trying to figure it all out anyway. This is actually in keeping with Bane's overall idea that he personally will not take over the galaxy and destroy the Jedi, but his title will be passed on to someone stronger than he, and that person will be defeated by someone stronger than they, and so on, until you get to some supremely strongest of strong person to finish the deed. Bane is a brute, but lacks subtly. His apprentice is strong in Sith sorcery, but lacks ambition and confidence. Neither of them would have a chance of overthrowing a campfire much less the entire Republic. But you can see how Bane's self-imposed Rule of Two would lead, incrimentally, to someone like Darth Sidious a thousand years later, who's mastery of politics and deception becomes to key to following through with the master plan.

So we've got a coherent plot and believable characters. It's been a while, but the Star Wars writers finally get a mark in the win column. Which isn't to say everything is perfect. There are still a few niggling things that make me wonder if 'intelligent people' are still in Del Rey's target audience. When you have a main character who spends the entire novel being called only "The Huntress" you can't help but roll your eyes at the cliche goofiness.

But the one thing that would have been an easy fix would be for the author to not fear writing in paragraphs! Maybe much of the EU readership suffers from some kind of ADD, and new paragraphs are intended to entrap their attention, even if the previous paragraph was only a line or two long. But Karpyshyn was doing this even with the dialogue! Bane would start lecturing Zannah on some mystical tennant of being evil, and his speech would be broken up into four or five paragraphs, each one a line or two long. It would actually get kind of confusing. When one sees a page of dialogue, each short paragraph beginning with quotation marks, he is expecting a conversation between characters. But after scanning past the third or fourth paragraph, you realize its just one person talking. It was like a picture book with one sentence on each page. Very frustrating. I guess they were trying to pad out the page count or something.

Final thoughts: not the greatest Star Wars novel every written, but the best of the Darth Bane trilogy that jumps along nicely thanks to believable characters, a tightly plotted and mostly unpredictable story, and the novelty of having evil-doers as your heroes which made for lots of unnecessary but appropriate carnage.