Trevor Williamson's Reviews > Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire

Shadows of the Empire was the biggest novel in the series to date, debuting in 1996 as the focus of a massive advertising campaign to pull people back into the property ahead of Lucas's film remasters in 1997. It is, unsurprisingly, a novel built to be a blockbuster; lots of action, a dash of sex, and a couple of new characters perfect for selling some toys and other assorted merchandise.

But whereas the book was a media sensation, the story itself isn't all that great. True, Perry gives us a convincing new villain in Prince Xizor and brings back Darth Vader for the first novel in about a dozen years, but his dialogue is often clumsy, his plotting uneven, and his transitions from scene to scene whiplash-inducing. The book isn't all bad, but its seams show fairly obviously, and the book serves as too convenient an effort to narrativize Luke's transition from fledgling Jedi to Jedi Knight.

In many ways, the book is just a little too convenient, a bit too unfocused, and it stands about 80 pages too long, filled with explanatory prose that falls far too wholly on the diegetic. The story is fairly repetitive, especially as it pertains to the bits explaining Xizor's point of view. The new villain, Prince Xizor, is an interesting antagonist, but he exists only to lose, and the fact that he's only present mostly in this novel and so quickly disposed of undercuts any significance he could have had to the series as a whole.

The book is also oddly horny for a Star Wars novel, and I counted that Perry uses the word "lube" at least six times in this book, which is approximately six times too many. As much as I think Star Wars could stand to be a bit more romantic at times, I do think the bits between Leia and Xizor were just a bit overcooked, and it's pretty clear Perry intended for their interaction to go pretty well beyond a kick to the nuts.

All in all, Shadows of the Empire isn't the worst of Star Wars, but it is Star Wars in one of its most commercialized forms. It's not nearly as philosophically complex as some of the other novels in the series, its focus more on action and adventure in the swashbuckling fashion of old serials, and in this it gets the spirit of Star Wars kind of right; where it fails is in convincing a readership that these books are anything but quick cash-grab novels. To be fair, that is kind of what Shadows of the Empire is, but I do want it to aspire to be more than that--especially when the other books published in 1996 proves that Star Wars can aspire to more.