15 February 2016

Review: Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis: Tyrant's Test by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

Mass market paperback, 366 pages
Published 1997

Acquired August 2010
Reread January 2016
Star Wars: The Black Fleet Crisis, Book Three: Tyrant's Test
by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

It all sort of fizzles out in Tyrant's Test. The last book ended with the promise of action; in this one, Han Solo spends 250 pages in space jail while Leia wrings her hands a lot and weathers an impeachment crisis. Then war is declared. C'mon, this is Star Wars; if you write a Star Wars trilogy where war isn't declared until page 250 of Book Three, you have grossly misunderstood the genre you are meant to be working in. I couldn't even explain to you what the 250 pages were filled with; nothing happened.

And once we get the war, it's not terribly exciting, because the New Republic succeeds through Luke suddenly turning up because the mysterious Force adepts he's been seeking the whole time are completely coincidentally from the same region of space the Republic is invading. Like, really? The Force adepts do all the day-saving, undermining what could otherwise be cool scenes, and making Luke come across as a condescending windbag to boot.

Even the initially interesting Lando plot just sputters to a conclusion, with the day-saving all done by characters who aren't Lando.

There are some good moments in this trilogy, but there's not enough of them to fill one book, much less three. Next time the boffins at TheForce.Net suggest some book I know I didn't like in 1997 is actually quite good, I'll stick to my initial impression and not expend effort rereading it to confirm what I already thought!

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