Star Wars: Lords of the Sithby Paul S. KempLucasBooks, 2015Novels set in the extended and hyper-detailed cosmology of the Star Wars universe share some of the same uphill battles as Star Trek or Doctor Who fiction, mainly the ankle-weighted feeling of being forever an appendix but never a main event. Readers of these novels need to be up to speed on a whole host of things that happened outside the confines of the novels themselves, because the novels themselves almost never condescend to do any explaining for the uninitiated. If you don't know a horta from a rancor, don't expect even so much as a helpful footnote, and the more such footnotes you find yourself wanting, the more you get the feeling that these books are invitation-only events from which you've been casually but completely excluded.But Star Wars novels face one additional hurdle the others don't necessarily face: historicity. Unlike in Star Trek, where Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise can simply have an adventure on some weird planet and then call it a day, or Doctor Who, where the Doctor (any Doctor) can pop into his TARDIS, visit a moment of time in crisis, save the day, then pop back into his TARDIS and disappear, every Star Wars story is a separate single line from William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich; every novel fills in a blank in an enormous and utterly bewildering timeline connecting the events of the first movie back in 1977 with not only the five movies that followed but also with a wide array of ancillary sources, from the hundreds of Star Wars novels that have been published in the last 40 years to the TV series The Clone Wars that ran from 2008 to 2014. These innumerable pieces combine to tell the story of a spacefaring civilization “long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away,” and since George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, is a deeply delusional over-enunciating megalomaniac who's often invoked the concept of “accuracy” when referring to events in this made-up fantasy world, all the iterations of Star Wars, big and small, share the insane (and, needless to add, completely humorless) task of faithfully chronicling the long defeat of the Old Republic at the hands of an avaricious would-be emperor, the establishment of an evil galactic empire, and then that evil empire's gradual defeat at the hands of a rebel alliance. It's geopolitics, every single day. Fun, frivolous adventures are strictly not allowed, and would-be fans have thick textbooks they need to study.So there's no such thing as “a Star Wars adventure,” by and large (isolated tales can sometimes be told with lower stakes – the old Marvel run of Star Wars comic books had some good examples of that – but it's very, very rare). Instead of asking about some new book “How is it?” Star Wars fans must instead ask “Where does it fit in the timeline? Is it before the battle of Yavin? After the battle of Hoth? What are the ramifications?”If it all sounds like a joyless task of sifting dreck from more dreck, that's not inaccurate. The “Shared Universe” Star Wars novels contain among their ranks some of the worst books of any kind ever published in any language. And while this has the negative effect of creating a deep sense of foreboding in trying a new one, it also has the positive effect of setting the bar so low for “success” that a working hack worth his salt might conceivably come up with a better-than-average installment.Mercifully, this is just the case with Star Wars: Lords of the Sith, the new Star Wars novel from Paul Kemp.It's set eight years after the Clone Wars, if that means anything to you. The Empire is firmly in control, despite sporadic, desperate rebel groups like the one featured in this book, the “Free Ryloth movement” led by a character named Cham Syndulla. The novel has deep roots in the Clone Wars TV show – and of course in the movies, where the evil Emperor is actually a Sith Lord, one of the wielders of the Dark Side of the Force, and where his foremost henchman is Darth Vader, the wonderfully ominous black-clad villain Lucas created for the first of his movies and then thoroughly trivialized as subsequent movies unfolded. In Lords of the Sith, we get Vader in his prime as a bad guy, trapped on a hostile world along with the Emperor, fighting to elude both ferocious carnivores and Cham Syndulla & co., all of whom are intent on killing them. Faster than you can say “the old hunter-becomes-the-hunted cliché,” Kemp has his one-note but effective plot scooting along.It's all very energetic stuff, and hugely to Kemp's credit, he manages to do just enough background-filling so that prospective readers who are unable to quote twenty-minute chunks of Clone Wars verbatim will nevertheless find themselves having a fine time. And although Kemp draws his various rebel characters with real empathy, the high points of that fine time are more reliably delivered by Darth Vader himself, portrayed by Kemp as a figure of hard pathos, trapped in the black armor that keeps his mutilated body alive but also reveling in his own cage:

When man and machine were one, he no longer felt the absence of his legs or arms, the pain of his flesh, but the hate remained, and the rage still burned. Those, he never relinquished, and he never felt more connected to the Force than when his fury burned. With an effort of will, he commanded the onboard computer to link the primary respirator to the secondary, and to seal the helmet at the neck, encasing him fully. He was home.

“The armor separated him from the galaxy,” Kemp writes, “from everyone, made him singular, freed him from the needs of the flesh, the concerns of the body that once had plagued him, and allowed him to focus solely on his relationship to the Force.” (Cynical readers might gather from that “freed him from the needs of the flesh” part that Vader poops inside his armor, which is exactly why cynical readers aren't permitted in the Lucas Extended Universe)One of the keys to Kemp's success in delivering such a complex and believable Darth Vader is his skill at giving us the character's innermost thoughts without for a moment making them either relatable or sympathetic. This is a character whose wounds are far from merely physical:

It was his duty to rule them all. He saw that now. It was the manifest will of the Force. Existence without proper rule was chaos, disorder, suboptimal. The Force – invisible but ubiquitous – bent toward order and was the tool through which order could and must be imposed, but not through harmony, not through peaceful coexistence. That had been the approach of the Jedi, a foolish, failed approach that only fomented more disorder. Vader and his Master imposed order the only way it could be imposed, the way the Force required that it be imposed, through conquest, by forcing the disorder to submit to the order, by bending the weak to the will of the strong.

Of course, the closed-circuit nature of franchise fiction like this applies to good outings just as much as to bad; we know going into the book that neither Vader nor the Emperor is going to die, and we know that the Free Ryloth movement, no matter how heroic, won't succeed, just as we know that spritely centenarian Jessica Fletcher won't end up hacked to pieces at the end of the latest “Murder, She Wrote” novel, to say nothing of unexpected pregnancies in a Nancy Drew novel. The Empire has a date with destiny, after all, and that date is well-established. Down to the second.