Review Tuesday: Star Wars: Darth Plagueis by James Luceno

Star Wars

Darth Plagueis

by James Luceno

The tale of how a wealthy and powerful Muun, who was secretly Darth Plagueis, went on to take a forceful politically connected human from Naboo as his apprentice to spread dissent throughout the Republic to set up the conspiracy that would leave the Sith in control of everything. 

A long time ago I grew weary and tired of waves upon waves of Star Wars books containing the backstories of every imaginable character. There was a dude running around in Cloud City with an ice cream maker that they even wrote a back story for, for crying out loud. So, unless it was a novelization of a movie, I steered clear of most of the Star Wars books for years now. However, I kept hearing curious things about this novel by James Luceno about Darth Plagueis. Published ten years ago and still getting hailed by fans, I finally decided to make the investment. 

 

The book immediately starts with Sideous murdering Plagueis. Don't let that put you off, it's a vision, of things to come. The book then skips to Plagueis with his master, Tenebrous, doing some mining when things go wrong. While Tenebrous was distracted with the mining accident, Plagueis took the opportunity to kill the master who had lost touch with the goals of the Sith. This is barely a handful of pages into the book, but you quickly learn how cunning and vicious Plagueis could be. 

 

The book is pretty long, taking a good chunk of time in the Star Wars timeline. Despite being called DARTH PLAGUEIS, a good amount of the work he did to undermine the Republic was with Sheev Palpatine, who was in junior politics at university when they met. 

 

Reading the story and seeing how things were set into motion years, even DECADES before the events of the prequel trilogy was some incredible writing. Taking all the insurrections, chaos, rivalries, misgivings, conspiracies, dealings, etc. and getting them all to reconcile so that the book ends right at the end of Episode One: The Phantom Menace, had to be a huge undertaking for James Luceno. 

 

I haven't even scraped at the surface here. The book is so thick, so thorough, so clever, you never lose interest in it. Exceedingly well written. It weaves perfectly into the Star Wars universe, even though I believe it's not considered canon. I highly recommend this book for Star Wars fans. I would also recommend that Disney look to this book with all of it's material as a source for another television series.

  

Got a copy on AMAZON