I just finished reading Drew Karpyshyn’s Star Wars book, Darth Bane: Path of Destruction. I haven’t read a Star Wars book since Timothy Zahn finished his first trilogy, the one with Thrawn in it. Anyhow, I like the Star Wars universe, it’s fun but it’s also incredibly shallow in ways. I’m not saying this to knock on Star Wars, it is a problem that most genre (sci-fi/fantasy) books and settings have. All the good guys are called light and look good and all the bad guys have called dark and are ugly, the exception to this is for evil women who are either young and beautiful or old and ugly. I think my readers are smart enough to pick out the sexism inherent in that fact. Anyhow I enjoyed the book it was quick, entertaining and about as far as you can get from what I have been reading (see my reading and what I recommend lists).
Of course the book suffers from what I just mentioned the story centers around a young man who names himself “bane” and is bald and pale evil. He begins his training in a Sith academy so that one day he can join the “brotherhood of darkness” and now he is embracing his evil. The book is good except when it gets bogged down in this completely cliche, shallow, parody of ethics and morality… Very few people ever see themselves as evil, they almost always believe what they are doing is good and right… I wholeheartedly believe that there are evil people, but they are rare, it is usually good, or misguided people doing evil things. I wish genre fiction could get past this so that great stories in fantastic places can have realistic people living in them as opposed to the cardboard cut outs we usually see…
