The Book Nook: Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire by Steve Perry

 Hey everyone! How're you all doing today? I'm really excited because not only is SNW going to have a fun episode this week, with lots of great character moments, but the season premiere of The Orville: New Horizons is finally here!!! I'm watching it tonight with my sister so please internet, no spoilers for me. You'll have to come back for those reviews tomorrow. Right now though we are returning to my childhood yet again at the Geek Cave's Book Nook where I take a look at a book or a series of books from my childhood and talk about them. Today I'm going to be talking about Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire by Steve Perry, and published in 1996. I just finished reading the book for the first time in seven or eight years so I'll not only be talking about my history with the book, but how I feel about it now. So let's get into it.

Shadows of the Empire, like many of the Bantam era novels, doesn't hold up very well in terms of the character of Prince Xizor (pronounced Sheezor) and how he behaves towards women, but on a story level, what Xizor represents to Darth Vader and how Luke goes from where we left him at the end of The Empire Strikes Back to where we meet him when he enters Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi. It also does an excellent job at portraying Darth Vader, which we didn't get to see alot of in the Bantam era, because with the exception of The Han Solo Trilogy and Shadows of the Empire, the vast majority of the novels took place after Return of the Jedi, when Vader and the Emperor are gone and the Empire is in ruins. 

Aside from what I mentioned before, Xizor is a pretty decent villain. He's different from all the Imperial warlords and Dark Side users we got in the other Bantam novels, but also different from criminals like Durga the Hutt in Darksaber (he also shows up here as one of Xizor's lieutenants). Or maybe not so different since they both had galactic domination for why they did what they do in these books. With Xizor though, he was willing to wait and take out his enemies, including the Emperor and Darth Vader, one by one, no matter how long it took. Well, until his enemies knocked on his door and started wrecking his stuff. 

I first got this book back in 1999 or 2000, when I was starting to build up my Star Wars book collection. Even though the Star Wars novel license had moved from Bantam back to Del Rey in 1999 for the prequel movie novelizations and The New Jedi Order, Bantam kept their books in print right up until 2014 when Penguin Random House, the parent company, began re-releasing all of the Bantam era books under the Legends banner, and shifted all of them under Del Rey. So the paperback editions were available at Chapters throughout the 2000s and that's where I got the majority of my Bantam era paperbacks, though I did get some from Brad occasionally too. I don't have my original copy of Shadows of the Empire anymore, but I did pick up the 2015 paperback edition with the Legends banner across the top of the front cover, a year or two ago. I'm gonna do a full post about the Legends banner reprints of the Bantam novels at another point, but apart from the inside of the front and back cover, and the Legends novel timeline at the end, the book has the exact same layout as the original paperback does, so I really like that.

I'm also going to do a full post on it, but this novel was part of a larger multimedia program almost as a celebration of the franchise's 20th Anniversary leading up to the theatrical release of the Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition in 1997. In addition to the novel, there was a toyline, a soundtrack, a making of book, a junior novel, a comic book, a comic book sequel that was published a few years later, and the video game for the Nintendo 64, which was just being launched in 1996. Like I said, I'll do a full post on this at a later time.

I actually forgot how funny this book is. I think Steve Perry and Aaron Allston were the only authors to inject some outright comedy into their Star Wars novels, Especially later on during the 2000s when The New Jedi Order and the Clone Wars books were coming out. Though Steve Perry wouldn't write a Star Wars novel by himself again, he did write the comic book sequel to Shadows of the Empire, Shadows of the Empire: Evolution (1998), and he co-wrote Medstar I: Battle Surgeons (2004), Medstar II: Jedi Healer (2004), and Death Star (2007) with fellow Batman: The Animated Series and Gargoyles writer, Michael Reaves. Lando, Luke, and even Leia are funny in this book, Threepio and even Chewbacca get many comedic moments in the book, and when it comes to those characters, even when Dash Rendar was with them, it felt more like a buddy comedy more than anything else.

I love that we got into Darth Vader's head in this book. Again, because he doesn't appear in any of the other Bantam era books, this is the only opportunity we have to focus on him. And it's also interesting because the prequels hadn't started coming out yet, so this is Before Prequel Era Vader, so there's no Padme, no Order 66, no Clone Troopers, no Ahsoka even. Just Vader as he was portrayed in the Original Trilogy and in the 1997 Special Editions too. None of the context of the prequels is there.

Luke is very interesting in this book too. He's honing his skills as a Jedi, but he's always dealing with the fact that he ran off to try to rescue Han and Leia, and nearly got killed as a result of his impatience, just as Yoda and Obi-Wan warned him of. He's also dealing with the possibility that Darth Vader hadn't lied to him about being his father during their duel at Cloud City at the end of The Empire Strikes Back. Leia gets alot of cool stuff to do in this book...but also ends up doing some stupid stuff to do as well, when it comes to Prince Xizor.

Dash Rendar, and his YT-2400 freighter, the Outrider, are probably the best known things to come out of the book because Dash is the POV character for the N64 game. So he got more exposure than Xizor and his second in command, Guri, did because of that. 

Overall, Shadows of the Empire is still a pretty good read, despite the problematic nature of Prince Xizor. It's definitely one of my favourites from the Bantam era, simply because Steve Perry does an incredible job of telling an epic Star Wars tale, that doesn't tread on what the N64 game, the comic or the junior novelization do with their versions of the story or the aspects they focus on, which is good because big multimedia projects like this don't always end up working very well because each form of media doesn't focus on different aspects. But it works here, and I'll talk more about that another time.

That is going to be it for me for today. I'll be back tomorrow for my reviews of the season 3 premiere of The Orville and this week's episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. So until then have a wonderful rest of your day and I will talk to you all later. Take care.