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Customer Review
Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2013
John Jackson Miller has been amassing an impressive list of Star Wars contributions, notably with his superb run writing the Dark Horse comic series Knights of the Old Republic and then continuing into the Knight Errant series, which is still ongoing. Knight Errant saw him public an excellent full-length novel as well. Here, Mr. Miller writes something with a scope between the comics and the books: nine short stories originally published as e-books (well, at least eight were, with the ninth being exclusive to this trade paperback). These stories were released as free downloads initially and have now been collected into this compendium. I'm old-fashioned when it comes to reading fiction and so was quite pleased to have these tales in print form.
The stories contained within Lost Tribe of the Sith: The Collected Stories span slightly over two thousand years of galactic history, starting five thousand years before the Battle of Yavin. The Sith vessel Omen experiences a catastrophic crash on a remote and desolate planet. The crash itself is quite interesting as it completes the story of what happened with the two Sith vessels on a doomed mining mission at the outset of Paul S. Kemp's Crosscurrent. The Sith Lord commanding the vessel, Yaru Korsin, sets off to build a new civilization with the extremely limited resources available on this new world. Fortunately for the Sith, they quickly meet a native people and are able to start leveraging their existing mythology and beliefs to benefit the Sith.
There are several tensions presented in the first few short stories (which tell one complete story before time jumps forward) which are dramatic and intriguing. The first is between the Sith of human/alien origin and the Massassi who have traditionally been subjugated by the Sith. The Massassi do not adapt well to the alien environment, to say the least, and there is a quick rebalancing among the survivors of Omen's crash. The other tension of greatest interest is between the native Keshiri and the Sith accidental invaders. At first a Keshiri named Adari is excited to meet the new visitors but over time she is saddened to realize the underlying evil of the Sith culture and she starts to see a need for the Keshiri to protect themselves.
The fifth story of the nine jumps forward over one thousand years to the time of the Knights of the Old Republic and Darth Revan. Several stories cover this era and then we have a final jump forward to 2975 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin) as the book concludes. Mr. Miller does a good job of connecting these stories together and presents the overall evolution of a stable Sith society in a convincing manner. No easy trick considering Sith nature is to prey upon the weak and not help those in need. These Sith evolve into a more secure society than any others we've seen presented in the Star Wars galaxy to date.
I favor full-length novels over short stories, as I often struggle to get into a short story in the limited pages it is allotted, but Mr. Miller does well in making these chronologically disparate tales hang together. Some characters do not have much opportunity to develop but giving several stories in a row to the same group gives the main ones a little room to grow. The world the Sith are stranded on is compelling, with its lack of raw materials and general remoteness from the galaxy at large. The Lost Tribe of the Sith plays a major role in the Fate of the Jedi saga and so I chose to read this collection just before plunging into those nine books. Even though its characters do not appear in Fate of the Jedi, the background it gives to this unique Sith group is welcome. The story of the Lost Tribe is also being expanded upon in an ongoing Dark Horse comics series. I wouldn't recommend this story collection to a casual Star Wars reader but I would definitely do so to anyone interested in reading Fate of the Jedi or learning more about a different take on a Sith society.
The stories contained within Lost Tribe of the Sith: The Collected Stories span slightly over two thousand years of galactic history, starting five thousand years before the Battle of Yavin. The Sith vessel Omen experiences a catastrophic crash on a remote and desolate planet. The crash itself is quite interesting as it completes the story of what happened with the two Sith vessels on a doomed mining mission at the outset of Paul S. Kemp's Crosscurrent. The Sith Lord commanding the vessel, Yaru Korsin, sets off to build a new civilization with the extremely limited resources available on this new world. Fortunately for the Sith, they quickly meet a native people and are able to start leveraging their existing mythology and beliefs to benefit the Sith.
There are several tensions presented in the first few short stories (which tell one complete story before time jumps forward) which are dramatic and intriguing. The first is between the Sith of human/alien origin and the Massassi who have traditionally been subjugated by the Sith. The Massassi do not adapt well to the alien environment, to say the least, and there is a quick rebalancing among the survivors of Omen's crash. The other tension of greatest interest is between the native Keshiri and the Sith accidental invaders. At first a Keshiri named Adari is excited to meet the new visitors but over time she is saddened to realize the underlying evil of the Sith culture and she starts to see a need for the Keshiri to protect themselves.
The fifth story of the nine jumps forward over one thousand years to the time of the Knights of the Old Republic and Darth Revan. Several stories cover this era and then we have a final jump forward to 2975 BBY (Before the Battle of Yavin) as the book concludes. Mr. Miller does a good job of connecting these stories together and presents the overall evolution of a stable Sith society in a convincing manner. No easy trick considering Sith nature is to prey upon the weak and not help those in need. These Sith evolve into a more secure society than any others we've seen presented in the Star Wars galaxy to date.
I favor full-length novels over short stories, as I often struggle to get into a short story in the limited pages it is allotted, but Mr. Miller does well in making these chronologically disparate tales hang together. Some characters do not have much opportunity to develop but giving several stories in a row to the same group gives the main ones a little room to grow. The world the Sith are stranded on is compelling, with its lack of raw materials and general remoteness from the galaxy at large. The Lost Tribe of the Sith plays a major role in the Fate of the Jedi saga and so I chose to read this collection just before plunging into those nine books. Even though its characters do not appear in Fate of the Jedi, the background it gives to this unique Sith group is welcome. The story of the Lost Tribe is also being expanded upon in an ongoing Dark Horse comics series. I wouldn't recommend this story collection to a casual Star Wars reader but I would definitely do so to anyone interested in reading Fate of the Jedi or learning more about a different take on a Sith society.
