For those of you that have looked at my reviews in the past, you know that I have a propensity for hyperbole.  And snark.  Lots of snark.  Kevin J. Anderson is a writer that I’ve thrown a lot of flak at in the past.  Really, he’s been one of my favorite targets, and I’ll say this, he really does seem to bear a good bit of it.  At a time not so far back, I’ve referred to him as being a kind of nemesis to me.

But to be honest, that was before I read some of the SWEU material that I was steered around the first time I was going through the Bantam/Spectra era books, which has been a long time ago.  You know that the last review I did was for Children of the Jedi in a series of posts that went on for a bit too long.  Barbara Hambly is likely not as bad a writer as she came across in that book, but it really seemed like she was pretty far outside her wheelhouse.

That book gave me a big dose of perspective for the concept of bad Star Wars.  I had held that Anderson’s books were bad Star Wars up to a point, but something else has come to my attention.  There’s a difference between bad Star Wars and not good Star Wars.  Children of the Jedi was bad.  Darksaber isn’t bad Star Wars; in fact it fits in with my usual prerequisites for being pretty good, but it has a pretty long list of bad features that throw it out of that.

I can say something good about Kevin J. Anderson up front.  I swear, just watch.  The Jedi Academy Trilogy established some very important aspects of the Expanded Universe at large.  I didn’t like it.  I didn’t like the way it was written, but for anyone who is coming into the EU from the start of the Bantam/Spectra era, it’s pretty much required reading.  For anybody who is wondering where the Academy came from, it’s important.  Let’s be honest, if you’re looking at anything except the core of the New Republic Era, anything later pretty much encourages you to read it.  The characters and concepts that get to be important later on have their sources there.

Now, you don’t want to read this; it isn’t the funny bit.  Me talking about the stuff that’s wrong–that’s what you want.  So, here’s where we stand, I’m going to break this down into just two parts, I’m not running a page by page analysis, you’re going to get the problems at large as I see them.  For me, Darksaber has two fronts of problems.  There’s the distinct storytelling issues and there’s the technical issues.

For today’s post, we’re going to focus on the latter of the two.  Hit the jump to see the story elements of this book that crawl under my skin.

The eponymous Darksaber is a weapon, this being an early Star Wars novel and especially one written by Anderson, it’s a SUPER weapon!  As if the Sun Crusher wasn’t dumb enough (oh, and it was dumb), the Darksaber is the dumbest thing I’ve seen this side of the Eye of Palpatine.  Don’t look that up, you’ll have a coronary.

I can even deal with those two easier than this, though, because at least they were developed by a government which has access to nigh infinite resources.  Darksaber, on the other hand, was created and funded after the fall of the Empire by a Hutt.  It’s not even worth remembering his name, we might as well call him Jabba Jr.  So, Jabba Jr. is the, wait for it, head of a crime syndicate and apparently has all the currency in the bleedin’ galaxy!

Lil’ Tykes Jabba hired out to a bunch of space contractors, people he could trust, I guess, to gather materials to build his weapon.  Now, if this were a starship and not what it is, I’d be fine with that, but I’m about to tell you what it is.  Darksaber is the Death Star, minus all the bits that aren’t the super laser.  Just to be clear, we’re not talking about one of the component lasers, the whole bleeding thing.

So, who built it?  No, I don’t mean who paid for it, who did Jabba the mutt pay to build it?  Well, it turns out he found a group of hive-minded aliens.  That sounds like the perfect workforce, doesn’t it?  They were pretty easily controlled and they were easily organized because it had a flawless central mind, right?  Except that the attention span of the Taurill is about as long as a kindergardener

Okay, so having established that we move on to my next problem.  If I’m doing this, I build this monstrous starship somewhere remote but safe, like you would, right?  I mean, there’s a lot of uncharted and simply empty space out there between world.  The Empire can’t patrol it all, or at this point the Republic.  They check out the trade lanes and the populated worlds, why not build it in an unpopulated system that’s easy to get to but nobody has any real reason?  So where does Junior the Dope decide to break ground on this now enormously fragile, defenseless mobile station?  Why, in an asteroid field of course!

I’m going to say that again because it bears repeating.  HE BUILT THE STATION IN AN ASTEROID FIELD WHERE IT COULD BE COMPLETELY AND EASILY DESTROYED BY A BIG ROCK.  AT RANDOM.  AT LITERALLY ANY TIME DURING ITS CONSTRUCTION.

Yeah, that’s a thing that Anderson wrote down, gave to his editor and they both nodded their heads and said, “Yup, that looks good.”

Now, this is all so stupid, I feel like you can’t really appreciate it.  No, I’m going to help you out with this, alright?  Here is a real world example.

Starting in the 1980’s, the US Navy began developing plans to help offset the country’s reliance on bases in foreign countries.  The plans were drawn up for what amounted to an enormous floating base that was supposed to be able to be set up in a matter of two weeks anywhere in the world thirteen miles off the coast of an offending country that would serve as a launching point for any attacks without worrying about having the permission of international states between a base and the offender.

The mobile base was essentially a series of enormous barges that would be towed into place and secured together to allow for a base to house personnel, materiel and airstrips.  They were even planned to allow for the individual barges to flex to deal with waves.  It was a smart idea, but it was deemed unnecessary because the nation already HAS bases all over the world for power projection, and even aside from that, we have this whole other thing our naval strategy has been built on for the past fifty years, super-carriers.

So, imagine for a minute the Navy did build it.  When the plans were finalized, the Joint Mobile Offshore Base (JMOB) was going to cost about eight billion dollars.  It was deemed too inefficient for the cost.  Now let’s compare that to the what is essentially that idea pared down to the next lowest level, the Nimitz class super carrier, which tends to run about four and a half billion dollars.

In this imaginary world where the US has JMOB’s ready to attack anywhere in the world when suddenly, the Chinese Triad suddenly comes into possession of a Nimitz carrier.  Substitute any other organized crime group you’d like, the Yakuza, La Cosa Nostra, Russian Mafia, whatever.  This, this is what Anderson wanted you to believe was going on!

Would you like to know the dumbest part?  Yeah, absorb that for a minute, it gets dumber.  The former Imperial officer that was in charge of the construction decided to cut the corner of putting a Commodore 64 in for the primary computer.  So, Jabba the Dolt spent what is likely to have been ALL THE MONEY IN THE GALAXY to build a super weapon with the power to threaten a galactic government and THAT was when he decided, “Ya know, this stuff is really expensive, I think we might want to take some cost cutting measures.  Computer?  How important could that really be?”

THIS IS A THING THAT SOLD.  It hit #3 on the New York Times Bestseller list and sold copies world wide!  I’m not even kidding, this is what Starlog had to say on the back cover blurbs, “Anderson has all but assumed the title of chancellor of the Star Wars University.”