Space Zombies! (spoilers for Star Wars: Death Troopers)

Just finished my first book of 2010.  Walking through the library last week, a Star Wars novel caught my eye.  Having read every single Star Wars novel (including the Young Adult titles) published between 1978 and early 2001, I considered myself a huge fan of the Star Wars novels.  What happened in 2001, you ask?  That was when the first novel set in the prequels was released. It was with some trepidation that I picked up Rogue Planet by Greg Bear.  I had been throughly disappointed by the Phantom Menace movie and was worried that it would carryover to the books.  It did.  The book was as lifeless and dull as the other prequel material.  It was the last I would read of any books set before A New Hope.  I still dutifully read the post-ANH books and thoroughly enjoyed the beginning of the New Jedi Order series set 20+ years after ANH.  But that series dragged on and on and on and well you get the point.  21 books in all and by the end I was burnt out.  I was done with Star Wars books.  From 2004 to the present, I returned to the Star Wars twice.  The first was Timothy Zahn's Allegiance which was a great read.  It triggered a slight renaissance in which I re-read the X-Wing series of novels.  Set after ROTJ the X-Wing novels follow Wedge Antilles and the rest of Rogue (and later Wraith) Squadron.  They're fun light reading (what I call popcorn books).

So, when Death Troopers caught my eye, I was surprised that I stopped to look at it.  Reading the dust jacket I got the impression that it was a zombie story set in the Star Wars universe shortly before ANH.  From the dramatis personae, it appeared that the book followed none of the characters from the movies.  that intrigued me, so I picked it up.

I started the book the night before I left for a two day car trip to Baltimore for work.  Let me be clear, it was a zombie novel set in the Star Wars universe.  I wasn't expecting (and nor did I get) literary fireworks.  I did get a good popcorn read for the first half of the book, but it quickly left a funny taste in my mouth.  The story revolves around an Imperial prison ship being stranded in space and coming across an abandoned Imperial Star Destroyer.  The Imperial Star Destroyer had been transporting a biological agent that infected and then killed the crew and transformed the dead into zombies.  Halfway through the novel, one of the main characters (an Imperial Doctor with a heart of gold) realizes that any prisoners in solitary wouldn't be infected.  She devises an antidote and heads down to solitary where she releases the two prisoners-who just happen to be Han Solo and Chewbacca.  I was actually annoyed that they were shoe horned into the book.  It made no sense.  This book is set in the period just prior to ANH and here are Han & Chewie in a prison barge and the Millennium Falcon had been impounded (and subsequently auctioned off) by the Empire.  Han is completely out of character, not acting like the self absorbed scoundrel that he is in ANH.  The ending of the book leads a lot to be desired.  The action gets wrapped up too quickly and through no action of the main characters.  The zombie threat isn't really dealt with, it's just left to drift in space.  Han and Chewie exit stage left after stealing an Imperial shuttle during their escape and selling it.  Han graciously gives half the credits to the other survivors (something I can't see the ANH Han doing.)  We're left to believe that Han is able to parlay that money into somehow tracking down the Falcon and re-buying it.  Really?

All in all, it was a decent read; the first half was very suspenseful and well written, but once Han & Chewie show up, the novel starts to lose it's focus and by the end I was glad it was done.  Perhaps the author was using the novel as an allegory of the literary Star Wars genre.  The first 25 years of the novels were lively, but since the introduction of the prequels, they have been lifeless and soulless creations that just don't know they're dead.