Book Review: Star Wars - The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire by Dr. Chris Kempshall

What a neat idea!

Star Wars has been getting into in-universe history lately. They started with the biography of the Skywalker family a few years ago, but that book had a lot going against it, namely it knew things nobody in-universe would be able to know, it mostly repeated things from the movies, and was frankly pretty boring.

When putting together the full history of the Empire, instead of assigning it to a usual Star Wars writer, they turned to actual real-world WWI historian and Star Wars fan Dr. Chris Kempshall. Dr. Kempshall found ways to weave together EVERYTHING that is in-canon (movies, TV shows, cartoons, comic books, video games, etc.) into one overarching narrative. He also engaged the Lucasfilm overseers to flesh out previously undefined portions of the story (for example, what children in the Empire were learning in school). The result of this is a comprehensive (with an asterisk - we'll get to that later) history of the Empire from Order 66 to the fall of the Final Order on Exegol.

Trying to become a comprehensive history is both this book's triumph as well as greatest problem. On the one hand, it's fun to read a chapter and notice references to Andor, Rebels, Tarkin, and a random comic book all in the same page. On the other hand, since this book combines EVERYTHING considered canon, it can be hard to keep track of all the unfamiliar planets, characters, etc. For example, I barely remembered Admiral Tagge or Admiral Rae Sloane, but there are pages and pages on these characters that I barely knew - as well as pages and pages on characters that I don't know offhand (although I really want to look up who Cylo was and where that story came from).

Two other issues that I want to mention. The first is that this is an in-universe book and we're reading it in English. That wasn't a problem for most of it, but in the middle of the book there was a picture of a poster claiming the Emperor wasn't really dead - and the poster was in English, not Basic, which was a bit of a disconnect. Secondly, this is the history of what happened right now and what Lucasfilm/Disney want us to know, leaving themselves space for other stories, so there's no mention of important stuff like what ever happened to the thousands of Jedi who apparently survived Order 66, or what happened between the fall of Endor and the cataclysm on Hosnian Prime (when the book ended the story of the Battle of Jakku, it was 90% over according to my Kindle).

But the benefit of having a real historian writing this is the history can be written to offer real insights. Dr. Kempshall really shines when discussing why the galaxy allowed the New Order to re-take control, how the Emperor was more interesting in attaining power than actually ruling, how the Battle of Hoth was really the start of the Empire's fall, and why the Empire didn't surrender after the Battle of Endor.

It's amazing to me that this fictional universe feels so lived-in now that it takes a real historian to make sense of it - but that's where we are with Star Wars and it was brilliantly done. Eight out of ten hot dogs!