Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith - The Collected Stories by John Jackson Miller was originally published as a series of e-books. Now, for the first time, the stories have been collected together in a single volume, which includes the all new story Pandemonium.

The stories have a lot of ground to cover as the tale covers the Tribes accidental crash on Kesh (5000 years BBY) to their attempts to unify the planet (2975 BBY). As such, Miller has taken that age old structure of using each story to reflect important phase in the tribe’s history, with few of the stories containing the same characters. This structure has been used by both Blish (Cities in Flight) and Asimov (Foundation series), although they generally worked with longer stories. Some of the stories cover more than one time period with the first four covering a period of the first twenty five years after the crash. I never caught up with the series as a set of e-books, but as a collection the book works very well.

The book contains all the original stories, Precipice, Skyborn, Paragon, Saviour, Purgatory, Sentinel, Pantheon, Secrets and the new story Pandemonium.

The book tells the tale of the Sith Crew of the Starship Omen, who having to make an emergency jump through hyperspace. Unfortunately they are slightly off course, a slight deviation which throws them into an unknown area of space and straight into the gravity well of Kesh. Through their ingenuity they crash without killing all the crew, but damaging the ship and its communications array. They find themselves on an unknown world, stranded.

Kesh is inhabitable, with an indigenous population and the Sith set about creating a whole new society, under their captain, Yaru Korsin. Being Sith this is a very bumpy ride. The Keshiri worship the newcomers as gods, which allows the Sith to infiltrate and finally control their society, but not all of them are convinced that their new guest are gods, including Adari Vaal, the woman who first rescued them.

One of the good things which Miller is able to demonstrate with this collection is the whole pantheon of Sith, some are classically insanely violent, always scheming against their own people, but within these ranks are more rounded thoughtful characters. It’s a nice change from the one dimensional representations which are often offered up.

As far as I am aware Miller intends to take these characters forward in comic book form, if the stories are up to this calibre, it should make for some interesting reading.

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Charles Packer