Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith: The Collected Stories

The Lost Tribe of the Sith stories were released as free eBooks to promote Del Rey's publishing of other Star Wars works.  They were written by John Jackson Miller who is a history nerd and tries to weave all of the history knowledge bottled up in his head into science fiction, making for quite the enjoyable tale.  If you can ever hear him talk about what influenced him to write basically any plot point, it is sure to be interesting and probably have some grounding in world history.

The eBooks became quite popular and so Del Rey decided to publish them together in a collection as well as with a novella that followed after the last story and wrapped up the open ending of the last story.  The novella takes up about 3/8ths of the book, while the other 8 short stories take up the rest. 

The stories cover over 2000 years, so the reader can really watch the society evolve and change over time.  There are basically three trilogies with the novella making up the third part of the last trilogy.  The basic premise is that this group (tribe) of Sith crash lands on an unknown (lost) planet and must support themselves without killing each other, a tall order for Sith.

Each of the stories has a pretty clear protagonist and it is sort of interesting to think that the guy that you are rooting for could easily have been the villain in a variety of other tales.  Also, seeing a large group of ego-centric people try to get along is pretty humorous.

An issue with this is that (if you haven't done the math) not all of the characters get the same amount of screen time.  The final part in the time line takes up about half of the book.  While I didn't have a problem with this, I could easily see how someone could be miffed that they were stuck with characters they didn't like as much as those the author introduced 1000 years ago.

No one from the movies shows up in this story and it requires no real knowledge of the Star Wars universe to enjoy.  The book presents a unique perspective on Star Wars and while the marooned on an alien planet is sort of a sci-fi trope, I can't think of another story that follows the growth of the marooned civilization like this one does.

Overall, I would give this collection a 82%.