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An e-book novella by John Jackson Miller (2011, Del Rey)
Lost Tribe of the Sith, Book 6
Set 4000 years before Star Wars: A New Hope

A stranded Jedi chases down an outcast Sith so she can't divulge the secret he has been harboring for three years -that he might have a way off the planet.

 

 

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Read on June 24th, 2011  
    This is the shortest Lost Tribe of the Sith story yet by only one page, but it feels even shorter, for some reason. I really thought I could only be halfway through it when it abruptly ended. Having said that, it was well written, as usual, and I'm happy that it continued the plot from Purgatory. Yet there were a number of ideas or plot conveniences that I really think the author glossed over.

The entire story revolves around Jelph, the former Jedi who crashed on Kesh and became stranded, chasing down Ori, in order to prevent her from revealing the presence of a near-functional starship on the planet. He admits to himself, at least, that he is being irrational, but he also realizes that he is in love -with a Sith.

We get a little more background on Jelph in this story, which gives us insight into what is occurring in the galaxy at large. I believe this book is tied in with one of the Knights of the Old Republic novels, which I have not yet read, or video games of the same name. Jelph comes from a Jedi sect which operate separate from the Jedi Council, and which is dedicated to ensuring that the Sith never return. What I don't believe, and which I will have to read the novels to see how it happens (if indeed I'm correct), is that the Jedi end up going to war amongst themselves because of it. Does each faction call the other one Sith? No wonder the population views the Jedi warily.

Suffice to say that Ori finds her mother and tells her of the starship, planning to bargain her mother's release with it. But her mother betrays her, the way any true Sith would, and bargains herself with the information -with the Sith leader, instead.

When Jelph catches up with Ori, they battle with their lightsabers -and I have trouble believing nobody noticed a green lightsaber up on the rooftops. But he manages to disarm her and convince her that she can embrace a different lifestyle. I wasn't entirely convinced, but it appears that her turnaround was true. They try to get back to his farm before the Sith council, but fail. The old, frail leader gets into the ship and takes off, but of course it is set to explode if anybody does that. Tied to a proton torpedo, it makes a huge crater where the farm used to be -Jelph Force-leaps Ori out of the way into the river to save them, without even a scratch!

So they go to the hiding spot where he gathered his famous manure, where he shows her the communications device he had secreted away. He spends days poring over the stray transmissions it picked up, which are far and few between. But when he hears of the Jedi civil war, he agrees to turn from being a "selfless" Jedi to a more selfish viewpoint. Jelph and Ori say they will meet halfway, as he destroys the transmitter. Unfortunately, they don't know how selfish the Jedi really are, imposing their justice and viewpoints on everybody -the ensuing power struggle only proves that Jedi are in very few ways actually selfless.

At least they mention the band of uvak fliers who escaped to another continent back in Savior. I wonder and hope that a future story will show what happened to those people -if they even survived and thrived. If the series is ending soon, we'll need some sort of continuity and conclusion, but I don't really see a consistent plot connecting all the stories. The small amount of Sith culture we see here isn't it. I hope the series is going somewhere.

 
   

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