Star Wars zombies. Yep, you read it right. Death Troopers follows the adventures of several inmates and workers on an Imperial prison barge that finds itself adrift in space right next to a ghost ship Star Destroyer with the lights on but nobody home… or so it seems! A few thoughts:

- I haven’t read any Star Wars novels before, but this one fit other fictionalizations of the SW universe that I’ve encountered (comics, video games, the RPG). It assumes the reader knows the universe well, but doesn’t demand that the reader know too much background information, at least that I can see. It’s possible that some of the characters are from other novels and I just didn’t know that (Wookiepedia doesn’t indicate any). I like the chronological layout of all the SW novels in the timeline at the beginning of the novel. There’s something nerdily satisfying about complete and consistent canons.
- The writing was distinctly action fiction, with solid descriptions of action and decent, if quick, characterizations. The focus on the narrative moving forward with a briefly developed explanation of the zombie virus. Not provocative or evocative syntax, but I suspect the SW brand limits the scope of a writer’s vocabulary in order to keep the book at an accessible level to hit the YA market.
- When I think about the writing here, I wonder whether it was really any worse than some of the other action-oriented genre fiction I’ve read, like William Shatner’s Tekwar or William Deitz’s Legion of the Damned. My instinct is that it was more limited, but not only because the novels need to hit a specific market. I think writing within an established universe limits your ability to be creative about world-building, and one of the thing the cheesiest action sf has that this misses is new worlds to explore. Ironically, the familiar setting removes a crucial element of novelty.
- Minor spoiler: It turns out I don’t like reading novels with Han Solo in them. Han feels like an enigma to me, a brash adventurer with a good side (Sam Spade/ Rick Blaine in space?), and so to know his inner thoughts, as we do several times in the novel, undermines that mystery. That said, I was pretty surprised to find anyone from the main stories here. Who knew Han and Chewy had a run-in with space zombies less than five years before they met Luke in Tatooine?

Death Troopers is fine for what it is, an adventure novel within an established universe. But it also underwhelms for character development and syntax. Schreiber’s concept left open the possibility for a sequel, but he also wrote in a safety net so that the novel could be a standalone without the reader wondering what happened to the zombies.