A review by berenikeasteria
Annihilation by Drew Karpyshyn

3.0

I have to admit straight up that this was better than I expected it to be. As a Revan fan, The Old Republic MMO has never found favour with me, and I find many of its stories disconnected (I don’t know the characters or what’s happening), or just plain dull (really? Another Empire? That just happens to basically be a clone of the one that we see 4000 years later? That’s the big secret Revan discovered? Way to create a boring recycled plot you guys!). And granted, my knowledge about the context in which this book sits is still limited, and I still find the Empire an unoriginal copy. But I did actually enjoy Annihilation as a standalone story.

I liked the fact that we’re on the shoulder of a non-Jedi this time. Towards the end of the book line when they just started churning out the books it seemed like so many Jedi we’d never met before took centre stage (Knight Errant comes to mind); characters we didn’t know and had no reason to care about but were asked to invest in just because they were Jedi and that’s a stand in for ‘kickass good guys’. I actually missed some of the 90s novels where non-Jedi took much more central roles in events and it wasn’t all about a Jedi, a Sith, and revenge. It felt good to be sitting on the shoulder of Theron Shan and doing something different… even if he was a little too clever at his job and the story pans out perhaps a little too easily in the end to have me on the edge of my seat as I was reading it.

Although the outcome in the end was slightly predictable, I also liked the premise. The objective for our protagonists was ambitious enough to get me interested, and small enough not to come across as yet-another-doomsday-weapon-trying-to-top-the-last-one. Cough Starkiller Base cough. And I quite enjoyed the nod to the Enigma Machine and the destruction of Coventry.

I think the difficulty is that these last novels in the line really didn’t stand out the way the earlier ones did. I can still recall in intense detail the plots for the Heir to the Empire trilogy, heck, even the Jedi Academy trilogy, the Blackfeet Crisis trilogy, the Corellia trilogy… even though I think we’d all agree that some of the aforementioned offerings were memorable for all the wrong reasons. At least each one was fairly distinct and different. The later books started becoming rather formulaic – and it doesn’t help that no matter where in the timeline they’re placed, there always seems to be the same cookie cutter Empire. Annihilation perhaps cracks the mould somewhat, but it’s still the same basic shape.

6 out of 10