A very specific type of Star Wars fan gets what they always wanted
There’s a segment of fandom communities, and I can vouch that this is particularly strong in alternate history communities, that likes taking a look at a fantastic setting and seeing how it could be made to make some degree of sense. Of course, many of these settings violate the laws of physics, but you can look at them and impose logical consistency. Being a Star Wars fan, I have often thought of how you could make that universe make sense—and, of course, the Expanded Universe, both before and after the Disney buyout, did this in spades. But now, Disney has done something the franchise, to my knowledge, has never done: released a history book about the Star Wars setting: The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire, by Chris Kempshall.
Reading this book I could not help but feel that us Star Wars fans were given a great gift in that the universe conspired to get Mr. Kempshall to write a book like this; he himself admits that he had been wanting to write this book for most of his life. He is also a professional historian, specializing in World War I, and having done a lot of work on the representation of history in video games. What you get, then, is a book that feels like it was written by a fan, in the sense that sheer enthusiasm drips off of every page, and by a professional, in that there is a structural rigor undergirding the project that gives it greater depth than simple fan works might.
One of the things that really helps the verisimilitude of the book is that Kempshall knows how history as a discipline works. I am familiar with this type of faux-history book style of writing, as I have been involved with online alternate history communities for the better part of twenty years (and that makes me feel very old to say), and one of the things that become very obvious after a certain point of learning history on your own is that many of them have only gotten facts from Wikipedia and other easily accessible sources that nevertheless lack depth. They write in vagaries and treat facts as bits of trivia and not as pieces of information in a much larger panorama. The works are, as my dear friend and colleague Colin Salt once said while interpreting me, trinketized. As I wrote many years ago:
“How can the neophyte alternate historian improve their questions? I think it’s ultimately a matter of mindset. A mistake many newcomers make (and this is a notion encouraged by many online historical discussion fora, not just alternate historical spaces) is assuming that history is simply the aggregation of bits of trivia, whose own complex interrelationships are neglected. This reduces the study of history to a collection of trinkets rather than the system of the world that many academics spend entire lives studying but a tiny portion. This is not something that newcomers should feel overly guilty over; this is how history is taught as in many school systems before the university level.”
What Kempshall’s book reminded me of very strongly was Robert Sobel’s 1971 work of alternate history, For Want of a Nail, a book about the American Revolution failing, much of what in our world became the eastern United States remaining British and thereby becoming a super-Canada of sorts, and the patriots and their descendants moving into what we would call Texas (they call it the state of Jefferson), intervening in a Mexican civil war, and merging their country and that larger country into the United States of Mexico. Sobel’s book discusses the long-standing rivalry between these two countries over a period of centuries. It is a book that goes to great care to not only detail history, but historiography. He has a whole section of totally fictitious sources at the end, and it is as long as the sources in a real history book would be. There are footnotes throughout the text. More crucially, he frames his work within a longstanding historian’s fight between North American and Mexican historians about the intertwined genesis of their two nations, and complies with an in-universe historiographical convention to have a historian from the other country (in respect to the background of the in-universe author) write the conclusion to a book written about the interaction between both. Looking back on Sobel, I see a commitment not just to emulating history, but emulating how people think about their own history.
Kempshall has done both of these in his book. He has a plethora of footnotes, although no lengthy bibliography at the end. Notably, a large chunk of these sources are audio logs, as well as primary source military records and postwar memoirs. This feels different from an actual history book in setting, but not in aim, as this is a universe that does not have a large production of paper books (befitting a space opera). The in-universe author of this book, a clear stand-in for Kempshall, nevertheless is not simply a pastiche. He took up arms to fight the First Order, and that experience colors his entire view of the events of the previous wars (he argues that it may make more sense to view the Clone Wars, the Galactic Civil War, and the war against the First Order as one single decades-long war, not unlike the European Civil War thesis, for example).
Your narrator is, likewise, a politically inclined being. There is a point where he is contemplating the racial capitalism that the Galactic Empire practiced, with humans as a dominant caste and nonhumans as a subordinate caste consigned to second-class citizenship and degrading grunt work (the Wookiees, for example, are exported to various worlds to be used as slave labor. Similarly, Geonosians were used as slaves to build the Death Star), and he ruminates on how there is a blind spot in having a human like himself writing the history of the Galactic Empire, a state built on vicious human supremacy. He has great empathy for the victims of the Empire, demanding that the galaxy respect the decision of a species, for whom a refusal to acknowledge someone is the worst insult imaginable, to refuse to mention the Empire at all. Furthermore, he has seen the cost of warfare, and the cost of totalitarianism, within his own life. He has come to the conclusion that an injury to one is an injury to all, that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, that none of us are free until all of us are free; and that is a lesson he is intent on imparting to us. It is a lesson, not unlike that in Andor, that is quite relevant to us in our own galaxy.
Kempshall, and his in-universe counterpart, are very good at getting the vastness of the Star Wars setting across. I remember once realizing that the part of me that loved reading many Expanded Universe books, and how they interwove little references to each other, was the same part of me that loved reading different history books on broadly the same period and seeing how they interconnected, and Kempshall realizes that too. An alternate historian friend once talked of how online alternate history has an “accent” of sorts, an unspoken assumption that any historical figure or event that is unfamiliar to the reader can simply be googled by said reader, allowing the actual story to not be bogged down in too much detail (I phrased it, in that same conversation, as an assumption that the reader has Wikipedia open in the next tab over). That is how Kempshall treats a variety of Expanded Universe happenings, several of which I recognized, but also a lot that I didn’t. For those wanting a deep dive into the Star Wars universe, you will be pleased, and you will have more to read (he has reminded me that I really need to get around to reading Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy at some point).
But Kempshall is also very good at discussing the individual. He frames the Galactic Empire as a personalist dictatorship under the malevolent rule of Sheev Palpatine, and as such the psychology of the dictator played a massive role in determining how the Empire actually ruled. It is here where I think Kemphall makes his best interpretations of the Star Wars lore, and particularly one tension that has always existed within it: the conflict between the mystical aspect of the setting and the critique of imperialism within the setting. Tony Gilroy, the man who wrote Rogue One and Andor, wrote that he found Darth Vader to be very difficult to write for in the former, and ultimately decided not to include him in the latter as the mystical feeling of the man who used to be Anakin Skywalker clashed with the very on-the-ground, view-from-the-bottom nature of the latter show.
Kempshall resolves this tension well by being very cognizant of what the average denizen of the galaxy far, far away would actually know about the nature of the Jedi, the Sith, and the Force. His in-universe avatar talks of the journey he underwent in the research for this book, which ultimately convinced him that the Force was real. He considers Palpatine not only as a politician, but as a religious extremist following a creed that is shrouded in secrecy. He, like most of the Galaxy, had only a vague idea of who the Jedi actually were before they were destroyed. He takes the fact that both Jedi and Sith believed in their religions seriously and examines how their creeds affected their behavior. He has only the briefest idea of what the Bendu was, and how he affected the Battle of Atollon (this is in the Rebels show). He believes what transpired when Mace Windu confronted Palpatine to be lost in the mists of history. But he is quite correct in realizing that what Darth Sidious and Darth Vader wanted was not necessarily what the Republic and the Empire wanted.
This judicious evaluation of what the average citizen of the galaxy actually knows, or could potentially know, extends to the workings of the Empire at large. Like a real history book, there are insets in the text that are filled with images. Notably, he says that two pictures of the conference room scene in A New Hope, infamous for Darth Vader nearly choking Admiral Conan Antonio Motti to death, are only allegedly from the Death Star and that their actual provenance cannot be demonstrated with certainty as the battle station was nearly destroyed. Likewise, there are major gaps in what can be understood in regards to Imperial doctrine as well as the lives of Sheev Palpatine among others. This, I found, did a lot of work in persuading me for a moment that this was a real, actual history book.
Kempshall, in his own way, is deconstructing the “cool” image that the Galactic Empire has had for the past few decades in popular culture. This state is not a ruthlessly efficient engine of war that made the railspeeders run on time. This state was an incoherent morass of infighting, egos, and pettiness, all bound together by the megalomania of Sheev Palpatine. He was a man who was so arrogant to believe that he would live forever, and was paranoid to a fault. Even in death the man loved to punish for its own sake, most obviously in Operation Cinder as portrayed in the first Alphabet Squadron book and the new Battlefront II (a move that reminds me very much of Sanji Iwabuchi’s order to his IJA troops, upon seeing that Manila would fall to the Americans any day now, to destroy as many buildings as possible and to rape as many women as possible, to give the Americans and the Filipinos nothing worth liberating). This was a man who, for decades, used a younger image of himself to avoid looking feeble, calling to mind Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s discussion of how strongmen think (Palpatine's depiction here reminds me of John Ganz's conception of a “creep loser” form of fascism). Much as Andor showed the coldness and the misery of the Empire on a personal level, Kempshall shows the dysfunction and immaturity underlying the Empire on a political level. The Death Stars are cast as impractical Nazi-like Wunderwaffen, intended to win any civil war through fear, neglecting that you also need doctrine. One bit near the end is telling: Kempshall talks of how, during the New Republic, Imperial reenactment groups proliferated while most of the rest of the galaxy, especially nonhumans, found the very idea offensive. I cannot help but read this as a critique of the real-world 501st Legion, the legion of fans who dress up in stormtrooper costumes and parade around, who on the one hand probably don’t know that the word “stormtrooper” came from World War I German shock troops, but have also gotten love from canon by becoming the namesake of Darth Vader’s personal formation of stormtroopers.
(Incidentally—this book solidified my belief that the closest real-world analogue to Darth Vader is Yevgeny Prigozhin.)
The book is very good in how it handles the fact that the Empire committed myriad atrocities, up to and including genocide. He treats Alderaan as not merely a spectacular explosion on screen, but as the calculated destruction of an entire way of life. He is very clearly horrified that his book cannot capture the wholeness of the death that the Empire meted out, and you can tell, as a veteran of the war against those who wanted to bring it all back, that it haunts him. He makes an interesting case that Order 66 should be considered the first Imperial genocide, which feels odd until you remember that he is treating the Jedi Order as a religious group, a group that was targeted because it stood for hope.
Kempshall succeeds in doing something I would have thought difficult: building out the universe in the sequel era. I have conflicted feelings about the sequel trilogy; I think, ultimately, that they are entertaining films when viewed by themselves, but it is clear that there was no thematic spine uniting them in the way that there was, for all its flaws, in the prequel trilogy. More damningly, in my mind, they failed to really build out the universe in an interesting way. Kempshall finds the thematic core that the sequels should have had, and runs with it: that era is about the consequences of winning the fight against tyranny, and how to build a better society on its ruins. The age of the First Order, he contends, is the age of the fight for the value of democracy, and how it must be fought again and again, inside every heart.
I finished this book wanting more like it, and not just for Star Wars; there’s a part of me that wants this for StarCraft, and Transformers, and Sonic the Hedgehog, and Command & Conquer. While I was reading this book on the Indigenous People’s Day holiday, I went to the local Barnes & Noble and bought Kempshall’s newest Star Wars book, on the history of space combat (which, I promise you, dear reader, I shall review for this blog in due course). This is the sort of book a very specific type of nerd has dreamed of for years, and now we are so lucky to have it. It is the type of book that takes worldbuilding seriously as an aspect of storytelling, while never letting worldbuilding overtake storytelling. It is a reminder to us that rebellions are built on hope, a lesson we, in this galaxy, need more than ever.
Reference: Kempshall, Chris. The Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire [Dorling Kindersley, 2024].
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
