Scan barcode
A review by blancwene
The Ruins of Dantooine: Star Wars Galaxies Legends by Voronica Whitney-Robinson
2.0
More like 1.5 stars ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
For 2022, I decided to go back in time and reread all the Prequels Era novels published between 1999 and 2005, plus a smidgen of other novels (like [b:Survivor's Quest|46623|Star Wars Survivor's Quest|Timothy Zahn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330605305l/46623._SY75_.jpg|1197542] and the Dark Nest trilogy) released during that time frame. This shakes out to 21 novels, four eBook novellas, and at least thirteen short stories.
This week’s focus: the first (??) Star Wars video game tie-in novel, Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine by Voronica Whitney-Robinson with W. Haden Blackman.
SOME HISTORY:
Voronica Whitney-Robinson wrote very fast. Star Wars Galaxies (often abbreviated SWG), the massive multiplayer online role playing game was set to come out in the summer of 2003, and Lucasarts and Del Rey decided that maybe a tie-in novel would be the way to go. So they reached out to Whitney-Robinson, who had previously written novels for Wizards of the Coast; she submitted an outline of the story in August, and by early September she had already written half the story. Considering that Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine was published on December 30, 2003, I would say that Whitney-Robinson is a very speedy author indeed!
MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK:
This novel was one that I might have heard about, but I never saw in the flesh and never felt compelled to seek it out—mostly because I had never played SWG, and had no interest in doing so. It wasn’t until I started compiling my list of prequel releases that I realized that this was a Star Wars book at all
A BRIEF SUMMARY:
Hidden within the Jedi ruins on Dantooine is a holocron that contains the names of Rebel sympathizers—and if this information were to get into the hands of the Empire, it would cause innumerable deaths. So former Imperial bioengineer Dusque Mistflier and Rebel operative Finn Darktrin are dispatched to retrieve the holocron. But Dusque will learn that the hardest part of this mission is figuring out whose side you're on, and how far you're willing to go to win…
STAR WARS GALAXIES: THE GAME:
Some background on Star Wars Galaxies: it was a Star Wars-themed massive multiplayer online role playing game, or MMORPG, developed by Sony Online Entertainment and published by Lucasarts for Windows computers. There was originally a plan to also release it for consoles, but that never panned out. The base game titled Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided was released on June 26, 2003 in the USA and later in the rest of the world, and the base game was upgraded with three major expansions between 2003-2005. (In addition to the initial cost of the software, there was also a monthly subscription fee of 14.99 USD, but there were discounts if you subscribed for long periods of time.)
A combat upgrade was released in April 2005 that was a major rewrite of the combat armor and weapons systems—basically meaning that only certain professions could use specific weapons and armors—and this resulted in a lot of controversy from players who criticized the changes and canceled their subscriptions. Another set of game changes dubbed the New Game Enhancements (NGE) began testing in November of 2005 and went live later that month. These changes reduced the number of 34 original professions to nine, and once again there was lots of criticism of these changes. But people were still playing this game up until 2011, when Sony Online Entertainment announced that they would permanently shut down Star Wars Galaxies in December 2011. However, even after that shutdown people still play SWG in emulator form, so even though it's an old game at this point, there's still a lot of nostalgia surrounding it.
THE PLOT AND CHARACTERS:
I guess Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine was an attempt to get book readers interested in this online game, but I think that if you have played SWG in the past, you’ll get more enjoyment out of this book than a complete newbie would. There are easter eggs of locations and items that appear within the game, but someone unfamiliar with the game won’t pick up on them at all.
I feel like Del Rey really did this story dirty by giving it such a bad cover. It's obviously artwork from the game, but it's that sort of middling-to-low quality CGI stuff from the early 2000s—and I think that an actual illustration would have done a lot better to sell me this as a legit SW book.
The Ruins of Dantooine follows our heroine Dusque Mistflier, an Imperial bioengineer from Talus. As the story progresses, she becomes frustrated with both her role as well as what the Empire is doing, and she ends up joining the Rebels and helping them with this fetch quest. She's joined for most of the journey by Finn Darktrin (not that Finn), a Rebel operative who’s been dispatched to get Dusque and convert her to the Rebel cause because she has the right credentials to get them on Dantooine to retrieve the holocron for Princess Leia and the Rebel leaders.
I did wonder why they were retrieving a holocron, because my understanding was that Jedi holocrons and Sith holocrons could only be accessed by someone with Force abilities, but I guess that within the game holocrons are used to store information? Maybe there's a third kind of holocron that anyone can access? Because if not, the climactic ending really couldn't have worked out.
When we first meet Dusque, she's on Nabooaccompanied by a fellow bioengineer who is an Ithorian (you know, these guys). She attends some sort of animal fight-to-the-death coliseum event and is disgusted by it, then goes into a casino. There's a one-page cameo appearance by Lando Calrissian which really felt like a video game move, and then she meets Finn. He makes her question things about the Empire, but she makes no decisions and heads off on a side quest with her Ithorian companion in search of these giant bats on one of Naboo's moons.
They head back to Naboo and the Ithorian is arrested and executed by the Imperials. This is what initially converts Dusque to the Rebel cause, because she wants to get revenge for her colleague. Dusque and Finn head to Lok, complete a fetch quest, meet Han Solo….and are not transported in the Millennium Falcon to the Rebel base, but instead just follow Han? They crash on Corellia, walk with C-3PO to the secret Rebel base, meet Luke and Leia, and are given their mission.
It's not until chapter 10 (of 15) that they finally leave for Dantooine—there's a lot more traveling, they get the holocron, they make it off Dantooine, and then So as the book ends, Finn is back with the Imperials, still in their good graces, and Dusque is alive and 100% on the Rebel’s side.
You think “okay, they're probably going to show up in some other story and interact again” but unfortunately that's it for these characters. Whitney-Robinson wrote a short story prequel to The Ruins of Dantooine that was published in Star Wars Insider, but that's really it as far as I could tell. She didn't write anything more in the Star Wars universe, or really anything more at all. Her author bio says that she's a marine biologist who lives in Washington state, so maybe she decided she didn't like writing tie-in novels and just wanted to focus on her real job.
ISSUES:
The Ruins of Dantooine is like a spy/intrigue story with a stealth romance plot. I had no idea going into it that the romance between Dusque and Finn would play such a huge part in the story, but it does. It’s OK, I guess? It’s not the best romance, but since I was not expecting any romance I was rather thrown by it.
I was also not expecting the sheer number of side quests that appear here. They don’t even head to the titular planet until two-thirds into the story, mostly because of all these useless side quests and fetch quests—many of which have no relevance to the greater plot, and seemed more like an opportunity to show the different worlds that appear in SWG.
And there are a lot of descriptions of different creatures on every planet they visit. Dusque is a bioengineer, so it makes sense that she would note them all, but there are so many different creatures, their eating habits, their temperament, their prey and their predators, and I found most of them uninteresting additions to the story.
I also wish that the appearance of Original Trilogy characters had been a little better integrated into the story. Because as it stands, they feel like unnecessary cameo appearances. Lando didn’t need to be there at all; I thought that Han would give them a ride, but he didn't; and Leia’s behavior with Dusque seemed to indicate a closer relationship than they actually had. Even the fact that Luke rescues Dusque at the end felt like an illogical reach.
But most of all, the novel felt very fanfiction to me. Characters like Dusque Mistflier and Finn Darktrin sound like something thrown out of a Star Wars name generator. It's hard to get a grasp on Finn, because he never talks about himself—and then he ends up being an Imperial agent anyway. Dusque was nice, but I wish that Whitney-Robinson had not used the trope of Dusque being not like other girls, because if she truly doesn’t care about her appearance why does she have waist-length hair?? As someone who has had very long hair in the past, that is not a no maintenance hairstyle.
I also felt like there were a lot of mentions of the fact that since Dusque is a woman in Imperial service, she’s never considered for promotions and no one pays attention to her. It’s probably true, but it felt clunkily integrated into the story. I wish that could have played a bigger role into why she chooses to side with the Rebellion—not just her family history, and the Ithorian being executed in front of her, but the realization that she's never going to accomplish anything within the Empire, that her morals and ideals do not align with the Empire, and that she doesn't see herself with a future there.
IN CONCLUSION:
I sometimes see The Ruins of Dantooine described as the worst Star Wars novel, or one of the worst SW novels, and I don't think it is…I do think that the amount of time Whitney-Robinson spent on the story is reflected in the quality of the plot and characterization. I wish that The Ruins of Dantooine wasn't so heavily dependent on knowledge of Star Wars Galaxies, because all the video game aspects like cameos by Original Trilogy characters and endless side quests took away from the story. Since we never revisit these characters again, they don't get a chance to develop and grow—it's just generic Imperial agent masquerading as a Rebel, and generic Imperial scientist who realizes the wrongs of her ways. Whitney-Robinson obviously had a lot of fun with all the creatures and locations visited, but it's a mediocre intrigue/quest story, and not really important for your understanding of anything in Star Wars. (And yes, I still wish that it had gotten a better cover!)
Next up: an eBook about the stormtroopers from [b:Survivor's Quest|46623|Star Wars Survivor's Quest|Timothy Zahn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330605305l/46623._SY75_.jpg|1197542], [b:Fool's Bargain|2056957|Fool's Bargain (Star Wars)|Timothy Zahn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1215545924l/2056957._SY75_.jpg|2062136] by Timothy Zahn
My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/heAz2GPMdJ8
Voronica Whitney-Robinson: The Fastest Pen in the Galaxy? (February 2004): https://web.archive.org/web/20090718194041/http://www.starwars.com/vault/books/0201004news.html
Homing Beacon #96 - Exploring the Ruins of Dantooine (June 2003): https://web.archive.org/web/20050205105355/http://www.starwars.com/eu/lit/novel/beacon96.html
For 2022, I decided to go back in time and reread all the Prequels Era novels published between 1999 and 2005, plus a smidgen of other novels (like [b:Survivor's Quest|46623|Star Wars Survivor's Quest|Timothy Zahn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330605305l/46623._SY75_.jpg|1197542] and the Dark Nest trilogy) released during that time frame. This shakes out to 21 novels, four eBook novellas, and at least thirteen short stories.
This week’s focus: the first (??) Star Wars video game tie-in novel, Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine by Voronica Whitney-Robinson with W. Haden Blackman.
SOME HISTORY:
Voronica Whitney-Robinson wrote very fast. Star Wars Galaxies (often abbreviated SWG), the massive multiplayer online role playing game was set to come out in the summer of 2003, and Lucasarts and Del Rey decided that maybe a tie-in novel would be the way to go. So they reached out to Whitney-Robinson, who had previously written novels for Wizards of the Coast; she submitted an outline of the story in August, and by early September she had already written half the story. Considering that Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine was published on December 30, 2003, I would say that Whitney-Robinson is a very speedy author indeed!
MY RECOLLECTION OF THE BOOK:
This novel was one that I might have heard about, but I never saw in the flesh and never felt compelled to seek it out—mostly because I had never played SWG, and had no interest in doing so. It wasn’t until I started compiling my list of prequel releases that I realized that this was a Star Wars book at all
A BRIEF SUMMARY:
Hidden within the Jedi ruins on Dantooine is a holocron that contains the names of Rebel sympathizers—and if this information were to get into the hands of the Empire, it would cause innumerable deaths. So former Imperial bioengineer Dusque Mistflier and Rebel operative Finn Darktrin are dispatched to retrieve the holocron. But Dusque will learn that the hardest part of this mission is figuring out whose side you're on, and how far you're willing to go to win…
STAR WARS GALAXIES: THE GAME:
Some background on Star Wars Galaxies: it was a Star Wars-themed massive multiplayer online role playing game, or MMORPG, developed by Sony Online Entertainment and published by Lucasarts for Windows computers. There was originally a plan to also release it for consoles, but that never panned out. The base game titled Star Wars Galaxies: An Empire Divided was released on June 26, 2003 in the USA and later in the rest of the world, and the base game was upgraded with three major expansions between 2003-2005. (In addition to the initial cost of the software, there was also a monthly subscription fee of 14.99 USD, but there were discounts if you subscribed for long periods of time.)
A combat upgrade was released in April 2005 that was a major rewrite of the combat armor and weapons systems—basically meaning that only certain professions could use specific weapons and armors—and this resulted in a lot of controversy from players who criticized the changes and canceled their subscriptions. Another set of game changes dubbed the New Game Enhancements (NGE) began testing in November of 2005 and went live later that month. These changes reduced the number of 34 original professions to nine, and once again there was lots of criticism of these changes. But people were still playing this game up until 2011, when Sony Online Entertainment announced that they would permanently shut down Star Wars Galaxies in December 2011. However, even after that shutdown people still play SWG in emulator form, so even though it's an old game at this point, there's still a lot of nostalgia surrounding it.
THE PLOT AND CHARACTERS:
I guess Star Wars Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine was an attempt to get book readers interested in this online game, but I think that if you have played SWG in the past, you’ll get more enjoyment out of this book than a complete newbie would. There are easter eggs of locations and items that appear within the game, but someone unfamiliar with the game won’t pick up on them at all.
I feel like Del Rey really did this story dirty by giving it such a bad cover. It's obviously artwork from the game, but it's that sort of middling-to-low quality CGI stuff from the early 2000s—and I think that an actual illustration would have done a lot better to sell me this as a legit SW book.
The Ruins of Dantooine follows our heroine Dusque Mistflier, an Imperial bioengineer from Talus. As the story progresses, she becomes frustrated with both her role as well as what the Empire is doing, and she ends up joining the Rebels and helping them with this fetch quest. She's joined for most of the journey by Finn Darktrin (not that Finn), a Rebel operative who’s been dispatched to get Dusque and convert her to the Rebel cause because she has the right credentials to get them on Dantooine to retrieve the holocron for Princess Leia and the Rebel leaders.
I did wonder why they were retrieving a holocron, because my understanding was that Jedi holocrons and Sith holocrons could only be accessed by someone with Force abilities, but I guess that within the game holocrons are used to store information? Maybe there's a third kind of holocron that anyone can access? Because if not, the climactic ending really couldn't have worked out.
When we first meet Dusque, she's on Nabooaccompanied by a fellow bioengineer who is an Ithorian (you know, these guys). She attends some sort of animal fight-to-the-death coliseum event and is disgusted by it, then goes into a casino. There's a one-page cameo appearance by Lando Calrissian which really felt like a video game move, and then she meets Finn. He makes her question things about the Empire, but she makes no decisions and heads off on a side quest with her Ithorian companion in search of these giant bats on one of Naboo's moons.
They head back to Naboo and the Ithorian is arrested and executed by the Imperials. This is what initially converts Dusque to the Rebel cause, because she wants to get revenge for her colleague. Dusque and Finn head to Lok, complete a fetch quest, meet Han Solo….and are not transported in the Millennium Falcon to the Rebel base, but instead just follow Han? They crash on Corellia, walk with C-3PO to the secret Rebel base, meet Luke and Leia, and are given their mission.
It's not until chapter 10 (of 15) that they finally leave for Dantooine—there's a lot more traveling, they get the holocron, they make it off Dantooine, and then
Spoiler
it is revealed that all along Finn has been an Imperial operative deep undercover with the Rebels. He's able to send some of the names from the holocron to his superiors, but Dusque gets the holocron and jettisons it into space—and he stabs her! It should be fatal, but Luke Skywalker and some other rebels show up and save her just in time.You think “okay, they're probably going to show up in some other story and interact again” but unfortunately that's it for these characters. Whitney-Robinson wrote a short story prequel to The Ruins of Dantooine that was published in Star Wars Insider, but that's really it as far as I could tell. She didn't write anything more in the Star Wars universe, or really anything more at all. Her author bio says that she's a marine biologist who lives in Washington state, so maybe she decided she didn't like writing tie-in novels and just wanted to focus on her real job.
ISSUES:
The Ruins of Dantooine is like a spy/intrigue story with a stealth romance plot. I had no idea going into it that the romance between Dusque and Finn would play such a huge part in the story, but it does. It’s OK, I guess? It’s not the best romance, but since I was not expecting any romance I was rather thrown by it.
I was also not expecting the sheer number of side quests that appear here. They don’t even head to the titular planet until two-thirds into the story, mostly because of all these useless side quests and fetch quests—many of which have no relevance to the greater plot, and seemed more like an opportunity to show the different worlds that appear in SWG.
And there are a lot of descriptions of different creatures on every planet they visit. Dusque is a bioengineer, so it makes sense that she would note them all, but there are so many different creatures, their eating habits, their temperament, their prey and their predators, and I found most of them uninteresting additions to the story.
I also wish that the appearance of Original Trilogy characters had been a little better integrated into the story. Because as it stands, they feel like unnecessary cameo appearances. Lando didn’t need to be there at all; I thought that Han would give them a ride, but he didn't; and Leia’s behavior with Dusque seemed to indicate a closer relationship than they actually had. Even the fact that Luke rescues Dusque at the end felt like an illogical reach.
But most of all, the novel felt very fanfiction to me. Characters like Dusque Mistflier and Finn Darktrin sound like something thrown out of a Star Wars name generator. It's hard to get a grasp on Finn, because he never talks about himself—and then he ends up being an Imperial agent anyway. Dusque was nice, but I wish that Whitney-Robinson had not used the trope of Dusque being not like other girls, because if she truly doesn’t care about her appearance why does she have waist-length hair?? As someone who has had very long hair in the past, that is not a no maintenance hairstyle.
I also felt like there were a lot of mentions of the fact that since Dusque is a woman in Imperial service, she’s never considered for promotions and no one pays attention to her. It’s probably true, but it felt clunkily integrated into the story. I wish that could have played a bigger role into why she chooses to side with the Rebellion—not just her family history, and the Ithorian being executed in front of her, but the realization that she's never going to accomplish anything within the Empire, that her morals and ideals do not align with the Empire, and that she doesn't see herself with a future there.
IN CONCLUSION:
I sometimes see The Ruins of Dantooine described as the worst Star Wars novel, or one of the worst SW novels, and I don't think it is…I do think that the amount of time Whitney-Robinson spent on the story is reflected in the quality of the plot and characterization. I wish that The Ruins of Dantooine wasn't so heavily dependent on knowledge of Star Wars Galaxies, because all the video game aspects like cameos by Original Trilogy characters and endless side quests took away from the story. Since we never revisit these characters again, they don't get a chance to develop and grow—it's just generic Imperial agent masquerading as a Rebel, and generic Imperial scientist who realizes the wrongs of her ways. Whitney-Robinson obviously had a lot of fun with all the creatures and locations visited, but it's a mediocre intrigue/quest story, and not really important for your understanding of anything in Star Wars. (And yes, I still wish that it had gotten a better cover!)
Next up: an eBook about the stormtroopers from [b:Survivor's Quest|46623|Star Wars Survivor's Quest|Timothy Zahn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1330605305l/46623._SY75_.jpg|1197542], [b:Fool's Bargain|2056957|Fool's Bargain (Star Wars)|Timothy Zahn|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1215545924l/2056957._SY75_.jpg|2062136] by Timothy Zahn
My YouTube review: https://youtu.be/heAz2GPMdJ8
Voronica Whitney-Robinson: The Fastest Pen in the Galaxy? (February 2004): https://web.archive.org/web/20090718194041/http://www.starwars.com/vault/books/0201004news.html
Homing Beacon #96 - Exploring the Ruins of Dantooine (June 2003): https://web.archive.org/web/20050205105355/http://www.starwars.com/eu/lit/novel/beacon96.html