The Doomsday Ship

Note: While the below text represents a brief review of this specific Star Wars: Galaxy of Fear entry, a greater retrospective on the entire series, complete with images and footnotes, can be found here on my site, dendrobibliography.

The Doomsday Ship is the most isolated entry in the Galaxy of Fear series. After Project Starscream was laid to rest, the followup adventures have shown themselves to be standalone horror yarns, but still giving attention to character development.

Tash, Zak, and uncle Hoole are still trying to get a proper vacation after barely escaping their six encounters with Boborygmus Gog, and this time has them on an intergalactic cruise ship. The Doomdsday Ship focuses on the younger brother, Zak -- the more hands-on show more and tech-friendly of the siblings -- who's more interested in how the ship's engines and AI work. Early on, he's introduced to the ship's custom-made AI system, SIM, who befriends Zak and shows him some of the ship's nerdy luxuries (video games!). Before they can get too far, however, the ship suffers an emergency evacuation, forcing everyone but our heroes (of course...) off the ship.

Something murderous and psychopathic is gaining control of the ship's systems, causing the on-board robots to attack, siccing the ship's menagerie of predators on our heroes, cutting oxygen supplies and heating the atmosphere to the boiling point. Dash Rendar provides this entry's cameo appearance, and he's handled fairly well. (Not too difficult, as he's basically a younger clone of Han Solo with less catchphrases.)

This 10th entry keeps up the thrills and cleverness of the last three books, but has a share of issues, as well. Tash takes a backseat to Zak and barely says a word through the entire adventure. It's easy to forget she's even there. Neither Zak or Tash undergo much in the way of character development, which only makes this monster-of-the-week story feel even more isolated. Zak does learn to respect some of Tash's teachings in the Force, but they're short-lived lessons he'll forget by the next book. Hoole is also gone for most of the novella, and appears at the very end to uncharacteristically put both Zak and Tash into extreme danger by acting recklessly.

The implications of AI are a little out of step with Star Wars' canon or EU material. But still, the Doomsday Ship is really fun, and one of the more violent entries. The body count is massive and painful (and a little predictable -- anyone without a name will die). The real villain's identity -- SIM -- is falsely hidden for too long. The narrative makes it obvious early on (even to the target YA audience), but Zak densely ignores the obvious until he finally spells it out to himself. Time is wasted casting suspicion on Dash Rendar, who was a popular Star Wars hero at the time of release (1998), and readers were likely to be aware of that.

Despite the issues, the series was still fun by this entry, and worth reading for either young Star Wars or horror fans already invested in the characters. It's still better than the earlier stories, and I'll be sad to reach the series' end with the twelfth book.

John Whitman's Star Wars: Galaxy of Fear (1997–1998):
#9 Spore | #11 Clones show less