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Increasingly, I find the popularity of the Empire disturbing.

The fact that cosplayers dress as Stormtroopers in massive numbers, that there are plushy Darth Vaders for sale (or cute little kid Vaders starting their parents' cars with the force), that our girls are meant to look up to First Order ultra-thug Captain Phasma (and it's supposed to be a positive step forward for women in general), that Empire aesthetic is cool, and that we now have peeks into the making of the Empire's greatest criminals, peeks which humanize them and make them at least somewhat sympathetic (as James Luceno does) is at the heart of this disturbance.

It is a massive shift from the way we consumed Star Wars in the seventies and eighties, the time when the Empire was seen as universally evil and beyond redemption. Now, however, the Empire has become only sort of bad, and members of the Empire are impressive for their power, their loyalty, the conviction, their military brilliance, their embracing of order.

It seems to me that this is all a reflection of the shift in our society, in our world of Forever Terror War. So a book like Tarkin, that I might have admired forty years ago as providing some balance to the black and white of the Star Wars universe, feels now, instead, like a tiny part of a greater movement in our culture, wherein the Tarkins and Vaders and Emperors are, once again, to be looked up to and understood as inspirational figures, figures of authority that we should bow to, whose decisions should be accepted, regardless of what those decisions would mean for us (and do mean for us) in the real world.

I am not saying this well, so I will try and boil it down.

Something in me feels more and more that Tarkin (and his Star Wars cronies) are slowly becoming peoples' heroes, and that scares me. Genocidal maniacs are not to be honoured and revered, even if they are fictional. They should be feared and reviled.