“Everyone is a monster.”
For a novel about one of the lousiest characters in the Star Wars Disney-era sequel series, Delilah Dawson’s Phasma offers a surprisingly rollicking tale. The backstory to Captain Phasma, Finn’s chief nemesis in the sequel film trilogy, is recounted primarily by Resistance spy Vi Moradi (the main character in the novel Black Spire) as she is captured, interrogated, and tortured aboard the Absolution by First Order leader Captain Cardinal (a man who was once taken from the planet Jakku by First Order leader Brendol Hux, and who now dons his signature bright red First Order armor). His role in the First Order is to recruit, brainwash, and train young potential stormtroopers, but lately he has become convinced his First Order rival Captain Phasma is secretly a traitor (or at least he despises her for receiving special favor among the First Order elite). He breaks protocol and takes Resistance spy Vi Moradi into a secret room and demands information on Captain Phasma, knowing that she had recently been sent off to the planet Parnassos to investigate Phasma’s backstory.
Vi tries to delay her torture and build a rapport with Cardinal by recalling a lengthy story about Phasma on Parnassos, an apocalyptic, barren, lawless world filled with endless deserts and rising ocean waves. It is Mad Max meets Star Wars. The people on the planet are ruled by marauding bands of warlords like the Claw and Scyre, and there are also elements of Dune plagiarized here (like the detraxor machines which extract bodily nutrients and liquids). The tribes struggle with few children born, and they retreat to hammocks over the water as well as an ancestral cave known as the “Nautilus” where sacred relics are stored. Throughout the novel there is an ongoing tension between Phasma and her brother Keldo who does not approve of her decisions, as well as a subtle conflict between Phasma and another female named Siv who becomes pregnant with the child of one of the other warriors named Torben.
Vi explains how Phasma rose to become a fearsome warrior and assassinated her tribal leader when a First Order leader suddenly appeared on Parnassos. It was Brendol Hux (father of Armitage Hux in the sequel films), a man who Phasma saw as her ticket to a better life. Vi describes how Phasma journeyed together with Hux across the planet to the places where her tribe has never visited before –vast deserts filled with countless poisonous blood-sucking beetles and fearsome lizards. There, they find a long abandoned underground droid-run mining company (the Con Star Mining Corporation) where they are temporarily enslaved before escaping only to be captured again by a whole city run by an “Arratu” (it was known as Arratu Station, once a fabric manufacturer for the Con Star Mining Corporation). Here they are forced to fight in a gladiatorial ring for entertainment before Phasma assassinates the Arratu thus taking his place.
They escape Arratu and finally locate Hux’s ship where he contacts the First Order. The First Order then sends a black star destroyer to rescue them. From here, Phasma begins eliminating all remnants of her past. She murders her brother Keldo and watches silently as Brendol Hux destroys her former community on Parnassos (especially the Nautilus) as well as the Arratu city. She then abandons Siv and her newborn child “Torbi” on Parnassos before they depart (partly a punishment for Siv’s disobedience during their gladiatorial adventure). We later learn that Siv was left in the Con Star mining facility for ten years before Vi Moradi had arrived to investigate Phasma’s past and Vi found her still living there. Therefore, Siv is the chief source of all information on Phasma’s background. At any rate, Phasma later poisons Hux with one of the poisonous blood beetles (though Cardinal later learns that Phasma and Armitage Hux actually conspired to kill Brendol Hux). Cardinal confronts Phasma with a poison-tipped blade given to him by Vi, but during the brutal scuffle, Phasma turns the tables on Cardinal and stabs him, poisoning him. Phasma reveals her face to him as he lies dying on the floor. Shortly thereafter, Vi escapes from her interrogation room and rescues Cardinal, taking him away to receive urgent medical care from the Resistance.
In the final flashback scene in the novel, Phasma returns to Parnassos where she captures a blood beetle and revisits Hux’s crashed ship –which is actually revealed to be Palpatine’s former Naboo yacht from the prequels. She strips the ship of its chrome exterior and begins to construct her own shiny unique armor plates, in part with the help of abandoned machinery at Cleo Station, another former Con Star factory where the workers all poisoned themselves long ago after a famine destroyed their crops.
Thus ends the novel. The only reason I read this book was to gain a broader understanding of the lore behind Black Spire and the Galaxy’s Edge theme park attraction, but I was somewhat pleasantly surprised with this adventure. The best parts of this novel can be found in the expansive, fascinating world-construction on Phasma’s homeworld of Parnassos –a world of remote warlords and abandoned mining outposts as well as deadly blood beetles. This offered fertile ground for some captivating quests throughout the novel. However, there is also a ridiculous amount of graphic brutality in this novel and the whole characterization of Cardinal as a “villain with a secret heart of gold” is pretty flimsy. The back-and-forth between Cardinal and Vi Moradi during her torture sequence is cringeworthy at best and as I read along I continued to ask myself: what is the point of the First Order? What are they trying to achieve? Why are they so unbelievably vicious? All things considered, this was an entertaining adventure, though I remain fairly unimpressed with the new Disney “Canon” era of Star Wars literature. Thankfully we still have the old Expanded Universe to return to for refuge.
Dawson, Delilah S. Phasma. Del Rey Books. New York, New York (2017).