Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi: Into The Void Review

This week I decided to review Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi: Into The Void by Tim Lebbon. The book is set more than 25,000 years before the Star Wars movie and focuses on the Tython system and the  Je'daii Order, which eventually evolves into the Jedi Order of the Old Republic. It starts with a Je’daii Ranger named Lanoree Brock, who is recalled to Tython, the order’s homeworld. There she is assigned to hunt down her younger brother, Dalien, whom she believed had died years earlier. The Je’daii have discovered that Dalien is alive and has become one of the leaders of a cult seeking to develop or discover a means of interstellar travel. Unfortunately Dalien’s plan involves using dark matter to reactivate an ancient hypergate, and the Je'daii leadership believes that the attempt will result in the creation of a black hole which will destroy the entire solar system. Lanoree races across the system seeking to stop her brother's plan, aided by a Twi’lek rogue named Tre. The story is broken up with a number of flashbacks to Lanoree’s childhood, mostly events leading to when Dalien faked his death to escape the Je’daii Order.

I give the book a 6 out of 10. The overall story is interesting, and there’s even a nice little space battle in it, but there are several points which show laziness or a lack of research by the author and editor. To be more specific there’s a member of species which the Jedi aren’t supposed to encounter until  almost 20,000 years after the events of the book serving as a police captain on a world described as the jewel of the system which was the Jedi  Order’s birth place, and an assassin from a species which all evidence indicates hadn’t even developed the steam engine more than 25 millennia after the book's end, and native to a system in the region of the galaxy furthest from Tython. And no explanations are given for their presence in the system during a period when neither of their species, nor the inhabitants of the Tython system have access to any working means of interstellar travel.