It's been a rough few days, so when I swung by the library, I looked for some good old-fashioned escapism. I came away with Shatterpoint [Amazon | Mysterious Galaxy] by Matthew Stover.

I'm a bit over halfway through, and it wasn't what I expected. A page-turner to be sure, with lots of fighting and action and light-sabery goodness. But there's something much deeper going on here.

Shatterpoint is set after Attack of the Clones. Mace Windu receives a troubling message from his former Padawan Depa Billaba. Now Mace must travel to the jungle world of Haruun Kal to find Depa and either save her or destroy her.

The thing that both impresses and disturbs me about the book is how it addresses one of the flaws of the whole Star Wars universe. In these movies, we see a galaxy at war. Over a million worlds. And yet the war is clean. Sterile. Ships popping out of existence in flashy explosions. Anonymous stormtroopers falling with bloodless blaster wounds. Even lightsabers leave cauterized, clean wounds. The horrors are there, but you never see them. An entire world blows up, and Obi Wan Kenobi gets a headache. That's it.

Stover shows us a world devastated by war. Depa Billaba was sent to help drive the separatists from Haruun Kal, and she's done so, but at what cost? The planet's people are divided, slaughtering one another in the jungles even after the galactic conflict has moved on.

Stover hammers the theme home. War is not a heroic band fighting their way past faceless enemies to blow up the Death Star and save the galaxy. It's watching your friends die of parasites and diseases, because you have no way of getting the basic medical treatment that could have saved them. It's a child stabbing a wounded soldier again and again, because that child has never known anything but war and hate. It's mutilating your enemies' bodies because you no longer see them as human. For Mace Windu, it's struggling to find the right path, the Jedi path, when all of your choices lead to darkness and death.

It's a powerful book. A little heavy-handed at times, perhaps. But I have a lot of respect for Stover for going beyond the flash-bang special effects and the relatively clean imagery of the movies and reminding readers that it ain't so.

Based on what I've read so far, I don't expect a neat or happy ending. But then, I suspect that's the whole point.