Having decided to add a couple of Star Wars books to my to-read list, I just finished Reign of The Empire: The Mask of Fear by Alexanxder Freedman. Following in the steps of Andor, Mask of Fear is a political thriller set in the aftermath of Revenge of The Sith: the lasers and spaceships are less important than the machinery of government — this is a book about what happens when a republic is replaced with an empire. The Galactic Republic’s transition into the Galactic Empire tends to get glazed over a lot in Star Wars. Most stories that deal with the aftermath of Revenge of The Sith are less concerned with political restructuring than they are with Usual Star Wars Stuff, whether it’s the Dark Lord novelbeing about Darth Vader’s early days as a Sith Lord, The Bad Batch’s focus on Clone Trooper stuff, The Last of The Jedi following a Jedi surviving a post-Order 66 world.
All this to say, Mask of Fear is fairly uncharted territory for Star Wars.* It’s also a book that feels surprisingly relevant to the United States in 2025.
Palpatine has ended the Clone Wars and declared himself Emperor. With the new order comes a reorganization of power, new rules and new systems to legitimatize the new government. The novel follows the transformation from Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and Saw Gerrera’s perspectives as they adapt and respond to the new regime. Saw, ever the revolutionary, makes ready for war. He once used the assistance of the Republic to fight the Separatists off his home planet, now he seeks the tools of the Separatists to fight the Empire. One fight has been replaced with another; another oppressor — tyranny by another name. Bail is the idealist — one of the few who knows the depths of Palpatine’s treachery, he hopes that by exposing the innocence of the Jedi he might sway public opinion enough that the masses will revolt against the Empire. The truth, he believes, will set them free — if the people only knew who Palpatine really was then his grasp of power would surely falter.
In the process, the novel gets into how Palpatine is seen by those masses. The Emperor, it turns out, is decidedly well-liked. Described as a populist politician, Palpatine enjoys approval from the general public. Most people accept his telling of the Jedi assassination attempt, believing that the Jedi did indeed grow jealous of his power and influence and try to stop him. Not only that, but Palpatine is credited with ending the Clone Wars, a war that was made all too real to the people of Coruscant in the space battle that opened Revenge of The Sith. The Empire is a new era of stability, an era of peace.
Mon Mothma’s known opposition to Palpatine’s policies — even when he was Chancellor — has marked her a potential troublemaker and her pushback against the new order is seen as more of the same. She’s watched and stalked by the Imperial Security Bureau and Imperial loyalists alike. Pro-Imperial protestors greet her at rallies and events. An ardent supporter of Palpatine breaks into her home with the intent of murdering her but, unable to find the Senator, settles for her assistant. It’s hard to not see echoes of the current American political moment reflected in the story, especially when the novel touches on some of the details of Palpatine’s reforms.
Early in the novel, Mon laments being unable to keep up with Palpatine’s myriad changes, complaining that “Every day, there’s some new edict from the grand vizier citing the Emperor’s authority, judicial appointments no one asked for, an entirely new plan for this regional governor business…they’re deliberately burying us in changes” (22). Palpatine, like another demagogue, is flooding the zone, doing a lot rapidly to keep any opposition on the off-foot, forced to grasp at something to counter before finding a new emergency to scramble after. No one, not the public, the media, or the other politicians, can keep track of it all — something will fall through the cracks unchallenged.
The instituting of regional governors is not one of those smaller changes, but it’s certainly one of the more consequential. Palpatine loyalists are installed in the new positions and tasked with overseeing swaths of the galaxy — and ushering in more of the new Imperial order. Mon Mothma meets many of them at a gala and it’s through them that we learn some of the rhetoric espoused by the new administration. There is a governor with ideas about family structures, one has “…thoughts on “species compatibility,” a term Mon knew only as an archaic euphemism employed by human supremacists,” another uses the “moral value of toil” (123) to veil bringing back slavery. Mon, herself no stranger to realpolitik, is nonetheless still taken aback by the brazenness of it all. About one governor in particular she wonders:
“If he was sincere, he was espousing the rhetoric of a thousand tyrannies. If he wasn’t, he was a monster, advocating for what he knew to be monstrous.” (123)
Again, it’s hard to read the doublespeak, the subtly overt cruelty, the intimations towards returning to regressive social norms and not be reminded of, well, the right now. An American president rules by fiat, concentration camps are being funded by taxpayer money, by a government whose upper echelons are filled with loyalists and groveling sycophants. Mask of Fear, announced in July of 2024 with writing no doubt started long before then, was probably not meant to be a commentary on the United States in the Spring of 2025; more likely its underpinning is a treatise on regime change and the rise of autocracy. In the acknowledgements, author Alexander Freed thanks “a nearly endless list of journalists, historians, and political memoirists whose work provided fodder and food for thought” (464). Great political thinking went into the writing of this book. That this novel about the rise of a space opera’s Galactic Empire should so closely mirror current events is perhaps heavier an indictment of where the United States is right now than most satire.
All of Bail, Saw, and Mon’s efforts are doomed to fail. The novel takes place nearly 19 years before The Battle of Yavin, when the Rebel Alliance is only a dream. But the story isn’t about rebellion — not just yet anyway. It’s about the environment that builds resistance, it’s about the seeds of dissent. The Empire — in whatever form it takes — may reign supreme, but the rebellion will come. And someday too: freedom.
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*Or at least for me in Star Wars. It’s perfectly possible I’m missing something from the EU or the new canon.
Essays, Not Rants! 