Book Review: "Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire'
Cover Art by: Drew Struzan. (C) 1996 Penguin Random House Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Steve Perry's Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire , first published in 1996, is the centerpiece of a Lucasfilm multi-media marketing campaign that could be summed up with the tag line "Everything but the movie." Not only was Perry assigned to write the novel, but Kenner (now Hasbro) rolled out a line of action figures, Dark Horse Comics published a multi-issue series, Nintendo released a console-based game for its Nintendo 64 system, and Joel McNeeley ( The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles ) composed an original score. In short, all that was missing was a feature film. And what a film (animated, of course) Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire would have been! Although the novel is part of the Expanded Universe/Legends series that started with Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire, it's the first of the 1990s-era novels to explore the six-month or so time span betw...