A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

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...

Cover art by Two Dots. Cover Design by Scott Biel. (C) 2018 Del Rey Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) Star Wars book fans, rejoice. Timothy Zahn is back with a new canonical novel set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," a novel that features Emperor Palpatine's most feared servants: Lord Darth Vader and Grand Admiral Thrawn. On Tuesday, July 24, Random House's science fiction/fantasy imprint Del Rey Books published the U.S. edition of Star Wars: Thrawn: Alliances, the sequel to Zahn's New York Times bestselling novel from last year, Star Wars: Thrawn, which reintroduced a long-time fan favorite character from the former Expanded Universe and placed him in the "official" timeline to coincide with Thrawn's appearance as the main antagonist in Season Three of the  Star Wars Rebels animated series .  “I have sensed a disturbance in the Force.” Ominous words under any circumstances, but all the more so when uttered by Emperor Palpatine. ...

Cover art by Two Dots. (C) 2017 Del Rey Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On April 11, 2017, Del Rey Books, an imprint of Random House, published Timothy Zahn's canonical novel, Star Wars: Thrawn, the long-awaited origin story of one of the greatest villains ever created for the space-fantasy franchise set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." Grand Admiral Thrawn was originally conceived by Zahn in the early Nineties when Lucasfilm and Bantam Spectra hired the Hugo Award-winning author to reboot the moribund Star Wars Expanded Universe. Star Wars - Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. the final chapter of George Lucas's storied trilogy, was only followed by a handful of Lando Calrissian novels set before Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope and a lackluster Marvel Comics line that ended publication in 1986. And with the long-rumored Prequel Trilogy apparently on permanent hold, it looked as though the franchise itself was in danger of dying. The publication...

There are several explanations for Palpatine’s non-inclusion in  Star Wars,  aka  Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope. First, George Lucas hadn’t quite fleshed out the Original Trilogy that early in the history of the franchise. In 1976, when Lucas completed the fourth revised draft of  Star Wars,  he had already created the Emperor as a Nixon-like politician who was, to some extent, controlled by his henchmen. But since there was no  logical  way to include him in the film without putting him in mortal danger, Lucas decided to make Grand Moff Tarkin  A New Hope’s  main villain and saving the introduction of the Emperor for the sequel…assuming that  Star Wars  would at least be successful enough for Lucasfilm to produce one. “There is a great disturbance in the Force……” Second, by not introducing Palpatine in  A New Hope,  Lucas was hoping to create an aura of mystery around the one being who could truly command Da...