A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

Cover art by Tara Philips. © 2019 Disney-Lucasfilm Press Well, Dear Readers, it's Friday again, and here I am with a new Star Wars book about Padme Amidala, a character who is prominent in the franchise as the secret wife of the Man Who Will Be Vader and the ill-fated mother of the Skywalker Twins (Luke and Leia). Best of all, we get to revisit our favorite galaxy far, far away during a period that has not been explored much since the House of Mouse purchased Lucasfilm from George "the Maker" Lucas almost seven years ago: the Prequel Era. On March 5, Disney-Lucasfilm Press published E.K. Johnston's Star Wars: Queen's Shadow, a novel set four years after the events of Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In this all-new canonical novel by the author of Star Wars: Ahsoka, we get to follow the 18-year-old Padme as she makes the life-changing transition from being the elected monarch of Naboo to the challenging and perhaps even perilous world of galactic p...

Cover art by Doug Wheatley. © 2014 Del Rey Books, an imprint of Random House, and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) A NEW DAWN For a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights brought peace and order to the Galactic Republic, aided by their connection to the mystical energy field known as the Force. But they were betrayed--and the whole galaxy has paid the price. It is the Age of the Empire. Now Emperor Palpatine, once chancellor of the Republic and secretly a Sith follower of the dark side of the Force, has brought his own peace and order to the galaxy. Peace, through brutal repression--and order, through increasing control of his subjects' lives. But even as the Emperor tightens his iron grip, others have begun to question his means and motives. And still others, whose lives were destroyed by Palpatine's machinations, lay scattered about the galaxy like unexploded bombs, waiting to go off.... - "Title Crawl" from John Jackson Miller's Star Wars; A ...

Cover art by Drew Struzan. (C) 1998 Bantam Spectra and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) One of the side effects of creating a literary "expanded universe" of a popular movie or television series is the studio's licensing division coming in and saying to a diverse group of authors something like  Okay, go ahead and write novels based on our characters and situations and carry the story forward, even though what counts as the Official Story is what we show on movie screens or TV shows. We will vet almost anything so long as it doesn't seriously contradict or affect any past or future project we may have later on. Lovely idea, this, since it keeps the fans happy with new stories set in their favorite universes and gives them new insights into the offscreen lives and "further adventures" of such characters as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the captains and crews of the various starships named  Enterprise , and, of course, the heroes and villains that populate George Luc...

Cover art by Drew Struzan. (C) 2015 Del Rey/Random House and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) On January 5, 2016, Penguin Random House's science fiction/fantasy imprint Del Rey published the hardcover edition of Alan Dean Foster's Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the novelization of the film written by Lawrence Kasdan, Michael Arndt, and J.J. Abrams, directed by Abrams, and based on characters and situations.  Though Lucasfilm's corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company, allowed Del Rey to release the e-book edition on December 18, 2015, the same day of the film's theatrical release, it asked the publisher to delay the publication of the hardcover for a few weeks. Disney feared that if it followed the long-standing tradition of releasing the novelization of a Star Wars film before the theatrical premiere, fans would leak the film's plot - especially the "big reveals" that Abrams strove to keep secret - all over the Internet.  However, Disney-owned Lucasfilm p...

Pros:  Interesting Luke-and-Mara capstone to Timothy Zahn's novels set in the  Star Wars  universe Cons:   Might confuse readers who haven't read previous Timothy Zahn novels; too ship-bound If you are a more-or-less regular reader of the Bantam Spectra/Del Rey  Star Wars  Expanded Universe novels, you're doubtlessly aware that though each novel or series of novels is pretty much a stand-alone work, it's also part of a larger mosaic. There are many instances in which a minor character, planet, or even old pre-Empire projects mentioned in one book will later play a larger role in the continuing  Star Wars  narrative. This technique isn't exclusive to the Lucasfilm-licensed  Star Wars  projects; Paramount's  Star Trek  franchise has published hundreds of paperback and hardcover novels which not only tell "untold tales" of the famous starships  Enterprise  and their legendary c...

Cover of the Dark Horse Comics adaptation. Genesis of a Star Wars tale A long time ago in an office in Northern California, George Lucas made a contingency plan for a low-budget sequel to “Star Wars” in case his space-fantasy film didn’t do well at the box office. The young writer-director wanted to make a trilogy centered around Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia Organa, and Darth Vader, but 20 th Century Fox’s skepticism about the first installment and his own low expectations for the success of “Star Wars” led Lucas to conceive a cheap follow-up with Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Dave Prowse, Anthony Daniels, and Kenny Baker. (Harrison Ford had not yet signed on for a sequel, so Han Solo was not included in the proposed low-budget project.) Lucas wrote a quick-and-dirty story treatment for a film which would take place mostly on a fog-shrouded bog planet and didn’t feature dazzling special effects. He also resurrected some discarded story concepts from the second draft of...

Cover art by John Harris. (C) 2007 Del Rey/Lucas Books and Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) This station is now the ultimate power in the Universe! I suggest we use it.  - Admiral Motti. One of the most important locales in George Lucas'  Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope  is the Galactic Empire's gigantic battle station code-named "Death Star." Essentially an armored sphere the size of a small moon (its diameter is stated as being 160 kilometers) and powered by something called a "hypermatter reactor," the Death Star carries nearly 1,000,000 crewers, stormtroopers, TIE fighter pilots, med techs and doctors, political prisoners, bureaucrats, Fleet and Army personnel, and even civilians who have been enticed to open stores and other businesses aboard. At the heart of the Death Star is its Prime Weapon, a planet-killing superlaser which takes time to charge up and requires top-notch gunnery experts to run. These "facts," of course, are well-known to...

If you are a constant reader of noted science fiction author Timothy Zahn's  Star Wars  novels, you may have noticed that he often introduces a character, concept, or strand of storyline in one novel, seemingly leaves it alone for some time, then develops that person, concept, or situation more fully in a later novel. Such was the case when in  The Last Command  (1993), Zahn had Borsk Fe'lya make a comment that a Rebel mission to the Emperor's treasure trove on the planet Wayland could possibly have serious consequences for the Bothan people. In that  Thrawn Trilogy  novel nothing untoward happens, but a later visit to Wayland by Princess Leia and its dire repercussions become prominent plot points in  Specter of the Past  and  Vision of the Future .  One of the more prominent secondary storylines in Zahn's  Thrawn Trilogy  is the tale of Jedi Master Jorus C'baoth and his ambitious plan to seek out new worlds and new civi...