ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY the Ultimate Guide to Star Wars by The Editors of Entertainment Weekly

Author:The Editors of Entertainment Weekly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liberty Street
Published: 2015-07-24T20:30:00+00:00

The Universe Expands

Before the prequels and sequels hit the big screen, Lucasfilm licensed authors to write tales set in the galaxy far, far away. By Alyssa Smith and Anthony Breznican

The movies were over, but the adventures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia continued in a host of new media—books, comics and video games. The crown jewel was 1991’s Heir to the Empire, the first installment in Timothy Zahn’s bestselling Thrawn trilogy, a novel so successful it set off a landslide of additional books that eventually became known as the Expanded Universe. More than 150 novels and dozens more comics were eventually released featuring old favorites, new villains and a generation of young Jedi who grew up under Luke’s wise tutelage. They were considered gospel—the definitive answer to what happened to the beloved characters after the events depicted in Return of the Jedi.

Until they weren’t. In 2014 word came that Zahn’s series and the material that followed were being retired to make room for a new cinematic canon. Another set of books and movies would be launched around The Force Awakens.

While the decision was disappointing to fans of the EU, now named Legends, Zahn says he always knew that this was a possibility. “Everything we were doing could be overwritten at any time,” he says. “It was just something you had to accept if you wanted to play in George Lucas’s sandbox.”

The same thing happened decades before with Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, a 1978 sequel to A New Hope written before the movie made box office history. Splinter was outlined by Lucas and followed a plot designed to allow him to film it reusing A New Hope’s sets in order to keep costs low. Its finale included a lightsaber duel between Vader and Leia wherein the Sith Lord loses an arm—drastically different from the movie sequel Lucas eventually produced.

But Legends remained popular enough that, ultimately, it only seemed to make sense to bring back select story lines and characters, including Imperial military commander Thrawn himself: Zahn’s latest, Thrawn, was released this year, and its sequel, Thrawn: Alliances, is due in 2018. (Readers have drawn parallels between Kylo Ren and the books’ Jacen Solo, Han and Leia’s son who falls to the dark side.)

Enthusiasts have embraced the new books, and authors are lining up to enlist in Lucas’s galaxy. “It’s hard to describe how exciting it is to be included in the Star Wars universe,” says Madeleine Roux, whose short story appears in 2017’s From a Certain Point of View. “This is something I’ve loved since I was a kid.”

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