Star Wars on Trial

by David Brin

  So rather than being unprincipled opportunists in it strictly for the money, or brain-dead chimpanzees who can't write anything else, most Star Wars work-for-hire novelists like writing the books. It's true that in many cases, their original-fiction careers are not as lucrative or busy as their Star Wars careers; but then again, I like writing romance, and my romance career is not as lucrative or busy as my fantasy-writing career. That doesn't mean I'm in fantasy for the money or because I can't do anything else; but it does mean that I sensibly invest more of my time in writing fantasy, where my work is in demand, than in writing romance, where it is not. To assume that someone only writes a Star Wars novel because he wants the money or isn't a good enough writer for original fiction is to assume that media tie-in books are necessarily "lesser" novels.

  Which is the same assumption that goes along with criticizing someone for reading tie-in novels. I am frankly not a fan of Star Wars novels or any other media tie-in novels. I also don't like horror novels, techno-thrillers or sagas, and I am not a fan of the original fiction of Isaac Asimov, Danielle Steel, Stephen King or Ernest Hemingway. Your mileage may vary. All art is subjective, and there are indeed me dia tie-in writers who I consider better novelists than some prestigious award winners I've read. Readers are entitled to find the SF/F that they want to read, be it a Nebula Award-winning original-fiction novel or a Star Wars book. Whether one is better than the other is strictly in the eye of the beholder. And if anyone ever tries to make me read another Thomas Hardy novel, I will complain to the UN High Commission for Human Rights.

  Finally, what makes any discontented original-fiction novelist with sagging sales suppose that media tie-in readers would suddenly flock to his work if only all those damn Star Wars novels weren't crowding the shelves? Doesn't it seem more likely that if media tiein books disappeared from SF/F shelves, media tie-in readers would venture into the SF/F section of bookstores far less often, spend less money on books and be even less likely to buy an original-fiction SF/ F novel on impulse?

  Laura Resnick is the author of twenty original-fiction novels, including Disappearing Nightly and Doppelgangster. You can find her on the Web at www.LauraResnick.com.

  OMEBODY DUMPED A FERRARI in my drive last year.

  They were kind enough to leave the keys in it. Now, there are a few things you can do with an unexpected Ferrari. You can leave it standing in the drive and polish it, or you can use it to do the school run, or you can jump in, slam your foot to the floor and see how fast that sucker can fly.

  On February 26, 2004, Del Rey and Lucasfilm left a Ferrari in my drive. So I decided to burn rubber.

  It's been the most productive ride of my life. I describe it unashamedly as the best thing that ever happened to me, and that's not just because it was good for business in a pragmatic marketing and money kind of way, but because it also liberated me as a writer. It was superficial lust at first sight financially but then the relationship blossomed into true love, and nearly two years later I can look back and see that Star Wars changed my life in ways far more complex and far-reaching than just putting food on my table.

  The call came out of the blue. "Would you like to write a book for us?" asked Shelly Shapiro at Del Rey. "It's tied in to a video game called Republic Commando."

  I knew nothing about Star Wars and even less about media tieins-and completely zero about gaming. This was my first year as a novelist: my debut novel, City of Pearl, wasn't even on the shelves yet. I did some rapid research, but friends warned me I'd be ruining myself as a serious author, as if I were some pedigree poodle who'd jumped over the wall to be spoiled for breeding by the attentions of the neighborhood mutt.

  "It's rubbish," said a friend. "You've got a career as a serious writer ahead of you. Don't touch it."

  I never was much good at taking advice.

  The game was about a commando squad; I was a military specialist, both as a former defense correspondent and a military SF author. It sounded right up my street, although I'd have to finish the novel in eight weeks to meet my other book commitments. But I couldn't ignore the fact that grabbing the coattails of the most successful franchise in history would give me the kind of exposure and fast-track to my career that I simply couldn't buy.

  And they were paying me for the privilege. It was too good to be true.

  What brand-new author wouldn't want a crack at a readership of hundreds of thousands? Who wouldn't want that kind of publicity and opportunity in her very first year in print? I felt the Force was with me. In fact, I was so determined it was going to stay with me that I nailed its bloody feet to the floor.

  But it was a single line of a conversation with the LucasArts content manager that really lured me into the GFFA' at a much deeper level.

  There was the small problem that I knew zip about Star Wars in March 2004, although I'd reviewed the movies as a very young journalist. (No, really. I was tall for my age.) I liked the Vader guy, I recalled: commendable management style, cool outfit. But that was about it. I had to start doing my homework. I don't read novels, not even if I'm paid to, and anyway the Republic Commando world was brand new, so the continuity would largely be created by me, working alongside the game team. I plunged in with all the confidence of the joyously ignorant.

  And joyful pretty well summed up the whole experience. I had total freedom to create the plot and my own characters, including what became known as "that crap Jedi," the plain, skinny, not-very-gifted but very hardworking Etain.

  I had a superb continuity minder at LucasArts called Ryan Kaufman, who was on call 24/7 to answer my queries and clear up points like how the armor codpieces fitted on the commandos. No detail was too small, and he never lost patience with my endless questions.

  "Let me get this clear," I said. "Somebody creates a secret clone army. Then they maneuver the Jedi into using them to fight the Separatists."

  "That's right," said Ryan.

  "So...." My journalist brain was whirring. I had no preconceived happy notions about Jedi. I was new in town. "This is a slave army. They're bred to age at double the rate and die young. They have no choice. And the Jedi just take them and use them as cannon fodder? No questions asked? No big moral debate?"

  "You got it," said Ryan.

  I was outraged. "And these are the good guys?"

  That was the exact moment at which Star Wars moved from being a nice little earner into something I really, really wanted to write.

  Jedi. The elitist bastards! These poor bloody clones, used and discarded ... and of course I was told about Order 66 from the start. Serves the buggers right, I thought. The spoon-bending hippies would get what they deserved for their complicity in maintaining a slave army.

  I wrote Republic Commando: Hard Contact like a maniac for eight weeks, grabbing every spare second from my job, fueled by abstract anger, drawing on the energy you derive from seeing the strange and the new. I loved every second. I knew I'd almost weep when I was finished. (Yes, I nearly did.)

  I slipped into a new way of working right away. I'm a hard SF writer, and the GFFA is not hard science. It's allegory and myth wearing SFnal clothes. But as I can only function as a hard SF type, and I take the military authenticity seriously for a whole raft of reasons, I did the most realistic job I could within the confines of continuity. Somehow, without reading a word of Star Wars, I took the British SAS and SBS and turned them into Omega Squad, a group of four naive but pretty adept clone soldiers who win through by persistence, skill and comradeship. The Jedi Padawan who they team up with is, frankly, pants. She's not exactly the A-Team; they have to help her out. There's no Luke or Obi-Wan Force leaping to the rescue in this book, no sirree. This is the triumph of the ordinary man-no, the triumph of the most oppressed.

  Inevitably, hard SF clashed with SW continuity at a number of points. I knew that was the internal ecology when I took the Lucas shilling, so I had no real problem accepting there was no time dilation with FTL and all those other pesky unscientific things. Like cloning huma
ns and maturing them at double-time....

  Oh. Oh.

  And this was the point when I became liberated from my hard SF corset and was forced to look at much, much bigger themes than epigenetics and military economics. I had to go beyond the top dressing of the science and look at the impact these technologies had on individual people. That's what I thought I was doing in my own series. But thanks to my epiphanic experiences writing Star Wars, I found I was only doing a lite version of that. I was still too caught up in the science. It stopped me exploring the characters to their limits.

  In my own universes, I would never have looked at cloning at all. I felt it was a path too frequently trodden; I didn't think I'd have anything new to say. Had I tackled a clone army in my own terms, I'd have become engrossed in the failure rate, the developmental problems and the psychological mess that kids raised by aliens would have become-if they survived gestation in tanks at all. It would have been a very different story.

  But all that detail was done and dusted before I arrived on the scene. I had to work with the continuity from the movie Attach of the Clones, in which the cloned men are around ten years old but nearly twenty biologically, and fully trained elite troops. Rather than restrict me, though, it freed me to look at the ethical and human side of the equation. They're child soldiers. Their lives and rights have been stolen from them in the name of might, right and the Republic. And nobody in the Republic seems to object-least of all the Jedi. It's the kind of moral mire into which you can fling yourself.

  By that stage, I was about to storm the barricades. Order 66? I'd have volunteered, mate.

  One of the themes that most occupies me as a writer is the dividing line between the "us" that we treat with respect and can empathize with, and "them"-the external bin into which we dump those who we can crap on and get away with it. It can be gender, species, race, age-or genome. Wherever it's drawn, and whether we know we're doing it or not, it's the tipping point where people-decent people on the surface, people like you and me-rationalize and justify their exploitation and abuse of those who are different. They're not like us. So they don't feel like us, do they? They're the enemy, they're just kids, they're savages, they're only animals, they don't feel pain or loss or love. We can do as we like with them; because we can.

  You can see the pattern now. This one book caught me at the right time and on the right issue. It was the big red Ferrari. All I had to do was abandon a fear of speed and get in.

  So what's it like to be a clone? How does it feel to be raised in a sealed environment by aliens, and know nothing but combat from the time you can walk? How do you deal with the outside world? And how do you change when you see what the world is, and what's been done to you, and what you can never have? One of my readers-an academic from MIT, in case you believe a demographic stereotype of fandom-said that everything I write is about the politics of identity. And that acute observation has helped me understand why the GFFA and I seem to be made for each other.

  My love affair with the GFFA was cemented. Murky politics; love it, love it, love it. Moral ambiguity: bring it on. Big human issues: slavery, war, love, jealousy, poverty, misery, greed, ambition. This is the stuff that a journalist can get stuck into. Lucasfilm let me go as dark as I wanted to. They let me write a real war story about real men faced with difficult moral choices every day. I poured my guts into it because I was suddenly free of the need to get stuff like the FTL physics right, and I was ambushed by the emotional element of the universe. It was like moving from doing technical drawings to creating impressionist paintings with vivid colors. I saw the world in a new light.

  I finished Hard Contact with a sense of bereavement. I'd created a huge backstory in order to write it because I needed to know what happened to all the characters from birth to death, and part of that was expanding the Mandalorian culture. I even started building the language. When I turned in the manuscript, I wanted to go on with the story. It mattered to me. And that passion transmits itself into your writing, and your readers notice.

  At that point I had to start my third Wess'har Wars book, The World Before. I came to it as a different writer because of the way Hard Contact had taken the brakes off me. I'm a journalist by trade: I was trained not to feel about the subjects I covered and to keep my distance, an approach I carried over into my City of Pearl books.

  But as an author, you have to feel for each character-and feel vividly-for that power and passion to penetrate the filter of cold paper to reach the reader. By breaking that ingrained habit, I wrote a far better book in my own series. I say that because readers noticed the shift in gear, and told me so.

  The liberation continued. I went on to write more Republic Commando books and other Star Wars novels. The sequel to Hard Contact, Triple Zero, was an even more emotional experience for me, and I burned through it in five weeks. That confirmed something else for me: I wrote better when I shut out everything else and took a run at it. Too much time to think, and I lost the fire. Without Star Wars and the punishing schedule that went with it, I might never have discovered that.

  I've had sneers from writers who say there's no artistic challenge or merit in writing in someone else's universe. Needless to say, they've never done it. I wish they would: they'd learn a lot. Resisting the urge to mount the curb and mow them down in my Ferrari, I like to point out that it takes a new level of discipline to fit canon and remain true to the shared universe while keeping the original style and approach that the publisher signed you for in the first place. And writing characters who've been known and loved by fans for thirty years-like Luke and Han-is genuinely challenging. I know. I've just done it, and it's hard. When I want a rest, I go back to my own series. It's far easier in skill terms.

  Star Wars has taught me a huge amount about the craft of writing in a very short time. The learning curve for me since March 2004 has been the north face of the bloody Eiger: I've worked with composers and artists, I've worked with other authors on a joint series, and I've even created a full working language, Mandalorian. I'm now teaching it to fans. Would I have developed any of those skills-or had that much varied fun-if I'd only been writing my own reality-grounded, hyper-accurate realpolitik series? I doubt it very much. Star Wars kicked me hard up the arse, and it was the making of me.

  The restrictions of media tie-ins force you to grow. Ironically, the freedom lies in having to think outside your own creative box. Canon and continuity make you work harder to find work-rounds: necessity really is the mother of invention. And-to use my favorite analogy-there are no oranges in Star Wars. You have to reexamine the nuts and bolts of your writing because it's a wholly constructed universe, so analogies about surfaces like orange peel are denied you. All your own-brand cliches are out of reach. You redefine your approach. Even the age range of the audience made me stretch my skills: denied my usual palette of salty Anglo-Saxon expletives, I had to learn to write authentic soldiers' dialogue without four-letter words and explicit sexual references.

  Yes, it can be done. And I think I'm a better writer for having learned that.

  So I grew. And I gained, and so did my non-Star Wars books, which sold better and were better books because of Star Wars and its influence. And I got paid. Lucasfilm and Del Rey liked me and I liked them, so I signed to do more work for them. With my other series, that enabled me to leave the day job and write full time. Does it get any better than that? I don't think so.

  I'd be lying if I said the money wasn't a factor. Of course it is. I'm a jobbing writer, and I have been all my working life. But without less tangible benefits, no amount of money stops you getting pissed off with a job you don't like. I know: I've done that too many times in the past. There has to be more. Life's too short to have a job that saps your will to live.

  In the GFFA, the bonuses for any writer are legion if you want to reach out and grab them. I've reached a whole new audience who might never have picked up my City of Pearl books, but who now do just that. I've had very rewarding contact with the fan
community, who've been a sheer delight and have made me feel valued and welcome-and even a cynical old hack like me needs to be liked sometimes.

  Star Wars fans are also pretty sharp intellectually, and the level of debate is high. I'm not referring to the continuity arguments-and yeah, how big was Vader's Super Star Destroyer?-but to the long, sometimes heated and constantly educational debates I have with readers about duty, obedience to authority, the nature of sentience, political expedience and the existence (or not) of evil. Those aren't lightweight issues. They inform our views of the real world. And I don't know any other entertainment franchise that stimulates moral debate quite as well as Star Wars. It's a mythological epic in the fullest sense, providing us with cultural icons and reference points; and what writer doesn't want a piece of that?

  So you have choices with media tie-ins, as you have with that Ferrari someone dumped in your drive.

  You can park it and look at it: in other words, you can just phone the book in and assume the reader doesn't notice or even care. (Oh, they do, believe me. And how.) Or you can just use the Ferrari for shopping and stick to the speed limit: the book is just a media tie-in and nobody thinks tie-ins have to be good books, do they? Nobody expects you to bust a gut and go for broke on it. Just coast. It's okay.

  Or you can look at that shiny Ferrari and say: "Holy shit! I bet this thing can do 150 mph! Let's find out!" You can look at a big, fast, famous car whose keys have been pressed into your sweaty palm and just drive its guts out. You can throw yourself into that tie-in work and see how far and fast you can take it, and how far it can take you.

  And you can experience the thrill of taking the curves a little faster than you thought you could and still be alive to tell the tale. Everyone needs a bit of adrenaline and stress to push their personal limits.