The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  Fortunately, facing doesn’t necessarily mean fighting. My choice of words here was pure luck, but it helped me avoid a retroactive gaffe.

  —TZ

  Chapter 5

  1 In Return of the Jedi, Mon Mothma said that Bothan spies had learned the new Death Star’s location and an Imperial code that would allow a surreptitious Rebel approach. Even though all that turned out to be a trap, I figured the Bothans would probably use that to work themselves into a good position in the fledgling New Republic hierarchy.

  Especially if I gave them a high level of smooth political maneuvering skills. The result of that train of thought was Borsk Fey’lya.

  But even beyond that, I wanted to show the New Republic as being a somewhat uneasy patchwork of differing political views, motivations, and goals. We have this conflict in any group of humans of any size—surely among different types of aliens the effect would be even more pronounced.

  So, again, Borsk Fey’lya. For all the frustration and trouble he causes, he’s not a “villain” in the usual sense. He and his people simply have different ways of achieving their political goals. The fact that his approach causes chaos and possible destruction is apparently never a concern to him. It’s the way Bothans have always done things, and he—and they—see no reason to change.

  —TZ

  2 This seems to imply that Han first met Mon Mothma in Return of the Jedi, around the time of the Endor operation briefing. However, in Allegiance I have them meeting shortly after the Battle of Yavin, nearly four years earlier.

  Does that make this line a goof? Well … maybe not. In a much later story, “The Tale of the ‘Tonika Sisters,’ ” from Tales from the Star Wars Cantina, I have a Rebel agent getting hold of a segment of the second Death Star’s prototype superlaser. Ergo, as far back as Yavin, rumors of a second Death Star would already be swirling around the Empire. Ergo, the line in Allegiance isn’t really a mistake.

  Note that among other things, that bit of retrofitting implies that it took the Rebellion those same four years to track those rumors down. No wonder the Bothans came in for high praise when they brought the name Endor to Alliance attention.

  Still, don’t let all these clever explanations give you the impression that I had this whole immense thing mapped out in advance. Right now, I’m using the Indiana Jones approach, and making it up (more or less) as I go.

  —TZ

  3 And Mon Mothma undoubtedly recognizes the problem and conflict: future dividends of Leia as a Jedi versus present dividends of Leia as diplomat. Present versus future: a decision we all have to make from time to time.

  And that’s one of the reasons the Star Wars movies were so successful. They portrayed real people—with real, timeless, human problems and challenges—against the backdrop of a wondrous universe.

  —TZ

  4 “Just exactly like old times” perfectly calls to mind various scenes in the original Star Wars: Luke practicing his newfound Force abilities, Chewie and R2-D2 playing dejarik, Han and Leia sniping at each other. Therefore there’s no need to spell out what occurs between the end of this chapter and the beginning of chapter 6. Tim simply announces that the Falcon has arrived at Bimmisaari.

  —BM

  Chapter 6

  1 One of the subtle tricks George used in the Star Wars movies was to show us only a few different planets, but to then use throwaway mentions of others along the way, thus giving us a feel for a much larger galaxy than we were actually seeing.

  I wanted to continue that technique by throwing in short visits to lots of different worlds such as Bimmisaari.

  —TZ

  2 Han’s line here is pitch-perfect. One of Tim’s greatest challenges in this book was to re-create the voices of the film characters. It’s so easy to imagine Harrison Ford grinding out, “I like marketplaces. I like ’em a lot.”

  —BM

  3 As with extra planets, I can easily throw lots of different aliens into the background scenes.

  One of the advantages books have over movies—my costume and makeup departments don’t take up much space.

  —TZ

  Chapter 7

  1 I thought long and hard about how to write the sound of an igniting lightsaber. I finally went with snap-hiss.

  —TZ

  2 This gadget is now called a fibercord whip, but at the time it either hadn’t been named or I’d failed to find the right reference. (I suspect the former, since Lucasfilm didn’t correct it in the manuscript.)

  On the other hand, as with many things Star Wars, it’s quite possible the weapon had several names. Maybe Fibercord Whip was once a trademarked name that has now fallen into common usage, while smart-rope was the generic name.

  Back in my physics days, we used to call this procedure hand-waving. I’ll be using more of it as we go along.

  —TZ

  3 As I mentioned in the foreword, one of my goals in writing Heir was to do something that was Star Wars but which didn’t just cover the same territory as the movies. Part of that challenge was to come up with new problems and weapons for our heroes to face.

  Lightsabers are great for blocking blaster bolts and cutting through AT-AT armor, but what about something semiliquid?

  Of course, once I’ve gotten Luke into this situation, I also have to come up with a way to get him out of it.…

  —TZ

  4 A writer absolutely has to make his villains clever and competent. It’s no fun—and no challenge—for the heroes to get out of trouble without sweating about it first.

  —TZ

  5 From the Star Wars movies, it’s clear that George loves a good, swashbuckling, Errol Flynn–type rope swing. Luckily, so do I.

  —TZ

  6 Along with things like the hot chocolate, one of the major complaints I received was that I’d used too many of the movie lines in the book. The accusation was that I was simply trying to connect to the movies to add legitimacy to my books.

  I disagreed, and this particular quote is a good example of what I was actually trying to do. Every family, over their years together, develops a collection of private words and phrases that evoke incidents in their past—a kind of shorthand to their shared memories. In this case, Han’s comment is a reminder of the asteroid field incident, when his snap judgment (or so Leia thought at the time) proved to be the correct action. Leia’s response, again echoing that time, is her admission that he was right in that case and, yes, he’s probably right in this one, too.

  —TZ

  7 Even Yoda carried one, as we know now from the prequels.

  —TZ

  Chapter 8

  1 Admiral would be the normal shipboard form of address (Grand Admiral is awkwardly long for casual conversation), but C’baoth almost invariably uses the entire rank. Not as a form of respect, of course, but as a form of sarcasm.

  —TZ

  2 The second quality of a good commander: the ability to hear, evaluate, and adopt good ideas even if—perhaps especially if—they come from those who are technically his inferiors.

  —TZ

  3 At the time I was writing Heir, all we knew about the Old Republic’s political system was that it had included a Senate. Rather than try to guess at any other details, I settled on giving the New Republic a provisional form of government, with the implication that it would be changed at some point in the future.

  That way, if I got more details along the way as to how things were supposed to be done, I could have Leia and Mon Mothma revamp the whole thing.

  —TZ

  4 I generally dislike writing characters who deliberately distort, misinterpret, or ignore facts for their own political ends the way Fey’lya does here. Probably because I dislike seeing that done in real life.

  But sometimes the requirements of the story mean you just have to take a deep breath and do it.

  —TZ

  5 Han Solo: master of tact. You gotta love him.

  —TZ

  Chapter 9

  1 The third quality of a
good commander: the ability to see what is most valuable in his troops. Competence and the ability to learn are more important than the trappings of pomp and pageantry.

  Though Pellaeon clearly still misses that pomp, at least a little.

  —TZ

  2 I have another double planet, Poln Major and Poln Minor, as the centerpiece of my latest Star Wars book, Choices of One. There must be something about double planets I really like.

  —TZ

  3 Once again one would think, from this description of tactics, that Tim has a military background. He does not!

  —BM

  4 The fourth quality of a good commander: he plans ahead as much as possible.

  —TZ

  5 I was just a couple of weeks into Heir when I received a big box containing some of the sourcebooks and game modules that West End Games had created over the years for the Star Wars role-playing game. Along with the books came instructions from Lucasfilm that I was to coordinate Heir with the WEG material.

  As usual, I groused a little about that. But once I actually started digging into the books I realized the WEG folks had put together a boatload of really awesome stuff, including lists of aliens, equipment, ground vehicles, and ship types.

  So as it turned out, not only was the WEG material easy to coordinate with, but it saved me the work of having to invent all my own technology as I went along.

  —TZ

  6 Another of the challenges of writing Heir was to come up with phrases that are familiar and are properly descriptive, but aren’t quite the way we would normally say them. Thus hit-and-run becomes hit-and-fade.

  —TZ

  7 All of Karrde’s ship names involve puns or some other kind of wordplay—Wild Karrde (wild card), Starry Ice (starry eyes), Etherway (either way), and so on.

  —TZ

  8 Like Karrde, Mara has an ethical core that doesn’t take kindly to broken promises or bent loyalty.

  —TZ

  9 Over the years I’ve slowly gotten better at the art of teaching, but I can strongly identify with Luke’s concerns over his own ability in that area. Especially when all I had to do was teach elementary physics, and he has to train a Jedi.

  —TZ

  10 For some reason, Han not lumping Bpfassh in with the “unpronounceable” ones strikes me as both funny and very Han.

  —TZ

  11 Rogue Squadron was half convenience and half a throwaway line—a unit I could move around wherever I needed it, with Wedge in command because anyone who can survive three Star Wars movies is welcome in my book any day.

  I would never in my wildest dreams have guessed how well and how far Mike Stackpole and, later, Aaron Allston would run with the whole idea.

  —TZ

  12 One of the more subtle goofs in Heir is in the dating. At the time, George hadn’t settled on the final time line, and we were told that the Clone Wars took place thirty-five years before A New Hope.

  However, from the prequels we now know that the Clone Wars ended only nineteen years before ANH. All the dates in Heir are therefore off by those sixteen years.

  Personally, I put it down to the chaos of information loss during the Empire, and sloppy work on the part of post-Empire historians. These things happen …

  —TZ

  Chapter 10

  1 Slipping someone’s name and/or personal characteristics into a book Is sometimes called Tuckerizing, after Wilson “Bob” Tucker, who did a lot of it throughout his writing career.

  Normally, I do this in connection with charity auctions, where I auction off a walk-on role to the highest bidder. But sometimes, it’s just for fun. In Heir, I slipped in several friends, many from the Tampa-area Necronomicon convention, others just random friends as happened to occur to me.

  This one is an Illinois friend named Don Vandersluis. If I remember, I’ll point out some of the others as we go along.

  —TZ

  2 In fact, as we all know, Luke knew about the torture before it actually happened. But under the circumstances Leia may have been a little fuzzy on the details.

  Luke may also have fudged those same details a bit to keep Leia and the others from knowing how far away he’d been. Later, we’ll learn that he’s still keeping Dagobah’s significance a secret.

  —TZ

  3 Another Tuckerization: Mark Jones of Tampa. Fortunately, Mark never took offense that Jomark was only a minor world.

  —TZ

  4 In various sources this weapon is identified as a “Taim & Bak auto blaster cannon,” a “BlasTech Ax-108 ‘Ground Buzzer’ surface-defense blaster cannon,” and simply as “concealed blaster cannon.”

  I figure that my term, underside swivel blaster, is probably a generic term for all such handy gadgets.

  —TZ

  5 The West End Games material gave me the model designation for the Falcon. Unfortunately, it didn’t mention that the ships were pretty common throughout the galaxy. Ergo, digging one up wouldn’t have been nearly as hard as Han implied here.

  Probably what Han meant wasn’t that they’d found another YT-1300, but that they’d found one with the same quirks and add-ons as the Falcon. Sure—that’s what he meant.

  —TZ

  6 A couple of weeks after I finished Heir and sent it in, my editor, Betsy Mitchell, called to chat about the manuscript. In the course of the conversation she asked if I liked Han best of all the movie characters.

  I assured her that I liked them all, and asked why she would think I liked Han best. She said, “Because you gave him all the best lines.”

  She may have been right. But in all fairness, as far as giving Han good lines is concerned, George got there a long time before I did.

  —TZ

  7 Like Rogue Squadron, Page was another mostly background character whom other authors later picked up and ran with.

  Ran with in both directions, in fact, as he was retroactively added into the Rebellion era.

  Or at least his name was. There were certainly Rebel commandos running around making trouble for Palpatine’s Empire—it was only after Heir was published that Page was associated by name with some of those operations.

  —TZ

  8 Again, a word that echoes a familiar term—hacker—but is different enough to fit comfortably into the Star Wars universe.

  —TZ

  Chapter 11

  1 Luke’s actually wrong here—Yoda couldn’t have affected his X-wing’s systems at that distance. (Otherwise, Ben wouldn’t have had to physically go to the tractor beam station on the Death Star.)

  But Yoda could have affected Luke’s perception at the critical time.

  —TZ

  2 I’d always been a little confused about this. In The Empire Strikes Back, it appears that Luke is going into a cave; yet on the soundtrack that scene is listed as “The Magic Tree.”

  Fortunately, I was able to work the description so that I could sort of have it both ways.

  —TZ

  3 Depending on the motivation and the object of the curiosity, I suspect it can serve either side.

  —TZ

  4 One of the challenges I faced was to find a way to describe R2-D2’s sounds without having Skywalker Sound to draw on.

  I also didn’t want to simply say “he beeped” every time he said something, since that could get boring. So I made up a small note card with alternatives and kept it handy.

  Hence, at various spots throughout the book, Artoo warbles, chirps, twitters, grunts, gurgles, jabbers, beeps, and probably a few others that I’ve forgotten.

  Amazing what an hour with a thesaurus can accomplish.

  —TZ

  5 One of the rules of fantasy and SF writing (and of mysteries, for that matter) is to make sure to give the readers all the bits and pieces of information that you’ll be using later—it’s unfair to suddenly spring something on them just when you need it to get out of the corner you’ve painted yourself into.

  Nearly every reader will remember that Luke has a mechanical right hand,
and most will assume I’m just putting this in as another link to the movies. But of course, it’s also going to turn out to be very important down the road.…

  —TZ

  6 Another Tuckerism: longtime Athens, Georgia, fan Klon Newell, one of the most enthusiastic supporters of my original Cobra series way back in the eighties.

  —TZ

  Chapter 12

  1 There apparently is no paper in the Star Wars universe, so the term paper pusher is again one of those that needs a little tweaking.

  —TZ

  2 One of my all-time favorite movie examples of How To Do Technology Right is from A New Hope. During the escape from the Death Star, Han and Luke head up and down to the quad lasers. However, by the time they arrive at the gun wells, gravity has turned ninety degrees, which is what allows them to comfortably sit in the gunner seats facing up and down for firing.

  This is exactly the way people do things in the real world: if you have gravity plates (or whatever), you adjust and position them to get things arranged the way you want them to be. People do that with pretty much any technology.

  It’s completely and properly underplayed in the movie, of course. After all, Luke and Han are used to things working this way, so they wouldn’t comment on it.

  But having appreciated that little touch of cleverness back when the movie came out, I wanted to remind the readers about it here.

  —TZ

  3 One of the great and satisfying aspects of Star Wars is that no one is deadweight. All of the characters have their chance to shine, to come up with the clever way to think or fight their way out of whatever predicament they happen to be in at the moment.

  Maintaining that balance was yet another of the challenges—and fun parts—of writing Heir.

  —TZ

  4 Another Tuckerism: the Stonehill Science Fiction Club of Tampa, which puts on the Necronomicon convention every October.