The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  —TZ

  5 Before he became a full-time novelist, Tim was a grad student shooting for a PhD in physics. Here is just one place where he brings his science background into play. Checking for breathable air is always a good idea before jumping out of your ship on a strange planet.

  —BM

  6 Bestselling writers often use the literary device of the cliffhanger to grip readers. How many times have you stayed up far too late at night because something enthralling happens at the end of a chapter and you simply have to find out what happens next? Tim brings the use of the cliffhanger to a high art in Heir. I defy anyone to put this book down after a closing line like Leia’s.

  —BM

  Chapter 13

  1 This line is undoubtedly out of date now, with the other books that have been written in the gap between Return of the Jedi and Heir. But it was true when I wrote it.

  —TZ

  2 Coincidence is, of course, a necessary part of fiction, and Star Wars is no exception. What would have happened, for instance, if Han and Chewie hadn’t dropped into that Mos Eisley cantina for a drink?

  But unlike the case with most fiction, it can be argued that in Star Wars there’s an underlying purpose to seemingly random events. The Force may be subtly guiding encounters such as this.

  —TZ

  3 A small thing that I never would have anticipated, and never even knew before I was invited to a Star Wars convention in Munich:

  The thr combination apparently doesn’t exist in German, or so I was told. German Star Wars fans therefore have terrific difficulty pronouncing Thrawn’s name.

  —TZ

  Chapter 14

  1 Also echoes the phrase beck and call. Karrde isn’t the only one who likes puns.

  —TZ

  2 The Katana fleet isn’t going to become important until Dark Force Rising. But again, it’s important to start setting things up as soon as possible.

  —TZ

  3 The beckon call was originally nothing more than a plot device, something to get Luke to Lando’s in time for all of them to have this conversation together. The suggestion that the call had belonged to the Dark Jedi was supposed to be the complete explanation, and so I moved on to other matters and forgot about it.

  But not all of the readers bought my explanation. Speculation arose that there was a plot thread lurking in there that I was planning to use somewhere down the line.

  The more I thought about that, the more I liked the idea of coming up with a more interesting history for this particular piece of jetsam.

  So when I was contracted for the book The Hand of Thrawn (which was subsequently split into Specter of the Past and Vision of the Future), that’s exactly what I did.

  —TZ

  4 The name of the Wookiee home world has always bothered me—from what I’ve heard of Wookiee speech, I’m not convinced they can actually pronounce the word.

  In fact, before I knew the world had already been named, I had planned to call it Rwookrrorro.

  When I learned that Kashyyyk was already on the books, I suggested that could be the name the Republic and Empire knew it by, while Rwookrrorro was the local Wookiee name.

  I was turned down, probably on the grounds that a planet with two different and completely unconnected names would be confusing.

  So instead, we used Rwookrrorro as the name of the specific village Leia would be traveling to.

  Interestingly, the name Rwook was later used to denote the subspecies that Chewie and some of the other Wookiees belong to.

  —TZ

  5 I got at least one letter from a reader who took me to task for using borg, which he informed me was a Star Trek word.

  I wrote back and explained that borg comes from cyborg, which is a contraction of cybernetic organism and was coined by Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline in 1960.

  On top of that, the term borg was first used in Star Wars in 1978 in one of the Marvel Comics adventures, thus predating Star Trek’s borg concept by about eleven years.

  Not that anyone’s counting. Just thought you’d like to know.

  —TZ

  6 When Episode IV came out, Vader was described as “Dark Lord of the Sith,” but at the time no one knew what that meant. The explanation of Sith was far in the future.

  Or should that be far in the past? It’s so hard to keep track of these things sometimes.…

  —TZ

  Chapter 15

  1 Someone at a convention once suggested to me that, instead of art, Thrawn might do better to study an alien race’s myths and legends to get insights into their cultural psyche.

  In general, it’s an excellent idea. The problem, from Thrawn’s point of view, is that he would have to read those legends in translation, which might lose key nuances, or else spend years learning all the associated languages. Their artwork, in contrast, he can study directly, in either physical or holographic form.

  —TZ

  2 Various readers over the years have noted certain similarities between Thrawn and Sherlock Holmes. Here’s one of the spots where that kinship comes most clearly into view.

  Once my current reading stack gets a little smaller, it’ll probably be time for me to pull out my complete Sherlock Holmes collection and start through it again.

  —TZ

  3 Early on, I decided that I was going to use only humans as point-of-view characters. Not because I have a problem with aliens or droids, but because I was afraid that giving those POV segments a truly alien flavor might distract from the flow of the story.

  That meant I would never get into Thrawn’s skin and see how exactly he thought. Thus Pellaeon’s role was expanded from simply Thrawn’s second in command to the man through whom Thrawn was to be seen.

  To be, in effect, the Dr. Watson to Thrawn’s Sherlock Holmes.

  —TZ

  4 Another mostly throwaway line, put in to remind the reader that, for all his skill and urbanity, Thrawn can be ruthless if and when necessary.

  But as I read this again, I find myself intrigued by the possibilities. Somewhere in the future, I may have to tell this particular story.

  —TZ

  Chapter 16

  1 The Interdictor Cruiser had been invented by West End Games, keying (I assume) off Admiral Piett’s line in Return of the Jedi that the Imperial forces at Endor weren’t to attack, but merely to keep the Rebel ships from escaping.

  Thrawn, typically, would come up with several interesting tactical uses for the ship and its projected gravity well during his campaign against the New Republic.

  —TZ

  2 Two more Tuckerizations, only these two were charity auction winners. Chris Peterson won the chance to be in my next book, and Brian Colclazure won the decision of whether Peterson lived or died. Since Peterson’s death was his decision, I figured it might as well also be his fault.

  At the time of the auction they had no idea (nor did I) that my “next book” would be Heir. I hope they were both surprised and pleased with their appearances.

  —TZ

  3 Brasck and Par’tah, mentioned here, will make important appearances in The Last Command.

  —TZ

  Chapter 17

  1 West End Games’s source material included a splendid X-wing schematic, with all the cool tech stuff a writer could ever ask for.

  —TZ

  2 It’s always important that the heroes have a plan for getting out of whatever trouble the writer has thrown them into. Even if the plan is never used, or isn’t used the way the character expected, heroes need to be proactive. Luke can’t just sit around hoping that by some stroke of luck he’ll be rescued.

  Well, okay—technically, he is just sitting around right now. But you know what I mean.

  —TZ

  3 This was the description of Kashyyyk that I was given: immensely tall trees with Wookiee cities perched on them, with a layered ecology that got more and more vicious as you traveled down toward the ground below. Sort of an organic version of the tall, laye
red cityscape of Coruscant, now that I think about it.

  I was really looking forward to getting a glimpse of that world when I heard it would be featured in Revenge of the Sith. I was also curious as to the kind of tactics the Wookiees would use against the Separatist forces on such a battlefield. But either the planet had been redesigned when I wasn’t looking, or else George simply chose to use a ground-level area of the world for that scene.

  Maybe someday in a special edition …

  —TZ

  4 I got to experience this same effect on a recent cruise to Alaska. When looking over the rail at a glacier, with no trees, animals, or other objects near the ice to show scale, it was impossible for me to get a genuine feel for the size of what I was seeing. A chunk that looks like an ice cube falls off, and a boom rolls across the water, and you realize that the “ice cube” was probably the size of a refrigerator.

  —TZ

  5 I generally like to use brackets when I’m showing that a character is speaking in an alien language. It’s always seemed to me that an odd touch like that helps add to the alienness of the speech.

  —TZ

  6 Just in case the brackets weren’t enough alienness, I also threw in an extra letter at the end of r-ending words.

  This is the sort of thing that drives copy editors crazy …

  —TZ

  7 I needed to be able to have actual conversations with one of the Wookiees, and since I’d committed myself to never directly translating Chewie (it was never done in the movies), I came up with this idea that a “speech impediment” actually made Ralrra easier for humans to understand.

  —TZ

  8 A close hug does look a lot like vertical wrestling, after all. Probably even more so with Wookiees.

  —TZ

  9 One of the neat things about the Star Wars universe is that there’s always room for something new. Jumping off of the Kashyyyk background that I’d been given, I was able to add a few new things, such as the kroyies, into the ecological system.

  —TZ

  10 I liked the idea of Wookiees being arboreal and living on huge trees kilometers above the ground. The problem was that they didn’t seem to be built for that sort of life. So I added the protractible claws to make tree-climbing practical.

  Unfortunately, in the process I forgot my own admonition that I needed to pay attention to what wasn’t seen in the movies. Specifically, why weren’t these claws ever seen, particularly when Chewie was fighting for his life?

  Fortunately, the West End Games folks also spotted the lapse and came to my rescue. In one of the later sourcebooks they explained that it was a matter of honor that Wookiees never used these claws in combat, but kept them strictly for climbing.

  —TZ

  11 Art imitating life. I have the same problem that I’m attributing here to Leia. Airplanes don’t bother me; the Seattle Space Needle observation deck does.

  —TZ

  Chapter 18

  1 Someone asked me once what kind of modern-day car Karrde would drive. I told him that it would probably be a nice, simple, family-style sedan or minivan. A Toyota or Ford maybe … with a Lamborghini V-12 engine tucked away under the hood.

  —TZ

  2 I envisioned a force cylinder as being a cylindrical version of the atmosphere screen we saw in the movies in big hatchways like those of the Death Star. An emergency docking tube, probably meant for temporary use only.

  But given the prominent use of the term the Force, I really should have come up with a different name for this. Vac-walk cylinder, maybe. Way too late now.

  —TZ

  3 Somewhere along the line, one of the artists tackling Karrde either missed this description or else ignored it, and drew the man with long, flowing hair and a goatee. That’s the image that has now stuck for him.

  Which is fine with me. Karrde is the type who would probably find it useful to change appearance every so often anyway, and by the end of the Thrawn Trilogy he could very well have looked like that.

  It was also that image that Decipher used when they brought Mike Stackpole and me out to Virginia for a photo session to create their special Talon Karrde and Corran Horn cards.

  I would never have guessed, as I was writing Heir, that I might someday end up on a collectible card. Life can be very strange sometimes.

  —TZ

  4 This became the basis of a line in the Essential Guides, which then became an entire book: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor by Matthew Stover.

  —TZ

  Chapter 19

  1 This image of carved wood with blue light shining through the gaps comes from a couple of visits we made to a place called the House on the Rock in Wisconsin. It’s an absolutely stunning architectural masterpiece, and several of the rooms have this sort of background lighting.

  —TZ

  2 I read mythology voraciously when I was a child, and my favorites were the Norse myths. This one is straight out of the Siegfried legend—all we’re missing is a sword stuck in the tree.

  —TZ

  3 “What is a Froffli-style haircut?”

  I got asked this kind of question a lot with Heir and the other two books. The questions came from my editor, Lucasfilm, the copy editor, or sometimes all three.

  The answer: I don’t know. The idea was to sprinkle these alien non-Earth references throughout the books, with the intent being to add a little more Star Wars feeling to it.

  Of course, the throwaway lines also served another, more devious purpose. The reader never knew whether one of these things was merely some local color, or whether it was a subtle setup to an important plot point somewhere down the line.

  An aside: the comics depict Chin’s hair as spiky.

  —TZ

  4 The official currency of the Star Wars galaxy is the credit, but I never really liked that term—I guess it always seemed too fifties SF to me. (So do blasters, actually, but for some reason that one doesn’t bother me nearly as much.)

  So I took a page from Han’s bargaining with Obi-Wan for the Alderaan trip and tried wherever possible to simply avoid mentioning the type of currency, figuring that it would be understood by both parties.

  —TZ

  5 When I was offered this first Star Wars contract, and I was wandering the house trying to think up a story, the ysalamiri and their effect on the Force was the first thing that came to my mind. The initial idea was to use them to build a sort of cage around a captured Jedi.

  Interestingly enough, even though that was the first idea I had, the story ended up growing in another direction and it never actually made it into any of the three books. That specific aspect of the idea had to wait several more years, until Vision of the Future.

  —TZ

  Chapter 20

  1 Thanksgiving weekend 1989, a couple of weeks after I’d been given the Thrawn Trilogy, was the local Chambanacon SF convention, which as usual we were attending. On Saturday evening we went out to dinner at a nearby Sizzler with four close friends, friends to whom I’d entrusted the still-secret project I’d just been handed. And not just entrusted with the knowledge: I’d let them read the first-draft outline I’d written up for the trilogy.

  Naturally, I wanted to discuss the story with them and get whatever feedback they’d come up with. But as we sat there, we realized we had a problem. All around us were other SF fans from the convention, and at the first utterance of the names “Han,” “Luke,” or “Leia” ears would rotate like radar dishes, and I would be in big trouble with Lucasfilm.

  So we did exactly what I had Han and Winter do here: we came up with a code on the fly. Luke and Leia became Brother and Sister; Han became Friend, Chewie became Copilot, and so on. Names like Mara and Thrawn weren’t a problem, of course, since they would be meaningless to anyone else.

  I was actually surprised at how well we all pulled it off, especially without any prior consultation.

  They say “write what you know.” In this case, I definitely did.

  —TZ
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  2 Another Tuckerism: more friends from Tampa.

  —TZ

  3 Mike LoBue plays bagpipes, and plays them very well. So I’m sure this “annoying music” wasn’t bagpipes. Certainly not his.

  —TZ

  4 Tuckerism: Necronomicon, mushed together with their traditional Ygor/Igor party.

  —TZ

  5 The numbers here don’t fit with any of the various Star Wars dating schemes, but are references to the local planetary dating system. Another subtle indication that the New Republic’s hold on these systems isn’t as strong as they might like.

  —TZ

  6 Once again, I’m indebted to West End Games for the rules and subtleties of sabacc.

  —TZ

  7 Another code created on the fly. One of Han’s many hidden talents.

  —TZ

  8 The established rules of sabacc included the random shifting of the cards’ values. The skifter itself, though, was my creation.

  —TZ

  9 Just one more indication that Karrde has an ethical core lurking under the surface.

  Also another indication of how many of Lando’s contacts are of the somewhat dubious sort.

  —TZ

  Chapter 21

  1 Ideally, any confrontation between characters should play out as a sort of stylized chess game, with the writer playing both sides. One side makes a move—Mara sealing the door—and then the other side makes a countermove—Luke searching for and finding the power outlet.

  Also ideally, the side that wins a particular round does so out of cleverness, and the side that loses does so not so much out of stupidity but because they missed something. Here, there’s a little fact about Luke that Mara and Karrde either didn’t know or, in the rush of the moment, didn’t think all the way through.

  Just as the heroism of your hero is measured against the villainy of your villain, so too is the hero’s cleverness measured against that of his opponents.