Foster was simply having fun; few elements of Star Wars were sacrosanct at this point, least of all Vader and his tragic arc. Surprisingly, Lucas declared in those 1976 conversations with Foster that Vader was a weak villain, that, the killing of Obi-Wan Kenobi aside, “he never does anything to anybody. I mean, he chokes one guy.” He would have to be built up as a villain in this second book, Lucas declared, and “Luke kills Vader in the end.” Luckily, Lucas’s word was hardly law at this stage. Foster effectively saved Vader’s life.
As hokey as its plot was, Splinter was another best seller; by the time it was published in February 1978, nine months after the first film’s release, the world was hungry for any new Star Wars story. Children would reread the paperback until it fell apart in their hands. Foster was offered more Star Wars novel deals by Del Rey—“the story of Chewbacca’s second cousin’s uncle, that kind of thing,” he recalls—but declined. It was time to move on.
Apart from Splinter, there were surprisingly few Star Wars novels during the original trilogy years. Those two scoundrels, Han Solo and Lando Calrissian, got pulp-ish paperback trilogies of their own. (Han got exciting Western-style adventures at the outpost called “Star’s End”; Lando got odd, almost psychedelic adventures with “the Mindharp of Sharu.”) Before she died, Leigh Brackett was signed up to write a Princess Leia novel; she was not replaced, and once again Leia would get short shrift. The Expanded Universe was left to Marvel comics, which produced characters that would sometimes irk Lucasfilm—the most infamous being one of the earliest, a wisecracking green cartoon rabbit called Jaxxon, modeled on Bugs Bunny. Jaxxon offered the first inkling of the disastrously off-base concepts and creations that could swirl out of the Expanded Universe—but for every Jaxxon, fortunately, there was a Mara Jade or a Grand Admiral Thrawn.
One afternoon in the fall of 1988, Lou Aronica came back from lunch in midtown Manhattan, shut his office door, and wrote an impassioned letter to George Lucas. His lunch buddy had told him he’d read someplace that Lucas had officially announced there were going to be no more Star Wars movies. “There’s just so much wrong with that,” thought Aronica. The Rebel victory at the end of Return of the Jedi had seemed tenuous at best. He was a Luke Skywalker guy: What happened next to the galaxy’s only trained Jedi? “This body of work is too important to popular culture to end with these three movies,” Aronica wrote.
Aronica wasn’t just an aggrieved fan. He was the head of mass-market publishing at Bantam and had founded the company’s popular science fiction imprint, Spectra. His pitch to Lucas: if you’re not doing anything more with the franchise, let us produce quality books under your supervision. Aronica didn’t want to churn out two so-so novels every month the way the Star Trek franchise did. He envisioned one well-written hardback a year, starting with a trilogy that advanced the whole Star Wars story, written by an award-winning author. “We can’t do these casually,” he recalls saying at the time. “They have to be as ambitious as the movies were.”
Aronica heard nothing back for nearly a year. At some point, Lucas Licensing VP Howard Roffman went to sound Lucas out about the idea. “No one is going to buy this,” said Lucas, but gave his assent anyway. Ground rules were laid down: the first novel would take place five years after Return of the Jedi. Events prior to the original movie, such as the Clone Wars, were untouchable; Lucas was mulling the possibilities of prequels and didn’t want anything to interfere with his creative process. No major characters could be killed off. And no one who was already dead in the movies could be brought back.
Aronica agreed, gleefully. He cast around for writers but didn’t have to look too far: Spectra had just signed up Timothy Zahn, a Hugo award–winning author who had written the Cobra trilogy, a tale of intergalactic war. Aronica called up Zahn’s agent and learned that the author was an even bigger Star Wars fan than Aronica was. When Zahn turned in his manuscript, it was Aronica who came up with the title: Heir to the Empire.
Zahn’s novel was released on May 1, 1991. Lucasfilm lore claims that it was as instant a hit as the first Star Wars movie. “I’ll never forget the day that Lucy [Autrey Wilson, Lucasfilm finance director] came into my office in 1991 to deliver the news that Tim’s Heir to the Empire had premiered at number one on the New York Times bestseller list,” Roffman wrote in the introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition of the book.
In fact, Heir was on a slower boil than that. The book first appeared on the Times best-seller list on May 26, debuting at number 11. The next week it reached number 6, leapfrogging James Michener’s The Novel. Another two weeks and it overtook John Grisham’s debut The Firm, reaching the number 2 spot, held back by Dr. Seuss’ Oh the Places You’ll Go—the only cheaper hardback on the list than Heir, which was priced at a deliberately low $15.
On June 30, 1991, two months after it was released, Heir to the Empire became a coveted New York Times hardcover fiction list number 1 best seller. It remained at the top for exactly one week, though it stayed on the overall list for a total of nineteen weeks. Its initial print run of seventy thousand copies was gone within months. Four more print runs followed that year. Not bad at all, but you’d need a pretty selective memory to remember it debuting at number 1.
Aronica is aggrieved by another claim Roffman makes in his introduction: that it was Lucy Autrey Wilson who came up with the idea of pitching publishers rather than the other way around, and that Bantam just happened to be the only publisher that believed in the idea. “They didn’t approach us; they responded to my letter,” Aronica says. “I knew a lot of other people in the science fiction publishing world, and they were all furious that I’d been able to make this deal.”
After having to convince his bosses that Star Wars could sustain one hardback a year, Aronica now found himself having to hold back a deluge of books. “There was a lot of money to be made,” he says. “The program grew out a little faster than I would have liked.” After Zahn completed his trilogy, there were six, then nine, then twelve books a year; 1997 saw a record twenty-two Star Wars novels for all reading ages. The quality, and sales, suffered accordingly.
There was no year between the 1991 release of Heir and 2013 in which we have seen fewer than ten Star Wars novels. They sometimes nudge the bottom of the best-seller list for a week or so, like Star Trek paperbacks. Zahn’s most recent Star Wars novel, Scoundrels, sold a respectable seventeen thousand copies. but it’s a far cry from Aronica’s vision of one movie-like “event” book a year—or from the sales of Heir, which has been purchased more than a million times and which still moves about five thousand copies a month. “We could have made Star Wars a best-selling author, like a Grisham or a Clancy, and retained the audience,” Aronica laments. “If every book was as good as Heir, maybe they’d be top 5 best sellers every time out.”
So what was it that made Heir so good? It was a case of making new Star Wars by loving the idea and hating many of the preceding details. Timothy Zahn was a huge Star Wars fan and had been since 1977, when he was a physics student in grad school and took no fewer than eight separate dates to see the movie. “I was a physicist,” he says. “They had to know what they were getting into.” He had listened to Star Wars soundtracks while writing every prior science fiction novel. But as with any true Star Wars fan, there was something that bugged him. He didn’t like the fact that the Jedi seemed to have no inherent limit on their ability to operate the Force other than their own belief in it. “If they can do anything,” he says, “they’re just superheroes.”
So when Zahn was pacing around his house in November 1989, in those first few days after getting the call from his agent about Aronica’s offer, excited about the chance to play in the Star Wars sandbox and nervous about the notion of failing spectacularly in front of the hard-core fans, this was his first vision: a cage constructed of creatures that could negate the effects of the Force. A cage fit for a Jedi.
Zahn is fond of modestly insisting he didn’t revive Star Wars fandom; the fans were there, he s
ays, ready for anything that said Star Wars on its cover. “I got to stick my fork in the pie crust and show how much steam there was underneath,” he says. But he also made key choices about the directions the universe would expand in—choices that would lay down a template for what worked in Star Wars literature. (Zahn would also be reminded of what didn’t work when he made the apparently innocent choice to have Luke drink a cup of “hot chocolate” in the early pages of Heir to the Empire; fans howled with protest at this Alan Dean Foster–like insertion of a very Earth-bound beverage.)
Anyone faced with the task of picking out the threads Lucas had tied up at the end of Return of the Jedi would have been presented with some major problems. Lucas had killed off the series’ two main villains, the Emperor and Darth Vader. The Empire was on the run. It needed a seriously good bad guy at its helm to keep readers’ interest. With the Rebellion ascendant, here was a chance to create a villain who was also an underdog—one who, unlike his predecessors, ruled by loyalty rather than fear.
So Zahn came up with the character of Grand Admiral Thrawn, a blue-skinned, red-eyed humanoid who had worked his way up imperial ranks, a brilliant tactician who studied the art of any species he was in conflict with in order to understand their culture and thus outsmart them. A guy like that could uncover those obscure, Force-negating, anti-Jedi creatures that Zahn decided to call “ysilamari.” (Zahn did not always follow Lucas’s habit of writing easily pronounceable names.)
With that, Zahn was off to the races. He had a notion for a Dark Jedi with whom Thrawn could make common cause. He would be an insane clone of Obi-Wan Kenobi, created in the Clone Wars. Who better to throw Luke for a loop? He wanted to investigate the Sith, since Vader was always being called the Dark Lord of the Sith, and nobody knew what the Sith were. Zahn imagined a race of diminutive assassin aliens with faces that looked like Vader’s mask. He wanted a wily smuggler in the Han Solo vein, but one who was operating on a larger scale and could be even more wily. Along came Talon Karrde, supplier of ships that the Rebels were in desperately short supply of, and his ship the Wild Karrde.
And then there was Mara Jade, whom Zahn created specifically to fix something he hated about Return of the Jedi. His main problem with the film: the opening act in Jabba’s Palace seemed disjointed from the rest of the movie. What did any of that have to do with the struggle against the Empire, the topic of the entire trilogy? So Zahn retroactively inserted an Imperial assassin into Jabba’s Palace who tried, but failed, to ensure Skywalker’s death offscreen. The assassin worked directly for the Emperor, whom, Zahn decided, no longer trusted Vader’s plan to turn his son to the Dark Side. Mara Jade, the Emperor’s Hand, would put Luke in jeopardy throughout his trilogy. She was to become, after Thrawn, the Expanded Universe’s most popular character. She would marry Luke Skywalker in a later book, even though that’s not what Zahn originally intended. She would inspire the first online mailing group (and later the first blog) to cover the Expanded Universe, Club Jade. With her vibrant red hair, green eyes, and full-figured leather jumpsuit, Mara is fast becoming one of the more popular Star Wars costume choices for women on the comic convention circuit; she offers all of the feisty, fiery personality that Leia should have developed, but ultimately lacked.
Zahn had all of these concepts and characters in place in a mere two weeks and turned in a rough outline before Lucasfilm and Bantam had even inked a contract. The first draft of Heir to the Empire was written in six months.
Then came the pushback. Lucasfilm wouldn’t let him clone Obi-Wan Kenobi, that flouted the ban on avoiding the Clone Wars and resurrecting old characters. The race of assassins could not be called the Sith. Zahn had come up with his own laws of physics, his own background bible to the universe; Lucasfilm wanted him to use the sourcebook from West End Games’ Star Wars role-playing game.
Zahn chafed against what seemed like arbitrary restrictions. This was 1990. The Star Wars universe was still ill-defined; there was no internal digital database of its components at Lucasfilm (yet) and certainly no fan-edited encyclopedia (yet). Zahn chafed further when he found out that Lucasfilm was simultaneously restarting the Star Wars comics line with a publisher called Dark Horse, and wanted Zahn to coordinate his efforts with them. The comic series, Dark Empire, was to show Luke confronting a clone of the Emperor. For Zahn, that was a clone too far: “It destroys Darth Vader’s sacrifice in killing the Emperor at the end of Return of the Jedi,” he says. “It unravels the whole original trilogy.”
Compromises were reached. The insane clone of Kenobi, which Zahn fought the hardest for, became a Dark Jedi called Joruus C’boath (pronounced suh-boa-th). The Vader-worshipping assassins became the Noghri. Zahn’s ideas for the book title, Wild Card and Emperor’s Hand, were nixed by Aronica; Heir to the Empire it was. But Zahn wasn’t done hating Dark Empire, even though the comics referenced Grand Admiral Thrawn in their introductions. In a later novel, Visions of the Future, Zahn had Mara Jade and Luke recall having dealt with a cloned Emperor. “Whatever,” says Mara. “I’m not even convinced that was him.” (To its credit, Dark Empire is the source for the notion of a repository of Jedi knowledge—a “Holocron”—which would play an important role in the Expanded Universe in years to come.)
These days, having seen the Clone Wars unfold, Zahn is grateful that Lucasfilm fought back. There are still things he chafes against, one of them being the fact that a later writer—spoiler alert—killed off Mara Jade in a duel, after infecting her with mysterious intergalactic spores. “It would have been nice to let me know and to let me argue why not,” he said. “I know that Lucasfilm owns everything I put down on paper and give them. But it still feels like losing your daughter.” The Expanded Universe fans at Club Jade were right there with him. “They shunt her to the side and give her a stupid disease,” complains Tracy Duncan, a Detroit journalist known to the Internet as Dunc, proprietor of the Club Jade blog. “It was like ‘Oh, we only have two or three female characters; let’s kill off one of them.’ Such a waste.”
The Expanded Universe may have been two steps below the movie canon at all times, then erased from the canon altogether. But having authors and a story and characters messed with could hurt as much for fans as it had once hurt for Lucas.
Shelly Shapiro likes to say she saved Han Solo’s life. Del Rey, where Shapiro is an editor, took over the Lucasfilm publishing license from Spectra in 1998, part of a deal connected to the forthcoming release of the prequel movies. Lucasfilm had wanted the Expanded Universe to slowly build up a vast and complex mythology, but the plan had worked too well and too fast: the novels had already gotten too sprawling, the quality uneven. One trilogy follows Luke Skywalker as he sets up a Jedi Academy in the mysterious ruins of Yavin, the jungle planet seen at the end of Star Wars, which turns out to be haunted. Han and Leia get married, and a book devotes itself to the backstory of the wedding. Derided as one of the worst novels of the Expanded Universe, The Courtship of Princess Leia sees Han kidnap and control his future wife with the laughably titled “gun of command” after she receives a marriage offer from a well-connected prince.* The Solos then have three kids: Jaina, Jacen, and Anakin. Bring on the Young Jedi Knights series!
Lucasfilm called a summit at Skywalker Ranch, at which Shapiro was thrown straight into the deep end of the Star Wars universe. She, her first three authors, and a contingent from Dark Horse Comics were there to discuss what became known as the New Jedi Order, a series that would send the Expanded Universe off in a new direction over the course of twenty-nine novels (a number later whittled down to nineteen). There was to be an alien species invading the galaxy (the concept suggested by Kenner and used by Marvel comics was to be given a fresh coat of paint). But to inject a sense of jeopardy and gravitas into a universe where Luke and the Jedi had—despite Zahn’s best efforts—become way too much like superheroes once again, the licensees would also dust off the idea proposed by Lawrence Kasdan during that Return of the Jedi story conference: a main character must die.
Lucas had evidently moved on from the days when he felt that it wasn’t “nice” to kill our favorite characters. “Early on we got the all-clear to kill anyone,” says Mike Stackpole, an author at the table. “Literally anyone was fair game.” Shapiro, a serious Harrison Ford fan, says she put her foot down: Han Solo would live.
Stackpole remembers it differently. He says there was a simple, methodical process of deciding which of the leads—Han, Luke, Leia, Lando, the droids, Chewbacca—it would hurt the least to lose. From whose viewpoint would it be hardest to describe the grief? “After two days,” Stackpole says, “we had Chewie locked down.”
When fan grief over the death of Chewbacca surpassed anything Shapiro or Stackpole expected, a rumor surfaced that Randy Stradley of Dark Horse Comics had told the meeting to “kill the family dog,” and compared Chewie to Old Yeller. But Stackpole denies that, insisting they all stuck the knives in at the same time, like Roman conspirators. Shapiro, who would edit the book, was happy to wield a blade. “You’ve got to get people’s attention. Otherwise it’s just ‘Oh, another adventure, another super weapon,’” Shapiro explains.
Vector Prime, the first novel of the New Jedi Order, would thus become the most controversial work in the history of the Expanded Universe, whose readers like to protest even more loudly than the average Star Wars fan. The author of Vector Prime, R. A. Salvatore, would receive death threats for his contribution to the oeuvre. He was, however, only obeying orders, and did at least give the Wookiee a heroic end. Chewie is killed helping to evacuate the population of a planet whose moon, thanks to the alien invaders, has fallen out of orbit. “Financially, it was successful, and it did work,” Shapiro says. “Even people who complained about it couldn’t put it down.”
How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise Page 42