[May 27th will see the much-anticipated release of the first episode of Obi-Wan Kenobi, the newest Star Wars show. So this week I’ll offer a few ways to AmericanStudy the iconic series and its contexts and connections. May the Force be with us all!]
On what Timothy
Zahn’s Star Wars novels meant to fans, and what that can help us analyze about genre
storytelling.
It’s very
difficult to explain to my sons, growing up as they are in the era not only of
the new Star Wars films and shows, but of the Clone Wars and Rebels
animated series, of numerous Star Wars video games, and even of Star Wars
amusement parks for crying out loud, how much of a void there was for a young
Star Wars fan in the years after Return
of the Jedi (1984). I was almost 7 when Jedi
came out, just coming into my own as a full-fledged Star Wars fan; the next new
film, The Phantom Menace, wouldn’t be
released until 1999, when I was about to turn 22 and not quite in the same
place as that 7 year old StarWarsStudier had been. Although George Lucas tried
to bridge the gap by re-releasing
the original trilogy with new footage in the 1990s (not all of it uniformly
awful, although I still shudder in horror every time I have to watch Han Solo
step on Jabba the Hutt’s tail in that inserted New Hope sequence), I think it’s
fair to say that if we fans had been left with no new Star Wars stories between
Jedi and Phantom, many of us might have left the Star Wars universe behind
for fresher storytelling pastures.
But we weren’t
left so bereft, and the main reasons were the three novels in science fiction
writer Timothy Zahn’s
Thrawn trilogy:
Heir to the Empire (1991), Dark Force Rising (1992), and The Last Command (1993). There had been
novelizations and comic book versions of the films, but Zahn’s books, set five
years after the events of Return of the
Jedi and featuring both returning and new characters, were the first truly
new literary stories set in the Star Wars universe, creating (or at least
popularizing) the now-familiar concept
of the “expanded universe.” This teenage AmericanStudier had already read
and loved plenty of fantasy and science fiction books and series by the time Heir to the Empire appeared, but there
was nonetheless something different about such expanded universe books,
something particularly potent in the way they (that is, the way Zahn) blended
the familiar with the new, built on a world and characters and settings we knew
and cared about while taking them and us in unfamiliar and uncertain
directions. Clearly that wasn’t just me; Heir
to the Empire was a #1 New York Times
bestseller, the trilogy sold a combined 15 million copies (to date), and the
books’ popularity has even been credited by one Star
Wars historian (Michael Kaminsky) with helping convince George Lucas to
make the prequel films.
So what might we
make of those effects, of the potent cultural role of Zahn’s Star Wars novels?
Much of what my Fitchburg State
colleague Heather Urbanski argues in her study The Science
Fiction Reboot: Canon, Innovation, and Fandom in Refashioned Franchises
(2013) is certainly relevant to that question; Urbanski counter critiques of
reboots or sequels as unoriginal, arguing instead that such works, and
franchises overall, tap into audience desires and needs in profound ways. I
would agree with all of that, but would also suggest that there’s something specific
to novels and their form of storytelling that was also at play in the role and
success of Zahn’s Star Wars books. Of course multi-episode TV shows can expand
a universe in their own ways, as we’ve seen with the recent Star Wars shows
(characters from which have, tellingly, made
their way into the most recent films). Yet—and I grant that this might be
the literary scholar in me talking—I would argue that a novel can expand and
deepen a cinematic universe in ways that no other genre can, and that it’s thus
far from coincidental that it was Zahn’s Thrawn novels that first truly opened
up not only the Star Wars Expanded Universe, but even the concept of an
expanded universe at all. They certainly had a distinct and vital effect for
this StarWarsStudier.
May Recap this
weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other Star Wars contexts you’d highlight?
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