[May 25th
will mark the 40th anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars film (it wasn’t
titled A New Hope at that
point!). So this week I’ll offer a few ways to AmericanStudy the iconic series
and its contexts and connections. Share your own different points of view for a
force-full crowd-sourced weekend post, my fellow padawan learners!]
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, 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.
Crowd-sourced
post this weekend,
Ben
PS. So one more
time: what do you think? Other Star Wars contexts you’d highlight?
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