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Looking Back And Thinking Forward

Posted By Stephen on June 29, 2007

As Paul said in his article Beyond the Horizon of the Expanded Universe, the Books staff was planning on doing something connected to the upcoming EU License Contract being awarded. That "something" is a series of essays on our thoughts regarding it.

The following is the first of those essays.

Soon, the Star Wars novels license will be up for renewal—a contract that according to Sue over at the Official Site, is pretty much hammered out, and just waiting for the lawyers to finish picking at it.

But what does it mean for our beloved franchise? Well, there's only two possibilities here, either Del Rey retains the contract or some other publishing house gets the contract. Unfortunately, there's not really a middle ground.

Now, what does it mean if Del Rey retains the contract? Again, there are two possibilities here. Either Del Rey continues producing the same types of stories that they have been, or they start producing something slightly different.

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that if Del Rey retains the contract again that they will view it as justification for the way that they have pushed the story, so that means that we will continue getting the same fare that is being published today.

Is that a bad thing? As in most things, my answer has to be "that depends."

To define that, we need to look at what Del Rey has produced over the past few years, which translates into the contract getting won by Del Rey and then them receiving a renewal.

Their first foray into Star Wars EU was the New Jedi Order. An extensive, multi—year, multi-volume storyline, spanning a total of nineteen books, five of which were hardcovers. The NJO was hailed as an effort to push the next generation of heroes into the limelight, allowing the sons and daughters of the movie characters to become the stars of the franchise. It introduced a new destructive enemy, totally devoid of, as well as being a void in (well sometimes in), the Force. This new enemy was a warlike race, who worked in strict hierarchies with an elaborate honor system which dictated their every action. They were called Klingons... wait, sorry, wrong franchise... they were called the Yuuzhan Vong.

Anyways, this series started out with the death of a much beloved movie character. A sign to the fans at how things had changed with the change of publishing house. Then things in the franchise slowly fell apart. Del Rey tried to impose a sense of dread for the characters, tried to make us fear for them, through this death. They meant it as a sign that yes, these stories matter. That they're more realistic than what Bantam produced. What they managed to do, was garner death threats for poor Mr. Salvatore who they roped into writing that particular novel.

Unfortunately that wasn't the only way in which Del Rey fumbled with the NJO.

For the first half of the novels, they pushed at us three main characters: Anakin Solo, Jacen Solo and Jaina Solo. Anakin was the HERO in the traditional, Star Wars sense. He was the next Luke Skywalker. Jaina was her father's child, while Jacen was a pacifistic twerp, who most people did not like reading about (a fact that remained in place until the novel Traitor which focused on, and rebuilt his character).

Anyways, the second major fumble was that they gave us this strong, heroic character, one which we readily identified as a Star Wars HERO, and then ripped him from the franchise in the middle of his Hero's Journey, which was running parallel to the overarching storyline of the NJO. To make this worse, by the end of the series, Del Rey was pointing at Jacen, a character as far from a traditional Star Wars Hero as one can get and saying that he was the Hero of the franchise.

Then yet another fumble of the NJO, was the simple fact that the story still isn't finished. The story was never the Vong invasion. Star Wars is fantasy. It's about the reconciliation, or overcoming, of good and evil. In that framework, the story is not the war, but the fact that the Vong are not found in the Force. Again, if Anakin had lived, this is something that I believe would have been dealt with, as he clearly felt them in the Force towards the end of the NJO. Instead, we get a metaphysical band—aid, in the form of the deus ex machina, Zonoma Sekot. Additionally, as an exercise, I suggest you go re-read Traitor replacing Jacen with Anakin, and see how so often, he makes more sense in that role than his elder brother did.

Then to make that lack of resolution in the NJO that much worse, they used the deus ex machina to push a change in how Luke Skywalker and his Jedi Order view the Force. One which is in direct conflict with everything he had learned before. In fact, what Jacen learned from Vergere was the exact same lessons that the Shadow Academy tried to teach him during the YJK young adult novels.

Of course, at the same time we were getting the NJO, we were also getting the the Prequel & Clone Wars novels. Frankly, I think Del Rey did much better on these novels than they have on their post-RotJ work. The tone of the Prequels fit more with the type of stories that Del Rey wanted to put out than the stuff set after RotJ. That overriding sense of depression and oppression made sense in those novels.

After the NJO stumbled to a point where they were no longer publishing books under that imprint, Del Rey put out a trilogy entitled the Dark Nest Trilogy. DN3's purpose was to basically reset the Jedi's view of the Force. In the end, I didn't really have any problems with this trilogy, outside of the whole Joiner thing which gave me the shivers.

All through this time, we had also been getting random stand alone novels which weren't part of any over series within the franchise. Things such as Tatooine Ghost and Survivor's Quest. These novels tended to be more traditional Star Wars fare than the things in the major series.

Finally, we have the currently running Legacy of the Force series. It's a nine-book series, written by three authors, each with a hardcover and two paperbacks. Basically, it's another fine example of the folly of plotting by committee/editors. My biggest complaint about this series overall though, is that it is fundamentally a rehash of the Prequels. Consider, you have a Sith Lord, who works to bring about civil war within the galaxy for the dual purpose of pushing a Jedi into the role of Sith and for the Sith to conquer said galaxy. You have a scion of Skywalker becoming a Darth. You have a somewhat ineffectual Jedi Council, that is either unwilling or unable to see what is obviously right in front of their faces. Of course, it's not exactly the same, but the similarities are so many, and so close, that one cannot help but notice them. In the end, I want to wait for the entire series to be out before I give it a full review the way I discussed the NJO above, but once LotF is over, I suspect that the comparison between the Prequels and LotF will figure highly into that full review.

Yet, for all that negativity about the series produced, and the direction of the EU as a whole, there are a number of things that Del Rey did right here. Conquest, Traitor, and Tatooine Ghost are just three examples of some of my favorite Star Wars literature out there. In fact both of Keyes' NJO novels are the reason why most Anakin Solo fans exist, and the same applies to Jacen's fans in the Del Rey era and Traitor. Unfortunately, the things done right during this time span, were less obvious than the fallacies, at least from my point of view.

So where does that leave us?

Frankly, if we're stuck with the status quo, it's something of dire straits in regards to the direction of the EU.

That's not to say that Del Rey can't change things around. Of course they can. There are any number of ways to once more provide the fans with a strong hero, in the traditional Hero's Journey mold. They can once more provide escapism for their fans. Do I believe that will happen? Not really. I think that if Del Rey gets the contract for another decade, that we will get more of the same.

Of course, that begs the question, can any of the other publishing houses do better? The other houses whose work I am familiar with are: DAW Books, Wizards of the Coast, TOR and Baen.

DAW Books publishes a lot of fantasy novels, two of their best known authors being Mercedes Lackey and Tad Williams. The benefit here is that they do a lot of fantasy work, and Star Wars is fantasy. The bad thing here is that they are a smaller press—so I would worry over them being able to recruit a lot of the name brand talent which Del Rey is able to bring to the table.

Wizards of the Coast publishes all those RPG books, which is where I am familiar with them from. Additionally, they publish the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance and Magic: The Gathering series of novels. The good thing with this publisher is that they are primarily publishers of licensed lines, and again they are publishers of fantasy fare. The drawback is that a lot of folks view them solely from the point of view of the RPG games (and I was one of them, until doing a bit of research for this article), and I have the same concerns over their ability to recruit talent that I have for DAW. That said, I have never read, or even glanced at, the novels they publish, so I cannot honestly comment on their ability to recruit authors.

Baen Books is larger than either of the previous two. It is home to Aaron Allston, Poul Anderson, David Weber and a host of others. They have the talent on hand, and the knowledge to drive the franchise forward. The only issue with them that I can see, is that they don't have a lot of experience with licensed materials. Sure, they have a number of series in their catalog, but those series are entirely creations of the authors, as opposed to licensed fare (except for certain short-story anthologies), which of course are two distinctly different concepts and way to run things.

TOR is related somehow to Baen, as they share a lot of the same authors (at least according to their website), but TOR also has additional authors such as veteran Star Wars author, Kevin J. Anderson. Additionally, TOR has been around a long time, and has a lot of experience with licensed projects, including other space operas such as Battlestar Galactica, Andromeda and the Dune series. Truthfully, I would like to see TOR get this franchise, and see what they could do with it. Especially, if they convinced some of their existing authors to give it a go (and I'm looking at John Scalzi's novels as I write that line).

With Sue's announcement that the new contract is imminent, now is the time to be considering just where we, as a fandom, would like the franchise to go. How we think it should go forward, or more accurately, how we hope that the franchise goes forward.

My ultimate hope is that Star Wars once more rediscovers its mythological roots, taking up the mantle of space opera once again, becoming a hopeful story again, and leaving behind this insistence on realism, fatalism and an almost dystopic vision of the Galaxy Far, Far Away. Given, all the options for the upcoming contract, I can't help but hope that it will get delivered to TOR. Of course, being a realist, I have to believe that the status quo will be upheld, giving us another decade of the same types of stories, lacking as they are in the hope which I always associated with Star Wars both in the Original Trilogy and the books written during the Bantam era.

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