In the summer of 1992, an eleven-year-old me would ride his lime-green bicycle to the steps of the Dobson Ranch Library in Mesa, Arizona, hoping each time to see if his name had advanced on the waiting list to read Heir to the Empire. And when it finally did, and I began tearing through the pages, I remember feeling a little weird. I loved it, of course, but looking back, the reason Zahn’s first Star Wars novel is so wonderfully odd is that it audaciously asserts Star Wars not as epic space fantasy, but instead, science fiction.