I really like Star Wars: Traitor. I know it’s part of a long-ass, ridiculous-in-a-bad-way storyline, but that book was solid.
You forgot Han and Leia come out of retirement to save their old friends from an old, forgotten nemesis!
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Whenever movies move beyond JUST the movies, I consider anything filmed to be canon and anything not just stories and who really cares if they conflict a bit or a lot? Enjoy the stories!
Except for The Matrix. To me, only the first film and The Animatrix is canon. =o)
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Well technically that wasn’t stolen from the Original Trilogy.
Oh, c’mon, it was a long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, and nobody really remembers what happened back then or didn’t…
I’d be happy if they just came out with a release of “Star Wars: The Original Movie, In Which Han Shot First”, not the “Episode IV: A New Hope” that’s the only version you can get these days.
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Mostly in one book. Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina.
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On the downside no more Thrawn.
On the upside no more Jaice Solo or the Vong.
…I can live with that.
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What I really look forward to is when the movies fall out of copyright and Star Wars becomes a proper modern mythology that people reshape to make the best stories. Like how Agamemnon was originally killed by his cousin, but Aeschylus wrote a version where he was killed by his wife, and it was much better and so now that’s what happened.
So everyone knows that Anakin turned to the dark side, but it was really dumb that he just forgot about his enslaved mom for a decade, and so somebody would write a version where (say) sinister forces kept them apart and his adherence to the Jedi code got her killed, and then that would replace Lucas’ account.
And it might not end up exactly like what Zahn wrote, but seeing how many fans he still has, I’m sure Thrawn will find a place if we don’t wait too long. Sweet, right? When do the movies start becoming public domain agai…oh, I see.
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Would never happen before due to how copyright works. Now that Disney has it you’ll be lucky if they don’t shove the movies in ‘the vault’ and release them for two weeks every eight years or whatever their schedule is.
DIsney owns star wars. Even if a massive restructuring of copyright happened that did away with life plus whatever that keeps getting extended whenever steamboat willie looks like it could enter public domain… disney is going to hold onto the mother of all cash cow franchises.
The Walt Disney Corporation owns those copyrights now, so if you want to see that day you’d better plan on living for a long, long time.
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I didn’t keep up on the books much, but I read the earlier ones from the 90s and liked them. I was also into the comics, and there are many good stories there.
Can we bring back the green space rabbit from the Marvel comics?
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Bucky O’Hare?
Jaxxon.
As the SMBC dude said, “Worrying that Disney will ruin Star Wars is like worrying that a second iceberg will dive down to hit the Titanic.”
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Just something I like to envision on long Sunday nights after the power goes out.
Yup. And no, I shouldn’t have called you a dweeb, either. Then again, I plead Taking One To Know One, since both our fierce opinions in this case are about the canonicity of aging Star Wars stories. That’s probably as neo-maxi-zoom-dweeby as it gets. 
His presence is the most encouraging part of the entire endeavor, if you ask me. Then again, my understanding was that part of the $4 billion deal, one of the major Lucas caveats about allowing anybody other than him (Disney or otherwise) to take over making SW movies, was his insistence on them working from his (that is, George’s) story treatments.
The dialogue was never the worst part of the bad SW movie scripts. I trust Kasdan (and Arndt and Abrams, for that matter) to write dialogue that’s superior to anything in the prequels, but if the Lucas outline contains serious plot turds like bone-stock ordinary protocol droid C-3PO being built entirely out of spare parts by the precocious young slave kid who will grow to rule the galaxy and terrorize… what is it, five future 3PO-masters in a row? Hmm. Bail Organa, Captain Antilles, Owen Lars, Luke Skywalker… I guess Princess Leia never held formal mastery of the droids. Anyway, Bill Shakespeare himself couldn’t write dialogue to save sophomoric plotting like that, and his story worlds didn’t contain millions of populated worlds, so coincidences in Shakespeare aren’t nearly as stupid as they are in SW.
Oh, certainly. I really do think there are several splendid and satisfying plots and character arcs extant in the EU (more of them than you seem to believe exist, at any rate), and I think Disney isn’t wrong for de-canonizing the stupid or inconvenient or sufficiently obscure stuff. I just think you’re mistaken for claiming that “almost all of it is terrible.” (Referring to the post-ROTJ stuff.)
I think Kasdan (with the help of people like Leland Chee) could write perfectly great SW scripts that fit in with sizable chunks of the EU, if that were the corporate mandate, if only because so much of the EU was kept consistent, right down to Ann Crispin saving George’s bacon and Han Solo’s credibility by explaining how the Millennium Falcon actually could do the Kessel Run “in less than twelve parsecs” and having it make some sort of sense (insofar as space opera ever can make sense). Freeing Kasdan’s hand to write whatever he wants without worrying about contradicting the post-ROTJ EU is understandable, if not quite inevitable. What bugs me today is that you’ve summarily blessed the jettisoning of the whole EU as a good thing without bemoaning the fact that George’s suckass prequels, by sole virtue of being movies made by Lucas, are canonical and thus not to be messed with.
I swear, Lucas will reach out and soil his creation from the grave. A chance presented itself to utilize some genuinely superior SF writing, characters, stories, situations, organizations, and worlds, the ones created by some (though most assuredly not all) of the EU writers, and maybe let further visits to desert backwaters in binary systems and future discussions of midi-chlorians and other potential Campbellian mythic hamfistery (queen/slave love! virgin birth! fathers and sons, worlds without end!) recede into the mists of my failing memory, instead of the Good Stuff like Thrawn and Rogue Squadron and even (God love him) Don Wan Kihotay, my favorite Jedi knight ever.
Okay, so much for my credibility.
Well anyway. Who knows how much they’ll keep? And really, it’s tough for me to care too much. If anything, they’re accelerating the rate of content creation: not just three more movies over the next seven years, but probably at least five. And future books and TV shows and such will have to fit in the new canon. If Lucas had kept his hands out, I’d be mildly optimistic for much of it to turn out well, if only because so many of the powers-that-be in the industry grew up, as I did, loving these movies and characters and wanting them to be treated right.
As it is, well, I’m not gonna get too excited in advance. I’ll wait and see.
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Looks like Cory material here. He needs to write a story where pissed-off fans somehow get Star Wars out of Disney hands and into Public Domain.
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The EU covers, among many other things, the stories of all the main characters from at least the start of Episode 1 until more than 50 years after Episode 6.
@Shuck:The official explanation is that Lucas is absolute canon, while the EU contains a couple of levels of canon, each of which holds until and unless a higher level overrides it. They had to retcon a bunch of things when I-III came out, but the OLd Republic was relatively clear compared to the post-VI timeline
@rider: Yes there is a lot of crap, and yes Thrawn was first, but Zahn, Troy Denning, RA Salvatore, and a bunch of other good authors have written other very good ones since. We’re now four generations into the Skywalker family rebuilding the Jedi order.
A Tabasco-and-broken-glass enema is better than Episodes I-III.
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I note that you didn’t name Anderson’s products as “books”. Although they are arguably so, as they consists of chapters pages paragraphs sentences and words.
I will give him this – he’s a consummate professional. He must (I assume) generate a proposal and follow-through on the proposal close to 100% of the time. His books have decent concepts. The words are generally grammatical. In another age he’d have been writing Hardy Boys Nancy Drew and Bobsey Twins novels. Thank G-d for protecting Chet’s jalopy from a fate such as that.
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