A long, long time ago, in a city far, far away, there was a little boy, and he wanted to know everything.
* * *
Things changed the year I was born. When I say that, I’m usually talking about the collapse of the Soviet Union: the trick that whisked away the Iron Curtain and revealed, not the Evil Empire, but just a collection of states, confused, stumbling a little, trying to decide whether the past or the present was the hypnotism act. But this time I’m talking about Star Wars.
On May 1st of 1991, Heir to the Empire was published. It wasn’t the first Star Wars novel, but it might as well have been. It was the first in eight years, the first since Return of the Jedi. It was the first to be set after the films. (An extensive discussion of what, exactly, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye means for this claim has been omitted here. You’re welcome.)
It was the start of a whole new universe. (The Star Wars Expanded Universe, or EU for short. And yes, it does predate the European Union. It also has a weirdly similar but ultimately much cooler flag.)
Like most third-trimester fetuses, I was illiterate at the time, and so I can’t say I’ve been there from the beginning. But this universe, born just a few months before me, is one I would grow up in.
* * *
It’s hard to explain exactly how much the EU meant to me; I keep coming at it from different angles. I could tell you that I own hundreds of Star Wars novels, literally hundreds of them, that I slept with them overlooking my bed. I could tell you that I’m writing this in a room that contains a Lego TIE Defender, that the first thing I hunted for and bought with my first real adult paycheck was a Lego Star Wars set that wasn’t from the movies, that belonged to the larger universe.
I could tell you that my favorite mockery of Young Earth Creationism is that it proposes a universe smaller and younger than the EU (6,000 years and presumably 6,000 light-years vs. 25,000 years (at least) and 120,000 light years [not counting the Yuuzhan Vong galaxy and other extra-“Galaxy Far, Far Away” locations]). I could tell you about everyone I’ve impressed with that argument (nobody).
I could tell you about the time at Safeway that a guy behind me in line said he liked my Mythosaur-skull t-shirt, the design drawn from Boba Fett’s shoulder, and that when I said hey, thanks, he pulled up his sleeve and revealed the same pattern tattooed onto his shoulder. Turns out he was a member of the 501st Legion, Vader’s Fist, the world’s most serious Star Wars costuming association. (How serious? Very. Let’s leave it there.) I could explain that I knew what the 501st was, that I can identify them in the movies and talk about their history, how I know it started as a fan club but later became official.
I could tell you that I cannot remember being happier than the day I won the What’s The Story? contest, making my own small official contribution to the EU. It was a 250-word encyclopedia article about a spaceship in the background of Return of the Jedi, and I am about as proud of it as I am of my undergraduate thesis.
I could tell you that I still remember the playground swing I sat on when I heard that Chewbacca had died.
Hell, I stole these three-asterisk transitions from Heir to the Empire, and I haven’t re-read that book in years. What more do you want?
***
On April 25th, 2014, the EU came to a close. In retrospect, the novel-universe EU may have been dying for most of the time it’s been alive—a sad graph I made while working on this article shows a peak at 20 novels in the year of 1997, followed by a gradual and bumpy decline to the present. Disney, the new owner of Star Wars—
[Okay, pause. Let’s talk for a second about how weird it is that someone (even if that person is a faceless fictional metaperson like the Disney Corporation) owns Star Wars. How weird is that to you? Rest assured that to me it is far, far weirder. It’s like saying, oh, yes, Disney owns the moon, or the history of the UK from 1910 to 1960. (And now imagine that you grew up in the UK during that time.) And yet at the same time it was only because Lucasfilm owned Star Wars that there was a single coherent universe for me to have all the feelings about the universe that I did, and that I outlined below. So now think about how weird that is. Feeling appropriately unsettled? Good. Unpause.]
—April 25th, 2014, Disney announced that all new Star Wars content, going forward, would not be beholden to the 40 years of history that had come before. That while earlier materials might be used by future authors, the covenant of consistency was being broken. That the EU was being repackaged “under the new Legends banner.”
Legends. What a perfect name for everything that I feared.
My friend wrote on my Facebook wall “I feel like this means much more to you than it does to me.” He was right. Mostly what it meant was a sense of loss.
Something has been changed in my life, I hummed in my head, quoting the Talking Heads as I only do in my most emotionally intense moments. Something must be returned to us.
***
What did Disney take from me? It’s a tricky question. It’s not the joy of having read the books I loved, or the noble suffering of having finished The Crystal Star (sorry, Ms. McIntyre). No official-licensing announcement could change that. I’m still going to refer to Yoda: Dark Rendezvous (full title: Star Wars: Clone Wars: Yoda: Dark Rendezvous: Attack of the Colons) as the wisest book I’ve ever read. I’ll still keep quoting Shatterpoint about how to deal with bullies and with doubt, and I’ll always remember what Traitor did for me when I needed to learn how to believe in myself.
Nor have I lost a vision of the future. I’ve left the flock, faded into apostasy and stopped buying the new novels. (I was betrayed, funnily amusingly enough, by Betrayal. I do not accept what’s been done to Jacen Solo. As opposed to Traitor, which I loved. So it’s kind of a mixed bag with the titles.)
Oh, I check in, from time to time, go drift around Wookieepedia remembering the good old days. But they’ve moved on and so have I.
No, what I lost was a universe. A universe I could be right about, could be sure about. The boy I once was loved the Star Wars novels, yes, but not as much as he loved the encyclopedias. I reread the Essential Guide to Characters more eagerly than any other book. It was a bit of a bizarre choice: the Guide was spoiler-ridden and flat, turning the pulpy pulp of the novels into a few dry sentences per character. But I loved that book, because I wanted to know everything, and the Star Wars expanded universe was just the right size. It was large, and growing—hundreds of books, ultimately—but oh-so-safely finite, and oh-so-carefully consistent. I could tell that with just the right amount of effort, I could come to know it all.
“Know-it-all,” of course, is a dirty word. And I can see why. I was not the most pleasant conversationalist in those days, unless you had quite a lot to say about Star Wars. I still remember walking with my father, perplexed frustration in his voice as he tried to get me to talk about something other than X-Wings. He failed, that day. (But then, he probably wanted to talk about securities law, so, Dad, it takes one to raise one.)
I paid for it, too. My insistence on inhabiting a universe that others merely visited, if at all, left me lonely. When I found the rare person who shared some substantial portion of my interest, the strength of the connection I felt is, in retrospect, a little shocking. It took quite a deliberate bit of effort to get to the point where I could contain discussion of Star Wars just to appropriate contexts. So I don’t mean to present a dishonestly shiny view of things.
And yet, it seems to me we ignore the gift of a universe. My passion to know, to consume, to understand, to control the EU is regarded as the sad, bookish cousin of the fandom feelings. But why should it be? The project of carving out a space of control, of finding and seizing opportunities for mastery, is such an important part of childhood. It’s such an important part of life. It’s such a darling, nerdy type of love. We should be grateful for such a well-formed opportunity as the Star Wars EU provided. It’s hard to imagine a world built more beautifully to just the right scale.
Yes, perhaps it’s a little escapist. Perhaps it’s a little obsessive. There’s no doubt it’s sometimes a little silly. But it was a beautiful, spacious, precise universe I lived in, and it had space wizard fighter pilots with laser swords, so I kind of had it made.
***
Of course, the consistency I loved so much—the consistency that made it possible to talk about the Star Wars universe in such concrete terms—relied on the canon established by the license-holder. It relied on an institutional commitment to consistency in licensed materials, one that’s basically lacking in all other universes of comparable size (that I know of.) And now it’s gone. That’s what I’ve lost, and that’s why I mourn.
But we all lose our childhood homes, eventually. One way or another.
Another part of growing up is realizing that you get to choose what you believe in. So: call it Legends if you will. My passport still reads Star Wars Expanded Universe. Ask me about it, if you want to know. I can still go on for hours.
Tags: books, comics, i literally wept while putting this in wordpress, louis evans, star wars, star wars expanded universe
Related Posts
I lost Mara Jade goddamnit! All the feels of grief and rage!
The Animorphs tribe is a strong one.
I think the thing about HP is that like, Prisoner of Azkaban is STILL my favorite and I think I liked it because I could do world building of my own at that point in the series? Like, fill in the blanks about Remus (still my fave) and I REALLY liked the animagus concepts, and I think its "darker" quality is far more …. evident than all the maudlin shit that goes down in 6 and 7. Don't get me wrong: I bought them the day they came out, I read them, but like… let's be real, that shit needed an editor towards the end. Plus I like a little wiggle room, you know? I still like the fandom, but it was not my Star Wars. Nor things I really adore now (comics in many varieties, TV, I guess?).
Hey so I'm sorry it took me so long to respond to all of you! (But it feels appropriate that I'm writing my response(s) the way I wrote the article—three days later than I planned and also at 1 AM?)
Thank you all for the lovely replies. I'm glad that I was able to capture, at least a little bit, what went on for so many of us.
Thank you! I know that every time I've climbed a mountain, when I reach the top, I'm like, this is nice, but I wish it were a metaphor for my aptitude in philosophy/authorship/parenthetical asides.
(I thought about putting in a parenthetical aside here, but then I realized it would be too meta (oh shit—
My guess is that superfishely and ashkabash are the same person, but I'm choosing to officially believe that SO MANY people had this experience that two unrelated individuals described it in the comments to the article in exactly the same way.
It was awesome! He wasn't just from the 501st—he was from the HAWAII 501st. He lives in a tropical paradise and he dresses up as a clone trooper.
There was some wild fortuitousness at that Safeway, man.
So I loved the cloning crap, actually—it hit, for me, just the right balance between Force as science and Force as magic.
ALSO WRAITH SQUADRON IS AMAZING. Though I kind of love Starfighters of Adumar most of all. And I can't deal with the fact that Allston has died.
Has anyone read Mercy Kill? Is it worth it?
Man, I remember that website! It was a tiny bit crazy, yo. But it was cool finding it with you!
And thanks for saying that. I don't mind too much when Dad talks about securities law either, to be honest, but it's so almost exactly the same thing it deserved mention.
Plus the fact that your icon is nerdy teenage Leela makes me feel pretty great about our family.
I was staying in Disney World with my family when The Clone Wars: Season 2 was coming out (the original flat animated one, the AMAZING one), and I would hike from the house where we were staying to this public space nearby that had internet (slow, shitty internet) lugging my it-now-seems-massive-in-hindsight laptop to watch the next episode.
Which says a lot of things about me, though actually is remarkably prescient in its elucidation of the fuck you, Disney, Star Wars forever theme.
Honest answer? I kinda liked it. I especially dug the bit where Jacen and Jaina make fire by being ATOMIC SCALE JEDI, which should happen in approximately 112% of all Star Wars novels but doesn't. I was using it mostly as a community touchstone. The Waru bit was weird, though.
The one I hated was Dark Journey, which I could not STAND, especially since it was an obvious companion piece to Traitor but lacked basically all virtues. But then, you're talking to a guy who wrote an entry for What's the Story that heavily references the Black Fleet Crisis, so I am Not To Be Trusted.
Oh no — I'd heard that he was in poor health, but I didn't know he had died. Aw. I met him at a con when I was a teenager and he was just the nicest, and signed my copy of Iron Fist with a personal little note and everything. (I think Starfighters of Adumar had not come out yet, so Iron Fist was still my favorite at the time. But yes, obviously Starfighters of Adumar is the best one, it has the most Wes in it.)
I'm right there with you in terms of being drawn to the minutae of the universe as much as the stories themselves. I too DEVOURED those Essential guides again and again, committing them to memory and feverishly waiting for the next one. No joke, in 10th grade I gave a speech in speech class on the relative sizes of Star Destroyers: their various classes, how many wings of TIEs each could carry, etc, complete with visual aids. Looking back, I'm wondering what the heck I was thinking, but man, I loved that stuff.
Thanks also for putting to words my own disquiet with the end of the EU – the stories still exist, as you say, and as a superhero comics fan, lord knows this isn't my encounter with a sweeping retcon that reallocates existing stories to a non-canoncial space, but it's the end of that universe, of being able to know everything about it, that is dying. And I'll miss that. Even if my knowledge of it was already thinning.
"I do not accept what’s been done to Jacen Solo [in Betrayal]. As opposed to Traitor, which I loved."
Amen. I thought Traitor was incredible. Betrayal? UGH. Although I really liked The Crystal Star. But I was in like 9th grade, so…
I think wanting to master something entirely is very common for kids judging by the types of books that check out at the library I work in. LEGO and SW essential guides are HUGELY popular, and I think you've gotten it exactly right: the size of these worlds is just right for a kid to be able to master if they so choose.
Pouring one out for Mara Jade. Luckily my job as a librarian means I can still try to get those books into the hands of new readers so they aren't totally brainwashed by the Disney version of the EU. I HAVE POWER.
I also am rereading Wraith Squadron atm and it is freaking amazing. Kell, Myn, Face and Ton are all incredible characters!
I know this is a year and a half old now, but I just read it and enjoyed it and felt it deserved a comment, dammit!
I'm posting this 80 weeks after your comment, so for all I know you could've read and re-read the X-Wing books a million times by now, but yes, Mercy Kill is definitely worth it.
Allston rubs the pathos in from the word go, crushes your hopes and dreams, makes you laugh no more than twenty-to-thirty sentences later, and does it all again and again in a way only he seems to be able to do. The Wraith roster is different, albeit much larger (spoiler alert: the book jumps from year to year, so you get to see them before, during, and well after the Vong war) and I don't think I appreciated the new characters the same way I did Ton Phanan, Kell, and the entire arcs of Lara's heel-face-900 or the team trying to fix Myn's Heroic BSOD, but the same way each book gives insight to a specific character (or a few characters) and then the next iteration focuses on an entirely different cast member, this one is all about Voort "don't-call-me-Piggy-anymore-like-no-seriously-I'm-not-playing-guys-for-real" saBinring.
If you can't get behind a book about a living, breathing genius Gamorrean supercomputer that's polite 99% of the time and can savagely beat a man to pulp with a desk 1% of the time, you, sir, are not the Wraith Squadron fan you claim to be.
This article was brilliant, by the way. I feel the same sense of loss and discomfort, so much so that I haven't seen the new movie yet (because it feels like I'd be cheating on a dead spouse). And with Rogue One in the pipeline, it appears my worst fears have come true.
It was easy enough to imagine a lot of the Rogue/Wraith stuff still taking place within canon, even though Disney decided to cull history and erase the EU. One, the novels were pretty well contained within the series itself, and by the end of each author's run, the big-bads and fallout from their nefarious nefarious-ness had been dealt with. And two, we already know Wedge, Tycho, Wes, Hobbie, and Rogue Squadron was a thing. They're still canon. All the other guys were minor players in the grand scheme of the universe, anyway, so frig Disney. They existed. Rogue Squadron simply didn't cease to be. Thirty years post RotJ is enough time for me to imagine all these stories (except Mercy Kill, I suppose. You should still read it) taking place.
But I digress. Definitely give Mercy Kill a chance, even if only to read "new" Aaron Allston's prose one final time.