Next December it’ll be 10 years since the release of what is in my opinion the biggest train wreck in the history of movie sequels; certainly a blockbuster worth literal billions of dollars, but in my heart and in my mind, it’s just a failed attempt that needn’t be.
I’m talking about “Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens”, released in theaters worldwide shortly before Christmas 2015. I’m not going to comment on this movie or its sequels, as there is plenty of rants discussions about its relative merits (or lack thereof) online, and I won’t add to that discussion here. Let’s just point out that episodes 7, 8, and 9 are commonly credited with… making “The Phantom Menace” look good. Imagine that.
Forget all of that. For the humble author of these lines you’re reading now, “The Force Awakens” movie is not the real “episode 7”. Such a thing existed already, and had existed for almost 25 years when the movie was released.
The true episodes 7, 8, and 9, are collectively referred to as the “Thrawn Trilogy”, and consist of 3 magnificent novels written by Timothy Zahn: “Heir to the Empire”, “Dark Force Rising”, and “The Last Command”, published respectively in 1991, 92, and 93. I read devoured these books a few years after their initial publication, in their French translations, starting in 1994.
I vividly remember the shock I felt while reading those pages.
Regardless of my literary tastes, the legacy of these three masterpieces is vast, and visible to this day in oh so many corners of the wreckage of the Star Wars universe post Disney acquisition. The most visible and well-known of those is, without a doubt, Coruscant, the capital planet of the galaxy, which made its debut in the pages of these books, and was later included in the final scene of the Special Edition released in 1997 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the movies.
Timothy Zahn expanded the Star Wars universe (with the explicit approval and guidance of George Lucas himself) in wonderful and unforeseen directions. The three books are a sequence of surprises, one after another. We discover rich characters like Talon Karrde, a smuggler who works under the radar in the New Republic created after the Battle of Endor at the end of episode 6.
Or even more interesting, the captivating Mara Jade: she was a disciple of Palpatine (a character who, by the way, has not “somehow returned” to this universe: insert facepalm emoji here). Suffice to say that Mara Jade is obsessed with killing Luke Skywalker, and this single motivation is a major engine driving the plot of the three books. (Although apparently George Lucas hated her. That’s too bad. She was awesome.)
I must give a special mention to Grand Admiral Thrawn, probably the most complex and interesting villain in the whole of the Star Wars universe. An intelligent, cold, well-spoken, analytic, ruthless personality that was such a hit with readers of the novels, not only lent his name to the whole book trilogy, but also was co-opted by Disney at some point in some other TV show. Because that’s how awesome Thrawn was on the books.
What about the locations? One of my favorites was without any doubt Nkllon, a planet hosting a mining facility run by (you guessed it) Lando Calrissian himself, and located in a system next to a terribly hot and murderous star, so hot that ships required to duck themselves under humongous “shieldships” shaped like an umbrella. The mining facilities themselves were literal mobile cities, continuously roaming, always operating on the night side of the planet.
In these books we also discover, for the first time, Kashyyk, the planet where Chewbacca comes from, a place that would later be shown to audiences as part of the plot of “Episode 2: Attack of the Clones”, released in 2002.
And one more pet peeve of mine: the Ysalamiri, a brilliant concept, that of an animal that has evolved over millennia to gain the uncanny ability to repel the force. Think about that. One of the greatest sequences of the trilogy consists, precisely, of Luke Skywalker being stranded in space, and then captured thanks to one of those Ysalamiri, and in the following pages, the development of his relationship with Mara Jade, stripped of his powers and showing his skills and capacity, even without the Force.
I won’t say anything else; if you haven’t read these three gems, I can only recommend that you do. For those of you in Switzerland, the boxed set is available from Orell Füssli. The universe described there is way richer than the one in the movies; the prose is brilliant; and the description of the locations will paint a picture in your head that is radically better than what you’ve seen in theaters from 2015 to 2019.
At this point I need to make a point that might sound heretical or inexcusable to some: of the three movies of that last wreckage of a trilogy, the one I found the most interesting and with the biggest potential was “Episode 8: The Last Jedi”. But of course, J. J. Abrams had to come back later with a shockingly bad episode 9, that shamelessly demolished whatever episode 8 had tried to build. Anyway. Kudos to Rian Johnson for having made the best of the three: colorful, deep, witty, transgressive, controversial. No wonder Disney didn’t want anything to do with it.
OK, it’s all good, but with maybe just one exception that still troubles me to this day: the scene where Luke Skywalker drinks a cup of hot chocolate… arguably, one of the plants that E. T. brought back home with him from Earth in the 1982 movie.
Yeah. The jury is still debating about this scene. But don’t let this detail deter you from the rest of the books. They are a collective miracle, and among the greatest sci-fi novels of the 20th century for sure.