Classic Star Wars Novels

[Finarvyn]

I apologize if this has been covered. I thought there was a thread on this but I couldn't find it, so I'm starting one.

If you go here you can find a list of Star Wars novels organized by publication date.

I often find it interesting to play the "roll back the clock" game and try to remember what Star Wars was like in the early days. As it turns out, I found copies of the three original movie novelizations in SFBC hardback at a local used bookstore for $5 each, and scored Splinter and the first two Han Solo books on e-bay also in hardback. (I have this stuff in paperback, but the font size is better with the hardbacks.)

1. Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker (1976)
2. Splinter of the Mind's Eye (1978)
3. Han Solo at Stars' End (1979)
4. Han Solo's Revenge (1979)
5. The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
6. Han Solo and the Lost Legacy (1980)
7. Return of the Jedi (1983)

That gives me six of the first seven Star Wars novels (and I'm not sure I want to bother with Lost Legacy as I remember it as being the weakest of the Han Solo books).

So, since I'm starting a FFG Star Wars campaign called "It Was A Period of Civil War" at my local game store in a couple of weeks, I thought that these six books would make an excellent canon for my campaign.

[Deleted]

Add the Lando Calrissian Adventures by L. Neil Smith to this:

Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu (October 1983)
Lando Calrissian and the Flamewind of Oseon (November 1983)
Lando Calrissian and the Starcave of ThonBoka (December 1983)

You can grab an omnibus here:
www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Lando-Calrissian-Adventures/dp/0345391101

[Finarvyn]

I have the Lando books in paperback form from 1983. I wasn't a big fan of those, compared to the rest.

[Starbeard]

I've read all of them before, but it's been a long while. I'm planning on reading through them again and taking setting notes, but so far I've only gotten through Splinter of the Mind's Eye.

As weird as Splinter is, having re-read through now I have the feeling that it's probably the most informed of all the old offshoot adventures, from a 'canon' point of view. Several parts of the book are lifted straight out of the various draft scripts that Lucas wrote—the swamp world, scenes with the trooper tanks, the whole plot device of the Kaiburr crystal (although I think the draft script called it a Kiber crystal). As Foster was ghost writing the movie novelization, he and Lucas must have gone over a lot of ideas from the drafts. Also, from what I understand Splinter was originally intended to be a story draft for a possible movie sequel (the draft of the opening chapter supposedly had a dogfight in space, which Lucas asked Foster to cut because it would be too expensive to produce if a movie was made).

On the one hand I really like how in Splinter all of the characters remain unrelated (no soap opera revelations of hidden Skywalkers here), and I would include that in a Star Wars game that I ran—although how often the PCs ran into Luke, Leia or Darth might make the point irrelevant.

On the other hand, I found myself a little disappointed with the overpowered Force mojo in the book. I like the original movie Jedi—lots of mind tricks and sensing life/Force presence—but here the Jedi powers are already strangely close to what we see in EU stuff from the 90s and the Prequels. Now I'm torn between using Splinter as a 'canon source' of what Jedi can do, since I'd really rather keep it to the subtle shenanigans seen in the movie. Really though, I found it very interesting that all of the token Jedi powers, from telekinesis to superhuman reaction speeds and acrobatics to force lightning, actually show up in the book before they even were even hinted at in the more 'official' Star Wars material, even from the draft developments. I wonder how much Foster actually did influence the public perception (or even Lucas' perception) of what Jedi could do.

[Starbeard]

By the way, in addition to the books you could also add the Star Wars comics. There were basically two simultaneous runs: the Marvel comics and the LA Times daily strips. The comic book was extremely popular and is said to have almost single-handedly saved Marvel, and can be treated as a great source for getting a 70s Star Wars Mania feel. However, as far as I know the actual content had little or no input from Lucasfilm, since the whole thing was basically run in-house by Marvel staff. That might put you off using it as a 'canon' source.

The Dailies I'd consider more 'official' in the sense of having greater input from Lucasfilm. My understanding is that Lucas asked for Al Williamson and Russ Manning by name, since he was a huge admirer of their work on Flash Gordon. After Manning retired due to health issues, Archie Goodwin joined the strip (he'd already been on the Marvel SW team), and they produced a series of newspaper dailies in 1979-80 that were intended to bridge the story between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.

There's a great blog that has all of the Star Wars dailies: dailysw.blogspot.co.uk
And you can use this Wookiepedia article to figure out when each story arc was published: starwars.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_Star_Wars_media

[Deleted]

Jan 6, 2016 9:12:07 GMT -6 Starbeard said:

The Dailies I'd consider more 'official' in the sense of having greater input from Lucasfilm. My understanding is that Lucas asked for Al Williamson and Russ Manning by name, since he was a huge admirer of their work on Flash Gordon. After Manning retired due to health issues, Archie Goodwin joined the strip (he'd already been on the Marvel SW team), and they produced a series of newspaper dailies in 1979-80 that were intended to bridge the story between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back.

I have a book that takes those dailies and combines them into a single long running narrative. It also colorizes them. Pretty entertaining. Most of the story focused on the Rebels trying to find a new base as the Empire was trying to destroy the base on Yavin (which, somehow, held out for quite a bit). I seem to recall that Vader commissioned the Executor as a ship powerful enough to take on the Rebels.

I'm not sure when they were published as the comics show the encounter on Ord Mandell that Han briefly mentions in ESB.