Heir to the Empire Week: Part 1- Intro

 Heir to the Empire (1991)

IT'S FINALLY HERE! The "official" kick off to the Expanded Universe, and still one of the best Star Wars books ever written. I'm so excited to do something other than another minor spinoff/adaptation (although I have only myself to blame for that). I wanted to get this up Friday, but: 1. I overcommitted to blogging in general (10+ entries a week? As a hobby? MADNESS!) 2. There's a lot to talk about. 

I've decided to do a whole week (doing nothing for my "too many blog posts" problem, but whatever) of it. Starting with a little bit of an overview of why Heir to the Empire is such a big deal, how the franchise got here, and how I first read it. But first, have a fan trailer with bishonen Luke:

Why is Heir to the Empire a big deal? To start with, it was the first novel released in almost a decade. There was a time in the late 80s/early 90s where Star Wars was borderline a dead franchise. You got a couple of RPG source books, the occasional mediocre video game, but that was about it. There hadn't even been a comic book in half a decade. And then, HttE happened. Lucasarts started cranking out 2 or 3 games a year. Toys? MicroMachines for days. More novels books came out from '92-'93 than in the entire decade of the 80s. And they were "real" books. 300+ pages (not counting previews, etc.) compared to the Han Solo and Lando Calrissian trilogies that glorified novellas. And (some of them) were good! Written by "real" authors! Timothy Zahn was a respected sci-fi author with a half dozen novels under his belt, dozens of short stories, a Hugo winner and a handful of nominees. And it wasn't a weird side story that couldn't really interact with the main universe. It was a proper sequel. Luke, Leia, Han, Lando, Chewie, and the droids take center stage. It's five years after Return of the Jedi and the Empire's on the ropes. The Rebel Alliance has transformed into The New Republic, and taken Coruscant (the first of many of Zahn's inventions to be fully canonized). But there's also new characters and planets and things to check out.

So yeah, it's kind of a big deal.

The coolest merch line of all time. MicroMachines packaged in the "book" they come from.

There's surprisingly little weird backstory to the production. Lucasfilm wanted to farm out the license, George didn't care too much (just had to be a sequel, not a prequel), and Bantam had apparently already been kicking the idea around. There's a little drama between Bantam and Dark Horse about how Heir to the Empire and Dark Empire would interact. Zahn didn't want to deal with the Dark Empire plot, and Dark Empire was originally set earlier. In the end Zahn won and Dark Empire got pushed back to take place after Heir. Dark Empire sucks (title of an upcoming blog post) so good on him for sticking to his guns. I would say I don't want to live in the universe where Dark Empire formed the basis of the EU, but Disney got us pretty close already.

I actual came to HttE pretty late in my own personal EU journey. I don't think I read it until the mid twenty-teens, a good twenty years after it came out. I knew the broad strokes from references in other books, but I actually got it as my first "real" ebook. I'd gotten an ereader (I think it was the first Nook Glowlight, the blinking screen issue with early eink was finally behind us) and was looking for something to put on it. It was a classic I'd never read, and it felt very "Star Wars" to be reading on the ereader. I blasted through it in about a day and grabbed the rest of the trilogy. While Stackpole's X-Wing books will always be the North Star of my EU, I can't fault Zahn's writing. It's a little more Starwars-y than Stackpole's if I'm being totally fair.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about characters? Maybe? I dunno, kinda winging it. See you then!