"Heir to the Empire": Memorial of a Look Back Incomplete

[krpalmer]

I went back home last weekend for the long weekend, and with me I returned the three paperbacks of the "Zahn trilogy" of Star Wars novels, named late but in grandiose fashion. For a while, I had imagined looking back at them with perspectives shaped by six Star Wars movies, intending to argue that those novels somehow, in leaving some to claim that they were "a grown-up Star Wars" and what all the other novels ought to aspire to, encouraged a limited and perhaps in the end unsatisfying perspective on the movies... maybe I wound up thinking it was all just too mean-spirited in the end, or maybe it just all seemed like too much work. I read through "Heir to the Empire," wondering about "swashbuckling action" as a part of the Star Wars saga and how well that works in written form, and that was it.

However (as I dropped into the middle of a look at a draft of Return of the Jedi), while I was somehow a little worried starting out that I had formed (or had formed for me) all my conclusions beforehand about Luke ("spent five years sitting around and then came across overwhelmed, as if he hadn't formed his own viewpoint and succeeded with it"), Han ("should he have just given up so much of his own responsibility to others?"), and Lando ("I didn't think he was solely interested in exotic mining operations"), I was surprised to get the impression that Leia was constantly being described as limited by her obsession with "duty," such that Han was noticing things and coming up with ideas for her most of the time. It might not be much, but it's maybe a bit deeper than wondering about Grand Admiral Thrawn and whether being able to predict the "stimulus-response" actions of species as a whole is a "science fictional" idea that seems sort of condescendingly limited towards those very species in the end.

Comments

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

I suppose I should have mentioned that if I'd got around to writing that full, possibly multi-post "look back," I would have mentioned that I wrote a book review on "Heir to the Empire" about midway through high school... and what might have seeded my ambivalence about the trilogy was more constantly seeing people in the Star Wars Usenet newsgroup comparing it favourably to the other Star Wars novels, and wondering if I really felt that way.

I would agree that "Heir to the Empire" did give a sense of "Star Wars is back!" in its day... although as far as "extrapolating beyond the movies," I find myself thinking about the post-Return of the Jedi comics from Marvel. They didn't pick up "five years later," of course... although it's tempting to wonder how much some of the characters had "changed" or "grown" in the novel.