Books Leia Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray

The films cannot even keep it consistent. It seems like traveling around had become quicker and quicker as the film's progressed. Like both Padme and Sheev can seemingly get from Coruscant to Mustafar really quickly for example.

Speaking of Padme, given how well Claudia writes Leia (and female characters in general), I'd love to see her write a Padme-centric novel at some point.

 

Reminds me of the complaints of the most recent season of GOT, where in the first few seasons travelling from Winterfell to King's Landing took several episodes while now people are zipping back and forth and to the Wall in the span of a single episode.

 

That's the way it should be. Realism be damned.

 

If distance helps to enhance the story, then use it.

If it doesn't, then ignore it.

 

To be fair, with the films travel often seems quick, but unless a character specifically mentions how long they've been traveling it can be hard to tell how much time has passed. I earlier mentioned the TPM journey from Coruscant to Tatooine as seeming speedy, but on further reflection there was a scene where Padme talks with lil Annie while everyone else on the ship is sleeping. Yoda's time training Luke seems brief, but according to some sources it was about a month. And I've had debates before on how long the Falcon's journey from Tatooine to Alderaan actually took.

unicorn At least unlike GOT, Star Wars has the excuse that hyperspace is made up. Also any differences can be excused with either technobabble, or the understanding that there are different routes.

Charlemagne19


Eh, there are different kinds of realism. Some people don't bat an eye at the "unrealistic" FTL ships and lasers swords but roll their eyes at the unlikely coincidences (like Darth Vader building C-3PO). Or even if something is based on made up science (Star Trek's "you can't beam through the shields" rule or Star Wars' "you can't jump to lightspeed in atmosphere"), people at least like the writers to be consistent. Someone who studies reptiles may be bothered that the snakes in Indiana Jones aren't native to the area, whereas others might write that off as irrelevant. Different strokes for different folks.

 

Realism can be thrown out the window, but there has to be a set of fictional rules that are consistent. We're now told that Hosnian's destruction was visible on Takodana due to bizarre hyperspace tears or something that Pablo Hidalgo said on twitter. Were these hyperspace tears visible on all other planets as well? Because if they weren't, I'd say that's inconsistent. It's beyond improbable that they would only be visible on Takodana.

I also support violating realism in video games where they make the game more fun, not less. In another thread I got into a debate where I was accused of overly adhering to realism in X-Wing games due to my complaints that engine power was needed to support a steady velocity, which is against physics. I stated I support violating realism where you feel more powerful in the game and the game becomes more fun, not less--in the X-Wing case, forcing a user to divert laser and shield power to engines (when in real life this wouldn't be necessary for steady velocities) made you very weak and massively increased difficulty of the game for no actual reason and made the game less fun.

 

I remember as a kid always thinking the trip to Bespin took like one day because Han and Leia both have their same clothes and Leia's wearing the same hairstyle as the scene where they escaped. It wasn't until I read the EU (James Luceno mentions Han cherishing the private time he got with Leia during the slow trip to Bespin) and jasonfry mentioning that the trip to Bespin might have taken months with the hyperdrive broken that I realized in the canon universe it took a really long time to get there (which now that I think about it makes sense since Luke had to go through his training on Dagobah).

 

One explanation I read was how ESB is explained due to time dilation in real life physics. With a broken hyperdrive, Han and Leia were flying to Bespin at near-lightspeed, but not past it. As such there are time dilation effects; time for them passes slower (months don't actually pass inside the Falcon, but less).

Meanwhile, time outside the Falcon passes at "normal" speed. Luke takes months to train on Dagobah, while presumably Boba and Vader have been chilling on Bespin for a while waiting for the Falcon to show up, despite Lando's claims that they "arrived just before (Han) did".

 

In new canon, it's been stated via Twitter that Dagobah is a "magic" world like the Father/Son/Daughter world and Luke spent months there due to time operating differently there.

 

Not sure why this is necessary in new canon at all. Recent Doctor Who episodes 'World Enough and Time' and 'The Doctor Falls' used time dilation to perfect effect while also explaining science to the audience (and no one complained about this being too complicated for the general audience), yet new canon Star Wars needs to use magical handwaving to explain something already built into logic--the Falcon's hyperdrive was broken and acting on time dilation.

The new explanation would also bring issues into whether Yoda aged much faster and had his natural death much sooner by living on Dagobah than he would have on another world.

 

I suspect it opens a large ball of worms which Star Wars doesn't want to deal with regarding time progression.

 

And yet time dilation has already been addressed in the EU: https://web.archive.org/web/20130728111154/http://www.holonetnews.com/48/life/13321_2.html . They had no problems addressing it pre-buyout, but suddenly after the buyout they do?

 

Spoiler

I just finished it. Knowing Kier's grave is gonna blow up is messing me up man. Gray really twists the knife at the end there. I loved the book but it's almost hard for me to process it right now.

Also, I haven't been following news about TLJ closely so I didn't realize Amilyn would be in the movie. Right after I read the book I checked the wook to see if she was in anything else, which lead to a nice surprise.

So my plan over the next few weeks is to do a sort of Leia marathon. I'll go through Leia's episode of Rebels, ANH, the Leia mini-series, most of the main title SW comics, ESB, Moving Target, RotJ, Shattered Empire, Bloodlines, and TFA. I bought Moving Target and Bloodlines when they were released but I haven't read them yet, so this should be an interesting way to catch up.

 

You're going to be in for quite a time.

 

Exactly. TIme dilation is an SF concept; Star Wars isn't exactly Science Fiction. The further into questions of 'how fast is 0.5 past lightspeed' etc you get, the closer you get to turning into Star Trek, which is Importantly Different in a whole load of ways.

There is always a natural drift towards SF the more stuff that gets written, because anyone who writes about FTL spaceships and things will be tempted by the storytelling opportunities involved with them. But if you start treating the Falcon's hyperdrive as anything much more complex as Box That Make Ship Go Fast, it's going to end up causing more problems than it solves.

What you need is an unobtrusive kind of a handwave that doesn't then open you up to pedantry. The way the OT deals with this stuff is to not really mention it unless in cryptic terms ('12 parsecs', 'point five past lightspeed'.) It's the absolute bare minimum of opaque technobabble required to sell the bit. Exactly how long things like Luke's training and the voyage to Bespin take is hidden in the edit so that you just get a bunch of interleaved character moments.

The second you start to pin down any of these things is the second you start to cause problems for anybody wanting to write in the universe. You have written an entry in the Great RPG Sourcebook and everyone is going to have to play by those rules from now on. Training to be a Jedi takes x days, multiplied by a factor derived from your Midichlorian count and Willpower bonus. Travelling from Hoth to Bespin without a Class B hyperdrive takes y days, etc. Now you have to retrospectively fix all the stuff from the movies that doesn't fit, because all of it is going to be a bit inconsistent with the way you fixed the initial problem. It becomes a nightmare really quickly.

I'm not saying it can all be nonsensical - you need to sell this stuff to an audience the way I was sold it in the 1980s, and that means not insulting people's intelligence. But Star Wars cares about character far, far more than it does science, and I think if the story makes sense from that point of view I'm willing not to nitpick the universe's version of relativity, and so on.

 

Also SW is space opera, not hard SF, so it gets far more latitude on this stuff.

 

No explanation was ever given for the time discrepancy within ESB itself, so realistic-minded people could pretend it was time dilation and others could pretend magic Dagobah. I do hope that magic Dagobah stays in Pablo's twitter and doesn't get published in an official source. There are complaints that time dilation would make things more complicated, but magical Dagobah opens up way more questions and complexities--why would aging Yoda choose a planet that makes him age faster (and prevent him being around for the New Jedi Order)? Why don't all Jedi train on magical planets, or why doesn't the Empire build all their Death Stars on magical planets? (Imagine if the Death Star research facility was on Dagobah instead of Eadu--it wouldn't have taken 20 years to build!)

Last I checked, there isn't some list on what is hard sci-fi and what is space opera. It depends on the director. Star Trek became less about science when they had supernovae threatening the galaxy with the Abrams 2009 film. Doctor Who is often more about the character of the Doctor and the multi-Doctor stories take on rule of cool over logic (sometimes he remembers meeting himself and sometimes doesn't), yet it takes the time to explain time dilation. It depends on the writer and director of the work--they aren't looking up a list to say, Oh, is this franchise hard sci-fi or space opera?' before they start writing.

If a writer wanted to bring science to Star Wars they could and no one's really going to stop them unless it damages the story beyond a 10 second line. I agree that science should be removed to serve the story (travel times in ROTS are a good example, we needed the correlating duels for the drama), but at the same time it shouldn't be actively excluded especially when there is no list saying what is hard sci-fi and what isn't.

 

This will only muddy the waters and is no longer canon, but in the EU there was a specific, straightforward time period given for Luke's Dagobah training that never, ever seemed to stick. I even referenced it a time or two. Never made any difference.

It's several weeks. Which also worked as the Falcon's travel time. Zip, pow, done. No time dilation or Force magic needed.

I went to find it but can't. Think it's in Children of the Jedi, but that book's packed away.

Of course the fact that I can't find it is a continuation of that fact's innate slipperiness.

Anyway, as you were.

 

Wow Jason, thanks for the input!

Back to Leia Princess of Alderaan, I wonder how (spoiler for Marvel comics)

Spoiler

the Rebels finding their base on Crait in the upcoming comic fits with Crait in Princess of Alderaan.

I found the Children of the Jedi quote on Kindle:
"No," said Luke, thinking about the few weeks he'd spent on Dagobah.
So depending on how far we can stretch "few", maybe Luke spent 5 weeks on Dagobah? In the EU at least.

 

The real question is how did C3PO not get dismantled if Han had to spend weeks with him on a small ship in the middle of nowhere...

 

Almost finished. Damn this book is good.

Sent from my Moto X-Wing

 

Saying Yoda aged faster on Dagobah implies that a magic planet would follow consistent rules.

Which seems to miss the purpose.