Lit The EU going the ''Star Trek'' route?

Speculation. And nothing can ruin the original trilogy (adding Hayden Christensen and altering a few lines aside).

 

That's exactly what it is. There's cross-pollination of ideas, but other than that, EU always draws the short straw when it comes to Lucas' vision. It's always "little canon" that may grow and thrive and frolic in the sun, but when Big Canon comes along and steps on its toys, there's nothing it can do. And it's never really been the question if EU is as official as the movies. It's whether you prefer just watching the movies or enjoying the larger amount of fictional content in little canon. And if it's the latter, you want little canon to be kept, but little canon didn't only make mistakes in itself, it always had to adapt to Big Canon.

There's two actual dimensions to the original question: One, will Disney keep the current post-ROTJ EU continuity active (and most of all, will the movies respect 40 years of fictional EU history)? Two, since Disney most likely will not do that, will NEU - the New Expanded Universe - at least keep all reference stuff available on board? Will all the planets still be kept? And how will the movies work with all that stuff - will there be a cameo of a visually interesting comic book Jedi like Aayla in Ep2/3, will there be a planet like Coruscant that gets to keep the name EU has chosen?

All in all, I think we all know that TCW was basically the test run for this. Casually stomps over existing material, but makes pretty big steps so that a lot of EU can survive. For example, if the story of Luke, Leia and Han turns out pretty different 40 years down the line, they could still have fought Thrawn and the Yevethans and the Corellian Uprising and even the Vong. But since we talk about a much larger amount of time and material, we have lots of knock-on effects - maybe Jacen and Jaina won't have been there at all.

I think the most probable approach is that EU will be adapted to fit the new timeline. There's a pretty huge amount of TOTJ/PT/DT stuff that couldn't care less what happened after ROTJ. But as I note year after year, Luke's continuing adventures are somehow the most important part of our EU, since this is where it all started and where the basic interest came from. And also the only era where you really get to see the characters live a huge part of their lives.

I think there's enough people at LFL left to see the value of what is known as the Holocron. I can see them rewriting the post-ROJ era to fit the movies, but I can only vaguely see Disney firing everyone and convert SW into a more production-friendly thing that doesn't have as many rules and historical notes.

Therefore, the question would be - what's more important, the world building or the story? All retcons over the years showed that world building topped story, and that everything could be tweaked only to fit a new interpretation (e. g. Lumiya manipulating a lot of events in the Bantam era).

Now, if EP7 is the proverbial meteor hitting EU's surface, it will wipe off the ongoing stories on the planet but will keep the planet largely intact. Will you still recognize the planet, and will you still want to live there?

Now that's an interesting take.

 

Agreed, I never think of the post EU timeline splitting, all we've ever seen the EU do is retcon, retcon, retcon. So it was and so it shall be again. If Ep. 7 has Barry Solo and Pippy Skywalker as the main protagonists, they can still put out a novel called "Ben Skywalker and Jania Solo and their Wacky ST adventures: Thrill to the reason why they were never mentioned ever in the entire ST!" Now if the first line of Ep. 7 is Han Solo looking directly at the camera and saying "I have not seen Leia since we blew up the Death Star that night 40 years ago. Also Luke decided to undergo trans-species surgery so he's part Ewok now. And he's been living in a cave on Dantoonie for decades" that makes it tricker. But I still can't see the EU just hacking it off at a certain point in the timeline, there be money to be made! Instead, there would be a story ala Crisis on Infinite Earths that would cram the EU into the very specific Ep. 7 shape. The post ROTJ EU history would still have happened, then something made it not happen.

 

How exactly does that... happen?

 

Waru burped.

Shamelessly stolen from GrandAdmiralJello

 

That's about as much sense as something like "it happened and then something happened which made it not happen" will make, I guess....

 

While TCW is canceled (and I'm assuming they are keeping it canon????), I don't think Disney would cancel the EU as canon. While the new movie may alter a few minor EU books and so forth, I do beleive that your staples (Thrawn series, X-Wing series, Yuuzhan Vong series, and your few solo or small book series here and there) will stay in play and will, to an extent, most likely feed into the new movies.

 

I dunno, a lot of folks were not too happy with that Blu Ray edition

It likely sounds more interesting than I meant it to be. I was just trying to match FatSmel's level of negativity.

 

I think pandering to the most canon obsessed consumers was a terrible mistake in the first place. The occasional Luceno or Zahn can operate within the creative quagmire and make it look like real literature, but even the comparatively talented writers drop the occasional clanger. I understand they're not paid much, so there's an impetus to finish the job as quickly and painlessly as possible...

We're currently in a situation where trading card games, video games, Ewok videos and toddler's activity books are all narrative obstacles to be carefully negotiated. This can't make a writer's job very easy (or pleasurable), plus there's no prestige attached anyway, so why shouldn't writers switch on their creative autopilots and churn the stuff out?

The EU turning into Infinities would be the best result from my perspective; it would increase potential for creative freedom, allowing authors to tell interesting tales without being bogged down by the bad ideas of unimaginative writers. I honestly think the quality of literature would be better off without such a stringently regimented system of canon.

I would be far more inclined to buy Star Wars books and comics knowing that it was fresh material, unencumbered by the canonical detritus left by the likes of Kevin J Anderson, Vonda McCintyre, etc.

 

No one's forcing you to buy that edition.

 

I don't think anyone expects Star Wars tie-in fiction to be high art to begin with. I don't see how abolishing canon would suddenly increase writing quality; it'll still be mass market spinoff pulp. Most writers only name-drop continuity anyway. When was the last time anyone even referenced The Crystal Star? It's not like if that book had never been written LOTF would have sucked any less.

If I had to choose between reading an original creative story and a book that said STAR WARS on the cover but had no effect on the greater Star Wars universe, I don't know why I wouldn't pick the original story.

 

What if it was both

 

They could always go the General Grievous route. You know, Han really was convinced that this was what had happened in his life.

Also, Nom Anor gets his hands on the DeLorean. Nooo... too bad, they already did that with Star Trek.

 

For the very reason _Catherine_ said: because it will still be mass market spinoff pulp, which is not an attractive genre, and will never attract the likes of Stephen King to write for it, so all you will ever get are low quality books whose main selling point is simply the fact they have STAR WARS embossed on the cover in big letters.

 

Aren't there some authors who are actually better received in SF outside our little fandom? Like, Greg Bear and Steven Barnes? Or Terry Brooks and RA Salvatore in Fantasy?

 

RA Salvatore and Terry Brooks honestly aren't very well received. Well, they're popular, but are often considered synonymous with hack fantasy.

Greg Bear, on the other hand, is a fairly celebrated science fiction writer. And he also writes tie-in fiction.

I wouldn't necessarily consider that an inevitability. As someone who's read a great deal of Stephen King, I'd say that someone like Stover or Daniel Abraham outclasses him handily. Tie-in fiction is often regarded as hack work, true, but much of it is considered hack work regardless of actual content. I will never buy that a work set in an existing universe is inherently inferior; a work should always be judged on its own merits (Planescape: Torment, the best video game of all time, is set entirely in an established universe). In Stover's case, I'd say his Revenge of the Sith novel may just be his best work (only Blade of Tyshalle rivals it), regardless of the fact that it's based on a script that's not his own.

The problem with tie-in fiction is that fans, generally, buy everything with the brand name on it; that doesn't give the publishers much motivation to really look for great authors. Why fix what isn't broken? The problem is, people like Stover are pure luck. From a publishers perspective, why work with him, an author who works very slowly and probably doesn't sell particularly well, when you can get someone like Troy Denning, who works very quickly and presumably is one of the best selling Star Wars authors? Tie-in fiction, like everything else, ruthlessly follows Sturgeon's Law.

 

Well, it's not "inevitable" in theory, but ultimately more Troy Denning-quality fiction I'd what I foresee, yeah.

Like you said, from a publisher's perspective, why hire an expensive author when the fanboys will eat it up regardless? And that'll be even more true for Episode 7 tie-ins, as Disney will have a whole new generation of fanboys ready to lap up whatever's going.

And when it gets stale and people get bored...? No problem. Throw out a new spin-off and use that as the driving force behind the next gravy train. As I mentioned earlier in the thread, the video games have been like this all along, with as little as necessary connection between different games, hence why every single game protagonist has obtained the Death Star plans.

Coming in 2014... STAR WARS: REVAN'S RETURN, in which Revan, unfrozen from carbonite in 1 BBY, recovers the Death Star plans!

 

What I noticed when I read Vector Prime recently is that Salvatore made a lot of beginners mistakes, like explicitly telling the reader a character is "angry" or "sad" instead of implicitly showing it through actions and dialogue. Salvatore is definitely aware of these mistakes but they don't seem to bother him.

Not sure if Stephen King is a role model. After all, he is the guy who claimed plot is unimportant. He also churns out 2000 words daily no matter what.

 

Modern Stephen King is kind of lazy and full of himself, but Old Stephen King was a fantastic writer. He's always had trouble coming up with endings that live up to the rest of the book, and he does tend to recycle many of the same character tropes and archetypes across his body of work, but he is/was a great storyteller and very talented writer. Just look at some of his shorter earlier novels before he became richer than God and they let him write as much bloated nonsense as he wanted.

 

I don't know much about the old King, to be honest, so you may be right.

 

And I never will.

Just like no one is forcing you to buy the EU.

 

I think King was a good inspiration for Garth Marenghi.

Shawshank is great, but I don't rate anything else he's done tbh.

 

Not Star Wars related, but SK's recent stuff has been really fantastic, IMO. Duma Key, Under the Dome, 11/22/63 (to name a few)...those were all excellent. Really looking forward to Dr. Sleep--The Shinning sequel.

 

Don't get me wrong, I don't think he's become a bad writer, but at this point he can basically write anything and it'll get published, and I think much of his later work has suffered for that, particularly after his accident in 1999 (see the second half of the Dark Tower series). Insomnia, for instance, was built around a very interesting concept but most of it just bored me to tears because it was padded with several hundred pages of nothing happening. King's best book IMO is It, so I don't have anything against very long books, but with a lot of his stuff I'm like come on, can we get to the point already? Again, look at his earlier books: there's almost no action in Cujo but it's one of his most riveting books because it's so tensely paced and plotted, and it's only like 300 pages long. To be fair though I haven't read Under the Dome or 11/22/63, which I have heard are some of the best he's written in a long time, so I'm excited to check out some of his more recent stuff when I have the time (the last thing of his I read was the Dark Tower interquel, which was good fun but pretty toothless).

ANYWAY the point was that I don't think a bunch of big-name bona fide literary types would suddenly start begging to write for Star Wars as soon as they heard they didn't have to follow canon anymore. It's not like Batman, where someone can come in and do something like The Dark Knight Returns, because Batman is all about Batman and by the nature of his stories he can have an infinite number of adventures, whether they keep continuity with each other or not. Star Wars is bigger than Luke Skywalker, though; the appeal of Star Wars isn't a single central character whose story can go on forever or be retold ad infinitum, it's the whole universe that those stories take place in. The appeal of continuity is that the Expanded Universe literally expands the universe that people fell in love with in the OT. If you switch over to a Star Trek-style continuity free-for-all, that universe never really gets expanded, it just gets briefly reinterpreted by one media tie-in writer at a time. The way to get better Star Wars books isn't to abolish continuity and let everyone do whatever they want, it's to stop hiring crappy authors who write crappy books. How about a little quality control, guys? Do we really need like twenty new novels coming out every year? TTT was so big because there were basically no other Star Wars books you could read. Now the market is just saturated with suck.

 

The only eras that I can see having multiple interpretations are the Pre-Republic era, the Sith Era and the Dark Times. The first 2 because of the legend aspect of it. The Dark Times era because of Palpatine destroying records of everything. Feed on the chaos of the era. The Clone Wars and OT era are over saturated as is. No more there. For the era between the OT and ST would could be so bad that we get another Dark Times era? Assuming we throw out the current EU. The NJO could have done it but wouldn't that cause too many problems for the people who only watch the movies?