Lit GENERAL QUESTION THREAD (What to read? Where to start? What's canon? What's not? Duros, etc.)

Yeah, I was thinking it was this or the Darth Maul: Son of Dathomir series because I remember a news article at the time discussing these and how they were the last. It looks like Legacy's last issue beat Son of Dathomir as "last" by about a week (August 20 vs August 27).

 

Having recently read Gillen's Vader run, I'm wondering, is it possible that Aphra was "saved by the fans," so to speak? She is very conspicuously the only character to survive Vader's end-of-a-Godfather-movie-esque liquidation of everyone who cheesed him off during the run, despite being left in a VERY obviously fatal situation, and the epilogue showing her survival could be easily removed without affecting the story, making me curious if it was a last-minute addition.

 

Who knows?

But even so, then good on editorial for once. Since Aphra is amazing!

 

If you invent a lead who's occupation is "rogue archaeologist", you probably haven't planned to kill them off in the first pass.

But more seriously, I think they had planned from the beginning to keep her alive. She intentionally set up her own demise during her first meeting with Vader, so she'd have a way out. "Please don't kill me this way, wink wink/nudge nudge". I don't think they planned to have her series run as long as they did, and in that regard, the fans kept her going.

 

Do we know whether or not Vitiate knew about the Star Forge?

 

He must have.

 

Why do you think that?

 

He had Revan in prison for years and years he must have found out. Not to mention the involvement of the star forge in shadow of revan.

 

I have a question about a couple of previous star wars books.

Are Heir to the Jedi and Honor Among Thieves any good to read through or skip them?

 

Honor Among Thieves (or SWEARHAT as it's known around here) is pretty good. Some people have called it a spiritual fourth Daley book - I wouldn't go so far, but it's the same kind of pulpy read. There's debate about whether the stakes get raised too high in the endgame, but TBH I thought it was in keeping with the throwback nature of the book, and overall I think it's one of the better portrayals of Han between ANH and ESB.

Heir to the Jedi, OTOH, was kind of meh. There's a lot of individual likeable bits, but for a novel that has "Luke Skywalker first-person narrative" as its central selling point... Luke's inner monologue sounds remarkably unlike him (especially weird since his actual dialogue is pretty in-character.)

Spoiler

Also, it fridges its most interesting new character for no good reason, which is gross.

 

Was Rystáll Sant intended to be a Theelin when she was created, or was that connection made later?

 

Books like Heir to the Jedi and Tarkin were originally planned to be EU material. They were far enough along though when the reboot happened that they just switched them over to the new continuity.

 

I'd heard that Tarkin was proposed and written after the reboot, James Luceno just referenced a lot of older material in it.

 

Actual footage of Armand Isard racing through the reboot into Tarkin:

 

Well Tarkin was actually released before Heir to the Jedi so if Tarkin was an original work for the new continuity it would have seemed odd that they would have released it first.

Plus it would have been pretty swiftly developed if it wasn't started until after the reboot. The official reboot happened in April 2014 and Tarkin was released in November 2014.

 

You're right, that'd be a narrow window. Now I'm trying to remember where I'd read it, maybe an interview with Luceno?

 

The reboot was announced to the public in April 2014, but the authors might have known before that.

 

What is interesting about the initial books they released for canon is that they had two books (Heir to the Jedi and Tarkin) that were largely considered to be books that were far enough along that they could bring them over. And three books (A New Dawn, Lords of the Sith, and Dark Disciple) that were largely tied to tv shows that could have been released for legends as well. We could say that Aftermath was the first novel that we got that was 'made' for the new continuity.

 

Ok. If Tarkin wasn't in the works yet the timing of its release does seem a little odd. It was released about four months before the book that was already in the works before the announcement. Tarkin would have had to go through a pretty quick production phase to hit the release date it did. It was a pretty short book (less then 300 pages) but that is still a pretty fast time frame to create a novel and release it to the public.

I'm sure it varies from author to author but on average do you know how long it often takes writers to create a full length novel?

 

You’re still making the assumption that Luceno wasn’t aware that the Canon reboot was coming before the public was.

 

Armand’s ultimate revenge on his daughter: He is canon and she is NOT.

 

Was there ever any kind of controversy over the charity group 501st having their name applied to clones who killed children on-screen in Revenge of the Sith?
Does Droma look sort of like James Luceno to anyone else, or am I imagining things?

 

I don't know about controversy, per se, but Chris Taylor's How Star Wars Conquered the Universe does say that the 501st's founder Albin Johnson was/is "uneasy about the fact that the 501st were heading into the temple to help kill Jedi children."