“She will,” Leia insisted.
But Han wasn’t so sure of that anymore, not by a long shot. Suddenly he got the dread feeling that Mara was indeed terminal, and the realization that those others in his bubble, most notably his kids, weren’t exactly safe, either. With their efforts against the aliens, Jaina, Jacen, and Anakin had proven themselves worthy of the title Jedi Knight now, beyond anyone’s questioning. They had moved beyond Han’s control, and with or without that control, Han knew that they weren’t safe anymore.
The bubble was gone.
The alien threat had been all but eradicated, so it seemed.
But to Han Solo, the galaxy suddenly seemed a more dangerous place by far.
Star Wars:
New Jedi Order Round-Robin Interview
Featuring: Shelly Shapiro, Editorial Director, Del Rey Books
Sue Rostoni, Managing Editor, Lucasfilm
Lucy Wilson, Director of Publishing, Lucasfilm
James Luceno, Author
DR: Welcome all! Let me start with Sue Rostoni and Lucy Wilson, from Lucasfilm. Can you give our readers an overview of your jobs and your involvement with Star Wars publishing?
LW: Sure. I started my career at Lucasfilm way back in 1974. Believe it or not, one of my first jobs at the company was to type the original Star Wars script from George Lucas’s handwritten pages! Although I had majored in English literature at UCSD, prior to joining Lucasfilm I had worked as a bookkeeper in the machine shop at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, so I had no professional publishing experience. At Lucasfilm, after years of working my way up through various departments in finance, I started working with the then director of publishing on the book program for the movie Willow in 1988. In 1989, I negotiated the first deal with Bantam Books to relaunch the Star Wars adult fiction publishing line with three hardcover novels to be written by Timothy Zahn. By 1990, I had transferred out of finance to head up a new publishing department full time.
SR: Compared to Lucy, I’m a newcomer. I’ve been employed at Lucas Licensing since the fall of 1990, when Heir to the Empire was first released. I began as an assistant to Lucy, who was then director of finance and publishing, and worked my way through various job titles until I was promoted in late 2001 to managing editor, which is my position today.
I was involved with the Bantam Star Wars books with Tom Dupree and Pat LoBrutto, the editors at Bantam. I’ve also edited the Berkley line of Young Jedi Knights novels and Bantam Doubleday Dell’s Galaxy of Fear series, as well as numerous nonfiction titles, including the Star Wars Encyclopedia. For the first few years, it was just Lucy and me handling the entire publishing program.
Now, as managing editor, I am available as a resource and sounding board to the other two Lucas Licensing editors, Michelle Vuckovich and Jonathan Rinzler. I am also responsible for the editorial on Del Rey’s line of Star Wars fiction and, recently, the Dark Horse Comics line (except for Tales). I review, comment, and approve every element that goes into the novels, from outlines to cover and sales copy, cover art, manuscripts, all the way to the finished product.
DR: Let me bring in author Jim Luceno. Jim, what’s your history with Star Wars, and how did you get involved with the New Jedi Order?
JL: I was in my late twenties when Star Wars: A New Hope premiered. I went to a matinee screening in New Jersey with my then best friend, the late Brian Daley, who had just sold his first science-fiction novel and would go on to write a trilogy of Han Solo novels and radio dramatizations of the classic movies. The film had a great impact on both of us and became something of a leitmotif in our enduring friendship and various collaborations. Before the Star Wars license went to Bantam, there was a period when it looked liked Brian and I were going get a shot at contributing new material to the somewhat stalled franchise. Brian was asked to outline a novel, and I was working on a “nonfiction” book titled The Way of the Force. Those projects disappeared when Ballantine Books surrendered the licensing agreement it had with Lucasfilm. Regardless, I read and enjoyed many of the early Bantam titles by Tim Zahn, Kevin Andersen, Kathy Tyers, and others. When the license ultimately returned to Ballantine, and Shelly Shapiro asked if I’d be interested in working on the NJO, I made it a point to read the entire Bantam line, in addition to all the comics and sourcebooks.
DR: That’s Shelly Shapiro, the editor at Del Rey in charge of the NJO project. Shelly, what role did you play in this project, and how did Del Rey and Lucasfilm work together?
SS: I was involved in planning the NJO from the start. When I first came on board—when Ballantine first got the Star Wars license and we had to figure out what our publishing plan would be—I spoke with Lucy about the idea of one big ongoing multibook saga. That turned into a meeting with Lucasfilm’s licensing folks out at Skywalker Ranch—a huge meeting that included some authors (Star Wars veteran Mike Stackpole and then newcomer Jim Luceno among them), as well as some of the guys from Dark Horse Comics. From that point on, I became the liaison between the authors and Lucasfilm—everything they did was filtered through me, and I tried to help them get their work in as good a shape as possible before passing it on to Sue for approval. Throughout the series, I continued to brainstorm and debate ideas with Lucy and Sue as we and the authors moved the growing story forward. Sue and I became a real team, supporting each other, backing each other up (and arguing occasionally over creative issues!), and just working to make these books happen.
DR: Who was responsible for what?
SS: In general, I’d say I’m responsible for the books working primarily as novels—making sure they tell a good story, are well paced, and well written and edited—while Sue is responsible for the books working as integral parts of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, both in terms of continuity and making sure they “feel” like Star Wars. But in truth, we overlap a lot, working closely together to make sure the books work as well as possible on all levels.
SR: Right. My input is generally around continuity issues, characters, story elements, what will work and what won’t work.
DR:So the idea of big multibook saga was there from the start?
LW: Even earlier. I got the idea of doing a sequential series of related Star Wars books toward the end of the Bantam run of original Star Wars novels. The Bantam books were very much determined by what each writer wanted to create and were either one-off titles or trilogy series. Very early on we had agreed that it was important to maintain Star Wars continuity if people were to believe the Star Wars universe and its history were real. That meant that all events and characters created by any author (comics, novels, RPG material, et cetera) immediately became historical and could not then be contradicted in any subsequent book, story, or comic. But as the universe got more complicated, it was clear we had to take more control over where the stories were going in order to maintain this continuity. We also knew our readers wanted more sequential stories—rather than stories that jumped around in Star Wars time. So when the agreements for books related to the prequel trilogy films were negotiated and licensed to Ballantine Books in 1997, we included the rights to create a new spin-off fiction program that would be one big sequential story. Originally we planned to include thirty titles in this program, but concerns about whether we could sustain one story for that many titles, combined with a desire to create new stories set in the original trilogy period of history, resulted in an adjustment that reduced what had become the NJO series to nineteen books.
DR: What role did you play in all this, Jim?
JL: My original role was to assist in the nut-and-bolts development of the series. I attended the initial story conference at Skywalker Ranch in March 1998, then a follow-up conference in May devoted to fine-tuning the ideas that had been discussed at the first. Shelly had already written a rudimentary outline of the project, and for the next several weeks I worked closely with her and Del Rey editor Kathleen O’Shea to fashion a five-year story arc, along with individual story arcs for the principal characters, all of wh
ich would ultimately be incorporated into a writers’ bible. That meant keeping careful track of plot points and continuity, creating names for new characters, and designing a social structure for the Yuuzhan Vong.
My outlines and suggestions went directly to Shelly, who would rework them as necessary and forward them to Sue and Lucy, whose comments would frequently send Shelly and me back to the drawing board. Eventually, though, we’d all find ourselves on the same page.
I was also commissioned to contribute one paperback novel to the series, though at the last minute my one book became two when changes in the publishing schedule required that Mike Stackpole’s trilogy be compressed into two novels. As the project evolved, I worked with Dan Wallace and artist Christopher Barbieri to map the Star Wars galaxy and the Yuuzhan Vong invasion corridor, and I continued to read and comment on book outlines and manuscripts. After many discussions with Shelly, Sue, Lucy, Greg Keyes, Greg Bear, Sean Williams, and Shane Dix, I began work on the final NJO volume, The Unifying Force, in May 2002.
DR: Shelly, you mentioned Dark Horse Comics had people at the original meeting. What was their involvement?
SS: They had a character that we thought Bob Salvatore could use for the bad guy in Vector Prime.
SR: Right, Nom Anor. The original concept for Nom Anor came from the Crimson Empire II comics by Dark Horse.
LW: What we did at that meeting was plot out the major story points for a five-year book program that would be published from 1999 through 2003, with the big events unfolding in five hardcover novels; the material that would go into the paperbacks was to be developed later. That was where, for the first time, we all agreed that a well-loved Star Wars character would die—after all, the general story idea was a big alien invasion and galaxy war, and we wanted people to feel that there are consequences to war. Once we had agreed on the general plot, Dark Horse noted that they had invented a new character in their Crimson Empire comics who might serve as one of the invading species, so we started with the character of Nom Anor as an early concept for what was to become the Yuuzhan Vong.
DR: How was internal consistency maintained—not only within NJO but back through the entire history of Star Wars fiction? Who was responsible for that?
SR: In a sense, we are all responsible for continuity. Leland Chee works here at Lucasfilm maintaining our “Holocron,” an archival database containing a huge number of entries. As outlines and manuscripts are submitted, Leland enters new data into the Holocron, which is then available for use by the authors and editors via CD-ROM. Initially we wrote an NJO bible for use by the authors, to give them a sense of what was going to happen in each of the hardcovers; we also included summaries of previous NJO books, et cetera. However, after the first year or so, the bible became too unwieldy to keep up, and the Holocron has been the main source of reference ever since. Leland has been indispensable as well, as he has created government flow charts, timelines of events, and various lists of characters, vehicles, locations, and so on. Leland is the “go to” guy whenever esoteric questions come up.
LW: When we first started doing original Star Wars publishing, the editorial group consisted of me, Sue Rostoni, and later Allan Kausch, who was originally hired as a continuity consultant. Howard Roffman, president of Lucas Licensing, was also creatively involved, and we would get input from George Lucas through a series of Q&A memos in which we asked for guidance on big plot points and ideas. In order to track continuity, both the editors at Lucasfilm and the editors at our licensed publishing houses would combine their efforts—primarily based on who had the best memory. Our RPG licensees were integral to this early on, as they tended to publish the most detailed material of anyone. The early system of tracking continuity was for a question to be called out (by phone or by yelling down the room or corridor) in the hope that someone would remember and have an answer—very high tech, as you can see. As the Star Wars universe got more and more complicated, I recognized the need for a full-time person to track the material in a database, and Leland was brought on board to do that in February 2000.
SS: Before Leland and the Holocron, I relied (and I still do!) on Jim, who originally came on board to help with the NJO bible and quickly became an authority on continuity.
JL: I’d like to take all the credit, but I relied in turn on Stephen J. Sansweet’s recently published Star Wars Encyclopedia, Dan Wallace’s, Bill Smith’s, and Bill Slavicsek’s guidebooks, and a slew of fan glossaries and compendiums. And, of course, once it was available, the Holocron!
Early on, though, the NJO wasn’t intended to incorporate a great deal of Bantam continuity. We didn’t want to alienate (so to speak) a new generation of Expanded Universe readers. This certainly was the case in Bob Salvatore’s Vector Prime, and to some extent in Mike Stackpole’s duology. But by the time I was writing Agents of Chaos, Del Rey was receiving emails and letters from fans imploring us not to abandon the Bantam continuity. The hard-core readership wanted one story—and we’ve done our best to give it to them. Given the wealth of background material, writing a Star Wars novel at this point is almost like writing a work of historical fiction!
DR: I’ve heard that the name Yuuzhan Vong came from a restaurant menu during an early editorial powwow. Any truth to that?
LW: You bet. Yuuzhan Vong, as well as many other brilliant ideas over the course of history, came from food.
SS: Lucy and some of us Del Rey people were eating lunch at a wonderful French-Thai restaurant called Vong here in New York City. I suggested using Vong for the alien invaders. But we wanted something more, and perusing the menu, I came across their list of teas, which included a mention of the “Yunan region.” We tossed around ideas and came up with Yunan Vong. We added an extra n, making it Yunnan Vong. But a week or so later, we decided that we wanted it to sound more alien and less Asian, so we changed it first to Yuzzan Vong, then to Yuzhan Vong, and finally settled on Yuuzhan Vong.
DR: How much of a role did George Lucas play in shaping the series?
LW: George Lucas has been involved in all of the spin-off Star Wars publishing, but only on big concepts or plot points. The initial five-year NJO plot outline and early thoughts on who might die were sent to him in the form of a Q&A memo and subsequently discussed by phone.
SS: I would characterize his role as limited but important. He’s the one who said the alien invaders could not be dark side Force-users, that we couldn’t kill Luke, that we had to kill Anakin instead of Jacen (we had originally planned it the other way around). Other than that, he occasionally answered some basic questions for us, but that was rare. Mostly he leaves the books to his licensing people, trusting them to get it right.
JL: Several times at Skywalker Ranch, George was sitting almost within arm’s reach, but I never got to speak with him. But he played a major role in giving shape to the NJO by commenting extensively on the early version of the five-year story arc, as Lucy and Shelly have said. His objection to Anakin Solo being the main series protagonist was, I think, possible confusion with Anakin Skywalker in the prequel trilogy of movies. There would be too many Anakins out there! And I distinctly recall George’s taking particular exception to our careless description of Onimi as “dwarfish.”
When we received his feedback, suddenly we were faced with having to create a new enemy . . . and yet somehow differentiate that enemy from the dozens already developed by various authors of the Bantam books. Worse, we were stripped of the one character from the Bantam line who was ideally set up to inherit the Jedi mantle from Luke. Even so, Shelly and I emerged with a lot to work with, and over espressos in Sausalito and pizza at Point Lobos, we sketched many of the characters who later became prominent in the series.
DR: Like the original film trilogy, the NJO, both as a whole and in its individual books, follows Joseph Campbell’s concept of the myth of the hero’s journey. Is that Lucas’s influence at work?
SS: Not in the sense of him directing us to use it. I don’t even think he knows we did it! But we wanted to
use the hero’s journey as a template because it is so basic to Star Wars and to what George has done with his mythos.
JL: We had many discussions about archetypes and mythic themes, mostly at the behest of Lucy, who would frequently have a chalkboard brought to the conference rooms and make detailed outlines of the character arcs.
LW: In order to tell the best stories, we pull ideas from a variety of sources to come up with themes that can then be woven through the various works of new Star Wars fiction. In our big creative meetings, we work with publishers, editors, and our writers to develop strong stories with multiple levels, including: the pacing of basic plot points (beginning, climax, resolution); themes (both mythological and biblical themes have been presented, among others); and individual character development arcs (with specific levels of development and attributes depending on whether Jedi, Sith, alien, good, bad, or other). It’s the combination of these elements that makes the stories fit into the structure people associate with Star Wars. It’s not George Lucas’s decision that requires us to do this—rather, we have learned by observing his techniques and have then applied the same development process in our dealings with our print editors and authors.
SR: One of the advantages of using Campbell’s template is that it’s very familiar to us all, on both the minute and the grand scale, on an instinctive level. We are each challenged in ways that bring out either the hero or the villain. We each have choices and are accountable for those choices and their consequences. We are sometimes thrown into situations we thought we could never handle, and how it comes out is not the point—the point is the journey itself.
We discussed the hero’s journey at length in the first creative meetings. After feedback from George, we decided on Jacen as our “hero” and the character who would undergo the most dramatic changes—in many ways, the NJO is really his series. At those meetings, we charted the character threads for each of the main characters and how these threads would interact with Jacen to show him as an indecisive young man who grows into a strong and confident Jedi. We talked about Vergere and the role she could play. We also charted other characters’ journeys: how Han would react to Chewie’s death, his blaming Anakin, and how something like that affects a family. We discussed how Anakin was the stronger of the siblings, and how his death would affect things, since he was the obvious choice as Luke’s successor.
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