#Splinter Of The Minds Eye

[prankprincess123]

[retroscifiart]

Art by Noriyoshi Ohrai for Star Wars ‘Splinter of The Minds Eye’ novel by Alan Dean Foster (1978)

[star-wars-forever]

[walkawaytall]

In February of this year, I noticed that May the Fourth was on a Thursday, which happens to be when my Toastmasters group meets and I immediately asked the person who makes the schedule if I could lead the meeting that day. This is a summary of the presentation I gave to a group of coworkers -- 50% of whom had never seen Star Wars. Like, at all. I had much more energy during the actual presentation. But, you know, in case you've always wanted to listen to me talk about weird Star Wars stuff for seven-and-a-half minutes, here's me summarizing the presentation I gave for my friends.

[legends-expo]

Panel Announcement: Authors Geeking Out

Hear your favorite creators talk about all things Star Wars... except for their own contributions to the galaxy far, far away! Join us on Saturday, September 9th at the Marriott Convention Center in Burbank, CA for a discussion with Michael Kogge, Jason Fry and Abel Peña on favorite stories in the Expanded Universe.

Get your tickets now at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/legends-consortium-2023-tickets-541786186067

[arkham-prisoner]

Went digging through my book collection and found my Legends Reprint and my mothers original 1978 copy of Splinter of The Mind’s Eye

Love that the original isn’t listed as STAR WARS, just SOTME. Book has received a lot of love over the decades

[phoenixkaptain]

Reading the novelization of A New Hope already changed how I saw Luke as a character but Splinter of the Mind’s Eye is going one step further and making me question the very fundamentals thought to be obvious about Luke.

Like, Luke is, for lack of a better term, a nerd. He studied languages and cultures -

“”Yes,” Luke admitted modestly. “I used to study a lot about certain worlds, back on my uncle’s farm on Tatooine. It was my only escape, and educational as well. This,” and he indicated the creature resting a massive long arm on his head and shaking him in a friendly fashion, “is a Yuzzem.””

-he wants to study more languages and cultures-

“Empty doorways beckoned to him and he was tempted, very tempted, to enter one of the ruined structures to find out if its interior was as well preserved as the outside.

This was not, he reminded himself firmly, the time for playful exploration. Their first concern was to find a way out, not to go poking around this ancient metropolis. However wonderful it was.”

Luke wants to know about people. He wants to know about cultures and creatures and he wants to be able to communicate and…

He really just. Is a great Jedi. He jumps between Leia and danger and he befriends the Yuzzem the prison guards thought would kill him and he wants to explore the creepy abandoned ruins of a civilization long past and he uses Anakin’s lightsaber underwater to cut the stem of a lilypad they use as a boat and he comments that the rock formations are almost too beautiful to cut down and he knows how to work Imperial explosives and

He’s a Jedi, man. He’s a Jedi. He’s been a Jedi this whole time, before any of us even knew what that actually meant.

[mordicaifeed]

[swan2swan]

Yes. You were. Because 40+ years of lore has made it abundantly clear that you cannot just Tinker Bell your way into having magic superpowers.

Child, when I was studying the Lore, there were three movies. And maybe some books. You sit down and speak respectfully to your elders.

[grayrazor]

Splinter of the Mind's Eye is probably the most overt Vietnam allegory Star Wars has ever done, even more so than the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi or the Umbara arc in The Clone Wars.

It would have been interesting to see the reaction if it had ended up being the second Star Wars movie instead of The Empire Strikes Back.

Of course, in the post-Lucas era they had Solo revisit Mimban and portrayed it more like WWI. Although, the Mimbanese officer in Star Wars: Squadrons talks a bit more about guerrilla warfare.

[traewilson]

Saw Quinton Reviews' side video talking about Star Wars and how the brand's strict dedication to continuity leads to past "mistaken" continuity gets snipped off, like Sebastian Shaw as Anakin Skywalker. It got me thinking: Star Wars, deep to its most primordial basic structure, isn't actually myth - that's the bones of the body of Star Wars. In its proverbial genes, its history, and even cursory knowledge of how George Lucas tells stories shows this. American Graffiti is the most obvious example of this, being a dramatization of Lucas' childhood experiences. Indiana Jones is another example (until the last one, anyway, but we don't talk about Dial of Destiny). The first three films are defined by the pop culture trends of the time they were set. The villains in 1940s serials were, naturally, Nazis, so the villains are Nazis in the Indy films set in the 40s. This commitment to historical accuracy does lead to problems, however - namely, another source of villainy in the 40s were racial stereotypes of tribal peoples. Cue Temple of Doom, and the cartoonishly bigoted portrayal of Indian people in that film. This is why Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the way it is. In the 50s and 60s, the villains of American serials were the Soviets, so the villains are Russians. A chief obsession of that time was with aliens, so, like how religion was a big obsession in the 40s, aliens are a focus on Crystal Skull. Dial of Destiny partially failed because the filmmakers didn't engage with the series' formula, or rather, the executives didn't want Indiana Jones to deviate any further from what fans were nostalgic for. This results in a sort of bizarre feedback loop, where Indiana Jones is now referring back to ITS OWN PAST, ITS OWN HISTORY, rather than the actual history of the pop culture of the real world. The villains in the Indiana Jones films everybody likes are Nazis, so we're doing Nazis again.

Indiana Jones was on a trajectory where it would mirror the pop culture of the time period its set in. In the end, it abandoned this and gazed down its own navel, harkening back to the history of its own series, nonsensically contradicting the pop culture of the late 60s going into the 70s. Star Wars ran into a variant on this issue with continuity - with history.

Star Wars, of course, is obsessed with its own history. George Lucas himself was obsessed with the history of the Star Wars universe, at least the continuity of the films he made. The creators involved in the Expanded Universe were allowed to do their own thing, provided they didn't contradict his films, and with full knowledge their stories are only as canon as Lucas wanted them to be - which resulted in situations where stories about the Clone Wars pre-Prequels were essentially erased from existence because they, inadvertently, were inconvenient to a constantly revised history. To be clear, this isn't adjusting actual real life history, where it is a good idea to keep its narrative as accurate as possible. These are stories, fiction. And yet, creators and fanbase alike are as obsessed with the minutiae of Star Wars' history as the preacher is obsessed with the minutiae of the Bible and Biblical narratives.

This obsession with historical revisionism for a history that does not actually exist is resulting in the eradication of elements that are no longer convenient to its narrative. Sebastian Shaw as Anakin Skywalker, Clive Revill as the Emperor, all performances destined to become pop culture relics, only known by the most devoted of acolytes at the altar of Star Wars. I'd argue this started all the way back with Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the novel that was essentially George Lucas' backup concept for a Star Wars sequel if the first underperformed, realized. This novel is meaningless to the grand Star Wars continuity. An odd little curio; a peek into a future of the faith that could've been. I only know about it because I was obsessed with Star Wars as a kid. Less and less will know of it as time goes on, because it's basically a heretical text written in unwitting defiance of a constantly rewritten history. This eradication is deeply unfortunate, and actively works against Lucas' undeniable mythical inspirations for Star Wars. Myths are fluid, dynamic, ever-changing. Star Wars only changes as nostalgia and continuity so allow. This will be a BIG problem with Star Wars going forward - both the religious fanaticism of the fandom's strict devotion to their particular denomination of fandom faith (the Prequels are the best! The Originals are best! The Sequels are best! If you don't think that'll happen, I wouldn't bet on it.) and the strict devotion of the creators to the constantly changing, constantly eradicating, timeline of a world that is entirely fictional. Star Wars confines itself like this to its own detriment. Luke Skywalker won't be nostalgic for people forever. Anakin Skywalker won't be nostalgic forever, and in time, Rey won't be either. They will, gradually, over the course of time, become confined to the dustbin of history, along with Sebastian Shaw's Anakin, of Clive Revill's Emperor, as Splinter of the Mind's Eye, or Gennady Tartakovsky's Clone Wars miniseries. Some of this, of course, is the relentless march of time's fault, I get that. But the structure of Star Wars has grown to such an extent that stories are becoming harder and harder to write for it. You can't do too much; you absolutely cannot change Anakin's fate, or a different end for Luke that contradicts Last Jedi, or a British guy as Darth Vader's true self.

All this buildup to say George Miller and how he's handled the structure of the Mad Max franchise will give it a longer life, I feel, once its originator has passed on. George Miller is, frankly, a much better mythical storyteller than George Lucas. Anyone can be Max. Anyone can be Furiosa, or Immortan Joe, or Dementus, or Lord Humungus or the Doof Warrior or Aunty Entity. That's the beauty of this series; since anyone can be anyone, and hard facts are few and far between, this allows much more room for creative experimentation.

Anyway that's my ramble for tonight. I'm sure this will be a mess to get through, but it is a somewhat accurate picture of how I think. I'm a natural rambler. This is why Xwitter and I are not getting along lately.

[theros]

how's your night going a random white mouse just ran up onto our porch

[azazel-dreams]

Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster

Rating: ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤

[bobjackets]

Alan Dean Foster.

[phoenixkaptain]

I totally get what people mean about Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and it’s weirdly offputting tone, but at the same exact time it reads to me as old-timey fanfiction because like- it’s just. Comparing Luke and Leia. Their similarities and differences. They walk differently. They think about things differently. But they also have a strain of sameness to them. A strain of logic or way of thinking that they both follow. It’s so…

Like it’s trying really hard to be like romantic or something, the whole book is, but instead they just act like. Obi-Wan and Anakin.

The best proof I can give of this is two scenes in the first chapter. And I’ll explain the context because honestly the context is fucking hilarious. They both just crash landed on the moon right before the moon they were aiming for. They’re in separate ships. They got separated (they find each other within the same chapter). Luke is with Artoo and Leia is with Threepio (Leia is talking to Threepio in the quote).

“No rock is as soft as water and no water so soft as a swamp, he reflected, trying to cheer himself.”

““Relax. There can’t be anything out there,” she nodded toward the densest growth, “that would find you digestible.””

Just. Luke Optimism crashing into a swamp and being like “well, at least it isn’t a bunch of rocks.” Leia Realism over there comforting Threepio. But also, more proof withing the first chapter:

“There was a loud crashing, off to her right this time. Swinging around in the seat she instinctively fired off a burst through the cracked port and was rewarded with the odor of burnt, wet vegetable matter. The muzzle of the pistol remained focused on the carbonized spot. Hopefully, she’d hit the thing. Fortunately, she hadn’t.

“It’s me!” a voice shouted, sounding more than a little shaky. She’d barely missed him.”

Yes, Leia just shot at Luke. Yes, Leia feels pretty bad because first she made them both crashland into a swamp and second she just tried to murder him.

“Briskly scrambling over the side, she let herself drop to the ground, planted her feet, took two steps in the direction of the distant beacon… and began to sink…”

“Covered from the ribs down in a packing of green-gray mud and pieces of what looked like dried straw, the Princess appeared decidedly unregal. She pushed futilely at the mud, which was drying rapidly to the consistency of thin concrete. She said nothing, and Luke knew anything he might venture would not be terribly well-received.”

They are so cute.

“Once she spotted him peering hard at a dank copse. “Nervous?” It was part question, part challenge.

“You bet I’m nervous,” he shot back. “I’m nervous and frightened and I wish to hell we were on Circarpous right now. Anywhere on Circarpous, instead of trudging through this swamp on foot.”

Turning serious, the Princess told him, “One learns to accept whatsver events life has in store with the best possible spirits.” She stared straight ahead.

“That just what I’m doing,” Luke confessed, “accepting them in the best possible spirits—nervousness and fear.”

“Well, you needn’t look at me as if this is all my fault.”

“Did I imply that? Did I say that?” Luke countered, a touch more tightly than he intended. She glanced sharply at him and he cursed his inability to conceal his feelings. He would have been, he decided, a rotten card-player. Or politician.

“No, but you as much as…” she began hotly.”

Don’t look at me like this situation that I have already admitted to myself is my fault is my fault - Leia

They are. Obi-Wan and Anakin. Wow.

[blobracing]

2) Splinter of the Mind's Eye, by Alan Dean Foster

Featuring classic scifi’s issues with women and racism, “He Would Not Fucking Say That”, and more . . . .

Splinter has lived in infamy with me for a while: I didn’t like it as a kid, when pretty much anything with the Star Wars label would get a mild thumbs-up at worst. The complaints I’ve repeated to myself from that time was that I didn’t like the prose, it felt like something was wrong with the characters, and every chapter– or scene change– would end with a trailing ellipsis. You can set your watch by it. 

I’m not sure it would be worth it to harp on things I dislike about the prose now– even those ellipses strike me as kind of charming, in that they feel left over from conventions about serialized adventures ending in cliffhangers. Like, it’s not to my taste, but who’s it hurting?

In scrolling through the first pages of Goodreads reviews to see if I could snag more succinct blurbs and pawn off some of the work, I noticed that none of the reviewers mention any of the physical violence, condescension, or sexual threats made against Leia. I don’t mean to pearl-clutch, and I’m the last person to worry about or condemn “problematic” writing, but there’s something about the more-explicit-than-casual sexism going unaddressed in a Star Wars novel that feels… weird. There’s an argument to be made that Splinter is essentially a pulpy scifi novel, that the concept of “a Star Wars novel” with all the caveats of adhering to canon (or keeping romance very courtly and mostly chaste) didn’t exist yet. Foster was set the task to write a follow-up for Star Wars following the genre conventions of the time.

Unfortunately, those conventions suck. Leia pendulums between Annoying Princess and Active Obstacle, Luke is full of derring-do, better ideas, and in the last half of the book seems to be getting paid by the word. No aliens have speaking roles, and come in three varieties of Savage– Pathetic, Useful, and Too-Primitive-To-Be-Truly-Noble. Vader is verbose (boo), briefly sexually threatening ( 👀) and ultimately a blathering fool not that far off from the throwaway Imperial commander antagonist that wastes a lot of our time earlier in the novel. 

So, let’s get into it. We’ll do the world’s fastest plot summary, get into why the characterization fails and the silliest examples of it, and maybe I’ll have finally worked this splinter out from under my skin.

PLOT SPEEDRUN:

Luke and Leia are on their way to a planet to negotiate its support for the Rebel Alliance. They crashland on a nearby planet, find a secret Imperial mining colony, and are drawn into helping a Mysterious Eccentric Old Woman find a legendary Force-enhancing crystal. They’re briefly captured by the Imperials, break free with the help of two aliens, run from a giant worm and fall into an underground labyrinth of caves that ends in a long-abandoned city. Ritual fight to establish dominance over the “primitive natives,” Vader shows up, there’s a firefight, they find the temple with the crystal, Luke fights a beast, Vader shows up again, final fight, Vader gets dropped down a hole and the crystal revives Luke from death so he can heal Leia, done.  

Wookieepedia has a more in-depth summary if you’d prefer a nittier gritty.

It’s a little meandering, and has the cadence of a couple sessions of D&D where there are only two players and a DM with more setting ideas than story beats. The setting of a boggy planet full of ancient temples waiting to be explored and underground caves full of mysteries and aliens kinda fucks, and it feels like there may be some of Dagobah’s DNA in the descriptions of the swamp filled with alien birdcalls. (The Force-sensitive eccentric “oldster” [one of Al’s favorite words] Halla bears only a passing resemblance to Yoda in that Luke sort of forcibly adopts her as a mentor figure and she loves to lie.) 

OKAY COOL WHATEVER GET TO THE PART WHERE YOU TALK ABOUT LEIA:

As one of three returning “"canon”” characters and one of two main protagonists, Leia gets a lot of airtime and really doesn’t do much in the first half of the book besides scold Luke for acting sensibly but against her sensibilities, worry about the wrong things and get corrected for it, and get slapped either literally or by the narrative. It’s difficult to try and remember that at the time this was written, there wasn’t a large corpus of work that helped flesh out her character and give her agency and respect– but I don’t think that’s really an excuse. In Splinter, she’s frequently shrill and stuffy, infantilized, and in turns both naive but somehow knowing more than Luke– although his instincts usually prove to be right over her experience. 

Goodreads reviewers correctly note that the sexual tension between Luke and Leia is pushed hard and makes the reveal in Empire that they’re siblings… complicated. Luke/Leia has legs as a ship and I’m not about to deny it, but unfortunately the things that would make it interesting or compelling– the separation and then reuniting, both of them giving Han grief, the tension and intimacy granted by their potential bond through the Force– are best left in the hands of fic writers, since obviously it would never be even remotely embraced in canon. Foster’s take on Luke’s attraction to Leia is blithely and standardly horny in a boring way. After a day of trudging through the swamp and Leia harping at him, they huddle together for warmth at a campfire.

“Then he happened to glance down at his companion’s face. It was not the face of a Princess and a Senator or of a leader of the Rebel Alliance, but instead that of a chilled child. Moistly parted in sleep, her lips seemed to beckon to him. He leaned closer, seeking refuge from the damp green and brown of the swamp in that hypnotic redness.

He hesitated, pulled back. [...]

His assignment was to protect her. [...] He would do it out of respect and admiration and possibly out of the most powerful of emotions, unrequited love.

He would even defend her from himself, he determined tiredly. In five minutes he was fast asleep. . . .”

Damn, dude. The hypnotic redness? This part mostly stands out to me as being purple prose and a relic of “ohoho, this was back before we knew they were twins” writing– cherry on top being the idea of her as a “chilled child,” and the weird sort of babydoll innocent-sexy convention that we all know by now. It’s not worth excoriating Foster for this, we all know the real ways that it sucks and the tiredness of it as a fictional trope. It does tie into a lot of her (mis)characterization and irrationality in Splinter. 

Later, the two have snuck into the Imperial mining town after stealing some mining duds to blend in (which Luke steals, because Leia refuses to. Yeah, Leia ‘famously worried about personal property’ Organa.) and are getting something to eat at a tavern. Luke’s made a point to tell Leia to walk differently, to put dirt on her face, to disguise her regal bearing, but attentions from an officer make her anxious.

“They do suspect!” she whispered tightly. She started to stand. “I’ve had enough, Luke. Let’s get out of here.”

“We can’t rush off, especially if we’re being watched,” he countered. “Don’t panic, Princess.”

“I said I’m leaving, Luke.” Nervous, she started to turn and leave.

Without realizing what he was doing, he reached out, slapped her hard across the face, and as heads turned in their direction said loudly, “No favors for you until I’m finished eating!”

One hand went to her burning cheek. Wide-eyed and voiceless, the Princess slowly sat back down. Luke frantically attacked his steak as the uniformed Imperial sauntered over to them, backed by the attendant at a discreet distance.”

Luke spins them a tale of how she’s a servant he bought and is still breaking in, and they buy it and congratulate him on his taste.

“It was the first logical thing I could think of,” he insisted. “Besides, it explains you as well as anything could.” He sounded pleased. “No one will question you once the word gets around.”

Like, what happened to protecting her hypnotic redness? What makes this even more dumb and insidious bad is that occasionally, the story will cue us that Luke is being prompted by the Force to do things, even his hunches are usually correct, and none of his plans completely fail. The servant story is bought until they’re brought before the Imperial boss of the place, who proceeds to beat Leia until Luke spins him another story that’s miraculously believed. 

Beyond the shittiness of Wormie Skywalker, who has now been portrayed by doe-eyed cat-cuddler Mark Hamill, slapping Leia and then propping it up with a cover story, it’s the fact that he never faces any prompting from the narrative that this was, perhaps, shitty! 

When they’re outside, Leia kicks his shins to get back at him and he then instigates a mud-throwing fight– yeah– that evolves into wrestling in the mud– yeah, no, yeah– that gets to the point where local roughnecks show up to join in and try to get in on assaulting Leia once they see that she’s Beautiful Woman. That leads to their Imperial capture and drags the plot along by the barest of sinews. 

Blah blah, Leia is ogled and beat by the bog-standard Imperial Badguy officer, yadda yadda, thrown in a prison cell, Luke befriends the Yuzzems while Leia does nothing. Officer Badguy returns briefly to inform them that he’s called his bosses and an Imperial Governor will be by soon– which, interestingly but unsurprisingly, sends Leia into a panic attack.

“Imperial governors don’t take an interest in common thieves, Luke,” she whispered tightly. Something was clutching at her throat. “I’ll be interrogated again… like that time… that time.” She broke away, threw herself up against the back wall of the cell.

That time back on the Death Star. Small black worms crawled through her head. [...] The remorseless black machine, illegal, concocted by twisted Imperial scientists in defiance of every code, legal and moral. 

[...] Screaming, screaming, screaming never to stop she was…

Something hit her hard. She blinked, burned to see Luke looking at her, worried. She slid down to sit up against the wall.”

Nothing in the text contradicts the implication that Luke slaps her out of her panic attack. 

Later, she has some kind of screaming fit in the underground caverns and berates herself for missing a shot against Darth Vader in the middle of a fight. I could keep transcribing passages but like, I’m hoping you get the idea. 

Her one moment of sort-of triumph is when she takes up Luke’s lightsaber to duel Darth Vader– Luke has his leg trapped under a rock like on the cover and is momentarily out of commission. She surprises him at first but then spends the rest of the fight being wounded and toyed with until Luke is ready to get tagged back in. She dies? Or something maybe? And then gets healed– no scars, thank god, can you imagine if she wasn’t fuckable– wakes up, and has no speaking lines after wondering what happens to Threepio and Artoo. The old woman with a heart of gold gets cajoled into the Rebellion by Luke and everyone laughs.  

It sucks. It sucks! It’s so clearly just Default Woman Character and not informed by Carrie Fisher’s performance or anything other than the laxest tropes in adventure novel writing. And it’s not just her. This is nowhere more evident than the fact that Leia is characterized as not knowing how to swim– but Luke does.

OH SHIT, WHAT ABOUT LUKE?

Luke who? Luke Skywalker doesn’t exist here in any recognizable form. This is distilled perfectly in the last fourth of the book after he’s won his duel against a “primitive alien warrior.” Imagine this falling out of his cute little twink mouth:

“Don’t you understand?” [Leia] asked brightly. “You won. We can all go free now. That is,” she continued in a more subdued voice, staring around at the silent crowd and trying not to show any fear, “we can if these creatures have any sense of honor.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much about that, Leia,” he advised her, wiping water from his face. “Canu has judged, remember? Besides, it takes many thousands of years of advanced technological development for a society to reduce honor to an abstract moral truism devoid of real meaning.”

AND… THE RACISM?

Right, whoops. Let’s see– our three kinds of indians– I mean, uh, natives– I mean, native aliens! I meant aliens. The three kinds: pathetic, useful, and too-primitive-to-be-truly-noble. 

Pathetic: Local humanoid-but-furry aliens are seen speaking in broken English and begging Imperials for liquor. See: the firewater myth and stereotype of the Drunken Indian.   

Useful: Luke and Leia meet two almost-humanoid-and-furry, ultra-strong Yuzzems, Hin and Kee, who were also imprisoned by the Imperials for accidentally signing themselves in slavery and then getting drunk and trying to wreck the mine. They don’t have any speaking lines, and are only able to communicate through Luke. They function as a kind of “shit, we need the characters to get this resources” tool and nothing is ever learned about their personal lives or personalities beyond their ability to tear Imperials limb from limb. One of them gets gonked offscreen by Vader and the other one lives long enough to die helping Luke in the final fight. No time is spent mourning them.

Too Primitive To Be Truly Noble: In the underground city, Luke and Leia meet a settlement of humanoid-but-furry aliens called the Coway, who appear to be living in the remains of a more ‘advanced’ civilization. They challenge Luke to a ritual duel to determine if he and his captured friends should be set free, which Luke wins through an instinctive use of the Force. The Coways they kill before this point aren’t mourned by their people, and for winning the fight they throw Luke and Luke’s Friends a party. The settlement is attacked soon after by Imperials, but thanks to Luke and Luke’s Friends marshalling them, they defeat the stormtroopers. After the battle is done, the Coways kill any injured Imperials, which Leia condones and Luke finds morally repugnant.

I don’t super want to quote any of the passages illustrating how the narrative feels about these characters. It shouldn’t be shocking: old scifi is frequently as racist as it is misogynist. New scifi is frequently as racist as it is misogynist. (Shoutout to Rebel Moon, woo! Time I’ll never get back!) Part of Star Wars' genetic material is that of westerns, for good and ill.

DO WE HAVE TIME FOR HORNY DARTH VADER? WOULD THAT LIGHTEN THE MOOD? :( 

“Do you remember that day back on the station,” Vader mused, with deliberate patience, “when the late Governor Tarkin and I interviewed you?” He placed a peculiar stress on the word “interviewed.”

Leia had both hands on opposite shoulders and was shivering as if from intense cold.

“Yes,” Vader observed, perverse amusement in his voice, “I can see that you do. I am truly sorry I have nothing as elaborate to treat you to at this time. However,” he added, swinging his weapon lightly, “one can do some interesting things with a saber, you know. I’ll do my best to show you all of them if you’ll cooperate by not passing out.” 

Incredible prediction of itsorlo’s steez.  

FINAL THOUGHTS

My allotted “Um, Actually” for this post is pointing out that Luka and Leia navigate an underground lake by using rods of selenite as paddles on a giant lily pad– selenite is water-soluble. 

The first use of “stang” as a curse word shows up– “What the Stang!” Probably my preferred Star Wars expletive, considering how goofy they get. 

Oh– Leia does say “Well, darn” after missing Vader with a rifle shot. 

Do I recommend it? It's an unimpressed and dispassionate no from me, bud. The things that made Foster’s work charming in the ANH novelization are fewer and farther between, and additionally now that we know who Luke and Leia are, their mischaracterization means the only thing left of interest is the worldbuilding. Even that’s shallow at best, and not remotely worth the weird racist mouthfeels and seeing Leia get shit on. There are better adventure novels, there are better scifi novels, and there are better Star Wars novels. 

NEXT TIME:

Han Solo at Star's End, by Brian Daley.