This evening marked the second night of University Book Store’s trio of author events celebrating this week’s release of Lucasfilm Publishing’s short-story collection From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back. Tonight’s group included contributors Charles Yu, Jason Fry, Mike Chen, Catherynne M. Valente, Josh Jackson Miller, Tracy Deonn, and Zoraida Cordova. In the bullet-point list below, I’ve enumerated some of the most interesting tidbits and factoids to come out of this presentation.
- John Jackson Miller talked about how he was 12 years old when The Empire Strikes Back came out and spoiled the movie for himself three weeks in advance by reading the novelization. He says the Bespin Security Guard was the lamest action figure there was. He got a one-sheet poster from his sister’s friend who worked at a movie theater at the time.
- Miller created Rae Sloane for the novel Star Wars: A New Dawn. He wanted to established what it was like to be a member of the Empire who is not evil or incompetent. He liked getting to show what she was doing during Empire. He also named the Space Slug the Exogorth in the Knights of the Old Republic video game. He says the last words an Imperial officer would want to hear is “Lord Vader Will See You Now,” which is the title of his story in From a Certain Point of View.
- “This No Cave” by Catherynne M. Valente has a basis in folklore and mythology. She likes telling stories from the points of view of monsters. “It was meant to be.” She told her brother she was writing a story for this book and he asked, “Did you pick the Yeti or the slug?” She wanted to make people cry over “this dumb puppet.” She wanted to give the Exogorth culture and scope over many years. She was Hoth Leia for Halloween when she was a kid, and she loved being able to write these characters. Her story takes place over possibly the longest time period of any Star Wars story.
- Charles Yu wrote an intimate portrait of Admiral Ozzel’s final moments. “What is it like to sustain a career in fear?” He says he was incredibly anxious about touching something so revered and something people know so much about. His story takes place over a few seconds while Darth Vader is choking Ozzel to death. Yu enjoyed taking a forgotten-about character and fleshing out his life and backstory.
- “Vergence” by Tracy Deonn is about the Dark Side Cave on Dagobah. “Stepping into that space of writing the Force is no small thing.” She went through a process of how to think about it, as the cave has come to sentience in the story due to the Force users who have visited it over time. “Only what you take with you” is a really important concept to the story. She tried to put together a narrative thread to demonstrate how the cave operates, and used its other canon appearances in ancillary materials to flesh that out.
- Wedge Antilles gets his own story by Jason Fry, who wrote about “fake” Wedge in the first From a Certain Point of View. “Rendezvous Point” is apparently the longest story in the book by a couple hundred words. Fry says he wanted to write straightforward starfighter action scenes and make it a love letter to the old Star Wars: X-Wing novels by Michael A. Stackpole. The story has some Easter Eggs for people who loved those books.
- Mike Chen went through quite a few potential options for subjects, and settled on Emperor Palpatine. He wanted to make his mark in the canon, just in case he never gets to write Star Wars again. He thought Lucasfilm would say “no” to his pitch, but it turned out everyone loved it.
- Zoraida Cordova picked Boba Fett, and wanted to get inside his head. She had written for him briefly as a teenager in The Clone Wars: Stories of Light and Dark and wanted to address his relationship with the other bounty hunters. She had almost pitched a Weekend at Bernie’s with Han Solo frozen in Carbonite.
- Deonn says she started out by pulling from her childhood memories of The Empire Strikes Back. She loved the concept of Luke discovering his own face in Vader’s helmet, so she built from there and tracked the evolution of the cave. Over time it learned and absorbed and became the vergence. She borrowed a line of dialogue from the first book’s story “There is Another” because she wanted to refer back to that book.
- Chen says it was interesting to weave connective tissue between Vader in Empire to what we know of Anakin Skywalker in the prequel trilogy and Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
- Miller decided to bring in a second character from A New Dawn: a creepy woman named Lieutenant Kanna Deltic, for Rae Sloane to bounce off of. He says this book is more challenging because it’s not a sequel or prequel, but instead takes place during the movie. Nobody knows how much time Luke spends on Dagobah or Han and Leia spend inside the Space Slug.
- Fry says his original starting point sent him off in the wrong direction. He didn’t want to write a roll-call of Easter Eggs, but he was very conscious of the concept people had of Wedge from the comics and novels. “You don’t step lightly into Luke Skywalker’s shoes, but he has no choice.”
- Yu says there is conflict between judging a villainous character as a human and a character. He started off in a lighter place as a workplace story: Ozzel messes up really bad and his boss is angry. Ozzel doesn’t walk around thinking, “I’m evil.” Yu tried to humanize him from that perspective.
- “Dear Boba Fett, why are you like this?” was one of the questions Cordova wanted to answer in her story. What was his path to being an adult from where we saw him in the prequels? She also wanted to glimpse on the idea that Fett always gets his bounty, but then answer the question “why?”
- Deonn wanted to give the sense that the cave is stuck on a single planet and thus doesn’t know about the Galactic Civil War or either side of the greater conflict. She charted over time the cave coming into awareness of emotions, through other people. She always knew Yoda would bring the cave down to size at the end of the story. “In this scenario, Yoda’s the one in charge, and that feels familiar.”
- Valente says she set herself up for difficulty in writing a Star Wars story without using any familiar Star Wars words, as it’s told from a very alien point of view. She wanted to answer the question of why the inside of the Exogorth is pressurized to the point where humans can walk around inside of it. She had an earlier draft that referenced some things from the Expanded Universe “Legends” timeline, but they were cut out.
- “The way I wrote Palpatine experiencing the Force, there was a conscious effort to make it the polar opposite of Yoda’s ‘luminous beings’ speech,” says Chen. He sees the Force as ocean waves in a night sky, and he’s trying to harness the chaos in there. He threw the general rules of logic out the window to discover what Darth Vader really wants.
- Lucasfilm Story Group corrected the color of Imperial officer uniforms in Cordova’s story, because they look a certain color on screen but they are actually a different color.
- The remainder of the discussion focused on things the authors found surprising during their rewatches of the movie, how editor Tom Hoeler and his coworkers eventually decided the order in which the stories would go in the book, the legacy of The Empire Strikes Back, and their own personal favorite moments from this new volume of From a Certain Point of View.
From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back is available now wherever books are sold.