Force Sensitive Archive

This interview, given at the end of the Vector Prime e-book, with the creators of the New Jedi Order gives a little insight into the creative process as dictated by George to any prospective authors and publishers for his baby. It leaves little doubt as to his feelings on continuity in the Expanded Universe (EU).

Here are some exerpts with some of the important keys CAPITALIZED for emphasis:

DR (Del Ray books, The interveiwer): How were the authors for
each book selected? Howmuch freedom did the writers have in terms of plot,
character, setting, and invention of things like technologies,
names, cultures, and aspects of the Force?
SS (Shelley Shapiro, Editorial Director of Del Ray): Some
authors I knew and recommended to Lucasfilm;
some came to me, and I had to read their work before
recommending them to Lucasfilm. Of course, it’s well
known that, for a variety of reasons I won’t go into here,
we only use established, previously published, professional
writers.
Once an author is recommended to Lucasfilm, Sue
reads a sample of his or her work and makes the final decision
to approve using that author or not. The writers
had a lot of freedom, provided they DIDN'T CONTRADICT EXISTING CONTINUITY
and that they hit the major plot points we required
to keep the overall story arc moving along.

DR: How did your ideas about the Force change over the
course of the series? How much was preplanned and
imposed from the outset, and how much evolved as the
series was written, shaped by the demands of plot and
character? I’m thinking specifically of Vergere here.
JL (James Luceno, Author of The Unifying Force): Vergere was
created at the onset to serve as Anakin’s,
then Jacen’s, mentor. At a story conference at Skywalker
Ranch in March 1999, we saw a way to insert Vergere
into Greg Bear’s novel, Rogue Planet, and thus tie the
prequel era to the New Jedi Order. Subsequently, Greg’s
novel assumed even greater importance to the NJO and
became the focus of Sean Williams’s and Shane Dix’s
Force Heretic trilogy. Vergere was also designed from
the start to be an unorthodox teacher. Our intention was
for her to serve as a voice for the Republic-era Jedi and in
that capacity answer some of the questions Luke had
been pondering for most of his adult life. We also wanted
Vergere to demystify the Force, or at least convey a sense
that the ability to use the Force was not simply an accident
of birth. In Traitor, Matt Stover not only ran with
these ideas, but took them beyond our wildest imaginings.
SS: I personally would like to see the Force return to the
more mystical life force we saw in the first three movies,
but in the end, the plot and the characters are more in
charge than I am, and they moved in that direction naturally.
LW (Lucy Wilson, Director of Publishing; Lucasfilm): But you know,
we didn’t really change anything about
the Force. It’s more how the Jedi understand, think
about, and use the Force. That definitely evolved as the
series was written.
SR (Sue Rostoni, Managing Editor; Lucasfilm): Well, it had to be
that way. I mean, ALL THE ORIGINAL JEDI WERE WIPED OUT BY VADER AND PALPATINE.
Luke’s training by Yoda was never completed. So Luke has always had
questions about the Force, as have all the Jedi trained by
Luke. Vergere was a bridge back to the earlier Jedi. And
she’d taken her understanding of the Force in new directions,
too, because of her long experience with the Vong.

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.

The point of this post is this: The continuity of SWG has been horribly mishandled by the developers by including Jedi in this game. SWG is not a part of the Expanded Universe and if George were to see this game (and he's rumored to be taking a look at the Galaxies direction after the completion of the final movie releases and all that goes with it) then he'd likely pull his support from it and demand either the timeline be changed (easier to do and less stressful to all the current Jedi in the game) or that Jedi be removed from the game entirely.

Flame on!

It's in an INTERVIEW. His thoughts on the matter were conveyed to those being interviewed and recorded in the exerpts I provided. No mind reading required.

That comment was merely a deduction from his demands placed on the authors. Those demands weren't just for the NJO but for every author that seeks to contribute new material to the EU. I'm not trying to imply that the NJO is law or anything. It's an interesting read though. I like the darker aspects of it and how it affects the characters in the galaxy.

And incidentally, how do you mean, "written out?" And which book are you referring to? I'll have to read it I guess.

Thanks for the title. The only thing I'm taking it from is his demands that continuity be upheld above all else. That's no secret and everyone knew his desire that no EU fiction stray from the mythos of his galaxy. I put this up here to give a little reminder from folks intimately associated with Lucasfilm and the EU. The people in this interview are VERY high up on the ladder of Lucasfilm and Del Ray (the owner of the liscence to publish SWEU novels).

Yeah....I've read it and there's no Jedi mentioned in the book at all...including Luke. He's mentioned briefly but not as a Jedi. And I have no doubt that Lucas is aware of the Jedi issue in Galaxies but he's had very little time recently for some reason to deal with such things.

Message Edited by Jason_Solo on 04-15-2005 07:30 PM

Not all games make it into the EU. For example, KOTOR I made it into the EU but KOTOR II did not.