of star wars, worldbuilding, and capybaras

I keep wanting to get back to blogging regularly, if for no other reason than I have a lot of ideas and I won’t get them out anywhere else. Strangely, it seems that I’ll never get back to blogging unless I actually…oh, I dunno…blog.

So here I am. On my phone I have an app for keeping notes, and several of the notes contain the word “blog” — meaning that the note in question is either a single idea for a post or a list of ideas for posts. I intend to go through these lists and notes and write the things. Because my brain is overfull and some of these things need to live outside my head so my thoughts have more space.

If you have ADHD (aka DAVE) and/or anxiety, you know exactly what I mean.

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Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away….

I hope you’re hearing the music in your head.

Since I recently posted the lists of my last three years’ worth of books I’ve read, I want to share some observations about a read from 2024, namely Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker by George Lucas, ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster.

This book is the novelization of the film Star Wars, which was released on May 25, 1977, and re-titled Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope when re-released in 1981. Interestingly, the novelization was published on November 12, 1976, before the film came out. My copy of the book happens to be the edition published in the UK in 1977, which I inherited from a deceased nerd friend. (RIP Mike!)

I guess George Lucas is (in)famous for retconning all the things, what with the various and sundry re-releases and special editions of Star Wars films that have come out over the past 40+ years. I’m still a bit salty over how they changed the music (was it originally Ewoks singing?) at the end of the 2004 DVD release of Return of the Jedi — the original music was much better. Not to mention scrubbing out Sebastian Shaw as Anakin’s force ghost and replacing him with Hayden Christiansen. Obi-Wan didn’t appear as his younger self as a force ghost; there’s no reason Anakin should. Young Anakin made all the bad choices; Shaw’s older Anakin was the one who redeemed himself. Replacing Shaw was disrespectful to both the actor and the character.

But I’m not here to gripe about Lucas’s questionable retcons or even praise his good ones. (I can’t think of a good one off the top of my head — is that bad?) I’m here to talk about that 1976 novelization, which Foster based on Lucas’s screenplay. He also used the film itself to flesh out a lot of the Star Wars universe with backstory, planets, species, and languages. And that’s where this blog post comes in.

Fairly early on as I read this book, I noted a few oddities that pulled me out of the story a little. I don’t remember now what the very first thing was…but the first thing I wrote down that struck me as odd was in a little descriptive side-scene when Luke and C-3PO are out searching for R2-D2.

Unbeknownst to Luke and Threepio, two Tusken Raiders, aka sandpeople, are watching them. In Foster’s version of the story, we get to see the two Tuskens arguing with each other, apparently over whether to shoot Luke outright while he’s still traveling in his landspeeder, or ambush him when he comes to a stop. Finally, the two sandpeople stop arguing and hightail it down a ridge to where their Bantha mounts are waiting.

The Banthas are described as each being “as large as a small dinosaur.”
This set my brain spinning, and of course I had to have an imaginary conversation with the author about it.

Foster: “Each was as large as a small dinosaur, with bright eyes and long, thick fur.”
me: waiiiiit, wait, WAIT. this universe had dinosaurs?
him: well yeah. they have fossils, right? there’s gotta be dinos somewhere, and people know about them
me: sure, but why are they calling them ‘dinosaurs’?
him: whaddaya mean?
me: we call ’em ‘dinosaurs’ because sir richard owen started calling them that in 1842
him: so?
me: so, owen called them that because they were ‘terrible lizards’ and he gave them a name from ancient greek. you’re telling me luke skywalker lived a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away that had ancient greeks in it?
him: well, technically, it’s ‘another galaxy, another time’

him: besides, you think you’re reading this book in its original language? you think luke skywalker spoke english?
me: no, smartypants. but ‘dinosaur’ is a pretty specialized word with a lot of real-world ish attached to it. couldn’t you have gone with something a little more in-universe? i mean, you didn’t call the banthas ‘giant extra-hairy yaks’
him: that’s because they don’t actually look like giant yaks–
me: and another thing, when the tusken raiders are interacting with their banthas, why are you calling the raiders by the Hindi word ‘mahout’?!?? ‘handler’ was right there!!
him: …
me: and another thing…. what’s the size of a ‘small’ dinosaur? are we talking stego, t-rex, or compy?

And so it goes. Altogether, I enjoyed the book a lot, because it did give me some details and in-universe history that we don’t get from the movies (although it’s been too long now for me to recall those details). But these imaginary Kaffeeklatsche with Foster happened more or less from start to finish of the novel. Other things I demanded explanations for included:

• Luke knows what a panda, a baboon, and a capybara are.
• Luke does not know what a duck is.
• LUKE DOES NOT KNOW WHAT A DUCK IS.
• “Human” is a thing. I know, I know, that’s not exactly egregious. And I’m not reading the in-universe language in which I’m probably meant to believe it was originally written; like JRR Tolkien “translating” various hobbit manuscripts into English, Foster “translated” it from the SW-universe manuscript into English, which inevitably results words like “human” and “dinosaur”. BUT, I note, unlike Tolkien’s work, nothing in Foster’s book indicates that what we’re reading is a “found manuscript.”
• Ben Kenobi’s cave is “Spartan”. AGAIN WITH THE ANCIENT GREEKS?!
• Spelled out, “C-3PO” is “See Threepio.” Might be standard for all I know, but I think “Cee-Threepio” or just “C-Threepio” would make more sense. Especially when a sentence begins with the name: “See Threepio, come in.” Where should I see him coming in?

• Foster describes the Death Star’s tractor beam as “wrenching at (a) ship with the strength of a fallen angel.”
  So I’m to believe that not only does Star Wars have dinos, animal handlers from India, capybaras, and Leonidas I — this universe that supposedly existed eons before Terrans even thought about oozing up out of the ocean — this universe has not only angels (thank you again, Ancient Greek and transliteration) but a Lucifer??

• The change of frequency relative to an observer is called “the Doppler effect.” Yes, not reading in in-universe original language. BUT still not a found manuscript, and still a highly specialized word named after Christian Doppler, the Austrian physicist who described it in 1842.
• what the hell was going on in 1842

A few other things I noted that weren’t necessarily problematic but were interesting, and possibly show some of the earliest retconning:

• Han Solo is a Corellian, which I don’t remember finding out in Episode IV.
• “Wookiee” is spelled “Wookie.”
• “Hutt” is spelled “Hut.” (“Hut” means “hat” in German, which makes something conceptually different where Pizza Hut is concerned.)
• Speaking of pie establishments, Jabba isn’t really a giant goo-slug in this book. Instead, he is “a great, mobile tub of muscle and suet topped by a shaggy scarred skull.” (Say “shaggy scarred skull” out loud ten times fast. I dare you.)
• The Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in “less than twelve standard timeparts!”
  Clunkier, but a more accurate unit for time’s passage than “parsecs.”
• Blue Leader (Garven Dreis, unnamed in the book) says he knew Luke’s father, which I take to be another sign that the galaxy doesn’t know who Darth Vader is.

Altogether, Foster’s novelization is an enjoyable read, albeit frustrating and perplexing at times. It expands the Star Wars universe, especially the parts relevant to the first movie, obvi. I wish I’d had this book in hand when I watched Episode IV: A New Hope for the first time — in the early ’90s. I knew nothing about the franchise except that its name in German was Krieg der Sterne (“war of the stars”) and, according to my German classmates, anyone who liked it was an unadulterated nerd who should be shunned. Even though we had Episodes IV, V, and VI on (pirated) video, my dad had already made sure I was a solid Star Trek fan. Star Was was fine, he guessed. But he didn’t make a point of having me watch it.

I finally did that myself at age 15, fell head over heels for the emo boy from Tatooine, and resolved to consume as much Star Wars as I could from then on. I’ve mostly kept to that — although these days, the franchise’s being exclusively on Disney+ (which we cancelled last year) is prohibitive.

Anyway, I wish I’d had access to the novel when I was 15 and very confused about this new universe I’d plunged myself into. Now that I have the book, though, it occupies a special place on my Star TreWarsk nerdshelf. 😉

XOXO,
CC