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Heir To The Empire 20 Years Later
May. 12th, 2011 07:11 pmHas it really been 20 years since we’ve been introduced to the likes of Mara Jade, Talon Karrde, and that blue guy? Already??
That’s right, it was two whole decades ago this week that Timothy Zahn’s “Heir To The Empire” arrived in bookstores. It seems like everybody who was around in May 1991 and cared about Star Wars remembers the magical moment. For me, the first time I’d even heard about the book was in April 1991. I just so happened to have found a small blurb deep within the Sunday pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—I was attending the University of Missouri-Columbia at the time—while sitting around on the lawn trying to ignore the bad hippie band playing during the annual Earth Day fest. It mentioned that some book taking place five years after ROTJ with all of our favorite Star Wars characters, at least the ones who survived Episode VI, was going to come out in June, no doubt to whip up the masses in anticipation of new movies off in the vague and hazy future.
“No way!” I thought. Now, I’d already known about Marvel’s plans to publish a new Star Wars comic called “Dark Empire” that had yet to see the light of day (more on that when we get to DE’s 20th anniversary this December). Was this a new project? Was this in place of the erstwhile comic? Just to re-emphasize this wasn’t a hallucination, one of my friends pointed the same blurb out to me the next day. Whoa! I couldn’t wait for June!
After walking through my graduation ceremony a few weeks later, I had to remain in Columbia, MO until early July to pick up one last credit before my official graduation in August. I had sublet a room in a pretty nice apartment complex and on one hot, muggy Saturday in May, I drove to the mall to see if I could get a cable connection for the t.v. in my room. I went by the Radio Shack and didn’t find what I was looking for. Then something, perhaps the Force, told me to go to Waldenbooks and see if HTTE was out. I wasn’t expecting the book for another month, but this gut feeling was so strong, I went with it. I strolled into Waldenbooks and there by the entry was a big pile of HTTEs!
The first thing I did was grab a copy off the pile and started reading it right there. OMG, Leia was preggers! With twins! Han seemed to be vaguely unemployed while Luke agonized over re-starting the Jedi Order from scratch. And there were a bunch of other people I’d never heard of who figure into the story, particularly a smarty pants Grand Admiral and a redhead out to whack Luke for ending her long career with the Emperor. After a few minutes, I came out of it to pay for the book, went to one other store, then headed back to the car. I finished reading the first chapter in the car, and left when I figured I was going to die of heat exhaustion if I continued to sit there reading with the a/c off.
For a lot of fans hiding underground in the post ROTJ-years, HTTE is what brought them back to SW. In fact, when I bought the book, I was convinced that I was the only person in America buying it. For years, I thought I was literally the last hardcore SW fan left on Earth. I thought I was single-handedly keeping West End Games in business with my occasional sourcebook purchase. But I was heartened that at least this Timothy Zahn guy and Bantam-Spectra cared too, and that now made three of us. Imagine my surprise when I saw that several months later, it was one of the top-selling books of the year.
Of course I loved the book. Not everything was done the way I would have done it (particularly anything involving Han/Leia) but after a loooong drought of everything Star Wars, even water right from your car’s coolant would have been like a cold bottle of Smart Water down your gullet on a summer day. “Heir” isn’t my all-time fave now but it’s still better than some of the novels that have come after it. It was still a hopeful book with a lot of possibility. I dutifully picked up its sequels in 1992 and in 1993.
HTTE not only threw gasoline on the embers that had been Star Wars (“Dark Empire” and other factors helped as well), it also turned Star Wars into a licensed publishing juggernaut. In 1991, Star Trek was the #1 licensed publishing program. Bantam Spectra had tried to convince Lucasfilm for years that there was definitely a market for Star Wars in the same area; previously there had only been a handful of books in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. By 1999, Star Wars ruled the roost and it has ever since. There’s a lot that can be said good and bad about the untamable beast that the expanded universe has become. But at least for me, HTTE was the starting point for my wanting to get into Star Wars in a way I couldn’t before and that included contacting other fans and writing fan fiction. Within a year, I was ordering fanzines and writing stories. In two years, I was co-publishing my own zine. I was actively collecting. Soon I had a coterie of fan friends locally and around the world. The revival was underway.
That’s right, it was two whole decades ago this week that Timothy Zahn’s “Heir To The Empire” arrived in bookstores. It seems like everybody who was around in May 1991 and cared about Star Wars remembers the magical moment. For me, the first time I’d even heard about the book was in April 1991. I just so happened to have found a small blurb deep within the Sunday pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch—I was attending the University of Missouri-Columbia at the time—while sitting around on the lawn trying to ignore the bad hippie band playing during the annual Earth Day fest. It mentioned that some book taking place five years after ROTJ with all of our favorite Star Wars characters, at least the ones who survived Episode VI, was going to come out in June, no doubt to whip up the masses in anticipation of new movies off in the vague and hazy future.
“No way!” I thought. Now, I’d already known about Marvel’s plans to publish a new Star Wars comic called “Dark Empire” that had yet to see the light of day (more on that when we get to DE’s 20th anniversary this December). Was this a new project? Was this in place of the erstwhile comic? Just to re-emphasize this wasn’t a hallucination, one of my friends pointed the same blurb out to me the next day. Whoa! I couldn’t wait for June!
After walking through my graduation ceremony a few weeks later, I had to remain in Columbia, MO until early July to pick up one last credit before my official graduation in August. I had sublet a room in a pretty nice apartment complex and on one hot, muggy Saturday in May, I drove to the mall to see if I could get a cable connection for the t.v. in my room. I went by the Radio Shack and didn’t find what I was looking for. Then something, perhaps the Force, told me to go to Waldenbooks and see if HTTE was out. I wasn’t expecting the book for another month, but this gut feeling was so strong, I went with it. I strolled into Waldenbooks and there by the entry was a big pile of HTTEs!
The first thing I did was grab a copy off the pile and started reading it right there. OMG, Leia was preggers! With twins! Han seemed to be vaguely unemployed while Luke agonized over re-starting the Jedi Order from scratch. And there were a bunch of other people I’d never heard of who figure into the story, particularly a smarty pants Grand Admiral and a redhead out to whack Luke for ending her long career with the Emperor. After a few minutes, I came out of it to pay for the book, went to one other store, then headed back to the car. I finished reading the first chapter in the car, and left when I figured I was going to die of heat exhaustion if I continued to sit there reading with the a/c off.
For a lot of fans hiding underground in the post ROTJ-years, HTTE is what brought them back to SW. In fact, when I bought the book, I was convinced that I was the only person in America buying it. For years, I thought I was literally the last hardcore SW fan left on Earth. I thought I was single-handedly keeping West End Games in business with my occasional sourcebook purchase. But I was heartened that at least this Timothy Zahn guy and Bantam-Spectra cared too, and that now made three of us. Imagine my surprise when I saw that several months later, it was one of the top-selling books of the year.
Of course I loved the book. Not everything was done the way I would have done it (particularly anything involving Han/Leia) but after a loooong drought of everything Star Wars, even water right from your car’s coolant would have been like a cold bottle of Smart Water down your gullet on a summer day. “Heir” isn’t my all-time fave now but it’s still better than some of the novels that have come after it. It was still a hopeful book with a lot of possibility. I dutifully picked up its sequels in 1992 and in 1993.
HTTE not only threw gasoline on the embers that had been Star Wars (“Dark Empire” and other factors helped as well), it also turned Star Wars into a licensed publishing juggernaut. In 1991, Star Trek was the #1 licensed publishing program. Bantam Spectra had tried to convince Lucasfilm for years that there was definitely a market for Star Wars in the same area; previously there had only been a handful of books in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. By 1999, Star Wars ruled the roost and it has ever since. There’s a lot that can be said good and bad about the untamable beast that the expanded universe has become. But at least for me, HTTE was the starting point for my wanting to get into Star Wars in a way I couldn’t before and that included contacting other fans and writing fan fiction. Within a year, I was ordering fanzines and writing stories. In two years, I was co-publishing my own zine. I was actively collecting. Soon I had a coterie of fan friends locally and around the world. The revival was underway.
