Star Traders

Wanderer of Worlds

Author: John Dunivant

Medium: Short story

Publication date: October 1996 in Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #9

Timeline placement: c. 7 BBY

 

"Wanderer of Worlds" is more of a vignette than a true short story, a first-person, present-tense introduction of the Eirrauc species for players of The Star Wars Roleplaying Game. Daushoroc and Tamoss, two Eirrauc traders and potential quest-givers, are wandering the Tatooine wastes in search of a crashed courier ship, the Athallian Messenger. Many have sought the vessel's valuable cargo over the decades but none has been successful. The Eirraucs hope to find the lost treasure so they can buy the freedom of some of their people, who have been enslaved by the Empire. They trade water and a Tusken battle talisman with a band of Sand People in exchange for directions to the crash site and permission to venture into their territory.

 

This story was written and illustrated by John Dunivant, who created the Eirraucs for Star Wars Galaxy Magazine's Design an Alien Contest, most famous for creating the unsurpassed Jeby and Yoda's Jedi Master, N'Kata Del Gormo. The Galaxy editors were so impressed with Dunivant's submission that they turned it into its own independent article and added RPG stats for his creations. Pretty cool, but not cool enough for it to warrant inclusion in Pablo Hidalgo's The Essential Reader's Companion. Although "Wanderer" muddies the line between short story and RPG flavor text, other Galaxy stories of a similar length made it into the book, so for consistency's sake I think it should have been included.

The Brief Return of High Inquisitor Tremayne

Dark Vendetta

Author: Eric S. Trautmann

Medium: Short story

Publication date: July 1996 in Star Wars Galaxy Magazine #8

Timeline placement: 10 BBY

 

Extremely short but very cool, "Dark Vendetta" features the earliest in-story appearance of High Inquisitor Antinnis Tremayne, a Darth Vader expy from The Star Wars Roleplaying Game first introduced in 1993's  Galaxy Guide 9: Fragments from the Rim. Like Vader, Tremayne was a fallen Jedi who served the Emperor and had several cybernetic prostheses, as well as a penchant for telekinetically strangling his minions. The backstory of his lightsaber duel with fugitive Jedi Padawan Corwin Shelvay, which cost Tremayne his right arm and eye, was detailed in Fragments from the Rim before being depicted three years later in "Dark Vendetta."

 

On Coruscant, now called Imperial Center, Corwin Shelvay has just been rescued from Imperial interrogation by his Jedi Master, the Sullustan Darrin Arkanian. As they attempt to rendezvous with Rebel pilot Captain Rashh, they are confronted in an alley by High Inquisitor Tremayne, commanding a detachment of Imperial troopers, presumably of the storm- variety (but since this is Coruscant, it would be badass if it was these guys). Arkanian duels Tremayne, who wields a green-bladed lightsaber. Remember when authors could give Jedi and Dark Jedi any color lightsaber they wanted? Those were the days.

 

Tremayne admits that Arkanian may surpass him as a swordsman, so he orders his troops to shoot Corwin unless the Jedi Master surrenders. Darrin Arkanian deactivates his lightsaber, and Tremayne quickly cuts him down. "Dark Vendetta" gives every indication that Arkanian dies here, but the original version of this story in Fragments of the Rim had him escaping with Corwin to die of his wounds a few days later.

 

Corwin still escapes, though, as he calls his fallen Master's lightsaber to him with the Force, and, drawing on the dark side, brutally defeats Tremayne in combat, severing his right arm below the shoulder and slashing the right side of his face across the eye. What follows is the most interesting part of the story, a unique glimpse into the EU's pre-prequel assumptions about the prequel era. To this day, Timothy Zahn still gets shit from fans for including vague details about the Clone Wars in his Thrawn Trilogy books that were ultimately contradicted by Attack of the Clones, but Eric S. Trautmann really swung for the fences.

 

As he recuperates from his wounds in a bacta tank, Tremayne has flashbacks to his early life and time as a Jedi. He was accepted for Jedi training at the age of 15, impossibly old according to the standards George Lucas introduced in the prequels. Some years later, a courier met with him and revealed that Palpatine (no Senator, Chancellor, or Emperor, just Palpatine) had been watching Tremayne's progress with great interest and wanted him to study under his agent Darth Vader to weed out corruption in the Jedi ranks. Vader, already wearing his armor, promised Tremayne that they would work together to restore the Jedi to their former glory and bring order and justice back to the galaxy.

 

It's very rare for a '90s EU story to get so specific when touching on details from the rise of the Empire. Generally they just weren't allowed to do it, so I wonder how this one got through. It's very cool that it did, even though it got almost everything wrong.

 

Tremayne awakens from his fever dream and finds that his lost body parts have been replaced with grotesque cybernetics. Fragments of the Rim claimed that he deliberately selected his cybernetic parts to intimidate his victims and subordinates, but "Dark Vendetta" changes this so Vader had the Imperial medics turn Tremayne into a freak as punishment for his failure. I prefer this version, as young Tremayne is characterized as a vain man obsessed with appearance, so his choice to advance himself by doing evil ultimately leads to the ruination of the aspect of himself he most values.

 

Vader browbeats Tremayne, then warns him not to fail him again. Suitably humbled, Tremayne begins planning for his next meeting with Corwin Shelvay, something which never happens in recorded Star Wars canon.

 

3 out of 5 Death Stars. The writing isn't anything special, and the story is too short to accomplish anything of merit, but it's always awesome to see High Inquisitor Tremayne and this early attempt at prequel lore is fascinating, even if Vader fighting Obi-Wan, going into the suit, and still not being on the Jedi's radar despite being openly evil makes no sense.

From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker: The Lost City of Tatooine

The Lost City of Tatooine

Author: David West Reynolds

Medium: Short story

Publication date: July 1999 in Archaeology's Dig

Timeline placement: 3 BBY

 

A little known and very rare short story featuring a 16-year-old Luke Skywalker and an ambiguously aged Biggs Darklighter, who according to the illustrations is already sporting the full mustache he'll have three years hence in A New Hope. Luke has finally saved up enough money to buy his own landspeeder, and he and Biggs are joyriding through the Douz outpost on their way to the city of Metameur to gawk at spaceships like a couple of yokels. They decide to take a dangerous shortcut through the Desolation Canyons, though a racist mechanic warns them that that's Sand People territory. They might also run across the fabled lost city of the Ghorfas, a race who lived on Tatooine in ancient times but was exterminated by the Sand People, but all explorers who have gone looking for it have never returned.

 

Entering the canyons, Luke and Biggs are immediately caught in a sandstorm. Luke pilots the landspeeder to safety, and when the storm passes they find that they have run across the fabled lost city of the Ghorfas. Turns out it wasn't that hard to find at all. It was actually super easy, barely an inconvenience.

 

Luke and Biggs examine the ancient tombs and discover that at some point the Sand People started burying their dead here as well. There is a clear transition between the old Ghorfa art and architecture and the more recent Sand People construction, and Luke realizes that the Sand People didn't exterminate the Ghorfas—they are descended from them! 

 

Luke and Biggs study the carvings on the city walls and learn the history of the Ghorfas. When early settlers came to Tatooine, they used their technology to suck up all the water from the Ghorfas' wells, forcing them to abandon their city and become the nomadic Sand People. Of course, we know from playing Knights of the Old Republic that Tatooine was actually transformed into a desert planet by orbital bombardment by the Rakata, and the Sand People became nomadic wanderers thousands of years before humans settled there. It's possible that the Sand People still maintained some reservoirs that were plundered by colonists, or that the lost city of the Ghorfas was the only remaining permanent settlement when its inhabitants were forced to abandon it. The story itself seems to suggest that all of Tusken Raider society as we know it originated from brutal colonization, but since the Rakata colonized Tatooine long before humanity did, that can still be true, from a certain point of view.

 

Also KotOR suggests that the Sand People may somehow be genetically related to humans, something never brought up in any other source dealing with Tusken history, so who knows what to believe.

 

A party of Tuskens comes across Luke's landspeeder but he and Biggs escape in it with ease. Later, Luke tells his aunt and uncle about what he discovered, but Uncle Owen tells him that the past is best left alone. 

A very cool and interesting story, and blessedly short as well. High marks. Also so obscure that Pablo Hidalgo just plumb forgot to include it in The Essential Reader's Companion. Physical copies of the Dig magazine it appeared in seem to be very rare and expensive, but it's been archived by fan sites and is easily found online.

First Victory

Once Upon a Galaxy...

Writer: Uncredited 

Penciler: Martin Asbury
Medium: Comic

Publication date: October 1982 in TV Times Magazine

Timeline placement: 0 BBY 

 

A two-page comic appearing in the UK periodical TV Times to recap the backstory of Star Wars before its British television premiere, this story probably wasn't actually intended to be titled Once Upon a Galaxy, nor is it clear if it was even officially licensed by Lucasfilm or just something the TV Times editors threw together for fun. It's never been reprinted, not even in Dark Horse Comics' Wild Space Omnibuses, which collected many rare UK-exclusive Star Wars comics for the first time, or Marvel's comprehensive Epic Collections, but is that because this is an unlicensed fan work or because it's so obscure no one knew to include it?

 

As far as I can tell, it's also unknown who wrote this comic's text. Martin Asbury did the art, but he's only credited as "illustrations by"; the magazine contains no mention of who wrote the story, which consists mostly of brief descriptions of the film's major characters: Luke Skywalker, Ben Kenobi, R2-D2, C-3PO, Stormtroopers, Darth Vader, Princess Leia, Grand Moff Tarkin, Han Solo, and Chewbacca.

 

The part that makes this comic notable for EU fans, however, is the five panels and seven speech bubbles of narrative that tell a seemingly original story. A squadron of Rebel Alliance X-wings celebrates their "first great victory," the theft of the Death Star plans, while an Alliance spy transmits them to Princess Leia's ship before being blasted by stormtroopers. An Imperial officer reports the news to Darth Vader. "FOOLS!" he thunders. "Prepare my battle cruiser! We must find that ship! Neither it nor Princess Leia Organa can escape!" What will happen next? Watch Star Wars on ITV to find out!

 

Of course, the theft of the Death Star plans is a story that has been told an infamous number of times in the EU. It was done most famously by Kyle Katarn in the Dark Forces video game, but different and often contradictory versions were shown or described in a variety of other stories. Rather than try to work yet another version of this event into an already unnecessarily convoluted timeline, it might be best to simply relegate Once Upon a Galaxy... to the dustbin of Star Wars apocrypha.

 

Buuuuuuuuut, there may be one thing yet worth salvaging. While the journey of the Death Star plans from Imperial custody to Princess Leia's hands has been told far too many times, the "first victory" against the Empire won by "Rebel spaceships striking from a hidden base," as mentioned in the 1977 opening crawl, was never depicted in the EU. That event, established in the Star Wars radio drama as an attack on an Imperial convoy transporting the plans, can be assumed to be the "first great victory" of the Rebellion illustrated in this comic. Here it is!

 

 

Another untold story told at last.

A Long Time Ago....

Alien Exodus

Author: Robert J. Sawyer

Medium: Unfinished novel

Publication date: N/A (canceled; Chapters 1–2 and Outline archived online)

Timeline placement: "An even longer time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...."

There are a lot of annoying things about the Star Wars fandom, but one of the most tiresome for me is the subset of fans who over-literalize the magical fantasy setting that is the Star Wars universe. This takes many forms, but Alien Exodus was commissioned as a response to one in particular: how can humans, a species that evolved on Earth in the Milky Way Galaxy, exist "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away"?

 

How is it possible??? It makes no logical sense! I can suspend my disbelief for the Force, and faster-than-light travel, and giant vacuum-breathing slugs that live on asteroids, and Natalie Portman dying of a broken heart, but humans living in the Star Wars galaxy, speaking English and knowing about Earth things like "an aluminum falcon" and "the letter X"? Preposterous! Clearly the Star Wars language of "Basic" is just being translated into English for the audience's benefit via the magic of cinema, and Star Wars' "humans" aren't really humans, they're aliens portrayed with human likeness so the audience can emotionally connect with them.

 

If we're expected to believe that human beings, indistinguishable from human beings in the real world that evolved here on Earth, exist in the Star Wars galaxy, there must be a story behind how they got there, right? That's the story Alien Exodus was intended to tell, until someone realized that publishing a trilogy of novels solely to placate the most pedantic and literal-minded fans probably wasn't the best idea and canceled the whole thing.

 

(Forget about Star Wars, my question is how did humans get from Earth to Thedas, or Nirn, or Earthsea, or Abeir-Toril, or "Planetos," or Discworld? Why is no one asking these questions??)

 

Throughout the 1990s, the Star Wars publishing license was held by Bantam Spectra. Ace Books decided that they wanted in on that action, however, and entered into negotiations with Lucasfilm for the right to publish a trilogy revealing the origins of the major races and cultures of the Star Wars galaxy—a "Silmarillion of Star Wars," if you will. Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer was brought in the handle the project, and turned in the first two chapters of the first novel and a 10,000-word outline before negotiations failed. 

 

Lucasfilm decided that Ace Books would proceed with the trilogy but would not be allowed to use any existing Star Wars elements; instead, it would be a new property set in an original universe. Sawyer had only taken the job because he wanted to write for Star Wars, so he backed out of the project despite not being paid anything for the work he had already done. The Alien Exodus trilogy eventually became the Alien Chronicles trilogy, written by Deborah Chester.

 

Sawyer's sample chapters aren't the worst thing I've ever read, but, while his outline did intrigue me enough to want to read the rest of the book if it existed, the story doesn't justify the expense: demystifying the entire Star Wars setting by establishing a definitive connection between its fantastical universe and the real world.

 

In Sawyer's story, George Lucas's first film, 1971's THX 1138, takes place in the far future of Lucas's second film, 1973's American Graffiti. Dale Hender, a descendant of Richard Dreyfuss's American Graffiti character Curt Henderson, is part of an underground resistance movement fighting against the dystopian society of THX 1138. Along with "dashing and adventurous" Paxton Solo (gee I wonder if he's related to anyone we know), Hender is one of 5,000 people who escape Earth aboard a giant spaceship built for harvesting comets. Bound for the Alpha Centauri star system, they encounter a wormhole that transports them across the universe as well as billions of years back in time. "Antonia makes the announcement to the crew: it is now a long time ago, and they are in a galaxy far, far away..." Yay she said the thing.

 

The humans set down on a lush paradise world, but are soon beset by an arriving fleet of Rodian and Gamorrean slavers. Paxton Solo's girlfriend, Antonia Corelli, is killed, and the humans bury her on the planet, naming it Corellia in her honor. But soon another species arrives, drawn by the collapsing wormhole: giant insectoid conquerors called Varlians. Seeing they are technologically outmatched, the Rodians and Gamorreans gift the human slaves to the Varlians and pledge themselves to thralldom.

 

The humans are taken to the planet Forhilnor, where the Varlians plan to send all the peoples they enslave in their galactic conquest.

 

Five generations later, Forhilnor is now home to nine slave races: humans, Bith, Ithorians, Kubaz, Ortolans, Kitonaks, Twi'leks, Mon Calamari, and Sullustans. Each race has a representative on a secret slave council that meets surreptitiously to discuss their conditions and possible plans of escape, and the de facto leader of all the slaves is Dale's descendant, the hero of this book: Cosmo Hender.

 

 

Cosmo is sent to the palace of the Varlian Governor Kaxa, where the governor's daughter develops a fondness for him and teaches him to read. In the palace library, Cosmo finds a book called The Human Exodus, a Varlian translation of the chronicle of humanity's history and arrival in this galaxy. Inspired by the heroism of his ancestor, Cosmo concocts a plot to win the freedom of all the slaves.

 

Cosmo discovers that the governor has been using a giant crystal to leech the collective life energy of the slaves and use it to move the entire Forhilnor star system through space to launch a surprise attack on the Varlian homeworld and seize control of their empire. This is done through some mysterious power, some "Force," that seems to be shared and generated by all living beings. Cosmo discovers that he himself can tap into this power, unconsciously using it to cause himself to levitate, leading to the other slaves bestowing him with the nickname of "Skywalker." Boo! Booooo!

 

The slaves poison the Varlians' water supply, causing a deformity among larval Varlians that prevents them from spinning a cocoon and transitioning into adult insectoid form. As a result, all young natives of the planet Varl will remain giant slugs with greedy, temperamental personalities and a fetish for gold bikinis.

 

Cosmo then tricks the governor into letting his people go by fabricating the return of a legendary Varlian plague spread by the slaves. Kaxa allows the slaves to leave, but upon discovering their deception, his heart is hardened, and he sends his forces to recapture them. But the slaves have stolen the Force crystal, and Cosmo uses it to move the red stars blocking their escape, then releases them on the pursuing Gamorrean starships, destroying them. This act ages him decades and Cosmo dies an old man before ever reaching his people's promised land.

 

The surviving slaves travel to Corellia, where Cosmo's wife and their infant son, Freedom Hender, will pass down the legend of "the Skywalker" for generations to come...

 

What the hell would the other two books in this trilogy have been about? Who knows, but I think it's fairly obvious why Lucasfilm decided not to go with this pitch: because they didn't want Luke Skywalker to be descended from this dork, that's why.

 

 

Despite its intriguing premise, I'm glad that this story never saw the light of day in Expanded Universe canon. Somebody made the right call by realizing it worked better as its own original story, so the best thing I can say for Alien Exodus is that it made me a lot more interested in reading Deborah Chester's books instead of these ones that don't exist.

 

2 out of 5 Death Stars.

KOTOR

Knights of the Old Republic

Developer: BioWare

Medium: Video game

Release date: July 2003

Timeline placement: 3,956 BBY

 

"Savior, conqueror, hero, villain. You are all things, Revan... and yet you are nothing. In the end you belong to neither the light nor the darkness. You will forever stand alone."

 

It's December 19, 2015. I'm wearing a Star Trek shirt and standing in line for Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. I expect it to be a competent, well-made movie, but I don't expect to love it; it feels like it's been a long time since I was excited for Star Wars. Father Merrin speaks the first line of the film: "This will begin to make things right." I laugh to myself.

 

I had loved Star Wars since I was nine years old, but as I'd grown older I'd grown more critical, and Star Wars had grown worse. George Lucas had said the 1997 Special Editions represented his "original vision" for the classic trilogy, but he continued to make increasingly obtrusive changes for the 2004 DVDs and 2011 Blu-rays, as well as preventing any further releases of the unaltered films. 2006 saw the release of the first book in Drew Karpyshyn's Darth Bane trilogy, which ran roughshod over Darko Macan's Jedi vs. Sith, in my opinion the best Star Wars comic in the EU. That same year also saw the beginning of Legacy of the Force, a terrible series that gutted the accomplishments of its predecessor, The New Jedi Order. 

 

In 2008, The Clone Wars debuted on Cartoon Network, kickstarting the biggest and longest continuity clusterfuck in Star Wars history as Dave Filoni tapdanced all over the meticulous timeline of the 2002–2005 Clone Wars multimedia project. The Force Unleashed came out the same year, needlessly rewriting the early history of the Rebellion every time you failed a QTE. Meanwhile, Republic Commando author Karen Traviss was busy trampling her own corner of continuity; Abel G. Peña's article in Star Wars Insider #80, "The History of the Mandalorians," had done the seemingly impossible task of reconciling decades of contradictory Mandalorian lore, only for Traviss to pull it all back apart again. The coup de grâce, or sai cha if you will, came in 2011, when BioWare's MMO The Old Republic and its assorted tie-in media drove the final nail into the coffin of Knights of the Old Republic III, discarding the legacy of two of the best RPGs ever made in favor of a new story nobody asked for.

 

By the time George sold Star Wars to Disney, my favorite parts of the franchise had been eroding for more than five years. I hadn't read a new EU novel since Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor; Star Wars was essentially dead to me. Suicide by Star Wars Apocrypha was just my way of processing the loss.

 

It still annoys me to no end that this DeviantArt drawing remains the best image of the KotOR party all together.

 

I must have been sixteen the first time I played Knights of the Old Republic, or maybe seventeen, I can't remember. I had played a few Pokémon games but I was far from a gamer. My brother, on the other hand, had an Xbox, a GameCube, and half a dozen Star Wars games. For some reason I decided to start playing them.

 

My high school years were the height of my EU fandom, and what made KotOR so special, beyond the story and characters and music and writing, was how it put me into that universe that I had invested so much of my adolescent time and emotion in. I could explore planets and talk to aliens I'd read about. I could fly a starship and build a lightsaber and use the Force. I could exist in the Star Wars galaxy and act like myself, or at least a version of myself that I could imagine being.

I played it over and over and over again, until I'd exhausted every dialogue option, every quest path, every character variation. After a while I wasn't in high school anymore, and I didn't care about Star Wars quite so much. From time to time I'd start another KotOR run, but I'd never make it off Taris before abandoning it again. This compounded over multiple attempts, my familiarity with the tiresome opening planet becoming a wall, a psychological block on my progression. I'd played the game so many times already, and I just didn't have the time or stamina to power through it the way I once had. Best to stop trying.

 

I sat in the theater and watched the lights dim. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.... appeared on the screen, for the first time without being preceded by the 20th Fox Fanfare. Its absence felt like visiting a grave. But then something peculiar happened. The text faded way, and when the Star Wars logo filled the screen and the first chord of John Williams's main Star Wars theme blasted throughout the room, I felt it in my chest, in my heart, snagged behind my breastbone as if with a fishhook, and I couldn't help but grin like an idiot.

 

It turned out that my original prediction was right: I liked the movie, but I didn't love it. It was a competent film, or seemed so at the time, but at the end of the day, it just felt like watching Star Wars again.

 

Playing Knights of the Old Republic had felt like watching Star Wars for the first time. See the difference?

 

Star Wars had started life as a pastiche of Flash Gordon, The Hidden Fortress, Joseph Campbell, Isaac Asimov, old adventure serials, World War II iconography, Westerns, contemporary political commentary, and George Lucas's abiding love of cars. Someone put all of those things into a machine, pushed a button, and created something new.

 

KotOR was a pastiche of Star Wars, a remix of scenes, ideas, images, themes, and archetypes given the voice and stylings of BioWare, at the time the best RPG studio in the business. Something not entirely new, but done in a new way. Something that felt like Star Wars, but also like itself.

 

The Force Awakens was less pastiche, more Gus Van Sant's Psycho. But it still felt like Star Wars; it had been a long time since anything had. There were plenty of criticisms to be made, and I would eventually make many of them; for example, the scene where Finn witnesses the destruction of a planet light-years away in the sky of the planet he’s on and then nonsensically runs around screaming “The Republic! It’s the Republic!” (the equivalent of Washington, D.C., being bombed and someone declaring “They just blew up the United States!”) is possibly the dumbest and worst scene in any Star Wars movie.

But all this would come later. For now, I sat in the theater and allowed myself to enjoy Star Wars uncritically one last time. I was twenty-eight years old and watching a movie people had dreamed of since before I was born.

I was seventeen and telling Bastila her face was all scrunched up like a kinrath pup. 

I was nine and staring with envious eyes at my classmate Robbie’s Micro Machines Darth Vader playset, and all the world yet new.

Luke Skywalker has vanished—and again that tugging in my chest, that fishhook buried in my heart.

After twenty years, Star Wars still had me. I suppose it always will.

The next time I booted up Knights of the Old Republic, I made it off Taris.