Celebration VI Coverage: Del Rey 2013 and Beyond

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It’s Celebration VI Day Two, and we’re kicking things off with the hotly anticipated Del Ray panel looking into what’s new from the Expanded Universe. Some interesting tidbits, but a couple of HUGE announcements were dropped. To the jump, major announcements are in bold.

  • On the panel: Pablo Hidalgo, Aaron Allston, James Luceno, Drew Karpyshyn, Jen Heddle, Shelly Shapiro, Troy Denning, and Timothy Zahn
  • Star Wars Reads day will occur on October 6. This is a nation-wide event with all Star Wars IP licensed publishers with activities taking place in bookstores and libraries all over the country.
  • Announced is Fan Corps, an online “street team” to crowdsource Expanded Universe publicity.
  • X-Wing: Mercy Kill JUST hit the New York Times bestseller list. Loud cheers from the audience.
  • Essential Reader’s Companion will go on sale on October 2, the most incredible undertaking Erich Schoenweiss has embarked on. All sorts of great art that can be found within it.
  • The Old Republic: Annihilation by Drew Karpyshyn goes on sale November 13, 2012. This is described as an “action-packed spy novel.”
  • Karpyshyn: As Han Solo showed, you don’t have to have overt Force powers to be awesome.
  • Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn will go on sale December 26. Shelly Shapiro describes it as Zahn’s best novel yet, “which is saying something.”
  • Shapiro: We are going to start a digital initiative to produce more short stories. The first one is due out in December, a Scoundrels prequel by Timothy Zahn. The title is “Winner Lose All.” No lie, the title was approved IN the room by Shelly Shapiro writing the title down for Jen Heddle to review. The story features a sabaac tournament. And a murder. Available in ebook format only.
  • Some of the new short stories won’t be explicitly tied to existing books.
  • The Last Jedi by Michael Reaves and Maya Kaathryn Bonhoff will go on sale in Spring 2013.
  • Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void by new EU author Tim Lebbon will be available in Spring 2013. Ties into the Dawn of the Jedi comics, but you don’t need to read them to understand the book.
  • Crucible by Troy Denning has been pushed back to Summer 2013. It’s a “big adventure” that takes place after Fate of the Jedi, but Shapiro says that you won’t need to read those books to understand this one. Troy: “It starts in a cantina. And Han shoots first.” Luke, Han, and Leia will be the central characters.
  • A Leia book set between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back is FINALLY coming. This was just approved and will be part of a trilogy of classic-era novels. Another book in this series will center around Luke. The tentative working title for this series is “Rebels.”
  • The big announcement: Sword of the Jedi. The Jaina novel is finally going to happen. This will be a trilogy written by Christie Golden.
  • Allston: Mercy Kill required some acrobatics. Knew that the book would have a lot of readers that haven’t read an EU novel in a while. Needed a lot of work and thinking in order to make everything function correctly.
  • From here we’ve got fan questions …
  • Not sure what the digital short stories will be like. Will they be like the old Star Wars Adventure Journal? It could be, but nothing is fully settled and nothing is off the table. All of the short fiction from the old StarWars.com has been turned over for the project.
  • Fan inspiration for books? For Allston, individuals have impacted his work. The characterization of Bhindi was largely inspired by a fan’s mannerism.
  • A Jaina cosplayer thanked the panel profusely for the announced Jaina trilogy.
  • Inspiration for Abeloth was sort of the fascination with Dark-side powers incarnated.
  • Will there be new Young Jedi Knight types of books? That’s in the hands of their publishing partner Scholastic.
  • Allston: I’m hoping to bend Shelly Shapiro’s ear soon or at Dragon*Con for more X-Wing novels. At the moment there’s no contract, but let Del Rey know you want more.
  • Jen Heddle: Leland Chee is a huge part of the Expanded Universe. Allston: Thank GOD for Leland Chee.
  • Was the Mortis trilogy last-minute? Not really. Halfway through the series, Leland Chee approached the FotJ creative staff to make a connection between an upcoming Clone Wars arc and the Expanded Universe novels.
  • Will the Big Three  be killed off any time soon? No. There are no plans. Not at this time. Haven’t even talked about it. SO PLEASE STOP ASKING. This would have to be approved by Lucas. Staff has no desire.
  • Sword of the Jedi currently doesn’t have a specific timeframe, but it likely won’t be too long after Fate of the Jedi.
  • You should be on the lookout for more diversity in characters in the Expanded Universe, but it can’t be shoehorned into existing characters. It has to fit the character and the story.
  • Fan: Can you fix the continuity issue on Even Piell? Audience: Groooaaaan.
  • Pablo: I don’t want to see a book that only exists to fix a continuity problem. Allston: Retcon – The Series!
  • Will Republic Commando ever be finished? Shapiro’s response: Maybe.
  • New plans for Zahn? Something will happen at some point, but nothing immediate, it’s all a scheduling issue.
  • The Paul S. Kemp duology is still shrouded in secret.
  • Leland Chee’s role is not being the continuity cop. He helps facilitate stories and get them to fit into the universe. One service he does provide is pointing out redundancy in characters, a valuable resource as Allston points out.

2 thoughts on “Celebration VI Coverage: Del Rey 2013 and Beyond”

  1. My reaction is…a bit confused. Unlike many of my online Star Wars-reading friends, my reaction to Golden’s Fate of the Jedi books is extremely bored, not furious. That being said, a few things do stick out that made me quite upset when reading:

    1) The death of KP – similar to Nelani, it was meant to be painful and tragic, but came across as contrived and lazy drama. And no one followed up on it, so we were left with a profound sense of injustice, the opposite of what the Jedi should stand for.

    2) The starfighter and capital ship errors – seriously, don’t all authors get copies of all the essential guides? If you’re constructing a battle in your story, I’d think you’d want to check those. Not as important a concern, I know, but one that personally is more important to me.

    3) Having characters be primarily reactive and flat. Characters don’t really have plans or act, they react according to their preset circumstances and generic emotional stock responses.

    4) Perhaps one of the most irritating things to me is that Golden, as the replacement for Traviss (despite being a bit inferior in craftsmanship, though perhaps not in professionalism), seems to share her predecessor’s penchant for only reading summaries, rather than doing her research and reading the relevant EU material. When I asked her what her favorite EU book was, she replied “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” because it helped bridge the gap between A New Hope and Empire Strikes Back.

    Which implies to me that she hasn’t actually read any of the Bantam Star Wars books (let alone the admittedly daunting NJO, where most of Jaina’s character development occurs). Additionally, it implies that she hasn’t read an EU book for over 30 years.

    That one in particular really, really bugs me, since relying on summaries led to the rather bizzare characterizations for Jaina in Traviss’s books.

    Despite these, I am still actually excited for this book. I think the cover looks quite cool – mostly the colors – and think the concept (as everyone notes) is exactly what we needed – Jaina doing something on her own (or with Jag) that isn’t killing her brother.

    So, yes, confused.

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