Category Archives: Star Wars

Newest ‘Mercy Kill’ Mini-Excerpt Features Myri Antilles

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It’s another mini excerpt from Mercy Kill! This one features another look at the youngest of the Antilles-spawn, Myri:

“Myri, I thought you were making your living gambling. Nice and safe on the Errant Venture. Making a fortune, from what I heard.”

She nodded, her attention on her rifle.

“So? Why this?”

She smiled. “You must be so proud.”

“What? Of whom?”

“That’s what they tell me. Mostly about Daddy. ‘Wedge Antilles’s daughter? You must be so proud.’ And I am. Some people know about Mom’s career. ‘You must be so proud.’ And I am. Some people know about my sister’s record in the last war. ‘You must be so proud.’ Yes, yes, I am. But maybe it’s time for someone to be proud of what I do. Maybe even me.”

I suspect I’m going to like Myri a great deal. Mercy Kill is due out on August 7th. You should go buy it. Or preorder it.

Future of Star Wars at SDCC: What Do You Want To See?

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San Diego Comic Con is next week and the future of the Star Wars Expanded Universe hangs in the balance! Well. Not really. But drama is fun. Sometimes.

Over on Twitter, we asked you to tell us what you’re hoping or expect to have announced to continue the Post-Return of the Jedi Expanded Universe. If you have a suggestion (serious or snarky, we’re not picky), just reply to the tweet below and we’ll add you to this post!

Your suggestions below the jump!

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Latest Batch of ‘EG to Warfare’ Endnotes Looks at Spacey Things

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Another week, another set of endnotes from Essential Guide to Warfare author Jason Fry. This week, he takes a look at a touchy subject for a lot of fans: the Dark Empire comics.

The Dark Empire: I love the Dark Empire series, which I’ve long defended as a big-hearted continuation of the Skywalker clan’s struggles with family and the Force. But Dark Empire has always been a pain in the butt continuity-wise, hard to integrate with the story other sources tell about the Empire’s fragmentation and decline. I did my best here to cement it more believably in the chronology, letting the reader witness Imperial task forces disappearing into the Deep Core before Thrawn’s campaign gives New Republic Intelligence more clear and present dangers to worry about.

Fry also takes issue with things occasionally getting too “spacey.”

I groan when things are made “spacey” for no good reason – whether it’s space fantasy or some other genre, imaginary worlds work best when they depart from our own world in as few fundamental ways as possible. This makes it easy for us to imagine stepping into the protagonist’s shoes, which causes us to invest in the character and care what happens to him or her. When it comes to characters’ hopes and dreams and daily lives, you want to keep things familiar.

For this reason, I won’t willingly entertain retcons that speed up or slow down local calendars – when Luke looks at Uncle Owen and objects that “it’s a whole ‘nother year,” we understand his despair because we know or can imagine or can remember what a year feels like when you’re a teenager. If a year on Tatooine is only 100 days, the scene doesn’t work — and if you’ve made a key scene in A New Hope not work, you’ve accomplished the opposite of what a Star Wars author ought to be doing. (The EU says a Tatooine year is 304 days, which I dislike but is at least in the right ballpark.)

And I do mean days – don’t talk to me about “planetary rotations.” STOP IT. STOP IT RIGHT NOW. WHY DOES EVERYTHING HAVE TO BE SPACEY?

For more, and there’s a lot more in this batch, head over to Jason Fry’s Tumblr.

The Official Star Wars Blog Returns

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It went dark for a while, but the official Star Wars blog is back and under new management. Which is still kind of a bummer since we’re still pretty fond of Bonnie Burton. That said, the new blog has a solid lineup featuring names like Stephen Sansweet and Pablo Hidalgo.

It’s been just about two months since we put this blog on hiatus to update its design and develop a new approach to content. It took a bit longer than we had hoped, but we’re glad to say that starting today, we’re back… with a few exciting changes.

We want the Star Wars Blog to be as exceptional as the fan community that it’s written for, and that requires both ongoing commitment and a specific vision.

The truth is that this blog – much as we love it – often got less attention than it deserved, and became a place to put stories that don’t fit somewhere else on StarWars.com. Sure, we can give you news and announcements, but so can all of the community sites we now feature on the site. We can talk about collectibles and books, and point to stories from around the web, and we plan to keep doing all of that.

There area lready a few interesting posts up, so head on over to the revamped blog and have a look.

Trope Tuesday: Manchurian Agent

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Tycho Celchu: Manchurian Agent or Not?

It’s Tuesday! For some of us, it’s the day before a national holiday. But I’m not letting that serve as an excuse to slack off on my favorite feature on the blog, Trope Tuesday. This week, we’re looking at a trope called the Manchurian Agent.

Memory Gambit and Neuro Vault meet Deep Cover Agent. A person is Brainwashed so that, on a certain trigger (either a situation, or else a phrase only someone in the know would ever say), they will go from their normal self to The Mole; they will most often remember nothing afterward.

See also Brainwashed, Berserk Button, Morality Dial, Tomato in the Mirror, Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story and Lotus-Eater Machine. Compare Memory Gambit, which is when you do this to yourself. May require Deprogramming to cure.

Since we’ve been focusing a lot of the blog activities over the last month on the X-Wing series, it’s only appropriate we chose another trope that fits those books well. One of the central subplots of the first four Rogue Squadron books was the mystery surrounding Tycho Celchu. Throughout, there was the suspicion that he was the Manchurian Agent, just waiting for the signal to turn on his squadron mates.

A bit of a subversion there, but this trope was played a bit more straight in the Wraith Squadron books. The trigger phase “Wedge Antilles hops on one transparisteel leg” was used to activate one such sleeper agent in Solo Command, setting off a series of unfortunate events that would wreak havoc on the Wraiths and the New Republic military.

Random House Wants To Record Your Fan Fiction

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Seriously.

Attendees at San Diego Comic Con will have the opportunity to record a five-minute sample of their fan fiction for Random House to listen to. These pieces will then be judged and one lucky winner and a few runner-ups will be able to have their piece professionally recorded, mixed, and hosted at the official Random House Audio site.

Still with me? I never thought I would see the day a publisher reached out for fan fiction of any variety, but apparently this is a thing that actually exists.

One story will be selected by RH Audio producers to be recorded professionally and streamed online!

At this year’s Comic-Con International in San Diego, CA, Random House Audio will be recreating an audiobook studio right on the convention floor–inviting authors of fan fiction to record a sample of their work for a chance to have their story recorded and released as a digital audiobook.

Stories from the following fandoms are eligible for the contest:

  • Star Wars®
  • The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini
  • Percy Jackson and the Olympians by Rick Riordan
  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  • Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

Aspiring authors (who must be legal residents of the U.S. and 18 years or older) can sign up for a time slot to record their five-minute sample during the convention, July 12-15 at the San Diego Convention Center. Random House Audio producers will listen to the entries (no mashups, please) and select one to be professionally recorded and mixed by Random House Audio for streaming at www.randomhouseaudio.com. The grand prize winner and five runner-ups will have clips from their stories featured on the Random House Audio weekly podcast.

I imagine a lot of people will be disappointed they won’t have the opportunity to take part in this, which is understandable. It’s not like it’s exceptionally difficult to record a five minute excerpt on your own and digitally submit it, so limiting this strictly to attendees of San Diego Comic Con is a little odd.

In any case, if you’re going to be at SDCC, this might be something you want to check out.

(Via)

FandomFest Recap

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Me with Tim Zahn and my awesome Tosche-Station.net shirt.


So, this happened.

FandomFest Louisville was a blast. My besties and I arrived for events Saturday and had a great time. Tickets were really reasonable–$25 for the day, though if you wanted autographs from some of the guests, they were $30 apiece. Among the geekdom celebrities available for (paid) autographs there were John Rhys-Davies, Sean Astin, James Marsters, Nick Brendon, Peter Davison, Gareth David-Lloyd, and Luke Perry. (These were all the ones I saw.) Other celebrities included cast members from the Walking Dead and Boondock Saints, Colin Ferguson from Eureka, and of course, the headliner, Bruce Campbell. He was only going to be available for two hours Saturday evening, due to conflicts with his shooting schedule for Burn Notice, and tickets went amazingly fast.

Read more about FandomFest after the jump.
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In their tongue, Boba Fett is Dovahkiin, Dragonborn!

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When I was in college, I lived with one of my best friends for a year. We lived in the on-campus apartments so we had quite a bit more freedom than anybody in the dorms did. I had known that my friend was in the Imperial 501 and that he had several other costumes that he’d either purchased or made. I’d even watched the process of him building his own set of Mjolnir armor from Halo, and then proceed to paint it blue and drill a hole in one foot to make it Caboose from the popular webseries Red vs Blue. He helped me put together a few things of my own as time went by, the only one that I’ve been terribly proud of was my ODST helmet. My brother has the Uruk-Hai orc helmet that he built. What I’m trying to say is that I’m familiar with the process of building a costume out of cardstock, fiberglass, resin and Bondo.

So, I can understand all of what I’m about to show you and, given several months to work

on it, I might be able to emulate this. But probably not. And certainly not like this.

What you’re looking at is one artist’s work on making a piece for charity.  Harrison Krix built this helmet for an auction that will take place at Celebration VI that will benefit Make-a-Wish.  40 artists were contacted to make their own variations on Fett and Clone Trooper helmets for this purpose.  If you’re going to be at Celebration, then you really need to take pictures of these helmets.

This piece was inspired by the game Skyrim and its protagonist, the Dragonborn or Dovahkiin.

For those of you interested in seeing the process of building this piece of art, check out the artist’s site.

Future of Star Wars Books at San Diego Comic Con

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Details of Del Rey’s Future of Star Wars Books panel at San Diego Comic Con were released today. Of note was the one author explicitly said to be in attendance:

3:00-4:00 The Future of Star Wars Publishing: Dark Horse & Del Rey. Find out what’s coming up in the Expanded Universe of Star Wars publishing. Editors Randy Stradley and Dave Marshallfrom Dark Horse Comics discuss what’s next for Agent of the Empire, Dawn of the Jedi, Lost Tribe of the Sith, and Darth Maul, as well as reveal a new secret title that’s on the horizon. From Del Rey Books editors Frank Parisi and Erich Schoeneweiss, along with author Troy Denning (Apocalypse), look at new novels coming later this year from fan-favorite authors Timothy Zahn and Aaron Allston, as well as give a peek into 2013. Also on the panel is Jennifer Heddle, senior editor at LucasBooks. Moderated by author Pablo Hidalgo (Star Wars: The Essential Reader’s Companion). Room 7AB

What exactly does this mean? Well nothing concrete. Could signal that Troy Denning has a new contract and might be the person tasked with continuing the major post-RotJ storyline. It wouldn’t be much of a surprise and makes a certain amount of sense given the history between the two parties. Also keep in mind that Christie Golden was recently confirmed to be in attendance at SDCC.

Multiple people with Del Rey have said that for the foreseeable future, the megaseries will be shelved in favor of shorter formats. Whoever is writing the next series, expect it to be no longer than a trilogy.

Eight New Guests Announced for Celebration VI

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The Celebration VI staff announced eight new attendees today:

Roger Christian – Set Decoration: A New Hope
Jesse Jensen – Saesee Tiin in Attack of the Clones
Zac Jensen – Kit Fisto in Attack of the Clones
Tom Kane – Jedi Master Yoda in The Clone Wars
Katie Purvis – “Maternal Ewok” in Return of the Jedi
Mike Quinn – Nien Nunb in Return of the Jedi
Felix Silla – Ewok stunt performer in Return of the Jedi
Robert Watts – Producer for Star Wars and Indiana Jones

For a complete listing of confirmed guests, head over to the official site.