I’m going to pitch an idea here that goes against my fundamental theory of Star Wars.  In my head, Star Wars is about the asymmetric struggle between two powers for control of the galaxy and good and evil and all that jazz.  Now, I may tend to come down on the side of what most people might consider ‘evil’ most of the time, but I will someday tell you why Palpatine may have been evil and how it might have been a good thing for the galaxy.  Suffice to say that evil sucks but it is efficient.

But like I said, my favorite SWEU stories are reflections of the movies and how they worked.  The original Thrawn trilogy is still my favorite EU narrative ever, and it perfectly mirrors the Original Trilogy, one relatively small group of people fighting for what they believe is right against a larger, more powerful group.  It just so happens that the small group is Thrawn’s fleet and the larger group is the Republic.

But that doesn’t mean that these kinds of stories always work, I have some serious problems with stories like Jedi Academy, where it’s still there, but it’s a rehash.  And some books that are really different from the formula I’ve enjoyed, like Allegiance or Choices of One.  So, obviously I’m willing to make some exceptions for good books.  Another one that I’m sure will win that exception is Scoundrels.  I can rest assured it’s going to be good because it’s Timothy Zahn and he’s never done anything to upset me in the EU.

But Scoundrels got me thinking about this whole idea.  It’s a particular kind of story, isn’t it?  It’s the heist story.  The most common thing it’s being compared to is Ocean’s Eleven but at the same time it’s really similar to The Italian Job or Gone in Sixty Seconds.  It’s a genre.  What does this kind of book mean for the continuing narrative of the EU?

Before I get started, or at least too far into it, I want to go ahead and say that I am aware of some books in the EU that are already in this vein, but they never made the impact that this is likely too.  The Med-Star series is similar to what I’m about to propose.

I think Scoundrels breaks the mold.  And I don’t just mean it’s a one-off kind of story, I mean it may break the mold of the formulaic Star Wars narrative.  It’s not a book about a giant struggle between empires or the exploits of one squadron against a warlord.  Don’t get me wrong, there’s good stuff in that, but it can also lead to some serious fatigue on the readers.  At the end of the day, the only thing that separates Children of the Jedi from Darksaber is Callista, of all things.  Yeah, I am really dumbing that down, but you know what I mean, the Republic is facing a threat from a super-weapon and it’s up to Luke, Han, Leia and Chewie to stop it!

But Scoundrels gives us established characters doing something that’s not fighting the big bad, it may end up that way in the end but the story itself is about coordinating something between a group of highly specialized individuals to meet one goal, steal the thing.  That’s kind of an angle we’ve seen before, but not quite like this.

It makes me wonder what the possibilities are for expanding beyond the regular constraints.  Sixteen years ago, Michael Stackpole started a series about a small group of fighter pilots fighting the Empire and taking Coruscant, but he did it by basing it around a side character.  Wedge is somebody we hardly ever hear speak, but he’s in the films and we recognize him.  We even build off of that and get Tycho Celchu, a character we only see in the films as an A-Wing in the battle of Endor, but he’s been fleshed out.  Off of that spun out the first of the books that didn’t have a film character as its protagonist, I, Jedi.  Corran was a wholly original character and he did things that we hadn’t seen up to that point in the books, it was almost a detective mystery novel.

In my mind, Scoundrels opens up the EU to more of that.  Not just taking side characters and giving them their own stories, but doing it with whole new kinds of stories for the EU.  Let’s take a character from the EU that has had just about as much page-time as Wedge had screen-time.  Judder Page, we know him as a commando and a fairly hard guy to spot in a room because he seems so ordinary.

Why have we not seen more of Page?  I would say because it’s hard to do that kind of story without it centering on him.  We know he commands his own commando unit, but he’s perfect for any kind of insertion mission, isn’t he?  He knows how to gather information and make things happen and he’s hard to recognize.  He’s also not widely known among their opponents.  Why isn’t Page the SWEU equivalent of James Bond?

I don’t mean that gadgets and the like, but I mean why isn’t Page the guy that slips into the facilities and do the sabotage like at the start of Golden Eye?  It would be pretty simple to use that either during the Rebellion era or the New Republic era.

That’s one example.  If that doesn’t strike your fancy, what’s another genre that you like to read?  Death Troopers gives us horror, but there’s plenty out there to be looked at, more of the P.I. type story, the Rainbow Six type counter-terrorism story, the political intrigue of Dune or maybe even something like a high fantasy story set on a forgotten colony world that ends with the reintroduction of the character into the fold instead of being discovered by the likes of Luke.

On the note of the least plausible last entry there, consider this, tell the story of the witches of Dathomir from the reverse perspective.  What if they find the Republic instead of the other way around?  I understand I’m leaving a lot unspoken there, but it would also be part of the writing process to figure out how to make that work anyway.  I’m not endorsing it, I’m just saying it’s a possibility.

In conclusion, I suppose what I’m getting at is that Scoundrels might represent an opportunity, if Del Rey will take it, to add more depth to the story.  The chance to really show us what life is like in this setting if the protagonist isn’t a hero of the Rebellion or a Jedi Knight.  I feel like there’s a great opportunity in this, and I’d hate to see it go to waste.

If any of you readers are interested in this and have some ideas of what kind of story or genre you’d like to see come out of this, please leave it in the comments.  I’m pretty sure my wife would love a Star Wars romance novel, myself.