#STAR WARS AFTERMATH BOOK SERIES MOVIE#
#STAR WARS AFTERMATH BOOK SERIES SERIES#

There are hints here and there, like the potential foreshadowing in an allusion to Luke Skywalker - whose susceptibility to the Dark Side was explored in some of the EU’s most memorable work - having an “untouchable soul, at least for now,” or a chapter-long interlude about the black-market sale of Anakin Skywalker’s lightsaber, which appears to play a prominent role in the film.

Readers who pick up Aftermath hoping for more than a teaser trailer’s worth of insight into The Force Awakens will probably be disappointed.

#STAR WARS AFTERMATH BOOK SERIES MOVIE#

As in the upcoming movie, the emphasis is on new characters, although the non-Skywalker Alliance leadership shows up and Han and Chewie make a cameo only slightly longer than their dynamite drop-in from movie teaser no. The Rebel Alliance is now the New Republic, wrestling with its responsibility to rule without imposing order in an Empire-esque way.

#STAR WARS AFTERMATH BOOK SERIES SERIES#

Through its main conflict on a backwater world and a series of slightly disjointed vignettes, it lays the groundwork for the fractured galaxy we’ll see in the film, some 30 Star Wars-years later: The Empire is broken but still strong, and its surviving, squabbling bigwigs are struggling to present a united front instead of splitting into factions. At times, Aftermath feels more like the toll booth before the bridge, the expository price fans have to pay to unlock the larger story. “The way I always explain to people is we’re a bridge between Return of the Jedi and Force Awakens, but it’s not the whole bridge,” says Chuck Wendig, the author of Aftermath and its two upcoming sequels, who landed a licensed Star Wars trilogy after he asked the Internet for a hook-up a year ago today. It’s also the centerpiece of a painstakingly planned sequence of printed releases known as the “ Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens, ” a tagline emblazoned on Aftermath’s book jacket. But it is the first new-canonical incursion into the gulf between Jedi and The Force Awakens, as opposed to the relatively constrained space between the earlier films. But the book also arrives amid a meta-aftermath: the Alderaan-like extinction of the old Expanded Universe, which started as a supplement to the movies and soon outstripped them in scope, sprouting into a story-surrounding-the-story that spanned thousands of years and unfolded via hundreds of books, comics, and video games from 1976 until 2014, when Disney decided to clear the decks for future films by declaring all that came before non-canon.Īftermath, whose release coincides with “ Force Friday” - essentially Action-Figure Friday, a massive unveiling of merch - isn’t the first entry in the new timeline overseen by the Lucasfilm Story Group. The in-universe aftermath is the power struggle that succeeds the destruction of the Second Death Star and the loss of the Empire’s Sith-heavy C-Suite at the end of Return of the Jedi. It’s an apt title for a story at the intersection of two climactic events concerning the galaxy far, far away. We’ve seen it with DC’s summer reboot, which followed a 2011 reimagining named The New 52, and Marvel’s recent Secret Wars, which grabbed the baton from 2012’s Marvel NOW! And we’re also seeing it with Star Wars, whose latest Big Bang starts not on December 18, when The Force Awakens hits theaters, but today, when a novel called Aftermath hits shelves.

But the demand for more doesn’t diminish, so eventually - and seemingly more and more frequently, as tentpole franchises become billion-dollar businesses and the potential payoffs from fresh starts grow - the cycle begins again at a less complex entry point. An audience’s insatiable demand for more content leads to a lattice of loosely connected works, which eventually collapses beneath the weight of its unwieldiness and inaccessibility. Any fictional storyscape expansive enough to be described as a universe - Star Trek, DC, Marvel, Star Wars 2 - lurches forward in fits and starts. 1 But it perfectly describes the behavior of the ones we create. This theory, known as the Big Bounce, doesn’t do a great job of explaining the behavior of the universe we inhabit. It was only the latest in a series of expansions and contractions: Big Bangs caused by the incredible pressure of stuff crammed together and Big Crunches caused by the gravitational pull of stuff spread apart. According to one of science’s more speculative origin stories, the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning of everything.

Star wars aftermath book series