Digital Spy run with a very old story which ‘reveals’ that The Empire Strikes Back wasn’t the first story considered as a sequel to A New Hope. There was another…
But before Empire, a very different second Star Wars movie was planned. Allows us to introduce you to Splinter of the Mind’s Eye.
Splinter was an exercise in caution on Lucas’s part. It was written by Alan Dean Foster, the author who was brought in to work on the novelisation of the first film, and was designed to be deliberately simple in its setting and scope. If A New Hope was a flop, it could be used as the basis for a low-budget sequel, and if it was a success (as it of course turned out to be), then Splinter of the Mind’s Eye could be released as a novel to tide fans over until the next film.
And no, Foster didn’t have to wait 30 years to come back and write another Star Wars tale. Between 1978’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and his adaptation of The Force Awakens in 2015 he wrote 2002’s The Approaching Storm.
