USA Today has the first exclusive excerpt from the upcoming Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel.
As well as an excerpt, we also get some commentary on the upcoming novel from Lucasfilm Story Groups’ Pablo Hidalgo.
Pablo Hidalgo, a creative executive in Lucasfilm’s Star Wars Story Group, promises that the book will answer some of the questions about the history of the moon-sized Death Star, which annihilated the planet Alderaan — and later was blown up by Luke Skywalker — in 1977’s original Star Wars film.
“Everyone knows about the Death Star as this way-larger-than-life concept,” Hidalgo says. “It’s hard to wrap your head around this weapon that’s so powerful. But this is the idea of understanding who were some of its architects and what were they thinking?
“It’s no accident that we’ve taken a look at the Manhattan project and what was happening at Los Alamos laboratories during the tail end of World War II. Being able to look at that kind of thing through history and then apply the Star Wars filter to it is really fascinating.”
Krennic is a mastermind but Galen is the genius, and the former needs the secrets that are in the latter’s mind in order to fulfill this dream project, Hidalgo says. “We jokingly refer to it as like Mozart and Salieri or even Jobs and Wozniak. It’s these opposites that come together.”
Their character dynamic reminds Hidalgo of The Social Network, with “all the twists and turns that those kinds of relationships can take in the development of something as big as, in this case, the Death Star and not Facebook.”
The schematics of the Death Star are first seen in the prequel Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones, so Catalyst goes all the way back to the Clone Wars in its story. Grand Moff Tarkin, a villain well known from the original Star Wars movie, figures prominently as does Galen’s family, including his wife Lyra and daughter Jyn. In the exclusive excerpt below, Krennic meets baby Jyn for the first time as Galen is being sprung from prison.
“One of the great opportunities we have with Jyn, unlike some of our heroes in a Star Wars film, is she knows her past,” Hidalgo explains. “She knows her parents. She knows where she came from. So we’re able to take these characters and really flesh them out because we have this grounding of them actually established in the context of the film.”
Jyn’s a little girl throughout Catalyst, but once folks see her as a young woman in the movie, Hidalgo says, “you start to see puzzle pieces start to connect and you’ll understand things about Jyn from reading this book that you might not have otherwise.”
To read the excerpt, take the link below.
