Over at The Cantina Cast Ted Davey waxes lyrtical about the return of a blue skinned classic. No, I don’t mean a glass of blue milk that’s been left in the Tatooine heat for too long, I’m talking about the return of Grand Admiral Thrawn.
When I heard the news from Star Wars Celebration Europe that Grand Admiral Thrawn was making his return to the Star Wars universe, and ultimately canonized, I found myself locked in a moment of stunned silence. This was a big moment. When the stories of the Expanded Universe were declared Legend, there were many casualties, but none as big as the exclusion of Grand Admiral Thrawn from the official canon of Star Wars.
Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire and its sequels, Dark Force Rising and The Last Command, are some of the most influential Star Wars novels ever written. Simply put, Heir to the Empire is the book that launched a thousand stories. To understand the importance of this work you need to travel back in time to 1991.
Back then Star Wars was an afterthought. Everyone knew about it and most had seen the movies, but it was no longer fresh in our pop-culture. Star Wars was something that happened a long time ago.
New films were nowhere on the horizon and there were only a handful of novels that existed. Most notably there was Brian Daley’s Han Solo Trilogy, and L. Neil Smith’s Lando Calrissian books. There was also Alan Dean Foster’s Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, which was written as a fallback in case Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope was a flop. Imagine that? Yes, the Star Wars landscape was as barren as the Dune Sea of Tatooine with nary an oasis in sight. That is, until the Summer of 1991 when Timothy Zahn opened the doors of his desert cantina and invited us in to have a drink.
