In my
anticipation for the latest Star Wars
theatrical release, I’ve been exploring the Expanded Universe. This might seem
a little odd to some people after Disney’s announcement that the EU is no
longer canon, but that doesn’t matter to be one bit. I’ve read enough novels
and comics that are part of the EU to know that it’s a pretty incredible fictional
universe to explore. It can match, scene for scene, the enjoyment to be had
from the Star Wars films and it often
does that by exploring some pretty ludicrous ideas. It’s sometimes beautiful,
scary, uplifting, exciting, funny, embarrassing, action packed, and it’s just
about everything you could ever ask for from genre literature. I believe that
whatever descriptive word you can think of it can be applied to stories set in
the EU. It’s a large, inexplicably complicated, occasionally messy shared
universe continuation (and, uh further prequelization) of the Star Wars films.
It’s
much more than just tie-in media. These novels and comics aren’t just a
collection of one-off stories that don’t really matter. They’re not stories
that occur between the stories we already know from the movies (though they are
that, too). The Expanded Universe is really well named because it does what the
title suggests. It expands everything you know about Star Wars and in just about every direction possible. This brings
us to Heirs of the Force.
