My first memory of Star Wars was plugging in my old, dirt-encrusted copy of A New Hope into my VCR and wondering, "Why the heck do they call it Episode Four, when there's no One, Two, or Three?" I want to say this was just before the Special Editions were released in theaters, so I must have been seven or eight years old at the time.
From there, my love for it casually heightened. I remember renting Empire Strikes Back and watching it happily, even though the famous twist had been ruined for me long before then. I remember playing with my Han Solo action figure, complete with carbonite prison. And, I remember experiencing Star Wars' glorious return in 1999 and its effect on pretty much everything.
But, even through all of this, I was still just a casual fan. Someone who watched the movies because they were good, but who couldn't tell you who Salacious B. Crumb was or his monumental contribution to the galaxy.
That all changed, as well as many things in my life, when I played Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic on my Xbox for the first time. Maybe it was because I had been devoid from good storytelling for so long, thanks for my then-aversion to books of any kind, or maybe it was because I had never experienced a story that I genuinely felt a part of. Either way, I had made up my mind about two things that day: I wanted to be writer, and I really, really liked Star Wars.
Thanks to my obsession with KoTOR, I was able to get a lot done. Since then, I've written tons of short stories, many fanfiction stories, and even completed my first novel. But, after the games became near-antiquities by console standards, and after the hype of the last Star Wars movie had effectively worn off, I found that I didn't have a love for the universe anymore. My love for Darth Revan's story was still there, but on the whole, Star Wars fell to the backseat, so to speak.
As per the title of this post, this "rekindling" of my love for Star Wars happened the second Buch suggested an Expanded Universe book called Shatterpoint by Matthew Stover.
I picked up the book on my following trip to Borders and sat down to read it when I got home. I was...wary, at first. I had tried to read many Star Wars books in the past, and I had never been able to get into them at all. Nothing took me out of the illusion quicker than a misplaced line by Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, a couple of dudes that even the most casual of fans usually knows front to back.
So here comes Mace Windu following in Marlow's footprints. I was intrigued by this: that the book was essentially a mix between Heart of Darkness and Star Wars. HoD was a book that I cherished, but not because of its writing. On the contrary, I remember having to force myself to get through that book, but when all was said and done, I genuinely liked the story it had put in my head and the theme of social/moral decay that it communicated.
When I finished Shatterpoint, I was monumentally pleased for a few reasons. One, I found it fantastic that someone actually had the balls to incorporate some philosophical thought into a Star Wars story: something I hadn't seen since KotOR, and before that, the Original Trilogy. Two, it expanded the role of Mace Windu to an extent that he's one of my favorite characters now. I hardly see Sam "Bad Mother Fucker" Jackson in the role anymore. And three, there was violence! Yay! Why do I care? Because sometimes violence can bring a concept that's so up in the air, crashing back down to reality. So, for the first time since KotOR all those years ago, Star Wars felt alive again: it was a living, breathing world that I wanted to throw myself back into for the second time.
To make a long story semi-short, my love of Star Wars was saved by Matthew Stover. His musings on the Force and how to tell a story that, at some times, dives into the spiritual has inspired my writing as well as two fanfics here and here. I'll talk more about the latter story at a different time but, just to put it simply:
Thank you, Matthew "Fucking" Stover for the inspiration. I'll make sure I pick up Shadows of Mindor ASAP. Please, please, please come back to Star Wars soon and/or tell me your new pen name so's I can buy your book when it's released!
*taps foot impatiently while waiting for friend to return Heroes Die*
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