Star Wars – George Lucas, 1976 ★★★½

Another Galaxy, Another Time

Reading an adventure story after seeing it as a movie might seem a waste of time. You already got all its thrills in more visceral form.

But back in the day, when home video meant Super 8 or slide shows, a novelization of a just-released movie was something to own, and read. And when that novelization was of this amazing cinematic experience which had become our generation’s Beatles-at-Ed-Sullivan moment, you even brought it to school to wave around in homeroom.

How to review Star Wars the novel? For me, it’s not about ignoring the nostalgia as much as contextualizing it just enough to appreciate a first-class adventure story with more strings attached now than in 1976.

That year, by the way, is accurate: The book Star Wars, subtitled From The Adventures Of Luke Skywalker, was published over six months prior to the movie, and represented the first-ever chance for the public to learn about “a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”

Or in this case, “Another galaxy, another time,” the opening line here which doesn’t work nearly as well.

Concept art by Ralph McQuarrie for the Star Wars project predated both the book and movie. Above, a sample McQuarrie illustration of droids Artoo Detoo and See Threepio shows how influenced the latter was by the female robot design in Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis. Image from https://arstechnica.com/staff/2012/03/legendary-star-wars-concept-artist-ralph-mcquarrie-passes-away/

Many other anomalies in the book exist, but its bones are the same: A farm boy named Luke Skywalker happens upon a pair of droids. They make him aware of the plight of beautiful Princess Leia who has been captured by an evil Galactic Empire. This same Empire has plans to terrorize the cosmos with this awesome planet-destroying battle station they just built, called the Death Star.

A friend tells him: “You should have heard some of the stories I’ve heard, Luke, learned of some of the outrages I’ve learned about. The Empire may have been great and beautiful once, but the people in charge now – ” He shook his head sharply. “It’s rotten, Luke, rotten.”

The novel is credited to George Lucas, who directed the film and subsequently steered the franchise. Clearly Lucas’s script, in some near-finished form, provides a basis, but the book was actually written by Alan Dean Foster, a longtime science-fiction writer who does a fine job lending the story additional color and insight without loading it down with superfluous backstory.

Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in the 1977 film. Hamill shares more screen time with smuggler Han Solo, who as played by Harrison Ford steals much of the attention. In the book, Luke is the star. Image from https://www.maxim.com/entertainment/luke-skywalker-star-wars-lightsaber-2018-12. 

The first thing you notice comparing book to film is that the novel’s focus is much more on Luke. We meet him earlier than we do in the movie, and his point-of-view remains dominant throughout. We learn about his problems with a stern, grizzled uncle who lodges him and expects him to stay on the farm; his desire to join the Academy and become a star pilot; and his tangential relationship with old Ben Kenobi, who used to visit Luke before his uncle chased him away.

Luke, we are told, early and often, matters more than he realizes:

The old man suppressed a smile, aware that Luke’s destiny had already been determined for him… Kenobi shrugged inwardly. Likely it had been finalized even before the boy was born. Not that Ben believed in predestination, but he believed in heredity – and in the force.

That’s a nice bit of foreshadowing, given what we learn about Luke’s origins in the next movie. For this novel, it presents Luke’s central dilemma, that he is at the mercy of forces he neither knows nor can understand. This lends him more of a rooting interest for us.

A few scenes in the book don't make the finished film, including a confrontation between Jabba the Hutt (Declan Mulholland) and Han Solo (Harrison Ford). In the book, Jabba is "a great mobile tub of muscle and suet topped by a shaggy scarred skull," apparently human. Image from http://episodenothing.blogspot.com/2015/07/star-wars-deleted-scenes-6-original.html.

Darth Vader and Han Solo make much bigger impressions in the film, and you can add to that the special effects and John Williams’ score. The novel is not about spectacle, but a boy on an adventure, which is where I think it scores points with me.

When we first meet Luke, all of 20, he is out in the desert toiling at repairing a faulty moisture vaporator, wondering at the dirt-poor nature of his existence. “The most prepossessing thing about the young man was his name,” the narrative states. At a hangout for other disaffected youths on his home planet, he tries to gin up interest in a story about some battle he thinks he saw in the sky, only to get razzed for his pains. One cute girl calls him “Wormie.” Many readers will identify.

Influences on Star Wars are varied, and include the Akira Kurosawa film The Hidden Fortress, pictured above. "My first duty is to locate that hidden fortress of theirs," Darth Vader declares early in the book. Image from https://theculturetrip.com/asia/japan/articles/is-the-hidden-fortress-the-original-star-wars/.

Between episodes of Luke emerging from his nerd cocoon is this story about the Death Star and how it threatens to end all resistance to the Empire. For people who know the movie, perhaps more surprising here than the focus on Luke will be the absence of same on that most iconic of screen heavies, Darth Vader.

The novel’s approach to Vader is rather perfunctory:

Two meters tall. Bipedal. Flowing black robes trailing from the figure and a face forever masked by a functional if bizarre black metal breath screen – a Dark Lord of the Sith was an awesome, threatening shape as it strode through the corridors of the rebel ship.

I suspect few would expect the first modifier ever used to describe Vader would be “bipedal,” but there you are.

Another influence on Lucas was Flash Gordon, movie rights for which he tried and failed to get. Above, Ming The Merciless, Flash Gordon's nemesis, passes judgment and shows Darth how to rule an evil empire while rocking some heavy robes. Image from facebook.com.

Vader’s objective, regaining stolen plans on the Death Star, puts him on a collision course with farm-boy Luke. Yet most of the bad-guy action centers around Grand Moff Tarkin, the governor calling the shots.

“Events in this region of the galaxy will no longer be determined by fate, by decree, or by any other agency,” Tarkin declares. “They will be decided by this station!”

It is Tarkin, not Vader, who directs the main power play of this story, the destruction of an entire planet named Alderaan. He oversees the climactic attack. In his supercilious arrogance and comfort in the trappings of power (“The only words which have meaning are the last ones spoken”), he makes for the strongest imprint and the most satisfying foil.

Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in the movie, as if he knows he won't even get his own Kenner action figure while the face behind him becomes the Halloween mask of 1977. Image from https://www.small-screen.co.uk/grand-moff-tarkin-rogue-one/tarkin-32x_16f7b5db/.

Of the other familiar characters, the droid C-3PO (always spelled out “See Threepio” in this book) comes off best. He’s presented as comic relief, but also a way of registering the life-and-death stakes which seem somehow beneath the notice of Luke and the other heroes.

“I don’t think I can make it. You go on, Master Luke. It doesn’t make sense to risk yourself on my account. I’m finished.”

“No, you’re not,” Luke shot back, unaccountably affected by this recently encountered machine. Bu then, Threepio was not the usual uncommunicative, agrifunctional device Luke was accustomed to dealing with. “What kind of talk is that?”

“Logical,” Threepio informed him.

When one of the Empire’s TIE fighters are destroyed in battle, Foster’s way of playing it up is its own form of Industrial Light & Magic:

Without warning the fighter erupted in an incredible flash of multicolored light, throwing a billion bits of superheated metal to every section of the cosmos.

Ghost writer Alan Dean Foster, along with art that became the first dust jacket design for Star Wars. George Lucas always credited Foster with writing the book, which Foster followed in 1978 with the first-ever Star Wars sequel, Splinter Of The Mind's Eye. Image from https://www.fanthatracks.com/interviews/alan-dean-foster-talking-star-wars-disney-and-more/.

Foster has a bad habit of describing various alien creatures and concepts in Earth-bound terms, i.e. “a cross between a capybara and a small baboon.” He even references Greek myth to make analogies. His writing can be awkward or bland. Darth Vader’s presence crushes Princess Leia’s spirit “as thoroughly as an elephant would crush an eggshell.”

Lucas’s dialogue was criticized even while it was being filmed by the actors; you feel its clunkiness here. “Alderaan and its people are gone,” Princess Leia says when offered condolences about her home planet. “We must see that such does not happen again.”

Where the novel mirrors the movie to its advantage is in the pacing, with a slow but effective opening that introduces Luke and the Death Star crisis; a crackling middle section that brings together all the main players in a great-escape, multi-layer setpiece; and a final battle that like the movie is fast-paced and thrilling.

The rebel hideout on a moon of the planet Yavin, where Star Wars concludes, is described in the novel as the mysterious remnants of a lost civilization, "one of the many races which had aspired to the stars only to have their desperate reach fall short." Image from https://www.starwars.com/databank/yavin-4.

In fact, the book benefits from spelling out what is happening in this big fight, with fighters clashing over and around the Death Star while tower guns and shield arrays complicate the Rebel attack. A look inside the Death Star reveals a human face to the Imperial foe:

On the battle station, troopers worn half to death or deafened by the concussion of the big guns were replaced by fresh crews. None of them had time to wonder how the battle was going, and at the moment none of them much cared, a malady shared by common soldiers since the dawn of history.

While it is easy to take the Death Star attack for granted given how it appears in the finished film, Foster had recourse only to Lucas's script and Ralph McQuarrie illustrations like this one, made in 1975. Image from https://www.starwars.com/news/an-annotated-guide-to-the-star-wars-portfolio-by-ralph-mcquarrie. 

Other descriptions are similarly vivid. Earlier in the novel, when Princess Leia is interrogated by Vader, guards outside her cell step further away to avoid being in earshot of the torture. Jawas, short humanoid creatures that live in the deserts of Luke’s home world, speak “a randomly variable language that drove linguists mad.” Solo and Leia, previously squabbling, share a momentary glance of tenderness as they are about to be crushed by a garbage compactor.

It’s all wonderful stuff, and connects me to the pre-teen I was back when “Star Wars” was brand-new and completely free of associations to Joseph Campbell and Jar-Jar Binks. Nostalgia often interferes with honest appreciation, but here I think the book’s strengths are very much found in the way it synergizes sentiment and derring-do.

For me, it also brings back a version of the “Star Wars” saga I knew back when it was just a movie and this book. While the novel does hint at concepts drawn out decades later (such as laying out the basis for the entire prequel trilogy on page one), it shows why this saga works so well as a self-contained story.