Star Wars on Trial (28 page)

Finally, what makes any discontented original-fiction novelist with sagging sales suppose that media tie-in readers would suddenly flock to his work if only all those damn Star Wars novels weren't crowding the shelves? Doesn't it seem more likely that if media tiein books disappeared from SF/F shelves, media tie-in readers would venture into the SF/F section of bookstores far less often, spend less money on books and be even less likely to buy an original-fiction SF/ F novel on impulse?

Laura Resnick is the author of twenty original-fiction novels, including Disappearing Nightly and Doppelgangster. You can find her on the Web at www.LauraResnick.com.

OMEBODY DUMPED A FERRARI in my drive last year.

They were kind enough to leave the keys in it. Now, there are a few things you can do with an unexpected Ferrari. You can leave it standing in the drive and polish it, or you can use it to do the school run, or you can jump in, slam your foot to the floor and see how fast that sucker can fly.

On February 26, 2004, Del Rey and Lucasfilm left a Ferrari in my drive. So I decided to burn rubber.

It's been the most productive ride of my life. I describe it unashamedly as the best thing that ever happened to me, and that's not just because it was good for business in a pragmatic marketing and money kind of way, but because it also liberated me as a writer. It was superficial lust at first sight financially but then the relationship blossomed into true love, and nearly two years later I can look back and see that Star Wars changed my life in ways far more complex and far-reaching than just putting food on my table.

The call came out of the blue. "Would you like to write a book for us?" asked Shelly Shapiro at Del Rey. "It's tied in to a video game called Republic Commando."

I knew nothing about Star Wars and even less about media tieins-and completely zero about gaming. This was my first year as a novelist: my debut novel, City of Pearl, wasn't even on the shelves yet. I did some rapid research, but friends warned me I'd be ruining myself as a serious author, as if I were some pedigree poodle who'd jumped over the wall to be spoiled for breeding by the attentions of the neighborhood mutt.

"It's rubbish," said a friend. "You've got a career as a serious writer ahead of you. Don't touch it."

I never was much good at taking advice.

The game was about a commando squad; I was a military specialist, both as a former defense correspondent and a military SF author. It sounded right up my street, although I'd have to finish the novel in eight weeks to meet my other book commitments. But I couldn't ignore the fact that grabbing the coattails of the most successful franchise in history would give me the kind of exposure and fast-track to my career that I simply couldn't buy.

And they were paying me for the privilege. It was too good to be true.

What brand-new author wouldn't want a crack at a readership of hundreds of thousands? Who wouldn't want that kind of publicity and opportunity in her very first year in print? I felt the Force was with me. In fact, I was so determined it was going to stay with me that I nailed its bloody feet to the floor.

But it was a single line of a conversation with the LucasArts content manager that really lured me into the GFFA'
at a much deeper level.

There was the small problem that I knew zip about Star Wars in March 2004, although I'd reviewed the movies as a very young journalist. (No, really. I was tall for my age.) I liked the Vader guy, I recalled: commendable management style, cool outfit. But that was about it. I had to start doing my homework. I don't read novels, not even if I'm paid to, and anyway the Republic Commando world was brand new, so the continuity would largely be created by me, working alongside the game team. I plunged in with all the confidence of the joyously ignorant.

And joyful pretty well summed up the whole experience. I had total freedom to create the plot and my own characters, including what became known as "that crap Jedi," the plain, skinny, not-very-gifted but very hardworking Etain.

I had a superb continuity minder at LucasArts called Ryan Kaufman, who was on call 24/7 to answer my queries and clear up points like how the armor codpieces fitted on the commandos. No detail was too small, and he never lost patience with my endless questions.

"Let me get this clear," I said. "Somebody creates a secret clone army. Then they maneuver the Jedi into using them to fight the Separatists."

"That's right," said Ryan.

"So...." My journalist brain was whirring. I had no preconceived happy notions about Jedi. I was new in town. "This is a slave army. They're bred to age at double the rate and die young. They have no choice. And the Jedi just take them and use them as cannon fodder? No questions asked? No big moral debate?"

"You got it," said Ryan.

I was outraged. "And these are the good guys?"

That was the exact moment at which Star Wars moved from being a nice little earner into something I really, really wanted to write.

Jedi. The elitist bastards! These poor bloody clones, used and discarded ... and of course I was told about Order 66 from the start. Serves the buggers right, I thought. The spoon-bending hippies would get what they deserved for their complicity in maintaining a slave army.

I wrote Republic Commando: Hard Contact like a maniac for eight weeks, grabbing every spare second from my job, fueled by abstract anger, drawing on the energy you derive from seeing the strange and the new. I loved every second. I knew I'd almost weep when I was finished. (Yes, I nearly did.)

I slipped into a new way of working right away. I'm a hard SF writer, and the GFFA is not hard science. It's allegory and myth wearing SFnal clothes. But as I can only function as a hard SF type, and I take the military authenticity seriously for a whole raft of reasons, I did the most realistic job I could within the confines of continuity. Somehow, without reading a word of Star Wars, I took the British SAS and SBS and turned them into Omega Squad, a group of four naive but pretty adept clone soldiers who win through by persistence, skill and comradeship. The Jedi Padawan who they team up with is, frankly, pants. She's not exactly the A-Team; they have to help her out. There's no Luke or Obi-Wan Force leaping to the rescue in this book, no sirree. This is the triumph of the ordinary man-no, the triumph of the most oppressed.

Inevitably, hard SF clashed with SW continuity at a number of points. I knew that was the internal ecology when I took the Lucas shilling, so I had no real problem accepting there was no time dilation with FTL and all those other pesky unscientific things. Like cloning humans and maturing them at double-time....

Oh. Oh.

And this was the point when I became liberated from my hard SF corset and was forced to look at much, much bigger themes than epigenetics and military economics. I had to go beyond the top dressing of the science and look at the impact these technologies had on individual people. That's what I thought I was doing in my own series. But thanks to my epiphanic experiences writing Star Wars, I found I was only doing a lite version of that. I was still too caught up in the science. It stopped me exploring the characters to their limits.

In my own universes, I would never have looked at cloning at all. I felt it was a path too frequently trodden; I didn't think I'd have anything new to say. Had I tackled a clone army in my own terms, I'd have become engrossed in the failure rate, the developmental problems and the psychological mess that kids raised by aliens would have become-if they survived gestation in tanks at all. It would have been a very different story.