Star Wars on Trial (29 page)

But all that detail was done and dusted before I arrived on the scene. I had to work with the continuity from the movie Attach of the Clones, in which the cloned men are around ten years old but nearly twenty biologically, and fully trained elite troops. Rather than restrict me, though, it freed me to look at the ethical and human side of the equation. They're child soldiers. Their lives and rights have been stolen from them in the name of might, right and the Republic. And nobody in the Republic seems to object-least of all the Jedi. It's the kind of moral mire into which you can fling yourself.

By that stage, I was about to storm the barricades. Order 66? I'd have volunteered, mate.

One of the themes that most occupies me as a writer is the dividing line between the "us" that we treat with respect and can empathize with, and "them"-the external bin into which we dump those who we can crap on and get away with it. It can be gender, species, race, age-or genome. Wherever it's drawn, and whether we know we're doing it or not, it's the tipping point where people-decent people on the surface, people like you and me-rationalize and justify their exploitation and abuse of those who are different. They're not like us. So they don't feel like us, do they? They're the enemy, they're just kids, they're savages, they're only animals, they don't feel pain or loss or love. We can do as we like with them; because we can.

You can see the pattern now. This one book caught me at the right time and on the right issue. It was the big red Ferrari. All I had to do was abandon a fear of speed and get in.

So what's it like to be a clone? How does it feel to be raised in a sealed environment by aliens, and know nothing but combat from the time you can walk? How do you deal with the outside world? And how do you change when you see what the world is, and what's been done to you, and what you can never have? One of my readers-an academic from MIT, in case you believe a demographic stereotype of fandom-said that everything I write is about the politics of identity. And that acute observation has helped me understand why the GFFA and I seem to be made for each other.

My love affair with the GFFA was cemented. Murky politics; love it, love it, love it. Moral ambiguity: bring it on. Big human issues: slavery, war, love, jealousy, poverty, misery, greed, ambition. This is the stuff that a journalist can get stuck into. Lucasfilm let me go as dark as I wanted to. They let me write a real war story about real men faced with difficult moral choices every day. I poured my guts into it because I was suddenly free of the need to get stuff like the FTL physics right, and I was ambushed by the emotional element of the universe. It was like moving from doing technical drawings to creating impressionist paintings with vivid colors. I saw the world in a new light.

I finished Hard Contact with a sense of bereavement. I'd created a huge backstory in order to write it because I needed to know what happened to all the characters from birth to death, and part of that was expanding the Mandalorian culture. I even started building the language. When I turned in the manuscript, I wanted to go on with the story. It mattered to me. And that passion transmits itself into your writing, and your readers notice.

At that point I had to start my third Wess'har Wars book, The World Before. I came to it as a different writer because of the way Hard Contact had taken the brakes off me. I'm a journalist by trade: I was trained not to feel about the subjects I covered and to keep my distance, an approach I carried over into my City of Pearl books.

But as an author, you have to feel for each character-and feel vividly-for that power and passion to penetrate the filter of cold paper to reach the reader. By breaking that ingrained habit, I wrote a far better book in my own series. I say that because readers noticed the shift in gear, and told me so.

The liberation continued. I went on to write more Republic Commando books and other Star Wars novels. The sequel to Hard Contact, Triple Zero, was an even more emotional experience for me, and I burned through it in five weeks. That confirmed something else for me: I wrote better when I shut out everything else and took a run at it. Too much time to think, and I lost the fire. Without Star Wars and the punishing schedule that went with it, I might never have discovered that.

I've had sneers from writers who say there's no artistic challenge or merit in writing in someone else's universe. Needless to say, they've never done it. I wish they would: they'd learn a lot. Resisting the urge to mount the curb and mow them down in my Ferrari, I like to point out that it takes a new level of discipline to fit canon and remain true to the shared universe while keeping the original style and approach that the publisher signed you for in the first place. And writing characters who've been known and loved by fans for thirty years-like Luke and Han-is genuinely challenging. I know. I've just done it, and it's hard. When I want a rest, I go back to my own series. It's far easier in skill terms.

Star Wars has taught me a huge amount about the craft of writing in a very short time. The learning curve for me since March 2004 has been the north face of the bloody Eiger: I've worked with composers and artists, I've worked with other authors on a joint series, and I've even created a full working language, Mandalorian. I'm now teaching it to fans. Would I have developed any of those skills-or had that much varied fun-if I'd only been writing my own reality-grounded, hyper-accurate realpolitik series? I doubt it very much. Star Wars kicked me hard up the arse, and it was the making of me.

The restrictions of media tie-ins force you to grow. Ironically, the freedom lies in having to think outside your own creative box. Canon and continuity make you work harder to find work-rounds: necessity really is the mother of invention. And-to use my favorite analogy-there are no oranges in Star Wars. You have to reexamine the nuts and bolts of your writing because it's a wholly constructed universe, so analogies about surfaces like orange peel are denied you. All your own-brand cliches are out of reach. You redefine your approach. Even the age range of the audience made me stretch my skills: denied my usual palette of salty Anglo-Saxon expletives, I had to learn to write authentic soldiers' dialogue without four-letter words and explicit sexual references.

Yes, it can be done. And I think I'm a better writer for having learned that.

So I grew. And I gained, and so did my non-Star Wars books, which sold better and were better books because of Star Wars and its influence. And I got paid. Lucasfilm and Del Rey liked me and I liked them, so I signed to do more work for them. With my other series, that enabled me to leave the day job and write full time. Does it get any better than that? I don't think so.

I'd be lying if I said the money wasn't a factor. Of course it is. I'm a jobbing writer, and I have been all my working life. But without less tangible benefits, no amount of money stops you getting pissed off with a job you don't like. I know: I've done that too many times in the past. There has to be more. Life's too short to have a job that saps your will to live.

In the GFFA, the bonuses for any writer are legion if you want to reach out and grab them. I've reached a whole new audience who might never have picked up my City of Pearl books, but who now do just that. I've had very rewarding contact with the fan community, who've been a sheer delight and have made me feel valued and welcome-and even a cynical old hack like me needs to be liked sometimes.

Star Wars fans are also pretty sharp intellectually, and the level of debate is high. I'm not referring to the continuity arguments-and yeah, how big was Vader's Super Star Destroyer?-but to the long, sometimes heated and constantly educational debates I have with readers about duty, obedience to authority, the nature of sentience, political expedience and the existence (or not) of evil. Those aren't lightweight issues. They inform our views of the real world. And I don't know any other entertainment franchise that stimulates moral debate quite as well as Star Wars. It's a mythological epic in the fullest sense, providing us with cultural icons and reference points; and what writer doesn't want a piece of that?

So you have choices with media tie-ins, as you have with that Ferrari someone dumped in your drive.

You can park it and look at it: in other words, you can just phone the book in and assume the reader doesn't notice or even care. (Oh, they do, believe me. And how.) Or you can just use the Ferrari for shopping and stick to the speed limit: the book is just a media tie-in and nobody thinks tie-ins have to be good books, do they? Nobody expects you to bust a gut and go for broke on it. Just coast. It's okay.

Or you can look at that shiny Ferrari and say: "Holy shit! I bet this thing can do 150 mph! Let's find out!" You can look at a big, fast, famous car whose keys have been pressed into your sweaty palm and just drive its guts out. You can throw yourself into that tie-in work and see how far and fast you can take it, and how far it can take you.

And you can experience the thrill of taking the curves a little faster than you thought you could and still be alive to tell the tale. Everyone needs a bit of adrenaline and stress to push their personal limits.

I'm still on the road in that Ferrari. And not only am I enjoying the drive much more now I know the layout of the dashboard: I'm a better driver because of it.

Karen Traviss is a British author whose Wess'har series has received criti cal acclaim. Her debut novel City of Pearl (2004) was nominated for the Philip K Dick and Campbell Awards. A former defense correspondent and TV and newspaper journalist, she also writes Star Wars novels and short fiction. She lives in Wiltshire.