Heir to the Empire

I N T R O D U C T I O N

A long time ago in a galaxy far,

far away.…

Well, actually, it was Illinois.

But it was a long time ago.

It was Monday, November 6, 1989, to be exact, at about four o’clock in the afternoon. I was sitting in my home office in Champaign, Illinois, working on a novel I’d just sold to Bantam Books called Angelmass, when I got an unexpected call from my agent, Russell Galen. After the usual pleasantries, he dropped what would be, for me, the understatement of the decade:

“Tim, we have a very interesting offer here.”

As I stood there staring out a window in growing amazement, he went on to relate how, a year earlier, the head of Bantam Spectra, Lou Aronica, had written to Lucasfilm with an idea about restarting the Star Wars saga. Lou’s plan was to create a three-book saga that would pick up the story after Return of the Jedi, an era in which no author had ever been permitted to write.

As fate (or the Force) would have it, that letter had arrived just as Howard Roffman and the team at Lucasfilm had decided to restart their adult publishing program.

That would have been awesome enough. What raised it to flabbergastable level was that Bantam and Lucasfilm were offering me the books.

I’d been a Star Wars fan as long as anyone else on the planet. (Well, okay, maybe not everyone else. I didn’t make it to the theater until the second night.) Back in the early 1980s, when I was trying to forge a career for myself in the field, the Star Wars movie soundtracks were among my favorite records to listen to as I wrote. So much so that I distinctly remember thinking at the time that if George Lucas could come out of essentially nowhere to make a success of himself, maybe I could, too.

And now I was being invited to play in the universe he had created.

Anyway, Russ and I discussed it for forty minutes or so, and I told him I would think about it overnight and give him my answer in the morning. We said good-bye, and then I hung up the phone … and spent the next couple of hours panicking.

At issue was the fact that this offer was very much a two-edged sword. I had the chance to jump-start my career in a way I could never have anticipated or even hoped. I also had the chance to fail spectacularly in front of a potential audience of millions.

Because I was going to have to write Star Wars. Not something science-fictiony or space-operatic with the name Star Wars on it. I was going to have to write Star Wars. I would have to somehow capture the scope and feel of the universe; the faces and voices of the main characters; the ebb and flow and rhythm of the movies. The readers had to hear Mark Hamill’s and Carrie Fisher’s and Harrison Ford’s voices inside my quotation marks. The people flipping through those pages needed to be able to hear John Williams’s music in the backs of their minds.

If I couldn’t do that, or at least get close, it wouldn’t be Star Wars. It would be An Adventure of Two Guys Named Han and Luke. And that would be a waste of everyone’s time.

There was more. Not only did I have to get the feel of the universe right, I also had to come up with a story—a three-book-long story, in fact—that wasn’t simply a rehash of what George had already done. I would have to age the movie characters believably, and create new characters that would fit seamlessly into the mix.

By the next morning I still didn’t know if I could pull all that off. But I did know that I very much wanted to try. So I told Russ I was on board and got to work.

The first part was easy enough. By Thanksgiving, a little over two weeks later, I had a forty-page preliminary outline for the trilogy, and had had some conversations with Betsy Mitchell, my editor on the project.

We then hit an unexpected snag (unexpected to me, anyway): the Bantam and Lucasfilm lawyers were still hammering out their contract. Until they had a contract, I couldn’t get a contract with Bantam to write the books, and until I had my contract, Lucasfilm wouldn’t look at my outline (for legal reasons that I certainly understood). And until they approved my outline, it was pointless for me to start writing.

Between the lawyers and the back-and-forth LFL approval process it was a solid six months before I was finally able to get to work. (As it is, I jumped the gun by about a week, figuring that whatever final changes LFL might want probably wouldn’t affect the first two or three chapters that much.) Along the way there were problems to be ironed out, disagreements to be discussed, compromises to be made, and occasionally capitulation (on my part) to be graciously made.

I groused some about the latter. We authors usually grouse when we don’t get our way. But as I look back, I can honestly say that the book is much better because of the suggestions and changes that I sometimes only grudgingly accepted.

I mailed the book to Betsy on November 2, 1990 (yes, we still mailed paper manuscripts back then), a bit less than six months after I’d started and almost exactly a year after I was offered the project. For me, at that time, six months was phenomenally fast, though in the past twenty years I’ve gotten considerably faster. (For instance, my most recent Star Wars book, Choices of One, took only three months to write.) As with the outline, the finished manuscript went through an approval/change process with Bantam and Lucasfilm, and after a lot of (mostly minor) changes it was finally declared finished. Cover art was commissioned, other editorial stuff was done, the promotional and ad campaigns were arranged, and all was ready to go.

Except for one question, the question that had been hanging over the project since the very beginning.

Namely, would anyone actually buy the book?

Lou had been convinced from the start that the audience was out there. But even he was taking it mostly on faith. After all, Return of the Jedi was eight years in the past and the Star Wars fans were quiet.

There were hints, of course. A couple of months before Heir came out I went to talk to a class of fourth-graders, and took a copy of the cover to show them. These kids, who’d barely been alive when the last Star Wars movie came out, gazed excitedly at the cover art, pointing out Han and Luke and Chewie to one another. Through the magic of VCR tape, they were fully up to speed with everything Star Wars.

But hints are only hints. So Bantam and Lucasfilm hedged their bets. They set the price of the book at fifteen dollars, considerably below market standard for hardcovers. The sales staff worked hard to drum up enthusiasm among booksellers, with mixed results. They bought print ads and put out an actual radio ad. (I’d never before had a radio ad for one of my books. Nor, I think, have I had once since.)

After that, there was nothing to do but sit back and cross our fingers.

May 1991.

It’s been said by some that the Thrawn Trilogy restarted Star Wars. That sounds very impressive, but it’s not really true. A more accurate statement would be that I was the first person since Jedi who was permitted to stick a fork into the piecrust to see if there was still any steam underneath.

There was steam. Man, was there steam.

The first run of seventy thousand copies was gone within two weeks, and Bantam was scrambling to get more printed. (Semi-useless fact: the printer ran out of blue cover stock after the third printing, so the fourth printing was on a tan cover stock. Even today, if I see one of those come across my autographing table I’ll do a whole Force “I know what printing this is” routine.) I was told by some bookstore clerks that they were selling Heir right out of the box, that they would be putting the books on the rack and someone would catch sight of Star Wars on the cover, grab one, and head to checkout.

The book made it to number one on the New York Times list, the authors’ Holy Grail. (It actually beat out John Grisham’s The Firm. He later sent me a copy of his book with an autograph and a very nice, very tongue-in-cheek request for me to get out of his way.)

Heir went through multiple printings—I don’t remember how many. In fact, Bantam was still printing new hardcovers after the paperback came out, which Russ told me almost never happens. (As I recall, his actual comment had a bit more French in it—he was as astonished as anyone else.)

The book actually made it into a Jeopardy! question, which is beyond even New York Times Holy Grail status. (“Timothy Zahn’s best-selling novel Heir to the Empire is a sequel to this movie trilogy.” I still have that episode on tape somewhere.)

The Star Wars fans were out there, all right. And after three new movies, the hit Clone Wars TV show, and numerous books and comics, they and Star Wars are still going strong.

Reading Heir again after all these years has been an interesting and slightly unsettling experience. On the one hand, I see all the stylistic things I would change if I were writing it today—some of the sentence and paragraph structure, bits and pieces of writing technique, maybe some of the pacing. But on the other hand, the story still holds up well. Maybe even a little better than I’d expected it to.

So I invite you now to join Betsy and me on a journey down memory lane. Twenty years is a long time, but we’ll do my best to remember how it all happened.

—TIMOTHY ZAHN