Star Wars books flood onto shelves ahead of Rogue One (and Christmas)
From Carrie Fisher’s diaries to cartoons showing Darth and the kids at home, there’s no shortage of new books connected to Star Wars – with some fresh ways to explore and enrich the series’ mythos
For the next 60 or so pages, we get the diary Fisher kept during production. It’s as florid and angsty as you expect from someone who was 19 and wrangling with an older man when she wrote it. Ford was 33, with a wife and kids. There were London flats. Lots of free time. She’s “sorry it’s not Mark”, she writes (meaning Mark Hamill, aka Luke Skywalker).
But Ford’s brooding indifference is a tractor beam: “He is like a fantasy,” she writes. He’s also a huge bore: “The silences make my composure decompose from the inside out … I hate him and all of his quiet. But I love the implied disapproval, the seniority …”
Oh my. And you thought there was nothing left to say about Star Wars. Wrong, you were.
Two dozen new books have recently been published about Star Wars, suggesting what remains to be said about the space fantasy could fill a space cruiser. Books that send the saga off on thorny new tangents. Novels that catch up with iconic characters in their downtime. Art books that make a compelling case for the series as a wellspring of pop inspiration. Coffee-table bricks that pay (pricey) homage to under-appreciated conceptual visionaries. Books that speak to children. Bedtime books that speak to adults eager to indoctrinate their young padawane in a cradle-to-grave allegiance the Star Wars industrial complex will cheerfully supply. And that’s just books published in the past six months.