Author: M. Dean Cooper

Our Journey With Jason Fry, Part One

Posted on October 12, 2015by Interviews

weaponofajediJason Fry, author of more than thirty books in the Star Wars franchise, has already been gracious enough to grant us biannual interviews since Eleven-ThirtyEight’s inception; but this time was a challenge all around—not only did I have to cover his two different Force Friday releases, The Weapon of a Jedi and Moving Target, last Tuesday’s Servants of the Empire finale The Secret Academy, the upcoming third book in his Jupiter Pirates series, and any potential future projects in fewer than a hundred questions, but Jason himself was double-booked this past weekend (with appearances within a couple hours of each other at both New York Comic-Con and Star Wars Reads Day in the Maplewood Memorial Library in New Jersey). Luckily, we pulled it off—I assume it’s because he’s extra-pumped about the Mets being in the playoffs. Below we’ll discuss his Luke and Leia books; stay tuned for the latest on Zare Leonis, and more, on Wednesday.

 

Might as well get the Force Awakens business out of the way. I’m always very interested in the mechanics of how they tease things from an upcoming film, and my original question was going to be how you ended up using Sarco Plank specifically in The Weapon of a Jedi. Then I read your recent piece on the Official Site, and you say that by the time you came aboard, not just Plank’s role but the general outline of the story was already in place. Is that typical in a situation like this, to be handed not just a character but a rough plot? The TFA elements of Moving Target, on the other hand, remain a little more mysterious; how much of that book was decided before you and Cecil Castellucci became involved?

Every project is different, but I knew from the beginning that Weapon of a Jedi, as part of Journey to The Force Awakens, would be really different. For Weapon of a Jedi the basic plot was set, so I focused on figuring out Luke’s character and his arc – the book flies or dies based on how drawn in you are by Luke’s Force training and what he learns about the Force and himself. Contrast that assignment with, say, Servants of the Empire – for those books I had one episode to incorporate, a cameo to feature, and some story threads to include, but otherwise I had a free hand with the plots and characters. Read More

A Special Kind of Crazy, or Why You’re Probably Not a Rebel

Posted on October 9, 2015by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

RogueSquadronPilotsPicture two people, waking up on an average morning.

Person A eats breakfast, brushes his teeth, and goes to work. Person B starts to make a cup of coffee on her hot plate (can’t remember the last time she had regular electricity) but suddenly the room shakes—enemy air forces have arrived and they’re bombing. Person A clears some early work from his inbox and decides he’s got time to run out to Starbucks to grab a pumpkin spice latte. Person B shoves her few belongings aside in a rush to her computer, frantically entering in the commands to wipe it clean as a near miss blows out all the windows. A has an important question for a co-worker across the hall, but they’re on a conference call so he sends a terse e-mail instead and spends the rest of the morning waiting impatiently for them to notice it and get back to him. B didn’t have time to tell her superiors she was bugging out, so she sneaks around the CCTV cameras to an alley with a good view of the nearest drop point (luckily, there’s a restaurant dumpster nearby and she’s able to scoop up a few handfuls of leftover eggs) to wait for her contact to happen by. A comes back from lunch to find his computer frozen, so he spends most of the afternoon standing over the IT guy’s shoulder and falling behind on his work. B dozes off around hour five of watching the drop but it starts to snow and the cold wakes her up and shitshitshit, there are fresh footprints—she missed her contact.

I don’t have to ask which of these scenarios more resembles your life; unless you live in Syria or the Crimean Peninsula, it’s almost certainly A. My question is, what would your government have to do for you to willingly give up A in favor of B? Read More

Starkiller: Superweapons and the Sequel Trilogy

Posted on September 28, 2015by , , , , and Not A Committee

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Buried in the Force Friday blitz at the beginning of this month was the first The Force Awakens-related update to StarWars.com’s Databank section. Naturally, very little new information actually came out of the new entries; many didn’t include pictures, and some of the character entries were nothing but the same one-sentence bios from the back of their action figure cards.

One big new piece of info did show up, though—or rather, if you follow the spoiler reporting, a confirmation of one of the oldest rumors: there’s a superweapon on the table.

I actually stopped reading spoilers a long time ago, but even I had heard bits and pieces to this effect; and sure enough, the exceedingly minimal entry for the First Order’s Starkiller Base nevertheless deigns to include the apparent in-universe reasoning for its name:

“An ice planet converted into a stronghold of the First Order and armed with a fiercely destructive new weapon capable of destroying entire star systems.”

While certain reporting (and certain memes) has tended to paint the First Order as an upstart group of ne’er-do-wells rather than a serious galactic power, the ability to destroy an entire star system? Well, that changes the equation. Superweapons have a mixed reputation among Star Wars fans, though; the Expanded Universe is known for adding a whole bunch of ’em to the lineup (including the Sun Crusher, which did exactly what the Starkiller is alleged to do and was totally invulnerable besides), and even many movie purists will tell you that concluding the original trilogy with a second Death Star wasn’t exactly George’s Lucas’s most creative idea. So I put the question to the staff: is this a mistake? A ham-fisted attempt to replicate the feel of the OT? Or are superweapons a crucial part of Star Wars’s magic formula? Read More

Context is Everything: The Minority Report, Year One

Posted on September 14, 2015by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

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Not only was Force Friday our first big taste of the sequel era, it was almost the exact one-year anniversary of the release of A New Dawn—and thus, the new Star Wars canon (or NEU, as some are calling it but I refuse to). I celebrated A New Dawn‘s release by officially launching The Minority Report, Eleven-ThirtyEight’s loose ongoing series of diversity-focused articles by myself and others. While the tag has been a useful umbrella for a variety of pieces, up to and including new staff writer Sarah Dempster’s recent (and hugely popular) piece Star Wars’ Intersectionality Problem, as I originally envisioned it, the series’ main recurring feature would be a discussion of my longstanding diversity scoring system. Diversity scores, according to my initial conception, are quite simply the percentage of a story’s cast that is anything other than straight, white human men—WHMs, for short. In practice, though, they’ve become anything but simple.

To wit: on the whole, this first year of the new canon has been like a breath of fresh air. While A New Dawn‘s diversity score wasn’t exactly a mic drop, the series it led into, Star Wars Rebels, has been nothing short of miraculous. While there have been a fair amount of WHMs among its Imperial cast (and it could definitely use more women in this area) the main cast of heroes doesn’t contain a single one—as confirmed on this very site by Pablo Hidalgo. Their ranks of our heroes have grown since the premiere to include aliens like Old Joh, Tseebo, and of course, Ahsoka Tano, and people of color like Lando, Bail Organa, and Commander Sato (and soon, at least a few aging clones). For one of the most heavily child-facing elements of the franchise, Rebels is guaranteeing that the newest generation of Star Wars fans will finally have no shortage of heroes who look like them, and it’s been thrilling to see. Read More

What Star Wars Can Learn From Game of Thrones

Posted on August 31, 2015by Scotch Tape and Popsicle Sticks

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Oh yeah, you read that right. This is happening. I’ll be getting into The Force Awakens details below, incidentally, but nothing that hasn’t been officially revealed.

A lot of the news and speculation lately has been about alignments: Kylo Ren is a big fan of Darth Vader, but he’s not a Sith. He’s part of a group called the Knights of Ren, but what are they, exactly? Are they actually Imperials in some respect, or just a cult that he went rogue from?

And then there’s the First Order—recently explained, kind of, by JJ Abrams as follows:

“That all came out of conversations about what would have happened if the Nazis all went to Argentina but then started working together again? What could be born of that? Could The First Order exist as a group that actually admired The Empire?”

Abrams seems to be talking about two different things, here—actual ex-Imperials seeking to get things moving again, and perhaps also a younger generation who “admired” the Empire but weren’t actually a part of it. Just going by ages, it seems logical that Phasma, General Hux, and presumably even Kylo represent the latter, because they would have been toddlers when Palpatine died—if that. Maybe they’re acting completely of their own volition, but if so, who are the retired Nazis in this analogy? Read More