Author: M. Dean Cooper

The Pithy Reader’s Companion

While Eleven-ThirtyEight has no formal relationship with TheForce.Net, we make no secret of the fact that most of us got to know each other on their Jedi Council Forums—in the Literature section, for the most part. Almost a year before ETE began, I started a thread there called One Sentence or Less, which harnessed the collective wit of the forums to summarize the plots of numerous Expanded Universe works in, well, one sentence or less. While I did my best to encourage brevity, each winner was chosen by popular vote, so in a way I had very little to do with the results—but that didn’t stop me from compiling the first year of winners into the three-volume Pithy Reader’s Companion here, named after Pablo Hidalgo’s Essential Reader’s Companion. While activity died down a lot in the second year of the thread, eventually enough new winners were compiled that I was able to put together Volume IV just a couple months ago—which took us all the way up to the reboot, so when and if I get to Volume V it’ll be all canon—how exciting!

• Volume I
• Volume II
• Volume III
• Volume IV

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The Expanded Universe Explains

Reboot or no reboot, this site is founded in part on the premise that the Expanded Universe, by dint of breadth and longevity, represents a master class in the Star Wars universe, and the different things that can be done within it. To that end, my series The Expanded Universe Explains is meant to serve as a chronicle of the EU’s answers to many frequently-asked questions from casual fans—many of which came straight from my friend Pearl. In the wake of the Legends announcement, latter-day entries have begun to focus on individual throwaway references in the films that the EU subsequently explained in multiple, usually contradictory, ways; earlier entries tended to jump around a lot, so for ease of navigation, I’ve included sample questions in the list below.

• Vol. I – How do lightsabers work?
• Vol. II – Where did the Millennium Falcon come from?
• Vol. III – What if Luke died or turned evil on the Death Star?
• Vol. IV – Rebels Edition – Are stormtroopers clones?
• Vol. V – What happened to the Imperials at Endor?
• Vol. VI – Did Vader let Luke go at Cloud City?
• Vol. VII – What’s Artoo-Detoo’s backstory?
• Vol. VIII – Han and Lando
• Vol. IX – The Shuttle Tydirium

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Reviews

This one is straightforward enough. The reason I have book reviews as a tag rather than a category like “Interviews” is because ideally even review are still framed more as standard editorials rather than just a rote “three out of five Hutts” kind of thing; the goal is to find something interesting about the book, good or bad, that could stand to be part of the conversation and discuss that thing—and then presumably the reviewer’s general opinion of the work will come out naturally in the course of doing that. I think we’ve been pretty successful so far.

• Kenobi Review: The Smaller The Pond, The Bigger The Ripples
• Razor’s Edge Review: A New Author Delivers
• Maul: Lockdown Review: Not For The Faint Of Heart
• Honor Among Thieves – Blueprint for the future EU?
• A New Dawn shines a light on the future of Star Wars
• On Tarkin, and the Novel as Reference Material

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History and the EU

As a history major, former Eleven-ThirtyEight contributor Tyler Williams decided early on that his focus was going to be the influence of events and motifs from antiquity on the Star Wars universe—hence his personal editorial header “This Belongs in a Museum“. While this focus pervaded most of his work here, it found its primary expression in this loose three-part series subtitled “A Long Time Ago”. In it Tyler covered three major cultures of the GFFA—the Old Republic, the Tionese (roughly, the Greece to the Old Republic’s Rome), and the Mandalorians—and the ways that they were drawn from real life.

• Senatus Populusque Res Publica Galactica: A Long Time Ago, Part 1
• Beware of Tionese Bearing Gifts: A Long Time Ago, Part 2
• Mandalorians at the Gates: A Long Time Ago, Part 3

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Every six months or so, the staff of Eleven-ThirtyEight takes a well-deserved week-long break to rejoice in not having to write about Star Wars for a minute—also there’s some sort of pine tree festival going on; not sure what the deal is there. Because I, much like Mrs. Claus, am not at liberty to leave the premises, I use these skip weeks to run a feature called Second Look, where I revisit specific pieces from the past few months that deserve another moment in the spotlight.

I’m going to do it a little differently this time, though—after eighteen months of regular publishing, we’ve amassed a pretty damn huge back catalog; with more gems than I could ever revisit adequately. So this week I’m presenting the Eleven-ThirtyEight Gazetteer. See that “Ongoing Series” word cloud down there on the right? Think of this as a map of that territory—each weekday (yes, all five of them) I’ll list in detail a few of those recurring series, some finite and some still ongoing, talking a little about the goals of each series and what makes them interesting. Read More