Category: Interviews

When the first teaser trailer for Rogue One was released last April, a whole bunch of people who would identify themselves as Star Wars fans on some level found themselves seeing for the first time evidence of a movie that was unequivocally connected to the franchise, yet had little in the way of familiar characters—no Rey or Finn, no Luke or Leia, no Anakin or Padmé. The only recognizable face in the whole thing was Mon Mothma, but she looked a lot younger than she was in Return of the Jedi—what was this?

What is this rogue one ? Is it EP 8? A vid game?

— 💐 (@salsapantz) April 7, 2016

I didn't like the trailer for rogue one 🙁 I love Star Wars what is this

— Hope (@cancermoonbabyy) April 11, 2016

What is this Star Wars Rogue One business I just saw in a commercial?!?!?!?!? I'm freaking out. Someone tell me what's going on.

— Lancifer (@lancifer) May 1, 2016

While I have no interest in teasing or belittling these people for not following the ins and outs of Lucasfilm operations the way a lot of us do, I have to admit I found this oddly fascinating—not just confusion about the story and how it related to the existing movies, but even about whether it was an authorized Lucasfilm production, or some kind of off-brand remake a la Never Say Never Again, the unofficial James Bond movie.

So last month I came up with a short questionnaire and passed it out to several people, with a lot of help from the trusty David Schwarz, that you might call casual fans. The first couple questions revolved around The Force Awakens, with the goal of establishing their current perspectives on the franchise and its “main” story. Once that was done, I then got into their thoughts on the Rogue One trailer and premise in more detail; those responses are reproduced below with my own thoughts and conclusions peppered throughout. Read More

Welcome to the second half of Worldbuilding with Jason Fry! In lieu of imminent Star Wars news, this interview serves any aspiring authors out there as a primer on the development of a fictional universe, based on the lessons Jason has learned from his ongoing series The Jupiter Pirates. On Friday, we began with the broadest of strokes, namely the fictional history of a future-set story and how you get from Point A to Point B (spoiler: start with B), and moved on to original characters, and how to approach the morality of your protagonist and supporting characters. Below we’ll continue that line of thought, then move on to superficial details (or are they?) like character names, and what to do when you’re tempted to retcon something. Enjoy!

While we’re discussing morality, I want to close out this section with something that’s been in the back of my head since I read the first book, Hunt for the Hydra. Even in a universe that’s billed as space fantasy—meaning not especially subject to realism—it’s always sort of uncomfortable for me to read a story set in a future that’s not explicitly dystopian but nevertheless seems to have regressed in social areas.  What I’m thinking of specifically is the crewers aboard the Shadow Comet; they come across very clearly as a lower class than the Hashoones, often if not always less educated and mannered, and in some cases are even the second or third or god-knows-what generation of their family to serve as gunners or cooks or what-have-you for the Hashoone family. There’s no indication that they’re particularly unhappy or underpaid, but nevertheless it’s very easy to get a whiff of “indentured servitude” here—and I can only imagine how much worse it is on other ships.

In an historically-set pirate story I’m sure this kind of thing would be very accurate, but I have to admit it’s sort of depressing to read about a society this far in the future that still has such gigantic class disparities, and it’s always in the back of my head when Tycho and Yana are ordering around people two or three times their age, or visiting slums on what seems like every moon they come across, or fending off press gangs in your short story “The Trouble With Crimps”. Am I overthinking this? Do you see it as a necessary evil for a pirate story that you worked backwards to justify, or worse, do you think the story is subtlely making the case that this is something we’ll never get past? Read More

The last time Jason Fry and I digitally sat down together, The Force Awakens was right around the corner and a deluge of Force Friday books had just swept away everybody’s mental real estate. Even in a two-part interview, it was a huge challenge to cover everything Jason was then involved with in the world of Star Wars without asking a hundred questions. So it was actually kind of a relief that this time the decks were nice and clear—we know he’ll have things coming out this fall in conjunction with Rogue One, but it’s a mite too soon for any real detail on those (hell, even any fake detail).

What, then, should we talk about? Well, he does have one thing coming out just around the corner (June 14th, to be precise), something with a long history of coming up in these interviews of ours—The Rise of Earth, the third book in his original series The Jupiter Pirates. Something that’s also come up a lot is Jason’s advice on designing a world like JP’s from scratch; how that process was informed by his Star Wars experiences, and vice-versa. I know a lot of us SW fans have dabbled in original fiction inspired by our fandom (some, like Bryan Young and Tricia Barr, have even released their own stories and gotten invited to do SW as a result), so I thought rather than do a straight interview entirely about a non-SW series, it would be fun to frame this as sort of a seminar in worldbuilding, covering everything from the first steps to the finishing details, and even post-publishing.

First up we’ll discuss the foundations of the Jupiter Pirates universe—why it is the way that it is—and how they inform the messages present in the work, both deliberate and happenstance. Then in the second part on Wednesday (we’ll be off for Memorial Day) we’ll look at smaller stuff like naming characters, and how to handle errors that come up once a book is committed to paper. Read More

Dedicated readers of this site may be familiar with my friend Pearlann Porter, the “casual Star Wars fan”. She never really got into the Expanded Universe, but we’ve had no shortage of long conversations about the background details of the films, which ultimately led to the ETE series The Expanded Universe Explains.

Having once felt strongly as George Lucas did—that The Story ended with Return of the Jedi and nothing was worth getting into beyond that, she nevertheless decided to give The Force Awakens a go. Since she’d been so tuned out to current Star Wars output for so long (I dragged her to The Clone Wars in theaters and she’s never forgiven me), she made the decision early on to completely ignore all news relating to Episode VII; not just serious spoilers, but even who the cast was. No posters, no trailers, not a single luxury—and with almost no exceptions, she stayed that way right up until December 18th.

As rare an experience as hers was going to be, I knew I wanted to document it here. As we sat in the theater moments before the movie started, I asked her a few questions about her feelings thus far, and then a few weeks later she answered a few more looking back on the whole ordeal. She’s also working on a full review that I hope to publish here in the near future, but for now, enjoy our discussions. If you note a different feel between the two halves of the interview, that’s because the first really was conducted in the theater, and transcribed later—while the second batch was via email.

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