Splinter of the Mind's Eye

• 1. Introduction

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  Splinter of the Mind's Eye arrived in bookstores in 1978 as something that had never existed before: a full-length Star Wars novel with an original storyline. But the story behind its creation is almost stranger than the book itself. Alan Dean Foster wrote it as an insurance policy. If Star Wars had flopped at the box office, Hollywood would have needed a cheap, filmable follow-up fast. Foster's novel was that contingency plan, drafted with jungle sets, reusable props, and a cast stripped down to just Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. Han Solo was written out entirely because Harrison Ford had not yet signed on for any sequels. What kind of story do you tell when budget constraints are your first creative brief? And what happens when the film you were backing up becomes one of the biggest box office events in history? Those questions sit at the heart of this book's strange, accidental legacy.

• 2. A Contingency Plan

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  In 1976, Alan Dean Foster was contracted to ghostwrite the novelization of Star Wars. He was given draft scripts, rough footage, and production paintings to work from. Attached to that contract was a second obligation: a standalone novel that could serve as the basis for a low-budget sequel if the original film underperformed. The constraints shaping that second book were almost entirely financial. Foster chose a misty jungle planet as his setting partly because jungle environments would be cheaper to shoot than elaborate space vistas. The story had to allow for the reuse of props already built for the original production. A space dogfight that Foster originally included was cut at George Lucas's direct request because aerial effects sequences would have been expensive. Luke and Leia crash on the swampy world of Mimban as a direct consequence of those cost calculations. Even the two Yuzzem creatures who appear in the story were conceived as characters a film could execute without heavy spending.

• 3. The Kaiburr Crystal

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  At the center of the novel's plot is an object called the Kaiburr crystal, which focuses and amplifies a user's connection to the Force. An old woman named Halla carries a splinter of it when she first encounters Luke and Leia in a bar near an Imperial energy mine on Mimban. She identifies Luke as strong with the Force and strikes a deal: she will help the two escape the planet in exchange for help tracking down the whole crystal. The crystal's resting place is the Temple of Pomojema, and getting there requires crossing swampy wilderness, surviving a giant worm-like creature called a wandrella, navigating an underground lake on lily pads, and defeating the Coway tribe's champion fighter in single combat. When Luke finally holds the full crystal at the temple, it carries enough power to heal injuries. The book's title itself takes its name from that fragment Halla carries, the splinter that sets everything in motion.

• 4. Vader at the Temple

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  Darth Vader enters the story late, but his arrival reshapes the novel's final act entirely. Imperial Captain-Supervisor Grammel had been the primary antagonist through most of the book, incarcerating Luke and Leia early on and confiscating the crystal shard from them. Vader travels to Mimban personally, takes command of the Imperial forces, and executes Grammel when those forces are repelled by the Coway tribe. At the Temple of Pomojema, Vader announces that he has killed Luke's companions Hin and Kee before engaging the heroes directly. In a notable reversal, it is Leia who first takes up Luke's lightsaber and fights Vader, sustaining burns before Luke enters the duel. Luke eventually slices off Vader's arm and the villain falls into a pit. The novel closes on an ambiguous note: Luke senses that this is not the end of Vader. That instinct would, of course, prove correct.

• 5. Bestseller and Legacy

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  By the time Splinter of the Mind's Eye reached bookstores, Star Wars had already broken box office records. The planned film adaptation was set aside in favor of what became The Empire Strikes Back. The novel still rode the wave of the film's first-year success and became a bestseller. In 1994 it was reprinted under the title Classic Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind's Eye, and the new edition placed the story two years after the original film, making it one year prior to The Empire Strikes Back in the timeline. Alongside the Star Wars newspaper comic strip and Marvel's 1977 comic series, the novel is considered one of the founding texts of what became the Star Wars Expanded Universe. In 2008, the Los Angeles Times named it one of the most essential works of that Expanded Universe. After The Walt Disney Company acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, most of the licensed novels and comics produced since 1977 were reclassified as Legends and declared non-canon in April 2014.

• 6. Mimban Lives On

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  Despite its non-canon status, the planet Mimban has traveled further than almost any other element of the novel. Concept art for Rogue One in 2016 used Mimban as a name for a city that eventually developed into the location called Jedha in the finished film, itself another source of kyber crystals. Mimban then appeared as an actual planet in Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018. Marvel Comics' The Rise of Kylo Ren took the connection further still, sending Ben Solo to Mimban where he learns of something called the Mindsplinter, which the source text notes is possibly the Kaiburr crystal under a different name. Terry Austin and Chris Sprouse adapted the original novel as a graphic novel published by Dark Horse Comics in 1996, and that adaptation incorporated characters from The Empire Strikes Back who were absent from Foster's text. A contingency plan drafted in 1976 for a film that might never have needed a sequel left a footprint that Star Wars storytellers are still tracing decades later.