Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker

• 1. Introduction

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  Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker arrived in bookstores in November 1976, months before the film it retold ever reached a theater. The name printed on the cover was George Lucas. The person who actually wrote every word of it was someone else entirely. Readers met Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and an unnamed Emperor on the page before most of the world ever saw them projected on a screen. Why would a director let another writer's manuscript carry his name alone? And why does a novel adapted straight from his own screenplay end up telling parts of the story so differently, right down to how one of its most familiar characters finally dies?

• 2. Development

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  Alan Dean Foster had already followed George Lucas's work through THX 1138 and American Graffiti before he took on the job of turning Lucas's screenplay into a novel. Working from that screenplay, Foster fleshed out backstory the film never had time for: the setting's sense of time and place, its physics, its planets, species, languages, history, and technology.

  Asked whether it bothered him to see Lucas credited with the novelization, Foster replied: "Not at all. It was George's story idea. I was merely expanding upon it. Not having my name on the cover didn't bother me in the least. It would be akin to a contractor demanding to have his name on a Frank Lloyd Wright house."

  Lucas, for his part, never hid the arrangement. In his introduction to later editions of the book, he openly noted that Foster had ghostwritten it. That quiet arrangement held right up until the manuscript reached printers on two different continents, each with its own plans for the cover.

• 3. Publishing History

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  Ballantine Books put the paperback on shelves in the United States on the 12th of November, 1976, six months before the film's theatrical release. Star Wars conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie painted the cover, commissioned by Ballantine executive Judy Lynn Del Rey while he was still doing visualization work for Lucas's production. It showed Luke Skywalker holding a lightsaber alongside Chewbacca, C-3PO, and R2-D2, all standing in front of an enlarged image of Darth Vader's head. The back cover promised, "Soon to be a spectacular motion picture from Twentieth Century Fox."

  In the United Kingdom, Sphere Books published its own edition, with cover art by John Berkey. Sphere reportedly paid $225,000 for the British publishing rights.

  By February 1977, three months before the film even opened, the book had already sold through its initial print run of 500,000 copies. Over the following three months, Ballantine sold another 3.5 million. That runaway success fed some of the public appetite that greeted the film itself. Some later printings added sixteen pages of full color photographs from the movie, and the book itself was eventually retitled Star Wars: A New Hope, reflecting the subtitle Lucas added to the film in 1981. None of those sales figures hint at just how much the finished story actually diverged from the film audiences would soon watch.

• 4. A Different Backstory

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  The novelization opens not with the familiar words "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." but with a shorter line: "Another galaxy, another time." In place of the film's opening crawl, the book substitutes a prologue titled "From the First Saga: Journal of the Whills," echoing the name Lucas gave his very first story outline for the saga.

  That prologue contains the earliest reference anywhere to the Emperor's name: Palpatine. His portrayal there sits awkwardly next to how he later appears as a Sith Master in The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, and the prequel trilogy.

  Lucas later said the first film was written during the era of Richard Nixon, meant to explore, in his words, how a democracy turns itself over to a dictator, not how a dictator takes over a democracy. The book's own introduction spells out that transformation directly: "Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears."

  That prologue's dictator was only the first of the book's departures from the finished film. Even Ben Kenobi's own home would turn out different on the page.

• 5. Small Departures

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  The word "droid" never appears as an official term in the novelization. Characters instead say "mechanical," and "droid" is implied to be slang, a contraction of "android" spelled with an apostrophe in front of it. The word "rebel" is also never capitalized in the book, unlike the film's opening crawl, where it names the Rebel Alliance.

  Darth Vader is called a Sith Lord repeatedly in the novelization and its merchandising tie-ins, though the film never uses the term. It does surface once, in a scene filmed but cut from the movie, where General Taggi describes Vader as a Sith Lord during the Death Star meeting. Audiences didn't hear the term on screen until 1999, in Episode I: The Phantom Menace.

  Jabba the Hutt, in the book's version of a scene later restored for the Special Edition, is a fat biped with a "shaggy skull" and "jowels" that shake with his head, scarred from a fierce reputation in combat. The screenplay instead described him with "eyes on stalks," and Return of the Jedi eventually made him a giant slug creature.

  Obi-Wan Kenobi lives in a cave rather than a hut in the book, and he smokes a pipe. Luke's landspeeder has an enclosed cockpit instead of the open one seen in the film. Imperial stormtroopers board the Tantive IV by cutting through the ceiling rather than blasting through a door.

  In the Mos Eisley cantina, Obi-Wan defends Luke against three aliens rather than two, cutting one of them in half. Chewbacca is described with bright, yellow eyes. Admiral Motti, the officer Vader chokes in the film's conference room, doesn't appear in the book at all; a heavily scarred character named Romodi takes his place. The stormtroopers guarding the Millennium Falcon use the call sign THX-1138, a nod to Lucas's own directorial debut, rather than the film's TK-421.

  Several scenes filmed but left out of the finished movie survive only in the book, most notably ones with Luke and his friends at Tosche Station on Tatooine. Han also mentions a Corellian friend named Tocneppil, which is Lippincot spelled backwards, a nod to Charles Lippincott, the mastermind behind the Star Wars marketing campaign. Obi-Wan makes a single passing reference to a duck, prompting Luke to ask, "What's a duck?" Ducklike birds later swim on Naboo in The Phantom Menace, and the phrase "sitting ducks" turns up as an echo of the same joke.

  The book's changes run all the way to the final battle, where Luke's own call sign switches from Red Five to something else entirely.

• 6. A Different Ending

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  Grand Moff Tarkin is present during Princess Leia's torture in the novelization, a scene the film never confirms he attends. The destruction of Alderaan itself is never described on the page, and Obi-Wan never senses it happening, unlike his reaction in the film.

  Obi-Wan Kenobi's death plays out differently too. Vader actually defeats him in their lightsaber duel in the book, rather than Kenobi choosing to be struck down as a diversion so Luke and the others can escape, as happens in the film.

  Luke flies with Blue Squadron in the novelization's Death Star assault, making his call sign "Blue Five" instead of the film's "Red Five." Blue Leader, the book's counterpart to Red Leader, makes two runs down the trench toward the exhaust port, where the film shows him shot down after only one attempt. The order of deaths changes as well. In the book, Biggs is killed first, and Wedge then retreats after a malfunction caused by enemy fire, reversing the film's sequence of Wedge being damaged by Vader and Biggs being killed afterward.

  At the novel's close, Leia gives medals not only to Han Solo and Luke but also to Chewbacca, straining to reach up and place it on him. That ceremony marks the end of the book's own story, though Alan Dean Foster wasn't finished with the galaxy just yet.

• 7. Sequels

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  Alan Dean Foster wrote Splinter of the Mind's Eye after the film's massive success, a novel George Lucas had originally commissioned as a low-budget sequel in case Star Wars failed to do well. Published in 1978, a year after the movie's release, it became the first full-length original novel in the Star Wars expanded universe. The next official novelization arrived in 1980, when Donald F. Glut adapted The Empire Strikes Back for print.