The Hand of Thrawn--by Melissa J. Perenson

	When noted science fiction author Timothy Zahn began writing Star Wars: Heir to the Empire-the first book in a triolgy-little did he know their potential impact.  "No one was sure what to expect from these books at all," recalls Zahn.
	Largely credited as the catalyst for the rejuvenation of interest in Star Wars, the book became a chart-topping success upon it's release in 1991, reaching number one on the New York Times bestseller list.  The second and thrid books-Dark Force Rising and The Last Command-were equally as successful; together, there are over 5 million copies of the trilogy in print.  And what began simply as a trilogy designed to revisit the heros of Star Wars five years after the events in Return of the Jedi has evolved into something greater: a whole world of dozens of novels and short story collections detailing new Star Wars adventures.
	Originally, Zahn's chosen path did not focus on writing as a career.  Zahn got his master's degree in physics at the University of Illinois in Champaign.  He was on his way to his doctorate when his advisor died suddenly of a heart attack.  Until then, writing was something that Zahn had only dabbled in.  "I just kept it as a hobby," he says nonchalantly, noting tht he wrote his first story in 1975.  "Most of the stories I started never got finished."
	But it wasn't long before the tide turned.  His first sale was to Analog in 1978, and the story was published in Analog's September 1979 issue.  By coincidence, Zahn received a letter informing him that his second story had sold to Analog on the same day he found out about his advisor's passing.  "It was an omen," he says.  "I found out I liked writing short fiction, because, as he says, "that was what was paying the rent.  You get faster turn around there than a novel."  He began his first novel, Blackcollar, in 1981, stopping now and then to churn out another short story.  Over the decade, Zahn went on to write nine more novels, including three books in his Cobra series, a second book in the Blackcollar series, and Coming of Age, Spinneret, Warhorse, Deadman Switch, and Triplet.  He also wrote Conqueror's Pride, Conqueror's Legend, and Conqueror's Legacy.
	"The most fun is working out the plot twists and developing how the story will go," says Zahn, who works out of his home office in Oregon and produces 1,000 to 5,000 words a day of copy.  "I try to have somewhat convoluted plots, twists here and there, but I also try to people the story with folks I'd like to know."
	It was the strength and style of the Hugo Award-winning author's work that caught the attention of the editors at Bantam Spectra in 1989.  A year after proposing to Lucasfilm that the Star Wars saga be continued in a three book series, Bantam was given the green light to proceed.  "Lucy Wilson, Lucasfilm Licensing's Director of Publishing read the writing samples and decided that my writing felt the most like Star Wars," recalls Zahn as if it were yesterday. "The kicker to the story is that I had just moved over to Bantam about six weeks earlier.  Obviously, I wouldn't have been even considered if I hadn't been one of their authors already."
	The offer came as a suprise to Zahn.  "i'd been a fan of Star Wars since it first came out," he says.  "But I would never have considered the possibility that I might actually get to write in that universe.  I told my agent I'd let him know the next day, and then wandered around the house in a state of mild panic.  By the next morning, though, I had enough of a story that I thought I could probably get a three book saga out of it."
	Because it took Bantam and Lucasfilm about five months to work out their contract, Zahn had plenty of time to fine tune his ideas.  "I took the entire month of November to work out a basic outline for the three books," remembers Zahn.  Suprisingly, Lucasfilm placed few constraints on Zahn.  "It was much more a matter of guvung me the freedom to do what I wanted to do, and then letting me know if I hit a boundary someplace," he says.  "The only two rules they gave me at the beginning was that I was to start three to five years after Jedi, and that I could use anybody who had not been killed in the movies, which left alot of open ground."
	Zahn had planned on calling the Noghri "Siths," previously alluded to Darth Vader's title, Dark Lord of the Sith.  But that was one of those things that Lucasfilm objected to.  "At that point, I don't think they'd figured out what the Siths were, and they didn't want me disturbing that," recalls Zahn.  "The insane clone Joruus C'baoth was originally going to be an insane clone of Obi-Wan Kenobi.  However, that was also decided to be a little too far out from what [Lucasfilm] wanted.  But most of what I wanted they let me do."  Also off limits-for reasons now perfectly clear-was any discussion of the Clone Wars and Anakin Skuwalker's fall to the dark side of the Force.  
	One of the characters that Zahn introduced was Grand Admiral Thrawn.  The character was created to bridge the gap between Jedi and Heir to the Empire.  "Part of my assumption was that five years later they're still fighting," explains Zahn.  "Even with the centralized government that the Emperor tried to make having failed, the Empire was not going to simply collapse."
	Another original character that Zahn debuted was Mara Jade, a smuggler who was once known as The Emperpor's Hand.  "I liked her alot.  She's a fun character," says Zahn.  Regarding the intended nature of the relationship between Mara Jade and Luke, Zahn continues, "I left the realtionship between Luke and Mara exactly where I thought it should be.  They had just gone through a lot together, she figured out why she was hating him, and now we started a kind of a truce.  If there had been only three books, I probably would hace done some kind of epilogue tying other things together."
	Because of the preparation time, the first book in the trilogy took only five months to write; the second and third books each took close to a year to complete.  "The first thing that occurred to me when I got off the phone with my agent was the idea of the ysalamiri creatures that could reduce the level of Force to a point where Hedi could not access it," says Zahn enthusiastically.  "That was the first idea I had and the story just evolved from there."
	In researching the Star Wars universe, Zahn relied on three sources: the films, the role-playing materials from Wast End Games, and Lucasfilm's style sheets.  "Basically, the ultimate canon is the mocies, as far as I'm concerned," the author says.  He didn't find out about the West End materials until he was almost two months into Heir to the Empire.  "That was about the only thing aside form the movies that Lucasfilm really wanted me to coordinate with.  West End had done a lot of useful background, which kept me from having to reinvent the wheel all the time."
	Unbeknownst to Bantam, Zahn's hidden asset was the extent of his familiarity with the Star wars trilogy.  "When my son was three or four, we discovered that if he's seen a movie five or six times, we could audio tape the movie and play those on a long car trip.  This way, he could visualize what was happening and be nice and quiet for an hour and a half.  So, along with seeing all the Star Wars movies many times, I'd also heard them an extra six times each.  I could hear how the characters talked, how they phreased things-without the distraction of the visuals.  I personally think that helped me capture the voices of han, Luke and Leia."
	Capturing the true voice of the characters was one of Zahn's few concerns going into the Star Wars project.  "Every universe-Star Wars, Star Trek, The x-Files-has it's own feel to it.  If you can't cpture that feeling, at least as well as you can in a book, it's going to feel flat."
	Now, after years away from Star Wars, Zahn returns to the sandbox with a new duology, titled Star Wars: The Hand of Thrawn.  Part one, Specter of the Past was releases this fall, while part two Vision of the Future, will be released next fall.
	There's a certain sense of poetic symmetry to the fact that Zahn is writing what Bantam has scheduled as the final two books set in the era of the New Republix.  "It had been mentioned somewhat casually a couple of times that it would be nice if I could close off the series of books when this series came to an end because of the licensing [contract], he says "I thought about it for a year or two before I finally decided that I was interested in going back to the Star Wars universe, and that I had a story that would fit the universe."
	Coming back to the Star Wars unicerse was fun, says Zahn, "because Star Wars is just a fun place to write.  Or was also intimidating," he adds, "because I now had to pick my way through a field other people had been digging in, as it were, and try not to duplicate what other writers had done in their stories.  Also, I knew there was going to be some kind of expectation from people who likes my first three books that these two measure up or surpass those.  That's always hard for a writer to do."
	Zahn began working onthe new books two yeats ago.  At first, ir was supposed to be a single book for a fall 1997 release.  "It started getting long, though, remembers Zahn.  "About the time I realized I was in trouble, Lucas pushed the moies back another year, to 1999.  "Upon hearing the news, Zahn immediately called his editor at Bantam and offered to split the book into two parts, so that the books would conclude the Star Wars series as planned.
	Set a decade after Heir to the Empire, this stroy is filled with twists.  "The Empire is almost collapsed entirely," begins Zahn, describing the main plot.  "Bur as the threat has diminished, internal problems have appeared in the New Republic.  A lot of little brush wats and old conflicts that have been buried below the surface for years are starting to reappear between ruval systems and races and species.  Then a bit of information is found in the debris from the Emperor's storehouse, implicating the Bothans in an attempted genocide several decades earlier, against another species.  This revelation starts polarizing the members of the New Republic.  Everyone cries for justice for this tweeible act, but no one can agree on exactly what that justice should consist of."
	For this book, Leia has taken a leace of absence from the presidency of the New Rebulic but remains a senator.  "I actually tried to get her completely  out of the presidenct entirely, and Lucasfilm said she had to be on a leave of absence.  I don't understand this," he says puzzled, "but apparently in the Young Jedi Knights books she's back as president and they feel that means she was always president."  Han and Leia's three children only make a brief appearance in this story.
	Similarly, Han is working as a liaison to the independent shippers.  "Neither of them is doing an awful lot that's really official," says Zahn.  "Much of what they're doing winds up being semi-official, where they're the people on the spot, so they have to do it, which is actually what they mostly did during the movies, too."  
	While you're waiting for the sequel to Specter of the Past, you can still enjoy Zahn's Star Wars efforts: concurrent with Specter's release, Zahn's prose will appear in a collection of short stories, titled Tales of the Empire.  The author's contributions incluse a short story and two parts of a four-part story he co-wrote with Michael A. Stackpole.
	At a time when he's closing this chapter in the Star Wars timeline, Zahn recognized the depth of the universe to which he's contributed so much.  "Obviously, the mythic aspects there," he says.  "With the Star Wats saga, the people in it, you hear resonance in the human psyche.  Ir's a legend, a myth, a herois epic-on a large canvas."


*this interview was copied verbatim from Star Wars Insider Issue 36.  I had absolutely nothing to do with it except typing in in Notepad.