Book #7 of 2024:
Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi edited by Tom Hoeler
Another batch of 40 stories to celebrate the 40th anniversary of a Star Wars movie, this one centered around the background characters and/or events of Episode VI, Return of the Jedi. Some of these entries expand upon the film’s minor roles, fleshing out elaborate backstories and rich inner lives for them, while others bring in figures from elsewhere in the franchise to populate the era, sometimes to ludicrous effect. (You’ve maybe wondered what The Rise of Skywalker‘s villain General Pryde was up to in the waning days of the Empire, but you likely didn’t need to see Obi-Wan’s four-armed diner friend Dexter Jettster from Attack of the Clones during the closing celebration / riot on Coruscant.) As in the previous titles in this sequence of retellings, there’s also a noticeable and welcome inclusion of queer representation, retroactively working to make the Original Trilogy a little more diverse.
It’s an uneven effort across the board, but there are some particularly fun pieces that are worth checking out, especially given that all of this is, apparently, canonical in Disney’s eyes. In “My Mouth Never Closes” by Charlie Jane Anders, for example, the Sarlacc is established as a vegetarian who keeps trying to tell the people of Tatooine to stop throwing living beings into its gullet — not an herbivorous species, just one particular entity that we now know would have preferred to abstain from meat — while “Then Fall, Sidious” by Olivie Blake presents the great Shakespearean-style soliloquy that runs through Emperor Palpatine’s mind during his final moments on the Death Star. Meanwhile Jabba’s torture droid gets a surprisingly-touching redemption arc after its brief time on-screen (“The Key to Remembering” by Olivia Chadha), and one of the barely-seen palace dancers is involved in a beautiful star-crossed love affair that’s only tangentially-connected to the rebel heroes and their struggles (“Dune Sea Songs of Salt and Moonlight” by Thea Guanzon).
Some of the other tales are a bit less striking and even repetitive, but as a milestone celebration, the book has plenty for fans to enjoy overall.
★★★☆☆
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