In 2014, the literary world of Star Wars was turned upside down. After the Disney acquisition of Lucasfilm, none of the previous Star Wars books would be considered canon, and instead would be relegated to the status of “Legends.” Like Palpatine dissolving the senate offscreen, the Expanded Universe or “EU” of Star Wars was suddenly obliterated. But, then again, George Lucas never fully considered the EU to be true canon. Rather, he let the writers of those pre-2014 books and comics take all sorts of liberties. Indeed, contrary to what fans might assume about Lucas, he generally had a hands-off and pro-writer approach to the tie-in media of Star Wars, going all the way back to giving Alan Dean Foster a solid royalty deal for his ghost-written adaptation of the first movie, published in 1976.
But the possible zenith of EU-era Star Wars books may have been Matthew Stover’s ambitious and genre-connecting 2005 novelization of the film Revenge of the Sith. And now, 20 years after this book was published — one month before the film was in theaters — Stover’s Revenge of the Sith novelization is back, and has been given a major upgrade.
