The Age of Rebellion is four years long and contains three films, which makes it the densest era in Star Wars and, paradoxically, one of the harder ones to publish into. The gaps are small, the stakes are fixed, and everyone already knows how it ends. What the good books in this era do is widen it sideways — the same four years seen from a freighter crew, a stormtrooper garrison, an Alliance intelligence desk.
Year zero
The Battle of Yavin is the zero point of the galactic dating system used throughout this site. Everything before it is BBY, everything after is ABY, and the convention is a publishing artefact rather than an in-universe one — no character in the films says “BBY.” It is worth knowing because it silently encodes the assumption that the destruction of the first Death Star is the most important event in galactic history, which is a strange thing for a calendar to assert and a useful one to notice.
The Rebellion as an institution
In canon the Alliance is about two years old when A New Hope opens, which reframes almost everything. It is not a mature insurgency. It is a coalition of cells whose founding declaration is barely dry, held together by Mon Mothma's political credibility and the fact that the Empire keeps proving her right. Alderaan is destroyed in part to break that coalition, and instead does the opposite.
The Force comes back
The era's other real subject is the return of a religion. Luke Skywalker begins it as a farm boy who has never met a Jedi and ends it as the only trained one in the galaxy, taught by two old men in a total of a few weeks of screen time. Every later era — canon and Legends alike — is arguing about whether that was enough.
Canon and Legends
The films are shared ground, so the divergence here is in the gaps. Legends filled them with a very large shelf: Splinter of the Mind's Eye (Alan Dean Foster, 1978) was the first Star Wars spin-off novel ever published, and Shadows of the Empire (Steve Perry, Bantam Spectra, 1996) was an entire multimedia event dropped between the second and third films. Canon has filled the same gaps with its own material, and neither shelf contradicts the films — only each other.
The era ends at Endor with the Emperor dead, the second Death Star destroyed, and — in canon — a scorched-earth contingency called Operation: Cinder already executing. The Empire does not end at Endor in either continuity. See The New Republic.
