Editorial note: not a Lucasfilm publishing era. Lucasfilm’s chart has no bucket for the post-Return of the Jedi Legends novels, so this site made one. Everything below is Star Wars Legends and none of it is current canon.
By the time the Legends continuity reached its fortieth year after Endor it had a problem most franchises never get: too much history. The heroes of the films were grandparents. Their children were the protagonists. And the question the last decade of Legends publishing kept asking was whether the Skywalker–Solo family was a blessing on the galaxy or a recurring disaster it kept failing to learn from.
Legacy of the Force
Nine novels published between 2006 and 2008 by Aaron Allston, Karen Traviss and Troy Denning in rotation, set 40–41 ABY, opening with Betrayal. A Corellian secession crisis becomes a second galactic civil war, and Jacen Solo — hero of the Yuuzhan Vong War, tortured and remade by it — decides that the galaxy needs one person willing to do whatever is necessary. He takes the name Darth Caedus. The series is explicit that it is retelling Anakin Skywalker's fall with the serial numbers filed off, and it is at its best when it lets that comparison hurt: Jacen's reasoning is better than Anakin's, and it takes him to the same place.
It kills Mara Jade Skywalker, which the fanbase has still not forgiven, and it ends with Jaina Solo hunting and killing her own twin brother.
Fate of the Jedi
Nine more, 2009–2012, set 43–44 ABY, opening with Outcast. Luke Skywalker is exiled from Coruscant and told to go find out what went wrong with his nephew, which is both a political manoeuvre against him and a genuinely good question. Meanwhile Jedi Knights begin going psychotic, a Sith tribe marooned on Kesh for five thousand years finally reaches the wider galaxy, and behind both sits Abeloth — an entity old enough to predate the distinction between light and dark. The series is baggier than Legacy of the Force and its cosmology is divisive, but it is the only late-Legends work that seriously tries to expand what the Force is.
The far future
One more branch is worth knowing about. Dark Horse's Legacy comics (John Ostrander and Jan Duursema, 2006–2010) jump forward to roughly 130 ABY, where a Sith empire rules the galaxy openly, the Jedi are hunted again, and the last Skywalker is a bounty hunter and spice addict who wants nothing to do with any of it. It is the most interesting thing anyone ever did with the far future of this setting, and it is stranded — the continuity it belonged to closed before it could be resolved.
How it ended
Troy Denning's Crucible (Del Rey, July 2013) was the last novel in the Legends post-Return of the Jedi timeline. Two more Legends novels followed before the reset — Joe Schreiber's Maul: Lockdown (Del Rey, January 2014) and James S. A. Corey's Honor Among Thieves (Del Rey, March 2014) — both set earlier in the timeline. In April 2014 Lucasfilm announced that everything outside the films and The Clone Wars would be rebranded Star Wars Legends and would no longer constrain new stories. Nothing was unpublished; it simply stopped being binding.
Read this era knowing it is a closed system. That is not a defect. It is thirty-eight years of continuous storytelling with a real ending, which is more than most franchises manage — and it sits alongside, not underneath, the canon future told in Rise of the First Order.
