Why I am cataloguing the whole saga
A launch note: what this site is, what it will never do, and how a reading log ended up with a filing system attached.
Dispatches
Guides, retrospectives, opinion
Written by the site. Sourced, dated, and never speculative.
- 5guides
- 6retrospectives
- 3opinion, labelled
- 2roundups
- 0rumours published
All 20 dispatches, newest first
Where to start with Star Wars books
Four honest doors into a shelf that has been growing since 1976, depending on which part of the saga you already like.
Canon and Legends, explained without the headache
What Lucasfilm actually announced on 25 April 2014, what stayed canon, and why a Legends book is still a real book.
How to read the Thrawn novels without losing the thread
Two continuities, one character, and a nine-book spine. A practical order for anyone starting from zero.
The High Republic: publication order versus chronological order
Three phases that travel backwards and then forwards again. Here is why publication order wins anyway.
How to read the X-Wing novels
Ten Legends books, two authors and one squadron: a practical route through the series that made Wedge Antilles a lead character.
The reference shelf, from the Essential Guides to the Visual Dictionaries
The least discussed corner of Star Wars publishing is also the one that taught everybody else how the galaxy is supposed to work.
Matthew Stover and the best-written book on the shelf
An argument, clearly labelled as one, for the Revenge of the Sith novelisation as the high-water mark of Star Wars prose.
Zahn and the pleasure of watching someone be good at their job
Competence as a genre: how one author’s house style became the default register of Star Wars fiction.
What a Star Wars novel can do that a Star Wars film cannot
Interiority, bureaucracy and time: three things prose gets for free and cinema has to pay for.
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye and the sequel that never was
Alan Dean Foster’s 1978 novel was commissioned as insurance against failure. It became the first brick of the Expanded Universe instead.
Before Heir to the Empire: the expanded universe nobody talks about
Marvel comics, Corporate Sector heists, three Lando novels and a radio drama — what Star Wars publishing looked like from 1977 to 1990.
What the 2014 Legends decision actually changed
Twelve years on, a precise accounting of what moved, what stayed in print, and what quietly came back.
The Bantam years and the Del Rey years
Two publishing regimes, two completely different ideas of what a Star Wars novel is for.
The Yuuzhan Vong War and the risk the Expanded Universe took
Nineteen novels, four years of publishing, and a decision to kill a character from the films in the opening book.
Heir to the Empire at thirty-five
A retrospective on the 1991 novel that turned a dormant film franchise into a publishing programme.
Legends is not a consolation prize
Twelve years after the reset, the case for reading the old Expanded Universe on its own terms rather than as a might-have-been.
What our scores mean, and what they cannot mean
A note on the ten-point scale, why it exists at all, and why it is the least interesting part of any review here.
Review roundup: where the shelf stands
A pass back over the reviews posted so far, and what they suggest about this site’s taste.
Review roundup: reading both Thrawns
Our reviews of the 1991 Legends novel and the 2017 canon novel, read against each other.
