Every Star Wars book you can buy carries one of two labels, and the label is the single most useful piece of metadata on the shelf. Here is the whole thing, in as few words as it can honestly be said.
What happened
On 25 April 2014, Lucasfilm published a statement announcing that the Expanded Universe — the decades of licensed novels, comics, games and reference books — would no longer be treated as part of the official continuity. The six episodic films and The Clone Wars were named as the authoritative storyline. Everything else was rebranded Star Wars Legends and, crucially, kept in print.
Why
The stated reason was room. A sequel trilogy was in production, and the post-Return of the Jedi portion of the Expanded Universe was already densely written — decades of published plot covering exactly the years the new films wanted to occupy. Rather than either contradict it or be bound by it, Lucasfilm detached it.
At the same time the company formalised the Lucasfilm Story Group, whose job is to keep films, television and publishing consistent with one another going forward. That group is the reason a novel published today can safely reference a television episode that has not aired yet in your viewing order.
What the labels mean in practice
- Canon means the story is part of the single official continuity maintained since 2014. The first novel published under it was John Jackson Miller’s A New Dawn (Del Rey, 2 September 2014), a prequel to Star Wars Rebels.
- Legends means the story was published before the reset — or, in a handful of cases, after it under the Legends banner — and is not binding on anything. It is not “deleted”, it is not “apocryphal”, and it is not lower quality. Heir to the Empire is a Legends book.
The part that confuses people
Legends is a one-way door for stories, but not for ideas. Lucasfilm was explicit that creators could still draw on Legends material, and they have. The clearest example is Thrawn himself: a character created for a 1991 Legends novel, reintroduced into current canon in the third season of Star Wars Rebels, announced at Star Wars Celebration Europe in July 2016, and subsequently rebuilt in prose by his original author in Thrawn (Del Rey, 2017).
So a Legends character can become a canon character. The Legends novels he appeared in do not come with him. That is the whole rule, and it explains almost every apparent contradiction you will run into.
Does it change how you should read?
Only in one way: do not read the two shelves as one continuous story, because they will contradict each other on who lives, who marries whom and who runs the galaxy after Endor. Read each shelf on its own terms. Del Rey has been reissuing selected Legends titles in the Essential Legends Collection since June 2021, which is a reasonable signal about how permanent “out of continuity” actually is in commercial terms.
Every book on this site is tagged canon or Legends on its card and on its page.
