“Tie-in fiction” is a slightly insulting phrase and it is also accurate, so I use it. These books exist because films exist. The interesting question is not whether that makes them lesser — it makes them different — but what specifically prose can do here that a two-hour film cannot, and why the good ones keep going back to the same three things.
One: interiority
Film shows you a face. Prose can tell you what is behind it, and Star Wars is a saga stuffed with characters whose inner lives the camera has to imply. This is the whole reason Matthew Stover’s 2005 novelisation of Revenge of the Sith is worth reading after you have seen the film: the plot is identical and the experience is not, because you are inside the heads of people whose decisions look arbitrary from the outside.
It is also why a novel can take a character who exists on screen as an idea and make them a person. Claudia Gray’s Master & Apprentice does this for Qui-Gon Jinn, whose film role is essentially “the mentor who is right and then dies”.
Two: bureaucracy
Nobody has ever left a cinema wishing there had been more procurement. But committee meetings, supply lines, promotion boards and election law are where power actually lives, and prose can dramatise them because prose can be interesting about talking. Zahn’s Imperial navy, Gray’s Senate in Bloodline (Del Rey, 3 May 2016) — these are books about institutions, and they work precisely because a page of political manoeuvring costs nothing to stage.
Three: time
A film has to compress. A novel can let twenty years pass in a paragraph and then spend forty pages on an afternoon. Claudia Gray’s Lost Stars (Disney–Lucasfilm Press, 4 September 2015) follows two friends from childhood across the entire span of the original trilogy and out the other side, which is a shape no single film could hold.
The thing prose cannot do
Spectacle, obviously — but that is not really the limitation. The real one is authority. A film is the thing itself; a novel about the same events is a reading of it. Even the best of these books is arguing with a text that outranks it, and every reader knows that while they read. It is why the strongest tie-in novels tend to work in the gaps: before the film, beside it, twenty years after it, in a corridor the camera never entered.
Which is why the shelf is worth having
The novels that last are not the ones that retell. They are the ones that go and find a question the films left lying around — what were the Jedi actually for, what does a new government do on its first Tuesday, what happens to the people who were on the losing side — and then take four hundred pages to answer it properly.
