Is This New Dawn Just Like Yesterday's?

Not to sound cynical, but I get the sense that rather than there being a fresh mood at Del Rey, things are pretty much business as usual from the EU days, and that . . . as suspected and probably proper . . . the Story Group is handling the big-picture stuff and not engaged in any sort of line-editing.

I say that because I've read A New Dawn and the included preview of Star Wars: Tarkin, and saw some troubling things on two main fronts:

1.  I'm not sure anyone's doing any sort of technical oversight.  This is, of course, considered a minor province in the modern creative-arts world, but it would still be nice not to have everyone in Star Wars talking about subspace radio as we saw in A New Dawn.  I realize it snuck in to the EU more than a few times before, but we'd never heard of subspace in the Lucas canon.

I like Star Wars to be different from other sci-fi, and other sci-fi to be different than Star Wars.   I find things less interesting otherwise.   Stargate was a good show but I don't want Star Wars to suddenly feature ancients who had a system of gateways and small teams of Imperial garrison troops like IG-1 using them.  Similarly, I'm meh about the JJ Abrams Trek films and not all that big on some of the late TCW stuff like nanodroids.  I mean, how do you have a bulky 70's-looking nanodroid, anyway?  ;-)

For Star Wars to remain Star Wars, it needs to stay Star Wars.   Even by the time Star Wars came out, real fighter aircraft were dropping guns altogether in favor of missiles.  This oversight was later corrected, but suffice it to say that the default WW2 notion of trying to get in within visual range of your opposing fighter's tail was a somewhat anachronistic special circumstance even at the time.  And yet that's the look and feel he went for, and Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without it.

I think the same should apply in other areas.  Consider the work attributed to Jules Verne called In the Year 2889.   It's a short story, so feel free to go read it . . . I'll wait.

 . . .

Right, so if you noticed, there are more than a few things that might seem entirely silly to us now.   The concept of a mean lifespan of 52 years is presented as a wondrous achievement, and newspapers are said to have been replaced circa 2869 (meaning they existed until then, which at the moment sounds quite implausible).  They were replaced by people physically reading the news to them (and even then only that which is of interest) owing to the enormous development of telephony since 2789.   Solar power is presented as only a couple of centuries old, and a large planet a ways beyond Neptune has had its orbit located.  Moreover, space travel seems entirely absent from the picture, as determination of whether there's life on the moon seems still to be a question and, moreover, ascertaining if there's any on the back side is completely challenging!

Some of these bits are insightful insofar as being predictors of future developments beyond 1889, when the work was written, but much of it and more had already happened a mere 100 years later, not 1000.

So if we take this story as the canon of the 2889-verse, what are we to do with such absurdities?  We accept them, that's what.  If I were to want to write a sequel, I would think it appropriate to try to maintain the details rather than try to shoehorn in the Internet and iPhones and other 20th and 21st Century inventions and capabilities.

There is, of course, the contrary view wherein the universe should continue to evolve alongside newer developments in real technology.   For instance, Arthur C. Clarke had a choice when writing in the 2001 universe whether to keep or discard prior details like the Soviet Union or his 1960's-imagined future space travel history and details, and he consciously chose to dump them.   In the valediction of the fourth novel 3001: The Final Odyssey he says:

Obviously there is no way in which a series of four science fiction novels, written over a period of more than thirty years of the most breathtaking developments in technology (especially in space exploration) and politics could be mutually consistent.  As I wrote in the introduction to 2061, "Just as 2010: Odyssey Two was not a direct sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, so this book is not a linear sequel to 2010.  They must all be considered as variations on the same theme, involving many of the same characters and situations, but not necessarily happening in the same universe."  If you want a good analogy from another medium, listen to what Rachmaninoff and Andrew Lloyd Webber did to the same handful of notes by Paganini.
So this Final Odyssey has discarded many of the elements of its precursors, but developed others -- and I hope more important ones -- in much greater detail.  And if any readers of the earlier books feel disoriented by such transmutations, I hope I can dissuade them from sending me angry letters of denunciation by adapting one of the more endearing remarks of a certain U.S. President: "It's fiction, stupid!" 

Clarke's defensiveness notwithstanding, the simple fact is that he made the conscious choice to discard the details of the 2001-verse in favor of trying to keep it fresh.   I'd have bought them either way, but I would have rather preferred that he'd stuck to the universe he built rather than end up making multiple universes.

This brings us to:

2.  The Disney announcement was a chance to wipe the slate clean and then take the best parts of the EU and carry them forward provided they fit in with the inviolable Lucas canon.  Instead, in Tarkin, a lot of the background technical fluff is very EU and distinctly different from TCW . . . references to wake rotation, multiple class names like Munificent and such . . . in short, it feels like EU rather than feeling like the Lucas canon.   I never cared for the EU feel.   I liked the film novelizations, but the EU stuff always felt distinctly different, and frankly it felt gross.

The overall technological points were decent . . . fighters were used to try to attack and destroy a ground base rather than the ship a couple of hundred thousand kilometers away (thus making it out of range) . . . but in concert with #1 above, it seems it will only be a matter of time before we have total contradiction of one book author trying to rock EU stuff like Incredible Cross Sections-type nonsense while another explicitly contradicts it, instead keeping consistent with the Lucas canon.

We'll see how things go.

The big question is going to be what to do when some bit of new canon just totally craps on old canon, technologically speaking.   I mean, we already have this to some extent with the lack of visible chins and whatnot on stormtroopers (it's easier to animate the helmet as if it has a black covering that directly touches the neck), but that ship sailed during TCW as well, even though the storylines made it clear that the clone helmets weren't really sealed.

Eventually, though, assuming there is no real technical oversight, there will be some thing or things that just poop right on the old canon.  I feel sure hypermatter will rear its ugly head, trying to replace the nuclear fusion from multiple film novelizations, for instance.  And if presented as a new development in the sequel trilogy era then that's perfectly fine, but you know and I know that won't be what's done.

I'm not looking forward to it.

As far as I'm concerned, the default position ought to be that what's contrary to the inviolable Lucas canon is invalid.  But really, that's not likely to remain an enjoyable position simply because, as more and more self-referential EU new canon stuff is made, such a thing would be a point of divergence.

(That's my concern with the Luke's age issue from the last post, by the way . . . by taking a hardline Lucas canon approach, I am diverging from the EU-based position espoused by Chee.   While I don't mind that in concept, the fact is that Chee's position is the one most likely to be used and thus, over time, chronologic references could split off curiously.)

Nevertheless, the facts are what the facts are, and if the facts are that the new canon is contradictory, fans are either stuck with (1) accepting it without question, (2) making their own choices, or (3) going with the retcon reports from Chee and other folks about what's considered authoritative just like back in the EU days.  That's messy.

My hope would be that what I've seen are just some EU holdovers and eventually things will shake out, but the problem there is that the precedents are being set now.

Watch this space.