Crystal Power!

Mystic crystal revelations and the mind's true liberation:

Released on StarWars.com is an unfinished arc with critical ramifications for technological understanding of the technology of the Death Star.

1. http://www.starwars.com/video/star-wars-the-clone-wars-story-reel-a-death-on-utapau
2. http://www.starwars.com/video/star-wars-the-clone-wars-story-reel-in-search-of-the-crystal
3. http://www.starwars.com/video/star-wars-the-clone-wars-story-reel-crystal-crisis
4. http://www.starwars.com/video/star-wars-the-clone-wars-story-reel-the-big-bang

TCW's End and the Worrisome iPhoneization of Star Wars

The below was an unfinished thought from when the cancellation of The Clone Wars was announced.  Now that Rebels is coming on soon and Episode VII well into production, in addition to my recent point that I like my sci-fi universes to be different from one another, I thought it good to dredge it up and finish it.

                                  

"TCW's end good for Star Wars?  Are you nuts?!?"

Bear with me for a minute, here.

I hate to even type the words given how much I like the show, but in some ways Star Wars: The Clone Wars was venturing into some waters that it didn't need to steer toward, perhaps even watering down the Star Wars brand in the process.  And so perhaps the end of the show is not the worst thing that could happen for Star Wars as a whole.

Now, don't take that the wrong way.   I absolutely adore The Clone Wars.   It simultaneously charted new territory in the canon Star Wars universe while also reining in a lot of the Star Wars bunk out there, thus bringing our understanding of that universe closer to the vision of Lucas, its creator.  

Consider that Star Wars constituted about 13 hours of material with the six films.  With the 98 minute feature film and, as of the end of the fifth season, 108 episodes averaging 22 minutes each, TCW fans got to enjoy an additional 41.2 hours of the Star Wars of George Lucas . . . TCW alone is thus more than three times more than all the films.  Within that span were remarkable revelations, such as can be found in the absolutely amazing (and still perplexing) Force-Wielders arc on Mortis, the survival of Maul, and a plethora of details on every aspect of the prosecution of the Clone Wars from both sides.

That said, what makes Star Wars unique is not simply lightsabers, but the whole feel of the universe.  You don't get Star Wars by adding lightsabers and the Force to Stargate.  Beyond merely being "lived-in", there were certain aesthetics. Just as Star Trek generally went out of its way to keep the "Starfleet-clean" look, so too did Star Wars have certain things in certain ways.  There was a certain clunkiness to designs, even clunky for the 70's and early 80's.

Case in point, the scanning crew guys who were ordered aboard the Falcon weren't carrying little scanners on their wrists or little flip-open Motorola Razr tricorders, they had a big huge box of stuff that took two of them to maneuver.  Han's portable scanner wasn't a pocket-size device, but instead a large boxy affair with enormous antennae.  And you knew it wasn't as good as R2... otherwise why would they drag him along for scanning even on unsuitable terrain?

It gave you a sense and feel of the universe to have this commonality of production design.  You can readily imagine other unseen parts of the universe just as surely as you can imagine the unseen parts of a steampunk universe or a Flash Gordon movie universe.  And sure, the real world doesn't work this way... we don't all drive around in overgrown iPhones (though the Scion box things come close).  But that's Hollywood logic and it works for Hollywood universes.

However, we were starting to see TCW drift away from that.  And the result would've been that Star Wars would've become a much more mundane ho-hum franchise, rather than keeping its unique character.

To be sure, there were outliers, such as the odd comlink blood test thing from The Phantom Menace based on a lady's razor, or even sleek designs from Naboo or Umbara.  But those last ones were unique 'alien' exceptions rather than the rule.

The most notable examples of TCW drifting away from other Star Wars works come from the nanodroid arc . . . over and above the nanodroids themselves (and really, who would've ever assumed there was any nanotechnology in Star Wars prior to that point?), there was the handheld nanodroid scanner, looking for all the world like it came straight out of Andrew Probert's pre-production designs for Star Trek: The Next Generation:

Sure, we can dismiss it as being a single-purpose device compared to Han's undoubtedly-more-capable apparatus, but that's still somewhat unnerving.  Then there was the unfortunate way that wrist comlinks suddenly started projecting holograms, making the big hand-sized circular things from earlier seasons seem silly.

Indeed, there were other examples of holography that were also peculiar, such as the holographic disguises and whatnot.  They didn't work especially well, sure, but if you have that sort of thing why would Jango and Bane ever have relied on shapeshifters?   Of course, the transformation of Obi-Wan into a criminal thug is similarly odd in that respect.

The general gist of what I'm going for here is simply to point out that some production designers seem to feel that they must bring a modern (or modern sci-fi) sensibility to universes that already came equipped with their own sensibility.   In other words, just because we are doing things a certain way now in modern technology (or just because other universes have spiffy looking sonic screwdriver gizmos) doesn't mean it is a good idea to be parroted.  

To my mind, then, it's best to follow the Star Wars precedents rather than try to "iPhoneize" Star Wars.  

                                   

So that was the post.  I mostly just cleaned it up and added the last paragraph.   

I don't have any reason to suspect that Ep7 or Rebels is going to be naughty in the context above, but given some of the leanings toward the end of TCW I would not be surprised.

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.

The Age of the Twins in Star Wars

In the early scenes of the TESB novel, Luke is said to be "barely" 23 (23.0 or so, in decimal form), with the note that he'd been a farmboy on Tatooine "three years ago". We might then be tempted to conclude that Luke was thus about 20.0 or thereabouts in ANH, and therefore ANH is 20.0 years after the end of RoTS. And indeed, in the ANH novel we hear that "Luke Skywalker was twice the age of the ten-year-old vaporator" he was working on. This was reflected in publisher copy on the back of the ANH novel from May 1977 says "Luke Skywalker was a twenty-year-old who lived and worked on his uncle's farm on the remote planet of Tatooine".

But, alas, it's not quite so simple. See, there's the fact that he's also eighteen in a script for ANH.

Thus, a common maneuver is to compromise by having ANH as being 19 years after RotS, but this compromise is a little sketchy. If Luke is 23.0 in TESB, and was a farmboy even, say, 3.9 years prior, then he would've been 19.1 years old. If he were actually 18.9 in the ANH script, then we're really only talking a couple of months difference . . . but that's still not very satisfying, since we've basically just stretched the "three years" beyond belief and still didn't get things right.

We could, of course, simply conclude that the ANH script would override the ANH and TESB novelizations even though the latter came later, but that's not the end of the story, either. At this point it behooves us to get more than a little particular with our sources.

See, above it is mentioned that the "eighteen years" comes from "a script for ANH". That it says "a script" instead of "the script" is no mistake, and refers to the fact that there were several drafts, and Luke's age changed several times. Indeed, depending on which 1976 "Revised Fourth Draft" you look at online, Luke may be either eighteen or twenty. Case in point, the January 1976 revision here has him at eighteen, and this carried over when the January 1976 script was published in 1979 in The Art of Star Wars as "the script" (indeed, I myself have used it as "the script").

However, here and here we have him in revised fourth drafts at twenty years old. What gives? Well, these works are referring to the March 15 1976 revision of the fourth draft, and that is what was used during filming (albeit still with tweaking from Lucas). Indeed, Starwarz.com has a "Connoisseur’s Guide to the Scripts of the Star Wars Saga" which goes over the script variations, with special note of the fact that the March version, and not the January one, was the final script before cameras rolled. Lucas obviously made some changes on-set, but the March 15 script is the most valid version for our purposes.

Thus, it seems that the idea of Luke being eighteen must be considered somewhat fallacious, as it comes from an earlier script version (however frequently it might be referenced). And, as such, the compromise of 19 years between RotS and ANH must also be considered unnecessary . . . 20 years separate Luke's birth and his departure from Tatooine to meet his destiny.