Star Wars in an Alternate Universe
Before Star Wars was Star Wars, a science fiction writer named Alan Dean Foster was hired to write a novelization of the movie.
You may know that that odd word, novelization, refers to something resembling a novel that is written before the movie is finished and therefore is based entirely on the script. You may also know that, in the making of any movie, things change, and the changes don’t always find their way into the script.
Foster was, and still is, a fine writer—of his own science fiction novels and a staggering number of SF novelizations—and he dutifully started writing, using only the script and his own fertile imagination. The result, described in a fascinating Esquire article by Ryan Britt, is a version of Star Wars that “seems to come from an alternate universe.”
In Foster’s universe, Chewbacca is described as “a great hairy mass,” a lightsaber is “a small post and a circular metal disk,” and Luke and Leia, who later turn out to be brother and sister, are romantically inclined. Ick.
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