ForceCast Notes 08-14-09

Let me preface this by saying . . . I hate podcasts.  They have no place in my existence, and of course there's no simple CTRL-F to find the actual interesting stuff.

That said, the ForceCast has been getting interesting.  Crap.

Notes regarding the 08-14-09 episode.

54:00 - Karen Traviss talk begins.
60:00 - Exasperation over EU Completists who stand against Lucas.  Great stuff.
* Need to get full quote from Heir to the Empire flap for completeness, though it is overridden
66:00 - Noting quite correctly that the gauntlet has been thrown down.
68:00 - Henry Gilroy sends a solicited e-mail to ForceCast on the Traviss topic.
73:00 - The e-mail is finally read.

Below is my transcription of the reading of the e-mail to ForceCast.  Paragraphs and some punctuations are guesses on my part, but this is the statement as heard:

"Karen's books thrilled and entertained many fans and she is to be thanked for her hard work.  I think she's brought a lot of fans to Star Wars with her modern journalistic military style and I'm certain she'll be missed, although I have a feeling she'll be back.

It is unfortunate that she's moving on because [of] her opinion that canon is being changed. I guess the big problem is the assumption that her work is canon in the first place.  After working with George on The Clone Wars series I know there are elements of her work that are not in line with his vision of Star Wars, and in my mind only George Lucas’ Star Wars is canon. Everything else is Expanded Universe.  In my opinion, George's work on Star Wars, whether he created it before or after other writers, trumps all because he created Star Wars in the first place, period.  Karen admits as much in her blog.  If Karen’s own creative properties were to take off I have a feeling she would feel the same way about other people writing in her universe. She would want to be the last word.  

I put Karen's book[s] in perspective with the rest of the EU work, along with even my own Star Wars comics.  That doesn't make Karen's books any less exciting or enjoyable, because I believe that there's room for every great writer to tell Star Wars stories. 

The mythology has been around long enough that at some point it comes to belong to everyone.  That's the magic of storytelling.  I think of Star Wars as a great big mythology where writers can tell stories of all shapes and sizes.  I honestly hope writers will be writing Anakin Skywalker Clone Wars-era stories thirty years from now, and people will be reading these stories because they love the world and the characters.  They're not caught up in the timeline so much that it destroys their enjoyment of the story.  

To quote Randy Stradley [editor at Dark Horse] who said it best about continuity, "The more you define, the more you confine.""

(Hat tip to this person)