This evening, in celebration of the release of Lucasfilm Publishing and Del Rey’s anthology short-story collection From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back, University Book Store held an author event over Zoom featuring contributing writers Mark Oshiro, Emily Skrutskie, C.B. Lee, Delilah S. Dawson, Amy Ratcliffe, and Michael Moreci, moderated by editor Tom Hoeler. In the bullet-point list below, I’ve enumerated some of the more interesting tidbits and factoids to come out of this discussion.
- Mark Oshiro’s story “Hunger” wanted to write about the Wampa and he wanted it to be weird, because he loved all the characters he didn’t expect to show up in the first From a Certain Point of View anthology. He then realized how hard it would be because the Wampa can’t speak and doesn’t know the actual terms for anything. But he thinks that’s the beauty of Star Wars– how strange the creatures are. He wanted to capture that while digging into one of the side characters who has appeared a lot in the expanded canon.
- Emily Skrutskie wanted to tell a story about Toryn Farr because the character meant a lot to her. She was drawn to her because she’s the only other woman besides Leia with a spoken line in the movie. “What would be most interesting for her to be feeling in this moment?”
- C.B. Lee introduces us to Chase Wilsorr, the man who walks between Han and Leia holding a box on Hoth. She felt like that moment was so funny and always wondered what that guy was thinking. She says her story speaks a lot to her as a relatable person who’s really awkward and weird. “Not everyone can be Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. Some of us have normal jobs to do.” Chase wants to be a hero, but destroys everything he touches.”
- Delilah S. Dawson wrote “She Will Keep Them Warm,” about the tauntaun who Han slices open to save Luke’s life. She said if she existed in the Star Wars universe, she would be a tauntaun midwife, helping the universe give birth. The story became a dare to make people cry.
- Amy Ratcliffe’s story is her first foray into Star Wars narrative storytelling, but definitely not her first published Star Wars writing. She wrote about a journalist who comes to Hoth to interview the “Heroes of the Rebellion.” When she wrote Women of the Galaxy, she wrote about things that already exist, but she was excited to come up with a name for her own character in the Star Wars universe. “It was cool to get to tell my own story in the world– exciting and intimidating.”
- Michael Moreci wrote about a hardscrabble group of rebel soldiers on Hoth who are sent out to battle the AT-ATs and buy time for the others escaping. He was attracted to that story because he likes creating new pockets of perspectives. He was building off what Alexander Freed had done in his Battlefront novel. “What is this rebellion made of when you’re just there to hopefully mitigate loss?” He says it was cool to look at the world through those characters’ eyes. “Everyone’s got hope until you’re in a frozen trench on Hoth.”
- The authors talked about why people make the choice to fight in the Rebel Alliance. “Hope is one of the central themes of Star Wars.” Ratcliffe says she plays a Star Wars role-playing game as a diplomat, and that informed her decision to make her character Corwi Selgrothe a propagandist and rebel recruiter. Skrutskie says she wanted to talk about how all the women in Echo Base are working together to inspire each other.
- Oshiro didn’t want to make the Wampa too human, but the real idea came from an anecdote from actor Mark Hamill, who thought it was kind of cruel for Luke to have chopped off the Wampa’s arm. He was also inspired by The Empire Strikes Back deleted scenes that showed Echo Base as the Wampa’s home. “Sometimes you can be the hero, but you don’t know that you’re actually harming someone else.”
- Dawson compares the tauntauns to her experience working with horses. “Some of the things we do to horses are not super kind.” She re-read the book Raptor Red to prepare for her story. “The story still acts on hope.”
- Lee says the rebels don’t have a lot of entertainment on Hoth except for whatever they have on their own personal datapads, and it becomes about the relationships you form with your fellow soldiers. “These ordinary people have lives. They have hopes and dreams and crushes.” She wanted to explore the day-to-day life of the soldiers in Echo Base.
- Skrutskie loved the synergy between all of the stories and how they overlap or connect, despite the authors not having coordinated with each other beforehand. Several of the stories have characters commenting on the will-they-or-won’t-they relationship between Han and Leia. Skrutskie grew up with fanfic and writing exercises about characters in the background, so this project wasn’t too much of a stretch for her.
- Moreci talked about finding the core of the franchise and then telling it through the author’s own perspective.
- Oshiro says he has been a Star Wars fan since he was a kid, so he felt a lot of pressure to get his story right. He rewatched the movie again to get everything in the right order. He likes writing extremely emotional characters, so he found a way to make the Wampa emotional. His agent compared “Hunger” to a Hoth gentrification story.
- “What do you think it is about Star Wars that makes people interested in the most minute characters?” Dawson says when you watch a big party scene, casual viewers don’t realize how every character on screen has been completely thought out and detailed in the design phase. “None of it is random.”
- Ratcliffe: “We have this big galaxy– there’s a lot of fighting. But the galaxy’s so much more than that. Those slice-of-life stories enrich the galaxy. I love sinking my teeth into that stuff. It just makes it that much more real.”
- Lee says it speaks to the energy and excitement of fans in the Star Wars community and the synergy of ideas, where something new and beautiful comes out of a property everyone loves.
- Ratcliffe says in rewatching the movie, the Battle of Hoth is surprisingly shorter than she realized. Oshiro talked about how as a kid he felt like that battle belonged at the end of the movie, but it was near the beginning, and he found that fascinating structurally.
- Oshiro struggled with the timeframe of the story, and originally wanted it to cover only two or three days. Lee thought about Chase’s emotional journey, and how she wanted to know who he is going back to flashbacks in developing Echo Base. “I lingered in some place and skipped over some places. Deciding where to start and where to end felt very organic.”
- Tom Hoeler talked about the criteria by which they decided the order the stories would fall in chronologically.
- The authors listed their favorite moments from the anthology, either from their own stories or other stories.
- They also discussed the process by which each of them came up with their own original Star Wars character names.
- Lastly, they all answered the question of which character they would want to write in From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi.
From a Certain Point of View: The Empire Strikes Back is available now wherever books are sold.