After Disney purchased Lucasfilm back in 2012, the company de-canonized much of the ancillary Star Wars storytelling materials, classifying them as “Legends” content. Then Lucasfilm, under its new owner, began building up the current canon once again via new theatrical movies, animated television series, novels, comic books, video games, and most recently through live-action TV shows like The Mandalorian.
As you might guess whether you’re a Star Wars fan or not, it can be tough to keep track of all this stuff, which is still being generated on a nearly week-by-week basis. That’s why reference books like the new Star Wars: Timelines – From the Time Before the High Republic to the Fall of the First Order should be indispensable to both newcomers and tried-and-true aficionados alike.
Star Wars: Timelines, which was delayed from its originally announced Fall 2022 release to finally come out this week, is the brainchild of Lucasfilm Publishing in partnership with DK books, and was written by confirmed Star Wars experts Kristin Baver (Star Wars: 100 Objects), Jason Fry (Star Wars: Battles That Changed the Galaxy), Cole Horton (The Star Wars Book), Amy Richau (Star Wars: I Am Your Father), and Scripps News correspondent / first-time author Clayton Sandell. Together they’ve taken all the many volumes of canonical content generated by Lucasfilm over the past decade and have gone through the Herculean effort to organize it chronologically among George Lucas-created work like the first six Star Wars films and The Clone Wars animated series. When I flipped through this book for the first time all I could think was how daunting of a task this must have been for the five writers, and the more time I’ve spent with it the more impressive the encyclopedic finished product has become.
As the extended title implies, Timelines starts with the “Early History” of the Star Wars chronology and works its way through the High Republic era, the “Fall of the Jedi” (read: the prequel era), the “Reign of the Empire,” the “Age of Rebellion” (the hallowed Original Trilogy), the New Republic period, and the “Rise of the First Order” (the time during which the sequels take place). Each section is exhaustively broken down into individual bullet points that details precisely when just about every major– and oftentimes minor– event in the ongoing Star Wars saga took place, all relative to the Battle of Yavin as seen in the original Star Wars film, also known as Episode IV – A New Hope. If that sounds confusing to you, I can’t promise that this book will make too much more sense, but I do think if one were to really take their time both consuming the actual material itself and cross-referencing it with this volume, they’d have a much better understanding of how these galaxy-spanning occurrences took place and related to each other.
The amount of information on display here is awe-inspiring, and I do think this book will prove invaluable to fans at just about every level, but that doesn’t mean Star Wars: Timelines is without its flaws. My biggest criticism of this book is that, because it’s written largely from an in-universe perspective, readers are not given any hints as to where they might track down these specific events if they wanted to experience them for themselves. Sure, there are images scattered throughout that provide hints as to whether the referenced circumstances happened within live-action televisual media, a comic book or, say, a video game, but as to which ones, fans are left to simply guess or track down the information elsewhere. The second critique comes as an unfortunate by-product of just having this vast amount of material to work with– online resources like Wookieepedia have already started amassing steadily growing lists of all the inconsistencies and continuity errors that are present within the pages of Timelines. Now, these are just a couple dozen errors among thousands of comprehensively researched entries, but it still makes it feel like this book will be slightly less reliable on the whole than looking up the needed statistics on the internet. Plus, Star Wars: Timelines already feels at least a little out of date, considering it includes the events depicted in last year’s Obi-Wan Kenobi live-action series, but not Star Wars: Andor.
Still, despite those minor imperfections, Star Wars: Timelines remains a monumental, incredibly engrossing reference book, and I can only imagine younger fans sitting for hours upon hours absorbing each and every little detail, in-between enjoying the actual content. That’s why this hardcover tome would make a terrific gift… and likely why it was originally planned for release just before Christmas last year. And as for its scattered shortcomings, I can only see Timelines improving in further editions as the various crowdsourced corrections are implemented and the ever-expanding storytelling tapestry that is Star Wars continues to flourish.
Star Wars: Timelines is available now wherever books are sold.