Five Years of Words About Books and Thrawn
I am older than I was 5 years ago. I suppose most of us are. It’s strange to me to remember that there was a time before Words About Books. Believe it or not, working on this has become a part of my daily routine. Literally every day I am either recording, editing, reading, or writing something for this project. It’s the sort of project you can’t do unless you truly enjoy it. Despite the curmudgeonly role I sometimes play, I do truly enjoy it. It is the most productive (and, sadly, successful) creative outlet I have ever had. So it’s weird that it all started with a book that I genuinely hated about a blue man named Thrawn.
Heir to the Empire is the novel that kicked off the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Hundreds of books later it might be surprising to look back on just how uncertain a project this was. George Lucas was skeptical that adults would be interested in Star Wars novels. Even after Lucas gave his blessing (with a few restrictions), multiple publishers passed on the idea. We discuss in those early episodes that much of what we now take for granted about the Star Wars universe was still uncharted territory. There was no such thing as a “Sith”, for example. No one knew what this new project would look like. The authors and the publisher were both feeling around in the dark and making mistakes. These early attempts were rough. In that sense, maybe it was the perfect choice for a first episode of Words About Books.
Most of what was tried did not work. The craftsmanship was lacking. The content was meandering and all-over-the-place. There were some worthwhile elements created that would go on to become tentpoles of the project, but most of the project would be reimagined. Which project am I even talking about?
The first season of Words About Books is terrible. Honestly, Words About Books is still pretty terrible, but that first year was rough. We had an idea for what this project would be. It has changed significantly, but we did establish a few key elements of the podcast that have stood the test of time. One of those elements is Thrawn.
At the time this blog releases we will have done 16 episodes of Words About Books on Thrawn. That works out to more than three Thrawn episodes per year of Words About Books. This was not intentional. At first, it was a way for Nate to torture me. Then we had to keep going with this bizarre series from the early expanded universe. We’d already invested so much time, we had to know how it would end. We got through all of the original Thrawn material. We didn’t have to keep going. Neither of us particularly enjoyed the direction Star Wars had gone in, but at this point, Thrawn had started to feel like a part of Words About Books. Thrawn was our boy, and where once that statement would have sounded like a joke to us, we slowly realized that we weren’t joking any more.
Long before I started Words About Books, I was a huge Star Wars Expanded Universe fan. I hopped on the books at The Legacy of the Force arc, and I went back and read the New Jedi Order arc. I was in the middle of reading the Fate of the Jedi arc when Disney acquired the franchise and announced that they were removing the material I had been reading from the canon. I didn’t see much point in continuing my reading at that point. The plotlines and characters that I became attached to and was interested in seeing continued were going to be rewritten. Once the new movies came out, it was clear that the new Expanded Universe material would be going in an entirely different direction, a direction that I did not particularly care for.
It was in this context that Nate asked if I would be interested in doing an episode on the new Thrawn material. This was an interesting proposition. I was upset at the way the Expanded Universe had been treated by Disney and I wasn’t particularly interested in their reboot. At the same time, Thrawn was one of those characters from the Expanded Universe that I didn’t like. I had written him off as an early pre-prequel creation that was a necessary but messy evolutionary bump on the way to the stuff I liked. But there was reason to think a Thrawn reboot would be better. There were Timothy Zahn books in the later series that I quite liked, and I was open to the idea that, with the benefit of hindsight and decades more experience, Zahn could do more with Thrawn.
If you’ve listened to the episodes, you know that I was more than pleasantly surprised. While I do have some sentimental feelings toward the character because of the role he played in launching my favorite personal project, I do not have any issues picking apart things that I like. So when I tell you, that I genuinely think that the new Thrawn books are good, I hope that carries some weight. I still have yet to read anything in the Disney canon that is not related to Thrawn, but because of Thrawn, I would consider it.
I gave Heir to the Empire a 1 out of 5 star review on Goodreads. I gave the first book of the most recent Thrawn trilogy, Chaos Rising, 5 out of 5 stars. There’s a bit of a curve. It’s obviously not high art, but it’s good. It’s a solid novel. Timothy Zahn has taken this original character and built him into something that has converted one of his biggest detractors into a fan. I unironically love Thrawn. I unironically love this redemption arc.
If I’m honest, it gives me hope. It gives me hope that maybe we can do something similar with Words About Books. That maybe we can take it from a crappy, amateur, pseudo-intellectual, douche-philosophizing rant fest and turn it into something with genuine value. I like to think we’ve gotten better. I wouldn’t give us 5-stars yet, but a few more generous reviewers than I have done just that. Dare I say that I’m proud? I’m certainly not proud of everything we’ve done. There were several necessary but messy evolutionary steps on the path, and there are probably a few more in our future. But you know what else is in our future? More Thrawn. We started this podcast with Thrawn. We will end this podcast with Thrawn. And Thrawn isn’t going anywhere.
