Star Wars Legends

Long before the galaxy was redrawn, its storytellers kept the war going. Star Wars Legends is the vast shelf of novels that carried the galaxy far, far away beyond the cinema screen — a decades-long continuation, gathered under the "Legends" banner in 2014 when Lucasfilm cleared the board for new films. What the movies leave unshown, these books walk on foot: what happens after the second Death Star falls, and what stirred in the dark ages millennia before it was ever built. The sweep runs across eras. There is the ancient Old Republic, where Sith empires wake and vanish; the age of Clone Wars and the rising Empire; and above all the long generation after Return of the Jedi, where Luke, Leia, and Han grow older, marry, rule, and bury their dead. Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy anchors the whole enterprise, and from it the lines branch — the alien-invasion arc of The New Jedi Order, the slow civil-war fall of Legacy of the Force, the reckoning of Fate of the Jedi, the younger adventures of Young Jedi Knights, the pulp-brisk Han Solo Adventures set before A New Hope, John Jackson Miller's Lost Tribe of the Sith reaching back thousands of years. Zahn, Kevin J. Anderson, Troy Denning, Rebecca Moesta, and dozens more built it, and the seams of so many hands show honestly. This is a future the films never filmed — a timeline set gently aside rather than erased, still holding people who never reached the screen: the smuggler-chief Talon Karrde, the assassin-turned-Jedi Mara Jade, and Grand Admiral Thrawn, the tactician who reads a people by studying its art. Begin with Heir to the Empire, the 1991 novel that resurrected the saga in print; its sequels Dark Force Rising and The Last Command close the gate behind you. Then choose your era and go.