My Star Wars Experience: Splinter of the Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster (1978)

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well! I'm back with the next installment of "My Star Wars Experience". Today I'm looking at the very first original novel that was published for Star Wars in 1978. It's the beginning of the Expanded Universe, now known as Legends (he Marvel Comics run from 1977 to 1986 was ignored until 2006 when Lumiya was introduced as the main antagonist of the first two books of the Legacy of the Force series). Let's get into it.

Written by Alan Dean Foster, Splinter of the Mind's Eye was written with the intention of turning it into a low budget sequel if Star Wars ended up being a moderate success, and a sequel novel if Star Wars ended up failing. That's why the book is set on a foggy planet, as that would be easy to film if the book had been turned into a low budget movie sequel that reused costumes and props from Star Wars. Luckily the movie was a huge success and the money made at the box office enabled George Lucas to make The Empire Strikes Back, which came out in 1980. Despite this book being iconic in terms of starting the novel section of the Star Wars Expanded Universe, many people overlook this book today, thinking it's weird. So, let's go back to 1978, when this book came out, and see where Star Wars was within its universe.  

Leia wasn't Luke's sister, Darth Vader wasn't Luke's father, Emperor Palpatine hadn't been introduced yet except as a name in the novelization of Star Wars, nor was he a Sith Lord named Darth Sidious he was just a dictator, the Clone Wars was just some conflict that happened many years before the events shown in Star Wars, Threepio wasn't built by Darth Vader when he was a boy named Anakin Skywalker, and there was no New Republic or First Order or High Republic or anything like that. Lando didn't even exist yet. Luke and Leia were friends, and possible love interests for each other, Threepio and Artoo were simply Droids built by a corporation however many years earlier, and Han Solo owned the Millennium Falcon with Chewbacca.

In the real world of 1978, there was no Star Wars franchise. It was just a movie called Star Wars and its sequel, then known as Star Wars II, was in development. George Lucas had twelve movies planned at this time, telling different stories, directed by different people, and following different characters in each trilogy. He would later scale that back to nine movies, and then eventually just six. There was also no TV shows, TV movies, streaming services or even home video. Though something I'll be talking about next week was about to air on television to the dismay of everyone in the world. I'll get into that next week though.

Like with the movie it was a book sequel to, Splinter of the Mind's Eye is a unique piece of Star Wars media. It's not only a book of the '70s, but, like the movie, it's also a very pulpy Science Fiction story. The characters's motives aren't super deep. Unlike Star Wars today, this more pulpy style of storytelling was what Star Wars was in the '70s. You can see it in the movie, comics, and this novel.

A lot of people find the Luke and Leia romance to be weird because of what we know about them today. However, as I mentioned earlier, they WEREN'T brother and sister at the time this book was published. Darth Vader wasn't their father yet either. Actually, only three months after this book was published, George Lucas wrote the second draft of Star Wars II, possibly titled Star Wars II: The Empire Strikes Back at this point, and this is the draft where he combined the characters of Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader into one character named Darth Vader. So Splinter of the Mind's Eye was the last novel written before the change from Anakin and Darth to Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader.

I like this novel. It's not my favourite Star Wars novel, but I like it because it's such an interesting artifact of Star Wars history. It shows what a sequel movie could've been had Star Wars not been as successful as it ended up being in 1977. 

That's it for me for now. However, I'll be back shortly for a look at the 1994 reprint of this book for My 90s Experience. Mainly because I want to talk about the introduction written by George Lucas for that edition, shortly before he began writing The Phantom Menace. Later.