{"id":43627,"date":"2018-06-04T03:00:07","date_gmt":"2018-06-04T07:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=43627"},"modified":"2020-07-06T10:37:50","modified_gmt":"2020-07-06T14:37:50","slug":"l-neil-smith-on-his-time-in-the-salt-mines-of-the-star-wars-universe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/06\/04\/l-neil-smith-on-his-time-in-the-salt-mines-of-the-star-wars-universe\/","title":{"rendered":"L. Neil Smith on his time in the salt mines of the Star Wars<\/em> universe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Around the time I picked up my first L. Neil Smith novel (Tom Paine Maru<\/em>), I saw his name on a couple of Star Wars<\/em> tie-in novels. I didn’t buy them, as I’ve rarely found tie-in work to be worth much unless you’re a huge fan of the larger franchise. By the time I’d gotten around to reading Tom Paine Maru<\/em> and rushed back to buy all the rest of Smith’s available works, the Star Wars<\/em> books had gone. I haven’t seen any of them in my travels since then. In the latest Libertarian Enterprise<\/em>, Smith explains how the books came to be<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In 1983, I was chosen (or condemned \u2014 it depends how you look at these things), by Del Rey Books, a division of Random House, and Lucasfilm Ltd., to write three little \u201dexploitation\u201d novels about the Star Wars<\/em> character Lando Calrissian, specifically because I wasn\u2019t Brian Daley, author of three similar books about another Star Wars<\/em> character, Han Solo.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u201cLando Calrissian, meet Londo Mollari. Lando, Londo. Londo, Lando \u2026 \u201d<\/p>\n

The late Brian Daley was one of the kindest, gentlest, most generous men I\u2019ve ever known, a colleague to be proud of, and it was bewildering trying to figure out why the movie company had told the book publisher, when arranging for the second set of books, \u201cAnybody but Brian Daley!\u201d<\/p>\n

Brian loved Millennium Falcon<\/em>. He was like a little kid when he got invited to go out to Hollywood and was most excited that he got to clamber around inside the set. But it turned out that he had accidentally and unknowingly allowed himself to become associated with the losing faction in some kind of petty internal corporate feud and found himself rendered persona non grata<\/em>.<\/p>\n

My editor at Del Rey obligingly brought my name up. I was extremely reluctant to write in anybody else\u2019s corpus, but I needed the money very badly \u2014 around that time I\u2019d spent two weeks with nothing in the house to eat but a bag of shredded coconut. When requested, my editor sent LucasFilm a \u201csample\u201d of my work \u2014 a copy of my highly-political libertarian first novel, The Probability Broach<\/em>. I\u2019d love to have been there, a fly on the wall, when they saw it. Remember Beaker, from Muppet Labs, with a shock of bright red hair, a big red nose, great big eyes, whimpering and terrified of every known phenomenon? It must have been a lot like that.<\/p>\n

In any case, LucasFilm freaked out, and, hypocritically asked that Brian be brought back into the project as my co-author, apparently to temper my politically incorrect passions. My editor told me later that he blew up dramatically, and told them \u201cThese are authors<\/em> we\u2019re dealing with here, not Hollywood writers, they don\u2019t write by committee!\u201d They backed down eventually, but I had to promise I would write no politics in the books \u2014 which, given the attitude they were displaying, I interpreted to mean as much politics as I could possibly squeeze in before they squealed.<\/p>\n

I was told to write about Lando but leave all other Star Wars<\/em> characters and other things alone (I did end up using mynocks<\/em>). I told them I would have the spaceship, or I would give the project a miss. Brian started calling us \u201cthe Brotherhood of the Falcon\u201d. My editor advised me to politely decline any invitations to come to Hollywood, and stay out of company politics, which I gladly did. I invented a number of animals for the books but was told that only animals made up by George Lucas could be capitalized.<\/p>\n

In the beginning, they gave me sixteen weeks to write three books which I regarded as tough, but doable. \u201cBut wait! We have to approve your outlines first!\u201d And by the time they finished \u2014 altering my arch-villain Rokur Gepta to something other<\/em> than a \u201cDark Lord of Sith\u201d and making other insignificant changes, I had nine weeks left. For two and a half months, I got up each morning and wrote. My cute little fiancee came home for lunch and then I wrote. We had supper and I wrote. Then I collapsed and started the whole thing over the next day. Forget anything resembling a real life. This was just before word processors came along, and I did the whole thing in one draft, as Robert Heinlein advised, on a Sperry-Remington knock-off of an IBM Selectric II. It took a long, long time to recover my health.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around the time I picked up my first L. Neil Smith novel (Tom Paine Maru), I saw his name on a couple of Star Wars tie-in novels. I didn’t buy them, as I’ve rarely found tie-in work to be worth much unless you’re a huge fan of the larger franchise. By the time I’d gotten […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,831],"tags":[1382,193,134],"class_list":["post-43627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-business","tag-lneilsmith","tag-starwars","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-blF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43627"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43627\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58438,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43627\/revisions\/58438"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}