New/Old Story: The Guns of Kelrodo-Ai
Revisiting a Star Wars Insider story reprinted in a new fiction collection
Titan Comics just released Star Wars Insider: Fiction Collection Vol. 1, which collects new canon and Legends short stories from the magazine. My contribution is 2012’s “The Guns of Kelrodo-Ai,” which I wrote as a tie-in with The Essential Guide to Warfare.
I wrote four Insider stories in all. “The Guns of Kelrodo-Ai” was first, followed by the clone tale “Speaking Silently” (2013), “Hondo Ohnaka’s Not-So-Big Score” (2013), and 2015’s “Last Call at the Zero Angle.” For those who care about such labels, the first three are Legends while the last is new canon. “Zero Angle” was originally proposed as the kickoff for a serial about Imperial pilots, as a mirror of sorts to the Blade Squadron tales about Alliance fliers. That was a fun idea that never came to pass, which happens in publishing as well as in life.
The thing all Insider stories have in common is they’re very short — I think the longest one I wrote was 3,000 words. At 3,000 words you’re stripping a story down to the bare essentials, which means discarding a lot of stylistic detail and minimizing plot mechanics. With so few words, you need to dive into the core of the story immediately, and you’ve got time for at most one reversal or complication.
It’s a formula with no margin for error. Done well, you get a story that’s lean and mean; done poorly, you get one that feels undercooked. (I think I was three out of four for getting the recipe right.) I found the challenge interesting, though it ensured punishing revisions and inevitable regrets.
I dug into my email this morning to re-read “Kelrodo-Ai,” see if I could remember what I was up to and assess how I did. Digging reminded me of something I’d forgotten — this was my only chance to work with David Pomerico, then with Random House and now an ace editor with Harper Voyager. David’s critique and edits were invaluable; if I didn’t thank him enough then, I do so now.
“Kelrodo-Ai” grew from two seeds, and I think there’s a lesson there. For me, a lone idea can inform world-building but isn’t enough foundation for a story. To build a story, I need two ideas as starting points, and the story emerges from bumping those ideas into each other and seeing where my mind goes.
The first seed was a character — Shea Hublin, a cameo character from the old Russ Manning newspaper strips known as “the Rebel Destroyer” and encountered by Princess Leia while she was disguised as a servant girl for the Tarkin family. I’d always been intrigued by Hublin and filled out his backstory for Warfare, making him a decorated Imperial pilot who’d become a HoloNet star — he’s the Red Baron, basically.
The second seed was a plot mechanic — a mission in which the heroes needed to fly slow instead of fast. That was an inversion of the usual fighter-pilot trope and an intriguing trial for the characters, throwing them into an unfamiliar situation that would scramble their instincts and training — there’s the bumping together of ideas.
If my two elements generate some good narrative friction, I usually find a third element emerges from the storytelling and writing. For “Kelrodo-Ai” that third piece was a little interesting — Hublin was the protagonist, but I wanted readers who were paying attention to question his heroism. He believes the anti-alien bias of the Empire, and his freeing worlds from Separatist remnants could be just as accurately described as colonizing and conquering them for Tarkin and Palpatine.
I wanted that third element to be subtle. Hublin’s kinder and more open-minded than the other Imperials, noting all beings love their children and pointing out that his Kelrodoan valet, Fara, was a warrior chieftain and so surely has something to contribute to the Empire. But at the same time, he cheerfully tells the galaxy that his mother shouldn’t be worried about him bringing an alien girl home for dinner. Because Hublin takes Fara seriously, he learns from him and figures out how to complete his mission. But Fara remains his valet, and at the end of the story he’s taken away from his homeworld involuntarily. It’s an indefensible relationship, which I showed only through Hublin’s eyes as a reminder that Fara can’t safely speak for himself. I trusted the reader to say, “Hey, wait a minute” and leave the story thinking that the galaxy needed fewer heroes like Shea Hublin.
To my relief it’s a pretty good story — the Imperials’ slow retreat generates the tension I wanted, and I think I handled Hublin in an interesting way, though I do wish I’d written a less ambiguous moment for Fara that shined a harsher light on his relationship with Hublin. The story was also a reminder that once I scratch an itch it’s hard to stop: There are morally murky “good Imperials” in Servants of the Empire, I told fighter-pilot tales in “Zero Angle” and my two From a Certain Point of View stories, and class and power are quiet but important themes in Jupiter Pirates.
Anyway, that’s a lot of words about a very short story! There will be a second volume of Insider fiction, and I believe I have a story in that one too. I’ll keep my lip zipped about which one for now, but let’s do this again in the fall!