Notes: Edge of the Galaxy Pt. 1
Why hasn't someone written 'Friday Night Lights' ... in SPAAAAAAAACE?
WARNING: These notes will completely spoil Servants of the Empire: Edge of the Galaxy. If you haven’t read it, pick up a copy here.
In late 2013 Lucasfilm came to me with a question: did I want to write a quartet of young-adult novels tying in with Star Wars Rebels?
That was easy to answer: OH HELL YEAH.
The protagonist would be Zare Leonis, an Imperial Academy cadet with a supporting role in one episode, followed by a cameo or two. I inherited the basics of Zare’s backstory: he was an immigrant to Lothal who wanted to serve the Empire. His older sister became the star cadet at the Imperial Academy but then vanished under mysterious circumstances, prompting Zare to follow her in hopes of finding out what happened to her.
I’d be retelling one episode of the show: “Breaking Ranks,” in which Zare crosses paths with a disguised Ezra Bridger. But the details of Zare’s background and the outcome of his quest to find his sister would be mine to shape. That was exciting, and I got to work.
To open the series, I wanted to show Zare before he entered the Academy. What made him the kid we’d meet in “Breaking Ranks” and set him upon his course?
I found myself thinking about Lothal as a setting, and how the Empire’s arrival would reshape a sleepy agricultural world. Some Lothalites would welcome the influx of people and credits, while others would resent the new arrivals and the changes they brought. Zare would be one of the newcomers, part of a family that genuinely wanted the galaxy to be a better place and thought the Empire was making that happen. How would someone with that background react to Lothal, and deal with the creeping realization that the Empire was actually making the galaxy far worse?
Those two ideas – Lothal as a frontier farm world and Zare as a newcomer – ping-ponged around in my head until the story I wanted to tell coalesced. And that story surprised me a little: I wanted to try a sports novel set in the galaxy far, far away.
Lothal made me think of Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, and wonder about the Star Wars equivalent of a Texas town crazy for high-school football. I liked the idea of Zare as a city kid who’d have to win the respect of a bunch of farm boys – that gave me a chance to explore class distinctions. And I thought it might be interesting to take often-flippant comparisons of sports and war and see what I could extract from them.
Those ideas formed the core of the book that would become Edge of the Galaxy. What follows are section-by-section notes on the book, storytelling and continuity.
Prologue: Summer
This short section had three jobs: introduce us to the Leonises and the Imperial officials who run Lothal; establish Zare as in the shadow of his confident, accomplished sister Dhara; and give us the “before” in a series that’s all about the “after.”
Dhara’s party takes place on a perfect night on Lothal, one that probably ended with Tepha and Leo Leonis congratulating themselves on having raised good kids, helping the people of the galaxy, and getting some rewards and recognition for that service. They have no idea this is the high-water mark – everything is about to start a slow slide into hell. I knew before I began writing that I wanted this scene and the final scene of Edge of the Galaxy to be bookends, showing how much had changed in a year.
This scene shows us the class divisions on Lothal. (If you’ve read The Jupiter Pirates you know I’m really curious about class.) The Leonises are literally above the rest of the planet, dining among the gleaming new construction of Capital City. Ames Bunkle, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to fit in – he’s a kid used to working with his hands, and probably from Lothal. He knows that matters – Zare’s sister will get fast-tracked as officer material, while he’ll be a stormtrooper.
Lieutenant Roddance (whom we’ll see more of in the series) reads Ames’s background and snubs him. Zare, to his credit, does not – he encourages Ames to go meet the governor alongside Dhara, since they’re both new Academy cadets. That brief exchange teaches us something about Lothal, but also about Roddance and Zare.
My working title for the book was Lessons on Lothal. Yes, that’s a terrible name, but I always knew it would get replaced.
In my treatment – written after reading an early version of the “Breaking Ranks” script – Zare’s sister was named Jolie. The name Dhara was supplied later by the Rebels creative team.
Note that Dhara seems to know where Zare is before she looks at him. We’ll see this several times in the book, though we won’t understand what it means until Rebel in the Ranks.
This was Governor Pryce’s first Star Wars appearance, though she had been mentioned in a couple of HoloNet News features before Rebels’ debut.
I saw Auntie Nags as a character I could turn to for comic relief, since I knew I’d be writing a lot of grim scenes for the Leonis family. I was also intrigued by the idea of a nanny droid who’d served the same family for generations. Finally, I was laying the groundwork for a key scene in The Secret Academy that I had in mind from the beginning. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Ames says “wizard,” a callback to Episode I. The Clone Wars and the prequels are very much part of the background of the Leonises and this story.
This was one of the first books written after the Legends announcement, and so when I found myself needing to identify an engine part for a TIE fighter I went to Story Group for advice. What they told me was reassuring: I was pretty safe using Legends locations, terms for engine parts, and the like, because why would they reinvent those things? This was an early lesson about the durability of what I’ve come to think of as the “infrastructure EU.”
Next time: Grav-ball, clones and girl kickers.