Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (novel) Review

A long time ago....

It's funny to think about this now, but when George Lucas's first Star Wars movie was released in the spring of 1977, I wanted nothing to do with it.

When I was 14, my exposure to movies set in space was a hodge-podge of period pictures from the 1950s with dialog-heavy explanations of how rocket ships worked, invaders-from-Mars schlockers, the dystopian sci-fi of the Planet of the Apes series and The Omega Man, and - worse - Japanese imports such as Godzilla, Gamera, and Rodan.  I even tried watching Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey the one time it aired as an ABC Sunday Night Movie but fell asleep a third of the way through.  I didn't even like Star Trek at the time!

So when the first commercials for Star Wars hit the TV airwaves, I was not impressed.  The film's main baddie - Darth Vader -  looked too much like a robot from one of those awful Japanese sci-fi movies I didn't like, and the title seemed a bit, well, cheesy. 

It took five months of a steady chorus of Alex, you've GOT to see Star Wars! from most of my friends and a viewing of ABC's The Making of Star Wars TV special to break through my defenses, and in October of 1977 I finally made the first of many pilgrimages to see Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, Han, Chewie, Obi-Wan, and the droids R2-D2 and C-3PO squaring off against the evil Lord Darth Vader and the forces of the Galactic Empire.

Of course, having been a Johnny-come-lately to the Star Wars phenomenon I didn't have any of the tie-in products then available in late 1977.  The figures by Kenner hadn't even hit stores, I didn't own the two-LP original soundtrack album because our stereo was in storage because we were in the middle of our move to this house, so the only Star Wars stuff I had were a few packages of Topps' trading cards and a paperback edition of the Star Wars novelization.

The Power of the (tie-in) Force

Naturally, once I became a die-hard Star Warrior (the Star Wars equivalent to Trekkie), I made up my mind that when and if Lucas and 20th Century Fox made what everyone thought would be named Star Wars - Part II, I'd be buying the first available tie-in products to satisfy my curiosity about the further adventures of Luke Skywalker in that galaxy, far, far away.  This I did when Ballantine published Brian Daley's Han Solo at Star's End in 1978, and again when Alan Dean Foster's Splinter of the Mind's Eye was in print the following year.

Of course, neither of those were related to Star Wars II;  Daley's Han Solo Trilogy is set in a nebulous time period before Star Wars and doesn't take place in any of the familiar settings, and Foster's novel, while it is set after the Battle of Yavin, is actually a well-written Expanded Universe book based on a rejected concept of Lucas' first attempt to embody the Force in visual terms - in the form of a mysterious crystal.

Finally, a chance trip to a B. Dalton's Bookstore in April 1980 led me to my first copy of Donald F. Glut's novelization of Star Wars - The Empire Strikes Back.

Getting a Sneak Peek

Although the release of the movie was still a few weeks away, the three principal cast members (Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher) and new cast member Billy Dee Williams were making the prerequisite publicity appearances on the talk shows of the time.  While carefully avoiding certain spoilers - the whole "Episode V" thing was not mentioned -  they did have a couple of clips, one of Han, Leia, and Chewie meeting Lando on Bespin, and one of Luke and Darth Vader dueling in Cloud City. (So as not to give away "the big reveal", it was always the one with the line The Force is with you, young Skywalker. But you are not a Jedi yet.)

 Of course, once I saw that both the novel and the two-record LP soundtrack album were available, I bought them, and even though it was a school night, I read Glut's novel in one sitting. (The next day, I probably ambled through my junior high's halls in a zombie-like gaze, but at least I knew what Empire was going to be about!

Between the Covers

Glut's novelization of Lawrence Kasdan's screenplay for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, based on a story by George Lucas, is among one of the better adaptations in the continuing saga of the Galactic Civil War and the adventures of Luke Skywalker.

Three years after the Battle of Yavin, the Rebel Alliance is fighting for its very existence. Though the Rebels have won a significant victory with the destruction of the Death Star, the evil lord Darth Vader has survived and made his way to the Imperial capital, where Emperor Palpatine gives him the ultimate assignment -- to find and destroy the Rebel leadership and crush the Rebellion once and for all.

 For three years Vader's Imperial Death Squadron of six Star Destroyers -- including his own massive flagship -- has pursued the Rebels from system to system.

Vader is driven, too, to find one Rebel commander in particular: Luke Skywalker. Sometime after the defeat at Yavin, Vader discovered that Luke was the pilot who, with the assistance of the mystical energy field known as the Force, fired the torpedo that destroyed the Death Star. Realizing the young Rebel's untapped -- and untrained -- Jedi powers, Vader has made it his mission in life to capture Luke and, eventually, turn him to the dark side of the Force.

So when an Imperial probe droid spots evidence of a hidden Rebel base on the remote ice world of Hoth, Vader unleashes his legions of stormtroopers against the small Rebel force. In a brief but violent battle, the Empire overwhelms the Alliance troops fighting a rear-guard action, but the bulk of the Rebels, including Han Solo, Princess Leia, Chewbacca, Luke, and the droids escape.

Vader doesn't know, however, that the Rebels he seeks  have set out on diverging paths. While Han, Chewie, Leia and See Threepio fly off in the damaged Millennium Falcon in a desperate attempt to rejoin the Rebel fleet, Luke and Artoo are on their X-wing starfighter on a different mission altogether.

For the spirit of Obi-Wan Kenobi, Vader's former Jedi Master and now Luke's Force-spirit guide, has sent Luke to the Dagobah system. There, he will seek Yoda, the Jedi Master who first instructed Kenobi in the ways of the now-vanished Jedi Order.

Under Yoda's tutelage, the young Jedi-to-be must face many trials, some of them physical, but many of them of the spirit, especially having to learn how to deal with his impatience and anger, traits he inherited from who Yoda refers to obliquely as the "powerful Jedi" who was Luke's "dead" father. 

My Viewpoint:

Though the current edition now bears the photorealistic cover art used in the 2004 DVD cover of Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, the text remains that of the 1980 edition, with no revisions to reflect the changes made in the Special Edition (1997) or the original DVD edition. It sticks fairly close to the film's finished version, though careful viewers of the Star Wars: Empire of Dreams documentary on the making of the Star Wars Trilogy will recognize several scenes that were originally written (and even filmed) but later revised or cut out of director Irvin Kershner's final cut.

This is because Glut (like all Star Wars adapters) had to use an earlier draft of Kasdan's screenplay (Yoda, for instance, is described as being bluish and with long white hair parted in the middle).  While he was working on the novel in order to meet a certain deadline, Lucas, Kasdan, and Kershner were making revisions that Glut was not privy to. 

Nevertheless, though his novel does diverge from time to time from the film, Glut is a good enough writer and captures the essence of the film's characters and new settings.  Particularly interesting is the way he lets readers get more glimpses into Vader's mindset than the movie does. 

For instance, where in the films Vader is almost remarkably fearless, Glut reveals that he fears only one being in the galaxy, the Galactic Emperor himself.  This is the first literary chink in Vader's armor and reveals that he still carries a small sliver of humanity in his Sith-darkened souil.

Of course, Glut doesn't reveal who Vader really is - all he tells the reader is that he has a scarred hairless head that is glimpsed only briefly by Admiral Piett in the Dark Lord's meditation chamber, and one wonders if the author was in on the secret or if Lucasfilm kept him out of the Vader-is-Anakin loop.

What he does do is give readers a rip-roaring novel that might lack a true dramatic climax but whets the appetite for the next exciting chapter of the Star Wars saga.