Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker (novelization) Review

A long time ago....

Although the film version of Star Wars (renamed Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope in 1981) premiered on May 25, 1977, it wasn't exactly the medium through which the world had gotten its first glimpse at that "galaxy far, far away" created by the then 34-year-old writer-director George Lucas.

That distinction goes to a little-hailed paperback issued by Del Rey Books (a division of Ballantine Books) - a 220-page novel titled Star Wars: From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker, which hit bookstores and other specialty stores in November of 1976 as part of Lucasfilm Limited publicist Charles Lippincott's nearly one-man marketing push for a movie which skeptical members of 20th Century Fox's board of directors airily dismissed as "that science movie."

The novel was probably rolled out first because Fox had originally hoped to release Star Wars as a Christmas movie, but delays in the film's production caused the studio to postpone the premiere until the Memorial Day weekend of 1977.

According to a preface Lucas wrote in a later edition of the novel (which was ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster but credited to the director), this first edition, with a Ralph McQuarrie concept painting as the cover art, performed pretty much as he figured his movie would - it sold well but "didn't set the world on fire."

Luke Skywalker challenges the stormtroopers of a distant galaxy on a daring mission-where a force of life became the power of death!

Luke Skywalker was a twenty-year-old who lived and worked on his uncle's farm on the remote planet of Tatooine...and he was bored beyond belief. He yearned for adventures out among the stars-adventures that would take him beyond the farthest galaxies to distant and alien worlds.

But Luke got more than he bargained for when he intercepted a cryptic message from a beautiful princess being held captive by a dark and powerful warlord. Luke didn't know who she was, but he had to save her-and soon, because time was running out.

Armed only with courage and with the light saber that had been his father's, Luke was catapulted into the middle of the most savage space war ever...and he was headed straight for a desperate encounter on the enemy battle station known as the Death Star!  - from the novel's (1977 edition) publisher's blurb

Between the covers.....

Because Lucas and Lippincott gave novelist Alan Dean Foster the fourth revised draft of the original Star Wars screenplay, the novel's plot is essentially identical to the rough cut of the film.  The basics of the story are very much intact, although - of course - readers get "inside" the minds of the various characters a bit more intimately.

It's interesting to note that the book's prologue (an excerpt from The First Saga: The Journal of the Whills) serves two purposes.  First, it's the literary equivalent to the Star Wars movies' crawls; like we 1977 Generation fans who saw the movie in its first extended run, readers were being transported to "another galaxy, another time" in mid-tale, so Lucas and Foster provided a bit of back story to help them get their bearings and have some idea whence the Empire had come from and what the Big Picture was before getting into the first chapter.

Second, despite a few changed details (Senator Palpatine is mentioned as getting himself elected as President of the Republic; in Episodes I-III his title is Supreme Chancellor), the preface - less than two pages in length - is a bare bones outline of the Prequel Trilogy, albeit one told in very broad strokes.

The novel then segues directly into the famous opening scene of Star Wars: an Imperial Star Destroyer (called here an Imperial cruiser) chases Princess Leia's Rebel Blockade Runner and captures it over the desert planet of Tatooine. After a brief battle, Imperial stormtroopers take over the ship, and Leia is taken before Lord Darth Vader, who wants to know what she did with secret data "transmitted by Rebel spies."

Leia, of course, has wisely hidden the data -- the plans of the Empire's ultimate super weapon, the Death Star -- into the memory banks of Artoo Detoo, an astromech droid. Artoo and his loyal but easily rattled counterpart, See-Threepio, have managed to flee aboard a tiny escape pod down to the hostile wastes of Tatooine. They are "found" by jawas, a race of small desert scavengers, then sold to a moisture farmer named Owen Lars and his nephew Luke Skywalker....and when Luke stumbles on a fragment of a message for someone named "Obi-Wan Kenobi," well, things really get exciting, to say the least! 

My Viewpoint:

Though this novel has subsequently been re-issued over the years and now bears the title of Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, its content has undergone very few revisions since that first and widely unheralded 1976 first edition.  Del Rey and Lucas Books have done a few fixes here and there - such as capitalizing TIE (Twin Ion Engine) whenever that Imperial starfighter is mentioned - but Vader is still mentioned as having red eyes and Luke Skywalker still flies with Blue (and not Red) Squadron.

Although there are some differences between the novel and the film - the Imperial stormtroopers invade Princess Leia's consular ship from the roof, there are off-handed remarks about "later Emperors," and the off-screen Palpatine is portrayed as a politician who became a front for the "corporate interests" who aided and abetted his rise to power - Alan Dean Foster's novelization is very faithful to its screenplay source, and even the "added" material (Luke's first appearance in the novel as he repairs a vaporator, or scenes with Biggs and his friends at Tosche Station) comes from Lucas' fourth revised draft (available in Carol Titleman's The Art of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope). Most of the "deleted scenes" later appeared in Brian Daley's Star Wars: The Radio Drama), and the encounter between Han Solo and Jabba the Hutt (spelled Hut in this novel) was restored and tweaked with CGI in the 1997 Special Edition re-release.

Of the three Classic Trilogy novels, this is the best written. Foster's style is crisp yet elegant, and it does not read like it's a screenplay adaptation.