15 Best Books From the Defunct ‘Star Wars’ Expanded Universe (Photos)
After Disney bought LucasFilm and got the ball rolling on new “Star Wars” movies, they wiped clean the entire Expanded Universe of novels, comics and video games from the official “Star Wars” timeline. Gone, yes, but not forgotten. Even now as we’re neck deep in a new version of the continuity, there’s still plenty of gems to be found in the defunct Expanded Universe.
15. “Tale’s from Jabba’s Palace”
The “Star Wars” universe, being massive and full of oddities, was really well served by a series of short story anthologies like this, which also happens to be the best one. It explores a lot of the strange things we saw in Jabba’s palace in “Return of the Jedi,” and it’s never afraid to get real weird — which in this case, at least, is a great thing.
14. “Outbound Flight”
Functions as a prequel to Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy, finally detailing the Outbound Flight mission we’d heard mentioned so many times for over a decade — and it turned out to be a lot more involved than we’d thought.
Outbound Flight, which occurred during the events of the prequel trilogy, involved a group of Jedi Masters and a number of colonists taking an expedition beyond the galaxy in search of extragalactic Force users — but on their way out they flew through the Unknown Regions of the galaxy, and ran afoul of some of the more unsavory alien civilizations there. And also Thrawn, whose species of blue near-humans hails from that part of space.
13. “Edge of Victory: Conquest”
Late in the history of the Expanded Universe, they began publishing long-running series that would tell a single longform story — the longest of these longforms being the “New Jedi Order,” about a race of aliens called the Yuuzhan Vong invading the galaxy from elsewhere and attempting to enforce its evil will on the collection of “infidels” we know and love.
“Conquest” was the eighth in that series, and it was the first, ah, humanizing look at the Yuuzhan Vong society. It turned out that, like any other society, the Yuuzhan Vong has its downtrodden portions of folks who don’t like the murderous establishment, and Han and Leia’s teenage son Anakin has to come to grips with it while carrying out a dangerous mission with one such downtrodden soul.
12. “Isard’s Revenge”
This “X-Wing” one-shot novel is essentially the payoff to the entire long history of the elite Rogue Squadron that was told over a number of novels and comic books. Every loose end tied off and many stories, including some not part of the Rogue arc, recontextualized in a really interesting way. “Isard’s Revenge” is the kind of story that can only happen within a massive universe with a detailed history — it’s the kind of story, consequently, that makes a lot of old bad storytelling end up feeling like it was worth it.
11. “Han Solo and the Lost Legacy”
One of the most fascinating aspects, looking back now, of the “Star Wars” Expanded Universe was how the early authors were kinda making up how everything worked and casually establishing hugely important things. It was less cool at the time, because it was obvious nobody knew what they were doing and most of the books were pretty terrible as details were filled in at random.
The three “Han Solo Adventures” were among the earliest pieces of the Expanded Universe, being released in 1979 and 1980 — and they wisely tell small stories rather than the sort of galaxy-shaking narratives we would see every couple months throughout the ’90s. “Lost Legacy,” the third one, sees Han going after the fabled treasure of Xim the Despot at the edge of the galaxy. It’s a great story, and an early emblem for the flexibility of “Star Wars” as a setting.
