Set in the period five years after the events of Return of the Jedi, author Timothy Zahn beautifully captures the characters we fell in love with on screen. Given that Heir to the Empire appeared in an era of very little new content and introduced the popular Thrawn, I had wondered if this artificially inflated the title’s status, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that the book did indeed deserve its strong reputation. And while many of those titles have been relegated to “Legends” or non-canon status, the impressive military strategist Grand Admiral Thrawn introduced in this series has continued to appear in various ways including as a name drop in the recent season of the highly popular Disney+ series The Mandalorian. I can still recall the excitement when this book first appeared on shelves in 1991 and its success sparked a collection of Star Wars novels that helped fill the void until 1994’s announcement that Lucas was working on prequel scripts. Picking up the recent reprint of Star Wars: Heir to the Empire - this edition featuring a golden “the Essential Legends Collection” banner - carried me back to that very different era of Star Wars fandom.

In the current era of Star Wars content creation with numerous comic book lines, live-action and animated tv series, nearly annual film releases, a new portion of the timeline being explored in all of those media and even entire sections of Disney theme parks dedicated to the universe George Lucas crafted, it is hard to imagine the Star Wars content desert in play eight years after Return of the Jedi finished playing in theaters.

Star wars heir to the empire book