—TZ
2 Han’s line here is pitch-perfect. One of Tim’s greatest challenges in this book was to re-create the voices of the film characters. It’s so easy to imagine Harrison Ford grinding out, “I like marketplaces. I like ’em a lot.”
—BM
3 As with extra planets, I can easily throw lots of different aliens into the background scenes.
One of the advantages books have over movies—my costume and makeup departments don’t take up much space.
—TZ
Chapter 7
1 I thought long and hard about how to write the sound of an igniting lightsaber. I finally went with snap-hiss.
—TZ
2 This gadget is now called a fibercord whip, but at the time it either hadn’t been named or I’d failed to find the right reference. (I suspect the former, since Lucasfilm didn’t correct it in the manuscript.)
On the other hand, as with many things Star Wars, it’s quite possible the weapon had several names. Maybe Fibercord Whip was once a trademarked name that has now fallen into common usage, while smart-rope was the generic name.
Back in my physics days, we used to call this procedure hand-waving. I’ll be using more of it as we go along.
—TZ
3 As I mentioned in the foreword, one of my goals in writing Heir was to do something that was Star Wars but which didn’t just cover the same territory as the movies. Part of that challenge was to come up with new problems and weapons for our heroes to face.
Lightsabers are great for blocking blaster bolts and cutting through AT-AT armor, but what about something semiliquid?
Of course, once I’ve gotten Luke into this situation, I also have to come up with a way to get him out of it.…
—TZ
4 A writer absolutely has to make his villains clever and competent. It’s no fun—and no challenge—for the heroes to get out of trouble without sweating about it first.
—TZ
5 From the Star Wars movies, it’s clear that George loves a good, swashbuckling, Errol Flynn–type rope swing. Luckily, so do I.
—TZ
6 Along with things like the hot chocolate, one of the major complaints I received was that I’d used too many of the movie lines in the book. The accusation was that I was simply trying to connect to the movies to add legitimacy to my books.
I disagreed, and this particular quote is a good example of what I was actually trying to do. Every family, over their years together, develops a collection of private words and phrases that evoke incidents in their past—a kind of shorthand to their shared memories. In this case, Han’s comment is a reminder of the asteroid field incident, when his snap judgment (or so Leia thought at the time) proved to be the correct action. Leia’s response, again echoing that time, is her admission that he was right in that case and, yes, he’s probably right in this one, too.
—TZ
7 Even Yoda carried one, as we know now from the prequels.
—TZ
Chapter 8
1 Admiral would be the normal shipboard form of address (Grand Admiral is awkwardly long for casual conversation), but C’baoth almost invariably uses the entire rank. Not as a form of respect, of course, but as a form of sarcasm.
—TZ
2 The second quality of a good commander: the ability to hear, evaluate, and adopt good ideas even if—perhaps especially if—they come from those who are technically his inferiors.
—TZ
3 At the time I was writing Heir, all we knew about the Old Republic’s political system was that it had included a Senate. Rather than try to guess at any other details, I settled on giving the New Republic a provisional form of government, with the implication that it would be changed at some point in the future.
That way, if I got more details along the way as to how things were supposed to be done, I could have Leia and Mon Mothma revamp the whole thing.
—TZ
4 I generally dislike writing characters who deliberately distort, misinterpret, or ignore facts for their own political ends the way Fey’lya does here. Probably because I dislike seeing that done in real life.
But sometimes the requirements of the story mean you just have to take a deep breath and do it.
—TZ
5 Han Solo: master of tact. You gotta love him.
—TZ
Chapter 9
1 The third quality of a good commander: the ability to see what is most valuable in his troops. Competence and the ability to learn are more important than the trappings of pomp and pageantry.
Though Pellaeon clearly still misses that pomp, at least a little.
—TZ
2 I have another double planet, Poln Major and Poln Minor, as the centerpiece of my latest Star Wars book, Choices of One. There must be something about double planets I really like.
—TZ
3 Once again one would think, from this description of tactics, that Tim has a military background. He does not!
—BM
4 The fourth quality of a good commander: he plans ahead as much as possible.
—TZ
5 I was just a couple of weeks into Heir when I received a big box containing some of the sourcebooks and game modules that West End Games had created over the years for the Star Wars role-playing game. Along with the books came instructions from Lucasfilm that I was to coordinate Heir with the WEG material.
As usual, I groused a little about that. But once I actually started digging into the books I realized the WEG folks had put together a boatload of really awesome stuff, including lists of aliens, equipment, ground vehicles, and ship types.
So as it turned out, not only was the WEG material easy to coordinate with, but it saved me the work of having to invent all my own technology as I went along.
—TZ
6 Another of the challenges of writing Heir was to come up with phrases that are familiar and are properly descriptive, but aren’t quite the way we would normally say them. Thus hit-and-run becomes hit-and-fade.
—TZ
7 All of Karrde’s ship names involve puns or some other kind of wordplay—Wild Karrde (wild card), Starry Ice (starry eyes), Etherway (either way), and so on.
—TZ
8 Like Karrde, Mara has an ethical core that doesn’t take kindly to broken promises or bent loyalty.
—TZ
9 Over the years I’ve slowly gotten better at the art of teaching, but I can strongly identify with Luke’s concerns over his own ability in that area. Especially when all I had to do was teach elementary physics, and he has to train a Jedi.
—TZ
10 For some reason, Han not lumping Bpfassh in with the “unpronounceable” ones strikes me as both funny and very Han.
—TZ
11 Rogue Squadron was half convenience and half a throwaway line—a unit I could move around wherever I needed it, with Wedge in command because anyone who can survive three Star Wars movies is welcome in my book any day.
I would never in my wildest dreams have guessed how well and how far Mike Stackpole and, later, Aaron Allston would run with the whole idea.
—TZ
12 One of the more subtle goofs in Heir is in the dating. At the time, George hadn’t settled on the final time line, and we were told that the Clone Wars took place thirty-five years before A New Hope.