Well, okay—technically, he is just sitting around right now. But you know what I mean.
—TZ
3 This was the description of Kashyyyk that I was given: immensely tall trees with Wookiee cities perched on them, with a layered ecology that got more and more vicious as you traveled down toward the ground below. Sort of an organic version of the tall, layered cityscape of Coruscant, now that I think about it.
I was really looking forward to getting a glimpse of that world when I heard it would be featured in Revenge of the Sith. I was also curious as to the kind of tactics the Wookiees would use against the Separatist forces on such a battlefield. But either the planet had been redesigned when I wasn’t looking, or else George simply chose to use a ground-level area of the world for that scene.
Maybe someday in a special edition …
—TZ
4 I got to experience this same effect on a recent cruise to Alaska. When looking over the rail at a glacier, with no trees, animals, or other objects near the ice to show scale, it was impossible for me to get a genuine feel for the size of what I was seeing. A chunk that looks like an ice cube falls off, and a boom rolls across the water, and you realize that the “ice cube” was probably the size of a refrigerator.
—TZ
5 I generally like to use brackets when I’m showing that a character is speaking in an alien language. It’s always seemed to me that an odd touch like that helps add to the alienness of the speech.
—TZ
6 Just in case the brackets weren’t enough alienness, I also threw in an extra letter at the end of r-ending words.
This is the sort of thing that drives copy editors crazy …
—TZ
7 I needed to be able to have actual conversations with one of the Wookiees, and since I’d committed myself to never directly translating Chewie (it was never done in the movies), I came up with this idea that a “speech impediment” actually made Ralrra easier for humans to understand.
—TZ
8 A close hug does look a lot like vertical wrestling, after all. Probably even more so with Wookiees.
—TZ
9 One of the neat things about the Star Wars universe is that there’s always room for something new. Jumping off of the Kashyyyk background that I’d been given, I was able to add a few new things, such as the kroyies, into the ecological system.
—TZ
10 I liked the idea of Wookiees being arboreal and living on huge trees kilometers above the ground. The problem was that they didn’t seem to be built for that sort of life. So I added the protractible claws to make tree-climbing practical.
Unfortunately, in the process I forgot my own admonition that I needed to pay attention to what wasn’t seen in the movies. Specifically, why weren’t these claws ever seen, particularly when Chewie was fighting for his life?
Fortunately, the West End Games folks also spotted the lapse and came to my rescue. In one of the later sourcebooks they explained that it was a matter of honor that Wookiees never used these claws in combat, but kept them strictly for climbing.
—TZ
11 Art imitating life. I have the same problem that I’m attributing here to Leia. Airplanes don’t bother me; the Seattle Space Needle observation deck does.
—TZ
Chapter 18
1 Someone asked me once what kind of modern-day car Karrde would drive. I told him that it would probably be a nice, simple, family-style sedan or minivan. A Toyota or Ford maybe … with a Lamborghini V-12 engine tucked away under the hood.
—TZ
2 I envisioned a force cylinder as being a cylindrical version of the atmosphere screen we saw in the movies in big hatchways like those of the Death Star. An emergency docking tube, probably meant for temporary use only.
But given the prominent use of the term the Force, I really should have come up with a different name for this. Vac-walk cylinder, maybe. Way too late now.
—TZ
3 Somewhere along the line, one of the artists tackling Karrde either missed this description or else ignored it, and drew the man with long, flowing hair and a goatee. That’s the image that has now stuck for him.
Which is fine with me. Karrde is the type who would probably find it useful to change appearance every so often anyway, and by the end of the Thrawn Trilogy he could very well have looked like that.
It was also that image that Decipher used when they brought Mike Stackpole and me out to Virginia for a photo session to create their special Talon Karrde and Corran Horn cards.
I would never have guessed, as I was writing Heir, that I might someday end up on a collectible card. Life can be very strange sometimes.
—TZ
4 This became the basis of a line in the Essential Guides, which then became an entire book: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor by Matthew Stover.
—TZ
Chapter 19
1 This image of carved wood with blue light shining through the gaps comes from a couple of visits we made to a place called the House on the Rock in Wisconsin. It’s an absolutely stunning architectural masterpiece, and several of the rooms have this sort of background lighting.
—TZ
2 I read mythology voraciously when I was a child, and my favorites were the Norse myths. This one is straight out of the Siegfried legend—all we’re missing is a sword stuck in the tree.
—TZ
3 “What is a Froffli-style haircut?”
I got asked this kind of question a lot with Heir and the other two books. The questions came from my editor, Lucasfilm, the copy editor, or sometimes all three.
The answer: I don’t know. The idea was to sprinkle these alien non-Earth references throughout the books, with the intent being to add a little more Star Wars feeling to it.
Of course, the throwaway lines also served another, more devious purpose. The reader never knew whether one of these things was merely some local color, or whether it was a subtle setup to an important plot point somewhere down the line.
An aside: the comics depict Chin’s hair as spiky.
—TZ
4 The official currency of the Star Wars galaxy is the credit, but I never really liked that term—I guess it always seemed too fifties SF to me. (So do blasters, actually, but for some reason that one doesn’t bother me nearly as much.)
So I took a page from Han’s bargaining with Obi-Wan for the Alderaan trip and tried wherever possible to simply avoid mentioning the type of currency, figuring that it would be understood by both parties.
—TZ
5 When I was offered this first Star Wars contract, and I was wandering the house trying to think up a story, the ysalamiri and their effect on the Force was the first thing that came to my mind. The initial idea was to use them to build a sort of cage around a captured Jedi.
Interestingly enough, even though that was the first idea I had, the story ended up growing in another direction and it never actually made it into any of the three books. That specific aspect of the idea had to wait several more years, until Vision of the Future.
—TZ
Chapter 20
1 Thanksgiving weekend 1989, a couple of weeks after I’d been given the Thrawn Trilogy, was the local Chambanacon SF convention, which as usual we were attending. On Saturday evening we went out to dinner at a nearby Sizzler with four close friends, friends to whom I’d entrusted the still-secret project I’d just been handed. And not just entrusted with the knowledge: I’d let them read the first-draft outline I’d written up for the trilogy.