Naturally, I wanted to discuss the story with them and get whatever feedback they’d come up with. But as we sat there, we realized we had a problem. All around us were other SF fans from the convention, and at the first utterance of the names “Han,” “Luke,” or “Leia” ears would rotate like radar dishes, and I would be in big trouble with Lucasfilm.
So we did exactly what I had Han and Winter do here: we came up with a code on the fly. Luke and Leia became Brother and Sister; Han became Friend, Chewie became Copilot, and so on. Names like Mara and Thrawn weren’t a problem, of course, since they would be meaningless to anyone else.
I was actually surprised at how well we all pulled it off, especially without any prior consultation.
They say “write what you know.” In this case, I definitely did.
—TZ
2 Another Tuckerism: more friends from Tampa.
—TZ
3 Mike LoBue plays bagpipes, and plays them very well. So I’m sure this “annoying music” wasn’t bagpipes. Certainly not his.
—TZ
4 Tuckerism: Necronomicon, mushed together with their traditional Ygor/Igor party.
—TZ
5 The numbers here don’t fit with any of the various Star Wars dating schemes, but are references to the local planetary dating system. Another subtle indication that the New Republic’s hold on these systems isn’t as strong as they might like.
—TZ
6 Once again, I’m indebted to West End Games for the rules and subtleties of sabacc.
—TZ
7 Another code created on the fly. One of Han’s many hidden talents.
—TZ
8 The established rules of sabacc included the random shifting of the cards’ values. The skifter itself, though, was my creation.
—TZ
9 Just one more indication that Karrde has an ethical core lurking under the surface.
Also another indication of how many of Lando’s contacts are of the somewhat dubious sort.
—TZ
Chapter 21
1 Ideally, any confrontation between characters should play out as a sort of stylized chess game, with the writer playing both sides. One side makes a move—Mara sealing the door—and then the other side makes a countermove—Luke searching for and finding the power outlet.
Also ideally, the side that wins a particular round does so out of cleverness, and the side that loses does so not so much out of stupidity but because they missed something. Here, there’s a little fact about Luke that Mara and Karrde either didn’t know or, in the rush of the moment, didn’t think all the way through.
Just as the heroism of your hero is measured against the villainy of your villain, so too is the hero’s cleverness measured against that of his opponents.
—TZ
Chapter 22
1 And now, with all the other books being written in the Expanded Universe, there are even more such incidents for Karrde to be thinking of.
—TZ
2 I used both watch and chrono to designate timekeepers in Heir. The former I envisioned as small, personal timepieces, while the latter would be located aboard ships or the equivalent of wall or desk clocks.
I don’t think anything like watches ever showed up in the movies. But surely people there still needed easily portable ways to tell time.
—TZ
3 More art imitating life. In those days, whenever I found myself on my own (usually when I was off on one of my three-day, writing-intensive retreats), I would follow this same schedule: early breakfast, early dinner, no lunch.
—TZ
4 Tuckerism: Wade Warren, another Tampa fan.
—TZ
5 For someone who was never intended to be anything but a minor character, Ghent has picked up a surprising following among the readers over the years.
No doubt it’s a combination of his computer skills, his open-faced honesty, and his complete oblivioun to all the political machinations swirling around him.
If he’s not the king of the Star Wars nerds, he’s certainly one of the royal family.
—TZ
6 An odd echo (pre-echo?) of the “Jaynestown” episode of the TV series Firefly, where an action that was seen by some as heroic was really nothing more than pure pragmatism on the part of the person involved.
In this case, Ghent saw Han’s donation of the slaver ship and cargo to the victims as an act of charity, whereas Han’s motivations had been less altruistic than practical.
I adopted this particular incident from the Star Wars Sourcebook, where it was described briefly by one of the slavers’ victims. I thought it would be interesting to show Han’s side of it, especially since back then he wasn’t the noble yet lovable rogue we all know from the movies.
—TZ
7 Again, a bit of foreshadowing for something that won’t become important until the next book.
—TZ
8 Droid rhino boot! This concept made me laugh. But it’s so believable!
—BM
9 Like the use of borg earlier, the term corvette got me another letter chastising me for using such a non–Star Wars term—and this one the name of a modern car, to boot.
I had to write back and explain that a corvette was originally a seventeenth-century warship, that its use was already well established in the Star Wars universe, and that there was nothing we could do about General Motors having borrowed the name before we got to it.
—TZ
10 On the surface, this looks like another comment that’s since been overthrown by other stories, including a bunch of my own.
But it’s clear from the rest of Heir and the other books of the trilogy that she’s actually quite skilled with a lightsaber. I don’t remember what exactly I was thinking at the time I wrote this line, but my guess is that she’s merely being sarcastic.
Either that or it’s a flat-out typo, and I meant to say that she hadn’t picked up a lightsaber very often in the past few years.
One of those questions where the answer is now unfortunately lost in the mists of time.
—TZ
Chapter 23
1 In the real world, this maneuver (minus the throttle cutback) is called an Immelmann turn. It’s not much used by modern-day fighters, but shows up frequently in air shows.
—TZ
2 The preferred generic term for these things is now electrobinoculars, with the older macrobinoculars referring to a somewhat lower-quality version of the devices.
—TZ
3 Writing dialogue that mirrors the human characters’ voices is one thing, but Tim also manages to reproduce a distinctive range of machine-made noises. I had no trouble throughout this book hearing the correct R2-D2 utterance, whether it was a warbling question, a surprised squeal, a shriek of warning, or here, the “squeamish-sounding awe.”
—BM
4 Tuckerism: Ken and Denise Hillyard of Tampa.
—TZ
5 In my original outline, this scene had the same ultimate result—Mara grudgingly agreeing to work with Luke to get out of the forest alive—but I didn’t yet have any of the details worked out. Betsy spotted that, and pointed out that I needed a good reason for Mara putting aside her desire to just kill Luke then and there.
I agreed, and just to be on the safe side I gave her two reasons: R2’s sensors, and the counterpart encryption system that would let her find out what Karrde had told the Imperials and, therefore, what she would need to say to make their stories match up.