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Featured Essays SDCC 2014

What’s Next for Star Wars Books? The SDCC New Dawn Panel is Here!

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Published on July 25, 2014

She's coming. SHE'S COMING.
She's coming. SHE'S COMING.

Star Wars fans have already been informed the all Star Wars books going forward will fit into the new canon, going along with the television shows and movies, but here is a sample of what’s coming up! The Star Wars books panel at SDCC has tie-ins for Star Wars: Rebels and much more.

The upcoming novel A New Dawn by John Jackson Miller is basically a prequel to Rebels, so that was first and foremost on everyone’s mind. Here’s what people had to say about the future of Star Wars and reading:

  • A New Dawn is an important setup for Star Wars: Rebels in part because the show will contain no flashbacks whatsoever. Pablo Hidalgo pointed out that flashbacks are not the way Star Wars tells stories, so stories like A New Dawn are important.
  • Dave Filoni says that A New Dawn is the first chapter he’d imagined, but they couldn’t do it on the show. It’s a backstory for Hera and Kanan.
  • This connection between the current media and the books is brand new. People working on Star Wars: Rebels had notes on what would happen in the books. This level of cooperation has never happened before, and it’s got everyone really excited.
  • Actress Vanessa Marshal is moderating the panel, and she says that reading A New Dawn helped her find the emotion behind her lines while working on Rebels.
  • It seems as though A New Dawn won’t be such a simple tie-in; it contains incredibly important background on Rebels that fans will want to have.
  • Dave Filoni has a great amount of respect of the EU (Star Wars Legends). He is happy to smuggle bits of it into the shows, which are now canonized.
  • IMPORTANT: The last line of Star Wars: Kenobi is the first line of A New Dawn. (I’m squeeing, I’m sorry, I’m so excited about all of this.)
  • Shelly Shapiro, talking about the Legends line: “We don’t want to disappear things that people read and lived, including myself.” They’re saying the the term “legends” was chosen for a reason, to acknowledge how important these stories are to fans. Filoni points out that you can’t “unknow” what you read in those books and they keep that in mind.
  • Apparently, a lot of what we will see during this era directly before the original trilogy is informed by Lucas’ notes on the period.
  • Dave Filoni loves the cover of A Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. (YES) It would seem that his mother kept that book on her nightstand; knowing there was more Star Wars was mind-blowing for him.
  • Filoni intends to incorporate bits from the unproduced Clone Wars script into Rebels.
  • They seem to be hinting that there will be Clone Wars books based on those scripts…
  • James Luceno is writing a book for Tarkin that will be similar to what ws done for Darth Plagueis.
  • Paul Kempy is writing a novel that will include Vader and the Emperor “kicking ass together”: Lords of the Sith.
  • THERE IS GOING TO BE A BOOK WITH ASAJJ VENTRESS AND QUINLAN VOS. Apparently, it was from the season 7 Clone Wars scripts and developed with Lucas. Not a kids books at all. (Asajj is a natural blonde! Whoa.)
  • Dave Filoni and Pablo Hidalgo have an email chain detailing Obi-Wan and Duchess Satine’s scandalous back story. (GIVE IT TO ME NOW.)
  • There are comics coming up, and they will likely be announced at the Cup ‘O Joe panel!
  • How they are planning on taking Clone Wars stories and making them for Rebels-era from Filoni: The Republic took clones and made them people. The Empire took people and made them clones.

I am having a hard time containing my excitement currently. I suppose it’s good I got into Clone Wars before all this. Wow. Give me all these presents. Give them NOW.

All of our ongoing San Diego Comic Con 2014 coverage can be found here.

About the Author

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Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Emmet Asher-Perrin is the News & Entertainment Editor of Reactor. Their words can also be perused in tomes like Queers Dig Time Lords, Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy, and Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. They cannot ride a bike or bend their wrists. You can find them on Bluesky and other social media platforms where they are mostly quiet because they'd rather to you talk face-to-face.
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