What is the Expanded Universe?

[Gilberto]

I would like to think there are people reading this who don’t already know the answer to that question, but I suppose most of you already know what the Expanded Universe is.

It sounds more like physics than fiction, but that parallel is one of the reasons I find myself fascinated with the subject in the first place. Like our own universe, the Star Wars mythology is an ever-expanding and sometimes contracting world of limitless possibilities. Also like our universe, there are conflicting theories and debates concerning how or why this occurs.

The Star Wars Expanded Universe as it is commonly known began in 1991 with the publication of Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire, the first of a trilogy of novels that explored what happened to the core characters in the five years following Return of the Jedi.

Unlike Star Trek, which had been endlessly merchandised and cross-marketed, The Star Wars mythology had seen precious few entries into the story outside of that offered by the films themselves. Most of those had died away when the film series ended, so by 1991 Star Wars fans kept it alive for the sake of nostalgia, but the idea of new stories featuring the beloved characters was practically a dream come true. From that point on Lucas Licensing oversaw the creation and publication of countless post-Jedi Star Wars stories in print, from novels to new comic books, all of which maintained a close continuity with each other. This ongoing effort to maintain the Star Wars mythology in the absence of new films was branded, and is now popularly known as, the Expanded Universe.

Our purpose is to examine how this expansion to the Star Wars universe developed and how it has subtly been changed over the years. There are plenty of references in books and online regarding the internal chronology of that universe, but that’s not what this enterprise is about. You can’t tell the story of how history has been re-written simply by reading a current history book. You have to go back and compare it to accounts that were written at the time history was made. That’s my intent here. The Star Wars Universe and how its history is both created and revised is a microcosm of how information is spread and reinterpreted (sometimes even reinvented) in the real world. There’s never been so expansive a microcosm available for us to study in this way.

So the chronology we will follow is based on the order in which works were created in the real world, not the time-line in which the stories are said to take place within the Star Wars Universe. I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to look at the stories in the context of when they were written, and for those of us who grew up in that time period it should excite our sense of nostalgia as well as our curiosity.