Alan Dean Foster is writing the novelization of The Force Awakens, Del Rey revealed today at their panel at Celebration Anaheim. It’ll be out in eBook on December 18, the day the movie comes out, with a hardcover to follow on an unspecified date in January.
Foster was the ghostwriter for the original Star Wars adaptation (credited to George Lucas) back in the ’70s, as well as the author of the first actual Star Wars novel, Splinter in the Mind’s Eye. This won’t be his first return to the franchise: He also wrote a prequel novel, The Approaching Storm, which came out ahead of Attack of the Clones.
This was already floating around, but it was confirmed that Del Rey is repackaging A New Dawn and Tarkin together as Rise of the Empire. We learned that that book will contain three new short stories, one of which ties into Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath. (Sadly, that’s just about the most we heard on Aftermath.)
That was just about the only real news out of the Del Rey panel that wasn’t already revealed earlier in the con.
As for Marvel, we got a few things: Greg Weisman will be writing the second arc of Kanan; They will be doing an adaption of The Force Awakens, but not anytime soon. Star Wars #6 is not John Cassidy’s last SW comic for Marvel… And Simone Bianchi will be drawing Star Wars #7, which is a one-shot Obi-Wan story on Tatooine.
I have to say, my first reaction to this was “Ugh….” I’ve been so excited by the authors who’ve been writing the tie-in novels of late, because I recognize those names in the genre and it’s exciting to see what they’ll do in the SW universe (Martha Wells, James S.A. Corey, Chuck Wendig), and I always felt that getting current voices to write the prequel novelizations was a great step forward: those novelizations were parsecs better than the movies!
But this feels like SUCH a step backwards. Foster has written ONE SW tie-in novel that I didn’t mind reading (The Approaching Storm), but the other two novels he wrote were awful. Admittedly, I read them decades after their publication, and I’m sure Foster’s fiction has improved since then, but still…. I feel like they chose him for nostalgia purposes. Why not go to Zahn for that?
It is a pure nostalgia choice, but it’s a novelization: 9 times out of 10 they’re going to be pretty bland in any case. (SW is only batting a 1/6, IMO.) I’d rather see new voices – hell, even returning folks like Zahn – on a more original work.
That’s a fair observation. My consideration is that someone who doesn’t normally read SW novels might read the novelization, and therefore judge the original work based on how well the novelization reads. Which of the movie novelizations worked for you?
Revenge of the Sith. The others are just sort of… There. They’re really only worth mentioning for the oddities, like ducks and Owen being Obi-wan’s brother.
I was kind of hoping they’d get Stover back for TFA (there are rumors he was under contract for a SW novel before the sale, and they’ve reused everyone else that we know of who was) but an original novel might still be a better deal there.
Stover would’ve been wonderful. I would also love to see Sean Stewart come back!