UPDATE: Golden’s involvement was confirmed as of September 12, 2008. Googlers, for the very latest news on the Fate of the Jedi series, please see our Fate of the Jedi tag!
There’s been a rumor floating around the TFN boards for a while now about Fate of the Jedi. So far, all we know for sure is that there’s one book, by Aaron Allston, that appeared on Amazon. When asked, Sue Rostoni commented on it. Confirmed? Sort of… Maybe not. Only LFL knows, and we still don’t even have an official announcement on the Del Rey contract renewal…
The most rumory bit comes in when a random poster on TFN’s Lit boards (JohnTheRevelator) claimed that FOTJ is going to be a nine-book series, much like Legacy of the Force, with the author duties split between Allston, Troy Denning, and Christine Golden. (Golden has written many tie-ins, but no Star Wars, so far.) The news coming out of nowhere, TFN posters were rightly skeptical. Later, another poster (fanboyskywalker) claimed to have confirmed the information at SDCC, but again could provide no actual proof. (And to help matters along he seems to have mixed FOTJ up with other upcoming projects, like Traviss’ Boba Fett novel.) The news eventually made it over to StarWars.com and someone asked Sue, who had this to say:
I met her some time ago and she’s very enthusiastic about the unnamed project I can’t talk about. She’s a team player and a good communicator.
So now we know that Golden is on board for something. As we still really don’t know much about that many upcoming books, I’m hesitant to assume it’s Fate of the Jedi, but that’s certainly a possibility.
Sue also had some comments on the 9-book format, which I’ve put under the cut:
Oh, and those who want trilogies by the same author rather than a mixed series like we’ve done — the problem is that it takes from 9 months to a year from the time an outline is approved to the time the book goes to publication, so if we had three authors doing trilogies back-to-back, you’d be looking at a 9-years series with one book a year (or maybe two books during the “change author” year). The reason that Michael Reaves’ Coruscant Nights books are closer together is because he’s been working on all three for a few years now.
We’ll see…
I wait 9 months to a year (or more) for every other science-fiction or fanatsy series I read. I can wait that long between Star Wars books. And why do they have to keep doing these mega-series? What’s wrong with two or three-book series? If they have multiple authors writing smaller, unrelated series at the same time like Bantam did, they can still have 3 or 4 books out a year. Personally, I’d rather have the consistancy a single author would bring to a series than half a dozen books in a year.
I personally enjoy the 9 book format. It allows a longer story line with more plots and since the books are written from the view points of different people the change of author from book to book works out nicely. Also, because there are several different authors in the same series if one author is not as good or you don’t like their style you can still enjoy the series as a whole. On the other hand a trilogy written by a not so good author just becomes a bad trilogy and there are too many of those already.
I have the first Legacy era, and i wasn’t so hyped about it from beginning to end. Though the first three were the best and then 5 and 8 weren’t so bad either. I would have to say that I am still not happy with it. To me the books were more focused on the action and politics, rather then its story and characters. I hope this series proves me wrong.