Kenneth Flint’s The Heart of the Jedi is a cancelled 1993 Star Wars expanded universe novel. In 2015, it was published on The Star Wars Timeline in a re-edited form to fit the Legacy Expanded Universe of Star Wars, and has been now independently published on Amazon. The book is being sold with no profit in mind, only to cover the printing bill, but sadly this work isn’t the same as that 1993 cancelled book.
Why was the book cancelled in the first place? According to the author, Bantam Spectra considered the book not to fit then-new Expanded Universe timeline. We don’t have anyone else’s take what happened, and Flint’s Behind the Scenes story (readable at The Star Wars Timeline) is only his side we officially have. To get the whole picture, we should get someone who worked at Lucasfilm and Bantam, and was involved in the book to get a whole picture. We can assume that it was conflicting with other higher priority works under production, but we’ll probably never know. Nevertheless, Flint’s recollection does read like an education piece about not putting all your eggs in one basket. You can read a lot of pain between the lines.
Joe Bongiorno, the editor, wrote notes that he wanted to go give this “last Expanded Universe” novel the proper treatment like every EU novel before. It was never made to fit the then-new canon, but has been edited to fit the Legacy continuity for the given reason. This required shifting events slightly, renaming a planet (or rather, using a planet with little prior background) and changing things like shapeshifting species being more a common knowledge rather than something new due to something happening about ten years later in the old EU. While Bongiorno assets that no great changes were made and that the work is “essentially the same,” that’s not cutting it. While these edits were made under Flint’s blessing, it’s selling the audience and the work itself short. These edits mean the original cancelled The Heart of the Jedi is still unpublished as it has been replaced with this edited version.
You may consider this splitting hair. The book is now out there in physical form, and has been readable since 2015 online. However, the issue similar to the restoration of any old thing, be it a work of literature of furniture. It doesn’t matter how much the work has been edited and to what extent, but now that it has altered content, it needs to be treated as a new version of that cancelled version. The issue isn’t that it has been edited to fit the canon, new or old, the issue is that it was edited from its originally intended form. An argument can be made that if The Heart of the Jedi had been published in 1993 or later, it would have necessitated going through further revisions to fit the continuity that was being established. That would have been fine, that’s the nature of the beast. However, this does not stand twenty-two plus years after its cancellation, as the book was something fans were asking about for years on end. There was no need to go back and change it around. Fans, who were the target audience, would know the history and understand how it stands. This could have been a great act of preservation, a massive move to showcase a cancelled piece George Lucas himself supposedly liked. Yet, what we have in our hands now is an edited version of that particular book. Making changes to fit this work to the canon, when it never fit any canon, was a straight-up mistake.
The flavour blurp on Amazon funnily asks the “House of Mouse, don’t sue me”. Whatever your bottom line is on how Disney has handled Star Wars as a property, they still own it. Disney should have a case for property infringement. You can argue however much you want that this is a non-profit work (which in itself doesn’t actually mean profit isn’t made by someone) or how it is for collectors only, but there should have been permission from Disney to make things clear-cut. Clearly, there is a demand for old Star Wars books and Disney can easily argue how this book diverges purchases away from their official works. I’m honestly surprised the lawyer team hasn’t moved in for the kill yet. This isn’t exactly filling the bill for being transformative, it’s not a parody and you could argue it is diverging profit away from official Star Wars books. It might not be the most sensible move on their part regarding PR, but Disney hasn’t really given one flying fuck about that when it comes to Star Wars. Maybe this is flying under their radar.
Sadly, a lot of social media posts I’ve seen pushes Amazon sales as some sort of middle finger towards Disney. This really isn’t how it should be seen, but a number of users have claimed to have purchased the book just because Disney isn’t seeing a dime on it. I find this incongruent. While the old Star Wars is still in demand, this work isn’t the actual old Star Wars. It was still made to fit a mould that it was never intended to be in. This is contradictory in spirit, but I guess buying an edited Lostworlds Star Wars novel in physical form is deemed a worthwhile effort. As a side note, Lostworlds refers to numerous unpublished, cancelled or lost pieces of Star Wars media. The name was coined by Kevin Furman for his site, until it went down in 2004 someone on the Jedi Council Forums, though Kevin Furman was the first one to collect all the information for this site, which went down in 2004. Thanks for Kevin to point this out in the comments. The Star Wars Timeline resurrected and continued on with Furman’s efforts to catalogue these lost media.
If I haven’t stated my case on this clear enough, it’s not that the edited version of The Heart of the Jedi has been edited to fit the Expanded Universe. It could’ve been the new or the old, doesn’t matter. It is that the book itself was edited at all. That I can’t support as someone who wants to preserve and archive media in its most original form. To illustrate this in another way, the situation is just like with George Lucas and his Special Editions. They are, after all, “largely” the same movies. Maybe one day we’ll see the original, unedited version of The Heart of the Jedi published on The Star Wars Timeline.
Y’know, I’d be nice if I could center the Featured Images.
Aaltomies 