In September 2025 I had the pleasure of attending Legacy Expo as press on behalf of Fantha Tracks. It was an amazing weekend of community, celebrating the Star Wars Legends fandom. While there I had the wonderful opportunity to chat with Matthew Stover, the author of several Star Wars novels including The New Jedi Order: Traitor, Shatterpoint, the novelization of Revenge of the Sith, and Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor.
Stover is also the author of his own IP The Acts of Caine which are described on Matthew’s website as “a four-book science fantasy series by Matthew Stover, featuring a unique blend of Earth-based reality television and a magical, alternate dimension where the protagonist, Caine, is a legendary warrior. The series is known for its distinct tones and styles across the books”.
Legends fans also know him for his novelization of Revenge of The Sith, considered by many to be one of the best Legends books, and this month a twentieth anniversary edition of Revenge of The Sith is being released, loaded with the following features:
- Over 150 new annotations direct from author Matthew Stover
- An acetate jacket with foil stamping, a paper over-board bookcase, gilded and stained edges, illustrated full-color end papers, and a red satin ribbon market
- Pre-orders are available now with the book set to release on October 14th, 2025
In our interview I asked him about the origins of this special edition as well as his journey towards writing the annotations.
Fantha Tracks: How did the annotated version of this novel come about?
Matthew Stover: My editor from New York, the guy who came up with the idea to do it approached my agent, and my agent called me and I said no. I said well, I’m probably not interested but I’ll talk to him because I couldn’t think of anything interesting to say about it.
He (the editor of the anniversary edition, Tom Hoeler) had the idea of ‘why don’t you just talk about some of the choices that you made and how you presented the story, and why you did that, and what you were going for’, so that’s exactly what I did.
I said yes as well because I come from a teacher family. My mom was a teacher and my grandmother was a librarian so, the opportunity to just let people see how detailed it is all based on memory, that’s wonderful.
FT: Did you rely on documents or memories for this book, or a combination of the two?
MS: It’s all based on memory, and not all of them are entirely accurate, but fortunately most of the people that appear in any of these stories, they’re all still alive, so we were able to check the details and make sure that we had right who was who.
FT: Did you basically do a reread of your novel and let the memories come?
MS: I was looking at it and there are there are a few things where I talk about what I had originally done here and why it was changed into the way it is now.
FT: This 20th Anniversary edition has over 150 annotations, were you guided in any way to specific chapters or passages to annotate?
MS: Well, there were few. They wanted to be very sure I was not going to even imply that I knew what George wanted, so there were a few things that I had to recraft because my impression was that he wanted them, but it’s not verifiable, so they just want to be sure that I didn’t say anything that anyone would look at and say ‘no, that’s not right.’
FT: Have you seen the excitement level in the Star Wars book fandom community?
MS: Yes, yes I have. It’s wonderful. All I’ve wanted to do was tell stories people would enjoy, and the fans response has been so great.
The deluxe edition of the Revenge of the Sith novelisation is out today.
