The author of Star Wars: Force Collector, author Kevin Shinick, discusses his new book which in part looks at how the war was viewed on the ground, with the everyday people of the galaxy.
Inverse: How did the plot for Star Wars: Force Collector germinate and where does it fall within official Star Wars mythology?
Kevin Shinick: It was a huge opportunity and a blessing to be able to write this novel. I wrote Chewie and The Porgs, which is a children’s book, about two years ago, and when they asked me if I wanted to do that I said yes, but asked would you consider letting me do more adult stuff. Star Wars is everywhere, but I was trying to think of ways to be new. I wanted to kind of refreshen the nostalgia, but play into it as well. It came to me in the sense that what if you were in that world, live in that galaxy, what was it really like for these people? What was the war like? There doesn’t seem to be a good and a bad, there’s a lot of politics and grey area.
There’s the expression that history is written by the winners, and yet you have Palpatine talking about the Jedi in a way that soils the entire universe against them. Who’s with them, who are against them? Who thinks they’re made up, or criminals? I wanted to discover that world and figure out what the people in this galaxy are thinking. In the divisive world we live in now, with so many people with so many opinions, I wanted to capture some of that but in a galaxy far, far away.
