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After Disney bought LucasFilm and got the ball rolling on new «Star Wars» movies, they wiped clean the entire Expanded Universe of narratively connected novels, comics and video games from the official «Star Wars» timeline. Gone, yes, but not forgotten. Among all the novels that were published over three decades, there’s still plenty of gems to be found in the defunct Expanded Universe.
15. «Tales From Jabba’s Palace» (1996)
The «Star Wars» universe, being massive and full of oddities, was really well served by a series of short story anthologies like this, which also happens to be the best one. It explores a lot of the strange things we saw in Jabba’s palace in «Return of the Jedi,» and it’s never afraid to get real weird — which in this case, at least, is a great thing.
14. «Outbound Flight» (2006)
Functions as a prequel to Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn trilogy, finally detailing the Outbound Flight mission we’d heard mentioned so many times for over a decade — and it turned out to be a lot more involved than we’d thought.
«Outbound Flight,» which occurred during the events of the prequel trilogy, involved a group of Jedi Masters and a number of colonists taking an expedition beyond the galaxy in search of extra-galactic Force users — but on their way out they flew through the Unknown Regions of the galaxy, and ran afoul of some of the more unsavory alien civilizations there. And also Thrawn, whose species of blue near-humans hails from that part of space.
13. «Edge of Victory: Conquest» (2001)
Late in the run of the Expanded Universe came single longform stories published as a series — the longest of these was the «New Jedi Order,» about a race of religious fanatic aliens called the Yuuzhan Vong invading the galaxy.
«Conquest» was the eighth in that series, and it was the first, ah, humanizing look at the Yuuzhan Vong society. It turned out that, like any other society, the Yuuzhan Vong has its downtrodden folks who don’t like the murderous establishment, and teenage Anakin (youngest son of Han and Leia) carries out a dangerous mission with one such downtrodden soul.
12. «Isard’s Revenge» (1999)
This «X-Wing» one-shot novel is essentially the payoff to the entire long history of the elite Rogue Squadron that was told over a number of novels and comic books. Every loose end tied off and many stories, including some not part of the Rogue arc, re-contextualized in a really interesting way. «Isard’s Revenge» is the kind of story that can only happen within a massive universe with a detailed history — it’s the kind of story that makes a lot of old bad storytelling feel like it was worth it.
11. «Han Solo and the Lost Legacy» (1980)
One of the most fascinating aspects of the «Star Wars» Expanded Universe was how the early authors were kinda making up how everything worked and casually establishing hugely important things.
