A Long Time Ago... #2
Hello there.
Welcome to the second of these posts exploring art, fiction and history. Every other Sunday I'll be sharing some insights into my two major passions - Star Wars and history, or specifically, ancient art.
Art as a means of representation, observation and meaning, has survived tens of thousands of years, expressed now in a mesmerising multitude of ways. I'm fascinated by its origins, and a particular subgenre of art known as the Star Wars franchise.
At the moment, I’m expressing and sharing this fascination by taking you through my timeline-ordered shelves of Star Wars books, as well as the ancient art sites that inspire(d) my writing.
In a Galaxy Far, Far Away…
We move along now into the era of The Clone Wars, also known as the three years containing and between Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.
Queen’s Hope, the third in the Padme trilogy by E.K. Johnston, begins by fleshing out the Episode II’s ending, providing a lot more insight into Anakin and Padme’s wedding, and a galaxy heading into full-out war. Since this novel was written at the same time as the next one, Brotherhood, they coordinate to show this previously-unseen crucial moment between the end of the film and the start of The Clone Wars animated series.
Brotherhood ties into and continues beyond Queen’s Hope perfectly. Mike Chen nailed the bond between Anakin and Obi-Wan. The novel is so much more than “that business on Cato Nemoidia” that Obi-Wan mentions in Episode III.
There’s an explosive mystery on a neutral planet, Anakin’s journey from Padawan to Knight - dealing with his new cybernetic wrist and hand - as well as the duo’s first encounter with Asajj Ventress. If there was a Star Wars novel I would’ve liked to have written, it would’ve been this one, answering a question I’d had since I was a child; in The Clone Wars movie, Ventress already has a layered relationship with Obi-Wan particularly, and this novel shows us all the intricacies!
The Clone Wars: Stories of Light and Dark is a short story collection from eleven different authors. The first ten stories adapt some of the best stories from the animated series, from single episodes to four episode arcs, each focussing on different characters on both sides of the war and taken from most of the show’s seasons. The last story, Bug, is original, dealing with the aftermath of a certain episode, but introducing a new character that may have ties to the live-action show Ahsoka or the animated Tales of the Empire coming this May 4th!
If you’re just reading books (as my imagined audience is for the sake of this timeline order), this book is very important in showing the character development and world building that the animated show provided, from well-known characters to those that the series introduced or brought back, like Anakin’s Padawan Ahsoka Tano, the once-Sith Maul, clone Capitan Rex or the bounty hunter Cad Bane.
Dark Disciple is another adaptation, but it adapts an eight-episode arc that was never fully developed after The Clone Wars was cancelled (and before it was revived for a last season, missing many of the in-between arcs like this one). Christie Golden fantastically crafted eight scripts and the already-completed previsualisation into a novel that focusses on the deep and twisting relationship between Asajj Ventress and the Jedi Quinlan Vos. It completes the transformative arc of the character begun in Dooku: Jedi Lost, transmuted through many Clone Wars arcs (and a few of the adaptations in the collection above). It’s not just legacy from the animated show, but a fantastic book in its own right, and I wish they did more like this, novelising other arcs that will otherwise never see the light of day (another dream project of mine!).
The Thrawn Ascendancy trilogy is unlike anything else in the Star Wars canon, and that’s primarily because it’s all about a culture outside of the known Star Wars galaxy, the Chiss Ascendancy. It’s like a whole other sci-fi universe crafted by Timothy Zahn, with all the politics, families, shifting alien nomenclature and names of the red-eyed, blue-skinned people. It’s full of politics and exquisitely complicated plots and relationships, so many involved POVs including the machinating villains, and the fascinating journey of the books’ namesake, Thrawn, or Mitth’raw’nuruodo, told through present action and flashback ‘memory’ interlude chapters with fancy borders.
Thrawn is a very important Star Wars character, originating in Zahn’s first Heir to the Empire Thrawn trilogy that kicked off the old expanded universe in the nineties. He’s also a villain in a second canon trilogy beyond this one, seasons three and four of the animated show Rebels and more recently in Ahsoka.
I have the blue-edged edition of the first book, Chaos Rising, which blew my mind when I read it as it tied to and expanded the ‘Then’ half of the second book in Zahn’s first canon Thrawn trilogy that takes place later in the timeline. Sorry if that sentence was too confusing.
The Ascendancy trilogy also ends exactly as the first novel in that first looser trilogy begins, so really it’s a hexalogy (or maybe more, as Zahn wrote all of his novels to tie together beyond any old/new continuity). Thrawn returns to the main galaxy, where the Republic has turned to the Empire. So, now we’re post-Episode III.
The divide between my shelves is perhaps when this galaxy-altering event happens!
Catalyst by James Luceno is another story that spans the timeline from during to after the Clone Wars, and is another very important book. It’s a tie-in to the brilliant film Rogue One, but is much more than that. It explores the difficult science and politics behind the construction of the Death Star, and how scientists with consciences deal with the change from Republic to Empire. It perfectly expands on the relationships seen briefly in the film, between Jyn’s (Rogue One’s protagonist’s) parents and the power-seeking Krennic.
In Serrania de La Lindosa, Guaviare, Colombia…
The many panels here, wide, towering displays of haphazard imagery like a classroom blackboard graffitied by every child of differing heights, are a many-layered representation of the whole natural world, and perhaps a world beyond it. Shamanistic practices empowered these records, linking dream to reality in a marvellous display.
That’s a quote from the second interlude from my WIP novel, based at the above location in the Amazon forest. And it’s true:
There’s plenty more photos in this BBC article. But they’re only small excerpts of the tens of thousands of red ochre paintings across eight miles of rockface, potentially created 12,500 years ago. Try and picture eight miles of the above photo! I think it would be mind-blowing to see in person.
The art depicts many now-extinct ice-age animals - excitingly, megafauna - from when the area was more savannah-like. There’s ancient llamas, horses, mastodons and giant sloths! (The black arrow in the image above points to one.)
And as you can see, there’s much more, including birds, lizards, fish, turtles, bats, ancient cats and dogs, porcupines and tapirs, as well as people dancing and holding hands and more scenes. There’s also plenty of trees and other plants, hand prints and geometric designs common across time and culture. Another quote from my short story about the site:
The Earth was filled with so many creatures then, when humans spread out all over the world. The people near this site documented their world through dreamy eyes; vast tapestries of red cover walls of grey stone hidden beneath the lushness.
The vast tapestries as I call them were painted possibly by some of the first humans to reach the Amazon, migrating a long way out of Africa, all the way across Asia, down North- and further to South America. I do think the date for when sapiens first strolled across the Americas is being pushed back all the time, though.
These ancient people certainly made their mark, with art and ideas gathered over millennia and miles and miles and miles… They painted so much that it might take generations of scientists to properly record what locals have known about for a long time…
That brings us to an end of this exploration of a long time ago. I hope you enjoyed, and maybe learnt something along the way - that the two facets of this post balanced each other out. Any feedback would be much appreciated.
Thank you very much for reading,
Harvey