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“This story happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. It is already over. Nothing can be done to change it.”
In a single paragraph prefacing his take on the events of Revenge of the Sith, Matthew Stover got Star Wars. As resonant now—in the week the Revenge of the Sith novelization launched its own celebratory, deluxe edition—as it was upon release 20 years ago, Stover’s adaptation has maintained a legendary status among Star Wars fans for good reason.
It goes beyond a typical movie tie-in retelling (the book came out over a month before the film’s release), fleshing out details from either earlier script drafts or left to interpretation by the final film. Its increased interiority adds extra layers of depth to our main characters, amplifying the tragic misinterpretations and misunderstandings that propel Revenge of the Sith‘s broader story of betrayal and loss. And of course, Stover’s own knowledge of the Expanded Universe at the time put him in stark contrast to George Lucas’ own belief that the extended material and his own films were distinctly separated things, letting the writer drop in mentions and connections that more closely enmeshed over a decade of comics and books into the climax of the prequel saga.
This doesn’t make it inherently better than the film itself, but simply an alternate point of view of its narrative, an enrichment of a similar text rather than a supplanting of it. But that also ties into the actual thing that makes Stover’s novel so compelling and fun to read, even all these years after the film has been burned into the canon of Star Wars (both what Stover was working with at the time and the rebooted interpretation of it all): Revenge of the Sith‘s novelization treats Star Wars as a historical myth it has been for generations and, more crucially, as a fantastical fable that envisions its characters as larger-than-life archetypes of their genre—in this case, a tragedy.
From the very moment the book begins, Stover is playing with this idea that what is being told to you, the audience, is a piece of history, with an immutable essence at its core that makes the inevitability of its sadness all the more compelling. And yet beyond that core, it mythologizes its retelling of these events with a heightened, fantastical sense of the surreal. The interweaving between moments of second- and third-person narration feels at times like a Greek chorus and at others like an intimate envisioning of the events being described to you. Stover’s work is at its best when it dives deep into the abstract: characters fall away from simply being who they are and take on grand, conceptual identities, avatars of darkness and light and emotion itself, drawing upon the stories of the Expanded Universe to reframe Palpatine’s machinations as the culminations of thousands of years of cyclical conflict between good and evil while making you feel like you’re reading the latest chapter of some long, majestic epic.
Multiple times throughout the book you are told what it feels like to be one character or another, rather than having that information communicated to you by their actions or even by the interior dialogues, broadening and blurring the lines so that it’s less like you are getting a straight explanation of these supposed ancient, immutable events and more like an almost hazy retelling, made grandiose by both flowery prose and a feeling as if this story has been told and retold and heightened by the passage of time, transforming from history into myth itself.
Star Wars as fantasy over science fiction is an idea that has been baked into the story of the franchise from the very beginning, of course. There are spaceships and blaster rifles, but it’s a story of space wizards and their diametrically opposed magics of dark and light—the story of Star Wars is as much one as it is the other. Stover’s mythopoetic framing of Revenge of the Sith plays into that fantasy by doing what the very best Star Wars material does: treating the franchise by its opening crawl of being a long, long time ago, a piece of history that these stories are documentation of.
A lot of some of the best Star Wars stories of the past few years have taken this idea in a more grounded sense. The brilliant Rise and Fall of the Galactic Empire by Dr. Chris Kempshall last year took Star Wars‘ story and made it a literal historical text, an analysis of its world and narrative as if looking at it as a piece of real-world history, and engaged the audience to think about the Star Wars universe as such. Likewise, Andor treated Star Wars‘ history in its examination of the rise of resistance to the Empire as a direct parallel commentary to our own past (and, more grimly, the ways that history can be repeated).
But the most similar thing to Stover’s work on Revenge of the Sith is perhaps another prequel source in The Acolyte, with its Rashomon-esque retelling of the events that drove apart young sisters Osha and Mae Aniseya, asking us as an audience to not implicitly trust everything we’re seeing, that stories can in fact take on a mutability and heightened emotionality rather than perceiving a definitive truth. These all still come at the same idea from different perspectives: what does it actually mean that Star Wars is a history decided a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away? Does it mean treating it as we treat our own? Does it mean mythologizing it as a fable, a story of conceptual heroes and ideas that can be twisted and reinterpreted in retelling across generations?
What has made Star Wars so enduring as our own modern cultural myth is that it can be approached in both of these ways, and more, if we’re willing to trust in those interpretations beyond what is a canonical truth and what isn’t. And it is in turn what makes Stover’s Revenge of the Sith so compelling now, as it was 20 years ago. Something like these events may have happened a long time ago, but what we’re reading now is just one interpretation of many, transcended into a myth decades in the making.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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James Whitbrook
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