I think the best answer is that Star Wars is so good at bombarding you with sights and sounds that it’s never going to translate well to the written word, that any novel trying to do an introspective, emotionally complex Star Wars will just be dancing about architecture. It may just be that if you want Star Wars, there’s not exactly a shortage of branded stories, and they’re offering enough of a critique of the saga to get by. Or that it’s, at heart, a swashbuckling adventure for kids, and it can’t really bear the weight. Perhaps it’s the exact opposite, and that Star Wars is an incredibly specific thing that’s very hard to play with. Perhaps it’s that Star Wars is already found poetry, that it’s constructed from bits of lots of other things. There’s not been the artistic response that would seem to have been inevitable. There are discussions of race, politics, gender, philosophy and so on and so on around Star Wars, but they never seem terribly meaty. Not just Aldi own brand remakes, but ones that use the original as a lens to discuss bigger themes, or as a place to jump off from at a complete tangent. I just think it’s odd that those of us who grew up with Star Wars as a dominant narrative didn’t end up reading and writing a great mass of smart, poetic books about galactic empires that are clearly reactions and challenges to Star Wars in the same way a lot of ‘high fantasy’ novels are to Tolkien.
I don’t mean space opera more generally, I’ve got shelves of that, too. I don’t mean tie-in novels, I have shelves of those.
I’ve often wondered why Star Wars hasn’t generated a subgenre of literary fiction.
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