Zahn came to reboot the franchise back in the 1990s on the back of an already successful career as a science fiction author with books like The Blackcollar and Cobra.īut if you’re looking for a Star Wars-esque romp through space, I’d recommend his standalone novel The Icarus Hunt. Timothy Zahn is certainly well-known for his Star Wars novels, especially for creating the master tactician Grand Admiral Thrawn. Image: Spectra The Icarus Hunt by Timothy Zahn It’s a fun, snarky series of books set in a much larger world with plenty of more stories left in it.

In the volumes that follow - Artificial Condition, Rogue Protocol, Exit Strategy, Network Effect, and the forthcoming Fugitive Telemetry - Murderbot begins to make its way out to the larger universe on its own, only to find that it has to come to the rescue of various humans as it jumps from station to station, and planet to planet. After it rescues its fellow expedition members, it discovers that there’s a deeper plot at play surrounding the planet and expedition. It doesn’t mind humans, but it would rather be left alone to binge-watch hours of soap operas that it pulls from local data nets. The cyborg is secretly free, and yearns to leave the humans under its protection. In Martha Wells’ novella All Systems Red, we meet an expedition on a distant world that finds itself under attack, and which is saved by their SecUnit, a cyborg that calls itself Murderbot. Image: Tor The Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells With The Mandalorian season 2 out on Disney Plus, I’ve found myself reaching for books that remind me of that big, gritty world that is Star Wars, where spaceships run from port to port, where there’s a big, evil Empire to resist, and adventure to be had. The sheer scale and size of the Star Wars franchise means that there’s something for everyone.

Looking at the Expanded Universe, there are even more experiments, from pulp homages (as seen in Matthew Stover’s Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor) to weird cyberpunk (Barbara Hambly’s Children of the Jedi), to straight-up military sci-fi (Michael A. But then there’s the dirty Western aspect of the world that defines The Mandalorian, the brutal war stories that we saw in The Clone Wars, or the heist film that we saw with Ron Howard’s Solo. It’s set in a massive, mythical space universe that we’ve seen with big space-opera worlds like that of Frank Herbert’s Dune or Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, which span epic distances and time periods. The film pulled from books and comic books, as well as Japanese samurai thrillers and war films.Īs a result, the larger Star Wars franchise is a bit of a hodgepodge of genres, all blended together. When Star Wars first hit theaters back in 1977, it was clear to a number of science fiction fans that George Lucas had gone far and wide for inspiration to build his world.

Warchild by karin lowachee