A Splinter in the Mind

Ages ago, shortly after Star Wars came out, Alan Dean Foster released a novel of a Star Wars followup story with an awesomely cool cover that included Luke, Leia, and Darth Vader. I was young – innocent to the ways of movie tie ins – and it was much later that I learned that this author was also the author of the first Star Wars book, supposedly written by George Lucas. By then I’d already ready more than a fair bit of Foster’s stuff, including With Friends Like These… and the followon collection Who Needs Enemies, all the available Flinx and Pip books, most of the Humanx books, and the Spellsinger books.

Oh, and he wrote a hell of a lot of movie novelizations as well, including the book version of The Last Starfighter.

So I read this book, and enjoyed it. And when Empire came out, and later Jedi, got really confused because things didn’t mesh up with the book I’d read.

I expected things to make sense.

Anyway, I was recently reminded of this book when I stumbled into this review of it at Recalcitrant Male Watches Cinema:

On its own, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye is a solidly entertaining, reasonably well-written piece of light pulp. It doesn’t really fit well into what the franchise would later become and got swept under the rug more often than not by later writers, but Dark Horse Comics adapted the story in the 90s with a bunch of continuity fixes to bring it closer in line with the Expanded Universe proper. It doesn’t have a whole lot of substance going on, and its not as grandly ambitious as The Thrawn Trilogy, but I would recommend it as a snapshot of the humble early years of Star Wars.