Splinter of the Mind’s Eye was an interesting read, considering that, when it was written, the only source material was the first Star Wars film. I share funny and odd aspects to this interesting tale that COULD have been the second Star Wars film, as a low-budget alternative, if the first film didn’t do well at the box office.

I read this book recently that I just had to talk about it’s. It’s a Star wars book written in 1978 called Splinter of the Mind’s Eye. This is the story that George Lucas wanted to make into a movie, a low-budget version sequel of Star Wars: A New Hope if it didn’t do as well as he had hoped:)

What’s really neat about this is that it was written in 1978 after the release of the first movie. Nothing else in the Star wars universe had occurred, nothing had been defined other than the first movie. That was in soul original source material.

In this book, for example, it’s after the Death Star has blown up, but the Empire still rules and the rebels are still trying to gather forces, so princess Leia and Luke are on their way to this planet to get some alliances and they have some engine trouble. They crash land on a different planet which is actually a swamp planet a lot like Dagoba, which is used in The Empire Strikes Back, and on this planet are these a lot of aliens, living creatures there and some of them are kind of fierce, stronger versions of Ewoks, which I thought was kind of interesting, that were used in Return of the Jedi.

In this story Luke is still in love with Leia because, thankfully, we don’t know that they end up being related. And what’s really fascinating to me is that I thought Princess Leia in the first movie was strong and and and feisty, but in this book she’s kind of a whiner, while Luke, who, in the first movie, was kind of a whiner, is strong.

He still doesn’t know the force, doesn’t know how to use it, and he hears from this lady that there’s a temple that has a Kaibur Crystal which is somehow connected to the force and, in the future, these crystals are used to power lightsabers, but in this story they don’t, because Luke recharges his lightsaber with a power pack from a rifle. THat’s the stuff that is cool, the fact that it’s different.

What I love about this is stepping back in time, that you can, whenever you read a book, like A Tale of Two Cities, go back to that time. If you read a book from 1997, you’re accepting that you’re in 1997 and, even in science fiction, I can go back and I am accepting that nothing else I know about this universe exists. I’m just going to enjoy the story that George Lucas had in his back pocket that was never made.

Now, some of the things that kind of drive me nuts, and I don’t want to pick on a small 1978 sci-fi book, but logic problems kill me. That’s why I hated The Last Jedi so much. So, there are two moments in here that just that didn’t ring true. They we’re just funny to me.

One is Luke and Leia have to go across this lake and, for some reason, either the author, Alan Dean Foster, or maybe it was George Lucas, decided that, out of the two of them, Luke, who grew up on a desert planet, could swim, while Leia, who grew up in Alderan, which appeared to have water before it exploded, couldn’t swim. I just thought that doesn’t seem to make any sense. I mean, desert planet, like we know that, it was that was established in the first movie.

Another funny moment was Luke, who is still just a farm boy who whined about getting power converters in the first movie, says this… It takes many thousands of years of advanced technological development for a society to reduce honor to an abstract moral truism devoid of real meaning.

Those kind of moments drive me nuts. But, overall, it’s really cool. They end up having to face off against Darth Vader.

One last thing. Before all the things that had been established in the Star Wars universe that we take for granted now one is how to spell R2D2 and C3PO. In this book, they didn’t think anyone would really know how to pronounce those initials so they actually spelled them out as Artoo Deetoo and See Threepio.

I love books for this reason, that you can just step back in time, you can envelope yourself in a world and, sometimes, an alternate universe that never happened. But this is the story that George Lucas thought about making as a sequel if the movie didn’t do as well as he had hoped.

I thought it was pretty cool. It’s a reason I bought it and it’s the reason I read it and I just wanted to share that with you.