Yeah, I probably should clarify that I'm referring to the adult novels, not the comics or youth oriented books. I'm well aware that many of the Marvel comics weren't canon and that they've tried to patch up stuff with "retcons".
There is no difference. The SW comics were no more "youth-oriented" than the novels; heck,
all of
Star Wars is meant to be family-friendly, an homage to the children's adventure serials Lucas loved as a boy. And, more fundamentally, age range has nothing to do with the intrinsic fact that tie-ins are not canon. It's got nothing to do with maturity, it's got to do with the simple logic of how subsidiary materials relate to the core material, whether in terms of profit potential or audience awareness or the simple right of the
actual owners of the property to make their own choices about how to tell the story rather than be held hostage to the decisions of outsiders who are simply borrowing their ideas in the first place.
Look -- I write tie-ins for a living. And I would never tell the actual owners of the
Star Trek franchise that they should be expected to follow my lead, because that would be petty and obnoxious and ungrateful. I'm a guest in their house and they've graciously allowed me to play with their toys. But the toys still belong to them, and they're only letting me use them as a courtesy, and it's my obligation as a visitor to abide by their house rules. Now, if I'd gone to play in Lucasfilm's house, they would've been gracious enough to say "Sure, you can play along right beside me and it'll all be one big story," and that would've been nice, though maybe a bit restrictive for me. But if they then had an idea for what to do with their toys that required disassembling what I'd built, then that would still be their absolute and undeniable right, because the toys are still entirely theirs. If I want to have things my own way, then I can go home and play with
my own toys. Then I'm dealing with my own property and have total control over my possessions. But by the same token, I respect the other guys' right to have total control over their possessions.
This is the mistake in assuming that the SW books and comics exist on an equal level to the movies and TV shows. They fundamentally do not. They are produced by different companies under license from the franchise owner, they're made by different people and are read by a fraction of the audience. They only exist with the indulgence of the owner. Just because they have the owner's approval does not mean they exist on an equal level with the core material. And, despite my toy-based metaphors, that has absolutely nothing to do with the age range of the material or the medium it's published in. It's just the way tie-ins work.
The bottom line is: I haven't read many of the Star Wars books, but I've read a good amount and I'm disappointed that after investing time and money on them (mainly due to the notion that they were canon) that they've now decided it isn't.
But does that really strip away their value as stories? Why should their consistency with the source be the only standard of merit? Did you think you were studying for some upcoming exam on
Star Wars history and needed to get a good grade? Or were you reading these books for enjoyment? And if the stories were enjoyable in their own right, does it matter whether they're consistent with other stories?
Christopher, you seem to be making an argument that they were never canon, but quite frankly, that was not what I felt Lucasfilm led me to believe.
Yes, that's what I've been saying all along: That Lucasfilm's representation of its tie-ins as canonical material was deceptive. I don't think they deliberately defrauded the audience, but I think they misunderstood how canon worked and what its ramifications were and thereby promised the audience more than they could deliver. We've seen this happen in other franchises. The original Dell
Babylon 5 novels were meant to be canonical, but it proved impossible to keep them consistent with a show that was in production at the time, and so they were retroactively declared non-canonical. Jeri Taylor considered her
Voyager novels canonical, but once she was out as the showrunner, her successors ignored her books. Anything declared as "secondary" canon like tie-in books or comics is subject to the risk of being overwritten -- exactly the same as any overtly non-canonical tie-ins.
I'm sensing a defensiveness in some of the responses I've been getting from some of you guys (not sure why since I'm not picking a fight or trying to piss people off), but I think we'll have to agree to disagree here. I can't help how I feel about the situation.
No defensiveness, just experience. The
Star Trek tie-in community has been through all this before, more than once.
