Every who pays a certain amount of attention to Star Wars knows this story already, but I was lucky enough to hear it recounted first-hand last year, so Iâm gonna give it yet another retelling.
So The Husband and I were at Sci-fi Weekender (a British based annual Sci-fi and Fantasy convention) last year, and one of the guests that year was Kevin J Anderson, one of the very notable Star Wars Expanded Universe writers. During one of the events, a quiet little interview in a cafe on the event site, he fielded a question from an audience member about what it was like to write for a franchise like Star Wars which often had lots of cooks working on one broth, and he had the following to say (wording recounted as best as I can from memory):
âSo in one of my stories, Han Solo, he, he travels to this asteroid planet called Kessel, which is where a lot of Spice comes from, these Spice Mines of Kessel, and I got to really describe the effects of this Spice, this terrible drug and the addiction and all this and before publication I get this call, I get this call from the lawyers, and they say âKevin, you say in this story that Spice is a drug, you canât say that, you canât say that Spice is a drugâ, and I say âWhat? What do you mean itâs not a drug, of course itâs a drugâ, and they say âHan Solo used to smuggle Spice, and you cannot, let us be clear, you cannot imply that the Hero of Star Wars used to be a drug dealerâ. And I just stood there, at a loss for words, and I eventually said âSo what is it then?â and they said to me, very sternly, âItâs a food-additiveâ. Now, now obviously this is ridiculous, and I wonât back down, and they wonât back down, and none of us will back down, and the book is very close to getting pulled, which I donât want because I worked hard on it and they donât want because they already paid me the advance, and eventually, with this great air of superiority they say âOK Kevin, weâll take this to the top. WEâLL TAKE THIS TO GEORGEâ. And they go to all this trouble, this was a long while ago when such things were not so easy to arrange, they go to all this trouble to set up a conference call with all of them and me and with George Lucas and they say âGeorge, Kevin is trying to say in his new book that Spice is a drug, itâs a food additive, tell him itâs not a drug, Georgeâ. And thereâs this long silence on the other end of the line and eventually George says âIt is a drug, though. Itâs, itâs a drug, itâs a food-additive? What? Of course it a drug, itâs space heroin, what else would it be? What?â And that was then end of that.â
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