I'll make no bones about it - someone I call a friend of mine did good by herself and Star Wars this last week. If we, in our geekery carnivale ever look at one another and wonder if we are alone in our avid interest in Star Wars, we can look at this as an example that Star Wars can reach across several lines to enter new minds and therefore new markets.

Exhibit A, your honors, from the March 8, 2008 New York Times Best-Sellers List:

PAPERBACK MASS-MARKET FICTION

Top 5 at a Glance
1. REVELATION, by Karen Traviss
2. PREDATORY GAME, by Christine Feehan
3. NAUGHTY NEIGHBOR, by Janet Evanovich
4. I HEARD THAT SONG BEFORE, by Mary Higgins Clark
5. SISTERS, by Danielle Steel ...


Just to put that in perspective - Revelations beat out the venerable Danielle Steele, a staple on the best-sellers list. A Star Wars Novel. It beat out two critically acclaimed books made into major motion pictures out right now: Atonement by Ian McEwan and The Other Boleyn Girl by Phillipa Gregory. It beat out James Patterson even. It even made #8 on the USAToday list, which lumps every category together - number 8 on top of a stack of hundreds of releases. That's huge. Number 1 on a NYT list. That's huger.

A Star Wars novel. We are not alone.

And you know what? I haven't even read Revelations yet (so don't spoil me). But I am going today to slap down some of my own cash for another Karen Traviss book, because I think she's a good author.

I can't presume to tell someone else what makes an author good. I can tell you I may appreciate Pratchett's extremely wicked sense of humor and vast imagination, or the detail of Tad William's fantasies. I may also be able to tell you that I thoroughly enjoy what I feel to be Luceno's excellent grasp of drama, or Allston's vivid descriptions, or Denning's riveting sense of screenplay. For my tastes, in my world in which science fiction and humor and all things Star Wars reign supreme, these authors capture and hold my attention. But I can't point to some sort of universal scale and say "That thar is what such and such measures up to". I can't do it because I'm not a professional critic, nor do I want to be. I can just tell you what I like, what I buy, what I read, what I talk about (when I do, which is rarely). It's sort of like the words of US Justice Potter Stewart in 1964 when he worked out how to explain the bounds of obscenity: "I shall not today attempt further to define . . . but I know it when I see it . . . "

When I see a Star Wars novel at the top of an NYT Bestsellers list, I reach into my small-time marketing background and realize to sell that many copies that fast, it has reached outside of the normal bounds of our fandom. Sure, few on the planet can't call themselves a Star Wars fan. Having "Star Wars" on your front cover will absolutely get some sales. But #1? This isn't 1977, nor is it 1994. These are the post-prequel days. And I think we all can distinguish between the passive and the active fan. This looks to me as if it has reached out to the passive, and frak, who knows... maybe even some die-hard Trekkies.

See, sad truth is - I'm not a reader. I can say I write stuff for a living, or at least most of my living is made by writing stuff, but it's in no way as interesting as these books. I write technical jargon all day, which is all about trying to encapsulate bizarre acronyms inside normal sentence structure and acting for all the world as if it's completely normal. Stuff like "...platform environments including HP/UX, SUN and AIX and OSX" or "versions including ECC 6.0, 5.0, B.I 7.0, BW (3.0B, 3.1C, and 3.5), APO, EBP, SRM, and E.P 6.0" or "set up transport request using SCC1, SE09/SE10". Yeah. I do that. Annoying, ain't it?

So at the end of the day, I can't say it's easy to get into reading something when my melon is mush from spewing out nonsense like that all day long. But in my quieter moments, I will try to sneak away with a book and pour over the pages in my halting Moosanderthal way. So when I say I like an author, that's coming from someone that generally finds reading to be either too much like work, or it is work. (And work, children, is bad. Remember that.) When I say I like an author, I really like that author, because somehow they've managed to capture my attention with words and not pretty moving pictures.

Therefore, in the same vein as the aforementioned authors, I'd also point out "It's the characters, stupid" (to paraphrase an old Clinton campaign slogan). Now some people read these books for different reasons. Some people read them to picture space battles in their heads, or to glean some technical nuance, or just to be nostalgic for the movies. But when I read a Karen Traviss book, I'm reading characters. Vivid, three-dimensional characters.

I think Karen would say of her books that the key to that sort of success is that you don't have to know everything about a Galaxy Far, Far Away to get the story. While sound Star Wars ficiton, it doesn't just reach out to your Star Wars sensibilities - it reaches into your own experience. To which I would point directly to the first Star Wars movie and absolutely agree. There was a time when no one knew anything about Star Wars - no encyclopedias, no action figures, no detailed blueprints, no Databank, no website period. We saw something singularly bizarre and wholly unreal on the screen, and instead of tilting our heads in confusion...we related. We related to Luke Skywalker, and Han Solo. Hell, we even related to Chewie and R2, and no one knew What the Force they were even saying.

I would say of Karen's books this: you walk away with something you don't get from other authors. Mind you, as mentioned, each author has something to offer. What Karen offers is personal resonance with deeply imagined characters that are carefully constructed, true-to-life mental holograms. Each character in her book is not just a foil for the plot. It's a person, fully formed, capable of independent action. I daresay that not even Karen knows what her characters will do. They are rather like personality simulations running on some supercomputer. But instead of churning out their decisions and actions in a clustered processor, they come out of Karen's head. And each one has their own reasons, and by simply reading them, we start to think like them, at least so far as our personal boundaries go.

I don't mind saying I walk away from reading Karen's books feeling absolutely frustrated with the situation characters find themselves in, which is a testament to their realism. Thinking like Jacen can be, in a word, unsettling. Knowing what must come in the future for Darman or Skirata is worrisome, even tragic. I start prowling eBay looking for a bullhorn that can reach into Fiction, as if to yell at the movie screen "No, don't do that you idiot! Oh no you di-int! Aw man...see? That's what you get, dawg." Or something.

I think reaction overall to Karen's books, and her repeated presence on the NYT Best Sellers List, demonstrates a wide-based acceptance. Is the marketplace the only way to tell the worth of an author? No, not at all. But for us, it's a special measurement. A great many of us has engaged in that same argument with a friend (or enemy) who was a fan from a competing franchise. Each of us has had the opportunity to say at one point or another "Oh yeah? Well Star Wars grossed $775,400,000..!!" We like to point out its opening day performance, we love to talk about worldwide box office this and record merchandising revenue that...

We like to point out, basically, that Star Wars is Number 1. And Karen Traviss has helped us prove that once again not just by making all of us slap down our cash, but by adding fans to our ranks.

Well done, and May the Force be With You

DM out