Shortly before filming the prequel trilogy, George Lucas and Co. authorized a flood of new Star Wars novels. He called it the Expanded Universe (now Legends under Disney). Some were good reads, and a few (e.g., Shadows of the Empire) were great reads. But they fit together poorly. And as Lucas added novel after novel, they really didn’t work together.
By 2010 or so, the Star Wars ‘canon’ looked like unintelligible garbage. A few dozen or so authors wrote a long series of mostly self-contained stories about Luke Skywalker and friends. The stories didn’t necessarily contradict each other, but they veered wildly in terms of plot and characterization. They always added up to less than the sum of their parts.
In contrast, the Dune universe built a much more plausible franchise model. Two authors develop the plot and write each book. The Dune canon is a bit bloated, and some of the books aren’t good (and none are as good as the Frank Herbert originals), but it all fits together reasonably well.
Enter Disney
And then Disney bought Star Wars in 2012, to much criticism from the fan base. After doing so, it tore down and rebuilt the ‘official Star Wars canon.’ They rebuilt the canon on something closer to the Dune model than the 1990s and early 2000s Star Wars model. One even gets the impression that Disney mapped out the timeline ahead of time and tried to maintain at least some coordination of plot and characters.
The best books in the Disney era explore characters who didn’t appear in the films. A couple of highlights: the 6 Thrawn books from Timothy Zahn and anything written by Claudia Gray. These books explore new relationships, new alien species, and new psychological and political aspects of the Empire and Rebellion that the films never got around to exploring.
In short, Disney added a more diverse set of authors who wrote a more diverse set of stories. The books added to the universe. Rather than, as with much of the material from the 1990s and early 2000s, merely serving as filler while the audience waits for the next movie.
