The galaxy of Star Wars is a vast place, despite most of the current stories revolving around the Skywalker family. Hundreds of species on scores of planets are born, live, and die within the fictional universe George Lucas created in 1977. Most of them will never have their stories told because their life’s orbit doesn’t take them near the Most Important Family In The Galaxy™. Even those who are lucky enough to become background characters don’t have time to tell the audience who they are. Until now.
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Star Wars Del Rey books has teamed up with Lucasfilm for an anthology called Star Wars: From a Certain Point Of View. Due out this October, the book collects 40 stories from 40 authors about characters that appeared in A New Hope for brief moments and peeks into their lives.
From the official press release:
Each [story] will be told from the perspective of background characters of A New Hope — from X-wing pilots who helped Luke destroy the Death Star to the stormtroopers who never quite could find the droids they were looking for.
Generously, every author in Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View did not receive compensation for their words. Instead, all proceeds that would’ve gone to the authors will instead by donated to the charity First Book. The nonprofit is dedicated to providing books and other essential learning materials to underprivileged kids. Since 1992, First Book has distributed over 160 million books and resources. On top of the authors donating their pay, Penguin Random House will donate $100,000 to the charity and Disney/Lucasfilm will give 100,000 children’s’ books to celebrate the launch to Star Wars: From a Certain Point of View.
As of this writing, not all of the anthology authors have been announced. However, the partial list revealed includes Ben Acker & Ben Blacker, Renee Ahdieh, Tom Angleberger, Meg Cabot, Rae Carson, Adam Christopher, Zoraida Cordova, Delilah, S. Dawson, Paul Dini, Alexander Freed, Jason Fry, Christie Golden, EK Johnston & Ashley Eckstein, Paul Kemp, Mur Lafferty, Ken Liu, Griffin McElroy, John Jackson Miller, Nnedi Okorafor, Daniel José Older, Mallory Ortberg, Madeleine Roux, Gary D. Schmidt, Cavan Scott, Sabaa Tahir, Glen Weldon, Chuck Wendig, and Gary Whitta,