AARON ALLSTON INTERVIEW

Aaron Allston is the previous writer of several Star Wars and Science Fiction novels, the best known for his Wraith Squadron novels in the X-Wing Series. He has also written for the New Jedi Order series with a duology Enemy Lines, two short stories for Star Wars Insider, and has been contracted to write a trilogy for the Post-NJO series forthcoming from DelRey and Lucas Books. He currently lives in Austin, Texas.

TUCWS: Hello Mr. Allston, thanks for taking the time to talk with us.

Aaron Allston: Happy to. I’m glad there’s still interest, since I’ve been away from interviews for a year or so and haven’t done much Star Wars writing in that time.

TUCWS: For the sake of those who have not really heard of you, can you tell us a little about yourself and how you became a writer?

AA: Well, I come from a Texan family that’s chock full of journalists, not to mention a fair number of peace officers, military personnel, and teachers. My maternal grandparents were both reporters, and my father is a musician, journalist, short story writer and science fiction fan. So, obviously, I grew up in an environment where the written word played an important role.

When I was in elementary school, I had an odd dream, portions of which I can still remember vividly, even after 35 years or so. The next day, I tried to commit the dream to paper, and I strongly remember struggling to transcribe the dream’s events, and being really challenged by and interested in that process of translation – turning something as logic-free and ephemeral as a dream into words that would preserve it and convey it to other people. I tend to think of that event as the real start of my interest in writing for entertainment’s sake.

In the years that followed, I started entering work in junior high school and high school literary magazines, and eventually decided that I wanted to be a writer. I went to college at the University of Texas in Austin to study journalism, dropped out for financial reasons after a very short time, found a job with a local magazine, and began writing role-playing game material and then eventually novels. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

TUCWS: How did you come to write a Star Wars novel, and later, more?

AA: Well, it relates back to that career in writing role-playing supplements. ’Way back in the early 1980s, I got to know the merry creative staff of a game company called Flying Buffalo, Inc., including a fellow named Michael A. Stackpole. The magazine I edited published some of his short fiction (and some short fiction written buy a guy named Timothy Zahn, too), and in 1984 Mike and I collaborated with game publisher Steve Peterson on a role-playing game called Justice, Inc. Over the years, we got to know one another’s work pretty well, and discovered that we shared a lot of sensibilities and influences, such as the fact that we both really enjoyed the 1930s hero-pulp characters such as the Shadow and Doc Savage.

Skip ahead a few years, and we were both doing less game work and writing more novels. He’d just done the first four X-Wing novels, and was in the middle of writing I, Jedi, when the decision came down that Bantam Books wanted four more X-Wings. The trouble was, Mike didn’t have time to do them – he could do one, but not all. The editor asked him for recommendations for writers who might do the other three, and I was one of the names on that list. When the editor did his research into those writers, he decided that my style was a good match for Mike’s, and so I got the assignment to do the fifth, sixth, and seventh X-Wing novels, the books now referred to as the Wraith Squadron Trilogy.

I’d thought that this was going to be my entire career with Star Wars fiction – after all, there’s a lot of competition for those writing assignments – but several months later, a hole opened up in Bantam’s novel schedule and they asked me to fill it. That became Starfighters of Adumar, the last X-wing novel and, I believe, the last Star Wars novel Bantam published before the book license went to Del Rey. And I believe it was largely the fans’ influence that caused Del Rey to consider me for the two NJO novels.

Later, some people I knew from the game industry founded Paizo Publishing and received the license to publish Star Wars Insider, and its editor was interested in having me do some short fiction. I proposed a story or two involving Wraith Squadron characters, but with the prequel movies influencing the publishing schedules as heavily as they were, I was asked to do some prequel-era fiction.

TUCWS: You're a veteran of Star Wars already, having written several books in the X-Wing Series and a pair of books in the New Jedi Order series. Now, you've written a pair of short stories set in the Clone Wars. How is it to have written in such a vast space of Star Wars "History"?

AA: I haven’t actually written what I consider a vast space of history. I’ve written very short spans of history that pop up like freckles all over several decades of the timeline. But it’s been nice to wander all over the chronology.

TUCWS: These three main eras are fairly different from each other, because of several wars. While writing, did you notice any differences for each era? Do you have a favorite time to write in?

AA: They are different. The classic era (Luke/Han/Leia before the NJO) has, I think, the most charm, an echo of the energy, brashness and enthusiasm of the original movie. But it’s also the center of the most densely-plotted portion of the universe’s chronology; it’s sometimes hard to turn around without bumping into timeline details established by other writers, because those years have been so extensively chronicled.

The prequel era has lots of color and a really neat retro feel to it, and with much less of its timeline having been filled in, it’s less constraining than the classic era. But there’s also a pall of impending doom over that whole span of years. As a writer, you have to address that doom in some way. It colors everything, whether with a sense of tragedy, of irony, or whatever. Sort of like Camelot stories – as good as things are now, we the readers know they’re going to go to hell in just a few years.

The NJO era is extremely focused. It’s like World War II in that the war is everything. Sure, you can do adventures, or espionage stories, or clash-of-navies stories, or horror-styled stories, or hero’s quest epics, but it all has to relate to the war.

I can’t say that I do have a favorite. There are opportunities for storytelling in all of them. I’d like to do some writing in the post-NJO era, though, to see if the universe’s storytelling horizons open up some and allow for a return to more small-scale, personal stories.

TUCWS: Your X-Wing novels are among some of the best Star Wars books out there. Did you draw from anything in them for your short stories?

AA: Not really, though there’s one similarity. The Star Wars movies deal with the major players, the characters whose actions directly change the course the lives of all beings in the galaxy. I tend to prefer to concentrate on characters who contribute, but aren’t the fulcrums and levers who move all of existence. Joram Kithe, like Wedge and Face and Kell, is going to do everything he can to make things better for everyone, but he’ll never be the guy in a position to throw the Emperor down a bottomless shaft at the story’s climax. He has a smaller and more personal role to play.

TUCWS: Joram is a character that was introduced in Pengalan Tradeoff, as a sort of misplaced person. He's been bounced around from place to place and winds up with a unit of clones. How did Joram come to be?

AA: This is probably going to sound pretentious, but here goes. The basis for The Pengalan Tradeoff is an examination of individuality vs. conformity. The character representing individuality is Joram, an irresponsible free spirit suddenly caught up in a wartime environment. The Clone Troopers obviously represent conformity. The story is one in which both sides have to consider the notion that their way of life isn’t the only right answer, and they influence and are influenced by one another.

It would have been easy to write a story in which the character representing individuality demonstrates that his is the only answer, but that’s both unrealistic and simplistic. Joram has to come to the realization that, in infecting the Clone Troopers with individualism, he is conceivably diminishing their strength and causing them to have trouble fitting into the society into which they were born. Well, hatched.

So, anyway, Joram came to be as a manifestation of the concept of individuality, wrapped up with enough self-awareness to realize that his choice of way of life is just not right for everybody. And since I also conceived him as the sort of fellow who’s going to move through the Clone Wars era with an ever-growing realization that something is very wrong within the Republic, he had to be alert, intellectual, and smart enough to keep his mouth shut – else he wouldn’t live long enough to participate in many follow-up stories.

TUCWS: The Pengalan Tradeoff is a short story about a unit of odd Clone Troopers, who were confirmed to be Advance Recon Commandos later on. Did you have this prior to writing the story? What was your motivation for writing about elite forces in the war?

AA: I didn’t know that there would be a distinct class of Clone Troopers known as the Advance Recon Commandos, no. What I did believe is that the manufacturers of any successful design are going to tinker with it, introduce variations on it, and test those variations in the field. I also knew that off-the-rack Clone Troopers wouldn’t be able to perform as I needed Joram’s companions to perform – in the sense of acting on their own initiative and quickly adopting individual traits, that is. These two factors came together to define the troopers Joram finds himself with, and when details of the Advance Recon Commandos were released, I was very happy that they turned out to be such a good fit.

TUCWS: Is there any connection between the elite soldiers in the story and the ones fighting out in the world today?

AA: I don’t think so, not really. The Clone Troopers, whether standard or elite, are reared in an environment that offers very little in the way of dissenting opinion. Though Clone Troopers theoretically have free will – even if they are genetically designed for more obedient character traits – the troopers grow up in a society that supports only the notion of doing one’s duty, facing danger, and obeying orders without question, no matter how baffling those orders are.

In the real world, elite soldiers grow up in a much more complex environment, one with a broad range of role models, including courageous warriors, charming cowards, duty-minded soldiers, and rebellious free thinkers. By and large, real-world volunteers have to make a much harder decision to expose themselves to danger and possible death. That makes them more admirable than Clone Troopers.

TUCWS: Humor has always been a part of your stories, and we see the characters in Pengalan Tradeoff cracking some jokes here and there. Why do you use humor more than other authors?

AA: I’m not sure I do. I mean, the X-Wing novels and the Joram Kithe stories are very heavy on the humor, but my other work, including the NJOs, falls more closely in line with action fiction/action movies with one or more wisecracking protagonists. There’s humor in those stories, but it’s a condiment rather than a major ingredient.

The X-Wing novels ended up the way they did, actually, as a result of something Mike Stackpole told me. Early in the process of outlining the Wraith Squadron novels, I asked his advice, and one of the things he told me was, “Include a lot of humor. The fans like that.” So I shrugged and decided to give it a try. After that, the precise mix of protagonists I chose sort of took over, with each character reinforcing the next one’s lunacy, and the results are pretty much what you’ve seen in the books.

With the Joram Kithe stories, the series was planned from the outset as being chiefly a set of comic romps. Joram Kithe becomes the harassed witness to a set of events that couldn’t possibly happen, but do, largely because of the influence Darth Sidious is having behind the scenes in Republic government. In short, Sidious is pulling strings and manipulating people to reduce the efficiency of Republic government – especially the portions of government, such as the Intelligence department, that should be able to provide competent analyses of current events – and is bumping off the people who could point out this fact. So Joram is the sane eyewitness in an increasingly surreal corner of the universe, and this is the main source of the humor.

TUCWS: League of Spies is a continuation of Joram's character, although now he's teamed up with a trooper called Mapper. Mapper is a clone, so how did you want him to react in a new type of battlefield?

AA: Mapper has been sufficiently infected with individualism that he doesn’t fit in even into his elite unit any more, and yet the outer world is still a mystery to him, and this is another source of humor in the stories. He’s in a weird position because his cover identity is not that of a Clone Trooper, so he is, in a sense, pretending not to be the same as everyone else. But since he’s not surrounded by other clones, he isn’t the same as everyone else. So he’s learning about individualism and individual behavior by observing the people around him and behaving like them. It’s all part of the skewed logic that makes the Joram Kithe corner of the universe as strange as it is.

Anyway, Mapper is a good companion for Joram. They share a similar pragmatism, so they have similar reactions when surrounded by weirdness, as they were in League of Spies. But Joram’s the more intellectual one, meaning he plans better and reacts more slowly. Mapper’s the one who seizes opportunities the instant they arrive and cuts through red tape with the vibroblade of efficiency.

TUCWS: LOS is another twist on the entire Clone Wars, showing us the Intelligence community in which some of the information is found for the upcoming battles and reminds us that there are other fights in the war. How important do you think intelligence in wartime is?

AA: Vital, absolutely vital. An individual battle might not rely on intelligence information, but the majority of battles will be influenced by it, and a superiority of intelligence information (both in quantity and quality) will give an important edge to one side.

Don’t imagine my answer to mean that I undervalue other departments of the armed forces, though.

TUCWS: Will we be seeing other stories about the Clone Wars and Joram again from you? If so, what might we be seeing?

AA: I was asked to propose another Joram story, and plan to do so. But with the recent move of Star Wars Insider from Paizo Publishing to IDG entertainment, I have no idea what sort of interest the new editorial staff has in a continuation of the series. I haven’t yet queried them, something I need to do. (The delay is at my end, not theirs.)

TUCWS: What can you tell us about some of your non-Star Wars works? What do you have coming next?

AA: I’m writing or planning a number of books. Next up will be Terminator Hunt, a follow-up to last year’s Terminator Dreams, which was set in the universe of the Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines movie. I’ll be doing a trilogy of novels set in the Deux Ex computer game universe. After a long dry spell, I’m writing again on Mongoose Among Cobras, which will be the first novel in a new series set in a universe of my own creation; it’s military-oriented space opera and Star Wars fans will find it similar in tone to the X-Wing novels. I’m also doing preliminary outline work on a third novel in my Doc Sidhe series, which is a fantasy-world cross between Celtic mythology and the pulp heroes of the 1930s. Anyone who’s interested can download a free electronic copy of the entire first Doc Sidhe novel; there’s a link to it from the top page of my web site at http://www.AaronAllston.com/.

Finally, in one of my more ambitious projects, I’ve written a screenplay for a feature-length horror/comedy movie. Rather than pitch it endlessly in Hollywood, I’m forming a small production company to produce it, on an ultra-low-budget basis, here in central Texas. Right now, we’re forming the LLC, doing storyboards, getting tentative commitments from crew members, and so on. I expect it to go into production in late 2004 or early 2005. As it gets closer to production time, I’ll put up more news about it on my web page.

TUCWS: Finally, can you give any aspiring writers some advice on writing?

AA: Oh, I could give lots and lots, but I don’t have time to write that book – at least, not yet.

For aspiring writers, I like to point out that being a writer tends to be a lifetime thing. A lot of people think about writing a book and that being the end of it, but training yourself to be a writer means learning a lot of skills that change you forever. You can no more stop thinking like a writer than you can stop thinking like a lawyer. (I know some ex-lawyers. They’re happier doing other things, but they still think like lawyers.) Consequently, my advice is usually very long-term stuff.

So the first thing I tell aspiring writers is to learn skills that are useful to writers, and learn them at a proficient level. Study typing. Journalism. History. Anthropology. Literature. Foreign languages. (Studying foreign languages gives you a much better perspective on your native language{s}. Trust me on this.)

The second thing I tell them is to write. It’s fine to read books on writing, to take classes on writing, to listen to authors talk about writing. But it’s more important to write. Write regularly. And show your work to people who can evaluate it critically and dispassionately, people who won’t spare your feelings because they like you (and also won’t cut your legs out from under you because of their own emotional problems).

The third thing I tell them is to keep writing. It’s not enough to write one thing and be content. A writer continues on to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next. Only by continuing to write can a writer improve. Some people have estimated that an aspiring professional writer must write a million words before he or she is really likely to start getting good. Anyone who’s daunted by the notion of writing a million words, the equivalent of four thousand of those 250-word essays we all did in public school, before really getting anywhere, should re-think the notion of becoming a writer.

The fourth thing I tell them is to concentrate on characters, settings and stories of their own creation. Sure, a lot of people want to write for established universes like that of Star Wars, and some people want only to write in such universes. But people who write only in those universes generally don’t develop the full set of skills, of tools, that it takes to become a professional writer. I don’t disparage fan fiction, but it really doesn’t teach the aspiring writer enough about character creation, characterization, or world creation, and its audience is often not critical enough to force the writer to hone his skills to a professional level.

I have a little writing advice on my Frequently Asked Question page, at http://www.AaronAllston.com/faq.html. Click on the link labeled “Writing.”

Aspiring writers who are interested in the work of Star Wars veterans really ought to take a look at The Secrets, a newsletter being produced by Michael A. Stackpole. Subscriptions to this e-publication cost $25, which brings them 25 bi-weekly newsletters on the craft of writing. It’s a good mixture of tips, tricks, techniques, and philosophy. People who are interested can look at a sample issue at http://www.stormwolf.com/thesecrets/index.html.

So, anyway, that’s my advice.

The Unofficial Clone Wars Site would like to thank Aaron for his time, with best wishes for the future. We look forward to *crosses fingers* more stories about Joram!

Conducted by Andrew Liptak, July 2004.

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