Episode I: The Fandom Commences

It's not easy being the new kid in town.

Aaron Allston was born in Corsicana in 1960, but his "vagabond" family — after his folks split up, just him, his mother and his younger brother — moved all over Texas. Denton, where he graduated from high school, is the closest thing he has to a hometown.

Like plenty of boys who miss the chance to form long-term friendships, Allston found solace and wonder in the world of heroic fiction: comic books, the space operas of Robert Heinlein and the pulp adventures of Doc Savage. "I didn't establish ties with people in any community until my family returned to Denton in '73," he remembers. "Fiction was a constant companion when people couldn't be."

In 1979, Allston moved to Austin to attend the University of Texas and work as a clerk at the American-Statesman. Neither association lasted very long. Allston left UT after a semester for financial reasons and was fired from the Statesman for what he calls "a dumb teenager's mistake." (While trying to track down a factual error, he unthinkingly gave the subject of a story a rough draft of the article.)

C'est la vie: "I was hired 24 hours later, so I didn't have a lot of time to feel bad," he says. His new job was circulation manager for the Austin-based Space Gamer magazine.

Allston eventually became editor of Space Gamer and in 1983 turned to full-time freelance game design, writing dozens of supplements and adventures for such fare as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and even his beloved Doc Savage. By the mid-'90s, he had two original novels under his belt: "Galatea in 2-D," a fantasy about wizards who bring paintings to life, and "Doc Sidhe," in which a modern-day athlete enters the realm of Faerie and finds it filled with elves and submachine guns. Both books brought Allston fans, but not riches. His big break came in 1997, when the people who publish the official series of Star Wars novels decided to expand the successful "X-Wing" sequence that writer Michael Stackpole had launched in 1996. Stackpole couldn't handle the entire workload, so he suggested his editors try out a young novelist from Texas — a guy he had co-written a game supplement with back in the day.

Episode II: Attack of the Spinoffs

Star Wars novels don't get covered in the New York Times Book Review, but they're big business, selling hundreds of thousands of copies apiece. The latest film adaptation, Matthew Stover's "Revenge of the Sith," debuted at No. 2 on the New York Times best seller list five weeks ago and sits at No. 7 this week.

Publishing the books, as Allston has learned, is a complicated process. On top of the usual push and pull that goes on between an author and his editor must be added the demands of Lucasfilm Ltd. Nothing happens in the Star Wars universe without the say-so of a phalanx of Lucasfilm employees: book editor Sue Rostoni, publishing director Amy Gary, Internet content manager Pablo Hidalgo, Holocron guru Leland Chee (the Holocron is the internal Star Wars/Lucasfilm database) and Lucas Licensing president Howard Roffman. "It is, in a lot of ways, more complicated than editing original fiction," says Shelly Shapiro, editorial director of Del Rey Books, the science-fiction house that publishes the novels in cooperation with Lucasfilm. "There is so much continuity, so much to mesh with. A lot more people have oars in the water."

Allston has written six Star Wars novels so far, four in the "X-Wing" series and two in the 19-book "New Jedi Order" sequence. Next year, he'll have the honor of launching a new series, set far in the Star Wars future: "The Legacy of the Force." It will be his hardcover debut.

Allston won't say how much he earns for his Star Wars books, but writers are reportedly paid somewhere between the low-to-mid five figures and six figures. Some things, though, can't be measured in dollars and cents. Because he's now a big-time Star Wars muckety-muck, Allston is popular on the science-fiction convention circuit, which has pushed him out of his shell.

"I was very badly socialized," says Allston, who currently shares a big house in Round Rock with four friends. "I have to remind myself, for example, at parties to talk to people. Otherwise, I'm the archetypal wallflower.

"Conventions have helped in that respect, because when you're a guest at a convention, there's a structured format for the interaction between you and the other people," he explains. "If I don't have context, I don't know what to do. I can't walk up to a stranger and introduce myself."

Episode III:

Revenge of the mirth

Lando looked pained, his brow creased in a frown, his eyes bloodshot.

"Hangover?" Luke asked.

Lando winced. "Stop shouting."

"I could whistle you up some caf."

"If you were to whistle, my head would explode and there would be brains everywhere."

Mara shook her head, deadpan. "No brains. Just skull fragments."

— From Aaron Allston's 'New Jedi Order: Rebel Dream'

"He's a fan favorite," Shelly Shapiro says of Allston. "His books aren't 'funny books,' but he brings a sense of humor that in places does a wonderful job, just like R2-D2 and C-3PO did in the movies and, to some extent, Han Solo."

When Allston was first hired to write Star Wars novels, Michael Stackpole told him to keep it light. " 'Try to make it funny, the fans like that'," Allston remembers him saying. "And how! Nobody expected it to go over as well as it did."

Angela Jade, a UK-based member of the Star Wars Chicks Council, particularly appreciated his contributions to the "New Jedi Order" books. "Allston managed to inject a very welcome dose of humour into what had become a somewhat dark and depressing series," she says.

Like his love of pulp fiction, Allston's levity has its origins in the circumstances of his childhood. There was a lot of banter around the Allston family dinner table, and that training came in handy — in high school, jokes were his lightsaber. "I began expressing an external sense of humor in junior high school because it was a way to keep people off my back," Allston says. "I was never beaten up in junior high or high school — once in elementary school, but that was it. Largely, that was because of an ability to deflect things with humor.

"I also had a lot of grip strength in those days, so I could grab someone's arm and squeeze 'til it hurt them very badly. But mostly I relied on humor."

Episode IV:

A new medium

The directions to the film shoot are straightforward: Drive south to Lockhart, turn left at a farm road, take another left at a county road and look for the second ranch on the right. It's the one with the iron gate adorned with unicorn heads.

The property belongs to David Wheeler, owner of the Dragon's Lair chain of comic book and gaming stores; there are goats and cattle and even emu wandering about. Also, a motley-looking film crew.

It's the second day of production for "Deadbacks," a low-budget horror film about agricultural laborers who have crossed over the River Styx rather than the Rio Grande, and today's outdoor shoot is not going according to plan: Torrential rains have forced the production team to hurriedly build an indoor set in a nearby Quonset hut.

The rushed tempo doesn't seem to faze Allston, even though he's a rookie screenwriter and director. The wood paneling in the hallway is warped? The master bedroom has no art on the walls? The male lead keeps forgetting his cue to sit down on the bed? Other directors might let such problems get them down. But Allston can follow the example of the one-time maverick filmmaker whose intergalactic universe he toils in on a regular basis.

As someone scurries around looking for a misplaced roll of masking tape, Allston can ponder a simple question: What would George Lucas do?

Episode V: Character

development

strikes back

RebelPilot: Have you ever considered when writing an X-Wing novel to throw a bunch of a, b, x and y wings together and calling them Alphabet Soup Squadron? (I reckon they would have been the real heroes of the rebellion.)

Aaron Allston: Ummm . . . no. I haven't.

— From an interview conducted in 2000 by the Star Wars fan site www.rebelpilot.com.

His knack for banter notwithstanding, it's not all fun and games in Allston's version of the Star Wars universe. "I think it is absolutely necessary to demonstrate that warfare and life or death battles are not fun for the people who experience it," Allston says. "Now, the reader may enjoy it — and may enjoy it to a degree that I don't necessarily think is good — but for the protagonists it needs to be a focusing or terrifying or otherwise immersive event that is not entertaining for him because otherwise it's extremely unrealistic. I've never heard a story from someone who has been in a firefight telling me about how much he enjoyed it."

In other words, it's not just the jokes that make Allston's work popular; it's the fact that he takes his characters seriously and lets their humor evolve out of the intersection of their personalities and their predicaments.

"To do the humor, what I have to do is create this construct of emotions and thoughts and perceptions and outlooks — kind of like an invisible mask — and I put that mask on to speak the characters' lines," Allston explains. "And then I take it off to put on the mask for the next guy and do that again. When I was just starting as a writer, this was an extremely difficult and wrenching proposition. It's gotten a lot faster; I can now do back and forth banter just about as fast as it takes to hit the enter key. But when I was starting it was much more involved." There's a payoff for all that work. "I'd say that Allston's greatest strength lies in his ability to make the characters in this far-out space fantasy relatable and likable," says Mike Cooper of fan site www. theforce.net. "Allston makes us believe in his characters, disarms us with their clever repartee and ultimately convinces us that they're old friends. A great example of this is found not in a novel, but in a short story Allston wrote called 'The Pengalan Tradeoff.' Set amidst the outbreak of the Clone Wars, Allston takes an utterly alien concept — a squad of elite clone soldiers — and throws a lowly accountant into the mix. What better way to grab an Earthbound reader's attention than by exploring galactic war through the eyes of a person whose daily existence is as normal as any of ours?"

Episode VI: Return of

the Jedipal Complex

The Star Wars novels may not be great literature, but at their best they are briskly paced escapist fare featuring characters who, if they're not psychologically complex, at least hum with pulp vigor.

That's more than you could say about George Lucas' latest cinematic entry, "Revenge of the Sith," which leans heavily on eye-popping special effects and ear-popping explosions but pays little attention to the sense of humor and strength of character that animated his cult in the first place. Harrison Ford's terse way with a one-liner would be utterly lost amidst all the computer-generated hoo-ha.

"Does George Lucas not understand what made the first three movies so great?" wondered one fan out loud at the end of an advance screening of the new movie a couple of weeks ago.

It's as if the Star Wars novels have displaced the movies as the vehicle for Lucas' original spirit; like Luke Skywalker, they've had to overthrow their father to prevail. Star Wars novelists such as Aaron Allston are bound by contract to stay within the confines of the universe as laid down by Lucasfilm Ltd. But if they want to please Star Wars fans these days, they must also ask themselves, What wouldn't George Lucas do?

jsalamon@statesman.com; 445-3610