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DevanJedi (DJ) of GalaxyFarAway.com talked to Michael Kube-McDowell (MKM) on the 26th of March, 2000.

DJ: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us. I see the Michigan won last night! Congratulations!

MKM: Yes, Michigan State will return to the Final Four to take care of unfinished business. I'm very happy. The NCAA tournament is pretty much my favorite sporting event.

DJ: On to the interview then. How did you get involved with Star Wars? Why do you think you were asked to write these books?

MKM: The short answer to that is that Tom Dupree, who was my editor at Bantam, thought I'd bring something worthwhile to the STAR WARS universe, and proposed me to Lucasfilm. It's something of an audition process--Lucasfilm wants to see what you've written on your own...
...so they can make a judgment about the kind of stories you're comfortable with and how well you tell them. In my case, we sent them my novels EMPRISE and THE QUIET POOLS. They were looking for someone with science fiction (even hard SF) chops who was at ease with big galaxy-spanning stories, and that fit some of what I'd been writing on my own quite well.

DJ: Did you pick the slot in the timeline, or was that assigned to you by Lucasfilm?

MKM: I picked the spot in the timeline. The way it worked is this:
First, the "audition," and then approvals from Lucasfilm. Then the contracts. Then Lucasfilm drops a couple of big boxes of background material on your doorstep, and Bantam drops a big box of previously published SW novels right beside it. And the contract specifically calls on the writer to add to and extend the story of these characters--so you dive into what's already there and start looking for pieces of the story that haven't been told.

DJ: How much of the Expanded Universe literature were you familiar with? How much "homework" did you have to do? Have you read all the rest, or just become aware of the timeline/history as it relates to your trilogy?

MKM: It's kind of like being a historian of biographer. You have to be aware of as much of the both the big picture and as many of the details as you can possibly absorb. I made very heavy use of the unpublished master timeline from Lucasfilm and some of the published references. I only read a couple of the other novels before writing THE BLACK FLEET CRISIS. Even though I was bound to Lucasfilm, I felt that by reading them I didn't want to be overly influenced in either toward or away from by another "biographer's" and his or her take on the characters.

DJ: How did you get the "voices" accurately for the film characters? Was there anything specific you did to maintain continuity with who they are in the films (and other books, for that matter)?

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MKM: Immediately before starting to write, I used the original films as my touchstone. The material from Lucasfilm included a boxed set of the film trilogy, which I watched both at the beginning and the of my research (to refresh my memory) and right before starting to write, after the outline had been approved (to get the try to get the characters in my ear).

DJ: As far as that goes, how much guidance in general did Lucasfilm give you?

MKM: The contract says, "The manuscripts shall form a trilogy which will expand on the universe and characters presented in the Underlying Work, and introduce new characters and explore new worlds."

That's about 90% of the guidance, right there. This is one of the reasons I was interested in writing in the STAR WARS universe, but had never pursued writing in the STAR TREK universe. I wasn't brought in to write a piece of a story someone else had already devised--I was getting an opportunity to write part of that story myself.

DJ: So you were pretty much on your own. You created a lot of new species. Were you given guidelines on species creation? Any restrictions? Were you asked to include any specific species that were other authors' creations? What, in your own background, sparked the details for any given species? (Especially, where did the concept for the Yevetha come from?)

MKM: I did run afoul of the Continuity Demon on one point in my original outline-I wanted to give Chewie a polygamous marriage, with several wives. Lucasfilm advised me that Chewie already had a family, as established by the (much-despised) Holiday Special and the children's Storybook which was derived from it. One of the parts of the BLACK FLEET trilogy that I'm most proud of is the reinterpretation of the Storybook which takes place near the beginning of TYRANT'S TEST.

Moving on to your last question-- I haven't written about alien species very often in my other novels, which mostly deal with the human prospect just around the next blind curve. It was a lot of fun, therefore, to get a chance to do so in the Black Fleet books. My background is as a science teacher, and I have always had a special interest in biology, particularly evolution and natural history. There are so many "alien monsters" in Earth's own natural history, so many variations on how to reproduce and survive, that there's plenty of inspiration there for a hundred novels.

I enjoyed creating the Yevetha in particular. They were distinctively alien, but in their own context, perfectly reasonable.

DJ: As it turns out, there are now some fairly significant timeline discrepancies that have arisen since The Phantom Menace has arrived on the scene; Did Lucasfilm outline anything for you as far as the timeline goes in the pre-A New Hope era? (For example, you have Yoda on Dagobah for 100 years, and according to the new Young Obi-Wan novels, and from the first prequel, we assume that can't be).

MKM: Lucasfilm simply drew the blinds across the pre-ANH years; we were not to write about or make inferences about that period, and they were not about to answer any questions or give us a peek at the roughs for the prequels.

But frankly, since Lucas didn't even maintain continuity with the earlier (later) films, I don't think the novelists have anything to apologize for in terms of contradictions. No two histories of the world tell exactly the same story. No two biographies portray exactly the same person. Sometimes what you see depends on where you're standing. I think the prequels can be viewed as "archaeological finds" which may lead us to correct some previous errors and reinterpret some prior conclusions about people and events.

DJ: Very well said said. How was it to work with Lucasfilm? Some authors writing for previously established franchises have disdained the process as not "real" writing. Did you find this to be less creative than playing in your own "sandbox"? Compare this experience to writing in a universe completely of your own creation.

MKM: There were more hoops to jump through at the beginning, and more "inspectors" to satisfy at the end, but the part in the middle was not very different from working on EMPRISE or ALTERNITIES or EXILE. Primarily I think that's because it really was my own story, even if it wasn't my universe. I wrote the outline myself, and though it went through three rewrites and three levels of approval (Bantam, Lucasfilm, and George Lucas personally) before I could start writing, the final version was very close to what I'd started with. Apart from the business about Chewie's family (I was going to have the _Falcon_ crewed completely by Chewie's wives during the rescue), there were really no significant changes.

I want to mention a couple of other resources which were very helpful to me, btw--
One was Dan Wallace's guide to planets, which at that point existed only as a fannish effort published on the Internet. I was delighted when Del Rey and Lucasfilm tabbed Dan to create an official version.
The other is Craig Robert Carey's "Wookiee Sourcebook," which apparently never will be published in the form originally envisioned by West End Games, but which was a great help with the Kashyyyk portions.

DJ: Back to the Yevetha for a moment.. they are wonderful bad-guys. Really 3-dimensional enough to care about, and potent enough to pose a genuinely scary threat to our heroes. How did you develop them? Did you get any negative input from regarding how violent the Yevetha are? (Relative to most of the EU, the Yevetha dispatch their victims especially graphically).

MKM: Thank you for the kind words. I can't really tell you very much about where they came from--it's just something that happens in my head when the characters I'm writing about become real to me. When you get to the point where you see them clearly, all of their history and psychology and biology are there to be explored, each piece fitting with the rest in a synthesis of logical necessity--we see them in a moment in time, but they're the product of a long history just as we are.

You end up knowing much more about them than ever makes it into the story. I was never asked to tone them down (and I would have fought over it if I had)--I think I made clear pretty early that I was writing for the older portion of the STAR WARS audience.
I don't think everything in the STAR WARS universe needs to be accessible to and acceptable for six-year-olds.

Or even sixteen-year-olds.