Last year, an editor at Del Rey, the sci-fi/fantasy imprint that publishes many of the Star Wars books, called up the writer Claudia Gray. The editor needed someone to write a book---set between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens---under a tight deadline. Nothing quite so impossible as making the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs, but pretty close: Gray would have just six weeks to turn in a draft.
She didn't need much convincing. It wasn't that Gray was raring to write another Star Wars novel; her first, Star Wars: Lost Stars, hadn't even been published yet. But when the editor told her who this book would be about, "it was a foregone conclusion," Gray says. "She's been one of my favorite characters---and icons, really---my entire life."
This being Star Wars, there's really only one possibility who she means: Senator Leia Organa, onetime heiress of the royal house of Alderaan—and a linchpin of George Lucas' saga.
While Leia had become a general by the events of The Force Awakens, it's politics that are central to Gray's book, Bloodline, which came out earlier this month. The novel opens on Hosnian Prime, capital of the New Republic and seat of the Galactic Senate, and stays there for the length of a Palpatinian filibuster, following Senator Organa as she speaks at dedication ceremonies, debates policy, pushes paper, attends lavish parties, instructs teenage interns, and puts in face time with supporters.
Don't let any of that disturb you, though---this is no exercise in prequel trilogy-style bureaucratic tedium. There are no Gungans, for one thing, and the politics actually feel urgent. And there's espionage! Even though the galaxy is at peace, the Senate has fallen into utter dysfunction, incapable of enacting even the simplest legislation while a secret faction conspires to resurrect the Empire. Then there's this startling fact: At the opening of the book, no one but Luke and Han knows the dark secret of Leia's true parentage. Some fans are calling Bloodline the best book of the "new canon" so far (that's the official Disney-approved storyline now that the Expanded Universe has been reclassified/uncanonized as "Legends").
Besides, it's not just about the death of liberty to thunderous applause (again); there's also plenty of thrill-seeking, star-fighting, and rabble-rousing. "This is a political story," Gray says, "but my job was to get a blaster in Leia's hands as fast as possible." (That happens exactly 70 pages in, on a dangerous subterranean planet, and you can practically hear the John Williams score swell.) The man Leia's with, a political opponent-turned-collaborator named Ransolm Casterfo, expects her to panic as they're pursued through an underground cavern by yellow-green aliens. "Instead," Gray writes, "she merely tightened her grip around his waist and started firing behind them."
"You're not a bad shot," Ransolm later tells her. Clearly he hasn't seen A New Hope.
Of course, A New Hope was probably Leia at her most badass. When she's captured and brought before Grand Moff Tarkin near the beginning of the film, what does she do? Sasses the bastard. Later on, she's the one who covers for Luke and Han as they escape into the garbage chute. "Somebody has to save our skins!" she yells. (Incidentally, that's a phrase Gray repeats at least twice in her book. She says she wasn't even conscious of doing it.)
Over the course of the original trilogy, though, Leia's role felt increasingly marginalized (and certainly, as Jabba the Hutt's court can attest to, sexualized). She went from center stage to the wings, literally relegated to briefing a group of pilots in Empire. That's where Bloodline comes in. In many ways, it can be read as a corrective to the impression that Leia was ever anything less than vital to the success of the Rebellion, and therefore the safety of the entire galaxy.
And make no mistake: she was. Not only did she orchestrate key missions and save the boys countless times, but she also---in what Gray says "must have been a legend" throughout the cosmos---strangled Jabba with his own chain. For that, fans started referring to her as the "Huttslayer," a sobriquet Gray was able to officially canonize in Bloodline. "When the fans come up with something really great like that, why wouldn't you want to fold it in?" she says.
Gray makes no apologies for approaching the writing of Bloodline as a Leia worshipper. "I can't even begin to deny my incredibly nerdist fangirlishness," she says. She was 7 when the first Star Wars came out---a "really prime age to imprint for life." She spent hours in her "X-Wing simulator," aka her closet, sporting a cowboy hat-qua-helmet as she fired at enemy TIE fighters (that she'd drawn with crayons). As she got older, she began reading the expanded universe books, which she kept up with well into her 20s. "A whole lot of people move on," she says. "I never entirely did."
For Gray, Leia was always a symbol of strength, both on the battlefield and off. "She's somebody who can figure out how to deal with anyone. She has that capacity," she says. "And a sense of humor. She cracks wise." And, of course, she was a woman, not so typical in science fiction (plus ça change...).
"I feel like we are seeing some change," Gray says, pointing out that having a female lead in Force Awakens was "huge, absolutely huge. But there have been false starts before. It didn't matter that the Alien movies made money, or that Terminator 2 made money. And we still don't have a female superhero movie from Marvel---I don't know how many years we're at now."
As she wrote Bloodline, though, Gray didn't want Leia to be defined "as a wife, as a mom, as a sister"---and indeed, those roles are tangential to her work as a politician, struggling to keep a broken system from crumbling entirely.
Del Rey ended up extending Gray's deadline for the book a bit, and she completed the draft last fall. But even though Bloodline takes place before The Force Awakens, she wasn't allowed to see an early cut of the movie before its December release. Not that she wanted to, though. In fact, she asked Disney to keep spoilers to a bare minimum. "They were willing to tell me a fair bit," she says. "But I wanted to walk into Force Awakens as innocent as possible."
Spoken like a true fan.
